A letter to the Devs: Please do something.

[SentinalMasterWW]

Intro 

This is an essay or more so a cry for help to the Dev's and is summed up as this; please do something to save SWTOR. 

The game as a whole just continues to feel like its in a constant outward decline and is getting beat on by its peers. ESO and WOW are taking all the former disgruntled SWTOR players into their games. I should know, last December I took a break from SWTOR and sub'd to ESO again for the first time in years and honestly; I've had more fun there than at any point during 7.0. The game feels feature complete, I feel like my character gets stronger and stronger, and levelling alts while it can be tedious at some points is honestly rewarding when you get that level up to your abilities and can morph them to make it better. This isn't even counting the numerous large expansions and zones that ESO has for me to do, it always feels like I have something fun to do. 

SWTOR on the other hand feels like a demo product now, it feels like I'm playing half a game and am waiting for the full version to come out. In 6.0 I could play SWTOR literally for an entire day just doing story, messing around, etc. In 7.0 I hop on for 5-10 minutes, get bored and go play something else. 

I'm going to say this and its going to be harsh but it is what a lot of your fandom has been thinking if not saying; 7.0 is the worst expansion for SWTOR in all its history. 

7.0 feels like a massive backstep to SWTOR, 6.0 had set up all this great foundations for everything PVE, PVP, gearing, levelling, etc. 7.0 threw all that out the window and went and undid all of that. 

Pruning and levelling is bad 

Pruning and the levelling process as a whole in SWTOR is terrible. Levelling does not feel good and rewarding, the only thing you get is that every 4 levels you can get slightly better gear from the mod section of fleet. Removing abilities tied to these classes and to which the game for the past 10 years was balanced around is terrible and should not have been done. During the 7.0 PTS numerous players called this a terrible idea and forewarned Bioware at the time. The dev's did not listen and went ahead and well we still endure the effects of that today. 

Creating a new toon and levelling it to 80 is a long and honestly sucky process. Levelling can be fun if done right which it was in 6.0 and past; levelling in 7.0 is like doing chores. 

The biggest problem is that for around up until level 35 you are going to struggle to do anything, you do not have all of your core abilities until around level 33-35. So a majority of the time you are just spamming your free filler because you have no energy/force to use any of your other abilities over and over again. This is not even counting them going on cooldown so its just a slog of you using your free filler ability and occasional other abilities but being to careful not to destroy all of your energy/force. 

Too much of classes key parts are locked until towards the end of the trees. AP PT's for example have ionic accelerator which resets the cooldown of railshot and lets them build up for their cell bursts. That is locked until around level 64 while cell burst is given at level 35. That means for around 29 levels you must suffer through waiting for your railshot to come off cooldown. Ionic accelerator should've been given at like level 38 or 42 at the most. 

Another poor example is the Lacerate passive DMG buff. It buffs Assassins lacerate DMG by 25% pretty useful right? Well it would be great for levelling at the start but it is locked until level 64. This passive you could get back in 6.0 around level 12 where it actually was useful. 

Looking at the trees themselves and some classes have trees that are leagues above it peers, Engi sniper for example gets to spec into more Crit DMG on a spec that already has a ton of high crit abilities while something like Arsenal is getting 10% extra Crit chance and DMG on heatseekers. This is not even bringing up the fact that some classes got to keep hard stuns and the like. 

On top of this a lot of the tiers are clearly way to one sided with one passive or ability being leagues above its peers in that tier; Chaff flare for example for Mercenary is far superior to Supercharged celerity and the reduction on tech override and CC round. 

I made a post back in February of this year here talking about a potential revamp of the levelling system to make it more interesting and to lend itself to more interesting builds and player control on how they want to level their character. It's not the definitive one hundred percent thing the dev's need to implement but I thought it was a vast improvement over the current CS tree and levelling process. 

Lack of new desired content 

Let me clarify something real quick, there is "new" content and than there is New content. Players getting a content expansion of a daily area and a reputation system to grind for is not content players are going to sub for. A month after a content drops with a daily area, that area is devoid and dead of players. Players want content that has some meat to it. Flashpoints are alright as new content and I think players would take it over a daily area. 

However the big boys that people want are new Operations, new planets with actual things to do like side quests, etc. PVP'ers have been clawing for more of anything; they are getting sick of huttball and want some fresh content in the game. What about a battlefront conquest like mode? or really well anything. 

GSF players have been starving for anything, new maps, modes, a new season track, a new anything! 

What about a new difficulty for operations a nightmare difficulty? Where if your group wipes, than you have to do the entire operation over again. It sound's brutal but say you and your team manages to beat every operation on Nightmare; for doing that you and your team get a special armor or weapon set alongside maybe a unique flair or title. That would be something I could see players putting time into and would be a fun thing to get raiders back into the game for a bit. 

The point being this; you cannot rely on just churning out a daily area with a reputation to grind for. It feels lazy and half baked, players want fun not doing chores. I grinded Makeb's imp reputation back in the day, it was not fun. If your players feel like they are doing chores, than something is wrong. 

Poorly balanced Classes 

Class balancing is all over the place. This is especially evident if you play PVP where the issues are even more obvious. 

Classes like Marksman, Lightning, and Arsenal are underperforming currently. Whereas specs like Madness, Engineering, Advanced Powertech, Rage, etc are overperforming of where they should be comparing it to the official post made by the dev's back in 2017 on how classes are balanced. 

The thing is classes like Marksman, lightning and arsenal are fan favorites among many players, and as someone who enjoys those specs I can see why. Their more forgiving playstyle and simpleness lends itself to a more casual playstyle without having to worry about upkeep on say like DOT's or adhering to a very strict rotation. 

Players should be able to bring whatever spec they want to any form of content without being a detriment to their team. 

Some players have suggested separating PVP and PVE class balancing. While on paper it sounds ideal, in execution it would be a massive headache to implement for an already underfunded and understaffed team. The truth in my opinion is that there is no "perfect" class balancing, the best they can do is try and find that sweet spot where the class feels strong in both forms of content without being to OP. 

PVP is literally burning to the ground 

I highly recommend everyone check out these discussions by Vulkk, Ivano and Cease. The fact that three of these content creators are talking about the massive decline of PVP should be concerning to the Dev's. They also go more into depth than I would go into in this post. 

In short PVP is literally some of the most worst toxic content you can play in this game. This comes from me who really enjoys PVP and thinks SWTOR has the foundation for a great PVP system compared to any MMO but it is so bogged down by neglect from the Dev's.

I want to state PVP has had issues from the start and it always will have issues, but never before have we seen so much toxicity, so much of a lower player count in the history of SWTOR's PVP. 

I get that story content and Cartel Market sales are the moneymakers of this game, but when a good chunk of your player population leaves than that should be of concern. Their not giving you money Broadsword, their not going to buy an armor set based off of whatever star wars property is running at the time. 

PVP is overrun with premades harassing and farming solo players, Meta sweats running broken specs like Engi getting up to 200K crits without really any effort on their part. 

Just at the start of this PVP season on the first day, I played PVP and 90% of my games was us going against a premade. Very rarely was it actually premade vs premade but more so "here is a 6 man premade vs a bunch of solo players aaaannnddd half those solo players are PVE'rs who have never PVP'd before". This is basically a common occurrence in PVP and its actually rare nowadays to NOT run into a DMG farming premade. This system would work if we had the player count to balance premade vs premade but that rarely if ever happens and it when it does? I see one of the premades just dip out of the match and start Q dodging. Why? Because they want to farm solo players only for bragging rights and to gloat how great they are that they all focused targeted one person while having a pocket tank and healer 24/7. 

Additionally PVP seasons is just a participation mode, I see so many players going stealth and afk just because they don't care about PVPing and just want the space barbie rewards. PVP seasons is great at getting players in the door but its terrible at retaining them.

Without going into a dedicated Essay about PVP I think the core issues are this; 

1. Premades need to be limited down to 2 unless you have a tank or healer with you than it can go up to 4. 

2. Time to kill (TTK) is way too fast and lends itself to frustration and often just being CC'd to death by multiple players stacking on you. TTK needs to be increased so that players can react appropriately. We live in such a high DMG meta that players often get pushed back to their spawn and farmed. To keep this short increased TTK would help in the following ways; more breathing room for new players and players in general to react, reduced effectiveness in DMG farming premades, and reduced spawn camping. 

3. Guard is way to strong currently and tanks in general are nigh invincible currently. I highly recommend reading the link to Vulkks article. He goes better in depth than I could and explains it fifty times better. TLDR on tanks; they survive way too much DPS and often survive long enough for the rest of their team to come respawn and join them. 

4. Meta classes are way too strong and when stacked have basically almost no counter. If your solution is saying git gud, you are flat wrong. There is no counterplay and is literally impossible to counter even if you are a skilled player against multiple people tunneling you with meta classes. You cannot survive two ionic engis focusing you, there is a small chance you might but you'd have to sacrifice all your DCD's just to get to them and even than good luck trying to kill them.

5. Lack of good incentive; PVP seasons does not offer enough to bring veteran players to care about PVP. Adding medpacs and Adrenals as a reward to PVP seasons is honestly an insult to the PVP community. The dev's should have added more tokens, weapons, etc. While i'm not saying bring ranked back, there needs to be some form of rated PVP in the game. The leaderboard system is something that numerous players have brought up. I'd actually care about PVP and my performance if there was a rated system to opt into for unique rewards and flairs.

There is more like I said go to any of the links above and they go far more in depth if you are interested in the collapse of PVP. 

Gearing 

Gearing has definitely improved since launch 7.0 but it still needs a lot of work. 

Augments are wayyy to grossly expensive on the GTN. A standard gold 300 Augment will cost you hundreds of millions of credits for just one. Augments do matter for gearing especially in PVP. You loose out on so many stats without having augments. For example at 336i without any augments I'm about 390-395K HP; with augments im about 415-420. That is a big difference in HP and it often is; usually a 15-30K HP difference. 

I think the Dev's need to create an augment vendor on fleet that sells basic 308 Purple augments and and MK-11 Augment kits. That way everyone can get the stats they need for endgame. 

For crafters add 312 and 316 Augments as new craftable augs. 

Tacticals need to be addressed as well. Tacticals like spiteful saber, Agitating energies, primed ignition, etc all rely on "ticking" their DMG for their source of DPS. The problem is you are putting so much of your DPS on one ability that ticks a DOT. For example, Boltstorm for mercs is so reliant on ticking priming shot's burn DOT that 50-60% of your DMG output just comes from ticking that DOT. 50-60% of Annihilation marauders DMG running spiteful saber comes from ticking their DOT with slash and saber throw. Merciless slash does barely any DMG and thus the spec is really just used for parsing and DMG farming to get as much total DMG as possible. 

Look at this screencap of one Hypergate I played as watchman Sentinel. I only got 7 kills but I got 13K DPS and the most total DMG of the whole match.

They need to move away from these "tick" tacticals and moreso into improving the identity of the spec, Arsenal/Gunnery for example would benefit greatly from a shard of mortis esque tactical.

Implants also need to be reworked. Implants currently are basically one small buff to this one thing like now your cooldown on medical probe is 5 secs shorter, it is incredibly underwhelming. They need to  make Implants based on sets again. Basically rather than buying individual implants, you now would buy a crate that has two implants in it. These crates would be based on old 6.0 sets and equipping both implants gives you the old full 6.0 set bonus. You would than upgrade these implants like you do currently. However in order to get the set bonus you need to wear both implants that are part of a set. This means for example you can't run something like Shock trooper package and Second wind together. If you want the bonus from either or, you need to wear matching implants of said set. It not only buffs classes and makes them strong again, it also fixes the problem of everyone and their mother running 2nd wind in PVP getting constant health regen. 

Tanks also need a cap on their total DPS. "Skank tanks" especially juggernaut currently are hitting up to 100K crits, 15K DPS, while also being able to guard players. This is way too broken and tanks need a solid limit on the total amount of DPS they can output. All you have to do to be a skank tank is just throw a shield on and throw the rest of your gear into DPS and you are a literal unkillable DPS monster in PVP especially if you are running the aforementioned Second wind implant constantly giving you health regen on kills. 

Conclusion 

To @JackieKo, @EricMusco, @KeithKanneg, and @BryantWood. I hope you seriously take the time to read this and other players concerns. I am not trying to be a hater or just a negative Nancy. These are legit concerns and issues that are plaguing SWTOR. We are loosing players day by day because they are disgruntled and upset that these issues for the past two years have largely been ignored. PVP especially is in a really bad state and if the issues don't get resolved PVP entirely will die. 

I want to state that I do not encourage hate towards the Dev's nor do I want to say their lazy. I think in simple terms are building a bridge but they are not checking the structural integrity of their bridge and if they keep going without checking or addressing any of the issues? That bridge is going to collapse into the river. 

So from a concerned fan and probably a concerned fanbase, please fix something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Pietrastor]

All you mention requires BUDGET. Without it, we're gonna keep getting the bare minimum we do nowadays, or less.

[DuchessKristania]

I don't really PvP so I can't speak to any of that, but I disagree with leveling on ESO and WoW being fun. I've played both and found them massively grindy and boring. I quit both in less than a month because the leveling process was a snooze fest that felt like it sucked years of my life away like the machine in The Princess Bride. I won't claim leveling is fun here, but I would take the leveling process here over those games any day of the week. I'm not opposed to them improving it, but please not with those two games as the example.

[Exly]

2 hours ago, Pietrastor said:

All you mention requires BUDGET. Without it, we're gonna keep getting the bare minimum we do nowadays, or less.

I wouldn't call it a fix, but creating a separate queue for premade groups so that I could enjoy solo queueing is all that I want them to do.  If they did that, I would start pvping again. 

I don't know how hard that would be for them to do it, but it seems to me that doing so should require relatively little time or effort on their part.

[Pietrastor]

2 hours ago, Exly said:

I wouldn't call it a fix, but creating a separate queue for premade groups so that I could enjoy solo queueing is all that I want them to do.  If they did that, I would start pvping again. 

I don't know how hard that would be for them to do it, but it seems to me that doing so should require relatively little time or effort on their part.

A change like this yes. But almost everything the OP mentioned is brand new content othwise. Balancing things and making small tweaks like you mentioned could help quite a bit, but it can only go so far relaying consantly on old content

[SentinalMasterWW]

3 hours ago, Pietrastor said:

A change like this yes. But almost everything the OP mentioned is brand new content othwise. Balancing things and making small tweaks like you mentioned could help quite a bit, but it can only go so far relaying consantly on old content

I do understand that the Dev team size is around 80 or so people. I do understand that the game is also seriously underfunded. EA or Disney or whomever puts the minimum amount of development funds into the game mainly into the cartel market. They want the minimum amount of investment while trying to extract the maximum amount of money. 

Even still things like better Class balancing, improved levelling experience, Fixing PVP, Fixing gearing, etc. Would all be reasonable and attainable for the Dev team to do. Things like the aforementioned fixes and better communication would go a long way in repairing the game and drawing players back in. 

[FlatTax]

15 hours ago, SentinalMasterWW said:

Augments are wayyy to grossly expensive on the GTN. A standard gold 300 Augment will cost you hundreds of millions of credits for just one. Augments do matter for gearing especially in PVP. You loose out on so many stats without having augments. For example at 336i without any augments I'm about 390-395K HP; with augments im about 415-420. That is a big difference in HP and it often is; usually a 15-30K HP difference.

This won't change. It should but won't.

The scarcity of endgame Augments is a major cash cow for the devs.

Edited June 3 by FlatTax

[tsteenburg]

With regard to the gearing fiasco of 7.0, it came down to they decided to listen to the hardcore raiders who had been complaining since 5.0 that endgame gearing did not reward NiM Op completion. After 5 years of ignoring them , they gave in and re-instituted raid skill dependent gear. Except that the hardcore raiding community had shrunk substantially in that time, so they made maybe a few hundred people happy and annoyed the rest of the player base.  6.x gearing was not perfect but it was a good compromise given the then state of the game. If they even just implemented a 5.10.x Ossus style gearing that was legacy bound rather than character bound. Basically just have Ruhnuck, Kessan's Landing, and Mimboossa (if they add a weekly) have an equipment crate that gives a piece of let's say 350 gear. 

[supertimtaf]

I'll politely disagree on the game design vision you and I both have regarding how to make the game better, but I'll congratulate because you actually beat me to it, I was about to make a post like that too. Hope that someone will actually read it

[Stradlin]

9 hours ago, SentinalMasterWW said:

I do understand that the Dev team size is around 80 or so people. I do understand that the game is also seriously underfunded. EA or Disney or whomever puts the minimum amount of development funds in

These two declarations come with a small contradiction at least.  Dev team of 80 people sounds quite  huge, I assume it isn't accurate and/or consists of lots of people who aren't actual developers. Vanilla wow was made by 40 people, just for comparsion.

[Pietrastor]

4 minutes ago, Stradlin said:

These two declarations come with a small contradiction at least.  Dev team of 80 people sounds quite  huge, I assume it isn't accurate and/or consists of lots of people who aren't actual developers. Vanilla wow was made by 40 people, just for comparsion.

20 years ago. Not comparable. Altho I agree that for a game like SWTOR (based on an engine/tech from 2000s) a team of 80 people does sound large so I doubt it's that much, probs more like 50 given how little content we get

Edited June 3 by Pietrastor

[Stradlin]

17 minutes ago, Pietrastor said:

20 years ago. Not comparable. Altho I agree that for a game like SWTOR (based on an engine/tech from 2000s) a team of 80 people does sound large so I doubt it's that much, probs more like 50 given how little content we get

When it comes to game mechanics and overall DNA, We are speaking of a wow clone tab targeter mmo when we speak of SWTOR.  One far into its development. Ie tools and foundations were designed long ago. More about furnishing rooms than building the whole house. It icertainly is comparable enough. 

Edited June 3 by Stradlin

[Pietrastor]

36 minutes ago, Stradlin said:

When it comes to game mechanics and overall DNA, We are speaking of a wow clone tab targeter mmo when we speak of SWTOR.  One far into its development. Ie tools and foundations were designed long ago. More about furnishing rooms than building the whole house. It icertainly is comparable enough. 

But alot of the ingridients that come into new content are more time consuming to produce nowadays, even in older games and even in WOW. From a graphical POV, special effects, cutscenes, voicing, multiple interchanged features/subsystems/minigames even WOW progressed and got more complex since launch. All of that takes people to assemble. Similarly, SWTOR is a carbon copy of WOW's combat for sure but when it came to questing assets and presentation it was far more complex by its 2011 release than WOW was

Of course both titles even now require less manpower to produce content than modern games with high-fidelty assets and all, but still.

[supertimtaf]

7 hours ago, Stradlin said:

These two declarations come with a small contradiction at least.  Dev team of 80 people sounds quite  huge, I assume it isn't accurate and/or consists of lots of people who aren't actual developers. Vanilla wow was made by 40 people, just for comparsion.

The team's size was 80 people before the swap at Broadsword. It got cut down in half. There's now 40people working on swtor.

 

As a reminder, FFXIV has 300+ people working on it. ESO is well above the 100 and WoW has even more than XIV now even when not looking at Classic.

The swtor dev team is absurdly small for a MMO. The only one that's smaller is FF11, which has 10people working on it because it's more or less "maintenance mode".

[Kristallia]

3 minutes ago, supertimtaf said:

The team's size was 80 people before the swap at Broadsword. It got cut down in half. There's now 40people working on swtor.

Do you have a source of them having 40 people now?

[supertimtaf]

7 minutes ago, Kristallia said:

Do you have a source of them having 40 people now?

Literally the announcement they made during the merge/move, about how they had a 80people team and that half of it was moving to Broadsword. I can dig a little if you want, or you can. Fairly sure that we'll find the answer.

 

 

Edit : @Kristallia found it, in the original IGN article who first announced it. 

"Currently, roughly 70-80 people are part of the core development team of The Old Republic, more than half of whom are expected to move to Broadsword. Those remaining with EA would have an opportunity to look for roles elsewhere within the company, but may otherwise face layoffs."

So, more than half of 75 people got hired here, and the rest got fired. Corporate speech included, fairly sure to assume that if this was "70%" they'd have phrased it differently.

Link for the news article is there https://www.ign.com/articles/star-wars-the-old-republic-development-third-party-bioware

 

Edited June 3 by supertimtaf
Added source

[Kristallia]

1 minute ago, supertimtaf said:

Literally the announcement they made during the merge/move, about how they had a 80people team and that half of it was moving to Broadsword. I can dig a little if you want, or you can. Fairly sure that we'll find the answer

I remember them saying just "more than half" of the 80 of old team moving to broadsword (which could mean anything between 41-80) which would still be more than 40 even if we would assume no previous broadsword employees joined swtor team.

But its been a while since that announcement so I might remember wrong.

[supertimtaf]

2 minutes ago, Kristallia said:

I remember them saying just "more than half" of the 80 of old team moving to broadsword (which could mean anything between 41-80) which would still be more than 40 even if we would assume no previous broadsword employees joined swtor team.

But its been a while since that announcement so I might remember wrong.

I think that while we'll never know the exact numbers it'd be safe to assume that this is to be viewed with the same grain of salt that you use whenever they make an announcement about an "exciting new year full of surprises". Moderate expectations, believe in the worst, and that way if someone proves you wrong you'll be much happier about it.

[Planner]

The only hope for SWTOR is for BW to abandon it; like Sony did to SWG, and then picked up by private servers. 

[Kristallia]

5 minutes ago, supertimtaf said:

I think that while we'll never know the exact numbers it'd be safe to assume that this is to be viewed with the same grain of salt that you use whenever they make an announcement about an "exciting new year full of surprises". Moderate expectations, believe in the worst, and that way if someone proves you wrong you'll be much happier about it.

Maybe you are right! I however am very positive person and I tend to think positively about the things.

Since Broadsword took over, I have actually been quite happy about the game and I dont feel like the game feels like the team would have downsized a lot becuse I dont remember any old planets getting a big graphical reworks with the old team that we have now got for hutta and korriban and im super happy about.

[Pietrastor]

57 minutes ago, supertimtaf said:

The team's size was 80 people before the swap at Broadsword. It got cut down in half. There's now 40people working on swtor.

 

As a reminder, FFXIV has 300+ people working on it. ESO is well above the 100 and WoW has even more than XIV now even when not looking at Classic.

The swtor dev team is absurdly small for a MMO. The only one that's smaller is FF11, which has 10people working on it because it's more or less "maintenance mode".

Granted, some of Broadsword's existing employees may have been moved to SWTOR so the team size may be a bit bigger than 40/50. But clearly not by much given how much content we're getting (aka very little). It's been a year since the move and nothing's changed. It clearly still remains one of the most understaffed of the major MMOs out there so I don't have any hopes for an uptick in content cadence in 2025 and beyond

I'm frankly beginning to suspect that as much as we like to complain about Malgus era and its glacial pacing, it will be the last big arc anyway and anything that comes after will be even less significant. 

Edited June 3 by Pietrastor