Community, Content, And More

Let me first start off by saying thank you to the guys from ‘The Usual Podcast’, these guy are phenomenal. Their energy, beer, subjects, beer, comedy, pop culture, beer, movies, beer, are amazing! Did I mention beer? Also Marshall (@darthpops) and Will (@iamwillgriggs) have been asked to do ‘Galactic Gamers Coalition’ podcast. Now that’s awesome, if you haven’t listen to them before. DO IT! Now as a community if you are up for a challenge go to iTunes and give these great guys a rating. They deserve it. DO IT!

A side note, I am sorry to hear that Torocast is no longer going to be doing podcasts. And it truly breaks my heart. But you can still follow Road (@thatroadguy) on Twitter along with Mae (@maebeebuzz) and the infamous Swtor Miner (@swtor_miner). Road: I hope everything works out and I look forward to your return to the darkside. Mae has been working on new projects along with streaming and has an involvement with the TORCommunity. Swtor Miner continues to mine in the deep dark chasms of SWTOR data to brings us news and is also working with the TORCommunity in helping build its database. Which by the way, awesome work there Swtor Miner.

The community of Swtor is just like the Force, always in motion. I’ve been trying to keep my blog updated with streamers, links, information, opinions, thoughts. So if you have any suggestions please feel free to drop me a Tweet, email, whatever. I’m open to your thoughts. And let me say thank you in advance. The community of Swtor fans are incredible, great people, great podcasts, streamers, and sites. It’s impressive.

PvE ~ Content

As I stated in a previous post my thoughts on the storyline, but the content was lacking. The current Shadow of Revan operations, in storymodes you can get gear of 192 rating and in hardmodes 198 rating. Once getting to Ziost and throughout the storyarch, you get gear of 190 rating and once you do Coloassal Monolith you have a chance of getting a 204 mainhand (Note: the mods ARE bound to mainhand only). Which gives the impression that a Nightmare mode of Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice are not coming into play. There are 2 Monoliths on Ziost, the world boss Monolith and the instanced Monolith. When the continuation of the Ziost storyline came into play, one was able to skip the mechanics all together and just down the boss. That’s no longer possible, one now HAS to do the mechanics. Now for me, I was disappointed at the fact that really the only operation was the instanced Monolith.

Bioware has nerfed certain aspects of the current operations, Bulo, Torque, Coratanni, Sword Squadron, Underlurker, but many groups still seem to have issues passing certain bosses. I have spoken with different many people and it seems like in the past that a certain percentage of guilds in order for Nightmare mode to come out.

So when 3.0 hit, it was pretty much a hold new game. Now for myself I had issues with some of the classes that I normally play. Well given time I overcame my issues and moved forward into operations for gear and have gear for all my healers now. Dps, well that’s another story as I’m trying hard to get the Dps on Merc’s and Commandos, I’ve mostly played healers. Don’t even get me started on tanking.

Along with 3.0, melee classes took a huge hit, as this was brought up in the Anaheim Community Cantina. Bioware has been asking feedback from the playerbase about certain aspects. Which later got to the point that certain players started to harass one of the Devs and his family. Now, plain and simple. Be professional when talking to the Dev’s as Bioware doesn’t have to ask the playerbase anything. They can be tight-lip about everything and not include us in the development and improvements in the game.

Bioware with 3.2 brought a few quality of life improvements to the game, reduced Quick Travel, 12x XP Epic Story, Unlocked Taxi’s, the Outfit Designer. But also Bioware was gearing their advertisements towards getting new players with the ‘Choose your Path’ Bundle Promo (which is still currently for sale on the SWTOR site and on Amazon for $39.99). And you can use my referral link for extra perks. www.swtor.com/r/Ym9FT4

Right around the corner is the ‘Fallen Empire’ expansion, which has some rumors flying around as to what it’s all about. Some say The Rakata, but I thought maybe it’s about Malgus and his Empire, or Mandalorian storyline or just maybe that it’s talking about the current state of the Sith Empire and how it has fallen since the Emperor has kind of turned his back on them. So far the story has been quite engaging and others will agree. During the Anaheim Community Cantina, wristbands were given out with the #fallenempire and the date of 06.15.15 and during the the presentation one had to ‘find the secret image’.

You’re probably saying to yourself, ‘We know all this.’. True. But where is Bioware going with their direction? Class changes and balances all around. Which brings me into the next part of this blog.

PvP ~

I’m not much of a PvP’er so I won’t go into great detail but I feel for the PvP’ers. With classes being changed, rebalanced, and no new content it can be frustrating for players. So why hasn’t Bioware really said anything about it. Or atleast give the PvP’ers a new arena. So far what I’ve seen is that you can now buy deco’s from the PvP vendor. Oh wow. Really? Now given the fact that you can see the focus of the game, it’s PvE oriented. But unless Bioware has some secret projects that will satisfy the palette of the PvP’er, you might feel parched for awhile. There are great streamers that PvP and the one that tops the list in my mind is Snave, has ran tournaments on PTS and I think keeps the community PvP’ers involved. Kudos to Snave (@snave1208) and his Hitbox channel.

Anaheim Community Cantina event was streamed via Twitch through ESL. Remember when Bioware partnered up with ESL and the announcement of timed run operations? So I’m guessing that has been put on the back burner until the next chapter. I personally feel like Bioware has left the PvP’ers high and dry for too long. The game needs to be looked at as a whole. Granted, the game is storybase but one shouldn’t leave a portion of the community out of the loop and it discourages players in staying.

Marketing ~

I’ve touched on this before about Bioware in their advertising for new players, I had a conversation via Twitter about Bioware’s marketing or more over their lack of. For example just last week there was nothing said that there was an ingame promotion of 50% off unlocking outfits in your collections. Only to hear a tweet on Monday before reset.

Come on! Really? It was brought to my attention that the Swtor instagram before was always posting up things. How hard is it to send out a Tweet of an upcoming promo? It doesn’t cost anything. And as I’ve said before that Bioware need to re-evaluate its marketing tactics. We as a community have asked for a bit more communication. I would ask that Bioware not to hold the bad few against the rest of the community that want this game and everything that is Star Wars.

Conclusion ~

The Swtor community is a great community, great streamers, great bloggers, great podcasts. Take a moment to click through the links and blogroll and check out the fantastic community. I am excited to see what’s next in the story and expansion of the game. And guessing that the end of the year expansion should be a huge event. I am having a blast with people that I’ve met through the community and jumping on their servers and creating new characters just to play with some great people. Let’s just move in the right direction.

Stay tuned to The Balance Force.