Quit SWTOR. Sucked Then, Sucks Now, Will Suck in 1.2 PT.1

Seems alot of SWTOR players have forgotten the rocky road torwards SWTOR's launch which stilll continues it's jagged path today but I'll try to refresh their memory. It's kind of hard to say anything good about the way Bioware handled all of this because most of it was bad.

I followed the SWTOR development on and off since 2008. Coincidentally, I was in my "star wars fanboy" phase and playing Star Wars: Jedi Knight Academy a ton. So you can imagine I was pretty excited when I heard about Star Wars: The Old Republic being in development.

Not only this but I was a huge Bioware fan after Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins.

I never paid attention to the forum that much except for a quick peek to see what the community was talking about. It's better to stay away from the forums before the game is released since it's mainly filled with people dreaming and hoping (sometimes dictating) about what will be in the game.

Some years later with Bioware releasing small amounts of content /information on the game, I start to get the feeling the game isn't all it was being hyped up to be.

 Well, that along with the EA Louse thing and Warhammer team working on SWTOR...

Fast forward. Bioware dodging questions, still barely any info on SWTOR, strict NDA beta.

 I actually managed to find more "information" on SWTOR and got into beta. I pretty much went along with the whole "It's beta! It will get better!" idea people usually use to justify their favorite game looking nothing like what they imagined.  And though I turned my hype meter off long ago after disappointing games like Warhammer and APB...There was something about this game that was...wrong.

Fast forward. Bioware focusing more on hyping SWTOR, launching with tons of bugs and broken features, Wiped forum of past evidence.

SWTOR is launching with it's "early access" plan over a seven day period. Not only was this probably the worse idea ever, but it made it the worse MMO launch I have ever experienced.

Basically, people who paid the SAME PRICE for the game had to wait in a "que". This que was Bioware letting players into the game in order by which month they bought the game. Now I hope you can imagine how much the forums were on fire at this time. It was the people who were already in the game proclaiming how well a job Bioware was doing vs. angry customers who were...well..angry.

Biowares' whole reasoning for what they label as a "staggered release" was you create a "smooth launch". In other words, they wanted to pretend the servers were stable and would NOT have player ques by letting players in slowly...

That would have been acceptable I suppose...if it actually worked. Which it didn't.

Not only were the servers dead and empty because of this, but there were STILL huge ques. I'm talking, "Wait three hours to get in the game." ques. Then I get into the game and there is barely anyone to play with for group content.

Fast Forward. Leveled up, dealing with tons of bugs (some game breaking, some just annoying) and forum wars continue. Also, tons of exploiters either getting rich off the Slicing. Which nothing was done. In fact, there is a post on the official forums asking how many are millionaires.

Bioware gets tons of negative feedback on the forum about the amount of bugs and broken content. My guild is literally raging, myself included, about how much of the game is either not working properly or just frustrating. Bioware seeks to remedy this by releasing patches.

Now...normally, patches are supposed to "FIX" the game. Most of the patches released either didn't fix what they claimed to be fixing, made things worse or went into the game in what appeared to be untested states.

They claimed to had fixed "ability delay" (When you attempt to click your skills, it won't work if it's right after you do another skill. This leads to you not really being able to time attacks or have fluent effective combat responses) which was still very much in the game. They released the notorious "Ilum patch". Now, EVERYONE knew this patch was going to completely destroy Ilum content. There were so many post about it on the forum Bioware just seemingly ignored.

Well, not seemingly, they DID ignore them because they went ahead and patch it anyways. And sure enough what happened? Here's a clue for those that don't play SWTOR:

There are two factions. One Empire and one Republic.What used to happen was these factions would take turns destroying each others "war assests" which I agree should have been changed. However,
 on almost EVERY server, the Empire outnumber the Republic about 3:1.

The patch Bioware added to the game was one that would FORCE players to fight each other OR collect these "armaments" which have a slow respawn, are only in ONE place and you have to gather 30 of them.

Not only did this destroy Ilum as a "world PvP" zone. It helped most of the Empire players max out their valor ranks in ONE day. They did this by camping the Republic base due to sheer numbers. The guns that were SUPPOSED to keep them out were not working properely (go figure Bioware) and there was low FPS.

What did Bioware do to fix this? Nothing. What did Bioware do to fix the fact tons of Empire/Republic players gained max or near max valor in one day? Nothing.


To be continued....I'll discuss how linear the game is, how broken the end game content was/is, how there is no soul to the game and why legacy 1.2 will not fix the core problems with the game.