Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ - Road Map 2017

[Bulldogs_Rule]

That's awesome. Welcome back for sure. I have my unopened Collector's Edition sitting in my home office. During Alpha and internal Beta testing, I picked up two Shae Vizla statues for completing Act III on multiple toons. Both of those are still in their original boxes, too.

 

 

Although I never unsubscribed, I have not put in any meaningful time since finishing the chapters once, but this communication is making me consider putting my gaming time into SWTOR again. My collector's edition is at my parent's house, as I am only renting a room, but seeing how responsive the team has been the past couple of months has given me hope that someday when I own a house that the statue will be on the mantle while I play the game.

[casirabit]

Can you please do one thing with the galactic command? Please put a drop down box on each of the activities and list all the place you can go and let us chose instead of having to circle through them all a million times (okay an exaggeration but it feels like it).

 

Thanks!

[DarthSpuds]

 

Just because you dislike some content, doesn't mean the vast majority of the game does. PvP instances are dead because OWPvP is dead.

 

Across MMORPGs in general less than 25% of players regularly engage in PvP.

That has been fairly constant almost since the advent of MMORPG PvP.

 

ESO is probably the only traditional MMORPG that has ever got anywhere close to having 50% of players engage in PvP and that is only because so many Sky Shards, and Lorebooks are hidden in Cyrodiil, and even ESO PvP is in decline.

 

The idea that, to use your words, " the vast majority of the game" enjoys PvP is utterly laughable. I am in a guild of 100 or so people, and I can count on one hand the number of people that ever engage in PvP.

 

Please Note: I am NOT saying PvP should be dumped. I am NOT saying PvP doesn't deserve some love from the Devs.

 

I AM saying PvP Instances are dead because not that many people enjoy or engage with PvP.

 

All The Best

[DarthSpuds]

Can you please do one thing with the galactic command? Please put a drop down box on each of the activities and list all the place you can go and let us chose instead of having to circle through them all a million times (okay an exaggeration but it feels like it).

 

Thanks!

 

 

^ This

 

Took me 43 attempts to get the Balmora H2s to show the other day for Conquest Points.

 

And I have never once managed to get the Alderaan H2s to pop.

 

All The Best

[EzioMessi]

Across MMORPGs in general less than 25% of players regularly engage in PvP.

That has been fairly constant almost since the advent of MMORPG PvP.

 

ESO is probably the only traditional MMORPG that has ever got anywhere close to having 50% of players engage in PvP and that is only because so many Sky Shards, and Lorebooks are hidden in Cyrodiil, and even ESO PvP is in decline.

 

The idea that, to use your words, " the vast majority of the game" enjoys PvP is utterly laughable. I am in a guild of 100 or so people, and I can count on one hand the number of people that ever engage in PvP.

 

Please Note: I am NOT saying PvP should be dumped. I am NOT saying PvP doesn't deserve some love from the Devs.

 

I AM saying PvP Instances are dead because not that many people enjoy or engage with PvP.

 

All The Best

 

I never said the vast majority of the game enjoys PvP.... You are very literally NOT using my words there.

 

Just because you dislike some content, doesn't mean the vast majority of the game [dislikes it too].

 

I am not saying that the vast majority of the game likes PvP, I am saying a significant enough minority enjoys it that it's fallacious to argue that "most" players want to see PvP dead like the person I was replying to.

 

Most reasonable estimates show that the number of people who regularly PvP in this game is somewhere between 20% and 50%, more likely on the lower end of it, and the number of them who actively enjoy it and aren't just doing it is in all likelihood lower.

 

Read my post again. I was mocking the notion that the vast majority of the game dislike PvP. That's simply not true, and it is very easy to gauge that from just doing a search for every existing warzone, arena, GSF instance at any given time, and it's also very to gauge from looking at the Ranked leaderboards. No one in their right mind would say that the vast majority of the game PvPs, but it is absurd to claim that "not that many people enjoy or engage with PvP" when the simplest search will show you that warzones are far more active than, say, Operations.

 

The reason OWPvP is dead is because it isn't ever rewarded at all, and in an MMO, players will do an activity that rewards them and somewhat aligns with their interest, rather than a fully aligned one with no rewards. Unless you think OWPvPers have a secret cabal where we purposely keep OWPvP dead, while keeping warzones/arenas alive, and then resurrect OWPvP JUST during the Gree Relics Event, and then kill it again...

 

EDIT: Just to back that last bit up, I just logged on from work and did a quick search on Harb. There were concurrently 5 warzones going on, while I couldn't find a single Op in the /who list (I may have missed a couple of Ops). While I agree this isn't a scientific way of checking it at all (and it doesn't account for the fact that Warzones take 15 minutes while Ops taking longer and hence will not be active until evenings when everyone is free) it's similar to the results I have got at almost any time I did the search, on any of the three servers I have played on. So claiming that PvP is liked by only an insignificant minority of the game (which is a claim often heard on these forums) is the same as claiming Operations are liked by an insignificant minority of the game too, and the Devs have already spoken out about the latter not being an insignificant minority.

Edited June 9, 2017 by EzioMessi

[stoopicus]

Across MMORPGs in general less than 25% of players regularly engage in PvP.

That has been fairly constant almost since the advent of MMORPG PvP.

 

Citation? I think you just made that up

 

Eve's a lot more than that, for example. I suspect GW2 is too.

 

(I would also believe ~25%, I just want to know where you got the number from

Edited June 9, 2017 by stoopicus

[DarthSpuds]

Citation? I think you just made that up

 

Eve's a lot more than that, for example. I suspect GW2 is too.

 

(I would also believe ~25%, I just want to know where you got the number from

 

EVE's not really a traditional MMORPG though is it? Can't comment on GW2 I've never made it beyond the starter zones to be honest.

 

The original citation I saw for it was on the Codemaster's forums when they had control of LOTRO in Europe. It was mentioned in reference to questions as to why more resources were not put into PvP in LOTRO and a Community Manager said something along the lines of "according to industry internal reviews only around 20-25% of players regularly PvP, and only 20-25% of players regularly Raid - and there is roughly a 50% crossover between those two groups". I had it bookmarked for ages - but it went the way of the Dodo when Codemasters lost control of LOTRO in Europe and control, and the forums, reverted to Turbine in the US. For a while a Turbine CM referenced the Codemasters post when they were discussing not putting so much effort into Raids. And IIRC I saw similar numbers mentioned on an early Wildstar discussion on PvP / raid investment. I've had similar figures mentioned to me in PMs by a one or two Devs at different games as well.

 

To be honest, across all the MMORPGs I have played over the years I'd bet on 25% being the very top end of regular PvP uptake. But there will be occasional outliers - ESO had massive PvP uptake for a long, long time, but even they are moving to small scale, fast-paced, short duration "skirmish" style PvP now.

 

All The Best

Edited June 9, 2017 by DarthSpuds

[Pandoras_Jar]

I'm not Keith, but I'll hop in on this one!

 

You're definitely right - our goal was absolutely to encourage Open World PvP on Iokath. One of our main motivations for including stuff like playable vehicles and Op bosses and Player loot was to make PvP on Iokath a unique and interesting experience compared to Outlaw's Den or Ilum. And, yeah, it just doesn't seem to have grabbed folks' interest.

 

I don't think that forcing Players to participate in PvP is the answer - SWTOR just isn't that kind of game - so we need to look elsewhere for solutions. Presumably better incentives would be a great way to start, but I'd love to hear your thoughts (and everyone else's) on the subject. In the coming weeks one of the discussion topics we will make is on this very topic!

 

I know I"m a little late to the party in responding to this, but I wanted to offer my perspective on this on the forums. I wrote about PvP on Iokath and how to incentivise it on my Blog a couple of times leading up to the launch of Game Update 5.2.

 

I feel like a lot of people forget about the success of Open World PvP on Oricon back in its hay day. Players and Guilds were regularly organising massive Open World PvP engagements on Oricon despite the (at times) severe lag. Why?

 

Because there were fantastic, highly desirable Legacy Titles.

 

Kill Achievements in the Open World alone (generally) aren't enough incentive to get large amounts of people out in the Open World to 'battle it out' against each other (although I have participated in in-house Guild Open World PvP Events before). Players want to be rewarded for engaging in Open World PvP and good Legacy Titles are a great reward that worked really well to incentivise a lot of Open World PvP on Oricon.

 

Hell on Oricon you didn't even need large amounts of people. It was quite common for players to flag themselves on PvE servers (this was before we had PvE & PvP instances) while doing the dailies just to get a few extra kills to go towards the kill Achievements. I know my Guildies and I did this all the time and we found others that did the same!

 

I had hoped that the Developers would add some nice Legacy Titles to the Iokath PvP Achievements. But sadly, this was overlooked.

 

I would implore the Developers to look at Oricon and how well it worked as a Daily area and hub for Open World PvP when creating a Daily area in the future with Open World PvP achievements. Because Oricon was amazing! I really wanted to see that emulated with Iokath but alas, it was not to be.

[FerkWork]

So T4 Crafting is coming this Tuesday, I did have a few questions about it.

 

1) Will it require new matts and if so how will it work?

2) Will Schematics be updated in Ops as well i.e SM 234, HM 240 and NiM 246? Or just on the new Ops bosses?

3) Assuming PvP weeklies will be updated to reflect that?

4) Any effort to remove useless schems from table i.e Barrage enhancements or A mods?

 

Thanks

[EzioMessi]

@Charles, @Keith, @Eric. I hope you guys are reading all the suggestions for OWPvP in this thread. Whenever the discussion thread gets made, it'd be nice for the starter post to mention which of our ideas were the best (in terms of quality, ease of implementation, returns, etc) in the minds of the devs, so that we can channel more ideas along a similar vein to those in that thread, instead of giving you scattered ideas that sometimes may even seem to disagree with each other.

[Ylliarus]

@KeithKanneg If you are considering more customization options, may I suggest broadening the ones we have on the Cartel Market? In particular I would suggest for the 4 additional Eye Colour appearance options, the Yellow, Blue, Green and White, to be made available to all species with humanoid eyes. Bioware already did this with the previously Human/Cyborg-only additional hairstyles, making those available to Pureblood, Miraluka, Chiss etc. as well. It would be absolutely amazing if the additional Yellow, Blue, Green and White eye colour options were made available for Twi'lek, Togruta, Mirialan, Rattataki, Zabrak etc.

[VedaRa]

The Flashpoint will have Solo/Story, Veteran, and Master modes. In fact, any new Flashpoints will have all three modes.

 

That's Great, but can you make Uprising have Solo/Story too? Some of us don't have time because of the real world to try and find a group for an Uprising.

[EzioMessi]

That's Great, but can you make Uprising have Solo/Story too? Some of us don't have time because of the real world to try and find a group for an Uprising.

 

Go to Combat Training on Fleet.

 

Pick up Solo Uprising missions from the terminal.

 

Use the teleport they give you to get to the uprising.

 

Profit.

Edited June 9, 2017 by EzioMessi

[vadess]

That's Great, but can you make Uprising have Solo/Story too? Some of us don't have time because of the real world to try and find a group for an Uprising.

 

Group finder is great at finding groups...

[AscendingSky]

Go to Combat Training on Fleet.

 

Pick up Solo Uprising missions from the terminal.

 

Use the teleport they give you to get to the uprising.

 

Profit.

 

Yeah, most of the Story Uprisings can be soloed easily enough.

[Lecto]

Dear Keith,

So far I've been impressed with your level of engagement with the community, & I can only hope that continues -- kudos. However, I do have a pressing concern that has not been answered nor addressed in recent years, a concern that troubles my entire guild -- ignored concerns. I am the guild master of Tao Covenant (pub) & BC-Tao Covenant (imp) on the Prophecy of the Five server.

 

Your road map indicates that a new Warzone will be coming to the game. however, this content cannot even be played on our server due to it's population. PvP only pops on selected nights when guilds make an active effort to make it do so, & as a result I can count the amount of times I've PvPed on two hands over the last year. Do you have any plans to address this issue? If not, do you have plans to reduce the cost of subscriptions on dead servers like ours? I hardily think it's fair to charge us full price when we cannot play your entire game.

 

I've tried to reach out to you via back channeling though some "influencers" in the community, but this hasn't yielded much in the way of results. If you cannot comment on this publicly, a phone call or PM would be appreciated.

 

Thank you for your time,

~Lecto-Sama

 

PS: Yes we are aware of server transfers, but my guild refuses to leave our guild property behind (flagship & etc). Beyond that we would prefer to stay on an East Coast server & do not want to transfer to Harb, but I've recently heard that population size is starting to shrink on JC & Shadowlands as well.

[aerockyul]

I disagree. I fully enjoyed decorating all 5 SHs fully. Now I can't wait for a new one to do that again. Smaller SHs would shorten the time of fun.

 

If it's too big for you, don't decorate it fully. Don't unlock all rooms. You don't have to. But don't limit it for those, who'd like to.

 

No one said anything about all or nothing. The suggestion was for smaller strongholds in new areas of the game, nothing about making all of the existing ones different in any way. It's not like they'd have to say "we'll add some smaller ones but take away all the big ones"

This is how a lot of arguments start and the issue/suggestion gets lost. A suggestion for one thing does not mean take away something else.

[Spyderwoman]

Any chances of going back and adding story modes to those Flashpoints that don't have it? Like, the two Rakghoul Flashpoints Kaon under Siege and Lost Island actually have a little storyline going on, but they have no story modes.

 

I would love to see ALL flashpoints have this option, so that people that done group as often can enjoy the content too

[Spyderwoman]

You don't need to do the Op to continue the storyline.

 

Thank you for the link to the dev post *very happy now*

[stoopicus]

EVE's not really a traditional MMORPG though is it?

 

Nope. The reason everyone loves CCP is that not only is Eve unique on its own, they run it perfectly*. They take a very hands-off approach and embrace almost all forms of gameplay, including crime (ranging from scamming, espionage, and larceny all the way through piracy), while enforcing player safety (for people who want to be law-abiding space citizens) and so on via smart in-game mechanisms, and it has really let the game flourish into a unique and amazing thing.

 

*Ok they sometimes make mistakes. But generally, they are super smart.

 

The original citation I saw for it was on the Codemaster's forums when they had control of LOTRO in Europe. It was mentioned in reference to questions as to why more resources were not put into PvP in LOTRO and a Community Manager said something along the lines of "according to industry internal reviews only around 20-25% of players regularly PvP, and only 20-25% of players regularly Raid - and there is roughly a 50% crossover between those two groups".

 

Ok *that* I easily believe. I am surprised that 25% of players industry-wide make it to the endgame at all. I was only really considering the endgame (because for mature MMOs like this or WoW, nearly everyone is there. During XP events it only takes 15 hours /played to go 0-17 - I did it five times this year already in that amount of time).

 

It's funny. I just bought Legion and am leveling some new characters in WoW. I hadn't been back there in a long time. I got in to OWPvP on my *first day* back. It was awesome.

Edited June 10, 2017 by stoopicus

[frennky]

I'm not Keith, but I'll hop in on this one!

 

You're definitely right - our goal was absolutely to encourage Open World PvP on Iokath. One of our main motivations for including stuff like playable vehicles and Op bosses and Player loot was to make PvP on Iokath a unique and interesting experience compared to Outlaw's Den or Ilum. And, yeah, it just doesn't seem to have grabbed folks' interest.

 

I don't think that forcing Players to participate in PvP is the answer - SWTOR just isn't that kind of game - so we need to look elsewhere for solutions. Presumably better incentives would be a great way to start, but I'd love to hear your thoughts (and everyone else's) on the subject. In the coming weeks one of the discussion topics we will make is on this very topic!

 

If you want to make OWPvP on Iokath a thing, then you need proper incentive for players. No PvP player needs those silly little shards. Make players drop Unassembled Components. Or make some dailys for PvP instance only, that reward those components.

[cagthehack]

Also class balance. Right now, if players were in Iokath it would be filled with mercs and mandos. No one wants to pvp and get rolled by the FOTM class. Over and over.

 

And yes, better rewards. Shards are worthless. You'd better off dropping more creds frankly.

[CuddlyKitty]

I'm really hoping you'll use this opportunity to make it possible for your toons to fully defect, cause you got to choose which side to fight for on iokath . It only make's sense to just stay on the other side cause if your a Jedi who help the Empire on Iokath you should get to fully defect. Because its not like the Republics will for give you for what you did, or for get that you slaughtered there armies and vise versa.

[Yezzan]

That's simply you taking your prior bad experiences and makingassive assumptions out of them.

 

It's not a prior bad experience, it is the prevailing paradigm in any MMO that has a PvP element that is free-for-all.

 

 

Don't like getting attacked? Don't enter the very explicitly marked PvP instances... you can be entirely immune to any and all PvP in this game, don't use the "I always get ganked so you should give them no content!!!!!" logic. It was absurd even with vanilla, but now when PvP immunity is a thing, it's downright asinine to claim that ganking is your reason to not provide OWPvPers their content. You don't see PvPers enter NiM Ops, get killed by trash mobs, and then whine for nerfs to NiM content, so why exactly should PvP be gimped because a PvEr got ganked in an explicitly marked PvP instance?

 

LOL. Like seriously? Way to miss the point. But, as you said, people are staying out of PvP instances. So, you win. But, wait! Aren't y'all complaining that PvP instances are dead? Wonder why...hmmmmmm.

And win-trading on Ilum isn't anywhere near as common as people like to pretend it is. Any time you go there during the Gree Event, you're likely to see a 4v4 going on at the central pylon, alongside several scattered 1v1s and 2v2s everywhere else in the Western Ice Shelf. The reason guilds appear to be "win-trading" is actually quite simple. Go there with a guild or who's not in your group. They don't allow you to attack guildies. Bioware intended for this to be a mechanic that allowed guilds to use numbers without removing the "Small Group FFA" designation from the region. So even IF guilds wanted to not help their guildies win, they'd have to make a group that isn't in the guild to be able to hurt their guildies. If a guild controls mid, well, go wrest it from them if it bothers you that much? They wrested it from someone before, may as well continue the cycle.

 

Not sure what you going on about. I'm not trying to wrestle pylon from anybody. There is no reason to be at the pylon except to kill people who are trying to complete the PvP daily.

 

Stop pretending you have some insight into the PvP community and what they find hard and what they find easy, literally all you've said in this post is "I got murdered by 3 assassins in the most easily avoidable content in this game." Almost any PVPer worth their salt would form a group to take those Sims down instead, which is the exact reason Bioware has given you the option to not PvP if you don't want to.

 

Wowzy! I'm not a PvPer, and relaying experiences and comments (made by others) is not "pretending to have insight." Last, I checked, I wasn't the one coming here to say do something about OWPVP; and you are stupidly contradicting what the other PvPers are saying. They do not want PvP designated areas to be "avoidable." Moreover, the fact that they are "avoidable" is why they are deserted. And in case you didn't get the memo, players have utilized the option to NOT PvP, which is why we are hear..... get it?

[OneHit]

I'd like to see Planets be recycled for future expansions. The original planets are the best planets cause they are true open worlds. Since the game has been streamlined the majority of the planet is rarely visited. Side missions are no longer encouraged. Lets keep that, and take some of the area's that are rarely visited and re use them.