Empire: Legions of Lettow server

[Grilldyret]

Suffered from the same problem, Abyiss. You do a "/who" first, then type in "iron edge" in the search box. That will show you all the people currently online that has one or both words in their name or guild name. From there you need to identify a player from Iron Edge by name, or by whispering

[Abyiss]

Counter-intuitive skill is over 9000.

[Sidestep]

Counter-intuitive

Who are you and what have you done with Ben.

[Yoica]

omg side, I lol-ed so hard.

[Kawe / Dave]

Unless I've overlooked something huge, the /who function just plain sucks.

[Narw]

I have mixed feelings bout this game. Questing is fun, but nothing special. I mean yeah, voice acting and etc but quests are still mostly same old bullcrap kill x, pick y, delver to z. Grahpic is okish for mmo, but totally not on par with what you would expect from a game relased in 2011. User interface is abysmal piece of shit and "raid" frames make me wonder if i actually want to play healing character in this game. Character respnonsivnes is bad, nowhere near the level WoW have. Focus frames are basicly useless at this point, casting bars are way too small and it's hard to notice what someone is actually casting.

 PvP is bad, maps desing is medicore (cool thing is lot of LoS tho, so you can actually hide from turreting wizards), balance is propably not existant and some stuff just makes me wonder what the fuck were they smoking when they thought it will work. I mean, mixing leveling characters with lvl 50's? (yes i know about "boosting stats" so you dont get one shooted), possiblity to leave BG if you see your team is mentally handicaped and requeqe immediatly without any consequnces? No competitive arenas/bg's w/e is also at least suprising.

 I dont know how endgame PvE looks, but considering the problems i've listed with UI and the way character reacts to my commands i aint looking forward to it.

I honestly wonder where 5 years of development and 300m usd went, couse at this point i really do not know. If Bioware wont invest a lot of time and resources into fixing stuff i've listed i cant see it being playable for more then 3 months. 

So in short - storytelling, questing (or more like leveling) and graphic is cool, rest looks bad, especially if you compare it to WoW level. And yes i do know that its not exactly fair to compare "Fresh" game to old developed title, but its hard to just get over issues i've listed.

[Grishnag]

I believe that there is a 500ms delay on every action you do such results in you casting a 2 second spell but in reality it will take about 2.5 second to cast

It's a bug apperently so wouldn't worry about that

[Kawe / Dave]

-pvp chat-
My stance on 'competitive pvp' is the same for any and all mmos as well as diablo3, e.g. it can stay the fuck out. Invites nothing but wretches and vast amounts of time spent trying to appease the slavering husks that compose 'the pvp community'. The bgs, especially hutt ball, I have a lot more fun with than other mmo bgs thus far when it comes to what the objectives and maps themselves offer (e.g without considering classes, what you get when you press ability buttons and so on).

The UI really needs a few things, like a scale slider, and a target of target would be real nice but not really necessary. As far as casting bar goes, I've actually had a lot more success with it than other castbars, for whatever reason - maybe it's the icons, or some other combination of visual queues, but I find spells very easy to spot, and generally intuitive on a basic level, like green  usually means heals.

I especially like the hutt ball arena. The fire pits that fill chunks of the paths across a lower area that alternate, the acid pools and the wealth of options for making use of knockbacks, roots, and so forth, or for baiting them with some immunity, is great fun. That and the 'Blood Bowl' style of game with lots of verticality mean there are some cool options for how to play.

The 'no level brackets' thing is actually pretty much just fine and dandy - until you start getting max level characters in. Primarily this is because 50 is when characters get proper access to gear with the pvp stat on in addition to full complements of abilities etc. Whatever the specifics, it works shockingly well until 50 it seems. Though I hear there's an intention to bracket off the 50s once there's enough people at 50 that it wouldn't cripple queues (no cross server, so this would be a pretty nasty problem).

I've seen comment about the raid panels being a dick to try and heal with too. Only looked at them, not clicked them once personally as I haev no heals.

---

pvp tl;dr the pvp side of the game is being handled by Mythic (Dark age of Camelot, Warhammer Online), so that's the kind of style to expect, except on a smaller scale (8v8 in warzones compared to WAR and DAoC's massive numbers of players).

Response time definitely feeling a bit sluggish. The up-to-1s-buffer queueing of abilities mitigates this if you're using every GCD, but would just 'feel' a lot better if they tighten it up. Not sure they will though, WAR felt to me somewhat similar and that was just how that game was.

pve tl;dr The class (main) quest storyline is really fun and feels rather like most bioware singleplayer stuff, DA2 in particular (go through this area clear this shit) except with more varied enviornments as you hop from planet to planet. The more run-of-the-mill quests are less exciting and, well, more run of the mill.




Disorganised tidbits:
I love having starfox missions that you can do in your ship.

Crafting/gathering as something that your npc crew of your ship do in the background while you play the game is a neat change.

Auction house is awful. Buy outs only and no actual auction, and the search interface is the worst one in any mmo I've played.

Often have to do far too much walking/running on mount for quests.

Classes are cool. Tanks functioning in a cool tanky way in pvp, taunts making taunted guy do -30% damage if he doesn't hit the tank for the 6sec duration, and tank has a one-target guard thing that vacuums damage from it to him so long as he stays close, I like that kind of thing.

Dungeons, from the three first ones, seemed pretty good, with variability based on dialogue chosen. Having the first dungeon 2 or 3-mannable (with the 3rd/4th gap filled by compaions) but equally fine to do with full 4 man group was nice.

No LFD, and no intention to add it. On the other hand, it appears most if not all 4man dungeons are accessed from an area in the main 'city'. But either way you're stuck saying "LFG /LFM / Need healer/tank/dps for xyz dungeon" in chat to make groups.

Quite a few bugs here and there still.

No public quests from WAR or RIFT's take on them either

The money sinks are super duper backwards ones, I guess to make up for the lack of more fun ones. Skill training and mount training costs a vast amount of what you'll normally have, and there's no 'barber shop' or suchlike.

Ugly ass textures on a lot of gear. Seems this is in part due to high textures option being broken, but I wouldn't be surprised if those 'high' textures are plenty ass too, thinking back to the way NPCs gear looked in ME1 for example.

Performance, given the dated visuals, should really be better.

[Abyiss]

Often have to do far too much walking/running on mount for quests.

100% agree with this, particualy "town" zones are needlessly big.

[Kawe / Dave]

Regarding input: First, why WoW's input is basically perfect;

and second an example of input problems in SWTOR

And a fat, organised thread on it: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=95738

[Abyiss]

also, the going from standing to sitting "animation" is appauling.

So in wow, you press sit (defult x on your standard ui) and your character animates realisticly from his standing possition, into his sitting possition.

In Tor, his body parts just slide into the sitting keyframe.

Might not bug some, but as an animator, it's very sloppy- lazy and ultimatly make your question - why does my character do this ??

[Kawe / Dave]

WoW's animations are largely abominable though, so hey.

*by the way, speaking of animations, you have to PLAY shadow of the colossus and play it with a pad, then feel the feeling of joy at the way your inputs relate to what's going on on screen.