New Augments

[mike_carton]

In case anyone is curious, each character has 14 gear slots, which will require (ignoring crits) 14*15=210 OEMs. A standard 5 boss NiM operation will drop 7 OEMs. Hence, you must complete 30 NiM operations to gear ONE character in these new augments. Oh and on top of that you have to do ranked PvP for months.

 

Are you out of your mind?

 

Since there will be 8 players rolling on the OEMs (either for crafting or for selling on the GTN), you should expect to need to play 240 (= 30 * 8) NiM Operations to get enough OEMs to crafts augments for 1 character.

 

This is required for every character you need augments for. They didn't say if these will go into the existing MK-11 slots; nor did they mention the cost of pulling them out in the future when they bump up gear ratings or change set bonuses.

[mike_carton]

I hate this, so you are making the new augments inaccessible to a majority of the player base. The people who do both ranked and operations is a very small number, with most doing neither. The prices to buy the matts will be astronomical and the actual augments even worse. Why introduce something that will be inaccessible to more than 90% of your players?

 

Because that is what passes for Smart in Austin.

[mike_carton]

Yeah. I'll be ignoring these new augments.

 

This is what 99+% of the player base will do. Not like there'll be a choice between the pre-requisites for crafting and the price of the finished products on GTN.

[mike_carton]

Could we get a 3rd neutral option of acquisition?

 

10k tech fragments for 1 RPM or OEM piece.

 

150K tech frags just for the OEMs for 1 augment?! Then there are the other materials!

 

Do you work for Bioware? This suggestion sounds like it could come from them.

[elimatorxv]

I hate this, so you are making the new augments inaccessible to a majority of the player base. The people who do both ranked and operations is a very small number, with most doing neither. The prices to buy the matts will be astronomical and the actual augments even worse. Why introduce something that will be inaccessible to more than 90% of your players?

 

counter argument:

why do you need these top tier augments? after all and i will stress the point home in caps 95% of the entire game is capped due to shatstain lvl sync so those augs wont even have any effect what so ever

you dont do nim raids or ranked pvp so you have no need for it and 85-90% of the playerbase also dont need them

besides these new augs wont make or break anything. for those that clear mm dxun will stil clear it after the new augs have been implemented.

 

it is kinda baffling that bioware gives those that do nim raids or ranked pvp a small bone with a massive grind and a bunch of casuals are whining they cant get these new augs.

not every bit of content is meant for everyone and getting these augs isnt for the majority ( as they dont need it)

[DarkTergon]

counter argument:

why do you need these top tier augments?

 

Most people won't, but even if they don't, some people will still want them. That's one point.

BUT Nim & Ranked players will get them, and if they stayed there, it probably wouldn't matter, but that NEVER happens, there will be these people with maxed augs, etc in unranked, causing a huge issue. But it will also trickle in to ops. After all if you have to choose between two people, in equal gear, equal skill, etc, but one has better augs, then that's what most people will go for.

 

a bunch of casuals are whining they cant get these new augs.

not every bit of content is meant for everyone and getting these augs isnt for the majority ( as they dont need it)

 

It's not about casuals, and comments like this shows one of the major issues

Edited September 18, 2020 by DarkTergon

[Mobiousren]

Have the quarantine affected your brains somwhow? Are you damn out of your minds?

[Rion_Starkiller]

People always want what they can't have... "filthy casuals" are no exception.

[KendraP]

Its not even about wanting them. Its about the simple facts that:

1. The same dead horse I beat after ossus. Why new augments now? There is no new level cap, no new content, no new anything to warrant new augments.

 

2. There are major issues being ignored to add new unnecessary augments (the scaled content, amplifiers, etc)

 

3. These new augments literally create more problems, and for what? What problem are they solving?

 

You want to encourage people to do NiM or ranked? Make NiM and ranked fun then. In their current states my limited off time is better spent doing literally anything else, including not playing swtor.

 

Seriously Mr Schmidt, if these go through I want a refund and will not be renewing my game time. This is the straw that broke the camel's back. Ok I might be joking about the refund. But not the threat to stop paying you.

Edited September 18, 2020 by KendraP

[cyrusramsey]

cyrusramsey greatly disapproves.

[denavin]

Wow just completely screw over PvE players why don't you.... OH wait, you just did.

 

Most PvE players have no interest or desire to ever engage in any PvP activity of any kind EVER.

 

Why not just save yourselves the time and simply remove the PvE requirement since your intent is to ONLY offer this to PvP players and screw the PvE players.... and without any Vaseline to boot.

[MasterMurdock]

Instead of this how about you put guaranteed gear drops down for the ops only set bonuses. Hate running full ops and not seeing a single piece. It is infuriating.

[Cetsou]

What about all the players that do not PVP??? So basically you are tell us to screw off. You are catering to a small faction of the game, and closing the door on the majority of the players.

[kraform]

When this expansion started and the best gear was available to all players, I finally thought SWTOR had taken a step in the right direction. Now that you will basically be doing a re-run of the Ossus situation where you have to do NiM ops AND Ranked PvP in order to do it, this is no longer true.

 

As a subscriber from day one of this game, I will not suffer through another Ossus-like situation again. If this catering to 1% of the game's population and screwing over most of the game's population, I will no longer play SWTOR.

 

Hope the devs realize this is a step backwards and decide against this obvious slap in the face to most of their players.

[Elssha]

When this expansion started and the best gear was available to all players, I finally thought SWTOR had taken a step in the right direction. Now that you will basically be doing a re-run of the Ossus situation where you have to do NiM ops AND Ranked PvP in order to do it, this is no longer true.

 

As a subscriber from day one of this game, I will not suffer through another Ossus-like situation again. If this catering to 1% of the game's population and screwing over most of the game's population, I will no longer play SWTOR.

 

Hope the devs realize this is a step backwards and decide against this obvious slap in the face to most of their players.

Counterpoint:

 

This 'gear being available to everyone' is actually harming the playerbase; same way TV Dinners only lead to poor nutrition and people who don't know how to boil water.

 

A LOT of players have a very inflated expectation of what gear gives them, and what gear is necessary for doing (fairly) easy content.

 

This is not 248->258 jump like Ossus, where every armoring, mod, enhancement and aug had a sizable stat boost.

It's. Just. Augs.

 

People crying foul over augs that will likely make next to no difference (especially in anything scaled), feeling victimized by not getting this small stat bump (or that it will turn ranked players from minor annoyances to devastation incarnate in regs) really underlines how disconnected players have become from the game's actual mechanics and skill progression.

 

You get pugs DEMANDING you are 75, 306, and fully aug'd to join GF Ops.

GF Ops that are doable (by design) at lvl 70 in bad gear, even without great knowledge of your class or the op itself.

Why?

Because unlike 4.0, the gear isn't tied to content, so players don't have the game emphasizing what content is meant for what gear... and since even people in 306 aug'd gear fail (because they are leaning on gear and do not know game or class basics), they set gear as a requirement and pretend that fixes things.

 

People are agonizing over getting the perfect stats, reading other people's work and hating the RNG that doesn't give them that super special mod... never putting a hundredth of the effort into practicing their class or even looking up a rotation (let alone practicing and understaning it, so it actually make sense to them. I'm not talking about optimizing and maximizing rotations; I'm talking about basics like not spamming basic attack expecting praise, knowing that it might be a good idea to interrupt a heal or what you can do to not die if something goes sideways.

 

And, therefore, instead of realizing "oh no, I need to get better to do this" when a bump in the road comes up, the point turns instead to "oh no, I need better gear" or (sadly) "oh no, I can't do this in the BEST gear; game is obviously over-tuned/too hard".

I know... it's far easier to blame gear than realize you might need to work on something.

 

Gear masks problems. It does not solve them.

 

Games are no fun when they're barely interactive videos.

 

The result is more and more people leaning on gear, and more and more people setting a gear grind as their end goal instead of things that matter.

NiM players and Ranked PvPers aren't/weren't better and 'OP' because they had access to the best gear; they were OP because they spent countless hours in front of a dummy learning to milk their class for what its worth, studying other classes/boss mechanics and getting better.

 

The system turns rewards into participation trophies and barely stops short of giving everyone a "win" button.

 

You're not owed a top-line sports car for passing your driving exam. You're not owed access to top end gear as an average player. Stop insisting on it.

 

That's not elitist, that's honest.

 

You'll never learn how to interrupt a mechanic (or that it exists, or to look for something at all) if you only do it in gear good enough to stand there and ignore what should have almost killed you (because it was meant to withstand bosses tuned to make those in that gear barely survive), with a companion powerful enough to AFK and let THEM beat the story for you.

 

If you don't want to, the story is easy enough to do exactly this in green gear already.

[LeMage]

Not for bragging but have been here since these forums opened and the game since beta, really just to say I've been here awhile and seen some real whoppers come from the EA/Bioware bright idea club. Some of the things introduced (and even some things still not fixed) had me thinking about hoofing it to another game. So I'd play something new and play SWTOR less, but the new game after some months would get tiring and SWTOR would be my main game again.

 

But how many of these changes that are really not feeling very good does it take before this game goes to my game dustbin. Or do I just role with w/e Bioware does and carry on? I don't like this augment change - is this enough to stop giving them $20/month or will I stick around for a dozen more this peeves me offs?

 

How much is enough?? Do they care if I find another primary MMO?

[TrixxieTriss]

Hey Chris,

 

Lots of player push back on this. I hope you guys aren’t set in stone on how this will work and open to feed back changes.

[ImDeathGiver]

This idea is short sighted. it will discourages engagement in endgame. make top tires of PvE and PvP drop the same mats like they always have. PvP is not the content that makers this a good game, imo. if you play off meta classes you get destroyed. i have no desire to do a single match. please change this. Edited September 19, 2020 by ImDeathGiver

[Exly]

Makes me wonder if there is someone who has a stake in the credit sellers working on the dev team sometimes...

 

It's easy to understand. Doing this will encourage more people to buy stuff on the cartel market to sell for credits. In that way BioWare profits and solidifies their position as the only legitimate cash to cartel market items to credit seller in the game. So yeah, they are certainly motivated to do this so that they can make more profit.

[Nemmar]

Gonna be honest here.

 

I understand why you are doing it. But, it will mean pain to everyone that is not a top end player.

 

You could at least give a slower method of acquiring the materials for more casual players to also have objectives to strive for.

[DaemionMoadrin]

Well, we all know that BioWare will implement this anyway no matter what we say.

 

Has anyone considered what this means longterm?

 

NiM and TR have always been gated activities (as they should be) but you could obtain the necessary requirements before doing them. If those augments go live, then after a while they will become a requirement to join a team for either activitiy. This will prevent new players from joining in and ultimatively kill both game modes.

 

I mean, we won't see those effects until May 2021 because the grind is insane...

 

P.S. I love the fact that all NiM ops except Dxun only drop 7 mats for 8 players. Whoever came up with that is a brilliant sadist. ^^

[Tsillah]

Gonna be honest here.

 

I understand why you are doing it. But, it will mean pain to everyone that is not a top end player.

 

You could at least give a slower method of acquiring the materials for more casual players to also have objectives to strive for.

 

It means pain for top end players as well. If you're a top end PvP'er you don't generally want to do NiM Ops. And if you are a NiM raider you don't generally want to do warzones. And considering the amount of mats needed per craft, it definitely will mean pain for them.

 

If you're not a top end player, honestly, you'll be better off ignoring this round of augments altogether.

[kapitanmichal]

Locking new augments behind ranked and master mode operation is a terrible idea. As far as I remember, when Onslaught expansion launched, SWTOR team encouraged "play as you want and be rewarded" ideology.

 

I also doubt that making new tier of augments will encourage people to play ranked or master mode operations. Problem with players not queuing arenas is a little more complex then lack of rewards (e.g toxicity, cheating, class balance).

 

Whats more in my opinion adding new set of augments, which only boost player stats is cheap and boring idea. What about making new set bonuses or tacticals, they at least change gameplay.

[Tsillah]

Whats more in my opinion adding new set of augments, which only boost player stats is cheap and boring idea. What about making new set bonuses or tacticals, they at least change gameplay.

They want a carrot and make it count so this is the easiest way for them to do it. New set bonuses were just introduced but with 6.0 the previous set bonuses were changed after years and years of tinkering with the same set bonuses.

 

And a new tier of gear will make people rage even more because it means the realisation that the millions of credits they put into their amplifiers are worthless and that's something they want to postpone. I believe they said they were going to make changes to amplifiers to make it less "egregious" (their words so think about that for a moment).

 

But yeah, it goes against their philosophy for 6.0 to make BiS gear available to all and now they turn away from that again. I get that things change in an MMO but with BioWare it's just a 180 each time and that really doesn't help.

[DarkTergon]

How much is enough?? Do they care if I find another primary MMO?

 

Judging from previous issue, I don't think they really care, how many times have the forums exploded against ideas they've implemented, and they still kept them. They ignored the pushback on PTS and still put it live.

 

Hey Chris,

 

Lots of player push back on this. I hope you guys aren’t set in stone on how this will work and open to feed back changes.

 

If it's like anything else recently, nothing we say will matter, they'll just steam roll it through.