Level Sync Update

[Ruvalie]

What possible reason could you have for wanting stuff you played through seven to ten years ago to take 3 - 4x longer than it took just two months ago? It's still not hard, but it is time consuming. Why would you want the grind?

 

That's a serious question. I don't get it.

 

Because I wasn't here 7-10 years ago? And because it doesn't take 3-4x longer? The way people talk about the change on the forums doesn't match my actual game experience at all.

 

Apart from that, I play the game for the solo content. I've never done any master mode flashpoints or operations. So it's all very well for people who do those things to say only those should be challenging and everything else should be trivially easy, but that doesn't make sense for my playstyle at all.

[DakhathKilrathi]

Because I wasn't here 7-10 years ago? And because it doesn't take 3-4x longer? The way people talk about the change on the forums doesn't match my actual game experience at all.

 

Apart from that, I play the game for the solo content. I've never done any master mode flashpoints or operations. So it's all very well for people who do those things to say only those should be challenging and everything else should be trivially easy, but that doesn't make sense for my playstyle at all.

 

I play the game for solo content too, outside of GSF. I can't stand grouping in this game because as mentioned in one of my earlier posts, the player base in this game is pretty bad at the game these days on average. It absolutely does take longer than it used to, whether that's true for you or not.

 

I'm not really sure how it couldn't be true, but even assuming it is, everyone who is saying that it does take them longer isn't lying. In what world is being able to do more of the solo content with your time a bad thing? It's not like you're going to run out of years old content to run through with it resetting daily.

Edited April 2, 2022 by DakhathKilrathi

[Ruvalie]

I play the game for solo content too, outside of GSF. I can't stand grouping in this game because as mentioned in one of my earlier posts, the player base in this game is pretty bad at the game these days on average. It absolutely does take longer than it used to, whether that's true for you or not.

 

I'm not really sure how it couldn't be true, but even assuming it is, everyone who is saying that it does take them longer isn't lying. In what world is being able to do more of the solo content with your time a bad thing? It's not like you're going to run out of years old content to run through with it resetting daily.

 

I didn't say it doesn't take longer for me. Just that the difference is so small that the reaction seems disproportionate. The way people talk about it you'd think the entire game was the same level of difficulty as the Eternal Championship. When in fact it's perfectly normal and comparable to other games, just less of a cakewalk. You said earlier that you didn't understand my point of view, and honestly I don't really understand yours either. If you want everything to be trivially easy, why play at all?

[DakhathKilrathi]

I didn't say it doesn't take longer for me. Just that the difference is so small that the reaction seems disproportionate. The way people talk about it you'd think the entire game was the same level of difficulty as the Eternal Championship. When in fact it's perfectly normal and comparable to other games, just less of a cakewalk. You said earlier that you didn't understand my point of view, and honestly I don't really understand yours either. If you want everything to be trivially easy, why play at all?

 

Let's make something clear here: something taking longer does not mean that it's more challenging. That's kind of the whole problem; it takes longer, but it's not more engaging so it's just a bit of a mindless grind.

 

The Eternal Championship isn't hard either, but it's at least an interesting level of engaging as it is currently balanced. That said, I don't want the entire game to be that way. That would also be boring.

 

There should be a healthy mix of interesting endgame content and trivial older content available.

 

You didn't answer my question: what on earth is so bad about being able to do more in less time?

[Ruvalie]

Let's make something clear here: something taking longer does not mean that it's more challenging. That's kind of the whole problem; it takes longer, but it's not more engaging so it's just a bit of a mindless grind.

 

The Eternal Championship isn't hard either, but it's at least an interesting level of engaging as it is currently balanced. That said, I don't want the entire game to be that way. That would also be boring.

 

There should be a healthy mix of interesting endgame content and trivial older content available.

 

You didn't answer my question: what on earth is so bad about being able to do more in less time?

 

You say it's not more challenging. But you've also said that the majority of players are bad. I would venture to guess that most people do find the Eternal Championship challenging. As one of that majority I certainly do.

 

If the game were a chore, then being able to complete it more efficiently would be preferable. Since it's something I do for pleasure, I don't see why shorter would be better. I play for the experience, and a trivial experience isn't fun or worthwhile.

 

You didn't answer my question either. Why do you want to do more in less time? You say that the game should be a mix of challenging endgame content and trivial older content, but you also said that you don't even play endgame content. So you want to play only trivial content? Why? Why should any content be trivial?

[gregordunbar]

Hopefully this post sheds a bit of light on some of the issues and resolutions with Level Sync in the game. We’re still very excited about the content possibilities unlocked by modernizing this huge and fundamental system of the game.

 

Thanks!

-Chris

 

Yes, it shed light on how you are not actually listening to players and are not going to fix what we deem to be broken or wrongfully changed.

 

LONGER FIGHTS are not HARDER FIGHTS. You did not make the game "harder". You made it far more boring and tedious and it seems clear that you have no intentions of changing it.

 

Steam has shown a 22.01% drop in players from the gain in February. From 19,054 (peak) players down to 11,568. But if you look at the AVERAGE amount of players we are near pre 7.0 numbers ALREADY. 6,267 average before 7 hit, now back down to 6,308. This is horrible for less than 2 months after a major update.

 

How much longer are you going to ignore the fact that this "expansion" is failing the game and its players? Are you going to wait until the population falls too low to recover from? Is there going to be a mad scramble with another 20% drop? 40%? Can you at least address THAT? Some of us want to know if we have a team handling this game that is willing to let it die for their vision or if they are capable of understanding that their "vision" is bad for the game and is willing to change because this game, this game should be far more popular than it is...

[DakhathKilrathi]

You didn't answer my question either. Why do you want to do more in less time? You say that the game should be a mix of challenging endgame content and trivial older content, but you also said that you don't even play endgame content. So you want to play only trivial content? Why? Why should any content be trivial?

 

Because of the way SWTOR is currently managed, a large portion of the gear grind consists of old content. We do not yet have a current level daily zone, but they've said we will get that eventually and I would like to be able to have current gear on multiple alts by then.

 

I also used to two man a couple of the master mode flashpoints for the weekly, though that is admittedly not something you can do anymore thanks to it requiring group finder now. I'm playing wait and see on whether or not I want to bother with group finder later. As it stands, things are leaning toward "don't bother" but that could change eventually.

 

As for why it should be trivial? I've repeated the same content for literally years now. If they insist on making us repeat it for a few more years, the less of a chore it is the better. This is meant to be a game, not a job.

 

Edited to add: Conquest is another argument for why it shouldn't be quite so terribly tedious. If you're running multiple alts through to 100k, it gets old very very quickly.

Edited April 2, 2022 by DakhathKilrathi

[Ruvalie]

Because of the way SWTOR is currently managed, a large portion of the gear grind consists of old content. We do not yet have a current level daily zone, but they've said we will get that eventually and I would like to be able to have current gear on multiple alts by then.

 

I also used to two man a couple of the master mode flashpoints for the weekly, though that is admittedly not something you can do anymore thanks to it requiring group finder now. I'm playing wait and see on whether or not I want to bother with group finder later. As it stands, things are leaning toward "don't bother" but that could change eventually.

 

As for why it should be trivial? I've repeated the same content for literally years now. If they insist on making us repeat it for a few more years, the less of a chore it is the better. This is meant to be a game, not a job.

 

Edited to add: Conquest is another argument for why it shouldn't be quite so terribly tedious. If you're running multiple alts through to 100k, it gets old very very quickly.

 

Well, I've finally figured out the source of our disagreement. To me it's a game, to you it actually is a chore because you're only doing it in order to gear up. The solution here is not to ruin the content for the sake of your fast gearing, but for them to change gearing so that it doesn't require doing content you dislike.

 

Although I'm still a bit confused as to how you're gearing up from solo content in the first place – isn't the best gear only available from ops?

[ThadiusMoor]

An additional note on companions and their effectiveness: the Presence base stat does scale in Level Synced content to reflect the amount of base Presence a player would expect to have in that level range. This would apply to Presence earned through character level-up and from equipment. However, the system does not scale any bonus Presence earned from raising the influence levels of companions, so companions with high influence levels will always be more effective across all content where companions can be used.

 

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My question is this...

 

What about those of us that unlocked the 200 presence for legendary class?

What about the 100 presence for human species unlock?

What about the something like 75 presence from datacrons?

 

There is a huge amount of presence that is shared legacy-wide that SHOULD NOT be 'taxed' by your level sync because we worked dam hard to earn those points specifically so they could be shared to our new characters in order to make them much more powerful on purpose, and you put those things there specifically for that exact reason, so what's the deal here...

 

Are you going to write into the code to exclude bolsterizing the actual earned boosts to presence that we actually earned through gameplay?

Edited April 2, 2022 by ThadiusMoor

[Damask_Rose]

The solution here is not to ruin the content for the sake of your fast gearing, but for them to change gearing so that it doesn't require doing content you dislike.

 

That was 6.x gearing. Many of us would absolutely love if they'd go back to that! But, alas, playing for fun is not a part of Bioware's current vision.

[DurdensWrath]

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My question is this...

 

What about those of us that unlocked the 200 presence for legendary class?

What about the 100 presence for human species unlock?

What about the something like 75 presence from datacrons?

 

There is a huge amount of presence that is shared legacy-wide that SHOULD NOT be 'taxed' by your level sync because we worked dam hard to earn those points specifically so they could be shared to our new characters in order to make them much more powerful on purpose, and you put those things there specifically for that exact reason, so what's the deal here...

 

Are you going to write into the code to exclude bolsterizing the actual earned boosts to presence that we actually earned through gameplay?

 

This was my question as well. I almost think the girbil brains forgot about all of that, especially when they fibbed about influence 50 companions being significantly better

 

NONE OF OUR EARNED CONTENT SHOULD BE TAXED.

Edited April 2, 2022 by DurdensWrath

[Kleli]

Thank you for the detailed post! Always interesting to read about how a system works and how you devs are optimizing it. Keep it up!

[Victernus]

NONE OF OUR EARNED CONTENT SHOULD BE TAXED.

 

Hear hear.

 

You're so much more eager to stop players from playing the "wrong" way than to enable players to play at all - or, heaven forbid, have fun playing - that undocumented nerfs come in faster than a simple fix for desynced mission content!

 

And this right here is the most valid point in the whole thread. You cannot expect enthusiasm when the game gains gamebreaking bugs at the same time as massive nerfs, and then you promise to eventually roll some of the nerfs back - without ever once acknowledging the gamebreaking bugs you introduced!

Edited April 3, 2022 by Victernus

[Romeugues]

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My question is this...

 

What about those of us that unlocked the 200 presence for legendary class?

What about the 100 presence for human species unlock?

What about the something like 75 presence from datacrons?

 

There is a huge amount of presence that is shared legacy-wide that SHOULD NOT be 'taxed' by your level sync because we worked dam hard to earn those points specifically so they could be shared to our new characters in order to make them much more powerful on purpose, and you put those things there specifically for that exact reason, so what's the deal here...

 

Are you going to write into the code to exclude bolsterizing the actual earned boosts to presence that we actually earned through gameplay?

What about the Droid attack on the Wookies?

[DzastinBiberi]

I don't get it.

 

If I wanna have 4000 critical in total on my character, why would you take that away from me and scale it down to like 3000?

 

Why did I bother spending millions of credits on critical augments when your new bolster is gonna decide my stats and not me?

 

I've added two alacrity 286 rating augments to my 326 gear in order to raise my alacrity by 200ish.

 

Guess what, I entered the warzone and had the same amount of alacrity as if I didn't had those augments at all.

 

BioWare shouldn't cap our stats in warzones.

If you enter 80 lvl warzone "naked" or in like 252 gear, then that's in you, those ppl shouldn't have the stats of someone who grinded for 326 gear.

 

Remove the cap of stats in wz.

[Tressith]

What about the 100 presence for human species unlock?

 

Man, totally forgot about this when I was writing my post, but that's an excellent point. The devs neither know nor care how much work players have put in for these rewards -- they only care we're not bullying their precious little pieces of content.

[Sarova]

We’re still very excited about the content possibilities unlocked by modernizing this huge and fundamental system of the game.

 

Thanks!

-Chris

Is modernising the game BW's version of new content? As a story player, I would like to see some actual content please. I can't help but feel a number of things mentioned in your post should have been solved long before 7.0 was released.

[Damask_Rose]

Is modernising the game BW's version of new content? As a story player, I would like to see some actual content please. I can't help but feel a number of things mentioned in your post should have been solved long before 7.0 was released.

 

If feels to me like they vastly over-estimated what they were capable of accomplishing in one patch. They decided to change just about everything in major ways when they have known, for a fact, that every little change causes a ripple effect and can break numerous seemingly unrelated things. That just isn't smart planning. A team that hasn't been able to add new colors to Twi'leks because the database for those colors wasn't flexible had no business trying to totally revamp numerous core systems at once.

[YTTHYTTH]

Hello and Thank you Chris for the post, much appreciated.

 

I'm a casual player, this means that I do not to OPs, it does not mean that I put in any less hours than someone that does OPs or that I spend any less CC in game than someone who does OPs.

 

I would like to re-write your message from, this casual players, eyes.

 

The gear you have worked and farmed for is useless in 90% of the game.

 

The only solo content that my gear will perform at it's fullest is a daily area that has not yet been created/released.

 

Every other heroic mission, every other daily area, my gear is underperforming.

 

My gear should be ok in Veteran mode FPs, but if I'm honest they provide the worst gear in game. No idea why anyone actually does these outside of a CQ weekly.

 

My gear means nothing in GSF, my character can be naked for all GSF cares.

 

My gear should be ok in MM FPs, but as a casual player it's not really fun to sit in a queue for an hour to be grouped with people that see it's a FP they don't want so they leave. And let's be real, a lot of "casual" players don't even bother with MM FPs.

 

One thing that I didn't see you address in your post was fun.

I'm not here to speak for anyone else but it's not fun to go back to Taris, sixty levels later to spend the same amount or more time killing mobs.

 

The idea of level sync as you describe it takes away motivation for a lot of casual players to farm gear at all because the gear does not matter. I would go so far as to say that for 90% of the content I should stick with 306 gear because at least I can min/max that and when I do get level sync'd down I have the stats I want prioritized, not the stats you choose with the 326 gear.

 

I get what you are trying to do. I'm not sure which in game players the developers at Bioware talk to but I can tell you that every 7.0 move you have made, including this one has been received with a feeling that the game will not go on for much longer, in my guild discord. I'm not sure about everyone else's.

 

I, and I would like to think most player, are trying out best to cheer you on and see 7.0 become a success. Please don't completely alienate the casual player percentage of your player base while you try and figure everything out though.

[mike_carton]

Let's make something clear here: something taking longer does not mean that it's more challenging. That's kind of the whole problem; it takes longer, but it's not more engaging so it's just a bit of a mindless grind.

 

The Eternal Championship isn't hard either, but it's at least an interesting level of engaging as it is currently balanced. That said, I don't want the entire game to be that way. That would also be boring.

 

There should be a healthy mix of interesting endgame content and trivial older content available.

 

QFT. Good points, very well made.

[DurdensWrath]

I feel like the devs at this point are basically Admiral Ozzel.

 

And Vader's words are completely appropriate for them.

[Myryllyxan]

My great apology if this has already been asked.

 

What is the advantage, now, of doing the Datacrons to have an advantage over those to whom have not done them? Is it based on a pure percentage?

 

Such as: "Tatooine is a forty-percent reduction of stats", bringing your datacrons bonuses down by forty percent.

 

Or is it, "Tatooine has a base of X for where all stats should be, and then apply my datacron/legacy species completion bonus/companion influence level/all dialogue trees for each companion bonuses on top, adjusted by each planet?

 

Do stats appear and then be modified with adjustments per bonus, or, are all the bonuses applied, then all of it reduced to planet?

[DWho]

My great apology if this has already been asked.

 

What is the advantage, now, of doing the Datacrons to have an advantage over those to whom have not done them? Is it based on a pure percentage?

 

Such as: "Tatooine is a forty-percent reduction of stats", bringing your datacrons bonuses down by forty percent.

 

Or is it, "Tatooine has a base of X for where all stats should be, and then apply my datacron/legacy species completion bonus/companion influence level/all dialogue trees for each companion bonuses on top, adjusted by each planet?

 

Do stats appear and then be modified with adjustments per bonus, or, are all the bonuses applied, then all of it reduced to planet?

 

It depends on the stat being adjusted. Bonuses are supposed to apply on top of the base (the base is supposed to be adjusted for level sync and not the bonus). For Presence that is not working correctly at the moment and is a planned fix. The calculations may be not working with other abilities as well. If you have the datacrons, you should have a higher total ability score (base + bonus) than if you don't have them.

Edited April 3, 2022 by DWho

[mike_carton]

What is the advantage, now, of doing the Datacrons to have an advantage over those to whom have not done them?

 

Getting the datacrons - at least some of them - is fun. Beyond that, they are most useful to round out the stats for characters that do Operations regularly, especially VM+ Operations. Not much use in regular solo PvE.

Edited April 3, 2022 by mike_carton

[Octom]

'... in a future update.'

 

'... in future updates.'

Do you lot have these trademarked yet? You're missing out if not.