Blog Archives
Knights of the Eternal Throne, MMO evolution or deterioration?
After a summer of silence, and months of anticipation #Bioware has given us some information on #kotet. New York Comic Con Cantina event gave us an inside look of the upcoming conclusion to #kotfe. Ideas of Bioware listening to it’s playerbase may have fallen on deaf ears, some have stated. Blur gave us a teaser trailer and a full trailer. In short, it’s a backstory on Vaylin, so obviously you have an idea of the direction of the story. Vaylin is Emperess now and it’s pretty much an ultimate battle of Good vs. Bad aka Light vs. Dark.
Bioware for awhile has wanted to go back to its roots of story story story-telling, #KnightsOfTheFallenEmpire was pretty much Bioware’s way of testing the waters and dipping their toes in a different direction of what MMO evolution they have in mind. Though KotFE came with mixed reviews, the foundation of the game was the same, now with the next step of a complete revamp of the whole system of the game.
A bump in the road with the silent treatment
I thought that I would mention that right now going on in SWTOR that unlocking outfits in collections are HALF OFF!!!! For a limited time ONLY!
It was brought up to my attention on Twitter that why hadn’t Bioware announced it? And excellent question, perhaps maybe some sort of backlash from the harassment of one of the Devs? Speculation may arise from the community in regards to further communications from Bioware to the community. It’s sad in a way that a few bad apples ruins the bunch. The behavior of a few does not reflect the whole community. But what can we as the community do to gain the trust back from Bioware to make these small announcements?
Could this be the beginning of what we as the community struggled to get from Bioware? I know personally I don’t want Bioware to turn their backs to the community. It really seemed that we as in Bioware and the community were moving in the right direction and now we’re being put in the corner to think about we’ve done. People need to be respectful, being behind a computer doesn’t give one the right to just say anything that you want regardless of how it will affect the person. A silent treatment is toxic to a relationship.
Your rights end where others rights begins. Food for thought.
Stay tuned to The Balance Force.
PSA… Developer Harassment
Post on May 6th by John J. | Post 2. | Post 3.
Recently a Swtor Dev was harassed for a post on the forums, but to go to the degree of harassing ones family. Unacceptable, many players of Swtor will agree that this should never happen in any way, shape or form. It brings to light that these particular people don’t understand the particulars of communicating on a mature level. It’s shameful. And it affects the entire way we wanted Bioware to be more transparent on communicating with us, the player base.
For us players this is a game, a form of entertainment, a way to relax and have fun with friends. It’s NOT fun to affect a person who is doing their job and/or their family simply because one doesn’t like ‘X, Y, and Z’.
For example: Many of the healers were not happy with the proposed changes for 3.2.1. The Dev team asked for the opinions and feedback in regards to these changes. A majority of players presented a thoughtful and constructive point of views about these changes. And the changes for healers were reevaluated and pulled from 3.2.1.
Now, ofcourse this type of behavior upsets me simply because I feel that NO ONE should ever experience this type of situation.
Posted on May 7th by Eric Musco.
No one has the right to harass a person and/or their family. All the best to John and his family.
Ziost story impression and disappointments
Recently I’ve got to go through the second part of the Ziost story, on my Sage. And so far I like what Bioware did storywise. But I can’t help to feel like it lacked in content. Now, keep in mind that you have to finish your storyline on Yavin in order to get the mission-story arch for Ziost. Once you get to Ziost, you meet up with Lana/Theron (depending on which side you’re playing on), pick up a few missions and evacuate some citizens and fight mind controlled minions of the Emperor and are introduced to “The Sixth Line Jedi Order” (in some cases people are calling ‘The Grey Jedi Order’).
NOTE: May contain spoilers
Rise of the Emperor
First off, if you missed the Dev’s stream you can view it here. And there are some spoilers, so if you don’t want any spoilers. Than don’t watch it.
I will say that I personally think that the Dev’s did a good job with this stream, using the presentation that they were going to use for Pax East. Energy was good, the giveaways, nice touch.
Great that they’re building hype for ‘The Rise of the Emperor’, a new storyarch, and yes like the Devs said it did leave a few questions unanswered. I guess we’ll learn more once 3.2 hits the live servers. This stream seemed to cover PvE content, I was noticing in chat a lot of questions as to bug fixes, PvP, class balancing, cross-server, etc. If you can dodge a wrench, you dodge a question.
A tremor in the Force
Well, today Eric Musco announced (finally) that Bioware will have its stream.
March 20th from 3pm-4pm CDT via twitch.tv/swtor with some news of 3.2 update.
So we get 1 hour to hopefully watch something that will hype us up for 3.2 update. Maybe a little insight on ‘the outfitter’?
Maybe a Q&A? What questions do you think will be asked?
- Coratanni and Underlurker bug fix?
- PvP new content?
- Nightmare for new Ops?
- Class balancing? Or Nerfing?
- Operation: Victory, re announced?
Pulling the ears off a Gundark…
I had quite an interesting conversation with a couple of guildies and friends on Teamspeak, the topic… was Bioware and its reputation and where the company is going.
One of the most interesting things about this topic is the fact that Bioware seems to have a ‘running joke’ reputation. And every time that Bioware puts out an update to fix something they break something else. As a guildie said, ‘one step forward, and three steps back’. I mean how bad is that, that we as players of this game see it that way.
It’s all about that XP
When The ‘Shadow of Revan’ expansion preorder was announced, I was excited about it. I just had to look up the details about it, and to my surprise 12x XP to class story, say whaaaaaaat! When I preordered I jumped into the game and started leveling up my lowbie toons. I crunch out several characters to 55, I think I went a little crazy with it. But I was happy to see that I did it, going through some of the class stories so quickly I was spacebarring just to get to 55. I wanted to be ready for the expansion.
So after the 12x XP was done, I started hearing that players wanted 12x XP to be brought back. And I said to myself, now THAT’S a great idea. But when?
SW:ToR Community Shoutout…
I wanted to give a shout out to podcast peeps that I listen to. For the longest time I’ve listen to ‘The Republic‘ with @Shaddoe (Larry Everett of ‘Hyperspace Beacon‘), which features different co-host from time to time @Heather_PLS (Heather Nazareno also of prettylittlesith.com) from ‘Corellian Run Radio‘, @R3DN4 (Redna) ‘Ootinicast‘, @BeardedApe (Chuck) and @BadFeelingpdcst (Brian) from ‘Bad Feeling Podcasts‘, @ThatRoadGuy from ‘TOROcast‘, @Maebeebuzz of (Maebeebuzz Blog) and more. Old Republic Radio has a great podcast explaining the new operations that I would highly recommend in listening to.
I remember watching ‘The Republic’ being the first podcast I watched/listened to. Always enjoyed the cast. Wanting to hear more information on the upcoming MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. And little by little started listening to more and more podcasts, enjoying the content and different views.
When Star Wars Galaxies went under, I bounced around from MMO to MMO, played WoW for a bit, tried DCUO, beta tested Star Trek Online, Rift for like a minute (literally), and probably a few more that escape me at the moment. Read the rest of this entry
To pug or not to pug…
One thing the lately I have noticed is that not so many players are really starting to do a lot of the new ops. Guilds are doing progression raids of 8 mans. Haven’t really heard too much about 16 mans. Now let’s not forget about the bugs from the 3.0 update in regards to the new ops. Ravengers and Temple of Sacrifice. Read the rest of this entry
The Balance Force 