Musco opens 4 crates at level 90+ ZERO set gear

[peter_plankskull]

lol, can't believe what i read:

 

To be fair... he never did state all his community or even part of it, I mean... they do stay pretty in touch with there cm whale community, they never let there pockets overflow.

[Tsetso]

To be fair... he never did state all his community or even part of it, I mean... they do stay pretty in touch with there cm whale community, they never let there pockets overflow.

 

They don't stay in touch with the whales, they stay in touch with their wallets.

[peter_plankskull]

They don't stay in touch with the whales, they stay in touch with their wallets.

 

Damn... so many ref worthy quotes here... to bad it will never happen!

[Tsillah]

Well this whole system is a copy and paste of Destiny. In Destiny when you rank up your "Vanguard" rank you get a crate almost exactly like this. Sometimes you get a purple item, YAY!!!!! and some times you get a "Mote of Light"

 

This game has gone WAY off of the rails LOL. They keep introducing systems and currencies and ideas that get totally abandoned once they are deployed.

 

1.) Legacy System - ABANDONED

2.) Reputation System - ABANDONED

3.) Cartel Certificates - ABANDONED

4.) Outfit Designer - Deployed half baked... then ABANDONED

5.) Etc. etc. etc.

 

Come on guys....

 

Oh I agree with you.

 

I already mentioned this in another thread. You see, what will happen with this when the next expansion after comes? Think about it. Galactic Command will take you from level 1 to 100 and then you keep recycling levels for gear. What happens then when 6.0 comes out? Reset it all to level 1 so all will have to start the same system over again? This is yet another system that they'll have to get rid off next expansion, unless this is their plan for an actual maintenance mode. I mean 6.0 would mean new tiers of gear. You can't just add new tiers of gear when people are already at 100.

 

So yeah, if we don't go doom thinking and exclude maintenance mode, then GC will have to be abandoned for 6.0 ...basically it's a system made for one year or for the rest of the game's life without anymore changes. I don't see anything in between unless it's something different yet again.

[Falensawino]

I would like to believe that, but their lack of communication, or even acknowledgement, leads me to believe they have made up their minds. That they know what their customers want better than their customers, if forum feedback doesn't work because it's a one sided conversation, then the only thing left is to speak with our wallets.

lack of communication?

 

Bioware's just chosen to use twitch to reach out to the community every week. See all the weekly streams and even recorded chat replay here: https://www.twitch.tv/swtor/videos/all

 

or this:

One of the folks who went to the New York City meetup said that one of the staff members admitted that they're ignoring the forums.

 

Take that in whatever way you decide.

speaking with wallets is silent way to make them scramble to find answers why. If bioware's metrics don't help them figure out why, god help you if the devs start searching the forums for answers.

 

Game revenue and player purchases

 

In August 2015, a former employee of Machine Zone was arrested and charged with stealing proprietary data that included "player spending habits broken down by time, location, age and other characteristics" which showed, for example, "which in-game items generate the most revenue and where in the game players often quit."[22] The monetary value of the data was linked by the Wall Street Journal to the fact that "about 3% of mobile-game players buy virtual goodies, such as extra turns and special powers. Most spend only a few dollars a month, while a tiny fraction known as whales – a name derived from casinos – plunk down $50 or more a month."[22]

Devs are more likely to use their own tools to decrypt player happiness than anything read drivel

[Rion_Starkiller]

I was actually thinking the exact same thing but was too frightened to say anything in a rage thread.

 

Crates didn't look too bad to me, I don't care if it's green, blue or pink with purple spots. As long as it's an upgrade who cares? And if I don't get an upgrade, I've still got something to work towards.

 

What I think you guys are not understanding is that at GC level 96, it's reasonable to assume that no green gear would be an improvement. The only reason it was an improvement for Musco is because he didn't actually play his way to 96. He just gave himself that GC level for the stream.

 

You're avoiding the question, it must be hundreds of hours for 1 character whereas in 4.0 I could have 208 set bonus gear in say 10 hours. This is an issue.

 

Fun doing story over and over again? If you can play a story like kotfe more than 2-3 times well all I'll say is that you're not representative of most players. And with pvp you'll be playing against players luckier than you killing you over and over again purely because they are lucky enough to have got gear quicker than you or purely because they have grinded all aspects of the game.

 

You could have set bonus 208 set bonus gear immediately at 4.0 launch if you saved up 20k WZ comms. To be fair though, that's one of the reasons 4.0 was flawed, in my opinion. Not that I'm advocating RNG crates, bleh.

 

Have you heard of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes? They already did this

 

I put more time into SW GOH than SW TOR these days...

Edited November 18, 2016 by Rion_Starkiller

[ludoviccb]

It was taking roughly 50-70 Command Crates to get a full set of gear, at the right tier. With the inclusion of green and blue items that number of Command Crates required will multiply drastically. You're probably looking in the region (at a guess) of at least 150+ hours once you have reached Command Rank 100.

 

With a 1/4 chance to get a purple item from a crate, those are the 3 main cases for DPS (They got the highest number of possible pieces).

 

14 different purple (1 different pieces per slot):

50% of the players will get a full set with 132 crates

50% of the players will get 12 purple pieces useful gear in 92 crates

5% of the players will need at least 80 crates to get the 13th piece and be assured to get their set bonus.

5% of the players will need at least 164 crates to get the 14th piece.

 

21 different purple pieces (All the 224 pieces, 20 from tokens and the chapter 16 relics):

50% of the players will get a full set with 196 crates

50% of the players will get 12 purple pieces useful gear in 108 crates

5% of the players will need at least 120 crates to get the 13th piece and be assured to get their set bonus.

5% of the players will need at least 248 crates to get the 14th piece.

 

49 different purple pieces (All the 224 pieces + all the 220 random drop + all the 220 Vendor pieces):

50% of the players will get a full set with 452 crates

50% of the players will get 12 purple pieces useful gear in 248 crates

5% of the players will need at least 288 crates to get the 13th piece and be assured to get their set bonus.

5% of the players will need at least 580 crates to get the 14th piece.

 

My best case is 134 crates of grind to get a full set for 50% of the people. That is on top of at least 100 CXP level to grind to get to the top tier. Supposing that a playing night is of 3 hours and a player get a crate per hour, that give 3 crates a day. At that rate, that's 34 days of grind for the CXP and another 44 days to get a full gear set. If it's not the best case or if a player is unlucky, it can be a lot worse.

Edited November 18, 2016 by ludoviccb

[Tsetso]

There are some rumors that there will be 300 command levels and bis gear will start dropping after 180

[J_McSkill]

Just wait till they add the "Command Rank XP Boost" to the cartel market and make it pay to win.

[PlasmaJohn]

Devs are more likely to use their own tools to decrypt player happiness than anything read drivel

AHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAH *innnnnnhaaaale* HAHAHhha...haaaa... *wheeze*

 

good one

 

Oh I'm sure they're using their own tools all right. So far they've pretty much missed the mark for 3 or 4 years running. The recent quarterly report call-out pretty much condemns whatever analysis they have been doing. In simpler terms "It's done broke"

[Wintermutes]

OMG!!

FOUR crates with no set gear in it!

Proof that the RNG is rigged.

 

Well it's three crates that he actually opened on stream, and they all had GREEN gear in them.

 

Weekly heroics drop two pieces of levelled BLUE gear, and each of them takes only 10-15 minutes.

 

Random world mobs drop green gear constantly. I typically have to sell 10-15 such items per hour while leveling.

 

The fact is, even if every single crate was dropping a piece of set gear, you'd STILL quite often be frustrated by getting duplicates instead of the slots that you need. If 1/2 or 1/3 or God forbid 1/10 of crates drop set gear, that means you might not even get to the point of being frustrated by duplicates, because you might literally never get enough gear to form a full set, even without duplicates.

[Technohic]

I would like to believe that, but their lack of communication, or even acknowledgement, leads me to believe they have made up their minds. That they know what their customers want better than their customers, if forum feedback doesn't work because it's a one sided conversation, then the only thing left is to speak with our wallets.

 

I think the most telling thing is how they talked about having a bunch of blogs and posts to answer questions on the expansion and yet have decided to go silent without so much as even discussing the concerns.

[DanNV]

I think the most telling thing is how they talked about having a bunch of blogs and posts to answer questions on the expansion and yet have decided to go silent without so much as even discussing the concerns.

 

That's because they don't want everyone to drop before their sub renews. If everyone know how FUBAR it really is, they'd all be out of work by Christmas.

[Transcendent]

With a 1/4 chance to get a purple item from a crate

 

I think you're confusing the point about loot table dilution, and more specifically about chance and odds. If you have a 1 in 4 chance to get a purple item (it's actually not 1 in 4, but we'll go with your example for a second) then you are more likely to not get that item (3:1 odds).

 

Now extend your "1 in 4" to cover the entire loot table available per Command Crate. Assuming that the gear pool is including a full set of moddable green and blues, that'll be somewhere around 117 items. So 1 in 117 is actually closer to the figure, it definitely isn't "1 in 4".

 

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ERTS/3106383683x0x902862/EB2B27C5-AC60-4022-87CC-BA3C36B8C6E0/EA-Transcript-2016-08-02T21_00.pdf

 

Start on page 19 with the question about bugs from Doug Creutz.

 

Informative. Especially this part.

 

We won't always get the code exactly right, but it's as much about how we operate when we don't quite get it right as it is about when we do. And the commitment we make to gamers is to be very open and transparent with them, to listen to them, and always working diligently to deliver the best experience possible.

 

BioWare need to start reading their own forums and Reddit and start responding to the concerns over the direction they're taking this game. Otherwise, they're at complete odds with that statement.

Edited November 18, 2016 by Transcendent

[Andryah]

Well it's three crates that he actually opened on stream, and they all had GREEN gear in them.

Weekly heroics drop two pieces of levelled BLUE gear, and each of them takes only 10-15 minutes.

 

Random world mobs drop green gear constantly. I typically have to sell 10-15 such items per hour while leveling.

 

The fact is, even if every single crate was dropping a piece of set gear, you'd STILL quite often be frustrated by getting duplicates instead of the slots that you need. If 1/2 or 1/3 or God forbid 1/10 of crates drop set gear, that means you might not even get to the point of being frustrated by duplicates, because you might literally never get enough gear to form a full set, even without duplicates.

 

Did you even look at the stats on these modable green drops? They are better then top tier gear currently in game (with the exception of set bonus). They are gateway gear on the road to getting your set bonus gear, and being modable you can easily reuse the mods on alts with ease and not have to worry about max gearing an alt unless you intend said alt for end game PvP/Ops.

 

We also have no visibility into what drops in Heroic boxes in 5.0, but the fact is that in 4.0 once you hit a particular level, they no longer drop gear... but shift to token items for Alliance faction. No reason to believe this will change in 5.0, and so yes.. GC will be the pathway for cap level gear in 5.0. Whereas in 4.0, the non PvP/Ops pathway to gear was building Alliance faction and grinding for crystals.

 

The net of the GC approach is they are now giving players many content channels to earn GC xp and levels, and hence the gear grind at cap level is no longer specialized by content channel (OPs, PvP, etc)... it's now a broad based approach rather then a niche approach. I get that it rankles veterans in their established habits, but it remains to be seen if it is actually as evil as some insist it is.

 

As for what the actual time investment will be for players (on average) for a full set of max gear with set bonus... nobody.. nobody knows yet (except perhaps the internal alpha testers, who are under NDA and cannot speak). It could be as tedious as the sky-is-falling crowd insist it will be. It could also be much less so. We simply do not know yet, and no amount of doom and gloom in the forums is constructive at this point.

 

I would like to revisit something they said in an earlier stream... when they talked about why no monthly chapter releases (like they did with 4.0) in upcoming 5.0. They stated that they recognized that for the most part todays players are binge consumers of content. Hence, 4.0 monthly chapters did not achieve the goals they targeted. So, with 5.0 they move in a different direction of: making most content at level cap grant progress toward GC, and GC is the new binge food for the binge consumers. Will it work? No idea, and nobody here has any idea either at this point. I do give them credit for changing things over time, rather then just dig in and follow the deeply established formulaic pathways MMOs have settled into over the years since WoW landed in the market place.

 

Each player can choose to be open minded to change or not, and to prejudge before playing or wait and play before judging. Not surprisingly, many of the vocal posters here are choosing the closed minded prejudgment & condemn approach... as though it has actual weight of pressure or validity just because.

 

As I have said, personally, I'll take a wait and see approach to 5.0. It's definitely change, and it remains to be seen if it ends up being collectively good or collectively bad.

 

TL;DR: there is always a gear grind in MMOs. It differs from MMO to MMO, and it differs within an MMO over time.. but the key element is always present..... grind (work) for your gear. And like it or not, virtually all MMOs make the gear grind a gateway to end game content or min/maxing.

Edited November 18, 2016 by Andryah

[peter_plankskull]

Did you even look at the stats on these modable green drops? They are better then top tier gear currently in game (with the exception of set bonus). They are gateway gear on the road to getting your set bonus gear, and being modable you can easily reuse the mods on alts with ease and not have to worry about max gearing an alt unless you intend said alt for end game PvP/Ops.

 

He is level 96 GC command, im pretty sure any green gear that drops isn't going to be a improvement at that point.

[Tsetso]

He is level 96 GC command, im pretty sure any green gear that drops isn't going to be a improvement at that point.

 

Not that this gear helped him. He died like 3 times in a single pull.

[Andryah]

He is level 96 GC command, im pretty sure any green gear that drops isn't going to be a improvement at that point.

 

Typical for you Peter.

 

It was a play test. He entered with predetermined gear and GC level for the play test. His existing gear in no way reflected one way or the other on the fact that these "green trash drops" were better then the best gear in game right now (sans set bonus) AND said gear has value for alts that you will play but not need the very best gear for, and hence not want to run incremental effort to get them min/max gear.

 

Feel free to just vendor the "trash gear" without thought. Personally, I will look at each drop and determine if it has value for one of my alts and worth moving the mods, or if it would be better to decompose if for GC XP, or simply vendor it. It will vary by player, and by need of course, so it's nice that we have actual options in the players control rather then it being useless vendor trash just because it's "green".

Edited November 18, 2016 by Andryah

[Rion_Starkiller]

Typical for you Peter.

 

It was a play test. He entered with predetermined gear and GC level for the play test. His existing gear in no way reflected one way or the other on the fact that these "green trash drops" were better then the best gear in game right now (sans set bonus) AND said gear has value for alts that you will play but not need the very best gear for.

 

Feel free to just vendor the "trash gear" without thought. Personally, I will look at each drop and determine if it has value for one of my alts and worth moving the mods, or if it would be better to decompose if for GC XP, or simply vendor it. It will vary by player, and by need of course, so it's nice that we have actual options in the players control rather then it being useless vendor trash just because it's "green".

 

You don't get it. The color coded system isn't going anywhere. If anything, they are doubling down on it since SWGOH is using the exact same color coded system. In fact, if we take a page from SWGOH, the new "legendary" tier of gear will be GOLD (Gear Level I - III is green, IV - VI is blue, VII - XI is purple, and gear level XII in SWGOH is gold).

 

Had Musco not been artificially leveled, the GC crate basic 232 green gear would have been useless to him. While we can't discuss datamined info, if you had done a little bit of homework, you would at least know the new gear tiers.

Edited November 18, 2016 by Rion_Starkiller

[Transcendent]

Feel free to just vendor the "trash gear" without thought. Personally, I will look at each drop and determine if it has value for one of my alts and worth moving the mods, or if it would be better to decompose if for GC XP, or simply vendor it. It will vary by player, and by need of course, so it's nice that we have actual options in the players control rather then it being useless vendor trash just because it's "green".

 

Well to be fair, we had plenty of options in the current system. Without BioWare going all RNG on us and increasing the loot table to include green and blue gear.

 

It amuses me no end, BioWare are insistent on making schoolboy errors in development. Do you think that we would be seeing quite as many gripes if they had gone with Purple gear (no set bonus) / Purple Gear (set bonus) / Legendary Gear (no set bonus) / Legendary Gear (set bonus)?

 

Honestly, it's as if they decided they didn't have enough drama in their lives so they decided to add some more? Schoolboy errors. That's all I'm going to say.

[Exly]

He is level 96 GC command, im pretty sure any green gear that drops isn't going to be a improvement at that point.

 

Plus the gear didn't look that good when you compared it to the gear the he already had. When comparing gear it is necessary to know what you are comparing it to. Trying to compare it to Tionese, Rakata, or Black Hole gear would make no sense, and neither does comparing it to 4.0 gear. It needs to be compared to top tier 5.0 gear, and when doing that it still looks like green gear will nothing more than vendor trash.

Edited November 18, 2016 by Exly

[Falensawino]

AHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAH *innnnnnhaaaale* HAHAHhha...haaaa... *wheeze*

 

good one

 

Oh I'm sure they're using their own tools all right. So far they've pretty much missed the mark for 3 or 4 years running. The recent quarterly report call-out pretty much condemns whatever analysis they have been doing. In simpler terms "It's done broke"

Isn't that exactly what the command rank system confirms?

 

Bioware: "For the past 3 to 4 years we've been wrong to give players access to artifact gear via commendations/datacrystals and guarantee artifact drops each operation. Our system wasn't scummy enough to prevent player's addictions from ending."

Bioware: "Looking at our drop out data, we've figure out our previous system was too generous and not grindy enough to keep players from peaking and then quitting the treadmill."

 

Basically saying the past 4 to 5 years have spoiled the playerbase and outrage on the forum are experiencing entitlement, expecting artifact gear and set bonus gear too soon.

 

Player's kept reaching the carrot at the end of the stick, so now there's command rank.

Edited November 18, 2016 by Falensawino

[Khevar]

TL;DR: there is always a gear grind in MMOs. It differs from MMO to MMO, and it differs within an MMO over time.. but the key element is always present..... grind (work) for your gear. And like it or not, virtually all MMOs make the gear grind a gateway to end game content or min/maxing.

I feel the need to comment on this.

 

When SWTOR launched we had (for PvE anyway), the following types of gear grind:

 

1. End game schematics were random drops from operations bosses.

2. Gear drops were RNG for "which class", as well as "did I win the loot roll"

3. Which slot of gear came from specific bosses. (Need headpiece? Fight boss X)

 

Over time Bioware refined the gearing mechanisms (with ways that I feel were improvements):

 

4. Schematics could be learned by RE.

5. Gear commendations were added. You could lose the loot roll, but still gain currency to buy gear of any slot.

6. "Which class" RNG was replaced with a "gear token" that could be exchanged for gear for the class of your choice.

 

To wit, there was still RNG, but mechanics were added to the game to reduce the "sting" of bad RNG. Players had more control over the gearing experience.

 

The forthcoming changes with 5.0 do the following:

 

7. Commendations are being removed. Crafting is the only alternate way to obtain gear to fill in your missing slots.

8. Gear tokens are being removed. You can no longer choose gear for an off-spec, or for an alt character.

9. The ability to focus on a specific slot (i.e. fight boss X) has been removed.

10. The ability to focus on a specific tier of gear has been gated behind a potentially lengthy grind.

11. This grind is character specific, not legacy wide.

 

In my opinion, SWTOR had a pretty good system in place already. It had RNG, but many tools in place to mitigate bad RNG. It allowed a player more options to focus on a specific areas of gear they were lacking. It allowed a player who had spent time learning large-group content (and getting good at it), to short-cut the gearing process.

 

Every piece of data we have thus far on 5.0 gearing indicates that it is more RNG than we've ever had to deal with before, with fewer options to mitigate bad RNG, and new arbitrary barriers to participating in the gearing process (e.g. alt #2 has to start at command rank 1)

 

I'm willing to wait and try it out, but I'm going in with the expectation that it's NOT likely to be fun. We'll see.

Edited November 18, 2016 by Khevar

[curulz]

lack of communication?

 

Bioware's just chosen to use twitch to reach out to the community every week. See all the weekly streams and even recorded chat replay here: https://www.twitch.tv/swtor/videos/all

 

or this:

speaking with wallets is silent way to make them scramble to find answers why. If bioware's metrics don't help them figure out why, god help you if the devs start searching the forums for answers.

 

If you believe that a platform for them to selectively show items they want to, pick and choose softball questions while dodging the more controversial questions then ok. I do not count that as sufficient communication

 

A drop in subscriptions should lead them to a cause and effect analysis. And if they didn't use the forums then shame on them for not turning over every stone to understand why

Edited November 18, 2016 by curulz

[romercen]

me and my 2 brothers were working on pvp gear so we could have set bonuses

we werent done becuse we dont get to play much

not even close

so this sucks more and more and more everything i read about the changes

 

my mom has got many passes on her account for my 2 brothers and me for when we get good grades so we can play with her in ops or what ever without subbing

only time we get sub time is when my papaw pays for it

we are a really poor family that cant go bowling or other normal stuff like that becuse town is too far away

playing swtor with us kids not subbed is cheaper than eating out togeather even once in a month unless it was like mcpuke dollar menu

she only subs for the CC and being able to buy us mounts or what ever

she dont ever use her CC for any thing but those and passes and unlocking cartel market gear sets

she barely even play now becuse she take college classes thats an hour and a half away from our house and gas costs a lot

 

so what this means for my family is that we will REALLY NOT be able to play together like ever instead of just becuse we didnt do good enough in math or what ever

 

nobody cares about poor people becuse we dont matter

it isnt easy not having a normal life and this game helped becuse we got normal person fun that wasnt playing in the woods or creek or just sitting looking at the tv

we got to go do stuff even if it wasnt real stuff

 

i didnt even know about this stupid stupid change until today

merry stupid early christmas right