Dude, most people don't even read their abilities.

On my teams, the first four pieces of any set piece went to DPS. Next two went to heals. Next two went to tanks. Nothing random about it. From the point of view of the team, it didn't matter which DPS. Team DPS went up. Team heals went up. etc. Now - it's like, who PvP'ed the most on Saturday and got lucky with RNG.

Hyperbole, man. Most people I know thought HHM was stupid. 3.x gearing would be welcomed.

I dont see any justifiable reasoning for this. If I want to PvP, I'd like to be able to gear via PvP. If I want to do Ops, I'd like to be able to gear via Ops. I'm not sure an Ops players needs to be compelled to do other content to obtain gear for the sole purpose of running Ops. Nor do I feel that a player who logs in twice a week to raid should be penalized for not logging in the other 5 nights a week to PvP. If the game had been this way from the start I'd have no argument. But to suddenly create a situation, 5 years in, with exactly zero new content where this is arbitrarily the case makes no sense to me.

I'm not so sure. I don't so much think they're afraid to walk it back as much as they still don't believe they need to. I honestly think they truly don't understand how bad it is. At some level, reading some of the posts I'm not sure many players do yet either. To be fair though, most players don't need the gear and as such don't feel the pain. But to have content in the game that necessitates even decent gear, this system cannot be how it is acquired.

That said, IMO it certainly could be fixed. There's nothing stopping this title from regaining some credibility if the next six months bring some rationality back. First - The announcement of new Operations-ish content is a positive. However without an early commitment from studio leadership that there is more coming shortly after these 5 bosses - they're ****ed. Second - they need to announce something for the PvP'ers. More maps + the ability to opt in/out of arenas. The problem this studio has is that it doesn't understand the importance of maintaining its communities. This requires content at a reasonable cadence, of high quality, and with proper support. The manner in which PvP has been neglected in this game is mind blowing. With a bit more content, a little more respect given to ranked rewards, far more effort to stamp down on cheating, and a serious interest in actual class balance this game could have a huge PvP population. Likewise, with a more modern structure around raiding, realistic-cadence content drops, 4 difficulty modes and timely bug fixing the Ops community could be huge in this game as well. This studio insists on doing everything but the correct course of action. If I didn't love the game so much, it'd be comical. They do 95% of something, and let the last 5% wreck the whole thing. And then when people don't love it, they look at metrics and assume it's because the 2 million subscribers they had at launch must have really always wanted instanced solo cartoon content all along. At the end of the day - creating Ops content because subs are stampeding to the exit should not be their plan. And I'm certain that it is. The correct course of action would be to create Ops content because they are starting to do things properly, and this is simply step one on that path. Obviously none of this matters if the gear system doesn't radically change. The gear system can kill the game on it's own. The game is certainly fixable. I promise you, if you had someone that truly wanted this game to be amazing again in charge it could be. Instead, we get improved pack opening experience and a 17-step CXP gain modification program to drive RNG based loot for completing recycled recycled recycled content. It could be fixed though.

If I could ask the studio to read just one post and take a moment to truly stop and think - this would be the one. This is exactly how I, and everyone I know, feels.

Perhaps if you don't wall gear behind a months-long grind, players would focus on something other than gearing.

Respectfully, Eric, I'm a little blown away we're still having this same conversation - It's been three and a half months since you unveiled this system and we're still at square one. If you somehow truly believe the proper course is to phase in continued tweaks and tunes to this system, you are mistaken. It is broken. And horribly so. And your community essentially hates it. It is frustrating, to me as a long time subscriber, to know the studio is continuing to waste time and resources on this problem when there is a simple, elegant solution that puts this debacle in the rear view mirror. I would much prefer you guys were spending your time creating new content than continuing to bolt on more clumsiness and clutter. Go back to October when you first discussed this. Compare what you had in your mind then to what we have now. I suspect the two versions are nothing alike. Yet everything you're doing - and everything you intend to continue to do - is simply addressing problems we told you about the day of the announcement. And again on PTS. And again at 5.0 launch. And again at 5.1. And again, today. The phrase "putting lipstick on a pig" springs to mind. The fix you need to implement is to simply put loot back on the bosses, and revert PvP gearing to 4.0. You have broken the game badly, and until you make those two changes it will remain broken. However you are reacting at a pace that is about 10 speeds too slow. Remember how quickly you patched the bug the other day? Remember how quickly you nerfed Golds/Champs? That's how fast you need to be correcting here. Because I suspect we've still got a ways to go - a number of iterations - before what we've been telling you sinks in for you guys. And until it does, you're going to continue to hemorrhage bodies. To be clear - getting one random crate filled with crap that is both useless and unwanted, even every half hour, is still a crap system. You could give me three at a time and it's still crap. However I suspect you still don't realize we are probably months away from even seeing one crate per half hour. You just don't understand how your game works, do you? How can you possibly make flashpoints and PvP equitable for CXP? You understand it cannot be done, don't you? As in literally, it won't work. Because if you tune it so that casual players who use Galactic Command to queue for both PvP and FP's are going to have vastly different queue times. I would wager a DPS can do one HM flashpoint - if queueing - in the time another player can do 6-8 WZs. But let's be over generous and say only four WZs. So that HM FP ought to provide 4x the CXP as a WZ. Yet for the player that doesn't need to queue - and just has a group of friends to run FPS with - they can blast through those same FPs in half the time, with no queue. Now they're getting ~3x as much CXP as the PvP player. Think about it - chain running a broken Fractured netted about the same, maybe slightly more but not by much, CXP as PvPing. Don't you see the problem here? It. Can't. Work. Oink. Here's my suggestion. Whatever you plan to announce later this week - don't. Take whatever numbers you're planning on releasing, and triple them. Seriously, triple. And patch it into the game the very next day. And then go play, and see if it's still not broken. I promise you, it will be. Making these incremental changes is not helping. It's just pissing people off and encouraging them to quit. Because we know they are pointless, we're telling you they're pointless - and you're just not listening. There was nothing wrong with how PvP gearing used to work. Nothing. There was nothing wrong with how Ops gearing used to work until you created HHM. Nothing. Stop screwing around.

Are you seriously trying to imply the targeted playerbase of Veteran Uprisings is NM raiders? They are tuned fine for their intended audience, perhaps a bit on the difficult side, given the reward structure.

I like your idea, except for requiring the unassembled found in ops to also require GC tokens. If you kill a boss, that boss should drop a gear token worth one piece of gear, not something that also requires an external timesink. The players on my team that kill a boss should not have to have their gear throttled by how much free time they have outside of raid time. Period. GC/CXP should have nothing - literally nothing - to do with Operations gearing. If that is somehow inequitable with gearing via the rest of the game, then the rest of the game is the problem.

In complete seriousness, I'm curious if you could shed some light on the thinking behind your (well, the studio's) insistence on requiring this sort of gearing system. Because as I see it, there isn't a way to make it both fair and fun. I believe it can get "better", sure. And in fairness, from a PvE standpoint 5.1 > 5.0. But from a PvP standpoint, it is the opposite. Yet if you jack up the PvP side, eventually it's going to overtake PvE in terms of efficiency. And you'll always have the argument that one "can" PvP and contribute nothing, lose 100% of the time, burden their team - yet (eventually) be geared. I do not understand why you believe this is a better paradigm than having PvP gear be trivial to obtain quickly - making PvP more fair; and having PvE gear be obtainable based on PvE success. We've done DvL and have dozens of characters. Why do you not want us to be able to play them all effectively, quickly, in the content we "want" to play? For many of us, the content we "want" to play requires this gear. I have 7 or 8 characters on a server I have not even logged into since 5.0 dropped. I see no possible scenario where it makes sense to even try to play them. I worry, greatly, that you and Ben continue to use words like "watch", "tweak" and "tune". I believe for this game to truly be even in the same universe as "alt-friendly" you need to be using words like "massively boost" or "massively increase" because as it stands now, it's demoralizing to look at my character select screen. You're about two months in and the changes I've seen - short of the initial mega-nerf to elites/champs (which I assume you factored into the original tuning) - have been minuscule at best. I'm sorry Eric, but the pace at which you guys are addressing - no, fixing - current CXP gains is inexplicable to me. And I can't help but think that you guys honestly just don't know how to fix it. I wouldn't. Because however you do fix it something will be "best" and that's going to compel players to fixate on that activity. And that's not fun. I guess what I'm saying is I understand the motivations - at least some of them - to open gear to all. But you didn't factor in that the point of gear is to enable players to play better. Not just to have better gear. We're not "playing". We're gearing. And I don't understand why you seem to fear us "playing". I do not believe this is a healthy approach - especially in the weeks leading up to some long overdue content. So can you please shed some light onto why you feel we need to have gear throttled, and how you see this as a better experience for the players? Perhaps if we understood your thinking, we could make suggestions you'd actually consider. From where I sit, I think you guys have done a poor job of being timely in addressing CXP gain concerns. I think you'd have to agree with that. I don't know if you're understating the problem internally or you simply don't know what to do. But I can say with certainty, that reverting Operations and PvP to 3.0 gearing models would improve the gameplay experience for many players and do far more towards retention than slow, incremental CXP increases. That would leave less for your team to have to sort out from a CXP adjustment standpoint as well. TL;DR - Being able to gear quickly for PvP and Operations players wasn't a problem - why has it been treated as such by the studio?

You know what would be win/win? Putting the gear back on the bosses. Putting back the old PvP gearing model. It did not hurt anyone. The current system destroys the player that logs in for 6 hours per week. RNG does not help this game at all. From any standpoint, non-RNG > RNG for a casual player who wants to play at a high level.

The carrot is supposed to be content, not gear. The sad thing is, the content is starting to finally trickle in, and we have characters with no gear to do it. There is zero problem with quick gear acquisition (from a retention standpoint) if there are things to do in-game. Frankly, it helps. This current system devalues the new content.

+1, well put.

The inclusion of NM makes it worth it to me provided the gear system is overhauled massively. IMO that is the only real issue left. Once the content starts trickling out, as long as I can bring my alts through the higher difficulties I'll be fine. As it is, I do not see that as being possible. I'm with you about 99% of the time bro. Honestly. I just feel this is about the best we could have realistically expected and as such I'll take it. I can't take the gear system though. I literally have a server with characters I haven't played in months - I mean, I haven't even logged into the server once. That's not good. But if they can get the gear issue fixed I think it's worth sticking around for.

Bleh, this is not really something that actually happened en masse. For the most part, the raiding community was fine with an Operations cadence of once (10 bosses) per year. The ability to easily gear alts and see it from another perspective made this possible. And, for more casual players, the ability to overgear/overlevel previous-tier content added to the shelf life. As much as I suspect you're simply trying to rile people up, you're simply creating a false history.

At this cadence, I see no reason they can't add a 4th difficulty level at the bottom. Put it into 16M groupfinder and rip out all mechanics. No lockout. i.e. LFR.

It's a matter of relativity. Other games' systems are meaningless in this game. So leave them out of it. In this game, the ability to quickly and (relatively) easily gear up alts made the dearth of content tolerable. That is no longer the case. To most players I know, nothing is "fun" about RNG when your ability to effectively participate in content - especially group content - is gated behind it. WoW has RNG, sure, but you're not running Molten Core for gear now, are you? In this game, to have RNG added serves no purpose other than to dilute enjoyment. I'm not sure this game has the luxury of being quite so cavalier with how much its players enjoy their in-game time.

I'm in agreement with you. I think this is the first time since 3.0 that I've looked at what was coming (from a content standpoint) and thought they were going forward, not backwards. My first reaction, even in stream chat, was that we were just going to get a single entity a la TC or CM. But having a predictable cadence - and the inclusion of NM mode - makes it sit fine with me, much moreso than seeing exactly nothing until 2018, which is probably what we would have been looking at. Reality is there is no way I'd still be here at that point. I would say that I do have a couple concerns, that IMO are serious enough to make the entirety of the (IMO positive) news today moot in many players' minds. 1) This gearing system has the potential to overshadow all of what was announced today. They are still miles from anything I would characterize as "good", and I'm very concerned I keep hearing the words "tweak" and "tune". The system needs to be either removed entirely (i.e. back to 3.0 gearing) or the rate of CXP acquisition needs to be bumped, by something like an order of magnitude. The content cadence we are talking about is really only going to be sustainable for guilds if they can play the content with alts. For me, personally, I'm looking at about 5-6 weeks played since 5.0 dropped and I have one character barely able to do NM level content. I'm at GC level 130 on it, and the entirety of my alts total less than 30 levels. If it were not for focusing nearly 100% of my in-game time farming VMC's I would be screwed. More objectively, the focus needs to come off "gearing" and onto "playing". Reality is "playing how you want" is not a viable mechanism to gear as we have been asked to buy into. The current timesink for gear is staggeringly high. Put plainly, it isn't fun. Not being able to do the content because 15 of my alts are still in 224 will get old quickly. To look at it from another angle - for the players for whom the gear actually matters, a gear grind is the last thing they want to do. Period. I want to raid? Great, let me raid. Not: Let me make my team raid this low level crap so I can raid high level stuff on my alt - and then do that 7 more times for my 7 teammates. I want to PvP? Great, let me PvP. Not: Let me go run Operations for PvP gear. Let me be perfectly clear. YOU CAN NOT FIX THIS. Please stop trying. As long as this system is here, it will be bad. Not "imperfect". Bad. You cannot fix this via tweak. You cannot fix this via tuning. It is bad. It is brokenly, unfunly, bad idealy bad. Go back to how PvP used to gear. Go back to how Ops players used to gear. Leave GC in for everyone else. Not for us. It needs to be said that GC can easily torpedo 5.2. If, as a studio, you're ok with that, fine. I suspect you are not though. You need to get in game, talk to people, and understand the real problems. You do not see them yet, based on all you say. 2) These 5 bosses cannot be the "focus" on group content in it's entirety. Simply put, 5 bosses in three years is pointless. Without clear communication prior to the 5th boss release regarding the next Operation, there's no *********** point. If we get through this year, and go into next year knowing there is another full set of Ops releasing in 2018, that'll hold some guilds together. If we've heard radio silence, that will be all. The endgame community cannot turn itself on and off as the story crowd can. To be sustainable there needs to be not only content, but the secure knowledge of timely future content. Period. 3) The decision to abandon Hardmare is a good one. If you are going to trickle the content, and expect to sustain a playerbase, the content you do release has to fit the players. Hardmare destroyed guilds. Cratered them because they were blocked on boss 2 or 3. I know many casual players that were "hardmode" raiders that have never beaten Master Blaster. That certainly wouldn't fly in the mess you're currently in. So going back to real NM level content is good. But IMO I think the studio would get return from going to four levels. I really think an LFR-esque (Ben, Eric, since you guys don't play MMO's you might not understand but I promise, it's worth looking it up), true "story" mode is something this game could use. And the bang-for-buck if you're already creating the Ops anyway is major. Right now, Story Mode is trying to do two jobs: Be a button mash derpfest as well as an entry point into endgame play. It cannot be both. Split "Story" mode into "story" and "normal". It will be worth it.

Well put.

Obviously people are going to be gearing alts in this manner, as it saves the initial CXP grind. So, it's not supplementary at all.

In no way do I buy into the idea that it is not possible to rebuild the Operations community. Not for a moment. Certainly, putting that mission into the hands of a management team that has zero interest in the MMO aspect of their MMO is a dubious proposition. But I certainly believe draining the swamp and putting the right people in place would make this a straightforward venture. The point is, it's not that much more expensive to do it right than do it wrong. If they're going to do it at all, they should do it properly. I am certain the cost savings of Hardmare was far less than the lost subscriptions it caused. Does anyone honestly want to try to debate this? And frankly, I believe enough resources have been wasted on solo content. IMO that's why this game is in the mess that it is. What you call a "solid base" is what I call "what's left after the MMO players have been chased away". Not wanting to rebuild that community is stupid. Period.

This is the key point that I am 100% certain Ben can't grasp. I honestly think it's beyond him. He doesn't understand the mindset of a typical MMO player and as such this type of concept probably doesn't cross his mind. You've hit the nail on the head, of course. Simply throwing in a new Operation won't do a whole lot for this game without a clear, communicated commitment to the content type moving forward. This includes the return of master mode, discontinuing normalization (even phased would work), a radical change to end-game gearing (no, 5.1 isn't even close) and, as you say, the security of knowing new content will come in a reasonable timeframe. The community needs to be rebuilt. Right now it's basically dead. Nearly everyone I've ever been teamed with is playing WoW or FF right now. One new raid is not going to pull them back. Not without some promises. Not with this gear system. And for my friends that were more casual, not without older NM content being able to be over-leveled. And most definitely not with Hardmare. IMO If the studio wants to do it right they would do the following: Put new content on the PTS and invite raid guilds/groups to participate. Actually fix the **** people find. 8-10 new Operations bosses split into two raids. Stagger them by one month. Release them with three tiers: 16-man groupfinder "Story" mode. True LFR. No major mechanics. Derpfest. No enrage. Minimal outgoing damage. 8-man "Normal" mode. groupfinder. Equiv of vanilla normal mode. Extremely liberal enrage. Cleanses. Some spike tank damage, moderate raid damage. 1-2 mechanics per fight but lethal if not done properly. 8-man "Hard" mode. Equiv of vanilla hard mode. Tighter enrages, a few DPS checks. Heavy outgoing damage. Multiple lethal mechanics. Fix new bugs asap. As in hotfix. One month later release NM for the first raid. True NM. One month later release NM for the second. 9-10 months later, new Operations. Commit to this upfront. Follow through as best you can. Take EV/KP and drop them down in level, or if cap is raised, do not raise them. They need to die. Truly, they no longer belong in anything resembling Ops gameplay. I would also suggest taking older content like EC/TFB/SnV and phase them down a level as well. The NM versions of those raids are fantastic but the players that can do them have done them for years. Less capable groups would enjoy doing them overleveled. It stretches out the content cycle in a fun way. Stretching with a gear grind is not a fun way. And lastly, gear needs to be far, far more straightforward to get. Even the new changes do nothing to encourage playing an alt until they've been geared out by a main. It's not a healthy structure. Any semblance of RNG needs to vanish from Operations play. It does not belong in this portion of the game. The focus should be on gameplay. Not gearing. Period. I know this is a pipe dream. But being honest, my goal is not simply to see new Operations, but rather to see the community be what it once was - what I feel it ought to be. And what I know with proper management it easily could be. Sadly, we do not have that management. We have management that just doesn't get it.

You say a lot of things that make me laugh, but this is ridiculous. If you can conceive of a universe in which the content cadence of this game would require "over-consumption" to kill a guild you're delusional. My guilds have had that sense of community. But the fundamental, most basic, core purpose of a guild is to unite players who enjoy similar in-game activity. As such, they're playing different games now. They won't be back. This game has let two pillars of gameplay atrophy. Period. Dont even try to put this on the players. What you wrote is beyond asinine. If you think that somehow a guild that focuses on PvP is doing it wrong? A guild that focuses on 8-man content is doing it wrong? Seriously man, that is one of the most deranged things you've ever said. Back on ignore you go. Tired of your trolling. Your typical useless banter is one thing, but now you're just getting silly.