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AdrianDmitruk

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  1. I typically log into and play a dozen toons per week, ten of whom are orgainized into an alt guild. Granted, half of those toons are only crafters, but I "play" them nonetheless. I can maybe realistically pull off a medium invasion during a crafting week, which this event most decidedly is not. I work full time, and I'm not going to turn the game into a second job for this incompetence. So this week, I will only play two of my 12 active toons. The first was an accident as I had crafting lined up before logging in today. The second is my guildmaster, who found no invasion targets to invade because 3 swoop planets do not align with large/medium/small invasion targets according to EAWare Math. The only reason I have to log into the game at all until next Tuesday is my typical Wednesday night swtor social hour with friends. Other than that, it's time to play the games I just picked up on the Steam Summer Sale--money that did not go into the Cartel Market, I should like to add. I'll maybe play the event the next time it comes up, if and only if Bioware makes swoop racing great for small guilds again.
  2. A big giant negative that you omitted is the sheer tedium of inventory management once you do have your gear. Deconstructing 20+ items after *every* FP is a big chore, and if you dare to actually play the game instead, soon you will be interrupted by "inventory full!" after every boss, and then have to ask the group for bag clearance. Even though it's a universal problem so most people understand, it's still easy to feel shame for slowing the group down. Even toons that start with empty bags will encounter this before they finish the flashpoint weeklies. I know the legacy cargo bay got an expansion with 6.0, but tbh our main inventory bag should have been expanded to two or three tabs as well, just to handle the sheer amount of crap that the 6.0 gearing system throws at us. Coupled with a much larger deconstruction window, at least then we could have a hope of finishing our playing session before having to empty the bags. Better yet, an auto deconstruction filter option, with settings to deconstruct anything less than 306, deconstruct anything without gold amps, etc. would make the 6.0 gearing system 100000% better. I play 15 alts but only needed six gear sets, so I do appreciate the advantages of the new system, but once my toons are geared the sheer hassle of dealing with inventory overshadows anything else. I find myself almost exclusively pvping again simply because PVP drops less gear in more condensed form (crates that you don't have to open immediately). Hell, I know people who don't even bother opening the deconstruction window--they just throw gear on the ground, destroying it.
  3. TBH, there's another reason why I KP farm in addition to what you have said: I don't need gear or tech fragments anymore, yet the game insists on cluttering my bags with random crap I can't use, have no need for, and have nothing to spend it on. So I have to stop every 30 minutes to an hour or so to decon crap to get more tech fragments that I can't use for anything relevant, which interrupts whatever I'm doing with whatever group I'm in. I already have gear on all the alts I'm going to use this xpac, I don't have anything worthwhile to spend the tech fragments on since I've decided I'm going to stop gearing alts because I've spent enough credits on Bioware's new credit sink system, and 11 alts is quite a reasonable stopping point that I arguably should have stopped earlier. KP farm doesn't fill my bags in 30-60 minutes with useless ***** that I don't need anymore, like almost all other group content in the game does. I WANT TO TURN IT OFF. Or at least a filter for auto-decon so I don't have to micromanage bag space several times in a single gaming session. Previous xpacs with maybe 1 personal loot and a couple things to roll on per boss were much, much easier to manage bags. Even a second bag tab (not legacy, on your character's person, you know where the loot spam actually goes), and an increase in the decon window capacity to 50-80 items, would help limit the tedium to once, maybe twice, per gaming session, instead of constant "Your inventory is full!" interruptions. Notice how KP farm wasn't a thing yet when 6.0 first dropped, because people needed to gear (admittedly they did it with HS farm but at least they were doing the entire FP), but now that they've had a chance to gear, they KP farm? Until Bioware adds features to MANAGE the crap their new gear system throws at us, there is KP farm, and if Bioware nerfs KP farm, I'm sure it won't be long before players find the next most efficient method of playing the game that balances earning conquest with ease of bag management.
  4. Hear, hear. Even more infuriating: Sents can get this back via a utility, but Guardians can't. As if sents weren't already better than guardians in almost any respect anyway. And we still don't have access to the biochem schematic to craft the tactical that lets Enure reduce the cooldown of Focused Defense...one of the few good tacticals we (allegedly) have doesn't even exist yet. On Edit: If they *had* to do this to be able to fix the utility that reduces CD on leap when you are attacked, the least they could have done was attach the speed boost replacement bonus to something with a reasonable cooldown, like Blade Blitz.
  5. While I have personally not used the refund timers (have too many alts needing set bonuses to need the said timers), I will be doing PSAs on fleet warning people of the change and urging them to spend their tech fragments now. I encourage others to do the same. On a side note, I'm very displeased about the nerfs to the Nimble Master set, especially since the utility to replace the double Force Charge is only going to Sentinels and not Guardians. I wasted 12k tech fragments for a set I could only use for a week, and the replacement set bonus is completely underwhelming. Saber Ward is on way too long of a cooldown to replace a mobility bonus that attached to a fifteen-second cooldown ability previously. Blade Blitz would have had a far more appropriate cooldown to attach the replacement mobility set bonus--Saber Ward is on such a long cooldown that Nimble Master set went from being great in PvP to completely useless in all scenarios.
  6. You should PM this directly to both Eric and Keith; there's no way anyone at Bioware considered the law of unintended consequences
  7. Over the couple months since 5.8, I've contributed quite a lot of constructive feedback (also here when someone tried to suggest a workaround for the originally-described problems I was experiencing with conquest revamp, and also here). But as I searched my old posts for conquest feedback, I noticed that over time my posts gradually became shorter, more curt, more blunt, as it became clearer and clearer that composing my feedback, and anthologizing the feedback that I had already given to make it more centralized and accessible to the devs, was a waste of time, that Keith would refuse to expedite changes that were already planned to try to save a game population that seemed to be in freefall. I'm clearly not the only one burnt out on providing feedback. Bioware's requesting of feedback that they had little to no intention of heeding proved quite pointless indeed. I went from regularly generating about 120-150k conquest points a week pre 5.8 to barely logging in once a week to do the PVP weekly on a single character now. Once a single toon is capped, there's not much point in going any further with the game. I'm quite burnt out on trying to find groups for PVE after my experiences with doing so between 5.8 and 5.9, amid the catastrophic population declines during that period. I'm well aware that by withdrawing from the game I'm contributing to the very population decline that I bemoan--but I have expended a more than reasonable degree of patience providing constructive feedback as to the urgency of fixing the problems that Bioware created with 5.8, only to watch that feedback nearly completely ignored. The devs do not have an unlimited supply of time to sit back and monitor metrics. I've already drifted off to EVE online, which surprise surprise, encourages alts.
  8. I might do the PVP weekly on my main tomorrow...after that, let's just say that I reactivated an old EVE Online account and I might be goofing off with internet spaceships.
  9. This. So much this. Now I pretty much log in Tuesdays to see what the objectives are and how repeatable they are...by Thursdays I'm not even bothering to play the game anymore because there's no point; Bioware suddenly hates alts and they're not going to change. I find myself watching youtube a lot more often instead of playing swtor.
  10. Bug that benefits players by actually letting them alt for conquest? Oops, not intended, we need to fix that in a Thursday patch tomorrow... Bug that we've acknowledged is a bug but happens to align with our design goals of adding credit sinks? Well, fixing that bug might actually benefit a player somehow. We can't have that. *crickets*
  11. The sad truth is that it won't be fixed because even though it is an acknowledged bug, the bug benefits Bioware's current design goals (i.e. improved credit sinks, they recently increased the GTN tax to try to add more), and there is no urgent reason to fix the bug. Unlike certain recent patches, it didn't break the game for large, vocal groups of players, so their response to this bug will be salutary (for them) neglect. They'll have long expected the economy to adapt to the increased mod removal cost by now. Because they're looking for credit sinks, this bug isn't really a bug, it's a feature! Not that I approve of this, of course--the above is sad but true.
  12. No we don't. RNG is exciting when it's optional. Gambling is optional. Cartel packs are optional. Playing the DvL event was optional. Ben tried to make RNG mandatory for everything in the game at level cap. He tried to make RNG not optional. He tried to make RNG the only way to get level cap gear, period. Moreover, he didn't listen to the community screaming that RNG, with no workarounds for those with bad luck, would f over a significant part of the population. The community didn't tolerate RNG until it was once again made optional. Sure, you'll get the boxes no matter what, but unlike right at 5.0, you can also earn the gear directly now, without having to worry about RNG at all. And of course, the GC changes to make RNG optional instead of mandatory were slow walked to the point that they had to merge down to two NA servers. Where 5.0 hit gearing, 5.8 hit alts on a similar scale. It took far too long for Bioware to even admit there was a problem, they still seem ignorant about just how bad the problem is, and once again the studio has indicated it will slow walk fixes so that, by the time the conquest system encourages alts like it used to again, there is no one left playing the game.
  13. PVP is one of the only sources of infinitely repeatable (albeit very low yield right now) conquest points right now. The first week of 5.8, this was not the case, there was no repeatable for doing warzones the first week. It was such a dumpster fire, and the outcry from PVPers (full disclosure: myself included) so great, that they deployed patch 5.8a the very next week to make PVP repeatable again--because they literally deployed 5.8 without realizing that doing so completely removed a section of the game from conquest. They still didn't do anything to address the yields being nerfed into the ground--we have to wait until 5.9 for that. But 5.8a begs the question: if they can deploy an emergency fix for one thing they broke, why could they not accelerate the planned 5.9 changes into a patch 5.8b that should have went out early to mid April? The published list of intended changes looks like updating a database of conquest point values, nothing more. They shouldn't have needed a month for that--especially after having gotten 5.8a out the door as quickly as they did. Just goes to show you, the studio had the ability to address player concerns and feedback about conquest in a timely manner. Even without giving into the demands for a rollback, they still could have timely addressed player concerns if doing so had any importance or urgency to them. However, with the VERY NARROW exception of 5.8a, they chose not to exercise this ability.
  14. The real question is, will the devs make those adjustments quickly enough before the population declines below the minimum critical mass required to keep queues popping and sustain the game? While GC was eventually stitched together into something half-reasonable, the game sustained a grievous population decline while those adjustments only came as a trickle. There isn't enough population remaining post-GC for the game to absorb another blow over the course of several months on a similar scale. Population declines and increases in queue times have already become greatly noticeable--and that's as of the last time I logged into the game, a week and a half ago. I just can't find the motivation to log in and sit in a queue or wait for ops forming in fleet chat that hardly ever form anymore. The fact that Keith confirmed the studio plans on slow-walking these "adjustments" does not bode well for my motivation. Population will be nonexistent well before the conquest "adjustments" are complete.
  15. Data can also be cherry picked, which I suspect Keith did here. Participation and guild rewards up? That makes sense if you are only looking for how many guilds make the guild conquest goal. Pre 5.8, it would've been how many guilds place on the board. Of course that one part of conquest is more flexible, it's the one thing that became less rigid instead of more rigid. That's probably the one metric that supports Keith's view. But he seems to be latching onto that single data point while ignoring: Active population DOWN Hours played DOWN Operations DOWN Queue times UP Number of characters making personal goal DOWN Number of characters *per legacy* making personal goal DOWN And it's possible to have a guild make the 200k goal and not get a single reward from it, if no one in the guild can break 15k because their personal conquest points are spread too thinly across their legacies. The legacy restrictions are VERY punishing for "oh I have to do this content on my healer to get it going, and start from 0...but my tank is at 12k and will now be locked out from these points and unable to meet goal now." And while this scenario was technically possible under the old conquest system too, it was far less likely because the old conquest system was far more flexible and it was generally much easier to get those last couple thousand points on a Sunday night than it is now. OK, tbf, Keith has acknowledged it's "alt-unfriendly," but I still believe he does not understand the urgency of actually addressing this. The studio is certainly doubling down on retaining legacy restrictions, instead choosing to add more one-off objectives in the hopes that the band aid is enough to successfully heal the gaping, sucking chest wound after all. And the worst is that the 5.9 changes to conquest could have easily been patched in by last Tuesday if only the studio found "alt unfriendliness" urgent enough to fix. But it's pretty clear that declining population doesn't concern them.
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