Ancient Armaments: A nice idea that should have been a couple of vendors instead

[BenKatarn]

First of all, I want to say that I am grateful that Ancient Armaments are even a thing. I was one of the people crying foul when it was announced that 7.4's GTN update would no longer allow for old world drop armor pieces and weapons with randomized stats would no longer be able to be sold via the GTN. I annoyed by this decision for multiple reasons, mainly because 1) I dislike losing access to any kind of content or equipment in general and 2) because I very much love the original gear design of SWTOR's launch era. I'm aware that these days people are more into the newer, more high detail outfits that the Cartel Market offers, but for people like me who *love* the base game era of SWTOR, I always want something that fits with that design aesthetic to wear when doing that content.

I was therefore very grateful when it was also announced that these world drops would be brought back with another update, in spite of the fact that, according to @JoeStramaglia's words, these types of drops didn't "sell very often", the dev team would still look into ways to keep these appearances around for the Outfitter and companion gear.

Now 7.4.1 has brought us "Ancient Armaments", which returns all these old world drops in a new way. They no longer have any stats, but all of the armor pieces that are part of the "Fitted" line now feature a dye slot, and likewise the older weapons also feature a tuning slot. They also have a "fixed" appearance now, meaning they won't switch based on faction, so certain appearances can now be carried over to the opposing faction. That is all great, and I love that the team actually took the time to incorporate them all back into the game, but at the same time, I feel like we're kind of missing the mark here.

At the time of writing this post, we can't sell these "Fitted" items on the GTN yet due to a bug, but we're told that we're getting that fixed relatively soon, so good on that. However, I am a little worried about what will happen once these items become available on the GTN. The "Fitted" equipment has no credit value assigned to them, meaning they cannot be sold to regular vendors and they also can't be properly disintegrated like the current "normal" 320 gear drops we got before the last update, making them rather useless for most other players, which leads me to think that either we won't see much of the "Fitted" gear on the GTN at all, or at ridiculously inflated prices, and I don't think that was supposed to be intention here. I have already seen posts on here, the subreddit and on Twitter with people complaining about this old gear clogging up inventories while adding little to no benefit to all those who didn't care about these items in the first place. Even Treasure Hunting missions now yield the new drops and people aren't happy about that.

So I am asking a relatively simple question: Why were Ancient Armaments designed the way they are now? I love that we have them, but I also think that this gear shouldn't be world drops anymore, but rather, just be sold at vendors on the fleet. Unless you really want this gear for your outfitter, the gear itself is pretty much worthless for anyone else, so having them as cosmetic world drops that can't even be used to upgrade your gear if need be is a little questionable. We even now have a new Login Rewards calendar dedicated to Ancient Armaments that rewards some of this gear at key intervals in the calendar. It's a nice effort, but I seriously have to ask why this was even done? It feels like an unnecessary amount of additional work that was done for this gear. Again, I love that we still have this gear around, but not like this.

Would it have been so bad to just put this gear on a couple of vendors on the fleet for a reasonable credit price per piece (NOT like the old Galactic Command gear that is being sold for 500,000 credits AND 3,500 Tech Fragments per piece!) and be done with it? For several years now, the Galactic Trade Network section on both the Republic and Imperial Fleet have a vendor booth that's been sealed off, (I don't even remember what used to be there) that would have been perfect to place some vendors there. Since the gear itself is based on the game's original archetypes, they could easily be labeled with <Ancient Armaments - Knight>, <Ancient Armaments - Agent> etc and be sorted that way for easier access. Having 2000+ pieces of gear on a single vendor would be absolute overkill. Price them something between 20,000 and 100,000 credits per piece if need be (while keeping the pieces as Bind on Equip), it would even make a decent credit sink for people like me.

So overall, I'd like to ask the devs to rethink Ancient Armaments as they are now. Don't overly complicate the matter. Put the old gear on a couple of vendors, price everything reasonably and then either reduce the drop rate on planets so that people who didn't want this gear in the first place aren't beaten to death by them or remove them from the loot table altogether once they can be bought from an NPC vendor.

[GeneralGyro]

with how hard the tech frag vendor for old armor sets chugs along, 2000 items spread across a few vendors would be a nightmare.

[JakRoanin]

I think they should drop on the worlds they are themed for, ie. Balmora and Ord Mantel, Hutta or Nar Shaada. It's very disorganized and the Icons aren't good. 

[Darkestmonty]

8 minutes ago, JakRoanin said:

I think they should drop on the worlds they are themed for, ie. Balmora and Ord Mantel, Hutta or Nar Shaada. It's very disorganized and the Icons aren't good. 

would be nice if they clean the list up a bit getting rid of sets that are only slight colour differences (or no colour differences) and lock them to the planets/flashpoints they dropped in.

Over 2000 pieces is a lot of junk, that's almost 300 sets of gear that very few people had an interest in (because most of them could be had for a few thousand on the GTN prior to the update).

Edited March 17 by Darkestmonty

[BenKatarn]

48 minutes ago, GeneralGyro said:

with how hard the tech frag vendor for old armor sets chugs along, 2000 items spread across a few vendors would be a nightmare.

That is why I suggested that the items should be sold for credits only, with the sets being sorted by class aesthetic for each vendor (one vendor gets Knight gear, one Consular gear etc). Of course, we could also further sort the gear by having a premium, prototype and artifact vendor, but I figure that would be overkill.

Edited March 17 by BenKatarn

[VegaMist]

Would love to see this gear a) on vendors, b) sold for credits only, c) available to preview (a must - there are boxes currently sold on few vendors with no preview option which I don't want to risk buying without seeing it on the specific character I'm buying it for), d) either bound to legacy or bound to legacy on equip - way more useful than bound to a single toon, and e) moddable (empty shells) - yes, I'm a huge fan of modded gear and feel that without that option gear loses at least half of it's value.

[VegaMist]

11 hours ago, GeneralGyro said:

with how hard the tech frag vendor for old armor sets chugs along, 2000 items spread across a few vendors would be a nightmare.

The current situation is a nightmare. Putting all of this gear on vendors and reversing world drops and lootboxes to how they were before this "upgrade" would be HUGE improvement.

[roachfex]

16 hours ago, BenKatarn said:

which leads me to think that either we won't see much of the "Fitted" gear on the GTN at all

You won't be seeing any from me - they get dragged out of the inventory and deleted immediately. Venders or schematics would be how I would implement it.

[Darev]

9 hours ago, VegaMist said:

The current situation is a nightmare. Putting all of this gear on vendors and reversing world drops and lootboxes to how they were before this "upgrade" would be HUGE improvement.

Planetary vendors and the loot boxes out in the wild would be the PERFECT option for this.

[Traceguy]

20 hours ago, BenKatarn said:

That is why I suggested that the items should be sold for credits only

Which is the correct way to go about this. F2P and players under level 80 don't have access to Tech Frags. Selling cosmetics for TFs makes them an endgame thing.

[arunav]

21 hours ago, GeneralGyro said:

with how hard the tech frag vendor for old armor sets chugs along, 2000 items spread across a few vendors would be a nightmare.

Not with appropriate filters on the vendor.

The armor sets and weapons in question were designed from the start for specific classes/advanced classes in 1.0. 

Especially if split between vendors for each of the 8 base classes, filters can make the drops very much manageable. 

 

[arunav]

I also very much appreciate that @JoeStramaglia put these looks back in the game, now with a dye slot and the weapons featuring a tuning slot. 

While I think most players prefer all the nice armors and weapons from the CM (and I enjoy them as well), it's great to have a few tabs in Outfitter dedicated to the original aesthetics of the 1.0 game. 

Hopefully finding the pieces or weapons players are looking for becomes easier over time, as they are listed on the GTN. 

Though, if possible, I'd also prefer they be found on class-specific vendors with filters. Perhaps the filters could include which level range the gear was originally intended for? This way, so many sets and weapons wouldn't be overwhelming to look through, if the vendors are class-specific and then have something like a level range filter included. 

One legitimate issue is, unlike past launch-era world drop sets, these maintain their appearance on the opposing faction. It would be odd seeing a Jedi Consular vendor on the Imperial fleet, right? Because you'd need that, alongside the other Republic classes, and of course the Imperial classes on Republic fleet. 

Perhaps there's another reasonable approach to what any potential vendors would be, other than specifically relating to the original 8 base classes that the gear was designed for. 

Edited March 18 by arunav

[TrixxieTriss]

22 hours ago, GeneralGyro said:

with how hard the tech frag vendor for old armor sets chugs along, 2000 items spread across a few vendors would be a nightmare.

4 vendors per planet & the fleet would spread all of those out nicely. 

[BenKatarn]

2 hours ago, arunav said:

One legitimate issue is, unlike past launch-era world drop sets, these maintain their appearance on the opposing faction. It would be odd seeing a Jedi Consular vendor on the Imperial fleet, right? Because you'd need that, alongside the other Republic classes, and of course the Imperial classes on Republic fleet.

If the items on these vendors would remain Bind on Equip (or, if they get removed from loot tables are changed to Bind to Legacy instead), then there shouldn't be a problem.

[DawnAskham]

I'm so excited for the log in rewards week that gives me even more of this garbage (/sarcasm).

This has been such an epic fail and a colossal waste of time and resources.

The game has plenty of chronic issues from long existent bugs to the lack of content to very poorly thought out changes to existing systems, not to mention plenty of recently self inflicted issues from the changes to reputation to the handling of APAC / SV to the current Season that feels like it was not fully developed before being tossed into the game.

But instead of dealing with any of the above, the developers chose to add a bunch of stuff the vast majority could care less about (and most of which has been available in game through other means since forever with no interest from the players), and do so in a way that ticks off the majority of players.

Great job, Broadsword. 

[DakhathKilrathi]

Vendors on each planet would have been the way to go, and I say that as someone who wants a few of the pieces. Most of them are bad, as was pointed out by the devs themselves when the topic of removing them came up. Bad doesn't mean 'shouldn't be available at all' though, because some of them are actually pretty okay. Two vendors per faction per planet would have made way more sense to me. One for weapons, one for armors. Would need to be per faction, though, because the old items had different appearances depending on which faction you're on. 

The new ones don't. That's a fantastic change, even if the overall implementation leaves something to be desired.

[TrixxieTriss]

3 hours ago, DawnAskham said:

I'm so excited for the log in rewards week that gives me even more of this garbage (/sarcasm).

This has been such an epic fail and a colossal waste of time and resources.

The game has plenty of chronic issues from long existent bugs to the lack of content to very poorly thought out changes to existing systems, not to mention plenty of recently self inflicted issues from the changes to reputation to the handling of APAC / SV to the current Season that feels like it was not fully developed before being tossed into the game.

But instead of dealing with any of the above, the developers chose to add a bunch of stuff the vast majority could care less about (and most of which has been available in game through other means since forever with no interest from the players), and do so in a way that ticks off the majority of players.

Great job, Broadsword. 

I honestly think they ran out of development time because they were mucking around with setting up credit restrictions on APAC server transfers. And because they tied transfers to 7.4.1, which were needed asap, they rushed out the patch before it was 100%.

If they’d just left the credit limit alone on transfers, they could have opened them back in January & then spent all their dev time working on actual 7.4.1 features. And they could have pushed it another week or two if it still wasn’t polished. 

I also have a theory as to why there was no public PTS & why we may not see one again. When they tested SV earlier last year, it was their current PTS. If you look at last years PTS use & development cycle, as soon as they closed the PTS, they opened up SV that week. Which tells me that the current SV was probably the PTS. Which is why they didn’t announce an opening date ahead of schedule because they didn’t know exactly when they were closing the PTS. And it’s why we will probably never have another public PTS again because it’s now the SV server. 

[eabevella]

Just had an idea.

Since the class trainers are all empty husks now due to combat style being a thing.

Why not sort all those class specific armors to them and let them sell the respective armors?

You don't need to make new vendors nor figuring out where to put them, they're already on fleet and most planets.

Make the item drops as currency that goes to our currency inventory, and let us buy what we want from the class trainers.

[TonyTricicolo]

Slightly off topic:

Although I applaud the idea of flooding the loot tables with more appearance items, there has been not one single item I've seen worth saving. Very disappointed.

Edited March 19 by TonyTricicolo