I'm uncertain what you mean by "level flagged," could you explain further so we're not discussing different things with the same words? I'll ask if you've actually played through doing all the side missions. I haven't found a cool mission that's cut -- mostly just pointless killing from multi-stage bonus quests, and lower numbers of killing for bonus quests. My bet, though, is that metrics played a heavy part in showing which quests players got, started, and then never finished or gave up on.

Very well, since you dared me: Thank you for sharing the story, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the question at hand. We'll try and find something with an actual point in the rest of the diatribe. Then it is not perfectly accurate. You mean they expended absolutely no costs they could avoided? Sorry, incorrect. Make up your mind, then get back to me about logic. So absolutely nothing in the expansion was creative? That is actually what "most uncreative" means, you know. Purely subjective; I'm enjoying it immensely. Actually, I can conceive of far more and worse than all of the (putative) above. Easily. Please don't ascribe you own limited imagination to that of the community at large. I would welcome evidence that they only did the minimum amount of work, especially since bug fixes that were unrequired qualify as more than the minimum amount of work, as does making Datacrons legacy-wide. Or are you dealing with some private definition of "minimum" that has nothing to do with conversing in the English language? Evidence? Evidence? Evidence? And are you truly incapable of conceiving any other explanation? Evidence? And are you as incapable of coming up with another explanation as you were previously? I thought you said they were only doing the minimum effort. Since they don't have to reward subscribers with anything beyond what a subscription gets you, could you please make up your mind what you're actually complaining about? If that's all you noticed, the laziness and problems are not on Bioware's end. Evidence? I'd specifically like to see a list of every change they implemented and the man-hours required for each. Unless you're just taking the lazy way out and making broad unfounded statements that have less to do with what Bioware's actually done and more to do with how you feel. Actually, lazy is not a measure of quality at all. Sloppy is a matter of quality. Demonstrate some of that lack of laziness you claim and learn what words mean.

Yes, but even if you feel they screwed everything up, I think we have to admit they've worked hard at it.

This is where the disconnect is occurring. The group of adults is playing PvP. The AI does not have nor will it ever have an equal skill or ability in the game. You're asking for the developers for a switch to give one set of five-year-olds better gear. It may well include motorized vehicles so they can keep up with you as you run and break your legs if you don't dodge, but it's still the five-year olds. Actually, when the adversary gains the ability to intercept passes you would have otherwise caught, or to maintain a tackle that you would otherwise break, your assets have become limited. That's not what you're asking for. But that's what the effect will be. Psychologically, you may prefer one or the other. So long as we've cleared that out of the way, I'm content. You actually are. Queue for PvP. I wouldn't mind hard mode versions of story fights, so long as it's provided strictly for entertainment value/achievements. But the decision to remove the kind of challenge you're asking for in story content is one I can understand, especially with regards to anything open world. The market they're targeting with the story portion of the game is likely that which just enjoys hitting things with lightsabers. That they're reserving difficult content for groups is perhaps unfortunate, but hardly surprising. My hunch is that the portion of the player base who wants to have to use every tool at their disposal for a fight, where the slightest mistake can mean death, and yet does not wish to group up for Ops, is small enough to make it a low priority. I'm not saying it's never going to happen, but it will probably have to wait a while.

Yes, but that can't be changed outside of changing human nature. Having a tutorial/achievement gate would at least filter out the people who don't want to bother to learn what they're doing wrong, making it easier to identify trolls/griefers. I also don't know if they would have all of their important skills (I seem to recall each class gets a new one past 50, but I don't know that they're all game-changers), but the level requirement could be flexible.

Well, since you quoted yourself, I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing: You're asking for the developers to limit your resources instead of yourself. You want your damage to be less effective against the enemy's health and your available healing, hit points, and defenses to be less effective against the enemy's damage. You want your stuns and interrupts to be less effective in preventing enemy abilities. That's what giving enemies more hit points and damage does, what adding various channeled abilities does. To paraphrase myself from another thread: If you want the developers to do something for you that you are perfectly capable of doing for yourself, why do you claim to want to have to put forth effort at all? And to sum up this post: Why should they bother to put more options in if people aren't taking the ones already there?

Obviously it would have been more work to create a bunch of new stuff. But since we agree that they have actually been working, I think we can throw "lazy" out. I mean, given the limited number of hours in each day, doing the minimal amount of work necessary in order to attract new players while minimizing both existing player loss and expenses sounds like . . . an intelligent thing for them to be doing. Doing something extremely time-consuming when you can achieve comparable results through a much simpler and more efficient process is . . . less than ideal, to say the least. @Quraswren: You described what I have as: That's actually not what I got. Leveling characters is extremely fast, now. Those who want just the class story can do it without having to help every piddly person along the way. Therefore, everyone was not slowed down. Leveling a character feels far less grindy than it did previously. The fact that they chose to focus on a part of the game that you seem to ignore does not in any way invalidate the effort required. You rattled off a list of all the new things we haven't gotten. Then you said, Every single thing you listed actually sounds easier to implement than a universal level sync system. Implementing the level sync system required a balance pass on each planet. They also fixed bugs and redesigned quests for each planet along the way. The amount of work required there sounds far harder than keeping planetary content the exact same and writing a quick debuff toggle for a player.

I would contest that; those who play story mode are going to learn how to play story mode. What's not happening is that story mode isn't being used mechanically as a tutorial for end game flashpoints and ops. I, however, feel that this is a good thing insofar as story mode never really succeeded in that respect. What the game is missing (and has, for that matter, always missed) is something that is specifically designed to teach the mechanics of various classes. I would love to see some sort of "training hall" feature with some minimum benchmarks to pass depending on your class/role, and until those benchmarks were passed, Flashpoint/Ops participation would be limited. That, in my opinion, would teach the people who need to be taught how to play their class far more effectively than trying to shoehorn it into the story/leveling portion of the game. It just doesn't belong there. That only becomes more true with level increases and new class abilities. Generally speaking, a person with only their level 32 abilities isn't going to learn their full class rotation, because a few chunks of it are missing.

First of all, Psycho Fox was a Sega Master System game. Secondly, the game could be completely beaten in less than five minutes if you were skilled enough to precision jump to a warp hole on the first level. Psycho Fox was anything but Nintendo Hard. You could easily end the game with 99 lives (after starting with 3) if you knew what you were doing. Which is why I brought it up as an example of a game where one would deliberately increase the difficulty through in-game choices.

Several multi-stage bonus quests were reworked into something other than "kill 60 of the same mob," some areas were almost completely redesigned to be less of a pointless slog (Tatooine Czerka Base springs to mind), you can actually pick up the Adrenals for the Hutt on the Republic side of Quesh, and those are just off the top of my head. The point is simply that, whether it's cheaper or not, the amount of work that went into retooling all the planets in the game as well as implementing the level sync system (including companion role-switching and scaling old FPs/Ops) cannot be called lazy by any stretch of the imagination.

Out of curiosity, how much effort do you think it took to implement the level sync system as it stands? Have you played through the game with a new level 1 character and noted all the quest changes and even bug fixes? I'm just wondering how much work you think went into implementing this system, that you can call them lazy for doing it.

Around the same time that the idea of personal challenges became an unknown one. Back in my 8-bit days, once I'd mastered a game, I started finding ways to make it more difficult. (The Hippo-only Psycho Fox run was one of my favorites.) I didn't get online achievements, I didn't get better rewards. All I got was the satisfaction of knowing I could do it despite limiting myself. You know, challenge? There's no more validity to playing blindfolded if you insist that somebody else tie the knot. You're playing blindfolded either way.

In all fairness, I did have to use interrupts when fighting the final boss of the Consular story when I ran it post 4.0. But I was honestly just about as invulnerable running through the story missions pre 4.0. The only ones that were difficult were the Consular Quesh mission (and there, I'd often see people asking for help) and boss fights where you had to figure out what to interrupt. (That's still in the game.) I'll agree that some final fights need to be looked at in view of level sync (Sith Warrior/Inquisitor come to mind; the early levels of the game have numbers based around you not having a companion). I also find that running with a companion in healer mode makes the game easier than a companion in other modes. In that sense, invulnerability is a function of player choice; if you want to be able to die and have to use defensive cooldowns, a good place to start is not having a healer.

Not quite. RPGs have always been about character expression. You know, playing a role? Levels are not necessary for a functional role-playing game. Actually, combat isn't even necessary for a functional role-playing game.

Just a few points: 1) Flashpoints and Operations, by your own admission, are not easy. Therefore, this game still has difficult content. It's just not going to be in the open world. 2) By your own admission, the story missions and side missions were never hard. Therefore, there's little difference except time, now. If you don't wander away from the game and let your companion do everything, mobs fall very quickly. Sure, you don't have to use your defensive cooldowns as much. The last time I was leveling a character through the story pre-4.0, I had to use them maybe three times. It doesn't make that much of a difference. 3) Therefore, I enjoy this because there is a relaxed mode for playing the game, where you can just enjoy pretending you're a Jedi and cutting bad guys in two with your lightsaber. If I want tension, I can queue for PvP, and if I want a long, boring slog where I have to press the same keys repeatedly and move around, I can run FP/OPs.

Like looking for a new job? I mean, it's possible to bareface your way out of being blamed for sinking a game, but do you honestly imagine they're willing to risk their careers and corporate credibility by deliberately making a game tank? Now, accidentally doing it is another thing entirely. As a side note, to whoever was asking for evidence that people enjoy level sync as it is right now: I enjoy it.

As far as Warzones go, I would love to see some sort of Solo Tutorial mode for maps so that I could learn a given map's mechanics and have them down before I actually have to deal with other people trying to stop me. That would help me, at least, far more than going through scripted NPC fights.

I actually blame the stagnation on the nature of the war between the Jedi and the Sith. Whenever one of them really tries to create something new, the other panics and blows it up, along with all the research.

Does Hoth share a similar appeal? There are some pretty vast stretches, there. Open space is something I hadn't thought of (and I don't have much experience with expansion planets); Belsavis, Voss, and especially Corellia are actually all pretty crowded.

I've often wondered about this. What makes Tatooine so special? Can't you find max level players to PvP on max level planets?

I always thought Lord Scourge's story would have made for a tremendous KotOR 3 (assuming that the Lord Scourge we meet took the theoretical dark side option).

@Chibi: My point is simply that while we don't have the data, they do. You can't identify a piss-poor decision from their perspective without access to the data they have. We can discuss what we think the merits of the direction they're going are; what we can't do is fault their decision-making process without knowing how they came to their conclusions.

Good writing. You make the story as worth replaying as a good book is rereading.

I'm much less of an apologist than I am seeker of actual legitimate criticisms. Most of my posts have as their goal making people actually think about what their complaints really are. That being said: The question asked was whether there was a legitimate reason for implementing level sync. Making it easier to put new contents on old worlds is a legitimate reason. Whether Bioware capitalizes on that ability is an entirely different question. For claims like this, I prefer to see numbers. Anecdotally, my impression while leveling is that the average number of people on a planet (and not just doing the Heroics thereof) has increased. I assume they're enjoying themselves, because the idea of doing stuff you don't enjoy when you don't have to doesn't make much sense to me. Calling companies on a piss-poor decision is admirable. Identifying a piss-poor decision objectively is a trait that is missing on these forums, and the main thing I have objected to. To wit: How do you know that they'll be gone in three months? Must every single person who currently enjoys the game right now leave? Have I no option to stay four months? What if the three-quarters of the player base (assuming that the number is accurate) actually stays because, as stated, they enjoy it? What if they don't mind running through class stories multiple times? If their perception of the game is enjoyable, aren't they by definition having "fun?" What if all the creativity they need is in new outfits and combat companions to look at? Where are you getting your demographic data? That's what I tend to comment on. Unproven broad generalizations and/or personal preferences stated as facts and axiomatic laws of game design when they are, so far as I can tell, nothing of the sort.

It makes it easier for the developers to place new content on old worlds.