Break free of your conditioning - gearing, OPs, ...

Even 228 gear is useful since the max gear in 4.7 was 224, so you're saying you got none of that?

normally i'm not much annoyed by the typical forum whining (with their usual doom & gloop + "i quit" extortion attempts) that comes with every change in every game that has a forum. yeah, that's the nature of forums.

but with 5.0 gearing change i see some old veterans clinging to a (computer-) stone age gameplay system that prevents the game from evolving. and that clinging to a past long gone is eventually bad for everyone.

seriously, why do players focus so much on grinding gear as their main activity? don't they know that playing games can actually be fun out of itself? how can repeating/grinding through content that plays the same every single time just to get stats so one can play the next higher 'difficulty' which is mostly the very same gameplay with increased mob stats to undo the gear progression previously made be considered... fun? how much conditioning have MMORPGs inflicted onto these player that they cannot break free from it? that (skinner box) system may have worked for the very first online games where technical and financial limitations didn't allow for much more. but today?

and what's all the fuzz about having no new OPS if all they they are is just upsacled FPs. i mean just scale down mob stats appropriately and you could play them with 4 players as FPs. the gameplay would stay nearly the same with the biggest change being a better FPS rate. the number of player just doesn't feel meaningful in any way. but worst of all their replay value is next to null once you figured out the mechanics (or googled it to begin with to save yourself being kicked by a vet).

maybe it's because i am from a different generation of gamers that didn't play these first online games and i got too used to the pure entertainment value of the raw gameplay of modern games that i so despise the concept that i need a reward for everything i do in order to do it because the core MMORPG gameplay itself is just... not fun.

but with all the uproar on the forums with every change made i fear the dev are being too distracted to be really able to focus on that most fundamental problem. without it fixed i don't see how new generations of gamers can be won over to play this genre if they have experienced how fun games (on their own without counting social elements) can be? without adapting to these new players the games of old cannot last.

yet with the uprisings in 5.0 i saw that the rigid combat system can be tweaked to be somewhat interesting. still far from perfect but it's a start. now imagine the devs iterating on this with constant feedback. imagine combat encounters becoming more dynamic and less repetitive/predictable and therefore more immersive such that even fighting a lot of trash will be enjoyable (regardless of rewards). yeah, i find the current skipping of trash is the blatant depiction of how broken MMORPG gameplay is!

and perhaps even imagine this game bringing back a very old element of tabletop RPGs: the "dungeon master". the person responsible for making every run onto a dungeon a unique experience (by partially controlling mobs/environment placements and their reactions to player actions) may sound hard to implement but there is already one game that did just that: Left4Dead. yes, to shame all the MMORPGs it was a shooter that managed to revive this core idea of RPGs and it had incredible success with it. imagine how OPs, FPs and perhaps even the open world could be fun if we had that. a system, where all your small actions would suddenly matter - not story wise, but through gameplay (e.g. killing that black sun boss for loot might have been a bad idea with all the goons that are now constantly sent after you.. . oh and skipping all the mobs in the last FP run was perhaps also not so wise with the final boss managing to call upon them for help. hmpf)

Look I couldn't care less if they keep the system as an alternate method of gearing, but as the primary method its trash and should never have been used.

Even 228 gear is useful since the max gear in 4.7 was 224, so you're saying you got none of that?

It's going to be the secondary/complementary method of obtaining set armorings in 5.1 (unless you get really lucky or don't mind the grind). For every other slot, you already have crafting and GTN if RNG fails you.

I disagree with the premise of your post, my idea of fun and how I want to play the game is not for you to determine.
I play RPG games to see my characters improve, do more dps, tank harder enemies or heal tanks on harder challenges.
OPs are where I get my fun and if I only have time for a few ops a week and not much grinding, then I expect there to be an OPs progression path in order to gear up and do the ops I was able to do a month ago. At this rate I'm looking at months of work before I can get back to doing... what I was doing last month.
Does BW not understand that taking away our ability to do the same old stale content by adding an enormous gear grind as a prerequisite isn't fun? i would have preferred this expansion never happened if that was the case, I was enjoying doing hm ops on all my alts and gearing them up.

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Some of the 228s have worse stats than the 224s and are only a little better than 220s. Also the 228 stat mixes tend to be really strange.

How do you figure? You will be reliant on tokens to get the gear still, which means you need to rise in command rank and even so you are only guaranteed 1 piece for an 8 man op, so one person out of 8 gets a piece. That's not a primary gearing method, that's hope and prayer gearing.

I am ignore crafting since they made it by default weaker. You have noticed that crafted 230 purples are only equal to blue 230 pieces from the random boxes right? And crafting isn't a primary method either. So what would the primary method be still...oh the random crates which we need to grind to level to get tokens anyway.

Take the tokens off the board and have every op boss drop a UA and you might be right. What we have now, no not so much so.