Star Wars: The Old Republic

**alan_fatima** · 30 Jan 2012, 06:25 PM

With my brother and his guild. Darth Sion was the server name.

I had my fun so now I'm looking forward to GW2 and Archeage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr2G7C1jm0I which I hope will get a western release.

**Mzo** · 30 Jan 2012, 09:50 PM

As much as someone like the people posting here enjoy signing up with an MMO, getting to the level cap, and then peacing out, that's not what pays their bills. Especially if you can reach that goal in the first month. I know it might sound ridiculous or even elitist from someone who hasn't been all up ins before, but an MMO really does start at the max level. Nothing you do until that point really matters, character-wise. Any gear you had before then would be replaced, and at this point you can no longer over level the content and have to actually learn how to play. I'm not 100% on how these flashpoints work, but at the level cap the only way to improve is through boss drops so I'm going to assume there are flashpoints you can only do once a week and will have to replay over and over. At that point, where you're going through the same scenario week after week, how does all the Bioware flair really matter?

I believe Chris and Chux have mentioned that the flashpoints tend to go in different directions based on the dialogue options chosen, and that the choice is picked randomly from every member of your group. Does that mean you fight different bosses with different loot tables every week? People playing in the endgame will distill the game down to its basest components. You beat it once for the story and then you play it week after week for gear, completely ignoring the story. Does this game have hard mode versions of flashpoints? How are guilds doing in the endgame in general? Has the full game been completed yet, or is the content gated through either arbitrary time limits, attempt limits, or impossible difficulty until the dev team is ready to move on?

Having a really awesome single player story for leveling is nice, but that is not going to help at all with maintaining their user base past the first month. Now that they've set the bar so high, every single new area that will be patched in is going to either be disappointing or will take forever to be released.

At least it'll do better than Age of Conan, which only had a cool 1-10 game.

**Timber** · 31 Jan 2012, 12:02 AM

I'm a total noob to max level MMO playing but I'll answer what I can (I'm sure Yoshi will know more). Tonight was the first time I ever did one of the Hard Mode Flashpoints but our guild has been running them for a while.

7 of the Flashpoints have a Hard Mode. These are repeatable daily (I think) and you get very similar loot to what you would on an Opperation (raid). Flashpoints do have some small branches to them but I think you'll hit the same bosses no matter what. I haven't done them all yet and I still need to run the last one (False Emperor) which, I'm told, wraps up the main storyline of the game.

Our guild runs operations twice a week and hopefully on Wednesday we'll have enough people online to run a 16 man Opp instead of the 8 that we have been doing. We still have people who want to raid that are leveling up and once a few of them (healers) are there the 16 man ones should be easy to group up for.

**alan_fatima** · 31 Jan 2012, 12:06 AM

When you hit 50, you do dailies for purple mods for your moddable gear. Those are on Ilum and Belsavis. Hit the GTN or guildies who can craft to pick up at least blues of what's left. Once you're geared up in that way, you can start doing hard mode flashpoints or normal operations for better gear. Then you do hard mode ops. Then nightmare mode ops.

There's also grinding warzones for PVP gear. When you get valor rank...60, I think, you can start getting battlemaster bags.

And, yeah. When you're doing a story-heavy flashpoints for the nth time, it gets real frustrating if everyone isn't spamming that space bar. Kill the captain, don't kill the captain, whatever. Just hit the fucking space bar already.

**Timber** · 31 Jan 2012, 12:28 AM

I could honestly watch most of those a few times a week and not be bothered by it at all. But fuck hearing someone in my ear saying "spacebar, spacebar, spacebar..." while they wait the extra 30-90 seconds that pressing space as fast as you can would save. There's only 1 person in my guild who's done this so far and I no longer play with him outside of operations.

**Mzo** · 31 Jan 2012, 01:23 AM

Ok, so flashpoints are standard instances with a normal and hard mode. Those will become useless quickly enough.

Sounds like operations are the raids and what you'll end up doing for the endgame. These are the weekly ones, then. Are there still story choices during operations?

How many people play in a flashpoint, 5? How many in an operation, 10 or 15? I'd be surprised if they go higher than that.