Ishigami said:
It is about mathematics you see. Time needed vs. reward earned. This and similar calculation (cue: theory crafting) that foremost drives a huge chunk of the MMO community completely disregards certain aspects of games (any game for that matter) such as story, atmosphere or even combat situations (DPS meter, terrain etc...). And this is an attitude you can't simply break free.
What I was getting at with ?MMO community is not able to appreciate it? is that SW:ToR would have been better received being no MMO at all but continuation of KotOR aiming at a completely different crowd with different focus in games.
As to the player count: So WoW is the best game ever made?
And SW:ToR is not so bad in comparison to other competitors. It could be argued that it could be the 3rd or 4th most played traditional MMORPG on the market. It is just that the expectation were completely a miss.
That is exactly correct. Bioware had no business stepping into the MMO world. Nobody plays MMO's for the story... especially the MMO community and ESPECIALLY the WoW player subset of that community. SwToR wasn't bad... I'd say apart from WoW and GW2 its one of the better ones out there, though like the original guild wars I'd recommend it not as an MMO but as a large RPG experience to play with a few friends.
ToR simply couldn't get its act together. I was there when people decided to leave in droves.. I watched my server empty and become a ghost town. They promised endgame but when they delivered it was bugged all to hell. SOA and Karraga bugged out on my guild at least 20 times each. Then when they were finally going to implement some good PvP stuff they pushed it back to a later patch... at that point tons of people left. On Ilum, when they had pub and imp players scumming the honor/valor or whatever the pvp currency was called... that should have been rolled back, but it wasn't. As a result, the entire RUIN gaming community had tons of geared players and stomped all over everybody. Massive balance issue... and they didn't fix it. Of the players in other guilds I knew, at least ~700 players left just for that reason alone.
MMO players aren't gamers... not in the same way a lot of people here on the escapist are. They don't care about games like Dishonored or Bioshock. The game for them is social more than anything. Playing an MMO for many of them is more of meeting up with their friends to play golf or hockey than immerse themselves in a world. They have been playing with their guilds for years in many cases, this is why having a good guild system in place is important and I'd argue ToR didn't have that. DOn't know if it does now. What you are arguing is fine... but it doesn't excuse Bioware's lack of attention to these things. I can't tell you how many people I heard say this phrase while playing.
"Sometimes when i play this game, I get the feeling that the developers never played an MMO before"
This comes from doing the Eternity Vault and going broke fixing your gear. The amount of money you get from running raids is (or was) really low. These are base concepts that a game very much akin to WoW should have in place, but didn't. Bioware should have known these things, but they didn't. It is impossible to please the MMO community, granted. However, ToR should have done so much more at the beginning, it shouldn't have been released as soon as it was... and now it suffers the consequences.
