So we've reached the first month of live gameplay.
The time when the free month for most subscribers runs out.
This is a tipping point for most games to see how well they are doing. Do they get enough subscribers to keep the game going, or do they slowly scale back their investment to eventually kill the project.
While I know some people who are not subscribing, I honestly can't say if they are reflective of the whole community. Some of the people I play with are quite demanding and get a little whiny when things don't go their way. If things don't meet their expectations you can expect rants, posts about quitting, yelling at devs for their failures, and so on.
I find this frustration and anger misplaced.
The expectations for this game were imposed by the community, not by the devs. The devs knew that this wasn't going to replace games like Warcraft in the community. It was only meant to be their form of the MMO. It has similar functions: Leveling, questing, PVP, PVE, Raid content, and alot of crafting.
This doesn't mean it's supposed to copy it. They took what they thought worked and polished it with bioware flairs. To a great extent this was achieved. The leveling process from 1-50 is good. The story is engaging, the classes interesting, and the loot cool to play around with.
Where most people seem to start getting frustrated is the end game content. The level 50 raids, pvp, and crafting.
The itemization is probably the biggest downfall of the raiding at the moment. I'll forgive technical glitches, and issues with mechanics acting improperly. My issue and the same for alot of people is, the progression of gear based on difficulty isn't linear.
In games like warcraft each level of gear is received for completing harder content than before. In the current endgame you can receive items sometimes 1 or 2 times higher in quality than the current content you completed. This is random and happens often enough that gear levels are bleeding into each other.
There are 3 difficulties for SW:TOR endgame. Normal, Hard, Nightmare.
Normal should give entry level endgame gear with the kinds of stats that would make you a well rounded character for your chosen role. Unfortunately its giving gear at random times from the next tier up, making you far more powerful that you should be.
Hard is giving the second tier of gear, but also randomly the highest level of gear which would normally come from nightmare. This is the crux of the issue. Why would anyone do nightmare? If they can complete their full set with some LUCK rather than actual effort involved?
Nightmare was poorly tuned and mathematically impossible for the first month. The final encounters had situations where no matter how well geared you were not going to finish it.
If these examples weren't bad enough, the PVP in this game offers gear of a competitive value to hard mode gear. Making the first tier of gear irrelevant.
Without forcing people to gear up in a linear fashion, half of the content in the game is being skipped. (This is especially true up until the last patch of 1.1, which now they've made some chages to PVP, slowing the gear grind down a bit. so you can't get a full set of gear as quickly as before, this introduced new mechanics for valor ranks though which were heavily exploited and bioware has stated will now be actionable if continued.)
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So for the TLDR crowd.
There are issues with the game. People are frustrated with them.
My opinion though hasn't really changed. The game is good.
What's happened is that people who rushed to the level 50 content are finding it not quite as polished as it could be, and are complaining about it. Rightfully there are some issues to be brought up, but for some they take it almost personally and are rashly quitting because of it.
I for one don't plan on going anywhere. I enjoy the game, and plan to level several characters.
This is Karayne from Body Type Four on the "Wound in the force" Server. Assassin tank extraordinaire!
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