Baletraeger
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Posts posted by Baletraeger
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I've long wanted this game to dump the existing group finder system and implement a proper LFG system to give ALL players the ability in game to find each other and play the content we want, with who we want, and how we want.
Do you want to spam hammer station, post a grind run?
Do you want to group up for flashpoints and not have to see "spacebar pls" in the chat for the whole run? Post for a flower sniffing run!
Do you want to group up to run the world quests with someone, or kill a bunch of World Bosses, or hunt for HK parts? Post it and anyone in the server can join up.
Do you want to complete the dailies and weeklies that give extrinsic rewards? You can do that too?
But no, instead we are getting an even more claustrophobic grouping system in 7.0 that is solely designed to keep us on the hamster wheel.
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Here is the FAQ regarding the announcement made earlier today. Please note that I will be updating this post accordingly over time, so treat this as a living document. I will update this thread to indicate when this post is edited, so you know when updates are made.
What is the plan to address Primary Combat Style selection for ALL characters, as well as Secondary Combat Styles being available for preferred players? The pullback of these features as well as retconning the expansion announcement are pretty bad look, and fixing this would go a long way to convincing me that SWTOR is worth playing in 7.0. I am not going to create new characters to get the flavor I want, and should not have to. Telling me that if I want to have a Bounty Hunter Vanguard/Sniper that I will have to roll a new alt and leave existing characters behind is not a good player experience, and kind of invalidates the time and effort put into them. As a player I want to feel like all of the time I have put into the game has value, especially the time I put into my characters. Telling me 'reroll' is not the correct answer.
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Hey everyone,
I just made an announcement concerning the launch of our Legacy of the Sith expansion, and I encourage you to read the blog post.
We know you will have some questions in response to the blog, so feel free to ask them here and we'll be addressing them in an FAQ later today which we will continue update as you have more questions.
Be mindful of our forum guidelines as we want to ensure we can quickly answer your concerns and keep more information flowing your way.
---Keith---
"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." - Shigeru Miyamoto
Thank you Keith for stepping in here and making the right decision to delay launch.
The lead up to 7.0 has been very difficult for me. As a longtime almost exclusive player and wannabe completionist, to see so many changes to the core principles of the game get streamlined, and then to have what little player agency coming to the game pulled back at the eleventh hour with Primary Combat Style getting dropped, was incredibly disheartening. I reached a quit moment last week with Chris' update on Combat Styles, coming to the conclusion that I may no longer be the target player for the development team.
I'm hopeful that your announcement today means that I am wrong, and that there is some consideration for long time players like myself who aren't raid loggers or chronic altoholics. I hope there is some consideration that the game loop of daily job board and extrinsic rewards doesn't build lasting value. I hope there is consideration that even in a Theme Park MMO there is room for player agency and emergent gameplay that can be part of the game loop instead of outside of it.
10th Anniversary expansions are built on Hope. I hope.
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Hi all,
For transparency and context for those who are reading the dev tracker only, the choosing your Combat Style for existing characters text being referenced in this thread is from the Separating Story and Gameplay article that was published a while go.
There's been an update to this. We originally planned to allow players to switch their primary combat style with existing characters upon loading up 7.0, unfortunately we discovered some technical hurdles that will prevent us from supporting that. So upon login, existing characters will maintain their existing Advanced Class, which will be converted into their first Combat Style. And eligible players will still be free to choose their second Combat Style.
The original article has been updated to reflect this.
This is my quit moment for SWTOR. I wish you all the best, but this was the final straw for me. 7.0 is taking the game play loop too far in the opposite direction from my preference, and now telling me that my heavily invested characters will not have the same level of customization as a fresh toon? That's a nope for me.
I truly thank the devs and my fellow Ebon Hawk / Star Forge players for the thousands of hours of enjoyment.
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These kinds of grouping problems could be easily solved if the devs would give us a proper group finder system instead of the content corral group finder trash we have had to use for years.
Let players group up for the content they want to, with whom they want, run it how they want to, and when they want to. Instead we get crammed onto the same railcar and have shiny baubles waved in our faces to distract us from the fact that we aren't able make our own decisions on what is fun and rewarding play.
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Remember, this is Star Wars
"What I told you was true, from a certain point of view. You're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." <<Obi Wan Kenobi>>
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for voting with my wallet, kid.
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if we can't switch existing characters, after all the hype... people are going to get pissed.
That's why they aren't responding.
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I don't think they will ever invest in the dev resources needed to rewrite the engine under 64 bit.
Short of Windows removing support for 32 bit applications they are going to keep the status quo and deliver the best experience they can within the engine limitations.
So we'll never have large scale PVP. 16 man operations are deprecated. More instanced content to keep active world resources to a minimum.
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If we are unable to choose a new Primary Combat Style for our existing characters this will be a quit moment for myself and many others.
We're not talking about a change to gearing and levelling meta, which changes every expansion. We are talking about the opportunity to change our characters class. This is what has been advertised to us. I'm not talking about PTS. 99% of the playerbase isn't going to know about PTS.
I'm reading the marketing material for their launch, which has been linked in this thread already. It tells me that I will be able to pick a new Combat Style when I log into each character. Not a second Combat Style, which is for subs only. This is for all players. If they don't have the choice for a new Primary Combat Style, which is one of the only reasons I am considering staying on for this expansion, I will probably quit.
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Tested the pts and I am feeling what we see is how it will work.
I made a post explaining it here:
https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=998875
It isnt surprising they would choose that path, its possible untangling the original combat style of an existing character was harder than anticipated but it is also likely that they just wanted to give people a reason to create new characters since only new characters will truly be unrestricted.
This is literally the only reason I was going to keep playing in 7.0. If we can't pick new primary combat styles on our existing characters I may be done.
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Didn’t the devs create Galactic Seasons just for you casual story players? You don’t think they created that garbage for raiders, do you? GS targets the mindless conquest grinder crowd.
Galactic Seasons was created (alongside Login Rewards) to provide mobile game style extrinsic reward systems that manufacture player engagement. Why do they exist? Maybe the devs don't think players want to play the game, and in the absence of new content or a modern endgame loop they believe they need to add these blatant systems to keep players engaged.
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Has there been any dev clarification as to whether existing characters will be able to pick a new pirmary Combat Style at 7.0 launch?
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IDK man?! Why have any levels at all? also why have any gear at all?
That's a really good question, and I'd like to know as well, since I haven't found levelling or gearing to be at all interesting or relevant since 3.x
6.0 if they had actually released a horizontal gearing system instead of the 'one set is actually good for your spec and the rest are ****' system would have been awesome, but that train has sailed.
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it will help more people complete the operation and carry the weaker players.
So the gearing system is specifically designed to make sales runs possible. Good to know that is the priority for 7.0 gearing design.
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So now, with these changes, instead of taking 15 minutes per toon, it'll take 30 since you'll have to combine some of the activities mentioned above to complete conquest.
So in your opinion the changes won't solve this problem
What we have seen throughout 6.0 was that the rate of Conquest completion was not contributing to these facets in a healthy manner. It was increasing the rate of acquisition for what should be long term goals for players, promoting a playstyle of interruptive play as players hit their Conquest target and then swap out their characters, creating social pressures to participate in Conquest as often as possible, and adding to the on-going economic changes we have seen in the game over the past year. -
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I at first liked that they were going to do a class rebalance. Fixing and changing abilities, removing redundant or underused abilities, bringing back uniqueness to not only each class but also to each spec.
That isn't what we are getting in 7.0. The work on ability trees is half hearted. They only looked to cut TTK and punish players with difficult choices. They missed a huge opportunity to rework the classes and create a new tree system with interesting and dynamic choices. And yes, that might mean that some abilities would be left on the cutting room floor, but at least we would have classes that were still fun, and varied.
Instead we are largely going to end up with classes that are mechanically identical but cosmetically different. This makes it easy to manage from a dev perspective, easy to copy rotations for parsing, and easy to play alts for casuals. For anyone else looking for nuanced gameplay, find another game.
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They aren't stupid, They know what they are doing and they know the risks associated with them.
The lead game designer has immense knowledge of game systems, other MMOs, what works and what doesn't. These changes are not being made without knowing the intended results and consequences.
For players who are unhappy (like me) we just need to understand that our investment of time and money are not important, making a game that makes as much money as possible into the future is.
It's just business after all.
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They couldn't be much clearer on their intention: They want a different player base than us.
And that player base will require less dev work and will spend way more on CM than we do right now, just like the mobile games they are trying to emulate.
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I happen to be in a guild with a fellow member who is personal friends with one of our developers, and he relayed to me that the attitude internally was one of callous mockery of the players being cry-babies basically. I was shocked. I don't want to believe that, and I would urge anyone reading this to assume that was a misrepresentation by my guild mate, but the lack of willingness to adjust course by the developers seems to corroborate it.
I'm not at all surprised by this. The BW team has a long history of dismissing player concern, never admitting they are wrong, and sticking with their decisions even if it hurts the game.
The current game design director is clear on the vision to transform SWTOR into a mobile lobby game, seeing that as the future. CM shop cosmetics, quarterly story updates, daily/weekly mission table. The only outlier to the 7.0 changes is the exclusive gearing path for NiM raiders, which shows that there is still at least one group of players that the devs listen to.
If you only care about story, space barbie, rp, or are a nim raider, you probably will be fine with 7.0.
If you like mobile lobby games, you might like SWTOR even more than you do now.
If you like player agency, open world / sandbox elements, etc, SWTOR is not going to have anything to offer you going forward.
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Faction PvP doesn't work. Yes we need systems for FvF conflict/competition, but not PvP.
Now GvG PvP, that I think could be worth looking into.
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Somehow Bioware seems to have bought into the old foolish WoW-ish notion that there are "solo players", "Pvpers", "OPs players" and "FP players", who all apparently live in their own little silos and never play other aspects of the game.
They know exactly what they are doing. Isolating gear paths is entirely to gate progression, in the same way that he only way you can get non-RNG gear is to play in their new daily/weekly mission board, which autoresets if you don't complete the content in the timeframe they dictate.
Daily Login Rewards
Galactic Seasons
Daily/Weekly Mission Table
7.0 SWTOR is a mobile lobby game, not an MMO.
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But seriously, if you are just gonna move them to Feats of Strength and make them be worth 0 points then i want my sub money for the past 8 months back cause i have been doing just TC runs and GSF for fragments to buy the stuff from Kai!
They don't care about achievements. If they did they never would have created Feats of Strength in the first place. They never would have reset the DvL event achievements back in the day.
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We want to ensure that Conquest remains a viable and enjoyable loop for all types of players, while also ensuring that it is promoting a healthy relationship for players and the connecting systems.
The changes to daily/weekly quest design is going to create the same unhealthy relationship that conquest has today. I would say it is in fact making it worse since the mission goals are not only for currency and experience, but also for gear.
[*]How many characters a player decides to run through the Conquest cycle
Why do you think that you should control how many characters a players wants to run through any game loop cycle? Especially for solo and story players who tend to have more alts? This is removing player agency and is bad game design
What we have seen throughout 6.0 was that the rate of Conquest completion was not contributing to these facets in a healthy manner. It was increasing the rate of acquisition for what should be long term goals for players, promoting a playstyle of interruptive play as players hit their Conquest target and then swap out their characters, creating social pressures to participate in Conquest as often as possible, and adding to the on-going economic changes we have seen in the game over the past year.
This is laughable and antithetical. You are literally bringing in a new daily/weekly mission board system that is going to actively promote the behavior that you are now trying to stem for Conquest. Players are going to be encouraged to log into multiple characters to complete mission board only as the most efficient gearing path, at the exclusion of any other ingame activity. In the same way they find the most efficient path to Tech Frags and Conquest Points today. Instead of taking a nuanced approach to creating fun game systems with intrinsic rewards, you seek to control the overambundance of extrinsic rewards you crowd into a content starved game.
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Do you think Bioware will actually listen to any of the feedback and make any changes, or will they simply move forward with zero changes and face the consequences?
They already got the feedback they wanted from the players that matter to them.
Re: Amplifiers Why remove a credit sink without replacing it with another?
in Public Test Server
Posted
If you want character diversity you will now be able to put beard stubble on female characters. Problem solved.
TBF though, the economy was ****ed with or without amps in the game. The fundamentals for a stable economy simply can't exist with the priority of the Cartel Market for visual progression over crafting and endgame