Star Wars: The Old Republic anticipation thread.

[Whizzer]

As far as i know you get 'Preferred' status if you buy something from the cartel market, but that does not automatically unlock the artifact quality. You only get more slots and quickbars, I think. Of course, if the thing you buy of the cartel market is the artifact quality unlock you get that + the preferred bonus.
You only really need it at Lvl 50 though, its nice to have purple stuff <50 but its not necessary for the content available.

[Owain Taggart]

I see, thanks. I guess that's another option to look at for what to get in the cartel.

Unfortunately, it looks like I hit a bug and during the class quest line that is preventing me from continuing. On Alderaan, during Siege Mentality, I died during the ambush at the end. I've returned and none of the kiliks in the ambush are there anymore, and I can't advance it by talking to either of the two people in the room. I also can't reset the quest.

Edit: Nevermind. It would help if I try to reset outside the phase

[Reverend]

Well that tears it! They've started to enforcing the character limit so now all but 2 of the 8 characters I created during the free trial are locked out. The bugger of it is that even if I upgrade to preferred (which I probably will to be honest) they've set the limit at 6 so I still can't have one of each class on the same server unless I buy extra slots. I'm also loathed to delete any of them since most of them are races that have since been restricted.

So, I've already (re)activated my Chiss Agent (she rocks!) but I'm at a loss as to who else to choose. Can I ask everyone's opinions on which class (besides Agent) has the best story? I'm leaning towards Inquisitor at the moment since she's by far my highest levelled character (I refuse to call them toons!) and I am quite fond of the little red sardonic psychopath.

[O'Dib]

You can buy additional slots on the CM w/o subscribing.

[Reverend]

^Which is exactly what I did. Wasn't cheep mind. I spent about a tenner on cartel coins and most of it went on two character slot unlocks. I think I only have 300 left, which it appears isn't enough to buy anything. Indeed, now that I've had a look at the market I'm almost disgusted at how overpriced most items are. I think Bioware needs to look up the meaning of the word micro-transaction!

I'm also a little miffed now that I discover that legacy race unlocks aren't account wide. So for the sake of argument; if after finishing my Agent story I wanted to play as a Chiss Jedi, I'd have to delete a character, or buy the unlock on another server to do it. Even that is only because I happened to opened an account during the free trial when all those interesting races were only *class* restricted.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to finally have a GUI that is now usable above Lv20 and the cargo bay & second crew skill is nice, but I just don't think it's very good value for money.

[Holdfast]

Can't log in at the moment (judging by the Customer Support forum, I'm not the only one, especially in the EU). Probably some kind of bug introduced by the new patch, or some emergency maintenance. I was getting random lag spikes & disconnects last night and today I can't even pull up the server list.

Reverend wrote:

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I'm leaning towards Inquisitor at the moment since she's by far my highest levelled character (I refuse to call them toons!) and I am quite fond of the little red sardonic psychopath.

Inquistor is certainly fun so far, especially as a female sorceror. It feels quite appropriate for the storyline and there's lots of scope for sassy backchat, as you say, and a gradual drift to the dark side feels very natural given the events she experiences too. I like the way the story has just developed as I go into Act 2.

Having said that, for my next character I'm thinking about a male Smuggler, because I hear if you play him as chaotic good, you get into some entertaining Indiana Jones type situations and humour.

On the new patch, I do like the option to pay to unlock more character slots, though it does seem annoyingly expensive. I'll probably pay for med probes first, and get the extra quickbars for Preferred as I will really need them soon, and it'll be a while before I need the extra character slot.

Here's hoping they fix the instability & log on problems they seem to have introduced with the patch though, and soon...

[CorporalClegg]

Reverend wrote:

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^Which is exactly what I did. Wasn't cheep mind. I spent about a tenner on cartel coins and most of it went on two character slot unlocks. I think I only have 300 left, which it appears isn't enough to buy anything. Indeed, now that I've had a look at the market I'm almost disgusted at how overpriced most items are. I think Bioware needs to look up the meaning of the word micro-transaction!

I'm also a little miffed now that I discover that legacy race unlocks aren't account wide. So for the sake of argument; if after finishing my Agent story I wanted to play as a Chiss Jedi, I'd have to delete a character, or buy the unlock on another server to do it. Even that is only because I happened to opened an account during the free trial when all those interesting races were only *class* restricted.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to finally have a GUI that is now usable above Lv20 and the cargo bay & second crew skill is nice, but I just don't think it's very good value for money.

Or you can have it all for €12.99 a month.

[Reverend]

^Even less value for money I'm afraid.

Holdfast wrote:

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Can't log in at the moment (judging by the Customer Support forum, I'm not the only one, especially in the EU). Probably some kind of bug introduced by the new patch, or some emergency maintenance. I was getting random lag spikes & disconnects last night and today I can't even pull up the server list.

No problems logging in, though I've had quite a lot of C2DTs over the last week or so.

Inquistor is certainly fun so far, especially as a female sorceror. It feels quite appropriate for the storyline and there's lots of scope for sassy backchat, as you say, and a gradual drift to the dark side feels very natural given the events she experiences too. I like the way the story has just developed as I go into Act 2.

I love my Inquisitor Assassin. She's such a snarky little so-and-so.

Having said that, for my next character I'm thinking about a male Smuggler, because I hear if you play him as chaotic good, you get into some entertaining Indiana Jones type situations and humour.

Am I right in guessing that the whole LS/DS thing only matters to Jedi and Sith? As far as I can tell, only lightsabers have alignment requirements and aside from crew affection, a few extra mail rewards here and there I haven't noticed any major impact on the non-force user classes.

On the new patch, I do like the option to pay to unlock more character slots, though it does seem annoyingly expensive. I'll probably pay for med probes first, and get the extra quickbars for Preferred as I will really need them soon, and it'll be a while before I need the extra character slot.

I'm not sure that it's worth buying med probes. unless I misunderstand they're consumable, so once you use them all up...you have to buy more...with actual money. I wouldn't mind if it was in-game currency and you could spend real money to expand your capacity, but paying to not respawn 500+ meters away? No thanks.

I'm keeping an eye on the GTN as there are a lot of cartel items on there. The odd thing is that a lot of the asking prices are *way* over the credit cap for F2P or even preferred. I say odd because a lot of these items are only useful to non-subs. I have noticed the extra quickbars dip under the 200K mark (barely!) so at least some subs have twigged.

[Owain Taggart]

Reverend wrote:

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I'm not sure that it's worth buying med probes. unless I misunderstand they're consumable, so once you use them all up...you have to buy more...with actual money. I wouldn't mind if it was in-game currency and you could spend real money to expand your capacity, but paying to not respawn 500+ meters away? No thanks.

Right, but I can definitely see them mostly being used during instances, as it's a pain to die during an instance and having to get all the way back to it, sometimes with the mobs inside having resetted. Or like the bug that I've experienced earlier where dying and being sent back to the spawn point had caused the quest to be unable to proceed further. And I still haven't beat that quest due to the bug making it all that much harder since I've had to reset it. I'd only be using those probes during instances.

[CorporalClegg]

Reverend wrote:

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^Even less value for money I'm afraid.

It pays for itself with just the unlimited PvP and FPs/OPs, even if you don't play every night. Everything else is a bonus.

I think the F2P world has embellished a certain degree of entitlement amongst players that EA simply is obligated to adhere to.

SWTOR is the most professional and polished game on the F2P market. (And yes, I've played just about all of them.) The only others that even come close are Aion and LotRO, and even they are deficient in areas.

People like to focus on what they don't get as opposed to what they do.

If you break it down to its most basic elements, players are given a AAA single-player RPG with eight different story lines (all of Bioware quality) for absolutely free.

[Reverend]

Owain Taggart wrote:

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Right, but I can definitely see them mostly being used during instances, as it's a pain to die during an instance and having to get all the way back to it, sometimes with the mobs inside having resetted. Or like the bug that I've experienced earlier where dying and being sent back to the spawn point had caused the quest to be unable to proceed further. And I still haven't beat that quest due to the bug making it all that much harder since I've had to reset it. I'd only be using those probes during instances.

Of course it's a pain, but it's an artificially imposed one. As I've said since F2P was announced, I don't mind them charging for access to better gear, more social events, etc, but to gimp the gameplay mechanics with the express intent on gouging would be customers is a pretty shady business tactic.

CorporalClegg wrote:

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It pays for itself with just the unlimited PvP and FPs/OPs, even if you don't play every night. Everything else is a bonus.

I think the F2P world has embellished a certain degree of entitlement amongst players that EA simply is obligated to adhere to.

SWTOR is the most professional and polished game on the F2P market. (And yes, I've played just about all of them.) The only others that even come close are Aion and LotRO, and even they are deficient in areas.

People like to focus on what they don't get as opposed to what they do.

If you break it down to its most basic elements, players are given a AAA single-player RPG with eight different story lines (all of Bioware quality) for absolutely free.

Lets keep in mind that the reason it's supposedly the best F2P game on the market is because they spent a mint trying to make a WoW killer but even within the first six months they couldn't hold on to a sufficient number of subs. Also, I don't accept that it's a "AAA single-player RPG", what it is, is a heavily padded and *extremely* repetitive AAA single-player RPG. When you add the F2P restriction into the mix, what you're left with is a heavily padded and *extremely* repetitive AAA single-player RPG with artificially gimped mechanics which forces you into even more repetitive action and drawn out play times.

As for the PvP stuff "paying for itself", there are plenty of co-op and PvP games out there (mostly shooters, granted) that have been consistently maintaining thriving communities with regular FREE updates for years.

Don't get me wrong, I like the game, and if it was a straight up Kotor style RPG then I'd happily pay full price. What I won't do--even if I *could* afford it--is pay full price every month until it ceases to be a game and starts becoming a substance abuse problem. At which point, the only reason to keep playing is to justify the continued cost and the only reason to keep paying is to justify the amount of tome one spends on it and round and round it goes.

Personally, once I'm done with the class quests, I'll probably uninstall and never look back.

[Owain Taggart]

Reverend wrote:

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Of course it's a pain, but it's an artificially imposed one. As I've said since F2P was announced, I don't mind them charging for access to better gear, more social events, etc, but to gimp the gameplay mechanics with the express intent on gouging would be customers is a pretty shady business tactic.

That I can definitely agree with. It's a situation they could improve on, but I doubt it since this is EA we're talking about. There was even one situation on Alderaan, where dying during one mission had spawned me in an area I had never been in before, quite far away from the last spawn point. The heck? It's almost like they did that on purpose to get people to buy probes.

[Holdfast]

My log-in problems last night resolved about an hour after I posted. Hopefully it was just some teething problems with the patch that got resolved & won't recur.

Owain Taggart wrote:

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Right, but I can definitely see them mostly being used during instances, as it's a pain to die during an instance and having to get all the way back to it, sometimes with the mobs inside having resetted. Or like the bug that I've experienced earlier where dying and being sent back to the spawn point had caused the quest to be unable to proceed further. And I still haven't beat that quest due to the bug making it all that much harder since I've had to reset it. I'd only be using those probes during instances.

Exactly the reasons I'm thinking about it. It's the convenience, more than anything else. In this case, I reckon paying for it might be worth that convenience.

Reverend wrote:

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Am I right in guessing that the whole LS/DS thing only matters to Jedi and Sith? As far as I can tell, only lightsabers have alignment requirements and aside from crew affection, a few extra mail rewards here and there I haven't noticed any major impact on the non-force user classes.

In terms of gear I think it only matters to Jedi/Sith, but I've heard the storyline (or at least the side-quests) does change for the other classes depending on your side of the force. At the very least, the conversations will change, with some being more entertaining than others. I don't have direct experience of a non-force class yet.

Reverend wrote:

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Also, I don't accept that it's a "AAA single-player RPG", what it is, is a heavily padded and *extremely* repetitive AAA single-player RPG. When you add the F2P restriction into the mix, what you're left with is a heavily padded and *extremely* repetitive AAA single-player RPG with artificially gimped mechanics which forces you into even more repetitive action and drawn out play times.

I'm playing for the storylines myself too, and do find many (not all) of the side-quests repetitive and do them at least partly just for the XP in order to progress with the class quests. While I agree that that's little annoying, I don't feel bad about it as if I subbed, I know I'd get more XP from questing, more options/opportunites to get XP, etc. So I figure it's a fair way to keep the sub option attractive from the perspective of levelling to 50 quickly and getting stuck into the end-game content. Hey, there has to be something to encourage subbing.

As someone more interested the class stories (and who also will probably stop playing once I eventually work through them), I can accept that trade-off as a fair value proposition. What is more frustrating are the ways the F2P restrictions impact the basic mechanics (the quickbar slots, the med probes, to some extent the character slot restrictions, the purple gear) of the game.

Having said all that, I have to admit they've probably judged people like me just right given that I will probably pay for some of those specifically, but not the other sub benefits.

I do think the game overall is incredibly polished and content-rich; actually much more so than I expected. The extensive voice-acting adds so much richness & personality to the experience.

As with any judgement on fair value for money (or in this case fair value for a limite free experience), there's always going to be a bit of an eye of the beholder variation. What I find annoying may not be what others will. What I will say, is that my posting at this & other forums has almost completely collapsed since I started playing swtor, so it's doing something very right, even within the free paradigm.

[O'Dib]

Holdfast wrote:

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In terms of gear I think it only matters to Jedi/Sith, but I've heard the storyline (or at least the side-quests) does change for the other classes depending on your side of the force. At the very least, the conversations will change, with some being more entertaining than others. I don't have direct experience of a non-force class yet.

Haven't played for roughly 4 months, so I don't know if things have changed, but used to be you had to be progressing in either light or dark while leveling to be able to keep upgrading your relics. All classes would benefit.

And it's not alignment that changes story outcomes, but specific choices. The game doesn't eliminate choice 'cause of a preference for light or dark; but a fork taken in the story does.

[Holdfast]

O'Dib wrote:

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Haven't played for roughly 4 months, so I don't know if things have changed, but used to be you had to be progressing in either light or dark while leveling to be able to keep upgrading your relics. All classes would benefit.

Ah, I didn't realise non-force chars can use relics. I don't really understand the lore of that (I mean, they're basically force-imbued objects, right?), but I suppose it's needed for mechanical balance.

Talking of the potential for conflict between mechanics and story, I really like the healer companion you get in the inquisitor storyline on Hoth. His personality is hilarious, and the fact that you can Flirt with him as a female sorcererr only makes him funnier. But I don't like the way he operates mechanically with a very DPS-orientated sorcerer. He's not quite powerful enough a healer to compensate for your lack of endurance, or at least, I'm not good enough a player so prefer having a tank along especially when trying to deal with mobs with two Strong npcs in them (even if I Whirlwind one of them out of action for a while). Shame, because he's a hoot otherwise!