I don't get it. This new MMO by Bioware is good overall... the graphics are nice, the setting is engaging the voice acting for all the NPCs is refreshing... there are problems such as the PvP system, particularly disappointing for several reasons but I'll get into that later. Ultimately though the Old Republic is good... better than WoW that's for sure. So why does it seem dead mere months after release? I propose three major reasons.
1. MMO burnout: I know that I will not raid seriously in SWTOR because I'm just not looking for that experience. The raiding or 'operations' read like it would be fun... but I can't see myself doing the grind, finding 7 or however many people that are needed and killing bosses for hours straight. And I'm certain I'm not alone.
2. Bioware fucked up; pre orders of the game were able to play pre-release and there seemed to be too many people on too few servers. So Bioware put up a lot more servers... but a lot of these people appear to have been just checking things out and now the servers feel underpopulated or even dead. How this could be fixed I'm not sure but they need to do something.
3. WoW is still running; SWTOR is better, much better in my estimation... but there is a strong pull when you've been playing an MMO for a long time, a kind of gravity that constantly threatens to suck you back into the world of Blizzards creation... Despite its apparent loss of market share it's still a big game and it's hard to compete with that.
The first reason seems to be the greatest, from what I've been hearing it seems the losses from WoW haven't moved on to another game, they've moved on from the genre entirely. I can't blame people for dropping MMOs, I think it's the nature of the beast. A quick game of a shooter with mates will never lose it's attraction for me, but when an old friend asks me to log into WoW 'for old times sake' I say, jump onto ventrillo and I'll have a chat, skip the boring grindfest of a game.
Anyway, Star Wars! PEW PEW!
As I said, Star wars is a good game and I'm enjoying treating it like a single player game with multiplayer distractions such as dungeons/Flash points. The major negative is that I hate the PvP.
When I first played the game the PvP seemed pretty good, imagine a situation, where a level 10 character and a noob in PvP is on a nearly equal footing to a full level (50 in SWTOR) in terms of health and stats and such. There would be some differences, namely the skills available and their 'talent build' as you learn more skills and unlock more talents as you level up, but a skilled lower level player can and did dominate higher level characters due to this PvP balancing Bioware implemented.
Then they fucked it up... FUCKED IT UP HARD!
There's a PvP stat... WoW players will understand immediately what that means, but let me explain: In WoW, there was a stat you could build called 'Resilience', it was a kind of armour or defence that only worked when fighting other players and was the result of the initial design of WoW, player characters tended to be glass cannons dealing a lot of damage (or healing or tanking) but being relatively fragile compared to the NPC bosses. As a result, the best strategy in PvP was to simply aim for the biggest damage output so you could 'burst down' or blitz your opponents before they could do the same to you eliminating any chance for strategy or planning beyond "WHO DO WE KILLZ FIRST LOL". In other words...
Resilience was Blizzards band-aid fix to make PvP viable in a game designed for PvE.
This meant, if you were a new player or you were on an 'alt' that PvP was torture until you got a basic set of PvP gear, this turns off new players and leaves you with a situation where PvP games can become stagnant. Ultimately, the majority of dedicated PvP players have the same or similar gear making the gear essentially irrelevant except to allow you to brag in public chat or on the forums.
Now imagine, if you will... a game where they've designed PvP such that the survivability and damage output of a character is defined solely by the class and specialisation choice... and skill. No special stat required, right? But wait, if there isn't a special PvP stat, then the gear in PvP could be used in raiding, we can't have that! And we have to have SOME sort of gear reward for PvP. So Bioware introduced a stat called Expertise which increases your damage output and reduces incoming damage in PvP. This is only on gear from doing PvP, as you might expect.
Expertise is Biowares band-aid fix to make PvP gear attractive when it didn't need a fix at all.
PvP is fun before this stat comes into play, mercifully you can't get any of the special gear until you hit the leveling cap so while leveling, you can enjoy the PvP as it could have been. Once at 50, you once again have to choose... Lose over and over again in matches against people with the special gear, or avoid PvP altogether. And in this way, Expertise is WORSE than resilience! Because in WoW you could wear powerful gear from PvE/raiding into PvP matches and do alright without the resilience, but in SWTOR the only stat that matters in a PvP match is Expertise! So you MUST suffer the torture of the PvP gear grind and suffer you do... as a new level 50 character in PvP your role is to die... and die... and die and be abused by your team mates for being worthless and losing the game for your team.
And that, is not fun and I will not do it...
This black mark will likely stop me from bothering with PvP entirely, which will limit my options at level 50 to doing the odd flashpoint or operation... and as I'm not interested in being a full raider again and the game seems too quiet this will probably lead me to cancel my account when I finally become bored with leveling new characters.
Missed opportunity Bioware.
Keeper3 - We didn't need special gear rewards to kill each other in Quake, we don't it for PvP in MMOs.
