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[hemmingjay]

they are now issuing warnings and removing comments on their boards after spending the day corralling all threads into one. They are trying to do some damage control in classic EA function. This is honestly probably going to do some serious damage to the company. It's not about this event alone, but rather the culmination of extensive and repetitive poor management. I feel bad for the innocent loss of jobs.

[Trapezohedron]

Oh god, that screenshot.

I don't have anything on subject to say, but that screenshot made me laugh. A lot.

Same here. I absolutely did not expect an RCT2 screenshot to come out of nowhere.

[Tilla]

Only problem I have with this thread: the part where OP blames Hero Engine. It is definitely not HE's fault that Bioware didn't do a good job at using the engine, and insisted on using an outdated pre-release verison of the code, and haven't fixed any of the issues they easily could have. I see far more interesting games using it, like The Repopulation (which funnily enough seems to take many of it's queues from my favorite MMORPG, Star Wars Galaxies)

[Microcline]

they are now issuing warnings and removing comments on their boards after spending the day corralling all threads into one. They are trying to do some damage control in classic EA function. This is honestly probably going to do some serious damage to the company. It's not about this event alone, but rather the culmination of extensive and repetitive poor management. I feel bad for the innocent loss of jobs.

That doesn't strike me as out of the ordinary.  Stanley Woo has been ending lines since the Dragon Age 2 debacle, and TOR has been known to be run in the style of North Korea. They removed the unsubscribe button and locked the threads where people posted workarounds, banning users for farming credits, banned users for entering zones at low levels, banned users for using the trade network (essentially the only time I've seen an MMO company trying to shut down an in-game player run economy), and banned users for posting a workaround for the infinite-death loop resulting from the disastrous 1.1 patch (the party line was that if your character is trapped in the infinite loop you should make an alt).

I'm not too concerned about the loss of jobs given that from what I've heard TOR is a shining example of why outsourcing doesn't work for game development.  Coordinating the teams made quality assurance nearly impossible, customer service not always able to communicate with the playerbase, added massive overhead costs in addition to the bloated marketing and voiceacting budgets, and made the game an overall incoherent experience.

[Zangi]

I suppose its a good thing I pulled out before they started hiding the unsubscribe button. 
After hearing that... all the ban happy shit...  I hope someone sues them over it.

Either way, sounds like they are doing a good job of running their investment into the ground.

[Rex_Nex]

But soon after, with Bioware's other flagships burning into the sea, and further promises broken they realized how damned they were, with 600,000 subscribers left and dwindling, with many servers have only a hundred on so people active at anyone time...

600k subscribers? They are throwing out figures closer to two million. Can I get something to back up these claims?

[Korva]

What's this about "hiding" a button? I cancelled my subscription a short while ago without any trouble.

But, yeah, that "most valuable players" line leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. In a way, it exemplifies one of my problems with WoW-style MMOs: if you ain't max level and doing "endgame", you ain't worth shit. Of course, since they always said this wouldn't be a sandbox game or another SWG (which I never played) so hoping for something different from grind-loot-grind-loot-ad-nauseam was entirely my own fault.

[fenrif]

When the game had been out for a month, and all the people who were playing since launch had their free month of gametime about to run out the "cancel subscription" button mysteriously dissapeared from the account page. They also started locking threads on their forums where people explained how to get around the lack of a button to cancel your account. They put the button back up pretty quickly due to the obvious and invevitable outcry and negative media attention, but it's still pretty terrible. EA also did this with Warhammer Online too I believe?

[hemmingjay]

not only are they closing or removing any thread with critical(even polite ones) but they even closed the official discussion that they funneled everyone into. A friend at RPS told me they were told that covering the dissatisfaction would jeopardize their relationship(advertisement). If they took the time to tell RPS that, it's no wonder that MMORPG has removed 2 dozen similar threads.

EA, making bad situations worse since the 80's.

[Kilroy the Grand]

What's this about "hiding" a button? I cancelled my subscription a short while ago without any trouble.

[hemmingjay]

In an unrelated but unfortunate issue, their maintenance was rescheduled. Unfortunately they didn't reschedule it until after it was to have started. And in typical fashion, they informed people that the schedule was changed and they should have read the post saying so. Only the post didn't exist until a few hours ago.

This is actually pretty entertaining and a lesson in consumer facing business.

[Lord Dullard]

I really have to wonder what kind of instructions these admins receive in meetings and whatnot.

"Okay, has everyone got the new motto? Let's say it together. Team Bioware: WE EMBODY DISHONEST INEPTITUDE! And remember, guys, when in doubt, lie. Lie poorly, and allow your actions to blatantly contradict your statements."

[MorleyDev]

Should of just made KoToR 3. I would of bought that, but refuse to pay a subscription for an MMORPG just to experience the story when I don't give two craps about exactly half of that genre (namely the MMO part).

[fenrif]

The thing is that they had so many missed opportunities to cater to the "singleplayer mmo" crowd that they so obviously were trying to draw in. For those who haven't played the game you get companions who follow you around and help in combat and stuff, but for some reason they balanced them so once you get to level 30 or so they become kinda useless (at least the tank ones do). And you can only ever have one of your 4 or 5 companions out in the world with you at once.

It just seems like a no-brainer to me to let people use their companions to fill in slots in groups. Can't find a healer, bring a healy companion! Etc. It would've made slogging through the million "kill 20 of *mob X*, now kill another 40 *mob X* quests much more bearable, especially since that's pretty much the entire leveling experience.

It certainly would've gone a ways to distancing it from the cookie-cutter wow-clonery that it was.

[Zangi]

Hah, yea, healing companions are a god-send...  even though I played a smuggler/healer... it really got tiresome healing my jedi sentinel friend....
So I let the frogman do the healing for me.  He did his job right in most open world encounters too.  (I think we were around +40?)

Once he got his own healing companion, who was basically the same as frogman... 
I used my sniper girl.  I think she did as much damage as either one of us.... but its probably cause I gave her hand-me-downs that were like a few points lower then what I got.  Being able to craft purple level armoring/mods helped too.  Also who I used when going solo...  I can heal either her or me when I pull way too much aggro... usually myself though, since she is single target and I pull the aggro of everything else... >.>  She makes short work of them 1 by 1 as I spam my smuggler heals.

But yea, very important to gear up companions if you want them to pull the weight of another player...


EDIT: I'm of the opinion that companion healers don't heal as much as a real healer... there are encounters that I have trouble healing in dungeons as a specced healer... but yea, it takes a few casts to get my healing up to full strength and that may screw up my energy management in the long-run if I had to do too much burst heals in the beginning.... though, my frogman was 3rd tier in the hand-me-down department...