10.10
Episode 9 of the Darth Hater podcast is now up for stream and download. Check the bottom of the post for the stream and download links. Podcast notes after the jump.
Intro
Justin Lowe – Sado – Twitter: @realdarthhater
Pete Trerice – Misenus – Twitter: @petetrerice
Josh Coleman – Colm – Twitter: @colmination
Josh Ogborn – Sleeper – @dhsleeper
Stories Covered
Coruscant Developer Dispatch
- Creature Handler seen in Coruscant Developer Dispatch?
- Voice Dissection for “Developer Dispatch – The Making of Coruscant”
Sith Warrior Developer Blog is Out!
Could Star Wars: The Old Republic have BioWare Bucks?
- Community Questions/Poll for this week’s Podcast
Force Feedback Friday – 10/09/2009
MMOReport Mention in Microtransaction Discussion
Questions of Mention (noted during the question session)
desvetudo: “What are your thoughts on race-specific abilities?”
Seth: “Well, Microtransactions shouldn’t give certain players an advantage over one another because of their success in real life. Don’t we all play these games to get away from real life? We want to go somewhere where we all start out equal, something we can’t do in real life.”
Chronium: “I said yes to in game currency because it is the best and easiest way to effectively deal with gold farmers. If you offer a official service to buy gold at the gold farmers prices then you effectively got rid of there need to sell gold in TOR. No gold farming spam is more important to me then whining about it whether it should be allowed or not.”
indu.san: How do you see the roll of darthhater after release? Will you evolve as a site with the game as it progresses, or are you primarily concerned about functioning before release as a source of information and a forum based on confirmed information/speculation?
Aflixion: What’s your favorite aspect of SW:TOR that’s been announced so far? What’s your favorite Star Wars game overall?
Zihn: Would you ask BW to include the holonet in the game, and give you a presence on it? Imagine the possibilities!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:14 — 22.6MB)
Related posts:
First, nice podcast. =)
Second, after lurking the forums for a while this week-end I realized people seem crazed (as much as I) on the question of: “Are their 2 Jedi and 2 Sith classes, or just 1 per faction?”. It seemed every post about classes derived on that question at some point.
There are many indications leading to the 1st, while still confirming nothing. I’ll try to sum up:
- It is been confirmed that there is a reason for the Sith Warrior not just being a ‘Sith’… It could mean there clearly is a 2nd Sith Force-user as much as there could be a Sith Operative or Sith assassin, or even just to avoid the confusion between the Sith religion practitioners and the Sith Empire faction…
- From the holonet’s Sith Warrior page and the dev blog, it’s clear that it is a melee centric class “with little concern for scheming”. In other words, where is the other Sith type? The Darth Sidious type, working behind the scene, plotting, conspiring and rarely getting their saber out of their scabbard… so to speak…?
On the other side of the argumentation table, we can say that 4 force using classes feel like a lack of diversity, and that even if we can separate 2 types of Sith, it doesn’t seem that evident to do on the Jedi side, imo. Finally, through specialization and story choices you can maybe fashion a character like Darth Sidious starting as a Sith Warrior, but for now, we lack confirmation it is at all possible.
What do you guys think it is? And what would you like to see? I know I’d really like to have a Darth Sidious type character even if I can only attain a fraction of the original char’s accomplishments… =)
My stance on the whole Jedi/Sith is that there would be no point in a second force class for each side. When they say that the Sith Warrior has “little concern for scheming”, I think that they are saying that there will be another class that will do the scheming, and I think they already gave us a hint of that class with the Timeline on the Imperial Intelligence Operatives.
The way I see it, they will be doing the scheming and they are said to be “just as powerful as their Sith counterparts.” As some of the most powerful people in the galaxy I think they will end up being one of the Sith Classes for sure. They seem like a perfect answer for the smuggler on the Republic side as well.
But that’s my two cents.
I disagree with your idea that there will be “scheming” type Sith class who barely ever fights. How would you level a class like that? Scheming isn’t a valid combat option. Plus the Sith Warrior already has Force Choke and Force Smash and all those other abilities. The only unique ability it would have is Force Lightning, and that simply isn’t enough to make it unique. As we know, the Sith Warrior videos seen so far are of low level players. Force Lightning is probably a high level ability, and as Sith level, they may become more of the scheming type. You don’t start out as the grand schemer. You start as the apprentice doing the dirty work for your master, then slowly start to scheme against your Master, and then usurp him and become a grand schemer. No extra Force class required.
That’s my opinion on that.
I feel that the Sith Lord, or “Scheming Class” would utilize skills such as kill, mind trick, illness, and of course force lightning. Much like the evil consular in SW:ToR
And those skills couldn’t simply be added to a Sith Warrior’s repertoire as he levels? The Sith Warriors in the videos so far had Choke and Smash and other iconic abilities and they were only level 10 tops. For the other 30 or 40 or whatever, they wouldn’t pick up anything else Sithy like Lightning? That alone seems to point to Sith Warrior being the only Force class on Empire side.
The ‘imperial intelligence operative’ has its place as a class I think too, and I agree there would be lots of scheming ™ in their storyline, but their skills and overall feel is quite far from a Darth Sidious type character imo. And besides, this class would only fill the 3rd class slot, there is still 1 room left.
Also, I never meant the ’scheming’ type, as you put it, would barely ever fight, just not as efficiently with their light saber compared to the Warrior. And even if a Warrior would of course not rely entirely on their saber, he would have limited use of Force powers, again, compared to the, let’s call it, “Sith Corruptor” (sound good no? =) ).
Another thing is troubling me, the absence of robes for the Sith Warrior. And I don’t mean there aren’t lots of shots with Sith wearing long cloaks with hoods over their heavy armor (the trailer as plenty of them), but these are not robes. In my head, I’d see these cloaks as cosmetic for the Warrior while robes would be the primary “Sith Corruptor” chest slot equipment…
The point I try to make is not based on skill or equipment, but story. If ‘heavy scheming’ and robes would just come along in the last levels of the Sith Warrior storyline/progression, I’d be rather disappointed and for now, everything official I read hinted so or not at all.
Lastly, your points against the idea of a second Sith Force class are all valid, and if I was quite certain it would be it at 1st when they released the Sith Warrior page, now I’m not so sure. In fact I got a strong feeling you may well be right, but still it disappoints me.
In the end, I guess we’ll all have to wait and see…
Maybe they’re saving Robes for high level players. Maul was a Sith Apparentice, not too high level(if you had to think of him in level terms). Palpatine was a high level Sith Master, he had the robes of status. True, Dooku did have robes of a sort, but he also was a former Jedi Master, it probably carried over.
Robes seem like a good status symbol to recognize high level Jedi/Sith, especially since they can’t just get bulkier armor and bigger guns like the Troopers and Bounty Hunters.
I think they are indeed high level in the game, but it’s just not the case in the films from the lowliest trainee to the Jedi masters on the council, all robes, Sith included, be it Maul, Tyrannus or Sidious, no one had a big armor other than Vader and we all know why he had it. It was certainly not by choice.
And while no one clearly stated in the movies Jedi and/or Sith cannot wear armor, I guess it’s ok to have them in EU materials, but it’s just not ‘iconic’. I simply get a bad taste that BW introduced armor on Force users in TOR (pretty clear Jedi have them too considering their outfit in the trailer) for the sole purpose of providing an explanation for their survivability in large battles, with little regard to what people are used to. And the justification that the galaxy is at war and everyone needs good protection sounds lame to me.
Also, it’d feel illogical to either trade a heavy armor piece for a robe at high level, imo. And just get a cloak to put over my heavy armor feels cheap. It may just be me being short sighted, but I don’t like the idea of Force users with armor…
Obi-Wan’s been wearing pieces of clone trooper armor to GREAT effect in the Clone Wars cartoons.
My question is listed here on the page but I didn’t hear it in the podcast. I’m really curious to see if TOR will include the holonet (and it would be great if you guys were part of it). They could do all kinds of things. With the way they’re handling inserting characters into cinematics there’s no reason that players couldn’t leave video messages for other players (instead of plain text mail) or it could be useful for classes to get missions (i.e. BH’s looking for available bounties, etc). SWG at one point instituted a “News-Net” and there were terminals in the spaceports, but they never did anything with it. It got updated like twice a year so it was pointless. TOR could really do a lot with the holonet system if they put some thought into it. DarthHater could function as a pirate broadcast, hacking into the holonet to bring citizens information the Republic is trying to keep buried, like border skirmishes they’re trying to keep quiet, or the Senate snowballing efforts to get troopers better weapons or rumors of Sith deployments in anticipation of renewed fighting, etc., etc., etc.
LotRO includes its Lorebook in-game for lots of handy info, so there would be a precedent for BioWare trying it.
Woo. My comment was talked about in this podcast. I’m very humbled.
Nice to hear. Keep up the comments and they may appear again.
great podcast
I haven’t heard the podcast yet, but having sanctioned RMT will not get rid of gold farmers. The gold farmers will just start selling gold at cheaper prices than the game developers. I hear that happened in EverQuest 2 after they put in RMT. So gold spam will be there, it’ll just be “We sell credits cheaper than BioWare!”. So no, I wouldn’t want them to try that method to snuff out gold farmers. Just make it against the rules and have a dedicated Customer Service team whose sole job is to find and ban gold farmers and power levelers and such.
Great as always, but why does one of you take the “i should do less and get same” argument? And on the gold farm topic, china recently made it illegal to sell virutual items/curency, since 80% of the goldfarmers are from china im quite sure there’ll be alot less.
He just took the Devils Argument approach to it for the time being but he definitely is not for what he mentioned.
Ohh…guess i should pay more attention, i tend to read other things as i listen to it
Actually with china it was misinformed reporting. The game money it was referring to is a form of slot machine that is popular in china and the law does not apply to gold farming at all. The clarification was explained on Maximum PC website but there search sucks and can’t find the article anymore.
I also heard that the ban on “gold farming” only applied to the Chinese currency, not the American dollar or any other currency used outside China. So either way, that “ban” would never reach to the gold sites selling to Americans.
Sado, they said that when building the world they thought, “What would this 50 story building look like if it was a thousand stories high.”
I wouldn’t expect to see ANY 50 story buildings in Coruscant.
On the micro-transaction discussion: People that cannot play as much as their friends just have bad luck. A developer don’t EVER have to sell items that boost you stats or things like that. In my opinion that’s CHEATING!!! Ok, if you buy it ingame, it’s not but if you hack it it is. One way or another, it’s onfair to other players.
Also, the people that want to spend all their money on better items get the advantange on players that just want to play the game the way it’s supposed to.
It’s not that I don’t like micro’s. I like the cosmetic and server swap parts, but I don’t think people would want to play an mmo that gives the guy that has the most money to spend having the best gear or leveling the fastest.
World of Warcraft uses a badge system to allow people to fill in the gaps in their gear. Unfortunately, they decided to allow this system to escalate to the point where gearing your character up requires little to no effort. This in turn has caused those that have no business wearing some of the best gear in the game to be doing so. Thus resulting in a lack of purpose in raiding the current content available, causing an overall less skilled and more needy player base.
While this isn’t the same as micro-transactions, it is similar in that it dumbs down the game causing a watered down experience for all those involved. If micro-transactions are in the game, then they need to be managed, otherwise it could become a game crashing problem.
badge system is okay its how they use it and make everyone get high lvl badges for doing jack.
the purpose of raiding is to have fun playing a game with friends/guildies. There is no skill involved in pve mmo. all you have to do is to check the internet for spec and guide.
But okay you raid for gear, no problem. raid and get gear if thats what you want to do. why is it bad that joe blow, whom you do not know or has any impact on your gaming experince whatsoever, gets to get gear from other ways?
everytime someone gets 80 badges to get a peice of gear that you put half the effort into getting do you die a little on the inside?
its not badges or MTs that hurt game, its the elitist attitude that no one ekse can have fun in “your” video game.
If there is no skill involved in mmos, then why do plenty of guilds never down the top content?
80 badges, with the current system, could be easily obtained within a week, less even. I have no problem with people obtaining gear by other means. However, I draw the line when they are allowing people to obtain tier 9.5 by running a heroic that requires no effort at all. Risk = reward, but apparently not in this case.
I have no elitist attitude, I don’t mind that all the content is available to anyone who seeks to see it. But, I do mind when they start handing out the best gear in the game for practically free.
i dont care if i sound like a elitist prick bad players drive me nuts and its a cancerous sore upon mmos.
Shouldn’t your complaints about specific tiers and tokens and stuff in WoW be reserved for a WoW site? There’s nothing BioWare can do about Tier 9.5 and 80 badges.
I was simply replying to Team since he asked questions about my opinion.
Totally predictable responses to both of my questions
Jedi Power Battles was awesome, I admit. In fact, I don’t think I’ve come across a SW game I didn’t like, except that god-awful SWG.
At any rate, thanks for answering my questions, and thanks for a great podcast. See you next week
Glad you liked the cast
seeing as how they are trying to pound into our heads that this game is about story, there is no way that i can see them letting gender swaps or faction change… That would change the story, and since u cant go back in time that messes up the story.
I honestly dont see any way those 2 things can be in the game
I have the same feeling, and if they do put them in game gender swaps will come long before faction changes, as there are no identical classes to change to when you change factions.
Story wise sex changes can be treated the same way sex changes are done in real life, through surgery except they do not have to show it.
Faction changes would make a good expansion feature instead of making a new class. They can easily make a good story based on faction changing. But it does not make sense to have it when the game goes live.
its just kinda really odd , man know if you want a male or female toon. I usually play females in mmos , but this is BW so ill gona roll primarly male toons.
Ew, female toons, perv. Female butts and all that?
great podcast cant wait for next weeks and new update
Thanks
Glad you enjoyed the cast.