Tag Archives: Star Wars: The Old Republic

SW:TOR Announces Free-To-Play Option – With Several Restrictions

Posted by Centurion on

A little while back I wrote an article about why I think raiding sucks as “endgame”, and why it’s a manipulative, artificial way of slowing down the progress and reward acquisition of players of subscription based MMOs in order to keep them paying a monthly fee. I went into great detail about why Guild Wars 2, the soon to be released buy-to-play (you pay for a copy but no sub) MMO from ArenaNet doesn’t need this kind of endgame to be successful.

In subscription MMOs, raiding is a cooperative experience with very specific and intentional limitations built in to ensure players keep coming back week after week, month after month in order to repeat the same scripted, static content. That’s why only a few people receive loot of off each boss kill, and that’s why raids have lockouts that restrict the number of times you can defeat the same boss in a week. In many ways, it’s like gambling. You win once in awhile and get a rush, and then spend your remaining raid time chasing that high while pouring your time and money down the drain. And make no mistake, you NEED that loot to be competitive in a subscription MMO since the emphasis is on gear instead of skill. That’s why raids have new, more powerful gear to chase with each new raid tier. Without the promise of more power, who in their right mind would raid? Sure, the initial boss kill can be fun, like an unfamiliar puzzle you get to solve as a group. But who in their right mind would enjoy putting together the same exact puzzle time and time again without any additional reward, especially for a fee?

So what does this have to do with Star Wars: The Old Republic offering a free-to play option?

I’m glad you asked.

First, let’s take a look at exactly what that option is. Here is the breakdown as listed on the SW:TOR page:

Looks pretty good to me actually, considering I enjoy the Star Wars world enough to play in it for free now and then, but what I find really interesting are the restrictions and exclusions. I think it backs up everything I said about raiding in the first place and its dependency on the subscription model. Let’s break it down item by item:

1. Story Content  - Players can play their full class stories from levels 1 to 50.

This is perfectly logical, and some would argue it’s the only portion of the game SW:TOR really did right. BioWare has long said that playing this MMO is like playing several sequels to their Knights of the Old Republic games, and this line basically means that you get multiple single player story lines for the shelf price of the game. Looks great on paper, but we’ll get to the fine print on this later.

2. Character Creation Choices - Some character creation options, such as species, are limited to subscribers.

Interesting, but intentionally vague. Does this mean existing species/class combos are included but perhaps unlocking new combinations through the Legacy system is for subscribers only? What if you already unlocked species in your Legacy system? Will those characters be locked unless you pay a subscription? Does this mean that even less species will be available than there are today under the F2P model? What other options are limited besides species?  Had SW:TOR been build from the ground up as a F2P model, then things like species could have been offered as microtransactions. It will be interesting to see how they implement this, and how many people they piss off in the process if they remove existing functionality. If it were any other MMO, I could see them adding new species exclusive to subscribers, but given the thousands of lines of voiced dialog each species needs to be a playable race, this is unlikely. Unless they add Wookiees, and make all their dialog the same 10 subtitled Wookie growls over and over again like they did in KOTOR, adding new species is a long shot.

3. Warzones - Free players are limited in terms of how many Warzones they can play per week.

This is a fairly huge limitation, intentionally designed to get players to sub. SW:TOR is essentially WoW in space, and just like in WoW, gear is everything. PvP in SW:TOR, just as it is in World of Warcraft, is NOT fought on a level playing field. The guy with the best gear wins. The team with the best gear wins. If you only have a limited number of games per week to earn the currency needed to purchase your PvP gear, you’ll never be the guy with the best gear, meaning F2P players will always be at a disadvantage. People hate losing. People love winning. Winners will subscribe, and BioWare is counting on this. Unless you don’t care about SW:TOR’s PvP at all (like me), and have no intention of participating in it, this may bother you.

4. Flashpoints - Free players are limited in terms of how many Flashpoints they can play per week.

The same concerns about limited Warzones apply here, with one large exception. You’ll still suffer the same gear disadvantage that your F2P PvP counterparts, but at least they’ll be able to access the “endgame” of PvP. As a PvE player, your access to Operations is completely dependent upon your subscription status. Unless you don’t care about raids at all (like me), and have no intention of participating in them, this may bother you… a lot. More on that below.

5. Space Missions - Free players are limited in terms of how many Space Missions they can play per week. Aside from being a means of picking up a few easy credits, space missions in SW:TOR were a lot like raiding, only without the prospect of new gear: static, boring and on rails. Unless they add some incredible new elements to this corner of the game, I can’t imagine anyone caring.

6. Operations - Only Subscribers may complete Operations.

ONLY SUBSCRIBERS MAY COMPLETE OPERATIONS. This validates everything I’ve said about raiding, and we’ll get to that after these last few items.

7. Travel Features - Subscribers have access to all travel functionality, making getting around the world easier.

If this isn’t the most backwards thing ever, I don’t know what is. How about make it easier for EVERYONE to get around in your terrible travel system? The fact that it takes multiple load screens to travel from one planet to another, or even from just your ship to a planet’s surface, is just horrible design. Orbital Stations shouldn’t even exist. The Looking for Group system was a much-needed addition to the game, but even it fails to let you return to the planet you were on immediately after your flashpoint. Instead it dumps you back on the fleet. Does this mean they’re only fixing this for subscription players?

Even if Bioware wanted to implement a solution to this mess and only offer it to subscription players for free, a microtransaction option for F2P players would have been a bare minimum. There are probably a lot of players out there who’d pony up for a limited use item that would make travel between planets instant.

8. Game Login - Subscribers will always be in login queues ahead of free players.

Fair is fair. VIP access only makes sense in a dual payment model game.

9. Galactic Trade Network - Subscribers can post up to 50 auctions for sale. F2P players get “Extremely Limited Access”, whatever that means.

Until they release details, it’s hard to say what the hell they mean. If anything, it probably devalues crafting even more that it already is for casual, F2P players. If you can’t sell your goods, or if you can’t compete with sellers who can post more product than you can, then why bother? You really only need top end gear to compete in top end PvP and PvE, and since you can’t even access Operations under the F2P model, why participate in the time and credit sink that is SW:TOR crafting? Seems short-sighted to make an entire avenue of your game useless to a portion of your player base, but it’s far from the worst thing on the list.

VALIDATION OF THE RAIDING CONSPIRACY

By locking out F2P players from the PvE endgame of SW:TOR, they’ve only proven that raiding is a system entirely dependent upon, and entirely designed for, subscription players. If you aren’t raiding, and you have no subscription strings attached, then congratulations, you’re free to come and go from the game as you please. The only thing keeping you playing is if the content you have access to is fun and enjoyable, just like any other game you own, and just like any game should be experienced. If you are paying a fee, then you need to feel like you’re getting something for your money. With this model BioWare is giving you exclusive access to content and, more importantly to a gear-based MMO, the best tier of PvE gear in the game.

Of course, you only need that gear to access the next set of raids, and so the cycle will continue ad infinitum. Enjoy your run on the hamster wheel.

This is what kills me about the current generation of MMO players. Raiding isn’t doing you any favors. It isn’t the alpha and omega of MMO endgame. It’s just a time sink, and by association, a money sink. Sure, there is the initial thrill of overcoming an obstacle and seeing new content, but your perpetual need for gear, coupled with the intentionally gated method in which raiding awards that gear, chains you down to that same content over and over again until you dread logging in. It dictates how you spend your time in-game, and with whom you spend it. Raiding leads to dedicated rosters and schedules, where you can lose your spot unless your attendance meets standards. It leads to loot systems to manage loot drama over the randomized loot that may or may not even drop. It leads to resentment when people can’t attend or when someone “less deserving” than you gets the loot you wanted. It leads to guild applications with more questions on it than you’ll find in many job interviews. In may ways it is just as much the opposite of fun as the grind fests that older generation MMOs used to be. Yet where most players have realized that the evolution of MMOs means freeing yourself from those terrible grinds, thousands and thousands of those same people can’t even imagine a successful MMO without raiding at its core.

It’s mind boggling.

In many ways, trying to talk to people about it feels like being in the Matrix films and trying to convince them to wake up from the system that enslaves them.

But hey, at least with SW:TOR, players will have a choice. They can still experience almost everything the game has to offer, including multiple characters and story lines…

Or can they?

Remember that fine print I mentioned earlier?

From the FAQ on the official site:

Q: What happens if I decide to change from being a subscription player to a Free-to-Play member? What will happen to my credits, inventory, bank items, and characters?

A: Your account will automatically be downgraded and it will operate under the Free player restrictions. You will need to choose what items to keep with you within the restriction levels of the free access. Furthermore, you will be able to see, but not use, your excess credits, inventory slots, bank tabs, and extra characters.

I’m not sure what the BioWare means by “extra characters,” but it sure seems like F2P players won’t be able to enjoy as much of the story portion of the game after all. It’s one thing to offer a number of character slots with purchase and then offer additional character slots for a small fee, but it is something else entirely to lock players out from using characters they already have. The same thing goes for inventory slots and bank tabs.

And what does “excess credits” mean? Does it mean that F2P players can only have so much wealth? If so, then that’s a whole other explosion waiting to go off in BioWare’s face.

I enjoy SW:TOR from time to time because I enjoy the Star Wars universe, and I’d continue to play it under the right F2P model, but I’m very skeptical about how all of this is going to shake out. While I’m certain that offering a F2P model within a year of release isn’t what anyone at BioWare or EA intended, half-assing it could be worse for the game than not offering it at all.

To me, this looks less like a free-to-play model and more like an extended trial.

Stop whining. Why Faction Imbalance in SW:TOR doesn’t matter.

Posted by Centurion on

Good vs Evil.

Jedi vs Sith.

Star Wars: The Old Republic centers on the classic confrontations between Light and Dark that we all know and love from the films.

The one thing I don’t recall seeing in the movies was a time when members of the Republic just sat around complaining about how they were outnumbered, and how it was unfair, and that George Lucas should stop shooting the movie and do something about it. You think Luke Skywalker would have wasted time on forums? HELL NO! He capitalized on years of practical womp rat killing experience and blew up the friggin Death Star! Unfortunately, I can’t read a SW:TOR forum or listen to a podcast without hearing how faction imbalance in the game is some sort of atrocity that needs fixed or moderated somehow by BioWare. A number of players seem to suffer from the mass delusion that imbalance in SW:TOR actually means something, and they’re all wrong.

This is why.

1. The leveling experience is fairly tame.

Don't worry, Republic. The Imperials aren't threatening till max level.

SW:TOR offers a very insulated and safe leveling experience, even on PvP servers. You won’t cross paths with members of the opposite faction until you’re about half way to max level. Oldrepublic.net features an impressive planet progression map which highlights this. This gives ample time for players to familiarize themselves with their abilities safe from predatory players. A fair number of the planets are even faction specific and don’t even allow the opposing faction to set foot on them. As it stands, there won’t be any sort of plundering and occupation of Coruscant or Korriban unless BioWare decides to create some sort of special instanced event.

Beyond this segregation, the other big factor that impedes spontaneous open world encounters is how frustratingly tedious it is to go from one planet to another. While patch 1.2 has cut down on the number of orbital station load screens we have to suffer through needlessly, that doesn’t mean that getting around is convenient. There aren’t any summoning mechanics or methods of fast travel directly from one planet to another. People tend to stay one whatever planet they’re on and focus on some other non-PvP oriented task rather than roaming the galaxy looking to pick a fight.

Even if you stumble over an enemy player in the open world somewhere, and even if you decide to fight, you always have the option to simply rez at the medical center and avoid corpse camping – essentially eliminating one of the major driving factors of open world PvP. It makes perfect sense from the point of view of BioWare wanting to reduce player frustration. Odd as it may seem however, corpse camping led to escalation of warfare in other games. Many a Southshore vs Tarren Mill battle in WoW began as single player getting camped and calling for backup, and ended up looking like something out of Braveheart. With the aforementioned inconvenience involved with planet hopping, even if you happen to need help, it probably isn’t going to come from another planet. At best you may see a handful of local players get involved, especially on lower population servers.

2. Instanced PvP is King – and the King is Benevolent.

PvP in SW:TOR means Warzones. That’s where the rewards primarily come from, so that’s where people go. Without any incentive for open world PvP, and with Ilum broken and discarded for the time being, Warzones are where players need to go to kill one another with elegant weapons during this civilized age. Faction imbalance in other games can make queues for battlegrounds an extremely hit or miss affair. Prior to cross servers BGs in WoW, it was quite common to wait for over an hour for a single game. Today’s players don’t have the patience for that anymore, nor should they. Luckily BioWare came along and gave us the possibility of fighting in Warzones against your own faction. Even if you’re server’s faction balance is skewed to comical proportions, you can still find near instant queues provided your server has a decent population to begin with.  Until patch 1.2 this may have meant a whole lot of Huttball for some people, but we have more inter-faction options available now. Everyone can participate and earn rewards.

At the very worst, one could theorize that faction imbalance may have given one faction more Huttball practice than the other. So what? That same logic means the minority faction got more consistent time in the other Warzones. You could also make the argument that inter-faction Warzones meant that the faction with superior numbers could gear up faster, but even this is pretty thin. With patch 1.2 you can purchase PvP gear with credits so no one has to start from scratch. It still may come down to which team has the highest amount of expertise on their gear, but it probably has a lot more with which team has two  partial premades of Battlemasters on it.

3. SW:TOR encourages, promotes and incentivizes cross-faction alts on the same server. 

Legacy is a pretty big thing in SW:TOR, and the bonuses apply cross-faction. There are so many incentives to level characters on both sides of the force that some guild leaders complained during the Guild Summit that BioWare was eroding the cohesiveness of their guilds. Everyone has a main, at least in theory, but tons of people have already leveled and geared up multiple characters in both PvE and PvP. It isn’t exactly hard to do in SW:TOR. Not everyone has the same time available to them as everyone else, but that’s sort of a non-issue on a long enough timeline. If you believe the grass is greener on Korriban (it isn’t), then nothing is stopping you from coming to the Dark Side and trying it out.

I love my Powertech. There is no doubt I consider that Bounty Hunter as my main. On the PvP front however, I had the most fun in SW:TOR I’ve ever experienced on my Vanguard. I didn’t have to tank with him. There was never a need to respec or worry over multiple gear sets. It was the mirror class, but offered just enough differences to be unique. Hell, it was worth it for the story alone. If I really wanted to swap sides and center on Republic as my PvP faction of choice, I could do so with my Trooper very easily and without the hesitations or aversions I have towards doing so in other MMOs. You fight your own faction in Warzones half the time anyway, so what does it really matter?

BioWare clearly understands that the strength of their game resides in the leveling experience, so which faction you’re on and who outnumbers who is mostly irrelevant. Go where you have the most fun. You don’t really have to worry about which side of the fence is greener when BioWare added a revolving door.

4. Players say they want an Open World PvP zone, but they really don’t.

James Ohlen, a man I greatly respect and admire from his Baldur’s Gate contributions, is a pretty smart guy.

After the Ilum collapse, he created a poll and forum topic asking players what they want in an Open PvP experience. Here are the options:

What kind of Open World PVP excites you most?

‘Raw’ Open World - faction vs faction, with no faction population restriction mechanics AKA ‘true’ Open World PvP. Factions claim objectives.

PvPvE balanced - bolstering the underdog faction through NPCs, turrets, etc. Factions claim objectives.

Faction population capped - strict balancing in place between faction populations in objective areas. Factions claim objectives.

Guild based - everyone is your enemy except players in your guild. Guilds claim objectives.

The majority of players currently opted for the PvPvE balanced approach with almost 50% of total votes. But that’s not true open world PvP. It’s Wintergrasp 2.0 in the making. Once you create mechanics to make everything ‘fair and balanced’, it isn’t open anymore. Since that isn’t the case, the whole concept of faction imbalance no longer applies.

Ilum was egg on BioWare’s face, and I’d wager it was enough that they lost subscriptions over it when combined with buggy Operations and lack of other basic MMO features that 1.2 has now partially corrected. They’re smart though. Just listen to Georg Zoeller speak, and tell me he doesn’t sound like a Bond villain. I’m willing to bet that, whatever they have in mind, they’re smart enough not to make the same mistakes twice. I’m not sure what form it will take, or how long it will take to implement, but I’m hopeful it will be the last nail in the faction imbalance argument – at least for a little while. You may never fully put it to rest in a game centered on binary factions, but in SW:TOR imbalance doesn’t really count for much.

Star Wars:The Old Republic – Legacy Patch 1.2

Posted by Centurion on

Regardless if you’re talking about the movies, books or the new MMO from BioWare, Star Wars always seems to revolve around defining moments. There is that fork in the path where a character is faced with a decision that will not only affect his own life, but potentially the fate of the galaxy. Han returns to help Luke destroy the Death Star. Luke refuses to kill Vader. Vader refuses to let his son be destroyed.  Leia never reveals the location of the hidden rebel base, putting quite a dent in Alderaan’s tourism business.

Now, with the massive Legacy patch to Star Wars: The Old Republic, the defining moment for BioWare’s MMO has arrived. Will this be shot in the arm the game desperately needs? Can it carve out a lasting spot for itself as a AAA subscription MMO? Or will subscription numbers dwindle once again, sending it towards the dark path of obscurity? I won’t try to tackle every single change–that’s what patch notes are for–but I’ll at least give you my initial impressions.

Let me start by saying that I really love what BioWare has done in their game, and for MMOs in general, in regards to storytelling and making your character feel like an individual instead of just another stat sheet. I have more empathy and attachment to my Bounty Hunter after a few months than I ever did for any of my World of Warcraft characters after years of playing them. The leveling experience in SW:TOR is much richer and interesting than in WoW too, and unlike Blizzard’s MMO, I never hear “the game starts at max level”. Companion characters have also been a really brilliant addition to my MMO experience. Not only are they helpful in a practical sense, but they also bring stories of their own and really enhance the idea that your character is a person of real power.

But… as many who play and follow the game know. SW:TOR has suffered from a lot of problems. World PvP is essentially dead. Even on PvP servers, the planet design ensures that factions do not cross paths easily till far into the game. Ilum, a world originally set up to be an entire planet for open PvP, has been put on ice. All incentives have been removed from it, and BioWare is going back to the drawing board regarding its future in the game. Bugs have plagued end game PvE content, sometimes being the only challenging part of a boss encounter. Faction imbalance led the Warzone PvP experience to become endless strings of Huttball. Even the basic need to get around in the game world is lacking, with a ponderous amount of steps and load screens needed to get from one place to another in order to meet up with friends. Frame rate and performance glitches made the game bog down at times on even high end machines, especially in warzones. The stock UI was decent, but completely lacking in customization options or even basic features like target of target frames. It all added up to a frustrating experience despite the game’s potential.

Fortunately, the Legacy patch solves (or at least improves upon) most of these issues.

THE LIGHT SIDE

With the addition of Novare Coast, and the alterations made to Voidstar, players now have three different PvP Warzones where they can potentially compete against their own faction. This adds a lot of variety when it comes to servers with a population imbalance, essentially smoothing over the only real problem population imbalance causes. Ilum is still in development, and there is no world PvP to speak of, so imbalance really isn’t a factor elsewhere. And, while I’m on the subject, even if there was a population imbalance, so what? Open world PvP was never about fairness and equality anyway. If you want a structured, evenly populated PvP environment, queue for a Warzone! But I digress…

Explosive Conflict adds another Operation to the game, much to the joy of raiders everywhere. Not only does this give people the new content and gear they’ve been after, but it also raises the bar with a higher tier of raid difficulty. In addition to this, BioWare has finally put to rest a number of bugs and design problems in their other two Operations. They also released a new Flashpoint called Lost Island which centers on the second half of the Rakghoul plague storyline (space zombies!). The first Flashpoint half was covered in Kaon Under Siege, and I considered it to be the finest and most challenging Flashpoint in the entire game. Lost Island is apparently ramping up the difficulty as well, perhaps too much so, given the fact that you’re still rewarded with first tier gear and commendations despite needing all of that gear to complete it in the first place. I’m sure we’ll see tweaks made to it in the near future, although I hope they increase the rewards rather than taking the Blizzard way out and adding training wheels to the content.

The real gem of the patch (as far as I am concerned) is the drastically improved performance and user interface. I don’t play on a bleeding edge machine, but it is more than capable of running most games at the highest settings without too many problems. This hasn’t been the case with SW:TOR till now. Even with max settings, I am no longer reduced to a stuttering sideshow on the crowded fleet or in warzones. The game just looks and feels better. I adore the Awareness Radius option which reduces the number of other players rendered in crowded environments. While BioWare claims this is for “low end machines” in the same way they write off every performance improvement – as if our machines were to blame, and not their code – I highly suggest everyone use this option. The UI customization is like a breath of fresh air. Finally being able to scale and move things around really helps me make the game my own. The addition of the target of target frame means tanking isn’t nearly as much guesswork in crowded AoE packs or in PvP. The UI still isn’t perfect, but it is a really great first step.

Other quality of life improvements include the gear “match to chest” option that allows you to match the color and pattern of your gear. There is starter level PvP gear for fresh level 50s so they can compete without being obliterated. Crafting has also seen huge improvements, with augmented crafted gear (containing sockets for augments) and the ability to remove mods from end game PvP and PvE gear combining to make for interesting combinations and levels of customization. You still won’t be able to carry over your set bonuses in your old gear, so don’t go too crazy, but if you’re like me and hate your Powertech having quad mufflers sticking out of your back, you can finally do something about it.

I may be a subcontractor, but that doesn't mean I can't try to blend in a little.

The other major feature of the Legacy patch is the fact that our Legacy is finally more than just a useless purple bar. We actually gain some tangible benefits for logging all these hours playing, and it’s pretty cool. The whole family tree business doesn’t really matter all that much to me. I suppose it adds an additional layer of depth to know that my Bounty Hunter has two brothers, a Sith Warrior and Jedi Knight (who are also cyborgs with a striking family resemblance), and that each of them has an ally they work with (Sorcerer and Trooper respectively) and that my Imperial Agent is my Bounty Hunter’s adopted daughter – a young lady who has proven a far more lethal and morally flexible protege than Mako has, and who provides me with intel on lucrative Imperial opportunities. It gives me a nice context to put things in when I play one of them that adds to their individual story arcs, even if that context only exists in my mind and on a family tree screen in game.

The real benefits come from features that encourages the leveling of alternate characters, and making that experience seem like a feature instead of something to do when you’re bored with your main character. These include:

  • The ability to send mail instantly to any of my characters, including cross faction. For someone who spreads out crafting professions across alts, this was most welcome.
  • The global unlocks that happen as you advance your characters. Whenever you finish a companion’s story line, you unlock a presence buff across all characters which stacks and makes your companions more effective at their roles. For each category of companion (like healer, for example) you also unlock a non-stacking buff that applies to all your characters as well. In the case of Mako, my healing companion, I unlocked the ability to receive more healing – making incoming heals on me a bit larger. I don’t know if this applies to non-companion heals, but I would assume it does considering other similar perks through this system include things like static boosts to your maximum health or critical hit and damage ratings. Each of these companion unlocks also reduce the cooldown of your Heroic Moment by 1 minute (to a max reduction of 5 minutes) and increase the duration of your Heroic Moment by 12 seconds (to a max increase of 1 minute). Your Heroic Moment now not only allows you to recharge your crowd control abilities and put a heal over time on you and your companion, but also allows you to use Legacy Abilities.
  • Legacy Abilities are signature abilities you unlock once hitting max level with a certain class that can be shared across all your characters. For example, each of my characters can use my Bounty Hunter’s flamethrower ability during their Heroic Moment. Since you can only do this with a companion out, it doesn’t impact Operations or Warzones.
  • Bind on Legacy gear that can really help you level – especially the gear that can use mods.
  • The ability to unlock any race you level to 50 (or are willing to spend 1.5 million credits on) that you can use with any class.
  • Other miscellaneous perks you can spend credits on like adding mailboxes to each character’s ship or reducing the cooldown on your fleet pass or quick travel.

Not only is this a fun system that provides a new mini-game for completionists and some decent perks for everyone involved, it is also a brilliant move on BioWare’s part. The strongest aspect of their MMO by far has been the leveling experience. From the start we’ve been told that the MMO is not only the spiritual sequel to their Knights of The Old Republic games, but that it is like eight sequels rolled into one game. Getting people to play through each of those stories is what BioWare is banking on. It keeps people playing, keeps them paying for their subscriptions, and it buys them time to improve their end game experiences. Even if some casual players out there have no intention of ever raiding or getting into PvP, there would still be hundreds and hundreds of hours of game time they could sink into these story lines. The fact that we’re now provided with rewards for doing so is just icing on the cake.

BioWare should also be commended for the incredible public relations and marketing push they’ve done surrounding this patch, pulling out all the stops with their Legacy Promotion. Free to play weekends. Referral initiatives. Giving 30 days of free play time to subscribers AND to people who reactivate their subscriptions. Pets you earn just from having an active subscription. When you consider this came on the heels of their Guild Summit which was an unprecedented community participation think tank aimed at making the game the best it can be, you know they are leaving nothing to chance. BioWare is committed to making this a great game.

However… That doesn’t mean everything with this patch has been good news.

THE DARK SIDE

Healers have been nerfed considerably, and while I understand that killing a geared and skilled healer in PvP in a 1 on 1 scenario was a huge challenge, I think it points out a drawback of the game. Healers have to be potent because they are the only thing keeping multiple people alive – especially in PvE endgame. If they aren’t powerful enough to do that, then your raid fails. If they are powerful enough, then they become the single most dominating factor on the PvP battlefield. It’s a problem that plagues every MMO that pays homage to the time tested and very effective “Holy Trinity”. Getting that balance right is a non-stop game of tail chasing.

Perhaps there were legitimate problems that needed fixing, such as the Force Bending buff for Sorcerers applying to more than one ability incorrectly. But the problem is that they’ve now changed the implementation of the ability as a whole, and removed the cast time reduction that applied to your biggest single target heal. This means to get that big heal off, Sorcerers have to root themselves in place for 3 seconds. This is a fair amount of time in PvE if there are environmental hazards or boss abilities to worry about. In PvP, standing still for 3 seconds can get you killed, and it gives people a LOT of time to interrupt you. This results in more emphasis being placed on your shorter, and less efficient heals, which means you burn through your Force faster. Sorcerers have the ability to trade Force for health, but doing so can be extremely dangerous. They used to be able to pick up a talent which would remove the health penalty, but no longer. This means on longer fights or in PvP, Sorcerer healers are going to run the risk of running out of heals. Maybe some of that can be compensated by throwing a heal over time on themselves when they pop Consumption and trade health for Force, but I have no idea how efficient that will be. At best you’re wasting two global cooldowns instead of one, and if you’re to the point where you’re starved for resources those seconds can add up.

To make matters worse on the healing front, medpacks have also been nerfed so that you can only use one per combat. This means that players other than healers, who are traditionally already horrible at self-preservation in Holy Trinity MMOs, now have even less incentive to keep themselves alive. They have a single emergency medpack to hold on to, but I can almost guarantee most players will be so worried about saving it that they’ll die before using it. This means healers, who are already less effective, are going to be expected to do more or risk shouldering the blame when things go wrong.

I think a far better solution to at least try would have been to remove the healing boost given by expertise. Let’s face it. No one complains about healers being too powerful in a PvE setting. Removing the healing boost from PvP gear would have been a decent nerf that wouldn’t have compromised PvE healing at all. Ahh… but maybe that isn’t what BioWare was really concerned with.

Time to put on my tinfoil hat!

Perhaps someone does see a downside to healing as it was in PvE – and that someone is BioWare. After people complaining over and over again how their Operations were too easy, perhaps they decided to take the easy way out. The Holy Trinity relies on three pillars. Weaken one of those pillars enough, and you weaken the whole. A nerf to healers can be perceived as increased difficulty in PvE without the need to make the content itself any harder or more dynamic. It’s effective, but it’s also a bit of a cheap shortcut.

Another thing that’s a big downside to patch 1.2 is the lack of Rated Warzones and the ability to queue as a full 8 man group. I know a lot of people were looking forward to this, not only for the sake of competition, but also in hopes that partial premades wouldn’t dominate like they currently do. What many players were looking forward to was 8 mans going up against  other 8 mans and the rag tag PuGs competing against mainly other rag tag PuGs. As it stands, this isn’t the case. When you factor in the changes to how medals are earned, the greatly nerfed rewards for losing, AND the complete lack of any sort of deserter penalty for leaving games early – the end result is less than ideal or fun. Partial premades dominate, people on the losing team drop, only to be replaced by people who come into half a game with no time to earn medals, and who then drop out themselves. Repeat until time expires. This may not be the way things are on every server, but it has certainly been my experience thus far.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about patch 1.2 is the feeling of it being too little and too late. Many players feel that this patch contains features that the game should have launched with back in December, and the develops themselves have gone on record saying that they wish a lot of these features were present at launch. While second chances are also a big part of the Star Wars universe, only time will tell if it carries over to The Old Republic. My own guild is scattered and many have gone off to find a more active home to join. Many have cancelled their subscriptions, and many more were waiting on this patch to “save the game” before pulling out completely. Personally I’m enjoying taking a very casual approach and leveling alts, and checking out the new dailies. I will say that solo PvP isn’t very fun, and the lack of any sort of group-finding tool makes running pick-up groups for Flashpoints a less enjoyable task than it already is. If I do continue to play, it will probably have to be as a member of another, more active, guild where I can hop in and out of Warzone, Flashpoint and Operations groups instead of trying to be a driving force in creating and maintaining them.

I will say that if you are even remotely interested in Star Wars: The Old Republic, NOW is the time to play. The experience is much better than it was at launch, and even BioWare is keenly aware that it is now or never.

If you’re playing the game, please share your impressions on it and on patch 1.2. I’d love to read your feedback!

May the Force be with you.

Specialized Gear: Why Subscription-Based MMOs Need You To Need Them

Posted by Centurion on

In both PvE and PvP, the overarching goal in many MMOs is to obtain better gear that allows you to excel in your chosen specialization. The more you PvP, the better quality of PvP gear you earn, which in turn makes you more formidable in PvP. The same principle exists for PvE. All of this seems pretty logical and basic for most anyone who has ever played World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic, or any number of similar titles.

It also seems just as natural to many of us that trying to take your PvP gear into PvE, or your PvE gear into PvE, isn’t going to work out so well. The reason for this is because the gear is specialized through the use of stats that only benefit you in PvP or PvE respectively. In WoW, for example, this PvP stat is currently called Resilience and it boosts both your damage output and damage reduction when facing other players. In their next expansion, Resilience is being split into two separate stats, Defense and Power,  that will handle each of these roles respectively. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, their PvP stat is called Expertise, and it functions like Resilience with the additional function of boosting your healing in PvP. In Patch 1.2, which releases tomorrow, BioWare is increasing the amount of Expertise found on their end game PvP gear.

A great deal of thought and planning revolves around these specialized stats, and these developers will try to sell you on them as if they’re doing you a favor. You’ll be told that PvE gear just isn’t designed to take the hits that PvP gear is because most players (other than tanks) aren’t supposed to be getting hit in PvE in the first place. PvP stats are therefore a requirement so people don’t get one-shot and so fights will last longer than a few seconds. This allegedly allows time for more complex strategies and battles to evolve during play, which should result in a more rewarding experience.

To me, that is a load of crap, and all it really does is highlight the downside of the holy trinity of PvE (tank/healer/DPS) in a game with PvP. If you didn’t force your players into these archaic roles, and if everyone shared the same overlapping responsibilities, you wouldn’t need to overcompensate for their weaknesses with a PvP stat.

The real idea around specialized gear is simple: developers of subscription-based MMOs don’t want players to be effective in both PvP and PvE without having to participate fully in both gear grinds.

Grinding is time, and time is money.

In SW:TOR, it has been far too easy, up to this point, to participate in both PvE and PvP using a single gear set. You didn’t need to spend time in hard mode flashpoints (dungeons) in order to work up to run raids (operations). You could just PvP and use that gear and clear all of their normal and hard mode PvE content. There was almost no incentive or need to spend weeks gearing up in PvE when you could easily skip that content entirely. This led to people clearing the end game content much faster than anticipated, which led to bored players, and bored players don’t continue to pay subscriptions.

The other thing that specialized gear does, and all end game gear for that matter, is create a status symbol for the player that can be envied by the rest of the player community. If you have the best of something, others want it. The key thing for subscription MMOs is that the best gear MUST exist at the end of a time sink.

I found an interesting article on Psychology Today that highlights a little of what I am talking about:

It’s all about status and exclusivity…

Whether we admit it or not, we all want to feel as if we are a little bit better than the people around us. We begin to establish that – at least in our own minds – with the accouterments of wealth such as branded clothing, jewelry, luxury automobiles, and exclusive neighborhoods. Even the poorest of people find symbols with which to establish their status. The visibility of these status symbols can create the powerfully motivating emotion of envy.

Most happiness that is acquired by achieving status symbols is short lived. Overtime such trappings become meaningless to us…   But, status can continue to motivate us long after money ceases to do so. Bestowing a new title with added responsibilities yet without any added pay is a common method for rewarding employees.

This absolutely applies to end game gear in most MMOs, just at it applies to titles like “Gladiator” or “Battlemaster” or “Slayer Of That Totally Kickass Dragon”. And if that status is only temporary, no problem. It only has to last until the next arena season or raid content anyway, which is (surprise!) just long enough for most people to reach that plateau.

Without these carrots on sticks, the only incentive that players are left with to participate in PvP and PvE content is how challenging and dynamic the content is, and how much fun they’re having doing it. For the developer of a subscription-based MMO, that is a chilling thought. They need you to slow down and make sure you only progress in bite-sized increments.

  • That is why loot is randomized in those games and why everyone doesn’t get a drop from each raid boss. They need you coming back and doing the same thing week after week, despite the very real threat of boredom, just so you can get that last piece of gear.
  • That is why getting around in the game world is blocked by things like fast-travel cooldowns or flight paths or worse…. orbital stations… (and why in game flight in WoW was a big mistake on their part). They need to make you spend time getting from Point A to Point B, not so you can appreciate the scope of how large the game world is, but because time is money.
  • That is why crafting stacks of a single item takes so bloody long.
  • That is why there are PvP rankings that exist as prerequisites to purchasing high level PvP gear.

I won’t sit here and tell you that free-to-play MMOs are all innocent of this entirely, but they really don’t need to go to the same lengths to keep you playing every single day, so they don’t need to resort to all of the same tricks. You can stop playing a F2P MMO for days, weeks or even months in order to play something else or engage in other hobbies, just as easily as you can with games in other genres. You can always come back for the next expansion, or after you finish that one Sci-Fi trilogy with the horrible endings.

By contrast, in Guild Wars  2:

  • You can get “end game” gear with all the same stats on it through various combinations of PvE, PvP and crafting. The only elite status symbols come in the form of cosmetic armor sets or titles. They’re there for the people who want to earn them, but they aren’t the entire reason for playing.
  • Bosses in Guild Wars 2 drop loot for everyone. No one walks away empty handed.
  • Fast travel has a cost, but is instant to anywhere you’ve already explored.
  • Crafting multiples of the same item actually speeds up your crafting time for each progressive item.
  • You can PvP in their structured PvP (battlegrounds) on DAY ONE using a PvP-only character with max level gear.

At the end of the day, the need for separate PvP and PvE gear isn’t about the game so much as it is about the subscription revenue. That model just doesn’t work for me anymore, because it isn’t honest. It isn’t about making the best game possible. It’s about keeping the grind alive to make the most money.

That’s another reason I’m taking my business to ArenaNet. Guild Wars 2 has a PvP stat as well. It’s called ‘Skill’.