Posted by Joanis | 15 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Do You Want To See Holidays In TOR?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, Joanis and 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!

In-game holidays never caught on with me.  I’ve spent most of my MMO career playing World of Warcraft, and many of its in-game holidays are copies of real-life events such as Christmas and the Chinese New Year.  Every year the holidays would come along and my guild-mates would log on and force themselves through the quests for achievement points, but I didn’t. The quests were often annoying and the result didn’t warrant the effort.

TOR offers an opportunity to do something different since the Star Wars universe actually has its own holidays.  While many of the holidays sound similar to those we have in real life, BioWare isn’t limited to holidays that are already canon.  If there is enough community interest, BioWare could create holidays to meet player demands.

Do you want to see holidays in TOR? Should they be based on real-life holidays? If there are holidays, do you think holidays should have gameplay elements attached to them? Vote and discuss!

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Posted by Joanis | 20 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Are You Going To Miss Swimming?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, Joanis and 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!

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 Joanis | 11 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: How Hard Should Titles Be To Earn?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, Joanis and 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!

BioWare announced some time ago that players would able to earn titles for their exploits in TOR. Some of the titles include Master, Lord and Darth. While some of the titles will be rewards for quests, others will be rewarded for raiding and player-versus-player combat. Some of them are going to be easier to get than others.

My opinion is that if titles such as Grand Master or Dark Lord are attainable, only a few people per server should be able to get them. It should be a long and difficult quest that takes hours and hours to complete. Such titles shouldn’t be rewarded for things that most people are expected to complete, such as class quests and raid content. If everyone has a title, it has much less meaning.

Others should be easier to attain. It shouldn’t take 40 hours to get every title. Only those select few that mean the most should take a lot of effort. I’m totally okay with every trooper running around with the Sergeant title.  Grand Generals should be much more uncommon, though.

How hard should titles be to earn? Do you think everyone should have the opportunity to get every title?

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Posted by Joanis | 17 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Are Cross-Server Groups A Good Thing Or A Bad Thing?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, Joanis and 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!

There’s a certain thrill that comes with finding a dungeon group. You become familiar with the good and bad guilds on your server and you add good group-mates to your friends list. You might even develop a reputation for yourself as a good player, resulting in a flurry of messages from past group-mates every time you log in.

Depending on the dungeon, finding groups could take some time. When Blizzard added the Dungeon Finder to World of Warcraft, many players were happy with how easy it became to find groups.  The number of people available in a group of servers made finding groups faster and you could do other things while waiting for your dungeon group to fill.

However, constantly grouping with people you never see again took most of the social aspect away from sharing a server with other players. I rarely group with people on my server outside of my guild, since I use the dungeon finder when my guild-mates are busy.

Do you think cross-server groups are good or bad? Do you miss the social aspect of getting to know your server-mates?

As far as we know, TOR will not have this mechanic, at least at launch. But would they be a good idea for TOR? Please vote and explain your reasoning below!

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Posted by Joanis | 16 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Should There Be Arena-Style PvP In TOR?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, Joanis and 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!

Arena 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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