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SWTOR's endgame is an absolute disaster.
BilboDoggins
Member Posts: 198
First and foremost let me assure you that when I say that SWTOR's endgame is a huge mess I am saying this from experience as myself and my guild are one of the most progressed around. We are 4/5 nightmare mode in EV already and most of us have been level 50 since late december. We have consumed all of the content SWTOR has to offer and what we have experienced is alarming.
The flashpoints themselves had (and continue) to have tons of bugs. While some of these have been fixed, the very fact they existed and went live in the firstplace is phenomenal. Until 1.1 3/4 of the flashpoints had unlootable chests. If you managed to beat the instance you would get nothing from most bosses which had chests instead of loot from their bodies. This bug existed for an entire month without Bioware actually addressing it which I find unbelievable. Most companies would have jumped all over a bug like this as soon as it was discovered and had a hotfix out ASAP. bioware however took weeks to finally address this massive issue. then there was the "one of your party is locked to a current flaspoint" bug. This bug made it impossible for a certain person with this bug to enter a flaspoint. The hilarious thing is the bug was able to be passed from one character to another like a disease (this was also the only way to fix it!). To get rid of this bug you would have to figure out who had the bug and have someone else create a lvl 1 alt who you invited to party to pass the bug onto it and then the alt would have it. This bug persisted for weeks! Talk about outrageous.
Raids were and continue to be even more of a disaster IMO. There are so many bugs and problems with both raid clusters and each individual fights I will only focus on the most disgusting of them.
1. In Eternity Vault there was a bug with master loot where if the Raid leader had master loot on and went to pass loot out on the corpse most of the loot would disapear! Only commndations and crafting mats and schematics would be on the corpse while set gear and other drops would simply not be there. The only way to work around this is to have to loot by random loot and everyone having to be careful not to roll on something.
2. Bosses would bug out and do all sorts of fun things. The worst involved Gharj. Gharj would bug out and make it so you couldnt re-enter the raid because you were stuck in combat even though noone was in zone. He would then KILL the entire raid while they were outside EV and in the fleet! The only thing you could do was to reset the instance and re-clear 20-30 min of trash.
3. The brand new raid Kraggas palace which just released a few days ago is hilariously bad. First off the very first boss, Bonethrasher cannot be tanked and has a very fast enrage timer which means tanks on the fight are useless. This means most guilds trying to get him in HM/NM mode HAVE to sit out tanks (and often melee DPS due to punishing mechanics) if they wanna kill him. Wats funny is the very next boss fight has two bosses which requires TWO TANKS on HM/NM mode. Better hope your guild has extra people who like sitting outside the zone and wont get to fight certain bosses! Also whoever itemized Kraggas palace has no understanding of the game or is downright lazy as all the bosses in Kraggas commonly drop loot which cannot be used by the classes it goes to (this may just be a normal mode issue though). My Bounty Hunter for example, recieved light armor pants with willpower on them wtf! Does Bioware even test this stuff?
4. Finally the worst raid boss ever created is Soa, the final boss in EV. This may be the single most bugged raid boss I have ever seen. This encounter has so many bugs it would take me 5 pages to explain them all in detail so here are the worst ones. Just last night on hard mode we encountered these ones. After a wipe, sometimes the floor in Soa's room would be half missing and you would have to reset the raid and run back. On the final phase the tank has to kite Soa and get pillars to drop on him so his shield drops and he becomes vunerable. A number of times the pillar would hit him but his shield stayed up! Because of this our guild failed 3 times to Soa and turned what would have been a win into another wipe. We were unable to get beat him because of this garbage yet again. Finally many guilda re reporting Soa after patch 1.1 isnt even dropping loot except for mounts and craft junk. Bioware again is sitting on their hands and taking their sweet time with all of these issue.
I wont even get into PvP issues............but I think most of us are aware of the many problems there.
There are other things as well which are not quite endgame related but incredibly frustrating. Myself and thousands of others who have high end gaming rigs are getting awful performance in SWTOR. I get 10-20 FPS in places like PvP/fleet even though I have a 6970 for crying out loud! I get 50 FPS minimum on high+ settings in every other game I own (BF3, Witcher 2, Rift) but for some reason I get 10 FPS at times in SWTOR. Pathetic.
Lastly, SWTOR is missing the most basic of MMO features like a COMBAT LOG!. What MMO these days releases without a freaking combat log?!!!!!
I really wanted this game to be good and I was expecting it to at least be mediocre and be well polished but to my absolute shock SWTOR is probably the most unpolished and buggy MMO I have every played. How could a game with a budget alledgedly topping $200 Million be this bad? HOW?
For those of you enjoying the game and planning to stick with it, good luck to you and I applaud your patience. SWTOR isnt without its merits of course but as a whole this is the most disapointing launch I have experienced in my 15 years of MMO gaming.
Comments
That is an awful lot of 'QQ words' to say 'end game of SWTOR is buggy', which is true. Pretty sure no one is saying that SWTOR's end gameis bug-free but my guild has progressed quite far and none of us has experienced most of the bugs you outlined.
Not saying they don't exists, just that our guild hasn't seen them.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
the "PETER PRINCIPAL"..........people rise in their careers, to their level of incompitance.We could be watching a high profile demonstration.
Not that I disagree with you but the main chunk of your post is about bugs in the first month of a newly launched mmorpg. Most of us who have played mmorpgs at launch before know to expect those. I agree they are annoying (and very exploitable too sometimes. No doubt with your raiding experience you have noticed bosses respawning now and then?)
I agree that SWTOR is disappointing and lackluster at 50 though and I quit myself after only a week at 50, but bugs were the very least of my reasons. Those always get fixed ... eventually. It's the risk of playing a mmorpg at launch
But poor performance, very little open world endgame content, lack of immersive social environments (really couldn't stand the fleets eventually), disappointing endgame crafting for non-pve'ers and lack of fun world pvp accross the world(s) were much more important to me personally.
My brand new bloggity blog.
I understand that bugs will exist at launch, but the amount and extent of these bugs is something I have never seen (and I have played a lot of MMO's from 96-2012 starting with Darksun Online). To make matters worse many of these bugs still exist and the ones which did get fixed took them weeks to address which is unacceptable.
with Biowares budget there are NO excuses that can be made for the quality that SWTOR was released in. It is atrocious how poorly programmed and polished SWTOR is.
It's interesting to see this coming from you.
He who keeps his cool best wins.
Yes it is. I thought the same thing when I read his wall of text about why he was quitting. At the same time I respect it because at least he is being honest and after playing it firsthand I agree with his points. Not saying he was wrong to begin with but I know of some who defended TOR pretty rabidly and would never admit they changed their minds.
On the topic, I can't say I know myself because I am struggling to pass the lower 30's due to boredom and trying alts to see if ones style catches my liking. Sadly they all seem to be pretty much the same so I doubt I'll make it to end game.
RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and Paul Gray.
...Well that seals the deal for me, if Dark Pony quit...
Totally serious too. Never thought I'd see the day.
I know the exact feeling though. I beta tested Warhammer Online from it's earliest stagest. I basically breathed anything Paul Barnett said. I convinced all of my friends to play, everyone I talked to, it was sliced bread v3.0. To say I was a fanboy was probably too nice. It took me 4 months after launch to finally realize that I had been lying to myself all along and I wrote a extensive 24 page letter on all the parts of the game that had failed to deliver and what I thought needed to be done and posted it on WarhammerAlliance.com (I was always on that website as well).
Needless to say I'm much more cautious now.
He who keeps his cool best wins.
Thats true enough, but i think part of what makes up his point is how long some of these bugs persisted. If a reward chest thats supposed to be lootable is broken for a month ... What kind of timetable do they need to fix complicated stuff?
I don't have any endgame anecdotes due to my altitis(yes i play every class), though im a bit worried about bugs that are allegedly in the game since beta still being around. Also they apparently never noticed they put an unwanted medium graphics option into the game settings ... that or they lied. Whats that supposed to mean, we get to chose wether we believe in incompetence or dishonesty? How can you miss a graphics setting thats either been in the games beta for months doing nothing, or worse has been doing something and your now lieing about it?
And yeah, how hard is it to optimize the game for ati cards? I have a 6970 and i have to turn OFF freaking shadows because they eat like 20 FPS even on low setting ... Again, why don't you notice stuff like that in Beta? "Whoopsie, apparently our game is not compatible with ati cards and we have launch tomorrow ..." again doesn't inspire confidence. Personally i even think this is the reason the highres textures are not in, if you can't run them in top of the line ATI that would kinda look bad.
This game is NOT unpolished, its NOT released early and an rushed mess. And that worries me, because i think the problems we currently have are not something easily fixed, rather due to something fundamental. Because if they where easy to fix i believe BW would have done it in early public beta when they became aware of them.
Personally i don't think they are in full control of the code, maybe some of the problems are due to outsourced stuff like the hero engine and not something that can easily be addressed this late in developement. There are just parts of the game that are incredibly polished, and then you notice some bug or glitch or fundamental flaw and simply can't believe that its originated from the same people that spent so much work polishing the other stuff.
They should have used vanilla wow as the touchstone and not present day wow which is what influenced the game.
Where is PvP Diminishing returns, guild banks, PvP re-grouping on Warzones finishing, and many other systems that are present in WoW but not SWTOR that make the make better?
These are all in present day WoW, but not SWTOR. It's weird!
He who keeps his cool best wins.
obviously they cut corners and put most of their money into the story element of the game, but im just quoting what a swtor dev said that they used wow as the touchstone for the developement of swtor.
I actually feel they kept bad things from both present WoW and vanilla but left out the good stuff.
It turned into a long post.
The way I see it is that it's frustrating, but the bosses are still very killable.
Shadow's Hand Guild
Open recruitment for
The Secret World - Dragons
Planetside 2 - Terran Republic
Tera - Dragonfall Server
http://www.shadowshand.com
Most of the bosses are very killable. This is true. In fact Most of them are WAY to easy to kill.
Our guild was 4/5 our first night in EV on normal mode back on 1/1/2012.
Last week on our first Nightmare mode attempt we went 4/5 again. We oneshot everything but the anhilliation droid. Nightmare mode my ass.
Finally Soa is NOT easily killable. Its not because hes hard or anything but because he seems to bug out constantly. We had Soa ready to die at 5% of lower last night and every...single...time some bullshit would wipe us. One fight the pillar TWICE in a row dropped on Soa and failed to take off his shield and we ended up hitting the enrage timer and failing. That happened multiple times. We also had a few runs where he kept mind trapping the tank and despawning. Why is a raid boss even using mechanics like the mind trap on a tank?
The fact this happens and has continued to happen now for a month just shows how incompetant Bioware is at both designing and programming these raids. Its ridiculous and I have noticed raid guilds disolving and going back to WoW and Rift at a rapid pace. If Bioware doesnt get a grip on things by the end of the next month/sub cycle their will be very few serious raiding guilds around anymore.
You know, out of all the issues you mentioned, the lack of a combat log is what really stood out to me.
But seriously, I'm playing the Witcher 2 and even that has a combat log.
BTW... Have you tried Rift? That has some good endgame raid content.
Oh yah. Played rift for awhile. Very well made game but it was just so generic and soullless to me.
I find it amazing that Rift cost something like 1/4 as much to make as SWTOR and they did it in less time and it is WAY more polished and playable.
I'm really looking forward to Trion getting their hands on a big name IP sooner or later and knockin it out of the park. I'd love for them to make a Marvel superhero MMO.
Have people lost the ablility since playing WoW to go, "Hey this MMO just came out a month ago, Maybe I should stop playing and wait for the game to iron itself out."?
Even RIFT had some problem when it came to verity of end game.
Illum aside this is one of the better end games at launch that I have experianced.
I don't care about innovation I care about fun.
Nope. Sounds to me like he has a grievance that he itemized and articulated nicely. I think a lot of people on this site could learn a thing or two from this guy.
Life of an MMORPG "addict"
For 7 years, proving that if you quote "fuck" you won't get banned.
I've lost track of how many times SOA decided to just reset or something sub 5%. OP is right on the money.
i agree with you. forums arent what they used to be.
Well hands down, i agree with you OP.
Been there, done that. Altho i will not quit i have abit of faith in bioware still.
They are all killable still. Our guild has cleared all of it numerous times. Bugs? Yes, there are still bugs, which is to expected. We bug report them and cross our fingers that they are fixed next patch. But have any of us complained in a public forum? No, because we know that it is still the beginning stages of a game, it's a given.
dude really.
No need to spam the text of things that were already discussed on the official forums.
And what's exactly the point of starting the same identical thread on the official forums and in this one too?
At least be a little costructive.
Lemme check other site i may spot u again..
lol maybe they should advertise that as one of their main features: "raid bosses very killable." i just dont see myself picking up a new MMO for "killable" raid bosses. you just sort of assume this would make into the game's first release.
so in other words, no, massive number of game-crippling bugs is not a "given" for any MMO. it's a "given" for an incomplete, bad MMO.