“TORtanic” – Star Wars: The Old Republic sinking fast
The relatively new Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game “Star Wars: The Old Republic” is getting bad fast. In fact, the game is screwing up so badly due to a new update that the slowly dying MMO has been dubbed “TORtanic” by many of the players.
So what happened?
From what I can gather, it all began with the mediocre game being updated with a 1.1 patch. The long story short, as perhaps best illustrated by this video, is that the 1.1 broke the game by making it possible for one set of players (those playing for the Empire) to basically massacre an entire other set of players (those playing for the Republic). In fact, the Empire can kill the Republic at spawn points, basically meaning that players on the side of the Republic cannot play the game, and are in effect stuck in a constant loop where they do nothing but die. For some reason, TOR developer Bioware is “investigating” rather than simply “fixing” this issue, despite the fact that the problem is pretty self-evident and game-destroying.
So, as one might guess, a lot of Republic players got pissed off about this and decided to suspend their subscription to the game. This is a pretty logical choice to make: after all, it makes no sense to pay for a game you cannot play. The problem? Bioware removed the “cancel subscription” button and is hiding the mechanisms by which players can stop paying for the game. Bioware has not only hidden the “cancel subscription” button, but some players are complaining that customer service is hanging up on them. Thus, most players are forced to pay for a game they cannot play.
They seem to be pretending it’s a browser issue:
Of course, as a former web developer/programmer, I can assure you that buttons don’t disappear. Website designs can cause all sorts of hell, but of the many things that can happen, buttons do not conveniently disappear because someone uses a special web browser.
Thinking this whole affair was unfair, user “Kraiten” decided to help his fellow gamers by providing them the following link to unsubsribe from TOR:
https://account.swtor.com/user/subscription/CancelBut what did Bioware do? Hide the post and punish Kraiten for posting it:
For those of you keeping score at home, this means that Bioware has not only massively screwed up their game, but that they are actively trying to lock players into subscriptions for their game in order to make it profitable for as long as possible. The company is even trying to bribe players to stay on the game by providing a “Founder’s Medal” to all players who maintain their subscription to the broken game.
The company has also seemingly threatened players “taking advantage” of the broken game (presumably, by killing Republic players or something), but it seems somewhat ludicrous for them to purport to punish people for playing the game in a way they designed it. Of course, Bioware refuses to actually roll the game back and fix the issue so that everyone is on an equal level — rather, they seem to want to just find a scapegoat and punish them to avoid discussing their horrible game.
It appears that Bioware is in trouble. If this game — and the behavior of their staffers — in any way indicates their standard for good business, then they are going to die off quickly. Stuff like this doesn’t go unpunished.