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Star Wars: The Old Republic: New Ways to Play with Friends in 1.3
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
The Star Wars: The Old Republic team has posted a new letter to players showing off the new features to allow players to more easily game together with the advent of v1.3.
Group Finder makes it much easier for players to join up with others in the game. The tool allows you to connect with other players who want to tackle the same Flashpoint or Operation that you do. The tool can also ensure the group is filled out with combat disciplines that complement each other. You’ll be better prepared to take on the more advanced challenges in the game.
Ranked Warzones make PvP more challenging and more rewarding. You can now create a group, compete in ranked warzones, and then track your personal performance and measure your skill against other players.
Read the full blog post on the Star Wars: The Old Republic site.
Comments
Sad it took patch 1.3 to get a group finder which was identified as needed in Beta numerous times by myself and a horde of others.
The group finder is nice, and the ability to wear social gear while retaining the stats of your combat gear is good. I like appearance tabs. Not sure how this is implemented but at least for rp'ers it's a small step in the right direction.
Yeah, thats great.
Except all the armor AND clothing in the game is butt-ugly.
Jedi with Short Sleeved Robes! Magnum P.I. is in charge of the Jedi Council 3,000 years before the Battle of Yavin!
Haha, I love these amateurs, so now we can play with new friends through a group finder... but thats kind of hard to do when we now have long queue times.
It's needed by all dungeon/raid only end game content games with an endless gear treadmill and a required trinity to fill groups.
Their thinking this patch is going to fix things proves they have no idea what drove such a massive amount of players away...
operation fanboy blindfold was a success, they managed to keep anyone important from hearing a thing.
I dont mind trying swtor if it had no sub but a one time pay like GW2 with a cash shop. I dont see it as a game worth a sub since in my opinion it doesnt bring anything new to the mmo market. I wished EA and such stopped looking at release sales ( bragging about how many beta testers which occurs in many mmos) and try looking at the long term picture. This game has lots of potential. With the focus on story telling and not a whole bunch of endgame I just saw the epic failure the game would receive. Kinda sad cuz the game was released in the best timing ever. No other mmos were released with that kind of a big title and they had months to keep the playerbase to do the right things. Im just tired seeing the same pattern over and over again with new mmos. Once they release the game they enter a layback mode. This is were the hard work actually begins to listen the community and add frequently updates and patches. The legacy system just indicates they want u to repeat the story telling again to distract u from the main issue which is the endgame. Hopefully they'll add more pvp features like more open world pvp with a bounty hunting system. Care to enlight me does this game have open pvp or is it broken?
Just my opinion as an outsider of swtor or am I wrong?
now .. now that servers aren't ghost towns .. now there is LFG .. it's like watching a movie on how not to make an MMO.
obviously I don't like LFDs much in the first place .. but this is priceless.
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity.
I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
It's nice that they added this but I think it's come to late for most. The LFG tool should have been in from launch or at the very latest the first major patch.
Really the issue I had with SWTOR other than feeling isolated due to poor game design was the speed that Bioware implemented fixes, it just wasn't acceptable for a subscription based game.
They have definitely lost me as a customer due to this regardless of what they implement now.
I'm not even mad about the speed at which they fixed things... it was the mis-prioritization of fixes and new features that didn't encourage me to stick around. When the sub fee is gone, I'm sure I'll come back and maybe throw a few bucks at a funky class/race combo, or maybe for access to the latest instances just to experience whatever I've been missing out on since February.
/waitingforF2P
We've been asking for this feature since Beta...........it took them 6 months to implement it.
Great job Bioware (/sarcasm)
To my knowledge, the dungeon finder isn't cross server, so it's a pretty good thing they merged servers.
Though, here's the thing: There were way more people in beta *against* the implementation of a group finder than there were people who were *for* the group finder.
So... You can say Bioware did listen to their playerbase alright.
So... You can say Bioware did listen to their playerbase alright.
Well, then you can say that BioWare listened to the wrong playerbase.
They should have known that something like this was needed from the very beginning.
And if it really is server only then they even implemented it wrong.
Kudos all around BioWare. Your rookie mistakes should be documented for future generations of MMO developers.
In my opinion, the early guild leaders panicked EA as they came in from WOW and various games and derailed a lot of dev intentions, and caused a lot of chaos. A great deal of the story based game we might have seen got re-engineered in ways we might never seen to give us a half-assed WOW clone, because the beta crew wanted to see familiar stuff they then rejected.
Gamer culture is such that you go in as an early adopter beta tester with preconceptions -- you say you want innovation but if you don't find things you can comfortably criticize against what you already know in order to make your ego enlarge so you feel you know better than the devs, you aren't cool. So you tear down the game like a school of piranhas, and the money people derail the devs, and anything original in the game gets excised by marketing. I've seen it over and over again.
The community around this site is Exhibit A.
Eh, just like in TERA, any time you complete a dungeon or finish early thanks to the group breaking up, you're forced to port back to the dungeon entrance rather than the location you were at when you accepted the invite.
Given SW:TOR's long, frequent loading screens, this is a HUGE turnoff and it really negates half the reason for using a dungeon finder over just standing around in fleet.
Obviously it isn't cross server, and there isn't even an estimated wait timer...
I'm at an absolute loss at why devs keep hamstringing great features.
Not gonna play until its F2P. Don't have a lot of time to waste money on P2P anymore.
WoW is a disease that will infect your brain and your computer.
This is true. There was a lot of feedback from players lobbying against group finder, and it was ardent vocal opposition.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
Ok it's official. I go back on my word yet again, I would play this game if it went F2P now. Well... maybe not but I would think about it.
Very long queu times for the dungeon finder. And the ranked WZ has made all PvP queu times longer as well. Not to mention you get stuck fighting the same group of Pubs or Imps over and over again. Wish I had saved the $15.
I am clopping in excitement... nawww im not. I do not see this brining back players, like many said it should have been implemented on release.
No group finder UI is needed, in any game.
As long as you aren't stupid and "know" how to form parties.
I could make a party for "ANY" instances within 3 minutes, which is much shorter than a queue line.
I'd gladly pay subscription for SWTOR if they were using the money to improve SWTOR.
I respec'd my commando to healing and the mid-level queues were near instant. My sentinel had to wait far longer.This game might have a good future if the dumb arrogant slow devs would come off their high horse, stop treating like everyone is a stupid biodrone and starting to label FIXES as fixes not "Features".
Seriously it took them over 7 Months to make "social gear" working? And this now is a huge "feature"?
Seriously....?
It was needed but it's value is shortterm, now you have a slave outfit on your char, great now what? ...EXCATLY.
I can't wait for the first anniversary. 1.6 "Planetary Speeder routes fi....feature". Speeders will now not tilt and fase in thin air or fly wonky curves. Come together and enjoy new and imrpoved speeder travel, "sub here".
Now wonder EAware claims to have the biggest updates in MMO history since launch. Fixing the same thing over and over (augmentation) counts as features.
Okay space combat was a cheap, poorly made on rail shooter with zero replayvalue, i thought maybe to this time there will be like one more a month added? It's such a crude copy & paste job "creating" new content may be not that much of an issue, right? Looks like we get ONE more in one year. Let's not even talk about making this a meaningful fun game system.