New Year, New Info, New Podcast

It’s the 2016, and many podcasts, bloggers, sites are making predictions about the upcoming year involving #StarWarsTheOldRepublic #KnightOfTheFallenEmpire. Bioware is back from their vacation and working on releasing the new chapter in February. But the #swtor community has alot of questions concerning the direction of the game.

With the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie, some community members noticed that there wasn’t alot of advertising/marketing to bring in new players. I also thought that Bioware along side with Disney would’ve capitalized on this since #StarWars is like everywhere. I went to my local supermarket and there was Star Wars balloons, Cheez-it’s, vitamins, candy dispensers, napkins, plates, the list goes on and on. But why not any Swtor marketing? I mean okay yeah we all know that Swtor isn’t cannon, okay. But with the revamp of the game was suppose to entice returning players and bring in new players, and before #kotfe it was the “Choose your path” promo, so what happened?

At the release of KotFE many changes happened to the game, and as I stated in my previous post it brought alot of excitement to players and many returning players. There was alot of positives to the game that were long overdue. But players saw through the smoke and mirrors and wanted more MMO bits. And yes I too was excited for the changes, it didn’t change for my progression group at that time which was solely trying to do Ravagers/Temple of Sacrifice. Now we got to revisited old content that has been revitalized, Eternity Vault, Karraga’s Palace, Scum & Villiany, etc. Lots of the old Operations had life again, it was nice to be able to do mechanics as a team again in old content. Changes happened to some Operations, Storymodes got a boost and made into ‘easy peasy lemon squeezey’ mode. Some mechanics were removed and bosses made easier, which in my opinion was great to introduce casuals into operations that may had been intimidated by them in the past. The sweet spot is the Hardmodes, weekly priority operations change week to week meaning that one can get nightmare mode gear from the highlighted hardmode operation (i.e. 216 rating drops in Storymode, 220 in Hardmode, but the priority weekly drops 224 rating). As it was discovered that Nightmare Operation seemed to be bugged and only dropping 220 gear, which upset the community to later find out that it really wasn’t bugged to begin with. At that point progression was thrown out the airlock, and millions of voices suddenly cried out. (Link to post)

Little by little progression raiders and teams started to quit the teams, and some are no longer raiding, others leaving the game and canceling their subscriptions. There now was a disturbance in the force, bringing the question now of what’s going on with group content.

A post by Eric Musco released yesterday January: (Link)

A Livestream Thursday, January 14th from 2pm – 2:30pm PST (4 – 4:30pm CST) will hopefully will start addressing the concerns of players. Honestly, #Bioware needs to get ahead of this train, and needs to take note of the concerns of their customer base.

There is even a petition on change.org about group content. I was a little surprised to hear about this but seeing only 1,200 signatures, I doubt that Bioware will take it seriously.

There hasn’t been alot of news due to the holidays and break, but over this time things broke in the game, events were bugged. So hopefully things will get fixed and we can get back to enjoying the game.

As for myself, I took a bit of a break. Had to take care of some things and been working on making my own podcast. Yes, that’s right. I working on bringing a swtor podcast to the community. I still have things that I need to fix here on the site. Also having help with graphics from @dinh_jonny, thank you Jonny!

I have spoken with some of the swtor podcasters/members got their feedback on my ideas for it, Marshall, Will, Chuck, Brian, Max, JT, and so far I have got the thumbs up from them. And appreciate their input and feedback, thank you. And I do hope that it gets accepted by the rest of the swtor community. More details coming soon™.

If any community members would like share ideas/feedback, please feel free to post on here, or on Twitter. Thank you.

Also please a moment to take a look at my Audible offer to get a free audiobook using my link to help support this site and upcoming podcast.

Stay tuned to The Balance Force.