The Old Republic - Why I Stopped Playing It.

I've been reflecting a bit on my time with The Old Republic.  This is a just a copy/paste from my The Old Republic guild's member forums.  Not exactly very topical, considering I wrote it a year ago.  Maybe all these issues were addressed when the game went free to play.  I doubt it, though.  Anyway, without further ado:

WHY I CANCELLED MY SUBSCRIPTION TO STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC 



I put a great deal of faith into the 1.2 update. I thought the legacy system would justify all the time I'd sunk into leveling my various max level alts. I thought that conclusion of the Rakghoul instance series would draw people online for longer than fourish hours on Sunday night where we clear the lackluster raid content. Finally, I thought that the new raiding tier would ignite my desire to raid like the Firelands update had done to my desire to play WoW. I think it's safe to say at this point that none of those things ended up happening.

It's been said (by people) that TOR's abilities are neither neither fun nor interesting. Nearly every ability I can think of off has an analogue in wow. In fact, I think that the class ability situation can serve as a microcosm for what (I feel) is really wrong at tor's heart.  It seems like they copy/pasted entire gameplay elements straight from wow, without any real consideration as to why those aspects are there, or even if they worked well in the first place.

Hey Look!  Star Wars has Mindless Daily Quests Too!

We were subjected to raiding situations where we spent more time clearing endless waves of trash monsters than engaging in any kind of compelling boss encounters. Why would the developers push this on their subscribers? I can think of two possible reasons why the new raid was so trash heavy: One - because they were mimicking classic wow. And two - to artificially extend the time players spent playing through the new content, thereby obscuring the fact that their new instance only included four bosses.

While I'm on a roll crying about tor, I feel I should touch on the ever-present specter of the absolutely horrid quality of life for any players foolish enough to attempt tanking. There was a reason I rerolled my Jugernaught after doing just ONE max level flashpoint dungeon on him. Not that assassin tanking was really any better. It seriously feels like the devlopers were going out of their way to make the tanking experience as unpleasant as possible, by adding mobs with stun, knockback, and or chokes to EVERY. SINGLE. TRASH. PACK. It really got to the point where one didn't "tank" trash in TOR as much as just you just ran from enemy to enemy as the dps players pulled agro in succession (repeat process until group of enemies is dead or the players are). That resulted in a dynamic that placed almost the entire responsibility for the group's survival squarely on the healers' shoulders. As a point of comparison, Attempting to tank a large group of enemies on a protection warrior in a Vanilla WOW 40 (a class that had no significant abilities that hit multiple targets)  person raid was less of a headache than trying to do a 4 person flashpoint in tor (maybe that's a bit hyperbolic, but I actually enjoyed doing the former).

These Screens Really Make the Game Look More Fun Than It Is.

The controls: Something in tor's UI/control scheme just felt clunky and "wrong." It's hard to properly articulate exactly what I mean, so yet again, I'll use wow as a point of comparison (which I think is fair, given the circumstances). In wow, the controls feel smooth. I could make my characters do what I wanted them to, when I wanted them to do it. If I ended up targeting the wrong thing or doing something similar, I knew it
was because *I* had made the mistake. In tor, I had a hell of a time selecting targets quickly and accurately, which is deadly for everyone as a tank (this also ties back into the tanking quality of life segment above.) As an example, I had a hell of a time properly selecting the proper turret in the 2 tanks boss encounter, as the game liked to ignore my target selections when the time came to do the swap tanks. This lead to massive frustrations on my part - again, because I felt many wipes were a result of the game improperly responding to my input, rather than something I'd done wrong.

DIABLO 3:  Gameplay-wise, I'm not going to compare the two games. However, as I started playing D3 experienced something strange and interesting - something that I hadn't been feeling towards TOR since its initial release:  enjoyment and excitement. I actually WANTED to log on and play D3, whereas I hadn't really felt that way about tor for quite some time, to the point where looking back, I don't even know why I spent so much time with it, even going as far as leveling multiple alts to max level.

TALENT TREES:  (I guess I'm making a list now)  Not to beat a dead horse here, but this is another blatant example of "because they did it in wow" syndrome. If you're going to incorporate talent trees into the leveling scheme, then give the players meaningful choices between abilities. Putting a spec together in wow had some hard choices because they made you pick between abilities that you could see being equally useful depending on the circumstances. I never really felt this pressure in tor, as I could usually get every single ability I wanted. Certain trees could even go for 15 level stretches where the tree contained no more than five ranks worth of abilities per tier, offering zero choice (check out the operative dps spec). This is stupid.

SO! That ended up being a fair bit longer than I thought it would. Also looks like I failed in my stated task - that of not using this post as a soapbox to needlessly bitch about tor.  Maybe I should start a series outlining why I stopped playing different MMOs.