Upcoming Patch Schedule

[iamnotacrook]

Not happy about this change, but its nothing i complain about. But i would like to have more conquest objectives for 71+ level like "Mission taskmaster: Complete 10 heroics" or "Missions taskmaster: Complete these two weeklys". Something in that line that contains repeatable missions and weeklys and heroics. Even some more with flashpoints for those who do grind them.

[Jedi_Max]

11 hours ago, RadarOMalley said:

This is not accurate. It would take 10 weeks to get to level 100 on the track, but 15 weeks to finish the Reputation track. Last week, just by doing regular content, I got to 100 fragments. Which if I keep that pace would put completion of that achievement at 15 weeks. It's would take the exact amount of time. 

Nope, 15 weeklies it takes you to do 100 weeklies achiev. Legend achiev you get before this, it takes about 10 weeks by doing 7 weeklies a week and a few weeks after this by just clicking what you earned (cause of reputation weekly cap).

For now by doing 7 weeklies you get ~75 fragments, not even close to 100. So to complete new achiev you need to do 20 weeks of 7 weeklies which gets you to 75*20=1500 fragments.

Now compare old 10 weeks of 7 weeklies with new 20 weeks of 7 weeklies. It takes 2x more time to complete new achiev.

[RadarOMalley]

11 hours ago, Jedi_Max said:

Nope, 15 weeklies it takes you to do 100 weeklies achiev. Legend achiev you get before this, it takes about 10 weeks by doing 7 weeklies a week and a few weeks after this by just clicking what you earned (cause of reputation weekly cap).

For now by doing 7 weeklies you get ~75 fragments, not even close to 100. So to complete new achiev you need to do 20 weeks of 7 weeklies which gets you to 75*20=1500 fragments.

Now compare old 10 weeks of 7 weeklies with new 20 weeks of 7 weeklies. It takes 2x more time to complete new achiev.

Yes, it's 15 weeks to do 100 weeklies. To get to Legend on the reputation track, you need 70,000 reputation points. The weekly cap is 5,000 reputation points. So 5,000 x 14 weeks = 70,000 points. Go ahead and check for yourself. I don't understand why you're arguing with me about easily verifiable facts?

Speaking from my personal experience in the first week of season 6, where I earned ~100 fragments, that'll take me the same amount of time to complete. And I didn't even do many operations last week. In theory, I can earn fragments at a much quicker pace if I PUG groups on fleet or in Allies. So I might even be able to complete the 1,500 fragments achievement faster than I could complete the GS track. I can say that it's just Thursday and I'm already at ~70 for the week. 

[Jedi_Max]

15 hours ago, RadarOMalley said:

Yes, it's 15 weeks to do 100 weeklies. To get to Legend on the reputation track, you need 70,000 reputation points. The weekly cap is 5,000 reputation points. So 5,000 x 14 weeks = 70,000 points. Go ahead and check for yourself. I don't understand why you're arguing with me about easily verifiable facts?

Speaking from my personal experience in the first week of season 6, where I earned ~100 fragments, that'll take me the same amount of time to complete. And I didn't even do many operations last week. In theory, I can earn fragments at a much quicker pace if I PUG groups on fleet or in Allies. So I might even be able to complete the 1,500 fragments achievement faster than I could complete the GS track. I can say that it's just Thursday and I'm already at ~70 for the week. 

I was speaking about different thing, it was not about what week you get the achiev - it was about how much weeks with 7 weeklies it takes to do the achiev. It is twice more.

14 weeks is just because you spend last weeks clicking rep items you earned before and not because you spend time farming things 14 weeks. And I'm talking about farming weeklies. Please re-read my last message again, I was not arguing about how much weeks it takes to get Legend. If it will be more clear, we can count it as "you should do 70 weeklies for old achiev" vs. "you should do 140 weeklies for new achiev" - twice more, fact.

And of course you can do more farming playing more PvE activities besides 7 weeklies a week, but that's not in line with previous achiev where it was not required.

[coreymj]

On 3/14/2024 at 1:13 PM, EricMusco said:

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
 

Really? lol.... this massive wall of text to simply say "The changes were missed" which should be easily understood by any reasonable player who gets how much goes into dev changes and patch notes, and this stuff gets missed all the time. Talk about TL;DR. LOL

[Mercielaga]

Stopping in to say, it's chilling just how quiet Satele Shan has become. I'm usually an optimist, but instead of getting a bump in activity, it has actually dropped since the start of the Galactic Season. Some of it may be attributable to the server transfers to Shae Vizla, but I think most people who are moving to SV were likely to already be spending more time there before the update.

From conversations in my guild, I know that some people are definitely not doing multiple server activity because of the rep token nerf.

Right now, I feel like this is the thing that could kill SS. It has certainly hurt my guild, and judging from the lack of usual activity during peak times, we're not the only ones.

[ytrenor]

On 3/14/2024 at 3:13 PM, EricMusco said:

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.

Two weeks in, I think I like it (removing the reputation track). As you say, it does remove the FOMO feeling I had in doing GS activities long after completing 100th level during previous GS, in order to accumulate all the tokens I could, on all servers. Now, with 160sih points on each servers after two weeks, I feel like I might be able to finish this GS in 10 weeks and just not give a F about GS activities once I reach level 100 this time, because any more activities will earn nothing, so pointless to do (unless some good CQ points attached to them (like a WB kill present in both GS and CQ objectives, but I'll do it for CQ, not for GS).

Also for me, with the nerf to the ground of the CQ points for reputation tokens, I'm just not going to try to grind to get 500k on each of my guilds, on each servers, like I did in between GS5 and GS6. So long extra servers, you won't see me populate you once this GS is completed. More time for me to maybe refocus on one server and just do enough on The Forge for a conquest while casualy playing the stories I like (from Origin stories up to Nathema Conspiracy, not the crap since 6.0 and 7.0).

And with all that more time outside the game with summer coming.  

I'm also currently playing my second account (prefered) to see how I could fare by only subscribing one month here and there in the future (to collect the subscribers' GS rewards), instead of the 6 months at a time I do since I started playing in 2018. So far, it feels like it would be another big stress relief, as it can (barely but still) do 40 points per week (even on Shae Vizla with one guildless toon at level 21), enough to complete GS. Then wait, maybe, until a real great story drops to sub longterm again.

So in summary, less grind because less playtime because less give-a-f because I'm not going to make up for the anihilation of rep tokens.

Sincerely, really Eric, thank you.

Edited March 25 by ytrenor

[casirabit]

That's what I been doing and with Dawn Trail on FFX dropping in July this will give me more time to play it, than here.

[TrixxieTriss]

16 hours ago, casirabit said:

That's what I been doing and with Dawn Trail on FFX dropping in July this will give me more time to play it, than here.

STO has been a fun diversion for us. It’s come a long way since we last played it several years ago. BS only have themselves to blame as more people find more fun & better value elsewhere.