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

I would agree with that if they improved the CXP gains or set the levels of the ranks at a static amount instead of ever increasing amounts of CXP required per level.

If the Command Rank levels required 1000CXP per rank, and they increased the rewards for running content such as Heroics to 200CXP (and all the other content to be comparable for time to CXP gain, so an Operation provides roughly 2-3k CXP etc), then I think the system would be doing what BioWare themselves stated. By that I mean gaining a Command Crate roughly every 30-60 minutes of playtime, so players actually feel like they're being rewarded for running the content.

As the system stands currently, if you are attempting to gear, not only do you have RNG with zero mitigation included, but the actual CXP gains and the ranks themselves are an issue. That doesn't even include the problem with alts or legacy.

I still think CXP gains should be legacy wide, as well as making the Command Stash legacy wide, at least that way you would be able to hop onto a new character and open those Command Crates on the character you want to play and start gearing right away. It also means you don't get penalised for spending time on any particular character and gaining ranks when you could have been spending time gearing a different one.

The whole system itself is flawed, even for a casual player who is fine with the RNG aspect, it certainly detracts from playing more than one or two characters. It definitely doesn't deliver on what we were told about gaining x amount of crates per hour. It definitely doesn't fit into the legacy system itself.

It feels like a rushed system designed to extract the maximum amount of money from players. For me it's had the opposite effect to the stated goals of the system. It isn't exciting, it feels worse than the old Crystals / Commendations systems, it doesn't fulfill the design goals that we were told about.

I do find myself wondering if BioWare listened to the feedback they were given in closed testing, instead of letting it go live before polishing it properly.

The numbers aren't finalized, but the average Op will yield about 2 pieces (1 is the minimum) from the last post EricMusco made about it. Running Ops will be a faster way to get set armorings than getting command levels, and you will be getting command levels from doing Ops as well. There's also PvP which should help with getting that last piece.



Though the schematics aren't easy to get, 240 pieces are craftable and being sold on the market.



I suggest you wait to experience 5.1 before passing the final judgement.

Have any examples? Not disagreeing but this is the first I have heard of this. For mods, hilts, barrels, armorings, and enhancements the progression 220-228-230-234 have all been as expected, stat-wise, that I have seen so far.

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)

Making CXP legacy wide means that you get less overall crates to roll for set armorings, making the system's biggest problem of getting set gear for your alts even worse.

Oh don't strain yourself too much over your white knighting, OP. People are breaking free ... by unsubbing. In droves.

Oh don't strain yourself too much over your white knighting, OP. People are breaking free ... by unsubbing. In droves.

Not seeing that in game.

Some of the 228s have worse stats than the 224s

in game you see FTP and subs.