The TOR guild House of Karrdes has been doing a series of audio interviews with other guilds in the TOR galaxy. Episode Four features none other than… drumroll, please… us!
Click here for the Beskar interview.
Many thanks to Caelen Rivers (who posts as AtinVer on the TOR forums), one of the council members over at House of Karrdes for conducting, editing and posting the interview.
Just a quick note today — and it’s not even TOR-specific, although it was certainly inspired by something I saw on the TOR forums. Basically, I’m seeing an increasing number of people in the guild section of the TOR forums with some rather selfish concepts. Here’s an example, word for word (so spelling mistakes and crappy grammar included), from the forums:
I am looking for partners to establish a strong and powerful Sith guild that will retain its strength and loyalties into SWTOR. I shall need a site technician to basically create our site, an ambassabor for our guild to create immediate support from the other Sith. A military strategist, a 2IC (or possilbe apprentice) and any one else who can help establish the foundations for our new guild. Your efforts will be rewarded with a united Sith front under a new council that will lead the Sith who join me to victory over the Jedi and the Republic.
So if I have this right… the guy wants someone to build him a site; someone else to recruit members; and someone to drive the members in game… but he will be in charge, LOL.
What planet does this guy live on?
The whole point of being a guild leader is:
Anyone who doesn’t get that concept has no business trying to start a guild or, worse, calling themselves a guild leader. It’s embarrassing, frankly, that there are people arrogant enough to suggest that others can do all the “heavy lifting” and “leg work”, but they should be in charge of the result without contributing anything. The only thing worse is that there might actually be people out there who’d reply to such a post and actually do all the hard work for someone like this!
I like to think I’m a fair man when it comes to talking about computer games. When Bioware does something good, by my estimation, I’ll be on the front line telling everyone about it. When Bioware does something bad — again, by my estimation I need to stress — I’ll be as cutting and scathing as I can be. In other words, I’m not a Bioware fanboi, but nor am I a Bioware hater, either.
I also like to think that I can judge an MMO pretty well these days after playing a wide array of them for over a decade, often for long periods. “Been there, done that & got the t-shirt…” doesn’t even remotely begin to explain my background with these frustrating, addictive, OCD-friendly pieces of code that have worked their way into my very DNA over time.
And as it so happens, just lately I’ve been doodling with the trial version of an MMO that I’ve played in the past, but thought I’d revisit at the moment because, honestly, I’ve been bored. I wanted something to do particularly on these cold weekends (I’m in the southern hemisphere), when neither my wife or I particularly feel like venturing outdoors.
Now, I’m not going to name the game in question because the game itself is irrelevant. It could be just about any MMO ever made because it’s what the game was making me do that I found so offensive.
Yes folks, it seems that after all this time, I’m finally sick of the grind. Even with an open mind, and hour upon hour to kill, the thought of running back and forth across a map to kill critters which slowly increased in toughness — with slight changes to their name to show this — was enough to make me almost throw my PC out the window.
Why do we play these games? Where does it lead us? What does it achieve? Who cares in the end? Why aren’t they FUN?
There… I finally said it. MMOs just aren’t fun. Even when you get to the “cool stuff” at the end of an MMO, like raiding, or PvPing, more often than not it’s full of frustration and time wasting and unexpected moments of sheer misery compared to what they should be offering, given that we call these things “games”. And that thing, once again, is FUN.
So I was standing in the shower earlier tonight — a great place for thinking — and it occurred to me that for all the crap that people hang on the concept of “story” in TOR (and I confess, I’ve found plenty to criticise myself including the fact that if our race is dictated by the background we want… or our background is dictated by the race we want, then we aren’t playing a very fun or open RPG for starters), that this could actually be the thing that saves TOR, and ourselves, from mind-numbing boredom.
Honestly, at this point in time, I don’t think I could play another “traditional” MMO from start to finish (and by “finish” I mean the level cap), but if a game can tell me a story, and keep me interested in that while the character grows and levels without me noticing then, hell yeah, this could be a good thing.
Of course, it doesn’t get Bioware completely off the hook with other aspects of the story but, in terms of simply keeping my interest and keeping me in the game, story is where it’s at. It blows my mind to already read comments from people about wanting to skip the storyline elements…!
In the recent Forced Species article at Massively, there’s a comment:
I do not know all the details at this time, but I do know that — as it stands — there is only one backstory choice which allows for a non-Human for each class. If we take the bounty hunter, for example, the choices are currently Outlaw, The Merc, and Gladiator. If you choose the Outlaw or The Merc backstory, you get a Human; whereas, if you choose the Gladiator backstory, your species will be Ratattaki.
I’ve read through the article once, twice, three times and it doesn’t get any better. The decision is ridiculous. It’s like Bioware, who always harp on about understanding RPGs, don’t actually understand RPGs at all.
For example, if you want to be a Ratattaki you MUST have the Gladiator background?!? Excuse me?!? Where is the diversity and imagination and everything else we associate with roleplaying in that decision?
I don’t even WANT to be a Ratattaki Bounty Hunter but, for those who do, I imagine some might like the option of the Outlaw or Merc background instead. Yet, they get wedged into being the Gladiator background only.
Crazy.
Pure crazy.
Who sanity checked all these ideas? Or was it just a group of guys sitting around a table too scared to disagree with one another for fear of being the odd one out (not dissimilar to the way the Star Wars prequels were made — and look how they ended up???)
And now some dummy, over on the TOR forums, has said to me that players still “have control over their character” in response to me making the point that this takes some of the control over a player’s character out of the player’s hands.
I mean, in what universe? How wrong can you be? If your race is dictated by the background you want… or your background is dictated by the race you want, YOU ARE NOT IN CONTROL. That is so obvious. Sheesh. The Bioware fanboi’s are out in force today, I can see.
I want to ask other experienced guild leaders about something I’ve encountered a lot over the past decade while running guilds.
Most guilds, we can all appreciate, have rules. Some might be tougher than others, sure, but there’s generally a core-set of rules that guilds will live by. These might relate to how members behave on forums and/or in-game. They might relate to how active a member has to be in the guild. They might dictate how loot is divided up in-game… whatever.
But how many of you find that despite applying and agreeing to these rules, you get members who will always think the rules don’t apply to them? That somehow they are “special” and you can cut them a little slack when they break the rules? Because, frankly, I’m currently finding about 1 in 5 people are like this… and that figure just shocks me.
One of the big ones for us here at Beskar, since we started in 2008, relates to activity. We ask that members are active on our forum, in the absence of the actual game, so that we can all get to know one another. That doesn’t sound too outrageous, does it? The rule is:
Beskar membership is a privilege not a right. As such, members are routinely marked “inactive” if they don’t post for a period of two weeks without prior notice to their guild mates. Anyone who remains “inactive” for an additional two weeks is removed from the guild roster completely. In this way, our system gives someone up to a month of not posting, without any prior notice, before they are dropped from the guild, so it’s hardly a “quick” process and you have to be quite a flake to actually get dropped. Having said that, it still one of the tougher membership policies in the TOR community.
Yet when you catch people out, time and time again, they come up with stories. “Oh, I’ve been too busy…”; “Oh, I’ve had nothing to say…”; “Oh, I had some girlfriend issues…”; “Oh, I was too tired…”; “Oh, I’ve been playing {insert game here} and kinda forgot…” and the list goes on.
And all of them, to a man (or woman, as the case might be), think that these are perfectly reasonable responses.
Huh?!?
I don’t know about you, but whenever I’ve had a busy time at work, or girlfriend issues, or been obsessed with a new game, that particular thing still hasn’t taken up my whole life, 24/7. Frankly, I can’t think of ANYTHING that does. And when all it takes is a note on the forums… ONE NOTE… to request a leave of absence — and you have ONE MONTH to make that leave of absence — I just don’t understand the excuses that get made instead.
I recently culled a bunch of people from Beskar who had been flaking out on their forum responsibilities to highlight this issue. As I’ve said before, we’re a guild which isn’t in this game to have the biggest community, but one of the best communities instead. If that meant a community of, say, 50 highly passionate friends, that’s fantastic. I’d rather have that than a community of 150 people where 2/3 of the group hasn’t posted in the last two weeks on its forums and people don’t really know each other.
(I actually did some math the other day and, if I had kept every Beskar member who I’ve tossed out of the guild since late 2008 for breaking a rule — most typically the inactive member rule — we’d have upwards of 150 members “on paper” right now. Instead we have 40 members at the time I write this and, frankly, I’m happier with it that way!)
So do you other guild leaders find this happening? You set rules and people agree to them… then flake on them? And are you as tough as Beskar and actually do something about it, or do you let it slide and, essentially, let the rules have no real meaning?
In a recent news article on the official TOR site, Bioware started talking about some new playable races in the game such as the Sith Pureblood, Miraluka and Zabrak. Interestingly, it linked these races to specific classes in the game, with comments like:
The rage of… the Sith Pureblood lives on in the Sith Warriors who dominate the battlefield with their intimidating presence and aggressive tactics.
As one of the most wise and mystical species in the galaxy, the green-skinned Mirialans can become powerful Jedi Consulars.
A proud species from an inhospitable world, Zabraks are among the few with the determination and ferocity to become Sith Inquisitors.
All of which leads myself — and others over on the TOR forum — to think that Bioware is limiting some races to select classes, in much the same way that it’s all but already linked, say, the Chiss race to the Imperial Agent class in some earlier stories.
Personally, I think this is a good thing but, of course, there are detractors on the official forums. What a surprise, eh readers? It’s the nature of the beast, as they say in the classics.
For mine, this decision makes sense from a roleplay viewpoint (for example, Chiss are barely spread among the galaxy at all, so it makes sense to limit them to shadowy Imperial Agents), and also a practical viewpoint, so we never see TONS of any one race; they will be limited by default because not every player on a server will ever play the same class simultaneously.
Now, I can understand why this concept is making people QQ. Someone might love the Chiss race, for example, and want to be a Jedi Chiss… but honestly, it just doesn’t work and I’m excited that Bioware appears to have made such a ballsy decision to keep some races exclusive to some classes. And for anyone who wants to take me on about this, just answer one question:
If I’m wrong about select races being exclusive to select classes, are you guys opposed to my comments saying that the Sith Pureblood will be available to, let’s say, Jedi classes? No? Then why on earth would the select races for select classes rule apply to Sith Purebloods and not the rest? And in that lies the reality of the situation, I think. Select races will be limited to select classes.
