You used to be able to enter the old level 50 operations (EV, KP, EC) before you actually hit level 50 - a guildie claims that he did them as early as level 47. This was a nice way of levelling alts in a social environment and of introducing new members to the idea of raiding.

Fast forward to tonight and my guild trying to do a social run of EV story mode, and our level 48 bounces off the door with an error message telling him that he needs to be level 50 to enter operations.

Which patch notes did I miss where they changed that? And why? Seems pretty backwards considering that they've generally been working on making story mode operations more inclusive, not less...

They changed it one year ago with patch 2.1; I think the reason for it was that the operations have become so easy that you can carry other players through it, and they didn't want players at like level 20 be able to farm experience there.

Now, the minimum level for all operations is 50 (except for the operations boss of the Rakghoul event in SM).

Note that the 55 operations also only require level 50, so you can enter those before level 55 to farm some experience if you find a group that can carry you through it.

Thanks for the link, I can hardly believe that change happened that long ago already... I guess it's been a while since we actually tried to take someone below level 50.

Still seems backwards to me though - I'm not saying there shouldn't be a minimum level requirement to enter, but they easily could've set it to 47 or 48.

Heh, was on the fleet yesterday and saw a PUG announcement for KP HM requiring 162 gear. Of course, everyone started mocking the announcement|(the HM itself requires 138 gear; Makeb mods would work just fine!), but still, the point is here.

I wish the ops were available earlier, too - first, many people finish the class story at levels 47-48, and second, with rest XP, you reach level 55 way too quickly and nobody's doing level 50 ops anymore by then.

Heh, was on the fleet yesterday and saw a PUG announcement for KP HM requiring 162 gear. Of course, everyone started mocking the announcement|(the HM itself requires 138 gear; Makeb mods would work just fine!), but still, the point is here.

With full makeb mods you're already overgeared.

back before 2.0 the hm dropped rakata (same level as the makeb mods)

I wish the ops were available earlier, too - first, many people finish the class story at levels 47-48, and second, with rest XP, you reach level 55 way too quickly and nobody's doing level 50 ops anymore by then.

I agree to that. In our PUG we had discussed this several days ago : Two of us (me included) never did Denova or Los Island before getting to level 55, and at level 55, no-one does them anymore. Similar thing is true for Karagga SM.