Upcoming Patch Schedule

[EricMusco]

Hey folks,

I wanted to give you a quick heads up on our plans for the next little bit as we have 3 patches coming to you in pretty short order.

7.4.1a will be coming ASAP, likely tomorrow. This is to address an issue that the Join the Fight mount is not currently working at level 1 as intended. Jackie will be posting details once we have locked down maintenance timing.

7.4.1b is right on the horizon, targeting early/mid next week followed by 7.4.1c in the next 2-3 weeks. We are tracking a variety of emerging issues for these patches such as Ancient Armaments and Conquest/Rep change. I’ll be back later today or early tomorrow with a follow-up post about our internal conversations following your feedback on the Conquest/Rep changes.

I’m gonna lock this thread for now and will respond here later. I will reopen the thread when I do!

Thanks all, talk soon.

-eric
 

[JackieKo]

Hi everyone,

Chiming in to give you all an idea of what to expect for tomorrow. We do intend on taking down the servers to roll out 7.4.1a which would fix the K-NorCo B5C Mount from the Join the Fight bundle. However, we do not have an exact time scheduled just yet as there are levels of verification and testing that needs to be happen. Once I have this information, I will update this thread. What I can say at this time that estimated downtime is approximately two (2) hours.

Thanks all.

[JackieKo]

Good morning everyone, 

We're getting ready to deploy Game Update 7.4.1a:

• Time: 9:30am CT / 2:30pm UTC
• Estimated downtime: 2 hours

I'll update this thread when the servers are back up. 

[JackieKo]

Servers are now back up! 

The following patch notes will be added shortly. 

• Fixed an issue with the exclusive Join the Fight bundle K-NorCo B5C Mount not being able to be rideable at level 1.
• Galactic Seasons 6 Blueprint Fragments are now Bind on Pickup.

Thanks all

[EricMusco]

Hey folks,

Coming off of 7.4.1, there were obviously some changes we made that received some feedback and I wanted to talk through them with you! I think we can put them in three buckets and in each there are some problems from our side that I want to address. Those buckets in order are:

• Removing Reputation tracks from GS / Blueprint Fragment confusion
• Changes to Reputation Conquest Objectives
• Missing patch notes

Where is the Rep Track?!

Simply put, the intended functionality of a Rep track does not pair well with the functionality of Galactic Seasons. For us, we want a rep track to be something that a player can engage with over a long period of time, to work through, earn rewards and titles, etc. Since a GS is only available for a limited time we didn’t want to push into a FOMO feeling or anything like that. We want Rep tracks to be tied to things like Daily Areas.

However, there was a similar expectation of those items being on the track, of those Achievements being earned during the season, etc. And so as a middle ground we replaced the rep items with the Blueprint Fragments which could serve a similar purpose. The problem here is that our messaging and overall user experience for these could use some work. We didn’t communicate this change clearly up front and more importantly, Blueprint Fragments themselves don’t do a great job of communicating what they or what their purpose is.

Going forward, it is our intention to stop doing rep tracks for Galactic Seasons and reserve them for content where it makes more sense (like Daily Areas).

The Conquest Change

This is surely the place we saw the most feedback here in the forums following the patch yesterday. First off, why did we even make this change? Well, this Objective is quite a bit outsized in just how many points you get relative to its effort. Not that we don’t want a range of Objectives, some of which can be completed very easily/quickly. But this Objective was a very large amount of points for what was required of you, and that’s why we ultimately nerfed it.

In connection to the first section is that although we lowered the points from this Conquest, our goal was to add in new objectives so that players who were jumping in for quick sessions and progression through Galactic Seasons, could then also be gaining Conquest points (the new Objectives focus on gaining GS levels).

Now, all of that being said, we definitely hear your feedback. We know that we hit this Objective pretty hard. And although it may have been needed to pull it into balance, we are actively discussing what adjustments we can make and I will let you know once I have those details.

But, Where was the Patch Note

Ok so before I peel back the curtain a little I want to get something out of the way, we didn’t try to hide any of this, it was just missed (I’ll tell you how in a minute). We know that a nerf like this is never fun and you having to discover it on your own adds so much more friction to the situation. But to be clear, any change that is player facing should be communicated to you, whether that is through patch notes, social media, forums, or some combination of all of the above. A change that affects you that is missed is never intentional. 

I know ya’ll appreciate some behind the scenes when we can and so this is a good opportunity, so here goes. Let me walk you through how our patch notes are built to illustrate how this was missed. And amusingly a little bit of how Musco of the past and Musco of the present combined for this one. Also usual reminder I am going to be doing a bit of oversimplifying here so don’t take all of this as 100% 1 to 1, but to be illustrative!

Ok so when we pull patch notes we do so mostly in two ways:

• Highlights - These are the big features we know and track across a whole lot of teams, usually have marketing blurbs written, blogs, etc. 
• Bugs - The important one for this section, we pull our bug fixes internally based on a query that Musco, Community Manager of the past, helped write. This pulls from our internal tracking of all of the bug fixes we made for a particular release so that Jackie and the Live team can convert those into patch notes!

Now fast forward. As of late we’ve really been trying to squeeze in more stuff when we can and often this stuff is small. So not a whole big feature, but also not us fixing a bug. From a project management standpoint, those things are tasks. This is something Musco, Producer of the Present has been helping to drive internally. You can see this in things like Ancient Armaments or the new Legacy Perk. 

Well, when we are building our patch notes as I already described, we are typically looking at our highlight features and bugs (thanks Musco of the past) and in that query we now realize we were missing some tasks. In fact, both of my examples of tasks from above, Ancient Armaments and the new Legacy Perk, were missed on our first internal draft of the patch notes until we caught them on review.

You can probably see where this is going. The changes I’ve been talking about in this thread were all captured in tasks and so when we were writing the patch notes they were just missed and then weren’t caught on internal review. As you already can guess we are updating our process to make sure we are throwing a better net on catching those tasks in the future.

Anyways, this is a long post and I have thrown quite a lot of information at you. Thank you all for the continued feedback and I will pass on any more information as I have it.

-eric
 

[casual_juergen]

 

Quote

 

Ok so when we pull patch notes we do so mostly in two ways:

• Highlights - These are the big features we know and track across a whole lot of teams, usually have marketing blurbs written, blogs, etc. 
• Bugs - The important one for this section, we pull our bug fixes internally based on a query that Musco, Community Manager of the past, helped write. This pulls from our internal tracking of all of the bug fixes we made for a particular release so that Jackie and the Live team can convert those into patch notes!

 

That I can understand. IMO a third category would have prevented the bad player experience post-patch and the, er, fallout, in the forums. That would be something like "Player affecting - Features that have a noticeable effect on user experience". The two issues you mentioned were major changes in this category.

Regards, Juergen

[GunqqerFriithian]

So you've mentioned why the patchnotes didn't have the cq changes in them, but what is being done to prevent this happenning in the future? What steps are being taken? You say you're updating your process but that doesn't really inspire any confidence.

And what about the achivements being removed from people's legacy?
And what about the ongoing login issues? I paid $15 a month to play this game, what is going to be done to compensate people for the loss of playtime?

It seems that a lot of the issues the playerbase is having with this new patch are being mostly ignored.

[Savyl]

Thanks for your post and explanation. I hate to go off topic but I seriously hope the Ambient sound bug is fixed for Copero SH because it's really annoying to hear the sound all the time unless I log completely out of the client. Would also love to see Mak-Ska SH on my legacy. As for galactic seasons I love it so much that I completely unlocked it. It was worth the money for me personally. I will play it out on other servers. Love everything except these two bugs and especially the Copero SH sound bug. That's major for me when I need to log out of the client. Doesn't motivate me to log back in.

Edited March 14 by Savyl
typo

[khamseen_air]

So you decided to remove reputation tracks from GS and decided to fill their rewards in the GS track with literal vendor trash.

Can you see how that doesn't look or feel particularly great to players?

Then while a lot of us are still peeved about you increasing personal CQ targets from 50k to 100k you decide to nerf one of the "over represented", aka "not a grind so we're going to use it because it makes my game experience more fun and less painful", objectives.

Again, can you see how that doesn't look or feel particularly great to players? 

 

As for the patch notes issue, we've all heard that speech before after pretty much every major patch with missing notes. Actions speak louder than words.

[damonskye]

EricMusco, that’s all fine and good, but… it doesn’t even begin to address the problem of WHY the CQ/rep change was such a shock to our systems: the fact that so much of the CQ reward requirements are based on grinding years-old content (much of it more than a decade old).

The actual REASON many of us are upset about it is that it was by far the path of least resistance to a punishing CQ requirement, when the alternatives are primarily just mindless grinds or things we’ve done to death.

Let’s make this simple. Given, say, a messy floor, and your alternatives to clean it are a vacuum cleaner or a toothbrush & pail, you’re going to choose the vacuum… because cleaning a floor with a toothbrush just plain sucks.

Easy CQ options are the vacuum. Heroic missions we’ve done a thousand times are the toothbrush. You’ve never given us an option in the middle, so it’s no wonder we’re frustrated, and the nerf made things worse. This isn’t rocket science, it’s common sense. 

Edited March 14 by damonskye

[nameinvalidoruna]

Please, just restore repu conq points to the original, and in the future just ignore any similar ideas that lead to this...

No need for "balancing" (aka ruining) the game further.

[Darcmoon]

This is my feedback on this.

1 hour ago, EricMusco said:

The Conquest Change

This is surely the place we saw the most feedback here in the forums following the patch yesterday. First off, why did we even make this change? Well, this Objective is quite a bit outsized in just how many points you get relative to its effort. Not that we don’t want a range of Objectives, some of which can be completed very easily/quickly. But this Objective was a very large amount of points for what was required of you, and that’s why we ultimately nerfed it.

In connection to the first section is that although we lowered the points from this Conquest, our goal was to add in new objectives so that players who were jumping in for quick sessions and progression through Galactic Seasons, could then also be gaining Conquest points (the new Objectives focus on gaining GS levels).

Now, all of that being said, we definitely hear your feedback. We know that we hit this Objective pretty hard. And although it may have been needed to pull it into balance, we are actively discussing what adjustments we can make and I will let you know once I have those details.

I'll start with this one.  The reason given makes sense but the new objectives are terrible in implementation.  The old CQ rep objective gave about 45k conquest.  That was 315k a week if you did it every day.  The two new objectives I found (if I missed any please let me know) give 22k once per week and 10k each day in theory.  That gives about 148k a week.  Not even half of what could be gotten.  Additionally, the daily one for 10k is not one that most people will be able to get every day.  I know that I generally complete my GS objectives over about two days.  Depending on how many points we have into the level, we may get one or two more levels from the daily but that can easily happen on a day you have already gotten a level from doing objectives or, for subscribers, on the fourth day we log in and get that level.  Lets say on average people will get that objective 4 times each week.  That means 118k from the new objectives and doing the rep CQ.  Those of us who are already maxed on our reps loose 56k from that so get only 62k per week.  That is a massive hit with the changes to the CQ and not having a rep for the season.  

Also, what is going to happen during the time period between seasons when those new objectives cannot be completed?  I makes it hard for players who mainly or only play solo.  I've seen more than a few people say it feels like they are getting pushed to do PVP/GSF to get the CQ they want/need.  Uprisings are the only thing close to them and finding a group for them is tough.  

 

1 hour ago, EricMusco said:

Where is the Rep Track?!

Simply put, the intended functionality of a Rep track does not pair well with the functionality of Galactic Seasons. For us, we want a rep track to be something that a player can engage with over a long period of time, to work through, earn rewards and titles, etc. Since a GS is only available for a limited time we didn’t want to push into a FOMO feeling or anything like that. We want Rep tracks to be tied to things like Daily Areas.

However, there was a similar expectation of those items being on the track, of those Achievements being earned during the season, etc. And so as a middle ground we replaced the rep items with the Blueprint Fragments which could serve a similar purpose. The problem here is that our messaging and overall user experience for these could use some work. We didn’t communicate this change clearly up front and more importantly, Blueprint Fragments themselves don’t do a great job of communicating what they or what their purpose is.

Going forward, it is our intention to stop doing rep tracks for Galactic Seasons and reserve them for content where it makes more sense (like Daily Areas).

I understand where you are coming from with the feeling that a rep track didn't pair well with GS.  The fragments, like you mentioned, don't do a great job of explaining themselves.  Additionally, I don't know if the drop rate for them is correct.  Playing three separate characters today I got a total of 4 fragments dropped from mobs. Yesterday with three different characters it was 5. 95% of the time my companion was out other than when I was doing a quest involving a walker/monitor/etc... such as on Iokath.  We need to get about 30 or so fragments from mobs each week to get the minimum needed to complete the achievement and that's with doing 7 GS objectives each week and the daily objective.  I'll admit that maybe I've just had bad luck with the RNG on them so far.  

 

1 hour ago, EricMusco said:

But, Where was the Patch Note

Ok so before I peel back the curtain a little I want to get something out of the way, we didn’t try to hide any of this, it was just missed (I’ll tell you how in a minute). We know that a nerf like this is never fun and you having to discover it on your own adds so much more friction to the situation. But to be clear, any change that is player facing should be communicated to you, whether that is through patch notes, social media, forums, or some combination of all of the above. A change that affects you that is missed is never intentional. 

I know ya’ll appreciate some behind the scenes when we can and so this is a good opportunity, so here goes. Let me walk you through how our patch notes are built to illustrate how this was missed. And amusingly a little bit of how Musco of the past and Musco of the present combined for this one. Also usual reminder I am going to be doing a bit of oversimplifying here so don’t take all of this as 100% 1 to 1, but to be illustrative!

Ok so when we pull patch notes we do so mostly in two ways:

• Highlights - These are the big features we know and track across a whole lot of teams, usually have marketing blurbs written, blogs, etc. 
• Bugs - The important one for this section, we pull our bug fixes internally based on a query that Musco, Community Manager of the past, helped write. This pulls from our internal tracking of all of the bug fixes we made for a particular release so that Jackie and the Live team can convert those into patch notes!

Now fast forward. As of late we’ve really been trying to squeeze in more stuff when we can and often this stuff is small. So not a whole big feature, but also not us fixing a bug. From a project management standpoint, those things are tasks. This is something Musco, Producer of the Present has been helping to drive internally. You can see this in things like Ancient Armaments or the new Legacy Perk. 

Well, when we are building our patch notes as I already described, we are typically looking at our highlight features and bugs (thanks Musco of the past) and in that query we now realize we were missing some tasks. In fact, both of my examples of tasks from above, Ancient Armaments and the new Legacy Perk, were missed on our first internal draft of the patch notes until we caught them on review.

You can probably see where this is going. The changes I’ve been talking about in this thread were all captured in tasks and so when we were writing the patch notes they were just missed and then weren’t caught on internal review. As you already can guess we are updating our process to make sure we are throwing a better net on catching those tasks in the future.

I appreciate the explanation about how this got missed in the patch notes.  Is sucks but stupid stuff happens and, as you said, you are working to make sure it doesn't happen again.  What is curious is that neither one of these things got mentioned before the patch.  The change for Seasons not having a rep would have been easy to include in the 7.4.1 livestream.  I highly doubt that was decided after the stream.  It is also a pretty major change so it would have made sense to say something then.  It also should have been in the GS6 article from the beginning and not added after the fact.

The change to the Reputation CQ is another one that I'm surprised no one apparently realized that players would have strong feelings about and therefore get mentioned beforehand.  The feedback would have at least given you all a heads up.  It would have also given the players a chance to communicate that the two new objectives do not make up for the loss.  

I do believe that you as a company badly messed up with how long it took to let players know that the changes were not a bug and were intended.  I wasn't able to log on until much later Tuesday but was watching the forums and there was alot of upset players and even some thinking that they had sold the fragments accidentally and therefore lost out on the rep.  Someone should have at least popped in real quick to the General Discussion and updated players.  It shouldn't have been a single post on a thread in the bug forums which is very easy to miss.  

[Jdast]

I typed a lengthy response in a different thread not knowing Jackie unlocked this one. Feel free to read it if you are so inclined...

https://forums.swtor.com/topic/934046-conquest-pts-for-advance-reputation-nerfed/page/8/#comment-9804989

Here is the TL;DR: The current system has decimated Alt progression and is way too far removed from the 'play your way' philosophy of days gone by. There is no reason not to just go preferred status and play 7.5 / 7.6 to wrap up the story when they are eventually released. 

Dasty

Edited March 14 by Jdast

[PeterGun-SWE]

EricMusco... so is this Broadswords message to the high level players, and faithful subscribers?

 

P.s. and you haven't even addressed the removal of 320 random items drop and level 11 lockboxes!!!

[nameinvalidoruna]

2 minutes ago, Jdast said:

TL;DR: The current system has decimated Alt progression and is way too far removed from the 'play your way' philosophy of days gone by. There is no reason not to just go preferred status and play 7.5 / 7.6 when they are eventually released. 

Dasty

More like 8.0 (if we ever get there)

[ThanderSnB]

As far as galactic seasons, the main problem with the rep conquest is that players can store up rep tokens to consume daily to get conquest points later without doing much. What I would do is add a new conquest objective:

Galactic Mission Complete (Complete a mission on any planet, available once daily) - Base conquest points 8,000, which is 20,000 with 150% stronghold bonus.

When combined with the 5,000 conquest points from completing a mission on specific planets (e.g. Tatooine: Heroics), it adds up to 25,000 conquest points, which is enough to get the galactic season daily done by completing a mission. That's about how much work feels right to me to get the galactic season daily done each day.

Another option would be increasing base conquest points of Galactic Seasons: Progress from 3,800 -> 10,000, which would be 25,000 with 150% stronghold bonus. Players could spread out their weeklies and get the daily done at the same time. The problem with this one is that it can be hard to find groups for a lot of the group weeklies, so players have to work on them early in the week. That prevents players from being able to space their weeklies over every day of the week. Players have to start those group ones early if they want to finish them before the reset. That's why I think my proposed new conquest objective Galactic Mission Complete would work better.

Edited March 14 by ThanderSnB

[AlainaFlute]

How about y'all just stop nerfing things! You're not good at nerfing at all. You nerf things with a giant hammer with the power of Thor behind it and nerf it into the ground. It might be fun for you guys, but it sucks for us. Stop nerfing. Add more stuff to do. Adding things (whether it's content, gs objectives, conquest objectives, things like that) will have the players be happier. Happy players spend more money in the Cartel Market! 

[SithLikeTraps]

2 hours ago, EricMusco said:

Well, this Objective is quite a bit outsized in just how many points you get relative to its effort. Not that we don’t want a range of Objectives, some of which can be completed very easily/quickly. But this Objective was a very large amount of points for what was required of you, and that’s why we ultimately nerfed it.

So, first you removed the 5k CPs per heroic that was there during 6.x and made it once per planet instead, then you nerfed the star fortress weekly CPs and buffed the PVP/GSF, and now you've nerfed the reputation. And the reason for the latter is "everyone was doing it, so we don't want you to do it anymore". You do realize that PVP/GSF provide much more conquest points but somehow they are not among those "many points you get"? Is it your intention to force everyone into doing PVP? Well, in my case it just means that I don't care about jumping through your hoops anymore, it's too much effort for very little fun.

[michaelkdaw]

What about the appearance gear and the removal of 320-level drops?

[Thraka]

So did you guys realize the changes would cut tech frags and conquest comms in half for conquest players, or was that just an accident?

[Taurax]

The drop rate of the blueprints is way too low to absolutely grind to get the achievement in time.

So, the rewards track at...

Level 2 subscribers get exactly 10,000 credits then, as the only thing you can do with them is vendor them.

Level 7, 12, 22,27, 32, 52, 57, 62, 72, 77,and 82 , subs get another 10000 credits each of those times.   So, subs get 120,000 credits for paying a sub during this for 2 months.

Subs don't need 120,000 credits.  The blueprints should have been something to turn in to get rewards or something.

[XhrisShan]

But where's the part about the dozens of posts on the forums of players unable to login since 7.4.1? The post you made earlier (i.e. "Check that your antivirus didn't suddenly start hating SWTOR; delete [folder most of you already tried deleting]; or make sure your PC didn't downgrade itself when 7.4.1 dropped") didn't help - many of us can't actually play, making what you're fixing essentially irrelevant.

[GhostofaJedi]

Where’s the part about removing players timers ??

[Kilekrn]

Eric Musco claiming that they didn't try and hide the reputation conquest nerf is about as believable as the NFL claiming they were unaware repeated hits to the head cause brain issues.

[damonskye]

36 minutes ago, AlainaFlute said:

How about y'all just stop nerfing things! You're not good at nerfing at all.

Not to mention, nerfs only punish loyal players at this point. The era of shiny new SWTOR players is in the past. Fun-hammers erode remaining goodwill from your longtime players, and that well is running dry.

Seriously, devs, just stop. You made NO ONE happy, and NO ONE will play more after these changes. 

Edited March 14 by damonskye