Hi there. Some who watch this site regularly might remember a while back when this game came out that Spoony and Angry Joe decided to set up rival guilds, with fans choosing to be either a Republic side Spoony Expendable, or a Sith side Disciple of Hate. Needless to say, as “Evil is Cool”, the disciples outnumbered the expendables by a fair margin come launch day.

I was an Expendable.

Anyone who took part in those days on either side might remember me as Elenee, sage consular and guildmaster of the Expendables. I don’t play any more, and haven’t for some time. I’d like to throw my two cents in as to why the game ended up in the free to play bin.

Some folks would argue that in this day and age paid subscription in an MMORPG is unfeasible. I disagree. Certainly the alternative can seem more attractive once the player base starts to dwindle, but the ugly truth is, the players leave for a reason. Personally I’ve never had a problem paying a subscription. I’m not made of money, but I look at it like a hobby or club. A little outlay for a lot of time spent doing things I enjoy with people who share my interests. Honestly the truth is that people will go right ahead and pay through the nose for something they want, we’re a society of ravenous consumers. So why did people stop wanting SWTOR?

Sages. The answer is sages. Well, some other stuff too, but mostly sages. And also evil is cool.

The developers of this game spent a great deal of time adding personal story elements, which is great. What is not great is that by far the weakest and, honestly, boring and disjointed story is that of the consular. Why is this such a problem? Because when the game launched EVERYONE WAS A CONSULAR. Republic side, that is. It’s not hard to see why, the class type is the most typically “jedi-ish” in the game. You want to swing a lightsaber and leap around around the room like a champion? Be a consular. You want to pick pieces of the scenery up and hurl them at your enemies? Be a consular. You want to hold life and death in your hands and kill your enemies with the power of your freakin’ MIND? Be a consular. So yeah, consulars were popular, and then they were frustrating, and then the real problems started to show. Namely sorcerers. That would be your Sith side counterpart of the sage consular. Except cool. Force lightning, need I say more? Well yes, I also have to say that they didn’t dress like they thought the height of fashion was a pair of snazzy novelty oven mitts. My god, I thought WoW paladin outfits were bad. There you’d be, feeling pretty righteous about being on the “good” side, when some nasty Sith type would walk past you flaunting his bling and making fun of your oven mitts. Killjoys. Thus arose the saying popular on our server “fashion designers work for the dark side”. There was also the much belabored issue that pretty much everyone in the game agreed that the animation for sorcerer abilities was fractionally faster than that of consulars, giving them an edge in battle. Whether this was true or an optical illusion, I couldn’t say. But I will say this, the complaints that sages may have had against sorcerers was nothing compared to the entirely legitimate complaints that smugglers had against sages. Namely, smuggler healers SUCKED. I knew one or two who managed to play their class decently despite how severely underpowered they were, but this put even the best smuggler player roughly on par with your average half-hearted button masher of a sage healer. A lot of smugglers simply gave up or re-rolled, putting them behind the curve again, needing to re-gear themselves and wasting a lot of time on characters they didn’t actually want to play. So why was this so truly awful if, as has been stated, everyone was a consular anyway? I mean, sure you’d be alienating a few poor schmucks, but the majority would still be solid, right? Well no, because then the game developers decided to “fix” the issue. Oh yeah, smugglers (of which no one was one anymore) could now heal efficiently… but the price. Oh the price. The trade off was that sage consulars got nerfed up the wazoo. And like I said, everyone was one. In addition to this, a new raid instance was released, which was… you know, alright I guess. Some bounty hunter or mercenary jackass that we all had to go kill for some reason. Not very clear why. He wasn’t Soa, or the Hutt guy. They were fun, bombastic Star Wars-ey badguys. Mercenary guy was.. there, I guess? Had loot? We kill things for loot, right? Not to, you know, defend whatever or save things. It’s for the loot. Who needs any of that story crap. The real problem with this guy was that he was hard. I mean hard as balls. You had to have your A team good to go for every match, forget trying to gear up any newbies. Oh wait, whats that? ALL your healers are either newbies or freshly nerfed? Well, sucks to be you then. Go do some daily quests. Enjoy your oven mitts, you’ll be wearing them a while. Oh, but don’t worry, turns out the gear this guy drops actually isn’t much of an upgrade anyway. In fact, in some cases you’ll actually LOSE stats. But you are the only three healers left in the entire world so you’d better damn well show up!

It was around this point players started leaving in droves. People just didn’t care anymore. You’d have to resort to emotional blackmail to get your good raiders to show up to waste five hours of their lives trying to push through the three people who actually wanted to be there.

I’ve gone on mostly about my experiences as a sage, coloured by my experience as guild master. But the cracks spread further than this, as any long time player could attest. The fundamental flaw, the fault line on which the rest of the game is built, is at the very core of the matter. Style over substance. Oh what’s that? The game has space battles? Oh, they’re kind of crap on-rails things with little or no reward. Wait, you have companions with their own individual stories that you can get involved in? Oh wait, they’re of no use anywhere but solo questing. You have your very own space ship??? Oh. That’s right. You’re a jedi. Your ship is small and ugly and can’t be customized. Lots of useless frills that sound awesome in concept, but fall woefully flat in execution. Your very own speeder bike? Ah, every single one looks like it was made out of spare parts and scrap metal. So much for my dreams of hot-rod glory. At one point, when it became obvious that the game was in trouble, the devs held an honest to god guild masters’ summit. I regrettably could not attend in person, being as I live in Australia, but I viewed the live stream. Basically what it amounted to was “Hey! We have all these really cool ideas for gimmicky gadgets and whatever. Look at our legacy system! Isn’t it gimmicky and gadgety? Um…. please tell us what we’re doing wrong. Please?” What they got in response was a bunch of “hey, there’s this gimmick that I personally am interested in that no one else in the world gives a crap about? Could you put that in the game too?” Of far more use would be if they’d actually had some of their staff GET INVOLVED WITH A GUILD. You know, rather than asking, find out what it’s actually like on the inside first hand. Would have cost them a buttload less money too. The result of this exercise in futility was that, once again, we got a lot of flashy new toys to play with, but they failed to address the actual underlying problems that people were having. Nobody quits a game cos they don’t have a damn pet tauntaun. People quit because there’s no more PvE to do and their class is too frustratingly unbalanced for PvP. There it is. MMO designers of the world take note. It’s not a mystery.

Oh, and for anyone interested in the result of the Expendables/Disciples rivalry, outside of an instant and often hilariously specific vendetta in every game of Huttball (which the Sith usually dominated by virtue of it being the only thing they ever got to play), we had approximately one open world battle, which amounted to a couple of our guys getting their butts kicked by means of massively superior Sith numbers. Cos, you know, evil is cool.