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Saxxonknight

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  1. This probably crosses topics on the various forum headings as I didn't see one for "Suggestions". #1 - Make gear bindable to outfits the way outfitter is. We have Bind to Legacy Gear, most people wind up swapping this gear between characters for various Ops, FPs etc. This is first off tedious to the play, often winds up with mistakes on gear left on a character or worse destroyed in a space purge. The second and perhaps more serious concern to the host company is it makes others in group activities wait on people to search for and swap out gear - this is boring and leads to degrading the game experience for everyone. So, if this worked as Outfitter does, you gain a piece of 344 Main Hand Weapon (lightsaber for instance), you would be able to bind it to a loadout on your character's page and NOT have to carry it around in inventory anymore. Ditto for the rest of your gear. This provides a few benefits. First, players can free up inventory space by not having duplicate gear carried on a character to swap specs during an Ops or having to root through a cargo bay making the Ops group wait for the 2nd tank to swap gear etc. Second, you create a cash sink, a viable one that is a convenience rather than an annoyance (ie quick travel costs, more on that later). #2 - Travel costs, quick travel vs taxis. BioWare in a last-ditch effort to "balance" the economy, instituted some new or rebalanced costs that frankly leave one scratching their head as to what they really wanted to accomplish. For one, we already paid for Quick travel in a onetime massive cost in Legacy, making it a per use was a slap in the face. Quick travel costs on low level worlds are 5k and on later worlds some fraction based on distance - that is absurd as it really screws new players that do come onboard creating a barrier to garnering new subs - whomever made that screw up shouldn't oversee such decisions. On top of that, it's cheaper to take a taxi, great, but in all the original worlds taxis are a boring time sink riding around the scenery - that's fine the first time but thereafter is a drain on the game's enjoyment for players - BioWare recognized this as on subs #3 - 7.0 changes = mixed bag. Combat Style "choices" - Prior to 7.0 all those abilities were available on player's bars. Some weren't used by all players much, but they were there when you needed them, not "Wait, I have to swap my spec" pull by pull thru a FP or Ops. While some changes in 7.0 were improvements, this was decidedly a poor decision by the developers, introducing wait time, impatience and downright group wiping errors when people forgot to swap back etc. A mention should also be made for the Combat styles and secondary roles - while it's great that each character can now have each of 6 former "classes" the majority of players 10+ years into the game had a legion of alts to cover this. The change devalued all those alts, other than their ability to repetitively farm the same locked out content each week. The gearing change where top level gear is fixed in its stats vs moddable, and those fixed stats only drop for certain class specs on each different piece of gear was a vexing convoluted mess. Please do not do this again, its carried over to the 344 gear now and the only thing I can say positively about that is its easy to farm up now so unlike the R4 only cluster-F of the last year, its somewhat enjoyable now because I can see an end in site for gear farming and get back to other activities rather than endlessly farm end game gear. Make end game gear player moddable, customizable to suit the needs of the player, and use the crafting system (kind of like Gold Augs do). #4 - UI Improvements - I played on release with a group of over 100 people, all were gone within 6 months. Many people cite a "lack of content" when Ilum was the end game, but I beg to differ. Many people never made it that far. Why? Inability to get groups to beat forced grouping content. Games like WOW have for the last 20 years used player mods as a means to shore up their UI, players would make mods via api to make a more ergonomic UI so that most people could tweak it how they liked. While SWTOR did this themselves some years after, their lack of player mods limits their view in what players deem deficient. Going back to the early dwindling of players, this game has a 4-man group system that then required 25% to play healers, 4-man Heroics & FPs weren't then doable without one. But healers have twice the ergonomic load of other roles because they must constantly target switch to use abilities on group members. This makes the role more stressful and less relaxing to play and thus few people bothered with it. Most of use back then didn't quit because we couldn't find anything to do - we quit because we couldn't do what we had found and needed to accomplish due to a lack of healers and were thus stalled in the game. Now in the interim it has improved, base survivability of classes is better, companions a viable option in many cases, but in MMFPs & Ops a healer is a must. One thing that made WOW and other games more successful in this area was the invention of a Click Cast Interface. This is where Group or Raid frames become a button that by Right, Left or Center mouse click modified with CTRL, ALT or SHIFT allow you to bind abilities and cast them like using hotkeys only with the mouse while you stay targeted on the boss. This is a huge boon to players because it makes the role's ergonomic load on par with other roles, leading to more willing to play it and facilitating group content.
  2. I've played MMOs since the 90s. While the general 3 roles of Tank, Healer & DPS are ubiquitous, how various games handle them is not. In general healers have a high ergonomic load with target switching if the UI does not have some adaptation to mitigate it, they perform roughly double the actions per second to play their role. Some games had the feature where you could activate an ability while mousing over a player's frame and it would apply that ability if applicable to that group member. This helped a fair bit as you did not have to select the target to heal them, being able to stay targeted on the raid target to inflict incidental DPS, interrupt or generally track the boss and it's target. After 2004 when World of Warcraft was in its first year, player mods came out with their UI, with a large population and a fairly broad palette of hooks there were many mods that improved gameplay (and many later found their way into the game's UI). Some of these mods were frame mods to improve healers game experience in groups and raids (operations in SWTOR). The click-cast UI was implemented. I've seen it port into other games, it in fact saved Rift for at least a time - that game was dying as you could not find a group for lack of healers. When they did allow player mods, one3 of the first was a healer click-cast frame mod and amazingly the game population went back up. SWTOR has spurned player mods from release, thus they never benefitted by seeing what it was that people were willing to create and use to make the game more playable for them. Of the 100 or so people I started the game with at launch, NONE were still playing 6 months later. Fact was then you could barely get anything done because groups were limited by available healers and with a 4 person group size that meant 25% needed to be playing healers when it was maybe 10%. The game shriveled and while its got a population its definitely not what it should have been. Implementing a click-cast interface where you tie your heal/buffs to mouse clicks on the target frame with CTRL, SHIFT & ALT modifiers would allow healers to enjoy this game a lot more. It would allow everyone else to enjoy it more because you wouldn't spend a half hour with 7 people in an Ops group spamming for a healer. More action, lets boredom, more people sticking around.
  3. +1 for the good answer, liked those examples.
  4. 7.0 brought a large revamp of the UI, though personally I didn't see the necessity of it save for the Combat Styles/Loadout section (ie moving Valor & Social ratings off character sheet) hopefully it served some purpose. Some things that really are needed to improve playability, reduce frustration and ideally increase clients and retention I'll list. A) Space is at a premium, gear you've had for a long time is often still required to hang onto for Outfitter purposes or for Companions. Things like Dyes & Mods aren't stackable - they should be. With the Galactic Seasons we've had several Dye schemes as rewards that give 10 of each - that's a ton of space and I doubt many had a use for them immediately. Make Dyes (and Mods/Enhancements) Stackable. B) In line with A) and with Combat Styles it is now common to need to carry 2-3 sets of gear, or wind up having to waste time going to or getting out a vault to accommodate joining a group or doing a given boss. Often that gear is used on different characters as well so the entire Operations Group waits while the player logs over & back - that makes it inconvenient and frustrating which are not conducive to enjoyment of the game. A system like the Outfitter where the Gear is bound to a loadout would be an improvement, even better, that is usable between characters (ie Vanguard & Powertech use the same equipment except for the weapon). This would free up a good bit of space in the character's inventory and avoid the mistaken destruction of a piece of gear they wanted to retain when emptying inventory. C) Third thing has been around since game launch. That is the excessive demand on healers for mouse click and movement for targeting healing, not only does it make the class more tedious to play vs DPS or Tank but it is ergonomically injurious to the player to do the excessive carpal tunnel aggravating movement. A Click Cast interface was developed in several similar games almost 20 years ago. It made healing on par with other classes because the healer could target a boss, and the clickable raid frames allowed bound ability use on the player whose frame was clicked. Using CTRL, ALT & SHIFT modifiers allows numerous such abilities to be cast in conjunction with Left, Right or Center mouse buttons. This is really a large reason WOW was so successful, early on the healers in that game had player mods that did this, it made raid healing accessible to the general player population and no more difficult than other classes in terms of actions per second to accomplish their task. That game, Rift & others have 5 man groups needing and average of 20% played healers to facilitate grouping. This game has 4 man groups meaning 25% player healers are needed. Its not even close. I have played them in other games, I won't in this one purely for the double strain on my hand the constant target shifting requires. The UI for healing is clunky, a fix was conceived of long ago and you would improve your game using it, quite probably increasing the player base size.
  5. #1 I think started from day 1. No user mods meant no live indication about what users wanted to make the game more playable. Healing sucks, its double the mouse clicks or more over other classes. Thats not only more tedious but injurious. Lack of healers early on led to difficulty finding groups which meant inability to complete some content, people quit in frustration. Of roughly 100 people in my guild that played the game at release I was the last one I knew of playing when I quit at 6 months. I have come back to check it out 3 times over the intervening years, and while they solved some early issues, they have never addressed this and it shows. The thing that is needed is a click-cast system, the raid frame becomes a clickable button, you tie your healing abilities to a given mouse click so that Right, Left or Center button in combination with CTRL, ALT & SHIFT modifiers activate the ability on the frame you have clicked on. WoW had several player mods that did this, for all I know its part of the game now (I left there for other reasons around 2010), but a big part of their success was the ability of groups to function, and that meant in their 5 man groups 20% of players doing healers and liking it. Player mods that enabled click cast made that possible.
  6. "That's ... um ... suboptimal." You have Mastery in understatement. The whole patch/expansion is vexing. After 10 years they rendered Alts irrelevant basically dumping on all that work. Dual spec and 3 sub-specs on each char? You basically need a handful to do everything. But, that gear swapping mechanic doesn't include stowage to keep it from cluttering your inventory. Meantime, the gearing while I somewhat understand it, is just unnecessarily convoluted and forces a boring grind on repetitious content to farm the currencies. And in the end, actual meaningful improvements that would get more people to play and importantly play needed classes like healers are lacking. This game always shunned player mods, but taking WOW for an example, they leveraged the player base to find out what people wanted or needed in UIs, thus coming up with the ideas to greatly improve the gaming ergonomics for players. Specifically for healers a click cast Group/Raid interface which allows them to bind their healing abilities to specific clicks on the player frames in the group to use those abilities. This equalizes the target switching that healers face vs everyone else who focuses the boss or a few other adds whereas the healer had easily double the amount of clicks required to target switch. Had they done this, more people would play healers, groups would be easier to find - which was one of the major factors in the early decline of the game population shortly after release. Of the 100 or so people I started the game with, I was the last one out at 6 months, only coming back to play every few years a while.
  7. Also if you mixed item where some were set to unify and others use their native colors or dyes you cannot change or fix it. If this erases does people bought on the CM you really have a problem, that is money not just crafting time.
  8. It is 2021 and this issue is still common. Updated drivers, checked game files and still locks up often. Note it is almost always with movement, rarely if every just locks up spontaneously. It is when you are moving and acting.
  9. Of the 3 roles, healing is generally the most action intensive, that is because as this game's interface is laid out you have to retarget for each different person to heal them (aside from AE Heals). SWTOR is years behind several other MMOs in that either by player mods or UI improvements (ie macros) they made the interface more ergonomic for the healing role. The big improvement I'd like to see is a click cast interface. This works by making modified clicks on the raid frame of a player like bound hotkeys. So, you click on the player's healthbar with Right or Left button and a different ability is tied to each. Using a CTRL, ALT or SHIFT modifier yields a different tied ability. With this game there are only a half dozen or so needed anyway. What this does is allow the healer to remain targeted on the boss, and heal whomever needs to be healed without target swapping. This puts the action required on par with DPS or Tank roles. The game needs more played healers, with a 4 person group size you need 25% playing healer role, 25% tank and rest DPS for best access to content. The better access, the more people are do content the more they are likely to play and stay.
  10. Its a very stupid idea really for players, and for the business. I think Bioware has a traitor in their midst sabotaging the game. I'll explain what my response to the problem is, and why though it is a workaround, it degrades the game making people less likely to stick around with it. So, hit my weekly cap - and the weekly quest completed too as I accepted the last Daily reward. There is that phat Purple rep token waiting to be claimed (and wasted). If I don't accept the mission rewards till weekly reset, I can get it then, hell I earned it. However, it means every time I zone, get another mission done etc, I have to carefully not accept that particular mission reward. Probability is I wind up with a couple other mission completions behind it in queue, and now I can't accept any new ones or do crafting missions until I do. I'm forced to retire the character, they are now held hostage for the remainder of the week on pain of losing the largest part of my weekly effort. I find it hard to think of a worse way to design a system than this - unless I wanted to frustrate, bore and piss people off. Whoever did this, hates their clients. And they are hurting the company, pissed off clients have lots of other choices. What was so difficult about accumulating and using rep tokens as you gain them, and then just save them if you keep grinding on that reputation faction? Having multiple toons I have several that are still sidelined from last week's Rakghoul event because they have 6-7 completed missions in the tunnels to turn in, but I already capped last week, and this week completing several other characters saved completions. Really piss poor design.
  11. Torian/Vette same issue. Companion may be dead for the story arc, but after pushing them high in influence would be good to have available for FPs & other legacy content/farming etc.
  12. That video is from July last year, 6.0 is here but so far I have searched in vain for this loadout system. And as one Youtube commenter was noting, having your hotbars memorize layout for spec swapping would be great (essential) too. Rift has had that for like a doze or more specs per char, for half a dozen years now or more.
  13. Thank you, the fact you had to pay 20 mill to people to get it done testifies that it is broken content. It doesn't take merely 20 minutes to complete - only if you have 4 people that are familiar with what needs to be done and are efficient about it. I've gotten a group one time to go in and do it, by the time we got part way thru, someone had to log after an hour and that was the end of it. I've never had 3 people wanting to go "help" do this mission even in guild, its a sure way to silence /gc to crickets.
  14. So says someone that got it done back when there were plenty of people doing it. Catering to that "dog in a manger" mentality is what costs the company paying clients, because everyone else won't long pay for being excluded from content by population dynamics having moved past content that they have yet to complete.
  15. One thing that is not good for a game is tedium. Many players strive to get the most out of game mechanics (what it takes to win in some cases). So having to compile a set of gear with the best bonuses and then log back and forth passing that gear between characters to maximize crafting, influence etc becomes boring. IE a downer to the game. These amplifiers that are essentially global (ie influence is usuable by any character) should be a bonus that you can tune up in the interface without swapping gear around. Sort of like how your outfit is bound on the character but you can make copies for all characters on account from Collections. Thus you have 7 gear slots, 2 wielded slots all potentially yielding 2.00% bonus influence, 18% total. Move that to the interface and not on gear that has to be passed around. Its a substantial bonus, but its a lot of boring game time wasted using it. That is a "feature" that doesn't keep people interested but will instead burn them out.
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