Thanks. All the best to groups pushing for their clears!

I'll address every point one at a time here. 1. This is a very different context because reflects got patched months after release, multuple groups had completed their timed runs at that point; it was pretty obscure to do a retroactive change that far into the tier because the complete lack of communication around it from BW meant teams had little direction on what would happen. I asked in this case because lessons were obviously learnt from that tier and hence I'm asking prospectively rather than retrospectively. Furthermore the fact a dev has acknowledged this in the first lockout of the tier is way more direction on BW's plan around this than it being ninja patched months into a tier. 2. The board I ran had a 5/8 requirement, before the tier even dropped I explained I would lessen the strictness of that requirement as the tier progressed and many kills had rolled in. I even lessened it on a clearance basis; ie. I was accepting 4/8 Tyth and A/E kills long before I was accepting 4/8 Izax kills. I even stated if anyone disagreed with that ruling they could comment and no one did. Except you now.. retrospectively. 3. I think I've asked every question around this discussion respectfully, I've even changed my mindset to agree with accepting that kill. I think that such aggression to someone raising a discussion is pretty poor form though.I also don't believe I've said I don't care at any point. I've said in various discussions around this that I'd support a final decision but care for a reasonable discussion around this topic at least. TBH though what's the point of talking about this further if all it leads to is hostility.

I think this is a pretty fair statement and a problem with many of these discussions is that they're retrospective so I'll respect that it's probably the worst circumstance to actually change anything in. Congrats to their kill and I'll naturally respect it. Sidenote; if it's meaningful to discussion. Camera 2's (the lead dev behind this raid) discord status for a period today was that he is currently actively trying to fix this red venom bug. So I suppose there's a degree of dev acknowledgement of this issue. That being said I'll pre-empt a discussion since talking about problems before they happen is probably the only way to make any meaningful changes. What's your plan if this gets patched relatively soon and all remaining teams are made to do this fight without access to this bug? Overall great work to FC in clearing so rapidly.

This lockout alone since the latest patch there have been 2 different teams to have cleared nightmare gods. A quick browse of twitch vods shows 3 different teams killing brontes (plus however many haven't been streamed). I think that addresses the 'show me this kill' comments. Even the current scaling of non-gods nightmares is easier than the launch of 5.0. To those teams who are saying this is too difficult and the veteran's edge stacks should be returned I'd suggest looking at the output of each of your individual players and compare it to those topping the associated specs in those fights. No one's saying play like the 99th percentile players but if you have members who can't even get within 10 or 15 percent of them then perhaps consider addressing that before suggesting the current tuning is too much.

Final board update complete! Would like to give a big congratulations to all teams who participated and a big thank you to helping make this tracking thread as good as it was. On this last update I've just added in a new colour to indicate world first claims of each category to comemorate those teams. I hope you all enjoyed progressing this this tier and wish all those teams continuing on the best of luck with 6.0 raiding and beyond.

Made my own thread but posting here as well for visibility. I think it is evident from overwhelming player feedback that the gearing system on the current PTS build needs some addressing and there are massive amounts of complaints and partially overlapping feedback. I am writing this post in an attempt to clearly categorise and summarise major areas from a game fundamentals standpoint. I am hoping this highlights system-wide flaws rather than something highly specific and thus can assist in a larger scale and more impactful change. Naturally I recognise this is the first iteration of this gearing system and your team at Bioware is looking for feedback so I am understanding of the issues present. I am hoping that the playerbase and the dev team can have a good enough line of communication to ultimately create a fun and rewarding gearing system come the live launch of onslaught. Issues 1. The sheer number of gear tiers. In prior expansions we have often seen something in the realms of 4, maybe 5 gear tiers from your entry level max level gear until you are at the highest item level gear and this progression (for the most part) has been ok. It has felt like an achievable number of tiers and thus players have been happy to grind out these 4 or 5 tiers until they are best in slot. In the current PTS system our entry level gear is 268 and the typical gear upgrade is a piece which is 2 item level higher than our character's item level. We as players have observed item level upgrades of 1 and up to 4 but these seem to be rarer cases and 2 is the norm. Now Onslaught's gear appears to go up to item level 306. This means that with each gear tier being only an upgrade of 2 item level for a player to go from entry level gear to the highest item level they must grind through a staggering 19 gear tiers. This is a grind that is far too extreme for most players and so daunting that many players I have spoken to feel so demotivated to gear that they do not even want to begin gearing. Proposed solution: increase the item level increments of gear upgrades; if your character is at say 268 item level they should have access to something like 274 item level pieces, this creates larger stepping stones and thus fewer tiers for a player to grind through. 2. Backwards and sideways gear progression. Currently a player can receive gear that is a drastically below their current item level and a player can receive gear that is their item level. This makes it extremely frustrating when trying to improve your item level. When a player has spent hours or days to reach a certain item level they do not want to be receiving pieces which are no longer relevant. Pieces of the same item level as a player's equipped gear a nuisance as well but a minor one and theoretically could remain purely for the purposes of min/maxing (a piece of your current item level could still be beneficial simply due to it granting you the power to choose between stat profiles). I understand this may be a bug as I believe it was mentioned in a dev stream that you should not receive downgrade gear. Proposed solution; do not award players gear that is lower than their item level. 3. Moddable vs non-moddable gear. This games history has shown moddable gear to be more useful to players due to the freedom of choice in controlling their stats. They can decide exactly which mods and enhancements they wish to run and it allows for players to utilise partial aspects of multiple acquired gear pieces to essentially combine them into a desired outcome. The current PTS gearing system retains moddable gear but at the same time awards massive amounts of non-moddable gear. This creates an extremely awkward disparity when upgrading your gear, swapping between moddable and non-moddable gear is frustrating, especially when you create situations where a player's moddable set bonus piece cannot be retained since higher item level non-moddable pieces are being obtained. Proposed solution; drastically increase the frequency of moddable gear pieces as gear rewards as opposed to non-moddable pieces. 4. Challenging content does not feel adequately rewarding. This opinion may not be fully fleshed out currently as we do not have access to loot drop implementation in all tiers of content. We do not know what nightmare operations or ranked PvP will give in relation to their story/hard and regular counterparts. However from comparing flashpoint difficulty tiers in Hammer station and comparing story and hard mode Karraga's Palace (the content the dev team has asked us to test for gear drops) it is quite apparent that the only reward for doing harder content is an increased probability in obtaining set pieces or tacticals. Now this is of course an incentive to run this content over easier content but I feel this is not the type of incentive the player base is looking for since you are still stuck upgrading your item level at the same rate as all other content in the game. Harder content is currently only aiding progression within a gear tier but not helping in any to obtain higher gear tiers. Proposed solution; more difficult content should either provide increased item level improvements over a players current item level (eg. a nightmare boss awards loot that is 2+y item levels above yours as opposed to the standard 2 item level gain) OR difficult content should drop a fixed item level of gear (akin to prior expansions) so it can be used as a stepping stone to pass lower gear tiers as a reward. 5. Stats and gear pieces obtained. Currently most loot boxes which are achieved through galactic renown and those bought from spoils of war vendors appear to award seemingly any piece of gear including gear that cannot be equipped by your class or stats that are for roles which you are not specced as or roles which your class cannot even do. This effectively renders a lot of gear received unusable. Proposed solution; loot boxes award gear based on discipline. I hope this provides some sort of methodological explanation of many current player frustrations with the PTS gearing changes.

I think it is evident from overwhelming player feedback that the gearing system on the current PTS build needs some addressing and there are massive amounts of complaints and partially overlapping feedback. I am writing this post in an attempt to clearly categorise and summarise major areas from a game fundamentals standpoint. I am hoping this highlights system-wide flaws rather than something highly specific and thus can assist in a larger scale and more impactful change. Naturally I recognise this is the first iteration of this gearing system and your team at Bioware is looking for feedback so I am understanding of the issues present. I am hoping that the playerbase and the dev team can have a good enough line of communication to ultimately create a fun and rewarding gearing system come the live launch of onslaught. Issues 1. The sheer number of gear tiers. In prior expansions we have often seen something in the realms of 4, maybe 5 gear tiers from your entry level max level gear until you are at the highest item level gear and this progression (for the most part) has been ok. It has felt like an achievable number of tiers and thus players have been happy to grind out these 4 or 5 tiers until they are best in slot. In the current PTS system our entry level gear is 268 and the typical gear upgrade is a piece which is 2 item level higher than our character's item level. We as players have observed item level upgrades of 1 and up to 4 but these seem to be rarer cases and 2 is the norm. Now Onslaught's gear appears to go up to item level 306. This means that with each gear tier being only an upgrade of 2 item level for a player to go from entry level gear to the highest item level they must grind through a staggering 19 gear tiers. This is a grind that is far too extreme for most players and so daunting that many players I have spoken to feel so demotivated to gear that they do not even want to begin gearing. Proposed solution: increase the item level increments of gear upgrades; if your character is at say 268 item level they should have access to something like 274 item level pieces, this creates larger stepping stones and thus fewer tiers for a player to grind through. 2. Backwards and sideways gear progression. Currently a player can receive gear that is a drastically below their current item level and a player can receive gear that is their item level. This makes it extremely frustrating when trying to improve your item level. When a player has spent hours or days to reach a certain item level they do not want to be receiving pieces which are no longer relevant. Pieces of the same item level as a player's equipped gear a nuisance as well but a minor one and theoretically could remain purely for the purposes of min/maxing (a piece of your current item level could still be beneficial simply due to it granting you the power to choose between stat profiles). I understand this may be a bug as I believe it was mentioned in a dev stream that you should not receive downgrade gear. Proposed solution; do not award players gear that is lower than their item level. 3. Moddable vs non-moddable gear. This games history has shown moddable gear to be more useful to players due to the freedom of choice in controlling their stats. They can decide exactly which mods and enhancements they wish to run and it allows for players to utilise partial aspects of multiple acquired gear pieces to essentially combine them into a desired outcome. The current PTS gearing system retains moddable gear but at the same time awards massive amounts of non-moddable gear. This creates an extremely awkward disparity when upgrading your gear, swapping between moddable and non-moddable gear is frustrating, especially when you create situations where a player's moddable set bonus piece cannot be retained since higher item level non-moddable pieces are being obtained. Proposed solution; drastically increase the frequency of moddable gear pieces as gear rewards as opposed to non-moddable pieces. 4. Challenging content does not feel adequately rewarding. This opinion may not be fully fleshed out currently as we do not have access to loot drop implementation in all tiers of content. We do not know what nightmare operations or ranked PvP will give in relation to their story/hard and regular counterparts. However from comparing flashpoint difficulty tiers in Hammer station and comparing story and hard mode Karraga's Palace (the content the dev team has asked us to test for gear drops) it is quite apparent that the only reward for doing harder content is an increased probability in obtaining set pieces or tacticals. Now this is of course an incentive to run this content over easier content but I feel this is not the type of incentive the player base is looking for since you are still stuck upgrading your item level at the same rate as all other content in the game. Harder content is currently only aiding progression within a gear tier but not helping in any to obtain higher gear tiers. Proposed solution; more difficult content should either provide increased item level improvements over a players current item level (eg. a nightmare boss awards loot that is 2+y item levels above yours as opposed to the standard 2 item level gain) OR difficult content should drop a fixed item level of gear (akin to prior expansions) so it can be used as a stepping stone to pass lower gear tiers as a reward. 5. Stats and gear pieces obtained. Currently most loot boxes which are achieved through galactic renown and those bought from spoils of war vendors appear to award seemingly any piece of gear including gear that cannot be equipped by your class or stats that are for roles which you are not specced as or roles which your class cannot even do. This effectively renders a lot of gear received unusable. Proposed solution; loot boxes award gear based on discipline. I hope this provides some sort of methodological explanation of many current player frustrations with the PTS gearing changes.

Apologies for the really slow update on this one but everyone's submissions should be up there. Congrats to all the clears still coming in!

Updated and congratulations. Really awesome to see a variety of claims including 16m and timed runs still coming in!

Great work on all the clears! Updated.

Congrats to all the latest kills, board is up to date! At this point I've decided to go and grant <Origin> their timed run; they have repeated it with more players and the key claim that conflicted with them (Team Amethyst) is from a team which is inactive so I feel their inclusion is relevant to an accurate representation of the community. Likewise another conflicting claim (Team Emerald) has had a roster change to lessen the conflict. Just on this claim; So I've put you guys up but as per the ruling statement about non-linear and incorrectly ordered progression, it'll be listed below the Tyth kills. I'm happy to work with you to get claims of the previous 4 bosses as I have with other groups; Amethyst having claimed once an independant core was established and Better Now revoking their claims under Braindead Minds to continue to claim kills under their final team/roster are good examples of ways I've accomodated teams which have been developing their roster throughout their progression. You're welcome to contact me if you want to get these claims and need anything explained more clearly.

It's pretty standard in MMOs to get a title from killing a boss so I think it's kinda awkward for them to just hard remove it given there's no currently available title from sm or hm. That being said BW has obviously hinted that they want timed run to be more of an optional thing since they've made it zero achievement points now so you could probably just remove that with 6.0 and achieve the same purpose. Given that very few teams even are attempting timed run and many are using shared lockouts for progression (a strategy which neglects timed run preparation massively) it definitely feels like the title only the much more dedicated teams care about and probably the better one to target if you want exclusivity.

Congrats again to all the kills this week! Everything should be up to date

Apologies on the delay on an update. I was unsubbed for a few weeks and thus unable to edit the post. A huge congrats to the latest kills, especially good to see later bosses being downed! Regarding the Izax reflect change; I am not going to be doing retroactive changes especially for ability tagging. There are many examples of abilities in the game which are tagged in ways which they likely shouldn't be and they haven't been changed for years and therefore making judgements about ability tagging when you are first doing an encounter is near impossible. It also creates a what-if scenario where you don't know the outcome had the change been in place from the start and then it just becomes guesswork.

The times I've made any exceptions to the literal reading of the rules I listed was when a team had not satisfied them but satisfied them at a later point. In these cases I only considered the satisfactory case. I'm personally not interested in running the board as they have been in previous tiers as I remember them being litterred with alt teams or teams which were heavily composed of cleared players. This creates a false and it can disappoint individual teams who are aiming for higher rankings when they end up in lower spots due to these alt-heavy teams. I agree previous boards have done better if the purpose is to involve anyone and everyone. That is not my purpose in running this board, I want to create a more accurate board than those from the past in this game. It's a balancing act though. I don't believe teams should be excluded forever if they fail to satisfy submission criteria once. That is why I said I am happy to consider repeat submissions if they satisfy the criteria. So I appreciate your opinion. If it was this simple I'd have never really branched out for opinions. I have a couple questions to pose on this; -"However, I think that if we are allowed to make this exception for Better Now" If any exception is made in the case of <Better Now> it was made only once they had a run which satisfied the criteria. <Origin> however, has not gone and done any such run addressing the original issue in their posting. Thus the cases of <Better Now> and even Team Amethyst are difficult to apply to <Origin> -"Origin should also be listed on the board above them" Is this because of the <Origin> achievement time? If so should they also be listed above Team Mango?

Big congrats to all the latest achievements! Board is updated. Currently the only point of ambiguity is <Origin> as there has been a bit of discussion regarding their timed run on this thread and via DM's to me. Typically I've tended towards inclusion on this board and as I've stated before I do plan to eventually put their timed run on there. However, I know "eventually" is not very specific so I'm happy to open up a small discussion and take some feedback to get this sorted. So to clarify; the issue with the posting is that the timed run claim would only satisfy 4 out of 5 required achievements/independant member criteria. This applies only to their timed run as this has not been an issue in any of their other claims. So basically from my own consideration and discussions with others the potential resolutions are the following; -Place their timed run at their original clearence time with some sort of differntiation (I'd probably just use an asterix and a footnote) -Do not include their timed run entirely -Put their timed run up at the end of the raid tier (all valid timed runs done before then ranked higher) -Apply some sort of time penalty and rank their timed run from the date it satisfies. I'd probably also include some sort of footnote here too. (If I were to go this route I'd want a measurable timeframe which makes sense instead of something arbitrarily chosen) -Anything else potentially suggested Naturally I'm in favour of some of these more than others but included everything to facilitate discussion and move on from here. So if you want to weigh in I encourage it

I appreciate the heads up. I have spoken with one of their members and am just waiting on a vod or screenshot from them for their link on the board. Regarding Origin, I will most likely put them up there at some point before I stop tracking progress. I was happy to put Amethyst up immediately since they had gone and done clears with their complete roster satisfying the criteria since their original kills. Thus if Origin does the same I'll put their timed run up there immediately, if not as I said they'll likely have it recorded eventually anyway. I do recognise that my goal of having a more accurate and meaningful board has meant stricter rules and I am happy compromising to an extent here and there to accomodate. Hope that clears up the current state of affairs.

Pretty much what has been already said; the major issue is abusing a bugged mechanic to skip an entire phase. Reflecting, whilst very broken currently, borders closer to utilising game mechanics through ability tagging and is not the primary reason here.

I personally don't have an issue submitting a log but (and I feel this sentiment is echoed by others) it's just something that adds to this being overly complex and from experience that tends to discourage participation. It's a great idea and of course intricate rules makes for a more interesting competition. But at the same time it's balancing act between complexity and encouraging participation. If it's too complex then many teams see no point and would likely rather just do their normal personal raid.

I understand your comments about fastest vs best. But in the context of raiding in this game and others, typically fastest is best. World first progression races are about who kills a boss first. They're not about who kills it the most cleanly. Bioware as an added skill test had put in timed run achievements, again encouraging quick clearance. I feel a death is punishing enough and will reflect in the time regardless so why make it subtract further points? A death will lead to some lack of DPS (either through tank dps loss, a dps death, healer dps loss or some sort of overall raid mechanical compensatory requirement for the dead player) which will cause your time to kill to increase. I feel that because player deaths already impact your time, time should then be the focus. Furthermore if your team has the resources to manage it, a death can be a way to deal with mechanics in some cases. If you mismanage your cleansing in phase 1 of revan an effective solution can be for a player to suicide and be revived, this could be considered a skillful recovery yet why punish this level of understanding? Your DTPS calculation is inherently biased; classes are balanced around different defensive toolkits. A sorc DPS has unnatural preservation, a cooldown which requires you to have taken damage to be effective, a merc and pt have kolto, again a cooldown which will not lower DTPS in any way but will keep you alive. Likewise enraged defence won't help DTPS. Compare this to say a marauder who has damage avoidance tools such as undying, saber ward, force camo etc. All of these listed examples are using their cooldowns in a good way to survive incoming damage yet many of these classes are going to be punished more than others if you're doing a scoring system based on DTPS. Does every team now have to run a sorc healer to spam bubbles to artificially lower DTPS seeing as HPS is not being rewarded anyway? Many of these rules have created an environment which does not reflect real raiding at all and are just weird things to game around in my opinion. Even your diversity rule is a little odd. If you really think about it; to achieve maximum scoring 2 of your 4 DPS must be occupied by a marauder and sniper (since these classes cannot do any other role). This means that 6 other classes must compete for the remaining 2 DPS spots. This doesn't demonstrate equality of classes to me. A new player could watch this and be lead to believe they should just play marauder or sniper if they're interested in DPS since these will obviously be the most prevalent DPS classes if a group is aiming for all 8 classes present. I also can't see a scenario where someone pre-records and plays back a VOD. To quote you, "The expectation is when the whistle is blown, you are pulling the first boss. That being said, the competition will not wait for a team to begin." This means it is near impossible for a team to guess the exact minute the competition starts. Just enforce streams show the in-game clock and you can verify that they are indeed running live. Heck if you're really suspicious about any result just enforce that streamer to do something that they could not pre-record the moment they kill Revan (eg. type a specified phrase in chat and just don't release said phrase until a few minutes before the event starts.) Make it simple; everyone starts at the same time, first to clear the final boss wins. The class diversity stuff and enforcing 2 tank 4 dps 2 healer is fine.

Rather than dozens of forum posts would you accept a nicely formatted google doc of our guild's brainstorm, Eric?

Board should be up to date. Really great to see so many teams continuing to progress and kills across all progression levels trickling in Great work!

Any update on this? There have been a couple maintenance times since this post.

Really sorry for taking so long to update (It's been a bit of a bad habit recently). Regarding the issues of the rankings of Team Amethyst and Team Mango; I recognise that the presence of additional further progressed fillins and members can impact progression and given the close time between the Izax submissions by both teams it could have played a factor in the final rankings between the teams. I also recognise that utilising further progressed players for initial clears is something which could be abused to speed up progression for a team. To me there obviously isn't any malicious abuse here but it is still an area where I would side cautiously. Given that Team Amethyst has shown satisfactory levels of team independence I have chosen to keep them on the board with all of their kills. If a future case arises it'll likely be a case of common sense and individual case review; if kills are drastically far apart then likely rankings won't be changed. One other change I made in this board update was regarding the teams Better Now and Braindead Minds. After having discussed with the relevant players my understanding is that the Braindead Minds team has effectively ceased and there is an overlap of at least 5 players between the Braindead Minds claims and the Better Now claims. Thus I have treated it as essentially a team re-form with the same core of players. I have allowed Better Now to retain the kills from Braindead Minds and thus removed Braindead Minds from the board.

Not going to quote each and every paragraph here but it should be pretty obvious to figure out whom/what I'm talking about. This post is mainly to share my thoughts about the recent discussions in these posts, and perhaps steer towards a resolution. When volunteering to run this board and in making the rules that I did, I knew this was a much stricter board than prior SWTOR tiers but hopefully a much more accurate board too. In doing so I knew there'd likely be issues to work out along the way and this is just one to work through So I do respect the opinions put forward, knowing they're for the most part aimed towards a resolution. So to begin with, I'm going to give a little commentary on the rulings. In writing the rulings, they obviously were not exhaustive of every single scenario and specific situation. Otherwise they would have multitudes longer and read like legislature with sections, subsections and clauses. Thus a degree of common sense regarding the interpretation of a ruling and the intention behind it is of course needed. This is not uncommon, even something as thoroughly detailed as legal systems are open to common sense interpretations (hence the need for judicial systems when the exact literal meaning of a law makes little functional sense). The major ruling in question here are the constituents of a valid kill claim; in particular the 5 achievements. The intention behind this ruling being to fill the board of reasonably differentiated teams. Now if we look at the wording of it, we can see it is in reference to a kill claim, which is a singular event in time. A differentiated team (as defined by 5 independent members) and hence the intention behind the rule continues to exist through time. On the topic of rulings I'll take some time here to address the laxing of rulings. At this point in time as far as I am concerned, I have started to lax Tyth and Aivela & Esne. Nahut, Scyva, and Izax are not at a point where I would accept fewer than 5 independent members. I understand not every screenshot shows all of the required achievements for many of the teams on the board but again, this is an area of common sense and I've made efforts to chase up and confirm on claims which appeared doubtful. Now for the case in question regarding Team Amethyst. After some thorough investigation into the team I have the following understanding of the group; -Statement 1: They have a total of 5 independent members (some of whom joined partway through the tier) -Statement 2: When looking at initial kills from the team, only A&E (given the laxing of requirements now) and Izax would satisfy criteria -Statement 3: When looking at kills following initial kills from the team, they are able to satisfy a minimum of 5 independent members (4 minimum in the case of Tyth and A&E) for all 5 bosses. That is all 5 members were present in the same kill of a boss. Now referencing the comments regarding the rulings before; this team has not satisfied the strict literal definition as the definition focused on initial kills. This team has satisfied the intention behind the ruling; showing they are a reasonably independent team. Furthermore it is quite punishing to force a team to abstain from beginning progression while they are still solidifying a roster (The balance between accurate community representation and inclusiveness being a fine line when making these rulings). As I said before disputes like this are not uncommon and can swing either way. The question is to what degree do we value that the intention behind a ruling has been satisfied? And if we say the ruling has not been satisfied what is the appropriate measure? I understand Team Mango may be upset as they may be represented a place below they believe they should be. In the case of their position being swapped with Team Amethyst, what happens when another team representing Team Mangos circumstance achieves 5/5 bosses? Does a separate category or marker for initial assisted kills need to exist? These are mostly rhetoric but if they spark some imagination feel free to weigh in. As I said, the purpose of this posting is to share my thoughts on the current situation to try steer it towards a resolution. I'll probably wait another day or two to give any invested individuals a chance to respond and share their opinions before adjusting anything on the board. To reiterate a last time; The main issue I see here is that a team has satisfied the intention of a ruling but not satisfied the literal definition. Whether to include this team or not is the debate and I am open to opinions regarding this.