Hooray! A chance to rant (briefly)!
Ravanel posted on Tuesday about a recent Q&A between a representative of the Sith Sorceror class in SWTOR, and the devs at BioWare. I seem to recall that sorcs were considered OP at launch. I take it that they got hit once too many times with the nerf bat at some point. In the comment section, Ravanel's S.O., Tiger, went into even greater objective detail on the balance concerns of the class. I won't go into the details, but I encourage you to go read her post.
I guess people have even made videos about it. This one was my favorite:
The proper answer to all those questions—if they didn't have a solution—was, "We'll look into it." Instead what the Sorc community got was, "You don't know how to play. Respect our wisdom in this matter." The answers given are simply symptoms of the larger tone deafness of BioWare, going all the way back to the "most valued players" debacle of April 2012. They have repeatedly demonstrated that they do not know how to manage an MMO and its community.
But I guess that matters not when people are still throwing money at you.
Ravanel posted on Tuesday about a recent Q&A between a representative of the Sith Sorceror class in SWTOR, and the devs at BioWare. I seem to recall that sorcs were considered OP at launch. I take it that they got hit once too many times with the nerf bat at some point. In the comment section, Ravanel's S.O., Tiger, went into even greater objective detail on the balance concerns of the class. I won't go into the details, but I encourage you to go read her post.
I guess people have even made videos about it. This one was my favorite:
But I guess that matters not when people are still throwing money at you.
Bioware is living off the Star Wars IP, like a trust fund kid that just can't be bothered with the reality of silly things like jobs and responsibility that matter so much to everyone around them.
ReplyDeleteAnd their own reputation as a maker of awesome SP-RPGs.
DeleteThey should have phrased their response "There is no try, only do. Learn to play you must. Heal to full you must. Whine like noobs you must not." :P
ReplyDeleteTHat actually would've been hilarious
DeleteThere's loads of great Bioware games out there, so you can consider me a fan of the "brand". Generally speaking, these guys know how to make good games.
ReplyDeleteCommunication with MMO players is a different thing, though. On the one hand there's a part of the player base that's extremely rude and self entitled crying very loudly, on the other there's companies having no idea how to handle players who want to be much more involved with their game.
And then there's class balance. In single-player games it doesn't matter much if mages are a tad overpowered (just an example :P) compared to melee classes, cause you can just pick which of the playstyle you like and how hard you want it to be. But in MMOs it of course does matter.
The sorc-thing made the Devs into the laughingstock of the game for this moment, but I don't think Bioware is an exception or the worst on communication out there. I'm still sort of positive about them when I have the way Turbine handles their players in LotRO at the back of my head.
Yeah, and I've never played a Single Player BioWare game. I know they design great stuff, that's why I specified the MMOs and communities.
DeleteAnd I've never said I would not buy a game form them in the future. Just not an MMO.
No need to go defensively, I agree totally with you here! I just yet have to meet a company that handles its MMO players in a great/decent way. *deep sigh*
DeleteYou've not dealt with Trion Worlds then. Just one example: There was some minor connection issue one evening in July, and they basically gave *every* player about $3 worth of gems to spend in the store, regardless of whether they'd been affected by the outage. It's not much, but it's 20% of the standard monthly subscription fee.
DeleteHeck, I've been treated much better by Blizzard, and they are notorious.
I guess Bioware hasn't learned that you can't say what you want because people like being told what they want to hear. Still, maybe next time they'll use more discretion.
ReplyDeleteAs I implied in the post, maybe they will when people stop paying them.
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