Removed DS/LS choice on Balmorra

[Raphael_diSanto]

What gives, BioWare? Story, character definition and choice are big draws for me and probably the main reasons why it's the only MMO I currently play.

 

I'm leveling a new character (and still finding gems of dialogue that I hadn't found before) and it's been fun. But I'm currently on Balmorra, and it appears you've removed an LS/DS choice. I see no reason for this. It's part of the planet story, not the Smuggler's class story, so it'll affect everyone who does this on Balmorra. The mission is Clearing A Path, and it's the mission you get right after you rescue Iain Sarkus. Go in, kill Admiral Riserre and then contact Sarkus on the holo to slice the satellite defense system.

 

Now, unless my memory serves me incorrectly - And according to the ZAM quest list here: http://www.zam.com/wiki/Balmorra_(TOR_Quest_Series) it doesn't - I should get a choice there. Be all hard-arsed and darksided and save the republic's supply center, or be a lilly-livered tree-hugger and lightsided and save the poor slicers.

 

But no! No, my smuggler does not get that choice any more (And she's pretty darksided, so I was looking forward to hearing Sarkus whine like a preteen about the choice). Now, instead, it auto selects the lightsided choice and she says "I won't let innocent people die!"

 

What the heck?

 

youtube vid for proof: Choice should happen at around 1:05. Those of you familiar with this mission will know exactly what I'm talking about.....

 

 

I mean, sure. It's just one choice. And it doesn't actually affect anything in the greater scheme of things. And it's not like the game actually gives you LS points for railroading you into the LS choice. But why even remove it? It makes no sense. It obviously took work to remove it and from what I can tell, it doesn't add anything to the game or the story by doing so. Seems like wasted effort to me.

Edited January 21, 2016 by Raphael_diSanto

[Keta]

I'm presuming you have the display alignment option turned on in settings? Or were watching after you made the choices? No chance you missed the alignment points be granted in game?

 

I haven't done those missions in quite sometime so I don't recall what happened last time. Personally I think they're both bad choices.

[Aeristash]

They removed the darkside point gain from agreeing to marry doc too. So not a fan of that decision, as it spits on lore in favor of fan service. The Jedi do not allow romantic attachments and willingly choosing to betray your oaths to indulge in such should be rewarded appropriately. It is a dark side action, as it's lying, self indulgence and betrayal. I'd have still made the choice to marry, even if I had to take the point hit, but taking it away altogether killed immersion for me. It felt like rules were unnecessarily being bent to pander to my benefit.

Not cool.

Edited January 21, 2016 by Aeristash

[Sebaddon]

I actually just did the same mission today and you're correct OP, the option that was there has been removed. It's especially strange since afterwards they still say "Thank you for going after them" while the commander doesn't approve of your "decision".

 

I know it still was there before 4.0.4.

 

Indeed a random thing to remove :s (Is it possibly bugged?)

[Raphael_diSanto]

I'm presuming you have the display alignment option turned on in settings? Or were watching after you made the choices? No chance you missed the alignment points be granted in game?

 

I haven't done those missions in quite sometime so I don't recall what happened last time. Personally I think they're both bad choices.

 

No, the choice just doesn't exist anymore. You don't get a dialogue wheel. It just skips straight to "Yeah, let's save the slicers", hehe.

[Raphael_diSanto]

They removed the darkside point gain from agreeing to marry doc too. So not a fan of that decision, as it spits on lore in favor of fan service. The Jedi do not allow romantic attachments and willingly choosing to betray your oaths to indulge in such should be rewarded appropriately. It is a dark side action, as it's lying, self indulgence and betrayal. I'd have still made the choice to marry, even if I had to take the point hit, but taking it away altogether killed immersion for me. It felt like rules were unnecessarily being bent to pander to my benefit.

Not cool.

 

Yeah, that's not cool

[Raphael_diSanto]

I actually just did the same mission today and you're correct OP, the option that was there has been removed. It's especially strange since afterwards they still say "Thank you for going after them" while the commander doesn't approve of your "decision".

 

I know it still was there before 4.0.4.

 

Indeed a random thing to remove :s (Is it possibly bugged?)

 

Oh well. I guess my darksided smuggler will have to just rescue the slicers.

[Xo-Lara]

Yeah, I noticed that too. I wondered if I was the only one not to get the dialogue wheel. It was the option I was going to take anyway but I thought it strange it was missing.

[Nothing_Shines]

I can pretty much guarantee that the person who came up with an original storyline for anything in vanilla SWTOR, as well as whoever made the original decision as to what would or would not be a choice during conversations AND what would earn points on the Light/Dark track, is no longer an employee of BW working on this game. If they are, they are no longer making the decisions that lead to things like the Doc alignment issue spoiler tagged above or that mentioned by the OP that are apparently now on the list of things BW Austin thinks should be tinkered with while game systems like the GTN search function and EVENTS are still BROKEN. The people making these decisions were handed a product they did not make and so they have zero investment in that product or real understanding of the intent behind how it was made or what it was supposed to be. OF COURSE they are going to start messing things up as they move forward with "their vision".

 

Look at what happened with the heroics throughout the entirety of the vanilla game with 4.0: the closing cutscenes, along with their dialogue options, L/S points, and influence effects WERE ALL REMOVED FROM THE GAME. If you're lucky, you get to hear a snippet of the original convo in a commlink voice over. A voice over from a character you've likely never met about an issue you have zero investment in.

 

Entire plots and characters and VA performances were just erased. Not fed into the holo completion system used when a group member turns something in and you're half a planet away, so you can appear as a holo and have the convo from anywhere. BW couldn't be bothered to use a system already in place for 4 years. They decided to ERASE STORY in their "STORY FOCUSED GAME" so people, who are supposedly joining the game to experience the story, could skip the story and finish the missions instantly.

 

Try to wrap your mind around that. Perceived desire for instant gratification conflicted with story focused game ... so the devs erased the story.

 

-They left the option to start the heroics with the original questgivers, despite also adding instant heroic pickup terminals everywhere, but removed the option to finish the heroics with those same questgivers.

 

-They already had the group holo conversation system that could have been adapted for solo use. They didn't use it.

 

-They added a companion system to the game that allows you to instantly teleport to the location of a particular questgiver from a dropdown menu that could have been adapted to a planetary mission list that did the same thing. They didn't use that.

 

-They added mission items that take you to mission start points anywhere in the game that could just as easily take you to the mission completion point when you were done. They didn't use them.

 

-They changed taxi hubs and QT points to instant discovery upon entry into an area and gave a legacy perk to reduce QT cooldown to essentially 0 seconds. They didn't use that, either.

 

-They went with option 'Z': remove story elements from the game and render storylines outside of the main character plots/KOTFE, essentially non-events. Some guy wants me to kill some other guys because who cares just give me the crate. #Betterthanspacebarringiguess

 

But they didn't just use this tactic with the teleport heroics. Go run the Black Hole daily area missions, for instance. The conclusion of the area for Imperials, where you speak with the general about killing Torvix: REMOVED. Now you just hand in the mission. WHY? This isn't an instant heroic mission. It can only be picked up through the convo with the general. What possible reason was there to remove the end cap convo for this series of missions? BW Answer: uh, who cares, NERD? Go grind more crates.

 

I heard you liked story so I put a few hours of NEW story in your game about story while quietly erasing hours upon hours of OLD story, resulting in a net-loss of STORY.

[BrianDavion]

this sounds more like a bug then anything, I'd bug report it.

 

as for the Doc DS choice. this seems fair to me. every supplement in existance has been pretty open that the jedi code is not the light side. and breaking the jedi code is not automaticly dark side

[MiguelGx]

Choice is an illusion!

[lhawke]

I found it pretty annoying that my character is taking a moral stance on the situation without my input.

If a quest is changed the dialogue needs to be updated as well.

 

"i'm not about to let innocent people die

 

Jedi Knight spoiler

 

She let a small settlement die because she thought the consequences of saving them would be severe

 

So the above makes her a bit of a looney.

 

There is another quest (imperial) that has been removed but the dialogue for it remains, some tidying up would be nice.

[Aeristash]

this sounds more like a bug then anything, I'd bug report it.

 

as for the Doc DS choice. this seems fair to me. every supplement in existance has been pretty open that the jedi code is not the light side. and breaking the jedi code is not automaticly dark side

 

It's lying, self indulgence and betrayal. Those are dark side traits, not light. It's not about the rules of the Jedi code in general, but how you go about breaking it. You're not going against the masters to stubbornly save some far rim system that the republic has chosen to sacrifice in order to save others, you're engaging in deception to satisfy yourself. And that should be rewarded appropriately.

[menofhorror]

bump, to this day I still don't understand why this was removed?

[OldVengeance]

Well, Knights don't have to take any Darkside points to romance Kira. It seems fair the same is true for Doc. I know they talked before the game came out about Jedi who pursue romance are on the path to the Darkside, but they seemed to have changed their mind about that when the final version came out because Kira, Nadia and Iresso all can be romanced without any alignment changes. Doc is the only one where earning DS points is necessary, so I can't help but wonder if they just forgot with him. Edited September 23, 2017 by OldVengeance

[cagthehack]

Well, Knights don't have to take any Darkside points to romance Kira. It seems fair the same is true for Doc. I know they talked before the game came out about Jedi who pursue romance are on the path to the Darkside, but they seemed to have changed their mind about that when the final version came out because Kira, Nadia and Iresso all can be romanced without any alignment changes. Doc is the only one where earning DS points is necessary, so I can't help but wonder if they just forgot with him.

 

Actually, if I remember correctly, in the first couple of versions of this game you DID take DS points if you romanced Kira. They changed it.

[OldVengeance]

Which choices were the ones that required DS points?

[Xaphiero]

What gives, BioWare? Story, character definition and choice are big draws for me and probably the main reasons why it's the only MMO I currently play.

 

I'm leveling a new character (and still finding gems of dialogue that I hadn't found before) and it's been fun. But I'm currently on Balmorra, and it appears you've removed an LS/DS choice. I see no reason for this. It's part of the planet story, not the Smuggler's class story, so it'll affect everyone who does this on Balmorra. The mission is Clearing A Path, and it's the mission you get right after you rescue Iain Sarkus. Go in, kill Admiral Riserre and then contact Sarkus on the holo to slice the satellite defense system.

 

Now, unless my memory serves me incorrectly - And according to the ZAM quest list here: http://www.zam.com/wiki/Balmorra_(TOR_Quest_Series) it doesn't - I should get a choice there. Be all hard-arsed and darksided and save the republic's supply center, or be a lilly-livered tree-hugger and lightsided and save the poor slicers.

 

But no! No, my smuggler does not get that choice any more (And she's pretty darksided, so I was looking forward to hearing Sarkus whine like a preteen about the choice). Now, instead, it auto selects the lightsided choice and she says "I won't let innocent people die!"

 

What the heck?

 

youtube vid for proof: Choice should happen at around 1:05. Those of you familiar with this mission will know exactly what I'm talking about.....

 

 

I mean, sure. It's just one choice. And it doesn't actually affect anything in the greater scheme of things. And it's not like the game actually gives you LS points for railroading you into the LS choice. But why even remove it? It makes no sense. It obviously took work to remove it and from what I can tell, it doesn't add anything to the game or the story by doing so. Seems like wasted effort to me.

 

My well of sadness fills. It was such a good moral choice point.

[ForfiniteStories]

Don't mind me. Just dropping by to express my disappointment on the fact that the issues the OP and Nothing-Shines made haven't been amended.

 

Where o' where has our subscription money gone? Oh where o' where could it be?

 

Oh, right, it's being spent on making Khem Val romanceable, new tiers of gear, and returning our beloved companions with an extra dosage of gay.

[MandFlurry]

Yeah, that's not cool

 

To say that Marriage is a Dark side thing is Wrong, it is Not evil, and never was. Mentally for anyone to say marriage is wrong is mentally un-balanced. It may be wrong in the sense of the Jedi order, only if they think that you have attachment issues, whoever Marriage was Never wrong in any way, as it being "dubbed a Dark-side/Evil choice, as it isn't". It is about a personal choice in being for or against what you may think of the Jedi order and Sith order, as even Sith do not believe in attachments impairing your judgement in your ascension, and making Sith choices, where love can get in your way.

Edited October 26, 2018 by MandFlurry

[SteveTheCynic]

To say that Marriage is a Dark side thing is Wrong, it is Not evil, and never was. Mentally for anyone to say marriage is wrong is mentally un-balanced. It may be wrong in the sense of the Jedi order, only if they think that you have attachment issues, whoever Marriage was Never wrong in any way, as it being "dubbed a Dark-side/Evil choice, as it isn't". It is about a personal choice in being for or against what you may think of the Jedi order and Sith order, as even Sith do not believe in attachments impairing your judgement in your ascension, and making Sith choices, where love can get in your way.

The fundamental problem with what you say here is the assumption of an equivalence between "Dark Side Action" and "Evil Action".

 

Lots of DS things *are* evil, but not all. A Jedi is supposed to calm and focussed and in control of his emotions, none of which are really compatible with falling in love and getting married and doing what people in love do when they are alone together in the dark. (No, I don't mean "sleeping", except in a euphemistic sense.) It is that conflict that makes shacking up with Doc a DS choice, especially because you keep it secret from the Order and say, more or less, "To Hell with the Order's rules, let's do this." It's not, as such, that following the Light Side requires celibacy. It is, rather, that it requires *chastity* (sexual behaviour in accordance with societal and/or religious norms(1)), and the Jedi's view of that is extremely narrow, but equally, the JK shacking up with Doc fails most Earthly chastity tests as well.

 

There's even at least one choice in the game where the LS choice is LS because it is *less*evil* than the DS choice. It's still not in any way "good", but it it is not a evil than the DS choice.

 

Go to the taxi point near the Colossus on DK, and you will find a Sith whose name escapes me who is even more of a googly-eyed maniac than even the most crazed DS Inquisitor/Warrior. He offers a mission to murder the rebellious slaves in the area by poisoning their water supplies. As the mission evolves, you end up with two choices: [DS]follow the lord's plan of using just enough poison to kill them very slowly and very painfully, or [LS]follow the assistant's request to use a bigger dose so that the slaves die quickly when you murder them. I wouldn't describe either of those choices as anything other than evil.

 

(1) The content of those norms is variable, but does not always imply celibacy.

[Tofu_Shark]

This bug still exists in 6.1c.

 

I remember when I first played it a long time ago, the light side icon actually showed up upon "making" the choice for me, and I was confused. It wasn't until later that I found out there was something wrong with the conversation.

 

I can pretty much guarantee that the person who came up with an original storyline for anything in vanilla SWTOR, as well as whoever made the original decision as to what would or would not be a choice during conversations AND what would earn points on the Light/Dark track, is no longer an employee of BW working on this game. If they are, they are no longer making the decisions that lead to things like the Doc alignment issue spoiler tagged above or that mentioned by the OP that are apparently now on the list of things BW Austin thinks should be tinkered with while game systems like the GTN search function and EVENTS are still BROKEN. The people making these decisions were handed a product they did not make and so they have zero investment in that product or real understanding of the intent behind how it was made or what it was supposed to be. OF COURSE they are going to start messing things up as they move forward with "their vision".

 

Look at what happened with the heroics throughout the entirety of the vanilla game with 4.0: the closing cutscenes, along with their dialogue options, L/S points, and influence effects WERE ALL REMOVED FROM THE GAME. If you're lucky, you get to hear a snippet of the original convo in a commlink voice over. A voice over from a character you've likely never met about an issue you have zero investment in.

 

Entire plots and characters and VA performances were just erased. Not fed into the holo completion system used when a group member turns something in and you're half a planet away, so you can appear as a holo and have the convo from anywhere. BW couldn't be bothered to use a system already in place for 4 years. They decided to ERASE STORY in their "STORY FOCUSED GAME" so people, who are supposedly joining the game to experience the story, could skip the story and finish the missions instantly.

 

Try to wrap your mind around that. Perceived desire for instant gratification conflicted with story focused game ... so the devs erased the story.

 

-They left the option to start the heroics with the original questgivers, despite also adding instant heroic pickup terminals everywhere, but removed the option to finish the heroics with those same questgivers.

 

-They already had the group holo conversation system that could have been adapted for solo use. They didn't use it.

 

-They added a companion system to the game that allows you to instantly teleport to the location of a particular questgiver from a dropdown menu that could have been adapted to a planetary mission list that did the same thing. They didn't use that.

 

-They added mission items that take you to mission start points anywhere in the game that could just as easily take you to the mission completion point when you were done. They didn't use them.

 

-They changed taxi hubs and QT points to instant discovery upon entry into an area and gave a legacy perk to reduce QT cooldown to essentially 0 seconds. They didn't use that, either.

 

-They went with option 'Z': remove story elements from the game and render storylines outside of the main character plots/KOTFE, essentially non-events. Some guy wants me to kill some other guys because who cares just give me the crate. #Betterthanspacebarringiguess

 

But they didn't just use this tactic with the teleport heroics. Go run the Black Hole daily area missions, for instance. The conclusion of the area for Imperials, where you speak with the general about killing Torvix: REMOVED. Now you just hand in the mission. WHY? This isn't an instant heroic mission. It can only be picked up through the convo with the general. What possible reason was there to remove the end cap convo for this series of missions? BW Answer: uh, who cares, NERD? Go grind more crates.

 

I heard you liked story so I put a few hours of NEW story in your game about story while quietly erasing hours upon hours of OLD story, resulting in a net-loss of STORY.

I 100% agree with you. And if you're still around, you noticed they started removing the heroic mission NPCs you pick up the missions from if you run them as you experience the story. There was no reason for that either! A lot of the newer players don't even know about this stuff. Bioware seems to have adopted a policy of "out of sight, out of mind, out of our list of bugs to fix or content restore."

Edited March 29, 2020 by Tofu_Shark