SWTOR: Patience, my friends.
I wanted to take a little time and express my thoughts about the launch, current status, and future of Star Wars: The Old Republic. However, before I go into the my opinions and whatnot, I’d like to explain the three different types of MMO players because each of these players are audiences that Bioware is trying to please at the same time, while maintaining a balancing act of game stability.
The three different types of players are Veteran PvE, Veteran PvP, and Casual. The Casual players are players who are either new to the game, MMO’s, or simply don’t take the game very seriously and don’t dive very deep into the depths of the game or mechanics. The Veteran PvP player is someone who really focuses on the PvP experience and has most likely already finished the grind process to Battlemaster. Lastly, the Veteran PvE player is the person who focuses mostly on the PvE content the game has to offer and is probably already progressed into Hard Mode or Nightmare Mode operations.
Now… as we know, with the latest patch, 1.1, we saw some great new content, bug fixes, and also the addition of some more bugs. As with any MMO during a time of exploits, the official forums instantly blew up with flaming posters and people threatening to quit the game. Granted the bug that people were frustrated with was definitely a major oversight on Bioware’s end and provided some players, within a few hours, with a feat that only a handful of players on each server had accomplished until that point. So, the frustration is definitely expected and understood. However, this brings me to the purpose of this article… Be patient!
Players need to keep in mind that the game is still just a baby, having only been live for just over a month. We’ve been spoiled over the last couple years with very stable MMO’s to keep us entertained, like World of Warcraft and RIFT, so it’s easy to lose sight of how complicated it is to launch an MMO with millions of players on day one. If you take a step back for a moment, you will quickly realize that the game has been playable since Early Access launch, with minimal downtime for most servers. All the bugs we’ve seen, granted there have been a good handful of them, have been very minimal and fairly easy to skip over and continue with the game.
As far as the oversight with Ilum and continuing poor experience with Ilum PvP, Bioware quickly addressed the issue within 24 hours, assessed the situation, and decided to opt against doing rollbacks. The amount of servers that the oversight affected was minimal; however, the forum post discussing the issue quickly blew up in flames and many people prematurely reacted negatively.
I guess the point I am trying to get across is that players need to be patient with Bioware. They are new to the MMO scene and have been very communicative with the community and have done a great job addressing a large quantity of issues in a very short amount of time, while still providing new content. The Bioware team picked up a handful of the PvP developers who worked on Warhammer Online, so this team has the potential to make great things happen with the game over time. So I ask everyone to please take a step back, realize that the game is still in a very early stage of its life cycle, and it has such great potential and a solid foundation to be one of the few MMO’s that can hold a consistent player base over the next five plus years.
So, let’s all enjoy what Bioware has provided us – an exceptional game with an extremely solid foundation, a good amount of PvE content, and a PvP framework that can only improve from here on out with ranked PvP and more. If you find a bug in the game, do the right thing and report the bug in-game and on the forums if you see it being a top priority issue. The negativity doesn’t help anyone. Stay positive, enjoy the game, and help Bioware improve the experience for everyone.
Thanks guys.
I’m a fan of the site, but I really dislike this sort of thing in the gaming community. People say this about lots of games when they are new and have some very underwhelming aspects. Now I’m not trying to be a negative nancy (I did renew after all) but people don’t tolerate this type of failure in any other product in their lives, why would you do it for video games?
That’s like saying you purchased a new video card from a new company. Its hardware is good, but the drivers are terrible. They crash on you all the time and often times ruin your fun. No one I know would keep the video card and hope drivers would get released. They would RMA it, pay the restocking fee and get something else. Why should gamers do any different? Stop paying the monthy sub and do something else.
I’m not saying given up on TOR yet (I waited so long, not giving up in one month), but I generally have a problem with people who only have rose-colored glasses and just keep saying “oh lets give it time” constantly because its new. Products and services live and die based on whether they can keep the customer happy. Don’t tell people that they SHOULD be happy with something that they shouldn’t.
PS: Keep up the good work.
Essentially what I am trying to communicate here is that people have this unrealistic view that a game will be perfect upon launch and anything less than that is unacceptable. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Usability Designer by profession and there are definitely more than a handful of issues that need addressing. However, the point I am trying to get across is that players need to be tolerant and rather than flaming all of these issues and each other for having conflicting thoughts, simply do your job as a player and report the issues accordingly, then move on. Having conversations about issues that actually provides some positive feedback or additional facts that would help support a fix is absolutely acceptable, but the recent crying and whining on the forums is more what I was hoping to advise against.
After years of experience, as many of us have, diving into just about every facet of the MMO world, we simply need to take a step back and enjoy the game while Bioware works on cleaning up some of the low hanging fruit during this time of growing pains. As far as seeing everything from behind “rose-colored glasses,” and simply being a little more lenient and tolerant of issues I might not be as lenient with in an established game such as World of Warcraft, I honestly don’t see anything wrong with this. So far I have been very pleased for the most part with the community that SWTOR has and I have absolutely zero desire to see it turn into a community like World of Warcraft. There is a very small community of players in WoW that I respect and that is the PvE end game theorycrafters that put in time to help other players understand the mechanics of the game and help find issues with the mechanics so the developers can fix them accordingly. If we can push this mindset in SWTOR, we can establish a solid community of players that simply enjoy playing the game, helping the developers fix issues accordingly, and not end up with a community full of asshats.
So basically, yes – there is a lot wrong with the game. And there is a lot right. If people find the flaws too much for them, then take a couple months off, go play World of Warcraft, and check back once some of the foundational issues are addressed. For those of us willing to be patient, we can continue to progress through PvE content in the various modes, knock out some PvP with the upcoming ranked PvP system, or level an alt to prepare for the implementation of the Legacy System. So to conclude, my hopeful intention was simply to try to cool some heads and open people’s eyes to the fact that they have a great game on their hands, with a lot of great players of various skill levels. Find your niche, a good group of guys to play with, and enjoy the hell out of the game while Bioware gets everything sorted out. We saw a great amount of fixes in the first patch and a million more that need to be fixed. But the game has been playable and enjoyable since Early Launch. For me, I’m happy with that for the time being.
P.S. Thank you.