Posted by Lethality | 17 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Have You Changed Your Class?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Many of us have been following the game since it was first announced on October 21, 2008. Some of us, even longer than that in our own speculative minds! During this extended gestation period, we’ve thought long and hard about what class we would like to play. Would we side with the Republic or the Empire? Do I want a ranged class or do I prefer melee combat? Does my species determine what classes are available to me?

Even though there were so many options, and so many “decisions” we could make without ever laying hands on the game, many of us were absolutely sure we know what class we wanted to play when we finally got the chance to log in and play. Whenever that was going to be!

For me, that notion was turned on it’s head. I have always played a melee character, but was sold on the Smuggler based on what we knew of him and his story. Plus, the only melee option was a Force-weilding class, which not only am I not crazy about, everyone and their brother would be playing Jedi and Sith. But once I rolled my Smuggler, got him to about level 15, I just wasn’t feeling it. It seems my heart was with melee after all, and even though everyone was doing it, I rolled a Jedi Knight. I haven’t looked back!

What about you guys? Is your main class now different than what you thought it would be? What made you decide to change it? Let us know!

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Posted by Lethality | 20 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Do You Miss Swimming?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Editor’ Note: I’ve had fun lately going back through some old polls we did from well before the game was out, so I think it’s equally fun to re-ask some of those questions again! We’re doing that today with an oldy but goody… swimming! You can also read my opinion on the whole topic here in Lethal Injection: The Drowning Pool

As you stroll through the Jedi compound on Tython, you are continually awestruck by the beauty of the planet. The landscape is dotted with sparkling lakes and one with a particularly beautiful waterfall catches your eye. You run over to check it out. As you stand at the edge, you wonder how deep it is. You stare at it, sigh, and walk away. There will be many more unexplored lakes in your future. Somewhere in your Jedi training they forgot to include the skill of swimming.

Aion, World of Warcraft and other popular MMOs all offer the ability to swim. One could even say that swimming has become a standard feature of modern MMOs. When BioWare announced that swimming would not be included at TOR’s release, there was a massive outcry from TOR’s community. Citing that they would have to create underwater content to justify adding swimming, BioWare’s Georg Zoeller responded that it’s something they might do at a later time.

So, are you going to miss swimming? Do you think adding swimming at a later date is a bad thing? Will it affect your decision to buy TOR?

 

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Posted by Lethality | 14 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Should There Be PvP Arenas In TOR?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Editor’s Note: Today’s topic is pulled from the Blue Milk & Cereal historical archives. Certain things we asked “back then” have different context now, so it’s fun to see if responses have changed! You can find the original poll here.

PvP: some people love it. Some people hate it.  Pitting a small number of combatants head-to-head gives the developers an easier time of balancing player-versus-player combat by minimizing variables.  This small-scale combat can be intense and visceral. However, in a class-based game like an MMO, it can often be frustrating.

For me, arena PvP always turned into a flavor of the month-based game of rock-paper-scissors. Some months, your class will be the best in the game, but after they nerf it, you might as well reroll instead of PvP.  While these are exaggerative statements, when your class is out of favor with developers, it can be extremely difficult to do well in arena-based PvP. One overpowered class doesn’t pull nearly as much weight in large-scale battles like TOR’s Warzones.

Despite all these gameplay complaints based on my own opinion, arena-style PvP does have basis in Star Wars lore.  From the gladiatorial arenas on Geonosis to the one-versus-one battles on Taris in Knights of The Old Republic, small-scale battles have always had their place in Star Wars.

Do you think there should be arena-style PvP in TOR? Or do you think the large-scale battles of TOR’s Warzones capture the heroic battles of Star Wars well enough?

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Posted by Lethality | 19 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Do You Stop For Datacrons?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

I think we’ve done a BM&C about datacrons once or twice, but I thought I’d take a slightly different spin on it this morning!

As you know, datacrons are placed all around the game world for players to not only find, but figure out how to acquire. Sometimes they’re in plain sight, but the act of getting to them is anything but plain. These evil awesome little mini-goals reward you with permanent stat boosts and codex entries.

Most of the players I’ve run into seem to be of the mindset that while, yes, they want to get all the datacrons, the treat it more like something on their list of chores to do. A common statement heard is “I usually wait until I out level a planet by a few levels, check out a video guide and go back to snap them up.”

Huh? Doesn’t that seem counterproductive to the reason for their existence – to encourage and reward exploration? When I ask about that, they usually say “it takes too long to stop what I am doing to go grab them.” While I may not agree with it, I do understand that statement. Questing and leveling is the main game, the datacrons are an optional sideshow.

However in the name of stopping to smell the roses, I think most players would end up appreciating not “rushing” things, take the time out to grab the datacrons, kill some beasts for the codex entries that you otherwise might skip, and so on. It makes your gameplay experience that much more whole when you don’t focus on the end, but rather what’s right in front of you.

Anyway, I’m just curious – how do you guys go about your datacron hunting? Do you stop immediately when you see one and work on getting it? Do you refer to guides, or do it the “right” way? Have you gotten them all yet?

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Posted by Lethality | 11 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Is The Ability Delay Fixed For You?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Arguably the biggest item that’s been addressed in this morning’s 1.1.0b patch is the fixes to the “ability delay.” For those not familiar, the issue came to light on the forums here, and prompted developer response from Associate Game Director Emmanuel Lusinchi and and update from Principle Lead Combat Designer Georg Zoeller.

The servers came back up at around 6:30AM EST this morning, and within minutes we were already getting reports from members of the AAJ Army that the ability delay had been fixed or greatly improved! We continued to get comments from Twitter:

@bran1138: I am on a lower end machine so ability delay got me killed a few times and I logged in just now to a much nicer experience.

@Stigas_Illidan: Just finished a game of #swtor Huttball and I went from unplayable 5FPS to 60FPS and zero delay. Big kudos to the dev team!

@gomatgo: Feels like a new game.

These are encouraging signs! Indeed, the ability delay had the silent but long term potential to turning players off of the combat without even realizing why. If this has been addressed, or at least in part this is great news!

But what about the test of you? Once you get in game and test it out, let us know your thoughts on the improvements (or, if you don’t notice anything different!)

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Posted by Lethality | 22 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Are The Factions Balanced On Your Server?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

One of the talking points that seems to have emerged over the past week or so was that of faction imbalance. Some sources, although not a single official one from BioWare, report seeing an extreme tilt towards the Empire. Evidence of this has been provided in the form of endless Imp vs. Imp Huttball matches, and lopsided open world PvP on Ilum. But I’m not sure that paints the whole picture, let alone that of faction balance.

My opinion? Players who elect to join the Galactic Republic tend to be more into the lore and the story side of things, skewing more of their gameplay toward PvE. Players who join the Sith Empire, as I guess is the Sith way, are more concerned about individual power, and well… killing things. Hence, they gravitate more toward the PvP aspects of the game. Even if the factions are imbalanced just a bit, this could skew it even more.

Now, this is complete opinion and speculation on my part. We saw poll upon poll during beta that showed near 50-50 splits of players on whether they were going to roll Republic or Empire. My hunch is, that is much closer to the truth. In fact, the numbers BioWare did release revealed a slight advantage to creation of Sith Warriors over Jedi Knights. But nothing drastic.

So, just curious… what kind of server population balances are you seeing? Vote, but let us know in the comments what faction and what server you’re on!

 

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