RaikuFA said:
Not playing this one till I know if its true that you get banned for being in a higher level than you're supposed to, and I'm really hoping its fake.
It's not fake, just somewhat misrepresented... the problems involved aren't quite what some people reported they were.
What happened was Bioware put all these high level treasure chests into open-world PVP zones on high level planets, presumably to draw people into them on PVE servers so they will kill people over the loot. There are however no NPCs or monsters present.
A few enterprising players decided it would be a fun way to become rich with minimal effort by exploiting knowlege from Beta, heading to these high level planets, and grabbing level 40-50 loot with their level 15 characters. With no monsters, and nobody really doing much PVP in such zones that have no other point on PVE servers, they pretty much just sat there collecting the chests as they re-spawn.
Now, here is where things are both good and bad. Bioware did NOT come swooping down like the hand of god and smacking people with the banhammer for exploiting. Rather arbitrary code inside the game banned these players as gold farmers, since this basic behavior (farming chest... which farmers in some games used very complicated botting for) is well known. Basically the game recognized that they were picking up the same chests for hours and hours on end without doing anything else in the game, and their characters didn't even really belond in the location they were in. As a result they wound up getting auto-banned and locked out of EA.
Now this is a good thing and a bad thing, the guys were exploiting by working the system to get an advantage, and this kind of thing is a problem with gold farmers (or credit farmers in Old Republic Online), the big problem is there was no real human review process here since apparently EA/Bioware doesn't want to pay people GMs to you know... actually act like GMs. There should have been warnings, or at least someone looking at the situation. These guys DID deserve to have their ill-gotten gains deleted, perhaps with the deletion of the characters they were farming with, but permanantly locking them out of ToR, and banning them from all their other EA products by association for this when nobody actually stepped in? That's a bit excessive.
On the positive side this does send a hardcore message to exploiters, but it also does show that the system is running on autopilot, and that's never a good thing.
The point here is that you can go to whatever planet you want to, you don't get banned for going to higher level zones or anything, you won't even get banned for picking up high level treasure chests. But if you do something fairly shady like this... they aren't letting it go like in other games.
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As far as Yahtzee's review goes, he's spot on about a lot of things. I really want to like this game, but he's correct that it's probably going to wind up getting crushed by WoW because in the final equasion it's a mere shadow of what it could have been. The space combat aspects of things are a huge joke, and while the storylines are nice, they do run into problems. The Smuggler bit is a good example of disjointed storytelling that doesn't nessicarly make a lot of sense, in my case I tend to look at the Jedi Counslar I've been playing as another example, but I don't want to post spoilers.
We'll see how things pan out, I don't think ToR is going to be a failure in the long run, but I don't expect it to be continuous blockbuster a lot of people heralded it as. Sadly, looking at area populations on the server I'm playing on, it does seem the crowds are thinning out.