Just_Bri_ThanksSeething with ragefrom a handbasket.Registered User, ClubPAregular
edited June 2011
Join her for her character with an alt, and have her join your character with an alt. Talk about your experiences. Reach an acceptable long-term compromise.
Just_Bri_Thanks on
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Earlier this year I heard a rumor that they were aiming for September, so October 4 seems realistic if they had to suddenly delay release for, say, a companion revamp.
Another friend got in last week. Said the client was 30GB, but he's had trouble downloading it, so he hasn't played yet. I doubt the bastard even likes Star Wars. He told me he hated KOTOR and Mass Effect.
Earlier this year I heard a rumor that they were aiming for September, so October 4 seems realistic if they had to suddenly delay release for, say, a companion revamp.
Another friend got in last week. Said the client was 30GB, but he's had trouble downloading it, so he hasn't played yet. I doubt the bastard even likes Star Wars. He told me he hated KOTOR and Mass Effect.
Ffffffuuuu! :x:x
I loved the Star Wars movies, didn't particularly care for KOTOR. Or Mass Effect for that matter.
Earlier this year I heard a rumor that they were aiming for September, so October 4 seems realistic if they had to suddenly delay release for, say, a companion revamp.
Another friend got in last week. Said the client was 30GB, but he's had trouble downloading it, so he hasn't played yet. I doubt the bastard even likes Star Wars. He told me he hated KOTOR and Mass Effect.
Ffffffuuuu! :x:x
Not only does he hate Star Wars but also fun apparently.
A friend is showing interest in this game, and so am I. She's waffling between Sith or a Smuggler. I want to play a Trooper. How do I convince her to go Republic with me?
Tell her she can be a smuggler, a "good guy", yet still be able to be the biggest dick in the galaxy without any of the guilt through some wonderful dialogue choices.
Don't forget kicking people in the crotch all day long
SiliconStew on
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
I think balance is a bit of an illusion really. In the end, these systems can always be optimized and players will always cry "foul" when they lose in PvP regardless of the equity or lack of it. Again I bring up World of Tanks (a game I've been grinding a lot lately), people are blaming the inequity of the random match maker and the "unbalanced" nature of the pay-tanks. When in fact, both complaints are overblown.
So, given that I think balance (or lack of it) is bit of an illusion, I'd rather have the variety.
I think balance based on player whine is bullshit, but there's definitely something to be said for statistical measurements of balance. If 80% of all battlegrounds are won by the Empire - not as in some random guy on the forums claimed it, but as in as-the-makers-of-a-proper-MMO-we-track-this-statistic fact - this is Bad, this will impact how Fun PvP is, and calling it an illusion is sort of an insult to the intelligence of your players. And while PvP is where it's likely to be most noticeable, you've got potential for some pretty huge issues in PvE as well; Taking down a turret is super easy for the Imperial agent, while not-so-much for the smuggler.
Honestly, ignoring various designs decisions on which their ruling is not known, not mirroring the classes except in roles is probably the single most glaring issue I have with their efforts so far. I get it, they get to tout a higher number of unique classes than they would have if they went for mirrors - as they'd still need separate storylines for Empire and Republic - and they set up for a portion of their first expansion nicely, but seriously, this could blow up in their faces.
It also ignores that balance isn't just about PvP. Raiding in Vanilla WoW was actually the main area the Paladin/Shaman divide fucked stuff up. Although it also fucked up PvP something fierce.
Just trying to wing it with different classes on each side is a fucking nightmare for balance. Especially in PvE where it can seriously impact your ability to make encounters and challenges.
Balance is not an illusion and it's just goosey to pretend it is.
shryke on
0
ArrynAsk not the InnkeeperFor destiny is thy name!Registered Userregular
It also ignores that balance isn't just about PvP. Raiding in Vanilla WoW was actually the main area the Paladin/Shaman divide fucked stuff up. Although it also fucked up PvP something fierce.
Just trying to wing it with different classes on each side is a fucking nightmare for balance. Especially in PvE where it can seriously impact your ability to make encounters and challenges.
Balance is not an illusion and it's just goosey to pretend it is.
Remember when only Dwarf Priests had Fear Ward? I recall many tears over Magmadar back in the day. Fight was a joke for Alliance, a PitA for Horde.
A friend is showing interest in this game, and so am I. She's waffling between Sith or a Smuggler. I want to play a Trooper. How do I convince her to go Republic with me?
You should give up on playing a Trooper and be a Bounty Hunter like a real man.
Troopers are pretty fun....unloading a shit ton of blaster fire on some schmuck then running up to him and giving him a rifle butt to the face is very satisfying.
It also ignores that balance isn't just about PvP. Raiding in Vanilla WoW was actually the main area the Paladin/Shaman divide fucked stuff up. Although it also fucked up PvP something fierce..
It really all depends on how different they are. Both paladin and shaman had no equal on the other faction because their respective base mechanic was each so unique. Is this the case with these TOR classes I wonder? They might not be mirrors in that the abilities and trees are not statistically exact, but they may be the same in their base mechanic. Perusing the ability charts on the SWTOR wiki might be a place to check. I'm too lazy to do that.
So it may not be a total clusterfuck for raiding. But yeah, there will certainly be boss fights where one class or tree on one side gives an advantage that the other side doesn't.
Since both of the PA guilds will probably be on the same server, I'm gonna have to find a Sith guild to be in on some other server. I want to play all the classes and their stories. Unfortunately I have no RL friends who are gonna play this game.
I might need to take a break from the hype. After finishing "Deceived" (which is quite good, way better than "Fatal Alliance,") I found myself with some free time and a hankering for more TOR. But this thread was used up. All the trailers are used up. I've probably read every holocron entry. There was nothing left.
So I went to the official forums.
Such stunning conversation. I don't know which I found more engaging... the fierce Twi'lek vs. Zeltron debate or the extensive list of reasons that people REALLY hate the Jedi!
And when it was time to wind down, some deep ethical discourse: Did Obi-Wan get Dark Side Points when he failed to kill Anakin Skywalker?
Maybe an announcement of the release date at Comic Con? They'd really have everyone's attention, press-wise.
Speaking of Comic Con, Im going to be there so Im willing to ask them any questions you guys may have. I'll probably just record the whole conversation on my phone unless that quality sucks since it can be quite loud in the main hall. Anyway, when we get closer to Comic Con (I believe it starts July 22nd, and I think preview night is on the 21st which I can get into but may not be able to attend) we can create a list of questions. Hopefully I'll be able to talk to someone important and not a booth model, although, I guess if you guys have questions for them I can ask them some things too.
Maybe an announcement of the release date at Comic Con? They'd really have everyone's attention, press-wise.
Speaking of Comic Con, Im going to be there so Im willing to ask them any questions you guys may have. I'll probably just record the whole conversation on my phone unless that quality sucks since it can be quite loud in the main hall. Anyway, when we get closer to Comic Con (I believe it starts July 22nd, and I think preview night is on the 21st which I can get into but may not be able to attend) we can create a list of questions. Hopefully I'll be able to talk to someone important and not a booth model, although, I guess if you guys have questions for them I can ask them some things too.
Love it if you could come up with 5 different ways to ask what colour lightsabers there are and then intersperse those questions with your others. Just keep dropping them in there.
Maybe an announcement of the release date at Comic Con? They'd really have everyone's attention, press-wise.
Speaking of Comic Con, Im going to be there so Im willing to ask them any questions you guys may have. I'll probably just record the whole conversation on my phone unless that quality sucks since it can be quite loud in the main hall. Anyway, when we get closer to Comic Con (I believe it starts July 22nd, and I think preview night is on the 21st which I can get into but may not be able to attend) we can create a list of questions. Hopefully I'll be able to talk to someone important and not a booth model, although, I guess if you guys have questions for them I can ask them some things too.
Love it if you could come up with 5 different ways to ask what colour lightsabers there are and then intersperse those questions with your others. Just keep dropping them in there.
Im tempted to come up with 5 different ways of asking what the release date is.
And what's this about variable flashpoint size? I stopped following this game for a few months - as in concluding that the release date was so far of there was no use torturing myself - but last I heard, well, I didn't hear anything about that. 4 person flashpoint, with the companion presence there to make sure that you could bring whichever 4 people you liked regardless of their classes, because companion swapping would still give you sufficient tank/healer/DPS.
I think you're mistaking instanced quest areas with flashpoints. they aren't the same thing. at different points while questing you'll head into an area instanced just for you and your group - which is really the only way to do the kind of story/interactive stuff on a live server. (otherwise you'll have folks camping quest areas on pvp servers hoping to gank you while you're in a cinematic - which is what happened a lot in Age of Conan).
The difficulty of those instanced areas will scale to your groups composition and size. So if you have four players it'll be much tougher than if its you and a companion, or you a friend and your companions.
I also believe outside or raids, you only have the 4 man group - and groups are made up of both players and companions. So there isn't a situation where its you, four friends and four companions running around killing stuff.
Earlier this year I heard a rumor that they were aiming for September, so October 4 seems realistic if they had to suddenly delay release for, say, a companion revamp.
Another friend got in last week. Said the client was 30GB, but he's had trouble downloading it, so he hasn't played yet. I doubt the bastard even likes Star Wars. He told me he hated KOTOR and Mass Effect.
Honestly right now they seem to be on a similar track as Warhammer Online a few years ago. If that holds it means ramped up testing now for a month, some kind of large beta in August along with an announcement date and pre-orders, and a late September/early October launch.
Q. Do you find soloing to be a viable option at all level ranges?
A. It’s viable, but you’re going to level more slowly. There are a lot of group quests which give great XP and loot and they can’t just be solo’d at an appropriate level. You have to basically come back 10 levels later if you want to solo those. I tried skipping some group quests and really regretted it later when I fell behind on levels. You absolutely want to group up and knock out every group quest in each planet.
No sir I don't like it. Forcing players into group quests was one thing WoW eliminated in 4.0 and it's for the better. These group quests will be great early on, when there is just a mass of players around, but as the player base levels up these quests will become impossible to do. And it will hamstring new players, possibly frustrate and lose them. This is a bad model to follow for questing.
Q. Do you find soloing to be a viable option at all level ranges?
A. It’s viable, but you’re going to level more slowly. There are a lot of group quests which give great XP and loot and they can’t just be solo’d at an appropriate level. You have to basically come back 10 levels later if you want to solo those. I tried skipping some group quests and really regretted it later when I fell behind on levels. You absolutely want to group up and knock out every group quest in each planet.
No sir I don't like it. Forcing players into group quests was one thing WoW eliminated in 4.0 and it's for the better. These group quests will be great early on, when there is just a mass of players around, but as the player base levels up these quests will become impossible to do. And it will hamstring new players, possibly frustrate and lose them. This is a bad model to follow for questing.
Wow started the same way. I say keep it until the majority of your player base is beyond that level range. Every expansion makes the previous content easier for new people.
Bannon9k on
0
ArrynAsk not the InnkeeperFor destiny is thy name!Registered Userregular
Q. Do you find soloing to be a viable option at all level ranges?
A. It’s viable, but you’re going to level more slowly. There are a lot of group quests which give great XP and loot and they can’t just be solo’d at an appropriate level. You have to basically come back 10 levels later if you want to solo those. I tried skipping some group quests and really regretted it later when I fell behind on levels. You absolutely want to group up and knock out every group quest in each planet.
No sir I don't like it. Forcing players into group quests was one thing WoW eliminated in 4.0 and it's for the better. These group quests will be great early on, when there is just a mass of players around, but as the player base levels up these quests will become impossible to do. And it will hamstring new players, possibly frustrate and lose them. This is a bad model to follow for questing.
They're sort of damned if they do, damned if they don't. For every person saying "this is a bad thing" there's going to be another who would complain about "there's no reason to even group in this game. It's not really an MMO, it's just an online single player!"
At the very least, it seems that their trend is to make the groups necessary for certain things smaller, e.g. 4 player groups for instances, and companions to help out in a pinch. I'd be surprised if most of the open world group quests required more than 2 people (plus companions).
No sir I don't like it. Forcing players into group quests was one thing WoW eliminated in 4.0 and it's for the better. These group quests will be great early on, when there is just a mass of players around, but as the player base levels up these quests will become impossible to do. And it will hamstring new players, possibly frustrate and lose them. This is a bad model to follow for questing.
But as the gear and buffs available in each WOW expansion improved, players over time became able to solo group quests. I can't remember the last time I needed a group to kill the Naga bosses in Zangarmarsh or the elite animals in Nagrand, for example.
I think one or two group quests at the end of a levelling zone is a fine thing. They can give slightly better rewards than the solo quests, and as long as there are few enough of them that a solo player who passes them up is not going to fall behind the levelling curve, there's really no downside. Stuff like the 5 man arenas with the weapon rewards in WoW have always been a good thing.
People will group up with them by forming through general chat or whatever, and if it's further down the road and there aren't people questing in the zone with you, then get one of your friends or guildmates to run you through it. If you can't do that, skip it and move on. You can live with missing out on one quest reward.
Balance is not an illusion and it's just goosey to pretend it is.
The lack of "balance" is very often an illusion, or at least highly exaggerated. Gamers often whine about THEIR perceptions, with only little, or limited data.
I do agree that designing a game to accommodate all styles of play is challenging, but that's part of the issue. Often whines about "balance" are focused on just one narrow incident or attempt to "pwn" something. Players are consistently looking for excuses for why they failed to pwn a particular aspect of the game.
This is most evident in a PUG, where you see some players blaming their team after a wipe, when in fact, the playing griping was just as much to blame as any.
I claimed that the perception of imbalance is often an illusion, because players jump to conclusions based on limited understanding and data and usually based on isolated incidents of their own experience.
A game's "balance" is really about enjoyment. If PvP is engaging and fun, people play it and a lack of mirrored classes on each side doesn't guarantee the PvP is fun.
Again, I examine World of Tanks, because this is a game in which I PvP extensively. The most common gripe is 60 pages long on their forum and it all stems from the lack of "balance" in the match maker. But if you look more closely, it's the same small group of players complaining and in fact, most player's win/loss percentage only stray from 50% by a few percentage points. Sure some tanks are harder to play than others, but that's the point, you can place a governor on your own challenge level. The real test of "balance" is whether people keep playing, and of course they do and indeed the player base grows each week. So the game is working exactly as intended, despite the whining.
It was the same with WoW, most of the gripes about "balance" were BS. From time to time, players have legitimate gripes, but I will also say that when they do, a competent game addresses them fairly quickly.
That's the problem with video games though, they are rather clumsy systems that are designed to provide advantages if you exploit it. In fact, they are set up to be exploited, that's their hook and they become more exploitable the more you subscribe (pay) to play them. That's their business model.
These games are often difficult to assess and understand (in terms of maximizing play) but then relatively easy to execute (the actual mechanics of playing). It's the opposite of chess and so you get endless minutia and pedantic discussion about "balance", because the game thrives on nerds dissecting every fractional advantage. I don't mind the nerdy talk, but I also call out the fact that so often the accusations that the game is broken are often hyperbolic and just an extension of a resentful player.
They're sort of damned if they do, damned if they don't. For every person saying "this is a bad thing" there's going to be another who would complain about "there's no reason to even group in this game. It's not really an MMO, it's just an online single player!"
This is a reasonable point, because I have seen this exact gripe before.
But this is an extension of the gaming community, which is notoriously opinionated (and I point to myself as I say that) and chronically dissatisfied. Again, look at WOW, their forum is riddled with gripes, complaints and ornery observations about how much Blizzard sucks.
And yet the vast majority of the complaints derive from players who continue to fork over 15 dollars a month and have done so for years.
The test as to whether the group quests are intrusive to a player's enjoyment of the game will be their wallets. If the group quests are cumbersome enough that the game becomes annoying, you'll quickly see EA resolve the situation.
I agree launching a game of this magnitude (every time I use the word magnitude I feel like Ackbar), you have to make tough choices and inevitably you'll get complaints which ever decisions you make. But I think the best way to mitigate the risk of your choices is being prepared to change those decisions, if it is discovered the players dislike them enough that they no longer subscribe.
In other words, stubborn game designers die in today's world of instant gratification. And some gaming companies only learn this lesson the hard way.
Good news is, I don't think Bio/EA are that stubborn.
I think group quests can be a great thing for connecting. I joined a PA guild just when TBC came out. I was pretty inexperienced with raiding, and didn't really know anyone in the guild. The key quests for Kara were my first real connection with the guild, and it led to joining a regular Kara raid. And it all started with jumping on a guild chat LFG. At that point, I had no clue that the quests were key quests-- they were just Group quests that I couldn't do on my own. Was a great learning and connecting opportunity for a noob.
Q. Do you find soloing to be a viable option at all level ranges?
A. It’s viable, but you’re going to level more slowly. There are a lot of group quests which give great XP and loot and they can’t just be solo’d at an appropriate level. You have to basically come back 10 levels later if you want to solo those. I tried skipping some group quests and really regretted it later when I fell behind on levels. You absolutely want to group up and knock out every group quest in each planet.
No sir I don't like it. Forcing players into group quests was one thing WoW eliminated in 4.0 and it's for the better. These group quests will be great early on, when there is just a mass of players around, but as the player base levels up these quests will become impossible to do. And it will hamstring new players, possibly frustrate and lose them. This is a bad model to follow for questing.
Is it for the better? I think that's one of the building blocks for WoW's "I Don't Give A Shit About Anybody But Me" Syndrome.
I have no problem with folks having the choice to grind completely solo. But its classic give an inch, take a mile situation. MMOs start to cater to a solo players. Then all of a sudden players want to be able to play by themselves without any trade-off.
Eh, Bioware have stated repeatedly that they want it to be absolutely possible to level from 1-50 solo.
Maybe it's not possible now according to that tester, but, you know, it's a beta. Shit is going to get tweaked.
Posts
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Ffffffuuuu! :x:x
I loved the Star Wars movies, didn't particularly care for KOTOR. Or Mass Effect for that matter.
I'll still be looking to buy this, probably.
Not only does he hate Star Wars but also fun apparently.
PSN: OrneryRooster
Don't forget kicking people in the crotch all day long
It also ignores that balance isn't just about PvP. Raiding in Vanilla WoW was actually the main area the Paladin/Shaman divide fucked stuff up. Although it also fucked up PvP something fierce.
Just trying to wing it with different classes on each side is a fucking nightmare for balance. Especially in PvE where it can seriously impact your ability to make encounters and challenges.
Balance is not an illusion and it's just goosey to pretend it is.
Remember when only Dwarf Priests had Fear Ward? I recall many tears over Magmadar back in the day. Fight was a joke for Alliance, a PitA for Horde.
Troopers are pretty fun....unloading a shit ton of blaster fire on some schmuck then running up to him and giving him a rifle butt to the face is very satisfying.
PSN: OrneryRooster
I'm not listening anymore LALALALALALALALALALALALALA!!!
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
It really all depends on how different they are. Both paladin and shaman had no equal on the other faction because their respective base mechanic was each so unique. Is this the case with these TOR classes I wonder? They might not be mirrors in that the abilities and trees are not statistically exact, but they may be the same in their base mechanic. Perusing the ability charts on the SWTOR wiki might be a place to check. I'm too lazy to do that.
So it may not be a total clusterfuck for raiding. But yeah, there will certainly be boss fights where one class or tree on one side gives an advantage that the other side doesn't.
SteamID: devCharles
twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesewise
This is sarcasm, right?
Because I do not see that as a glaring flaw, or a flaw, or anything.
Never thought of that. Just assumed you could only play one faction on a particular server.
Because one of them is specced to do no damage and the other is also specced to do no damage.
So I went to the official forums.
Such stunning conversation. I don't know which I found more engaging... the fierce Twi'lek vs. Zeltron debate or the extensive list of reasons that people REALLY hate the Jedi!
And when it was time to wind down, some deep ethical discourse: Did Obi-Wan get Dark Side Points when he failed to kill Anakin Skywalker?
I have gazed too long into the abyss.
Speaking of Comic Con, Im going to be there so Im willing to ask them any questions you guys may have. I'll probably just record the whole conversation on my phone unless that quality sucks since it can be quite loud in the main hall. Anyway, when we get closer to Comic Con (I believe it starts July 22nd, and I think preview night is on the 21st which I can get into but may not be able to attend) we can create a list of questions. Hopefully I'll be able to talk to someone important and not a booth model, although, I guess if you guys have questions for them I can ask them some things too.
Love it if you could come up with 5 different ways to ask what colour lightsabers there are and then intersperse those questions with your others. Just keep dropping them in there.
I want to know more PA people on Twitter.
Im tempted to come up with 5 different ways of asking what the release date is.
I have a feeling 90% of the questions at Comic Con will be when is it coming out?
God, those were the times!
I think you're mistaking instanced quest areas with flashpoints. they aren't the same thing. at different points while questing you'll head into an area instanced just for you and your group - which is really the only way to do the kind of story/interactive stuff on a live server. (otherwise you'll have folks camping quest areas on pvp servers hoping to gank you while you're in a cinematic - which is what happened a lot in Age of Conan).
The difficulty of those instanced areas will scale to your groups composition and size. So if you have four players it'll be much tougher than if its you and a companion, or you a friend and your companions.
I also believe outside or raids, you only have the 4 man group - and groups are made up of both players and companions. So there isn't a situation where its you, four friends and four companions running around killing stuff.
Empire - Veela Server
Honestly right now they seem to be on a similar track as Warhammer Online a few years ago. If that holds it means ramped up testing now for a month, some kind of large beta in August along with an announcement date and pre-orders, and a late September/early October launch.
Empire - Veela Server
No sir I don't like it. Forcing players into group quests was one thing WoW eliminated in 4.0 and it's for the better. These group quests will be great early on, when there is just a mass of players around, but as the player base levels up these quests will become impossible to do. And it will hamstring new players, possibly frustrate and lose them. This is a bad model to follow for questing.
Wow started the same way. I say keep it until the majority of your player base is beyond that level range. Every expansion makes the previous content easier for new people.
They're sort of damned if they do, damned if they don't. For every person saying "this is a bad thing" there's going to be another who would complain about "there's no reason to even group in this game. It's not really an MMO, it's just an online single player!"
At the very least, it seems that their trend is to make the groups necessary for certain things smaller, e.g. 4 player groups for instances, and companions to help out in a pinch. I'd be surprised if most of the open world group quests required more than 2 people (plus companions).
If you have a problem with off topic talk in a thread, feel free to report it. Otherwise keep your opinions to yourself.
People will group up with them by forming through general chat or whatever, and if it's further down the road and there aren't people questing in the zone with you, then get one of your friends or guildmates to run you through it. If you can't do that, skip it and move on. You can live with missing out on one quest reward.
The lack of "balance" is very often an illusion, or at least highly exaggerated. Gamers often whine about THEIR perceptions, with only little, or limited data.
I do agree that designing a game to accommodate all styles of play is challenging, but that's part of the issue. Often whines about "balance" are focused on just one narrow incident or attempt to "pwn" something. Players are consistently looking for excuses for why they failed to pwn a particular aspect of the game.
This is most evident in a PUG, where you see some players blaming their team after a wipe, when in fact, the playing griping was just as much to blame as any.
I claimed that the perception of imbalance is often an illusion, because players jump to conclusions based on limited understanding and data and usually based on isolated incidents of their own experience.
A game's "balance" is really about enjoyment. If PvP is engaging and fun, people play it and a lack of mirrored classes on each side doesn't guarantee the PvP is fun.
Again, I examine World of Tanks, because this is a game in which I PvP extensively. The most common gripe is 60 pages long on their forum and it all stems from the lack of "balance" in the match maker. But if you look more closely, it's the same small group of players complaining and in fact, most player's win/loss percentage only stray from 50% by a few percentage points. Sure some tanks are harder to play than others, but that's the point, you can place a governor on your own challenge level. The real test of "balance" is whether people keep playing, and of course they do and indeed the player base grows each week. So the game is working exactly as intended, despite the whining.
It was the same with WoW, most of the gripes about "balance" were BS. From time to time, players have legitimate gripes, but I will also say that when they do, a competent game addresses them fairly quickly.
That's the problem with video games though, they are rather clumsy systems that are designed to provide advantages if you exploit it. In fact, they are set up to be exploited, that's their hook and they become more exploitable the more you subscribe (pay) to play them. That's their business model.
These games are often difficult to assess and understand (in terms of maximizing play) but then relatively easy to execute (the actual mechanics of playing). It's the opposite of chess and so you get endless minutia and pedantic discussion about "balance", because the game thrives on nerds dissecting every fractional advantage. I don't mind the nerdy talk, but I also call out the fact that so often the accusations that the game is broken are often hyperbolic and just an extension of a resentful player.
This is a reasonable point, because I have seen this exact gripe before.
But this is an extension of the gaming community, which is notoriously opinionated (and I point to myself as I say that) and chronically dissatisfied. Again, look at WOW, their forum is riddled with gripes, complaints and ornery observations about how much Blizzard sucks.
And yet the vast majority of the complaints derive from players who continue to fork over 15 dollars a month and have done so for years.
The test as to whether the group quests are intrusive to a player's enjoyment of the game will be their wallets. If the group quests are cumbersome enough that the game becomes annoying, you'll quickly see EA resolve the situation.
I agree launching a game of this magnitude (every time I use the word magnitude I feel like Ackbar), you have to make tough choices and inevitably you'll get complaints which ever decisions you make. But I think the best way to mitigate the risk of your choices is being prepared to change those decisions, if it is discovered the players dislike them enough that they no longer subscribe.
In other words, stubborn game designers die in today's world of instant gratification. And some gaming companies only learn this lesson the hard way.
Good news is, I don't think Bio/EA are that stubborn.
Is it for the better? I think that's one of the building blocks for WoW's "I Don't Give A Shit About Anybody But Me" Syndrome.
I have no problem with folks having the choice to grind completely solo. But its classic give an inch, take a mile situation. MMOs start to cater to a solo players. Then all of a sudden players want to be able to play by themselves without any trade-off.
Empire - Veela Server
Maybe it's not possible now according to that tester, but, you know, it's a beta. Shit is going to get tweaked.