Dumbing down the game is a dumb idea.

[zorngodofall]

So this is an industry standard thing. As a game gets older very commonly developers dumb a game down to appeal to the more 'casual' audience. They also tried to do this in 4.0 when anthem came out. It had disastrous consequences. 3.0/4.0 largely annihilated the raiding community. It took the entirety of patch 5.0 to even get to where we are now. We're currently in a state where the size of the nightmare community is 3-4~ times the size of what it was in the prior patch.

 

Ability pruning is likely to erase any gains made to this. And what is even the point? So newer players have an easier way of understanding their classes? Last time i checked, newer casual people can't even be bothered to read skill trees. So how is reducing the amount of nothing they read going to change much of anything?

 

And one more thing. Lowering the bar of one thing in particular, lowers the bar of all things. What is considered casual today, will be the hardcore of tomorrow. And it's always like this, things continuously get dumbed down for no point, just to appeal to a more 'casual' audience, in a cyclic fashion.

 

If you guys want to do something to 'help' more casual audience out. Make an actual tutorial where you explain to them the theme of their class and how certain basics of it work. Encourage them to actually read the skill tree and think. Don't encourage them to just button mash by making things simpler. The game as it is, is completely fine.

[Nee-Elder]

So this is an industry standard thing. As a game gets older very commonly developers dumb a game down to appeal to the more 'casual' audience. They also tried to do this in 4.0 when anthem came out. It had disastrous consequences. 3.0/4.0 largely annihilated the raiding community. It took the entirety of patch 5.0 to even get to where we are now. We're currently in a state where the size of the nightmare community is 3-4~ times the size of what it was in the prior patch.

 

Ability pruning is likely to erase any gains made to this. And what is even the point? So newer players have an easier way of understanding their classes? Last time i checked, newer casual people can't even be bothered to read skill trees. So how is reducing the amount of nothing they read going to change much of anything?

 

And one more thing. Lowering the bar of one thing in particular, lowers the bar of all things. What is considered casual today, will be the hardcore of tomorrow. And it's always like this, things continuously get dumbed down for no point, just to appeal to a more 'casual' audience, in a cyclic fashion.

 

If you guys want to do something to 'help' more casual audience out. Make an actual tutorial where you explain to them the theme of their class and how certain basics of it work. Encourage them to actually read the skill tree and think. Don't encourage them to just button mash by making things simpler. The game as it is, is completely fine.

 

I agree with pretty much everything in your post. However....well...2 things:

 

First, 'our' way of thinking seems to be going by the wayside.

 

And second, we don't yet fully know exactly what---or how much---BioWare is doing with the Legacy of the Sith update. Hopefully, 1 of the Devs will post this week with either a detailed response/reasoning to address all the "worry" or with at least a new phase of PTS directions to give everyone a better idea of what's comin' .

 

We shall see. Meanwhile, these forums sure are rockin' entertainment lol