Hypothetical: Content release schedule

[Crossward]

Congratulations! You've been invited to a Bioware development meeting as a representative of the player base! You're flown out to Austin TX, sign your NDA and sit down and talk all about SWTOR with the developers. During the planning session, you discover that they are working on a new operation! You also learn that there are strict rules that Bioware Austin *must* adhere to when it comes to Operations:

 

1) It will have 5 bosses. Hard Mode and Story Mode must release at the same time. There will never be a Nightmare Mode.

 

2) The Operation will be a self contained side story like the Ravagers, and not tied in to the main plot like ToS or the Dread War.

 

3) Bioware's internal bug testing team will review the fights, but it will not be released on the PTS

 

4) If 20% of subscribers with a level 65 character do not defeat at least 2 bosses on any difficulty mode within 6 months of the operation being released, new operations will be deemed an inefficient use of resources and no new operations will ever be released.

 

You and Bioware Austin discuss the concept and come up with something really fun. You're confident that it will be a solid operation, easily on par with (Your Favorite Operation).

 

They say they will release this Operation in December of 2016. However, they could also release one boss a month starting in July. The operation after this one won't be available until December 2017. The developers are split 50/50 on how to release it, and look to you to cast the tiebreaker.

 

How do you vote?

[KeyboardNinja]

I abstain and use my ballot to write in the margins about how important it is that they release more than 5 bosses per year. I might also spend a fair bit of time grandstanding about how shoddy the current endgame is and how the game as a whole has been mismanaged into the ground. There might be some abbreviated "story is not content," too.

 

And I would also be reminded that the developers are human and actually very nice people who want to do the right thing for the game. Over the years, I've met a reasonable percentage of the devs, and never came away from the encounter with an actively poor opinion of anyone. Doesn't mean I agree with their decisions. If anything, it makes me more disappointed to know that completely reasonable human beings made these decisions.

[GrandLordMenace]

Congratulations! You've been invited to a Bioware development meeting as a representative of the player base! You're flown out to Austin TX, sign your NDA and sit down and talk all about SWTOR with the developers. During the planning session, you discover that they are working on a new operation! You also learn that there are strict rules that Bioware Austin *must* adhere to when it comes to Operations:

 

1) It will have 5 bosses. Hard Mode and Story Mode must release at the same time. There will never be a Nightmare Mode.

 

2) The Operation will be a self contained side story like the Ravagers, and not tied in to the main plot like ToS or the Dread War.

 

3) Bioware's internal bug testing team will review the fights, but it will not be released on the PTS

 

4) If 20% of subscribers with a level 65 character do not defeat at least 2 bosses on any difficulty mode within 6 months of the operation being released, new operations will be deemed an inefficient use of resources and no new operations will ever be released.

 

You and Bioware Austin discuss the concept and come up with something really fun. You're confident that it will be a solid operation, easily on par with (Your Favorite Operation).

 

They say they will release this Operation in December of 2016. However, they could also release one boss a month starting in July. The operation after this one won't be available until December 2017. The developers are split 50/50 on how to release it, and look to you to cast the tiebreaker.

 

How do you vote?

 

I don't have metrics, but I am almost 100% positive that more than 20% of subscribers with a level 65 character have step foot and continue to play the current operations that we now call "recycled content." On the ebon hawk, the pugging scene is still quite real in what we call the Allies channel, and there's a newly emerged class of "semihardmode" intermediary raiders that are well on their way to filling the gaps left by the people that quit game in the past 6 months.

 

I think a new operation NEEDS to be released on the PTS, and here's why: progression doesn't matter anymore. No one will care about the progression in this game, the concept of a World First doesn't matter anymore, the majority of people would just desire a game where we have NEW, RELATIVELY BUG FREE DIFFICULT CONTENT.

 

PTS testing is necessary for Bioware to be able to make the SM experience fun and playable by a large subset of the population, but make it a closed beta. I do not in any way shape or form trust Bioware to be able to create a puggable SM, and a truly difficult HM, without some form of tangible player input.

 

I think 2 bosses need to be released every 2 months, culminating into 10 bosses in two operations (There would be a short hiatus), but I don't think they are capable of doing that. They hamstrung themselves dev team wise and have no clue how to dig themselves out of the rut.

Edited February 29, 2016 by GrandLordMenace

[Jerba]

2) The Operation will be a self contained side story like the Ravagers, and not tied in to the main plot like ToS or the Dread War.

The devs have already stated twice that any future content including operations would tie into the story, so it's more likely that we'll get something like ToS/Oricon instead of Rav.

 

They say they will release this Operation in December of 2016. However, they could also release one boss a month starting in July. The operation after this one won't be available until December 2017. The developers are split 50/50 on how to release it, and look to you to cast the tiebreaker.

The earliest we could get an operation would be with 5.0, and the devs have already stated that 5.0 will not release this year, so you're looking more at Spring 2017. (Though I'm still at only a ~33% chance of getting a new op with 5.0)

 

Anyway, to your question: I don't think it matters much, by July the remaining veteran raiders will be gone, and a single boss will not cause them to stay.

The players who do stick around may enjoy it, the question is why bother? Single bosses like Gold Fury and Monolith already have no one playing them (who wants to put in all that work for a single random item for 8 players?). Unless they have it drop something like 228 gear, no one will run it except for curiousity, and then only once.

If they'd want to get players to run it, it has to have 5 bosses on release, and if it should not just become another operation, it needs to have something to differentiate it, like better loot (228+) or a lot of credits (e.g. 1 million credits for running through the whole operation on HM).

BioWare drove themselves into a corner and I don't know how they can get out of it. There will never be a progression-based endgame in SWTOR, so having one new operation would change nothing, it would just be another operation in the rotation for SM groupfinder or highlighted HM.

Now, if they started regularily releasing a new boss/operation, like 1 raid boss every month for next few years, that would make it interesting, but one single another operation won't help unless they change the reward system.

Edited March 1, 2016 by Jerba

[Crossward]

BioWare drove themselves into a corner and I don't know how they can get out of it. There will never be a progression-based endgame in SWTOR, so having one new operation would change nothing, it would just be another operation in the rotation for SM groupfinder or highlighted HM..

 

Interesting point, and probably worthy of another Hypothetical topic.

 

If new Operations have 228+ gear, the old ones are devalued, which defeats the purpose of scaling them up in the first place.

 

If new Operations drop the same gear, there is no new gear progression. Would new vanity items make it more appealing?

 

If they do nothing, more raiders leave. If raiders leave, there's no point in making Operations. This seems to be where we are now.

[Jerba]

If new Operations drop the same gear, there is no new gear progression. Would new vanity items make it more appealing?

Progression raiders have never been the people interested in vanity items, so we'd have to look at the casual players. Solo players will refuse to group up for operations, no matter how nice the vanity item is. Which leaves only a small part of the playerbase to begin with.

 

With a raid focused not around gear progression, the vanity items have to motivate the players to run it more than once. Mounts and pets are a problem because once you got them, there's no need to do it again.

Decorations are better because you can collect them multiple times but I already have more decorations than I can ever decorate, so unless it is a really, really nice decoration, I just want to collect it but not place it in my stronghold.

Sadly, the vanity items are dominated too much by the Cartel Market. They already released so many requested items that there's not much left to motivate players - we have Revan's armor, we have a swoop bike, we have nearly every animal mount there is. So I'm not sure what they can do.

 

Some things to consider:

• Binding: Only a BoP item can remain exclusive; if they make it BoE, everyone can just buy it off the GTN (like the new statues added with 4.1). But if they make it BoP and lock it behind HM, it will lock out many casual players from getting it, outside of sales runs (which I am an opponent of).
  
• Drop rate: A 1% drop rate would not be a big motivation to run the content. Just look at the mounts from EC or TFB NiM, they are so rare that no players are trying to farm it. Red Sphere is an exception because Xeno can be run so rarely that players will always do him during Gree event. On the other hand, if it had a 100% drop rate, the reward would be meaningless since everyone can get it.
  

 

There is one thing we suggested in the Eternal Championship thread which I found interesting: Having the final boss grant a 4 hour buff that would increase DPS/HPS by x%. In other words, consumable food buffs like in WoW.

Right now, we can quickly gear up to 224 and then there's no way to improve it. If the devs put in more ways to improve your character, similar to crafted buffs or the Nightmare Pilgrim buff, that would encourage players to run content I think. How exactly they'd do it and how to ensure it is not OP I'm not sure. But for example, they could make it so clearing a SM operation would give you a buff that you can then use to run HM/NiM, or something similar. I know progression players are offended by the NiM crystals and this isn't helping, but it would be a solution to the problem of: How to motivate players to run the content more than once.

 

If they do nothing, more raiders leave. If raiders leave, there's no point in making Operations. This seems to be where we are now.

Yep, that's how it is. The decision on whether to develop another operation is closely tied to the question on how to structure the endgame. I don't see a way for them to motivate players to run the new operation unless they go back to the pre-4.0 model of WoW-style progression raiding.

Edited March 1, 2016 by Jerba

[gabigool]

Congratulations! You've been invited to a Bioware development meeting as a representative of the player base! You're flown out to Austin TX, sign your NDA and sit down and talk all about SWTOR with the developers. During the planning session, you discover that they are working on a new operation! You also learn that there are strict rules that Bioware Austin *must* adhere to when it comes to Operations:

 

1) It will have 5 bosses. Hard Mode and Story Mode must release at the same time. There will never be a Nightmare Mode.

 

2) The Operation will be a self contained side story like the Ravagers, and not tied in to the main plot like ToS or the Dread War.

 

3) Bioware's internal bug testing team will review the fights, but it will not be released on the PTS

 

4) If 20% of subscribers with a level 65 character do not defeat at least 2 bosses on any difficulty mode within 6 months of the operation being released, new operations will be deemed an inefficient use of resources and no new operations will ever be released.

 

You and Bioware Austin discuss the concept and come up with something really fun. You're confident that it will be a solid operation, easily on par with (Your Favorite Operation).

 

They say they will release this Operation in December of 2016. However, they could also release one boss a month starting in July. The operation after this one won't be available until December 2017. The developers are split 50/50 on how to release it, and look to you to cast the tiebreaker.

 

How do you vote?

 

I wouldn't vote, and rather say to them that the above scenario is ridiculous.

 

1) Future Operations content needs to go back to 3 tier. If there was ever a game that needed it it's this one. BW has gone out of their way to ensure newer players to this game develop no skill, class or mechanic understanding. There is no way to reconcile the current 1-65 experience and a two-tier Operations system. 40% of the released content will never be clearable by most people. Go back to the way it was. It used to be perfect.

 

2) BW needs to get this stupid idea out of their head. No. One. Cares. We just want something to do. In fact, if it IS story-related, it creates new problems when solo-players cry that they can't do it.

 

3) This just can't happen.

 

4) This condition cannot exist because of (3). What will be wrong with these encounters? Will they be tuned wrong, like NM DG? Will they have engine mechanics that their LAN testing won't find like UL? Will they have just straight up broken mechanics like SoA? or will they have broken telegraphs, like say, all fights do now. In fact, has the current bug been fixed by this content release? That's dubious at this point. And, at a more basic level, how about BW mans up and takes some accountability for the metrics. Perhaps their metrics are less a picture of what the people here are doing but rather who they've chased off. If they had a reasonable track record of Operations release cadence AND quality they'd have a lot more subscribers today.

 

As far as release - no one who is remotely entertained by Operations content wants to see a one-month per boss release. That's foolish.

 

Do it properly, test it, PTS it, and release it. Give a few guilds access to a closed PTS when NM is ready and release NM. Just for once, do it properly and watch what happens.

 

And FFS make it coincide with a level cap raise, so that the reams of current NM content is available to the casuals that were having fun with it pre-4.0 - those same people who have literally nothing to do right now.