Hammer Station

[Gebrakstkasten]

Clearly not, as people are complaining about it. Blood Hunt isn't even that difficult anymore, and I would rather do that 8x in a row than even one HS.

I have never been concerned with not finishing HS at any level no matter who I was with. Depending on the group, finishing BH is not a foregone conclusion especially if your pugging with a lower level toon.

[MagicTerror]

No, this is wrong and it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what you are seeing. You (and people with your attitude) think all players want to play the game the same way. They don't. You want to force players to play in a certain way that you like. To heck with how they want to play.

 

If you look at MMOs ... any MMO, there is a significant set of players that like to grind. They want to grind the same content over and over again. EVF, KPF and HS are perfect examples of this. It's not about rewards or impatience, it's about playing the game the way they want to play it.

 

There are people with the Limitless title and full gear sets that still grind EVF all day long. Why? Because they like it and they have fun and it's a community. More power to them.

 

Some people like grinding, some people like camping, some people like doing different things, some people like doing the same thing over and over, some like pvp and some don't. You don't get do decide how others play the game or what is right for them.

 

I'm sure some groups have fun farming trash for the sake of endlessly grinding conquest or capping their fragments each week, but I don't see the entertainment value here. I go to games for a sense of accomplishment in mastering something most of the player base finds difficult, and then teaching them about the fight so we can work together to beat something that requires coordination. It's like the satisfaction a synchronized swimming team would get for finally nailing that routine. Whether it's a pug or a premade raid team makes no difference to me, even your friends will have issues that make them seem unbearable to have in a group at times, and they will sandbag you enough as well.

 

No one is saying groups should no longer have an easy hammer station run, but the rewards system needs to change. If you're getting the same value for completing that as you are for getting through Umbara, or even more value as opposed to Kuat, there's something wrong with how the game rewards you for wasting your time.

Play mindless content, win mindless rewards. That seems simple enough.

[Rion_Starkiller]

Its always funny when the people with 'I don't get it, this isn't difficult' opinions come in to tell people the obvious, like "uncheck it, problem solved". I think its fair to talk about, not like there's much activity on the forums to begin with, so can't we play nice? There's room for BW to do something fresh with the random weekly reward and a flashpoint tiered reward system would be lovely at this point in the game's life.

 

Hammer Station is fast and easy, great, we all know its role. Same with a few others that while not as straight forward, are pretty simplistic for even beginners. The issue is why should Nathema, which could take upward of an hour with a fair amount of groups, Copero, Blood Hunt and Umbara reward the same? Why not have tiers to the random weekly rewards? Why not offer alternative objectives or give an increase toward something like Conq points, Crafting mats, XP?

 

Come on, it's a legit complaint/critique and being so binary with solutions does nothing for anyone. It'd be nice to see them weigh in on this if their not dropping a considerable amount of content for the coming months.

 

To be fair, I legitimately uncheck Blood Hunt, Copero, Umbara, Nathema as well. Not because I don't like them, but because I would rather run the pre-Kuat FP's (excluding HS, RR) when queueing rando GF FP's. They're short, nostalgic, and fun for me.

 

But you're right -- some of those FP's are "operations-lite" and deserve their own category/rewards.

Edited June 24, 2020 by Rion_Starkiller

[MagicTerror]

.But you're right -- some of those FP's are "operations-lite" and deserve their own category/rewards.

 

Maybe those flashpoints are really so unpopular, and trash grinders really do make up the majority of the player base now. If Op-lite flashpoints ever get put into their own category, I am worried that no one will queue in that category, just like no one queues solo for GF Ops; even though most of them are nerfed to hell now, they're still too hard to trust 7 other people to reliably finish (or you can't trust enough people to queue as anything but dps), that should say something about the base.

 

There's one solitary difference I found between vet mode and master mode bosses in HS too: The 2nd boss pops random shields. That's it. What imagination.

 

But a barren Op-lite category wouldn't be much different than how it is now: Nathema pops, Healer insta-quits. Hammer Station pops, everyone else stays but I want to leave because it's my third HS straight in 2 evenings of playing. At least this way you'd know a group that does pop is less likely to quit because it wasn't the speedrun FP they were hoping. In reality, if you're doing nothing but EVF and HS to have fun, you don't need anything better than Sha-tek pieces at most and just a modest amount of frags towards your cap. If you're doing flashpoints that have plenty of challenging bosses or a large time test, the game should be saying "looks like you're pretty committed, here's a special set piece that'll help you with content like this in the future"

 

But all flashpoints created equal isn't sitting right with me, why do something that takes more time or coordination if your better chance of getting something more special is so negligible or not there at all? Of course people will continue to run HS if that continues to be the case.

Edited June 24, 2020 by MagicTerror

[DeannaVoyager]

No, this is wrong and it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what you are seeing. You (and people with your attitude) think all players want to play the game the same way. They don't. You want to force players to play in a certain way that you like. To heck with how they want to play.

 

Same could be said of HS farmers: they want to force everyone else to play their way. HS farmers won't get the random reward anyhow, yet they ruin it from everyone who wants to play random and get random reward. Getting HS 5 or more times in a row is not random, it's GF being manipulated by grinders who want to force people to play their way.

[Lodinn]

even though most of them are nerfed to hell now, they're still too hard to trust 7 other people to reliably finish (or you can't trust enough people to queue as anything but dps), that should say something about the base.

Er, no, it's really that faceroll at least for the old ops - maybe save for CM. The issue, perhaps unsurprisingly, lies in rewards yet again. I remember when basically the same system worked quite well but there was an incentive to do something other than TC quickies. As of now, people (sadly but also somewhat understandably) seem disinterested in running SM ops - mechanics went extinct so people don't just do it for the kicks anymore; rewards are 100% not worth it if it's not a 5 minute run, and now this part was very, very different back in a day...

HM/NiM is far harder but also largely unrewarding in terms of gearing up/making creds so that the population understandably opts for MMFP+heroics instead. "Fun" is apparently not enough for the playerbase to start doing more challenging things, especially when all the other factors and rewards point away from them.

[Sarova]

Moar Battlelord Croissant

I thumbs up this!

[Tsillah]

"Fun" is apparently not enough for the playerbase to start doing more challenging things, especially when all the other factors and rewards point away from them.

But what is fun? And this is the underlying issue.

 

I'm the type of person that gets satisfaction out of beating something challenging and having a reward to show for it. That is fun to me.

 

And I get that people just enjoy doing it for the sake of doing it and they call that fun, but that doesn't mean that can be used as a template for everybody and that one group is more right than the others.

 

The way I see it, when ops were rewarding you catered to both groups. Now they only cater to one. I'm not surprised that progression raiding has become more niche over time. And it seems to me that people like myself are a big group. You know what people do now? Well in FPs we have the HS farm but now we also have EVF. Why because that gives people are sense of reward for their time spent. It's the fastest way through to get that RNG loot that maybe you can turn into something useful.

 

That's just not an approach though that's going to work for a lot of people. But BW generated a generation of players with 5.0 and 6.0 that is all about rewards per time unit. Just like DPS means damage per second, people are now after the most efficient way of dealing with the RNG reward systems. So call it conquest points per second or random gear drops per second. It's all about efficiency because of the RNG. And because harder content isn't really rewarded. Sure you can get more of the same RNG gear but it also takes longer and when you're doing harder stuff you wipe and have repair costs so you get penalised for doing it. In the past there was better gear to look forward to and so that balanced out the repair cost factor.

 

So you really have to do it for the sake of doing it. But what if you've done the same ops hundreds of time? How many times can you do it just for the sake of it?

 

The current gearing doesn't really have an answer for it. And considering Gods and Dxun are not very popular ops among the general crowd, I don't see how this could be a sensible direction and still put all those resources into ops that hardly anybody plays.

 

After 3.0 they said they weren't going to do new ops for a while if not ever. Eric Musco reported that not even 8% of the player base had even set foot in ToS. I can't imagine that Gods and Dxun are much better. So I guess I just don't get it.

 

And with FPs it's the same. People avoid the new FPs because the easier modes aren't that easy and they are quite lengthy...and there are many alternatives that are. Again, reward efficiency. RNG loot per second played.

 

So it makes me wonder why they've been bringing out group content for the last few years that people rather avoid. And now we get Dxun NiM/MM. Well great for those who want it. But it can't be that many people. So why do so many resources go to such a small segment of people? I'd like to understand it but currently I just don't.

[Styxx]

@ Tsillah

 

Well, probably bercause every 'segment' of the population deserves some attention. And since there is now such an ease to get top gear just by running solo stuff, so some players would like a better challenge - it's not like they lacked it for so long, that they actually left for good.

 

That's my take on it, anyway.

[Toraak]

Same could be said of HS farmers: they want to force everyone else to play their way. HS farmers won't get the random reward anyhow, yet they ruin it from everyone who wants to play random and get random reward. Getting HS 5 or more times in a row is not random, it's GF being manipulated by grinders who want to force people to play their way.

 

You could make your own group of 4, and fully queu up randomly.

 

For the record I never queu'd up only for HS in GF when I wanted to run it, I Solo'd it on a Stealther in Vet mode.

Edited June 25, 2020 by Toraak

[BlackSilverRoar]

This topic does seem redundant, as other posters have said. No, to someone trying to dictate how I play and No to any undermining of grinding HS. Some people don't complain (lately) about BH bc they just don't do it. Scaling up drops for some other than HS is reasonable to a degree, as long as HS isn't shortchanged. Gods and Dxun should have scaled up drops, other than that, you get what you group for. Edited June 25, 2020 by Willjb

[Tsillah]

Well, probably bercause every 'segment' of the population deserves some attention.

However, a one size fits all approach can't accomplish that and essentially says "you're all the same" when in fact there's a reason for those segments being what they are.

 

And the segment that likes to be rewarded for beating difficult content is definitely not given that attention. One size doesn't fit all but BW keeps trying. PvP certainly didn't get any attention. What about GSF? What about RP? What about decorators who've been asking for improvements? Did they get attention? And don't count those overpriced decorations.

 

All in all they're doing a pretty poor job at this. I think it's right to give all kinds of players attention, but that's the problem...they're not, not really.

[DarthCasus]

This topic does seem redundant, as other posters have said. No, to someone trying to dictate how I play and No to any undermining of grinding HS. Some people don't complain (lately) about BH bc they just don't do it. Scaling up drops for some other than HS is reasonable to a degree, as long as HS isn't shortchanged. Gods and Dxun should have scaled up drops, other than that, you get what you group for.

 

Except this topic is far from redundant. It only is if you're fine with how it currently is and rather BW not actually address valid complaints people are conditioned to see as the norm. They could have updated the flashpoint rewards to entice people to stay and try them instead of making a handful the fast lane. Even if one is fine with doing the harder ones, they shouldn't have to be in queue and likely get the same, almost 9 year old content, because their group members wanted a quick run. Encouraging people to group up for what should be puggable content (flashpoints!!) is still a workaround to an issue BW created. The random reward isn't very important but why condition your playerbase to purposefully not do or try harder/longer content?

 

I care little for the 'now they're catering to space barbie players and throw the rest a bone every once a few years' argument, this is counterproductive to their conquest system (play whatever you like) and point of development (besides narrative). Why even produce more content like new flashpoints if you're going to make them longer and harder than HS? Not sure about Gods and Dxun, I don't run ops often enough but speaking purely about flashpoints, its a waste of development time and UI space if they're going to encourage such a system and they CAN fix it. Its more than reasonable, its in favor of variety. And the scaling up rewards for other content shouldn't affect HS' rewards, I've no idea why they would.

[killdozerone]

As it stands HS is the fastest way to get gear to deconstruct for the chance at embers. The percentage for HS and Athiss to pop 90% of the time was obviously patched in when the gearing system was changed. Me? I don’t have a problem with it. If you want to gear up quickly you can do this, if you want to get better looking gear/titles/mounts/achievements you can also join a guild and do operations/ master mode. As it stands both types of players can be satisfied without having to keep the other one from attaining their goal. My solution would just be to even the percentage of flash points and increase the rewards based on the difficulty of the FP that you get. If you get HS, you get baseline, if you get Blood Hunt or whatever you get triple the credits/ amount of gear for example.

[StrikePrice]

Same could be said of HS farmers: they want to force everyone else to play their way. HS farmers won't get the random reward anyhow, yet they ruin it from everyone who wants to play random and get random reward. Getting HS 5 or more times in a row is not random, it's GF being manipulated by grinders who want to force people to play their way.

I agree! Here's a thread I made on that very issue ...

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=977700

 

It is unfair to people who want random selection to have 1 person in the group limit to hammer and cause that to make the choice hammer. That makes the probability of actually getting a random FP very low between hammer and whatever is in conquest for the week.

 

They should make it so people can see 1/23 or 23/23 when the GF window pops. This would solve the problem.

[Lodinn]

So it makes me wonder why they've been bringing out group content for the last few years that people rather avoid. And now we get Dxun NiM/MM. Well great for those who want it. But it can't be that many people. So why do so many resources go to such a small segment of people? I'd like to understand it but currently I just don't.

Short answer: endgame PvE is not worth it when you frame that like so, it's actually a somewhat researched topic.

Long answer: MMO in a long term is more than just content, it's the community as well. And here's where things start getting interesting, without the elitist population largely defining the difficulty curve things start drifting apart. You need that carrot on a stick in form of Brontes wings or whatever to keep the... Civilization, if you will. Without it, there are no one to teach people to do hardmodes and then hardmodes become not worth doing. Then storymodes become too hard.

 

Then, diverting those substantial resources you've "wasted" on the NiM "only .1% of the population will ever play", you suddenly find that in year's time people complain about no one knowing their classes and wiping in storymodes constantly.

 

This is the reason the notion of endgame is important. The natural progression and things for people to look forward to are immensely important for the healthy population. Otherwise you have the Dark Ages.

[MagicTerror]

So you really have to do it for the sake of doing it. But what if you've done the same ops hundreds of time? How many times can you do it just for the sake of it?

 

The current gearing doesn't really have an answer for it. And considering Gods and Dxun are not very popular ops among the general crowd, I don't see how this could be a sensible direction and still put all those resources into ops that hardly anybody plays.

 

It makes me wonder, how many of these people who spam farms and the easiest flashpoint run really do it for fun? how many of them are just looking for the gear to get that rewardless achievement out of a sense of completion? And how many of them actually put that gear to something more challenging? What are they grinding for the sake of?

 

I for one loved the new ops, I still like doing them when they pop up in SM on the GF queue for fun, mostly Gods because those machines are so captivating, and as I've said: like most challenging content, I wish more people would learn it and do it but they don't, so I'm lucky to get a group together in a blue moon to do it. The culprit I think is less that they were poorly made or no one likes that sort of content, the culprit is they're not made worth the extra work or time to complete them; the team tried with Dxun-locked sets but that was just far too specific a play-wall; there's still content that keeps the players running for the hills other than Dxun.

[Lodinn]

It makes me wonder, how many of these people who spam farms and the easiest flashpoint run really do it for fun? how many of them are just looking for the gear to get that rewardless achievement out of a sense of completion? And how many of them actually put that gear to something more challenging? What are they grinding for the sake of?

Now, now, that might be their idea of fun after all. I can get behind the notion of grinding some arbitrary rewards is a less tangible accomplishment than acquiring the skills needed to kill some hard boss but you can't just tell people their goals are wrong. Ultimately, goals are not picked with reason and you can't really argue with this specific point.

[BelorfinSiana]

When my subscription finally runs out in 9 days (I'm using it for the renown xp at the moment as I farm heroics for money), I'm going to start farming Hammer Station for gear. Because I'm trying to get to 306 ASAP, and right now, I'm at about 276 on most of my characters. 275 on some, 277 on a couple of them. It's a very slow crawl, and I'm trying to minimize the grind.

[demotivator]

I've heard that they are going to rename SWTOR to Star Wars™: The Old Hammer Station™. Is that true?

[Lodinn]

I've heard that they are going to rename SWTOR to Star Wars™: The Old Hammer Station™. Is that true?

 

No, that'd clearly lack ™, ® and © given the EA management.

[Tsillah]

It makes me wonder, how many of these people who spam farms and the easiest flashpoint run really do it for fun? how many of them are just looking for the gear to get that rewardless achievement out of a sense of completion? And how many of them actually put that gear to something more challenging? What are they grinding for the sake of?

I don't get this EVF myself and I am at the level of gearing for the sense of completion now because that's all I can make of it currently. And out of habit because I used to raid a LOT in the old days before 5.0. I really deplore how in the last two expansions they stripped progression gearing from raiding. It makes no sense to do that because it keeps the community that does harder content smaller than it needs to be.

I for one loved the new ops, I still like doing them when they pop up in SM on the GF queue for fun, mostly Gods because those machines are so captivating, and as I've said: like most challenging content, I wish more people would learn it and do it but they don't, so I'm lucky to get a group together in a blue moon to do it. The culprit I think is less that they were poorly made or no one likes that sort of content, the culprit is they're not made worth the extra work or time to complete them; the team tried with Dxun-locked sets but that was just far too specific a play-wall; there's still content that keeps the players running for the hills other than Dxun.

The problem with the GF is that Gods and Dxun are not casual friendly at all. So pugs tend to fail there and then people avoid it. That might have as a consequence that the people who do still do it via the GF are the ones that already completed them and the rest just stays away from them. And that's the issue.

 

But beyond that, SM for the most part is so easy that it's night and day compared to HM. People also know this so there is little to no interest in that. Gods and Dxun aren't SM, they are NM, Normal Mode which we had in vanilla before Story Mode existed. The Normal Modes were already pretty tough but stood closer to HM. Personally I think one of the biggest mistakes they made is to drop NM when they introduced SM. They should've kept it and let SM just be easy and for GF purposes. But now SM isn't always SM and that doesn't work.

 

So on the days that Gods, Dxun and even EC and Ravagers are up a lot of people skip because they expect to fail in pugs and they're right. So that means that SM in the GF is not fulfilling its purpose as far as I'm concerned. And so we have EVF instead.

 

And as it stands the sets aren't even Dxun specific apparently cause they can drop (at a lower rate) in other ops as well Even still, if they had kept it to Dxun NiM as the patch notes said (not counting the RNG vendor), it wouldn't have made sense as you already indicated.

 

They should've never gotten rid of progression gearing in Ops. You're right that we don't really have people teaching new people and people aspiring to more difficult content cause the carrot isn't good enough. And that's why I wonder why they do make the ops in NiM but don't do anything in the reward system that makes sense to support that.

[OFAWFletch]

Hammer station is the best flashpoint in this game.

 

It's easy and fast and perfect to complete your conquest, your weekkly, your daily or whatever .

 

When I que for random flashpoints , I want to finish them fast , which makes HS so perfect .

 

90% of the playerbase thinks alike because these are old content and most of us have done them zillions of times over the years . I don't want to spend more time in them than I have to.

There's the problem here, Snowflakes expect EASY......

[Styxx]

There's the problem here, Snowflakes expect EASY......

 

Today we had one ranged lvl 75, one other sniper that stood on the container and 2 melee, me and someone else. The ranged totally ignored the bactas AND got mouthy also.

 

They cant even look past their quickbars to click one item next to them, but you want them to do more complicated content? Puhlease.

 

Not saying all are clueless, but, if we judge by the HS pugs... not much left in terms of player skill in 2020.

[Tsillah]

Today we had one ranged lvl 75, one other sniper that stood on the container and 2 melee, me and someone else. The ranged totally ignored the bactas AND got mouthy also.

 

They cant even look past their quickbars to click one item next to them, but you want them to do more complicated content? Puhlease.

 

Not saying all are clueless, but, if we judge by the HS pugs... not much left in terms of player skill in 2020.

Sure but you reap what you sow. We had a smarter crowd before and by dumbing things down you dumb the population down as well. Not because they can't do better but because they don't have a reason to be better.

 

People used to aspire to something. Now they just want the rewards because they showed up. Why is that? Because that's what companies and society have sown.