Callate said:
When any class is described primarily in terms of its combat advantages against other classes- without any mention of how other classes might gain an advantage over that class in turn- I get serious qualms, and I think reasonably so. There's an obvious contradiction when you describe a framework that rewards teamwork and cooperation and strategic thinking and then say, "And then there's so-and-so, who just kills the other side, heh heh heh." It may be that the Imperial Agent is PvP-strong and PvE-poor, as some have suggested of CoH's Stalker class- but frankly, that setup sucks in City of Heroes, and I've seen no reason to think it would work better anywhere else.
Granted, I haven't played CoH, but I hardly think that you're giving what the developer said a fair chance. He was doing a brief exposition on the Agent, and explaining the one element that set it apart from other classes. I'd wait until all the data is in before jumping down Bioware's throats about this class. What you quoted about the Agent sounds to me like "Rogues can stealth up to a target and stun them before they have a chance to react" - a concept that, in WoW,
sounds overpowered from a soundbyte, but is actually not gamebreaking.
They'd have to be extremely foolish to let something so obviously unbalanced go into the game, and whatever gripes you (or I, as I certainly have a lot of them) have with Bioware, being foolish is not really one of them. (Nor is a tendency toward egregious class imbalance, and as I recall, CoH was Cryptic and NCsoft, not Bioware.)
Callate said:
While there's nothing inherently wrong with "loot" and I recognize its attraction to many players, the loot system that has been shown in KOTOR and TSL is possibly the weakest overarcing element in both games.
But this is not KoTOR the single-player game, this is SW:TOR, an MMO. The loot systems will probably be very different, in keeping with how MMOs need to offer "carrots" to players.
Callate said:
In some ways, the very idea of "loot" borders on being antithetical to Star Wars as a whole. There are occasional suggestions of a system of trade and a need for money in the movies- usually as a means of getting off of a planet- but aside from light sabers themselves, the number of objects that a person could conceivably carry around with them that are ascribed worth and meaning in the Star Wars movies could be counted on one hand. Blasters, thermal detonators, the plans for the Death Star... Maybe whichever piece C-3PO has had blown off most recently- And that's about it, really.
Now, I'm a
fanatical Star Wars loretard, but having played a few video games in my time, preserving the lootless, relatively moneyless system you allege is central to Star Wars (rather than just an element of the films being, you know,
films) would be a deathknell for an MMO. Sometimes lore and flavor have to bend in favor of adhering to industry standards, and one of those standards is that MMOs tend to be reward-based and have virtual economies. This is one of those times. I think you're being a little bit picky.
Callate said:
Acquisition of wealth for wealth's sake seems to be relegated to giant slugs like the Hutts. Both the Jedi and the Sith largely seem to think it beneath them; people, cities, and planets are what matter. Frankly, even lightsaber-collecting seems to have been something only General Grievous was into, fat lot of good it did him.
You don't sound like an EU fan, so this is probably forgivable, but I did a giant @_@ at this section. There are instances of Force users, especially Sith, picking up trophies of their battles
all over the place. Palpatine was one of the worst, being several times described as basically a packrat, depositing giant hidden hoards of his confiscated goodies all over the galaxy like some kind of chipmunk dragon. The Sith embraced greed, and believed that if you were powerful enough to take something by force, you deserved to have it and had every right to do so. True, the Jedi at the height of the Republic tended toward a Spartan lifestyle, but that didn't mean they didn't carry around anything they might need. Then you have the bounty hunters and the smugglers, both explicitly for-profit occupations.
Callate said:
What players will say on the chat channel, as always, the moderators have only the faintest vestige of control over. If TOR is going to stand shoulder to shoulder with WoW, however, the people who present it should know better than to use language that conveys the message that it's just like every other also-ran.
First: I think you may have misunderstood the intent of what I said about how those phrases conceptually, if not linguistically, fit right into the greedy, vengeful, sadistic, utterly selfish mold of the post-Bane breed of Sith.
Second: Have you ever
heard a WoW developer talk? I don't expect Bioware's devs to be loretards (except the ones who do the writing, and they hopefully aren't the ones who do the class balancing or the gameplay design), and neither should you. Developers are gamers at heart, and I'd prefer they talk about phat lewts and pwning noobs - at least they're speaking my language.
