What can SE learn from Bioware's failing Star Wars MMO?

[Antipika]

Well, I haven't met a person yet that truly enjoys level grinding. It's accepted by most MMORPG veterans that "the real game begins at the level cap", so many people rush to get there as quickly as possible.

You certainly didn't play SWTOR then, the best part is the leveling and people left mostly because of the unbalanced endgame once Level 50 is reached. The game is heavily story driven and your journey from 1 to 50 is painless, as you don't really feel the grind (like you do on XIV, especially past level 30 where most of people are doing Raptor > Natalan grind fest).

Look, ever since Yoshi publically stated that Star Wars's problem was launching the game without enough content (which, while true, it still had more content at launch by far than XIV originally did),

SWTOR 1.0 had more content than XIV 1.22b have and will have more than XIV 1.23 unless SE release a super huge patch. But drop rate aren't low, so players went through the content faster.

Drop rate in high level 4-mans dungeons in SWTOR is 100%. Guaranteed drop on final boss and it's useable for 1 of the 4 class group of the game, meaning that if your party is made of 4 players from 4 different class group, there won't be any competition at /rolling (unlike XIV where on top of having a shit drop rate, lot of people are 7/7 jobs and you have to fight for whatever drops with at least 2 or 3 players which lower the chance to get your loot).

You can attempt a specific dungeon once every 24 hour max, but nothing prevent you to run 4 different dungeons a day. Meaning that in average, you get one guaranteed drop per day when you start gearing up. The pace will slow down a bit when you will only need 1 or 2 piece of armor (meaning that you will only do runs for the 1-2 dungeons you need).

Oh yeah, on top of armor drop, you get tokens. And you can use them to acquire piece of armor directly from NPC. It would take long to have enough token to buy Tier 2 equipment, roughly 1 month, still. That's enough to buy that very last piece of armor set you were missing.

I got my full Tier 2 set in about a month. Then T3 (Raid) was barely an improvement over T2, so why even bother (and 8-mans was dropping the same thing as 16-mans)? Nothing was even balanced in Raid yet, so I did like many, I left...

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The biggest mistake of Bioware was to listen to the community when it came to fixing the game. Stupid things that didn't require any fix were changed, while important things were overlooked.

It sounds like EN forums sometime with "PETITION FOR [...]" everywhere. Players think that because they pay $12 a month they are entitled to give orders to game designers. I am glad sometime SE do their own things, even if the community is complaining. While some complaints are off course legitimate, it doesn't mean that they should always be taken in consideration.

Typical example that comes in mind are the low drop rate. If XIV had SWTOR like drop rate, we wouldn't even be here anymore to talk, because we would all have left.

(In b4 : "B.. But! I don't play for the drops! I play for fun!!". That's not true for most of players, you don't do Primals because they're fun after 50 wins, but because you want your weapon. Same with dungeons. Same with just anything...)

I hope 2.0 will remain the way SE wants it to be and not the way some minority on forums wants it to be.