I had this problem with a MM Directive 7 flashpoint 2 days ago. I was a tank and we noted one of the dps had never done the flashpoint before and was not at max gear, not sure by how much but he at least had some of the gold set pieces that came out in Onslaught. It was clear from the comments that the 306 dps held some unspoken bitterness about running with the undergeared one, but kept going. We got to the 3 shielding droids and naturally no one clued the new guy in about the method until halfway into the fight, I gently prompted the new one with a target mark above the unshielded droid but the other had an outburst of irritation to have him stop hitting the shield droid that prompted sub-dps to quit after the boss. I reminded 306 that the other was new and that he didn't have to be so rude, to which he responded that the guy shouldn't have tried this MM anyway without 306; at that point I decided to abandon this too. Wasn't exactly a ray-of-sunshine group. I don't see players being undergeared as the problem with most fails, it's usually a problem that they're inexperienced on top of that and can't figure out how to optimize their dps in specific battles, which can be fixed without telling them not to come back until they grind to 306 from VMs. There are exceptions; if we were in Korriban 2nd boss instead of D7 the guy might have had a point, but we weren't so...

I don't disagree, but I do want a little bit of the loot for myself lol. I'm pretty lucky I don't see most of the high value items I'd find from there as that valuable to me personally. So I make a lot of money from the items.

At least I'm apparently in the uncommon rank of players' bank accounts lol! I've got about 90 million banked but at least 10 million spread out among my characters to spend on stuff. Though that's probably common now that people are trading the new augment mats like gold. It's slow going but I've resigned myself to waiting for my monthly stipend of Coins to be enough for a hypercrate, then open it, sell all the high value stuff I don't want (Like Tau Idair's armor; I don't like cosplaying with main NPC gear and it was worth a fortune!) and keep the less valuable stuff as a little cosmetic bonus for any toon I want to give it to. I'll probably make at least another hundred million in a few months, but it's more steady and requires less work than all these billion-credit players are doing.

So it seems like you have problems with PvP in other games too. This sounds like a simple case of a player's favorite activity just being one they really aren't very good at, and when they lose they blame the game and "cheating" players. Your main complaint is PvP class balance is completely out the window. And it is, but it's always going to be because if the devs weren't good at mathematically computing how to scale class damage in 2013, I don't see why EA would suddenly pay for their math lessons after 7 years. It's no good to keep whining that your preferred class is trash at pvp at this point, mayyybe they'll fix it eventually but you'd better just get used to the OP classes if you want a chance at having fun playing the mode. Right now you're playing a class that everyone knows is going to be grinding meat and you willfully play it. It's like you're in Call of Duty using a pistol in a sniper's roost when you should be using a scoped rifle and complaining you're not getting kills.

Yes these augments are certainly not for casual players to bother working for, they are meant for veterans who are well connected and experienced and can put up with a big little grind. But even then they are a dumb thing to put in, as you said there's no other new content that was made or any difficulties tweaked. Especially for us PvErs the reward of beating the dps check on a boss a few seconds faster is not worth spending a billion credits or grinding for the ranked mats. If they wanted to make an incentive for completing the hardest content they should have started rare dropping free-item vouchers for the Barbie Market instead.

Unfortunately it sounds like instances that have already done this will be screwed over until there's a fix, but good to know. Try to cheat the game for a quicker kill by avoiding the adds, it's going to bite you in the butt

This is how those marketing shills get you: Create a new zenith of stat progression that'll barely edge you to victory over anyone who doesn't have it, which takes a ridiculous amount of time or effort to reach so that anyone who has a job can't possibly endure the raw grind... But hey, it's okay it means you have money! Just buy a couple dozen hypercrates and you'll find plenty of stuff that's worth one augment mat.

I agree, their plan going forward in terms of progression has become painfully transparent. After an expansion has been around a while, some epilogue or other thing gets posted, which carries a minor gearing upgrade from completing content associated with it. Ziost and Ossus are the biggest examples that come to mind; they started giving out Citadel and Masterwork gear that amounted to such a minor % difference in gear rating, as though that's the best incentive for completing the new content. Then a new normal of standards for gearing come out with the next big update, with work for those standards that is so much easier than what you had to do to get the previous apex of gear (which immediately became trash). The difference is there was no new bridge like what I mentioned to come with the augments update this time, unless you count the hardest difficulty of Dxun as a bridge. This is their most blatant example of trying to make players grind not-so-fresh content just for the sake of being in their time sink of a game. Grind for the sake of grind.

They tried to do something like that with the onset of Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne; the reputation you had with each of your companions would be shown in the companion list, showing choices you made during the story that they approved of, disapproved of, or led to their current fate. Your character actually does get a general class codex about the journey your character has had now, I think it came with Onslaught But other than that, I don't really see the point of a story review since this game doesn't really bother making your choices matter to the future state of the galaxy anyway. Most of the NPCs will say or e-mail some passionate thing about how you were wrong to do what you did or how proud of you they are, but they'll continue their general relationship with you all the same, and the galaxy won't be significantly altered because of it. And BW only has enough work done on this game to make one continuing storyline anyway, they're not going to create more branches for specific player decisions anytime soon. It would be entertaining to look back at my character's psychological profile lol. But I'm starting to doubt how many of their choices the Devs actually keep in a general memory that they could reproduce in a more specific codex

And in this conflict between creating and fixing, the people that pull BW's purse strings are likely on the side of creating, even if they leave a trail of broken content in their wake. They want some kind of assurance that the budget the team's being given every year is being used in a forward-thinking productive way, and spending a whole cycle of the money on fixes for already created stuff just says "ok, these guys are terrible at working through spaghetti code, why are we funding this game?" What would sound better to you if you were doing an audit or a quarterly assessment of their work? "We're adding to the story, plus a new character and CM advert area in the game!" OR..."We're repairing the mission board bugs that came about while reopening the decade-old Bounty Broker event" ?

I get the feeling EA's exerting undue influence on this part of the game's production too. If BW techs were to answer CS complaints about lingering bugs honestly, they'd probably be like "sorry, we know there's issues and we'd love to fix them, but the budget EA gave us doesn't permit man-hours be spent fixing old content or fixing a rough draft of our new updates once they're in the test server, they're already demanding the next episode of the Valkorion Family soap opera by mid quarter so we're all working on that."

This sort of goes for all the skills, but I think Artifice in particular does need more schematics. Even for creating crystals and dyes, the ones you get from the crafting vendor and the few you get out in the world are very boring. (I really don't know of many dropped schematics but I know TFB/SnV still drop the same colored crystals all the time LOL). What I would have liked the recent augment update to do is: instead of ranked and MM ops dropping new mats for augments nobody wanted, have them get a small chance to reward you with special crafting schematics for valuable dyes, color crystals, armstech weapons, armormech armors, etc. which are almost as tough to craft as the new augments are. Though that will probably never happen, since most of the items I'm thinking of schematics for are on the CM or on the GTN listed for at least 100M credits. Why would they give us access to that fancy cosmetic stuff just for playing the game when they can lock it exclusively behind Cartel Coins?

The new augments are completely stupid. If you're at the skill level where you can reliably get the mats from this content because you clear MM bosses/win Ranked over 50% of the time, what do you want with +20 stat augments in a game where you've done all they can think of at the moment anyway? Though I do have an answer for that...My theory is that all the hype for getting these augs is only because of 2 things: 1. PvP was always like this really, but the other endgame content difficulty is mostly becoming a numbers game, where the game devs are too understaffed or unprepared to make competent, bug-free mechanics based on strategy in new PvE content so they have to resort to rewarding raiders who have the tippy-top stats. The augments will theoretically give them an edge, but one that, again, they've clearly shown they don't need and will only apply to 5% of the game's population, unless BW plans on another pointless cap increase where the additional stats are suddenly necessary for more endgame players. 2. The uber GTN traders are having a ball with the new augments, simply because right now they can guild up and wintrade to get a mat, then sell it for an obscene amount of credits. My PvE raid team recently tried to do ranked for this reason, but the honest way, and got our butts handed to us almost every match. Aside: I'm not a competent PvP deathmatch player, I'm just not. There's too much chaos and frames flashing across my screen when the fighting starts for me to keep to any strategy or tips I learn about, and at that point I'm fighting blind with my hands smashing the keyboard. I dropped out that night after 2 matches because it would just make me and the helpful Ranked tutor more irritated with every one of the countless mistakes I was going to make; no amount of fake game money is going to make up for the stress of that environment. Of these 2 reasons, I'm pretty sure the new credit market is the main driver for trying to get these mats, but it's going to crash once most people realize there aren't enough people that will bother with the augments to sell them reliably. It's still a stupid thing to put in as a reward for completing the most challenging content in the game. At that point far more rewards should be of the cosmetic/entertaining gimmick variety, not the performance variety.

I don't see what the guy's problem with HS players is specifically. That so many of them are jerks or don't even know how to use their mouse? To the point that he knows the fellow group members will ruin the FP for him? If I quit/uncheck HS, it's only because I'm sick of random group finder becoming Hammer Station Finder; I'd like my weekly to have at least one completion under its belt that shows I lifted a finger to finish the thing. The HS players in particular should not be as big an annoyance for Mr. HS Quitter to put up as huge a tantrum as he is. Given why most people are spamming it, most of them will at the very least be quiet and breeze through it without any drama (though that has its own annoyances when you aren't hopped up like they are and can't keep up). And that's all I want from my random pops, I don't give a dump if it's HS, KDY, Nathema, or Meridian. If people will shut up and show they're capable by giving it the old college try then I'll soldier through it. Insta-quitters deserve all the hate the forums can throw at them.

I have not seen much spamming of KDY, maybe because I see no reason to do Vet Mode FPs at lvl 75 anymore, but I agree that the only people that would be spamming this are 100% completion hunters or people who don't realize how the game's xp generation system has changed since the expansion that this flashpoint first arrived in. Other than that, that flashpoint by all accounts should be one of those considered a deserted instance at this point, just like Meridian, Nathema etc. because they are too much of a pain to get the rewards from. And these "deserted instances" are indeed a problem. I'm tired of being a seasoned player who has to queue alongside a pug community that can't be bothered to do most of the actually engaging content in the game, instead treating raids simply as a means to get mountains of useless gear you're likely to either sell or take apart in the end. I have nothing against pugs, I know decent ones are out there, but whenever they join me in a random FP they quit at the first sight of a harder FP because they're experienced enough to beat it, but enough to also know there's a decent chance they're going to get an oblivious pug who's entirely useless in this type of content, and because they know they can get a reward that's just as good from a mind-numbingly easier fp. It should be apparent by now that because of flaws with damage scaling over levels and time, or lack of creativity to mechanics in various encounters, there are fps that are incredibly stupid to lump with others in the game's entire random selection. It's stupid to lump single boss ops in with the single rotating regular one that will often take 5 times as long if it gets chosen at random. They absolutely need to be separated into different categories based on length or difficulty so players that desire a challenge don't have to risk getting stuck with a chore as often, the chore being stuck with a player or two you know has no place queuing for content they're going to faceflop at or say they need to leave to eat dinner just before the last boss. But I guess better categorization is too much work...just like putting those little missile crates that could plop down after completing a single KDY objective is too much work... While I agree Bioware needs to do something, your best option is to abandon random rewards and uncheck the box if it's popping so often and you're this sick of it.

Yeah I'm sore that Collicoid War Games isn't in the GF at all now, but I agree with putting Kaon and LI in Master Mode only. Some flashpoints I just do not want to do unless there's some assurance that the group is at least well prepared in terms of their level and in-game abilities. 15-75 Vet FPs are not a good spot to put a lot of what they have in there.

I would use the Slow Mercy tactical

It's because the devs could have spent their very limited time nowadays maybe fixing countless bugs, removing features nobody asked for and hated, or expanding on that trickle of content about the Emperor's far-too-rotting corpse infecting Satele Shan, but they decide to make a couple new shinys that will take months to grind for most teams that already know they don't need it to clear the content they're grinding, which is going to force out more NiM raiders than bring in. People are just going to stop playing at this point if the only things the devs can think of to "fix" is to add another gear grind.

Can we just admit that Bioware has run out of steam trying to improve the game and its poorly planned features that have been a mainstay since 3.0? Apparently they don't know how to listen to customer complaints about WHY no one is playing their endgame realms of PvP and PvE, so they think exclusive augments will do the trick. They'll probably subtly tweak all the stats too so the content becomes just a little too hard without that little stat boost. I'm just lucky I'm currently part of a MM group so we can do some Ops besides Dxun and farm these mats so I have an extra stream of credits coming in, but just about none of us want to get sucked into this ripoff for the gearing, it might not even be worth it for the sales if the Ops drops work how I fear they're going to and one insignificant mat is rolled for by the entire group. And no, this isn't even going to be used by all ranked players and MM raiders, it's going to be used for the even smaller subset that are legends in the game and/or are lucky enough to have a committed team with a well-connected, guilded, and material-stocked leader who trades in half a billion credits every day. For every famous youtuber team bragging about their clears, there's 5 more that don't belong in the content that suck players in but have months of difficulty focusing and memorizing strategies, and have players go AWOL for months because of real life, fatigue, rudeness or some other reason. The former is going to become even more insufferable and exclusive; forget a class becoming taboo, these new augments will become required before you can even join. While the content can be done without them, it's going to be easier with these and elites are going to pounce on demanding them of all their team members; it'll be a nightmare for endgamers all around.

There are plenty of people looking for players to fill in on a one-time basis for Operations in the fleet area (or in certain Discord channels, Star Forge Raiding Community is a good one for when you feel ready to do VM ops but they don't call for SM Ops). It's lost most of its value for group forming over the years, but you can also /cjoin the custom chat channel Allies to sometimes find a group. It doesn't make a difference that much which role you are, but if you're going to play a tank, that's good because you will always be in demand for groups as there's just so few of you compared to DPS, but the drawback is that you have the most riding on you to beat a boss; even in SM groups are going to be upset if you are too new to certain fights and cause difficulties. You may want to look over boss videos or guides to see how tanks are supposed to handle certain battles, but most are pretty understandable if you let them know you're new to an Operation and will instruct you. And SM for many Ops has been simplified to the limit anyway. Good luck! Glad to know another tank's starting to do Ops.

Exactly, I heard one person say about the lag "don't blame McDonalds for the potholes in the road on your drive there", but I think there can be some blame on them if the "McDonalds" is purposely and cheaply placed in the worst hub for most people's location and ISP to get to them.

The part that ruined this year's nightlife for me was the "addition" of two new slot machines in the casino. The standard reward other than refunding your token is 50 Kingpin tokens, to then as people say input them one at a time into the machine. And if you decide Feeling Lucky is still worth it you find yourself going back and forth between kingpins and smugglers. My raiding team was talking about this over the weekend and it is far too tedious, even for people with macros who can just sit around while the spins happen. I don't understand where the idea left the drawing room to make some games to play during nightlife that allowed greater stakes gambling of your chips. Have a bet min-bet max system for the slot machines? The countless sabaac tables? I even prefer playing Kotor pazaak over this event, why can't you guys input that???

Oh wow, can you imagine the car wreck that would look like if the devs tried something that bold in one of their patches?

If they made them too rewarding, half of the group content phases would become like KP farm once again. Are we just beholden to the speed-urges of whatever elite player comes in wanting to max out their frag cap before bedtime? Because it feels like we are. If you're bored to death of the game just. for the love of everything. leave.

What I really wish is that the devs would find a way to create a warning system for people who quit groups-in-progress, something like how GTA5 treats their "bad sports"; where one ragequit doesn't make you a bad sport, but if it becomes a pattern you get put in the bad boys lobby with other ragequitters. There are all sorts of legitimate non-trolling reasons why you don't want to play one of the random matchups you got and you should deserve at least 2 chances at it. For this game, one or two warnings that linger for a matter of hours would be fair to me I think; after another quit you get hit with the penalty, and as long as that system exists I don't really care how long you're locked out; though of course if it's just one warning, don't make it much harsher than it currently is. Go ahead, leave a huttball match if you're sick of it, no penalty, but if you cannot stand that your second spin of roulette gave you huttball and play through, probably best for you to deal with the lockout and play something else for a bit.