We need HM FPs to mean something for people that have gear

[Michaelphoenix]

As is stands right now there is no one with even a full set of columi gear to run a HM FP. I think the dalies should award daily comms and the columi comms.

 

It is only hurting FP participation because really no one has a reason to run them unless gearing a companion

[Valkirus]

As is stands right now there is no one with even a full set of columi gear to run a HM FP. I think the dalies should award daily comms and the columi comms.

 

It is only hurting FP participation because really no one has a reason to run them unless gearing a companion

 

What we really need is to have a tool so more can run Flashpoints.

[Skidrowbro]

What we really need is to have a tool so more can run Flashpoints.

 

A tool that so more can run? Or join a none dead server

Edited May 9, 2012 by Skidrowbro

[Valkirus]

A tool that makes more......?

 

Happy, resubbing fans...

[Michaelphoenix]

i love how fast this got derailed.........

 

can we talk about reasons to run FPs not the beaten to death group finder topic

[Mustelidaen]

As is stands right now there is no one with even a full set of columi gear to run a HM FP. I think the dalies should award daily comms and the columi comms.

 

It is only hurting FP participation because really no one has a reason to run them unless gearing a companion

I kind of agree with your point, but from the viewpoint of the many 50s who complain they have nothing to do.

 

Server mergers and LFG tools by themselves will NOT revitalize SWTOR. Why? There is no INCENTIVE to sign in and do anything frequently, especially for 50s. Looking for group to do WHAT that is worth while???

 

You combine two servers with people who don't have incentive to sign in at least daily, and you end up with NOTHING new.

 

What you need to do is provide that incentive. And you need it quick. So, do like WoW does, and make the HM FP daily quest worth doing. Many people have skipped some or all of the HM FPs...most them who have done HM FPs have done BT a zillion times over just to get the daily done. And no wonder people are bored!

 

You must up the ante for doing HM flashpoints. This would add huge incentive to do them. The HM daily quest reward should be increased and scaled to the difficulty of the heroic completed--and should include Rakata and Black Hole tokens as appropriate:

 

The Black Talon: Keep as-is, "LFG quick daily BT HM" in General Chat makes my stomach turn!

Boarding Party: Add 1 Rakata token

The Foundry, Directive 7: Add 2 Rakata token

The Battle of Ilum, The False Emperor, Kaon under Siege: Add 1 Black Hole token

Lost Island: Add 2 Black Hole token

 

If people log in daily, it will help revitalize the economy as well.

 

I'm sorry, but I am puzzled by all the people claiming that mergers and/or a LFG tool will fix things.

 

What I describe is a QUICK and effective fix. It would take the developers a few days.

Edited May 9, 2012 by Mustelidaen

[Michaelphoenix]

right now in fleet i KNOW there are people hanging out bored but they dont want to run a HM FP because there is no reason to

[pahbi]

Would be cool if you could spend your tionese crystals and commendations, and columi commendations (not tokens!) on gear for your alts. You know, the whole Legacy thing.

 

- P

[Resallaprov]

There is no way they are going to give BH Comms for doing old, EASY content.

 

Go do HM Keon and LI if you want BH Comms.

[Mustelidaen]

There is no way they are going to give BH Comms for doing old, EASY content.

 

Go do HM Keon and LI if you want BH Comms.

 

First of all, 1 BH token isn't exactly a huge reward. It would take over 30 days just to get a BH implant.

 

Besides, they do award BH tokens for doing something that is truly easy: the BH daily/weekly.

 

Few do Kaon or especially Lost Island (let alone, both). I have monitored these instances thru the fleet user search tool.

 

So yes, they will have to add incentive to log on, as pointed out on another thread--Blizzard adjusts the HM daily reward very carefully to entice people to log on. Bioware doesn't. BIg ooops!

Edited May 10, 2012 by Mustelidaen

[Mallorik]

What we really need is to have a tool so more can run Flashpoints.

 

Yes you are right, but without an incentive for raid geared players to use that tool, the lesser geared people will be sitting a long time before they get a group, and since bioware didnt do their home work they are coming out with a same server lfg tool instead of cross server, which will just magninfy the problem 10x.

[Sirsri]

There is no way they are going to give BH Comms for doing old, EASY content.

 

Go do HM Keon and LI if you want BH Comms.

 

Running one random dungeon a day is how blizzard has done it. By itself that isn't actually a bad idea. Even without dungeon finder it is workable. If you just hit 50 and you wanted some gear you have no chance of getting a group to run black Talon with you. You have to have a group carry you through EV or the like. Which is preferable since you can run EV normal in about 45 minutes wheres most of the flash points take over an hour. Yes, that's stupid.

 

They need to completely rethink flashpoints. Well there are a lot of things they need to completely rethink, flashpoints will be effected by that.

 

Why don't I want to run FP's:

Rewards aren't worth having

Time taken is prohibitive compared to other ways to get gear

Many bosses are completely unforgiving of one person dying, or just doing low numbers (say due to needing gear).

Dying can waste a huge amount of time because some people take forever to load in the game, and it takes a long time to run back when you die. Waiting for one person wastes my time.

Getting to a flashpoint can take forever due to the aforementioned loading issue.

There's no easy way to make a group to do flashpoints

There's no reason to wait around to see if people will want to do flashpoints, and running off and doing dailies just wastes peoples time.

 

See how these are all solvable, and solved problems elsewhere? Put a trickle of worthhile gear/tokens on FP's. All FP's should drop daily tokens and daily tokens should always be useful for example. Putting some BH commendations on dailies (and possibly increasing the BH comms costs of gear might be suitable). Cash as well. Killing a boss should be better than doing a daily, but not by much. Say each boss in a FP drops 45k + 2 daily coms + 1 BH com.

 

When you die you shouldn't be booted out of the instance, encounters reset just fine with people lying there dead, you should pop back up relatively near bosses, and the 'checkpoints' should be closer to bosses.

 

All instances should have a summoning inside the door. There should be no social points for selecting hard/normal in a group, so that you can share that quest (not waste peoples time) and then summon them without gimping them on social points.

 

There should be a daily (maybe that's where the cash/daily tokens etc.) should be, that randomly picks a new daily every day as 'today's daily'. That focuses everyone on the same daily, so everyone wants to do the same one today (easier to form a group), and gives people a chance to see all of them). Running the same heroic twice in one day should be possible but you only get the commendations once.

[Lymain]

As is stands right now there is no one with even a full set of columi gear to run a HM FP. I think the dalies should award daily comms and the columi comms.

 

It is only hurting FP participation because really no one has a reason to run them unless gearing a companion

 

Daily comms would be nice.

[Resallaprov]

I think those are great ideas, I think they SHOULD do them (ala WoW), but I still don't think they will anytime soon.

[jsdcaedus]

being able to trade up tokens would help as well. 5 tionese = 1 columni, 5C = 1R, 5R = 1BH.

 

simple, effective, and really no actual reason to not do it this way with a little tweaking on the ratios.

[Mustelidaen]

Running one random dungeon a day is how blizzard has done it. By itself that isn't actually a bad idea. Even without dungeon finder it is workable. If you just hit 50 and you wanted some gear you have no chance of getting a group to run black Talon with you. You have to have a group carry you through EV or the like. Which is preferable since you can run EV normal in about 45 minutes wheres most of the flash points take over an hour. Yes, that's stupid.

 

They need to completely rethink flashpoints. Well there are a lot of things they need to completely rethink, flashpoints will be effected by that.

 

Why don't I want to run FP's:

Rewards aren't worth having

Time taken is prohibitive compared to other ways to get gear

Many bosses are completely unforgiving of one person dying, or just doing low numbers (say due to needing gear).

Dying can waste a huge amount of time because some people take forever to load in the game, and it takes a long time to run back when you die. Waiting for one person wastes my time.

Getting to a flashpoint can take forever due to the aforementioned loading issue.

There's no easy way to make a group to do flashpoints

There's no reason to wait around to see if people will want to do flashpoints, and running off and doing dailies just wastes peoples time.

 

See how these are all solvable, and solved problems elsewhere? Put a trickle of worthhile gear/tokens on FP's. All FP's should drop daily tokens and daily tokens should always be useful for example. Putting some BH commendations on dailies (and possibly increasing the BH comms costs of gear might be suitable). Cash as well. Killing a boss should be better than doing a daily, but not by much. Say each boss in a FP drops 45k + 2 daily coms + 1 BH com.

 

When you die you shouldn't be booted out of the instance, encounters reset just fine with people lying there dead, you should pop back up relatively near bosses, and the 'checkpoints' should be closer to bosses.

 

All instances should have a summoning inside the door. There should be no social points for selecting hard/normal in a group, so that you can share that quest (not waste peoples time) and then summon them without gimping them on social points.

 

There should be a daily (maybe that's where the cash/daily tokens etc.) should be, that randomly picks a new daily every day as 'today's daily'. That focuses everyone on the same daily, so everyone wants to do the same one today (easier to form a group), and gives people a chance to see all of them). Running the same heroic twice in one day should be possible but you only get the commendations once.

 

The HM Flashpoints vary widely in difficulty. A random LFG tool would just aggravate people ("oh, I got HM Lost Island instead of HM BT?!?"...rage quit/logoff) And I just can't imagine awarding a BH token for running HM BT. This might be so outlandish, that I'd quit the game.

 

A better solution is to scale the reward for the heroic FP to the difficulty of the FP, and allow people to pick which challenge they feel comfortable with. Even better than WoW's random HM daily, IMO.

 

BT is the entry-level HM FP, but I'm afraid everyone used it over and over to get their Columni gear(ignoring harder instances), because it is so easy. So let BT stay as-is as far as reward tokens go, and scale higher rewards as the difficulty level of the instance goes up.

Edited May 9, 2012 by Mustelidaen

[TheOnlyKyrenS]

Um.... You don't need columi to run HM FPs. Just level 50 purple mods to pull your weight. You get columi from OPs.

[Zannis]

The incentive to run old content over and over again needs to scale with new tiers of loot being introduced. Otherwise, people only run as long as they need to progress to the next tier. If you happen to hit 50, and there aren't that many people in the same situation as yourself, you'll have to wait until other catch up to you. Why should full Columi/Rakata players do Flashpoints more than a couple times (just to see the content) if none of the gear is useful to them?

 

The only real answer is in some sort of currency reward, as the OP suggests. The gear you attain from these need to be better than the best gear you were able to obtain from the last tier, but still beneath what you can attain in the current tier's Operations.

 

Also, one thing a lot of people don't take into consideration is the amount of TIME involved to clear these Flashpoints. They should never take more than an hour to complete. Anything longer than that should be split up into more than a single Flashpoint. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've had to tell guildies 'I don't have time to run X, so let's just do a quick BT and get the daily out of the way'.

 

Also OP, I know you're trying to 'keep the dungeon finder out of this', but with the tool's introduction in the next month or two, you won't be able to talk about one without talking about the other. So if you want to talk about incentive for running Flashpoints, you'd do well to consider how a group finder plays into that. Otherwise, your ideas, while good, are irrelevant.

[Mallorik]

The HM Flashpoints vary widely in difficulty. A random LFG tool would just aggravate people ("oh, I got HM Lost Island instead of HM BT?!?...rage quit/logoff) And I just can't imagine awarding a BH token for running HM BT. This might be so outlandish, that I'd quit the game.

 

 

That is why wow has gear scores for their gear, so they dont let undergeared players into heroics they cant handle. Again, something that should have been thought about years ago when this game was being made and other games were already doing it.

[Zannis]

The HM Flashpoints vary widely in difficulty. A random LFG tool would just aggravate people ("oh, I got HM Lost Island instead of HM BT?!?...rage quit/logoff) And I just can't imagine awarding a BH token for running HM BT. This might be so outlandish, that I'd quit the game.

 

A better solution is to scale the reward for the heroic FP to the difficulty of the FP, and allow people to pick which challenge they feel comfortable with. Even better than WoW's random HM daily, IMO.

 

BT is the entry-level HM FP, but I'm afraid everyone used it over and over to get their Columni gear(ignoring harder instances), because it is so easy. So let BT stay as-is as far as reward tokens go, and scale higher rewards as the difficulty level of the instance goes up.

 

So true. Bioware will pretty much be forced to go back and retune a lot of their content when the Dungeon Finder is released and the 'Everyone keeps dropping X!' threads invade the forums.

 

Even the story mode Ops, which will be included in the group finder, will have to be readjusted, with the exception of EV.

 

Everyone on these forums keeps shouting that all the PvE content is too easy, when the reality of it is that Bioware keeps missing the 'sweet spot'. The early stuff is entirely too easy, and the newer content being introduced is entirely too difficult.

[Mustelidaen]

That is why wow has gear scores for their gear, so they dont let undergeared players into heroics they cant handle. Again, something that should have been thought about years ago when this game was being made and other games were already doing it.

 

Good point. I think it would be a huge job to assign gear scores to all the items at this point. So the fallback is to let people pick the difficulty of the HM FP daily they want to do.

[hfxRos]

Good point. I think it would be a huge job to assign gear scores to all the items at this point. So the fallback is to let people pick the difficulty of the HM FP daily they want to do.

 

The game pretty much already has gear scores. My Columi gear is level 56. My companion's Tionese Gear is level 52. The numbers are already there, and non-moddable gear probably have non-visable levels that would be very easy to calculate.

[Mallorik]

The game pretty much already has gear scores. My Columi gear is level 56. My companion's Tionese Gear is level 52. The numbers are already there, and non-moddable gear probably have non-visable levels that would be very easy to calculate.

 

Yeah i forgot about that, all mods already have gear scores, and id be willing to be even non modable armor has gear scores we cant see, like wow and rift did at first.

[Mustelidaen]

The game pretty much already has gear scores. My Columi gear is level 56. My companion's Tionese Gear is level 52. The numbers are already there, and non-moddable gear probably have non-visable levels that would be very easy to calculate.

 

Good point. On the other hand, they would still have to assign numbers to other items like implants, shields, etc...it could take a lot of effort, I just don't know.

[Kissakias]

thats why nobody runs the lost island in a heavy server?