free week

[arabeth]

so TOR is offering a free week for folks who haven't played in a while to come back and see all the cool new stuff.  i admit:  i took the bait.

so far, it's been a very bad marketing idea on their part:  i was on quesh, the fleet, and the republic capitol world (cor-whatever) and there was 1 other person on the entire time (in quesh, hilariously).  when there are ZERO people on the fleet, that's a bad sign for an MMO.  (interestingly, the server reported "light" activity.  does 2 count as light?)

reading the other threads i see that most of the active imperial people already jumped to the ebon hawk.  what do the republic folks think?  should we go ahead since they'll probably merge the servers anyway?  sadly i've checked and my main character's name - arabeth - is not available, so i don't know if it's worth bothering.  they're trying to bribe us like mad with a free pet and some black hole junk that i don't know what it is, but who knows if they'll do something different in the future.

of course, i am guessing since no one is really around anyway it's all sort of moot:  no one is playing so who cares if we move or not, right?  and in the end, even with tons of improvements (that all should have been in the release of course) they still haven't implemented some of the things i'm most looking forward to.  unfortunately the legacy system doesn't do much for someone who's main is only 37 and still in chapter 2.  (also, i have noticed that generally people rate the consular's story/companions as the worst in the game.  since >80% of my game time was on my consular, i know i'm still missing a lot of good content.  but it's also hard to convince myself to start all over, especially when the game played so slowly on my consular.)

i guess ultimately this is a quick shout out to see if anyone else is going to pick this game back up, or if we're all going to continue to wait for pandera and then jump back to WoW (especially since D3 apparently disappointed a lot:  i didn't even pick it up).  i know there's some good content in there, but i also know you can't really play a MMO by yourself.

in other news i hope everyone is doing well!

[arabeth]

i went ahead and made the jump; zero people in the fleet is so sad it's not funny.  i didn't get any of the promised free stuff, however.  i guess i must have misunderstood the offer.  either way, the ebon hawk is much better off:  there were nearly 200 in the fleet this afternoon with lots of chatting.  now i just have to remember how to actually play...

doubt i'll go past the free week but if anyone wants to find me my main is now aerabella (since all reasonable variations on "arabeth" were taken).  the times i'll be on will be sporadic at best, tho. 

[Tierant]

They're working on getting people to play the populated servers and discouraging players from being on the light servers. It's worked, to an extent. They're offering massive rewards (25 Black Hole Commendations and a free pet if you transfer to a new server and stay on it for 30 days --- PER character!). Black Hole comms are the equivalent of Valor Points in WoW, used for buying 'casual' endgame equipment.

They're still trying to merge the light/abandoned servers or take them down altogether without using the nasty 'merging' word, since that would admit defeat. I think it's silly, but posturing is everything for business types. I've heard that'll happen around late august/September.

Finally, story depends a lot on if you enjoy it. I loved the BH storyline, but the Inquisitor and the JK lines are slooooow IMO. I chewed through the first part of the Smuggler's line though (before they started transfers. Now i'm waiting for paid transfers to move him to EB).

If you ever roll Imperial, look up Runio. I'll help you out however I can.

[arabeth]

thanks for the reply!  i didn't realize you had to stay transferred for 30 days to get the rewards; that should be easy enough, although i probably won't have an active sub by then.

i read somewhere a cynical view that the "free week" is just to get old timers to resub just in time for the end of the quarter numbers.  i don't think that's true, though, since the quarter ended in june.  but i am wondering how their report will end up looking.  from what i can tell, they had 2 million try the game, 1.7 at the end of december, and 1.3 at the end of march.  i expect it'll be quite a bit lower at the end of june.  people blame EA for making them shove it out the door unfinished (1.3 should really be 1.0) but on the other hand people were already hating on them for taking as long as they did.  also i think the people making the game assumed people would play it for the story and to build a stable of alts (which is actually why i played it); what they didn't understand is that apparently most people only care about end-game content.  it makes sense that nearly everything they've done to improve the game is for level 50 people.  anyway the number one thing that the world has learned is this:  NO ONE will unseat WoW.  WoW will die its own death one day, but until then no one will try to move into this market space again.  it's a "free"-to-play world, now.

i keep hearing that the bounty hunter story is the best, so i was thinking of trying that one out next.  plus, having seen how FAST people in heavy armor blow through areas it makes me sad that once again light armor folks get the shaft.  well, especially light armor folks spec'd for healing instead of damage.  /sigh

my plan is to play this weekend - if i can get some time.    if i try the imperial side i'll definitely look you up!

[Tierant]

People can twist words to mean just about anything, including cynical views about unpopular games. But in the end, the only metric about liking a game is 'did you like it?'.

I tend not to follow most traffic about TOR except for the reddit subcommunity. That keeps a lot of the "lolTOR" traffic to a minimum, and they do a good job of mirroring official announcements from the official forums (since its blocked here at work).

I'd say BH & Smuggler have great stories, and everyone raves about the Agent storyline. Though, it makes me struggle to push on in the slower storylines because, if you look real closely, all the stories intertwine towards the endgame

[Agrim]

I played the IA to 50 and the story was quite good overall.  First chapter was interesting, second wasn't quite up to par but still good.  The third chapter was a mixed bag.  It started off  poorly and then the quality went up significantly at the very end and had an excellent conclusion.

What was interesting is that the ending could go several different ways depending on some of the choices you made throughout your journey to 50. 

I will say though as a non force user it always felt like you were a second class citizen bowing and scraping to the Sith.

[arabeth]

well my free week is about over.  i went ahead and took a bounty hunter and sith warrior to level 10, and tried the first instance on the sith side (which was actually worse than the republic one, sadly).  i will say that playing in heavy armor made me want to cry; the game is only about 10x faster with a BH than a consular.  (why oh why can no one make a game where being light armor heal-spec'd is a valid leveling option?)  the intro worlds were pretty fun, but frankly other than the fact that i constantly wanted to save and retry different options (which hasn't changed) it was pretty similar to the republic side.  i will say the entire game is definitely to a 1.0 state (finally).  the group finder helps SO MUCH it's not even funny.  i know it's part of the reason WoW sucks now but at least for now it's a really useful tool in TOR.

for me, the most surprising thing was how many little things they -still- haven't fixed.  you still can't hit enter (to start) or escape (to quit) from the character screen.  why?  and they still have the same, tired, badly-drawn loading screen that you see constantly.  that should have been at least a dozen screens, randomly cycled.  and they finally added some tutorials, but they pop up randomly and force you to click through them and often don't explain things any better than a tooltip.  and they even added a third step to logging into the game.  it's like they have no idea what good usability is.  tiny stuff like this is tiny, but it's all about polish.  and TOR, love it, never really was polished.

maybe one day when they finally add more companions and some same-gender romances i'll pick it back up, but i'm not holding my breath that the game won't be cancelled before they get around to that stuff.  in the end, TOR is still a LOT of doing the same thing over and over.  i'd love to explore different dialog paths and get my characters far enough along to have cool weapons and armor...  but the thought of going through another 3 billion giant, nearly featureless rooms packed with clumps of non-moving enemy set pieces just makes my stomach turn.  it's probably a bad sign that at this point i actively avoid all combat whenever possible.  ...maybe i should have rolled that inquisitor for the stealth... 

sorry i never found you, Tierant.  i looked but i guess we just never played at the same time.  thanks anyway for the offer of help!

anyway, hope everyone else is having a good summer!