Why would they do that? They are leaving so much money on the table from the community of people who enjoy raid level challenges and rewards.

Thing is, that community has been bleeding people at an increasingly faster rate in the past 2 years. We can discuss the whys and hows but at this point most people who cared about HM/NiM raiding are playing other games. And Bioware is thoroughly convinced, going by their actions and words, that the money is into a very different audience.

This especially sucks for newer players who just got into raiding or were hoping to get into it as most veterans leave and raiding guilds are folding or moving to other games.

Whatever "group content" they plan on "refocusing" on, I fear it will come too late to revert the trend. I'd love to be wrong.

Made a long post but it got lost when i finnaly submitted it

Anyway in short, proggresion is dead. For a new player (which seems to be BW target audience now) the game is full of content and they can raid, but its not proggresion anymore. The last bits of raiders that are left are also leaving, but im sure some will stay and see how the new system will work, but even if the gear is easy to get, what to do? The ops we did 3-4 years ago??

So maybe Eric can chime in and give us some clarity on this issue, but what is the future progression plan for SWTOR. Is progression officially dead in SWTOR? With the system of gearing coming down to points and "packs" and not clearing individual bosses what is the incentive to do the harder content? No one is going to attempt hard bosses over and over each night and walk away with no points when you can do the stuff you have on farm and get the same gear/points you would get by clearing the hard bosses? What does the dev team have in store for people who want a challenge in operations going forward? Is challenge just going to be for kicks with no real gear reward at the end of it? Is there no future for progression raiding in SWTOR?

i would say that yes, progression is dead, but not because of gearing. as a long time progression raider, i don't really care about the new gearing system and substituting one type of grind for another is not important to my mind. if we were still playing, we would get the gear, irregardless of which mobs we have to kill to get it. progression raiding is all about the challenge of working as a team and hoping it comes together. at the highest level, everybody in the group already has full bis gear on their main and a lot of alts. even if we kill the boss, he is not going to drop any gear that any of us can use. we weren't there for gear, we were there for the challenge. personally, i don't care about gear or level or cxp or any of it, i was just there to kill a challenging boss, but for 2 years now, there has been nothing new. that is what killed progression raiding in swtor.

To me, the tiered gearing progression died during 3.0 with the Coratanni exploit where everyone could get 198 gear with no consequences, the lack of a NiM tier and then the Ziost raid boss. Everything since then has just been going downhill - hardest content not dropping best loot, getting fully geared in one day thanks to Priority Ops + legacy gear, raid designers leaving, and now the GC system.

I made sure that the players in my raid group are not there for the loot but for having an enjoyable 5 hours when raiding each week, and that's why they haven't quit like so many other groups. But it is really tough to keep playing this game when the devs ignore us raiders.

I am open to innovation, I think there is potential for an alternate loot system, e.g. based on cosmetics, but WoW's model is proven to work and I don't expect BioWare to succeed given their past history. Not with the best cosmetics being reserved for the Cartel Market.

So sad... where did this game go wrong? When you really sit back and think about it, it had it all. Star Wars story for leveling (best leveling experience in any mmo). Daily quests, difficult 4 man content, and challenging 8/16 man content. I don't understand how it couldn't succeed with that model. I mean they didn't pick the best engine, but that shouldn't have destroyed the game. Now it's just a freemium model with no end game and a new system that is basically a time trade for a slot machine pull... So sad... I guess my dream for a great SW MMO will remain just that.

We don't know the full truth, but from my understanding, the subscription numbers were steadily declining since 2.0; sure Oricon kept raiders attached to the game but not in the masses BioWare hoped. 3.0 was mostly a traditional MMO expansion with new planets, dailies, flashpoints and raids but it apparently did not bring in enough money, so EA forced them to refocus.

The engine will forever plague this game, it prevents the devs from doing any more interesting content (nothing too fast-paced, and nothing with more than a dozen NPCs on screen at once).

If they do it correctly, 5.0 and 6.0 may save the game and the new group content may reignite the raiding population, but it is pretty safe to assume that the heydays of this game (Oricon) are over.

We don't know the full truth, but from my understanding, the subscription numbers were steadily declining

Yeah this is the problem, we dont see the numbers. I would say 2.0 till 3.0 was the golden era where subs had to be on its peak, but that is my impression. It is because i could see a lot of people on fleets on all servers in EU (i played on Progenitor and TRE was full, TOFN was full), forums were full of posts and there were discussions on many other websites about swtor.

All this made it seem the game is doing fine. However, what we dont realize is that all these forum discussions could still be the same 1000 ppl or so. The fact that there are a lot of ppl on fleet and forums may not be a guarantee for a healthy game, still we have nothing else to use a hint for the game status. We simply dont know the numbers!

Yeah this is the problem, we dont see the numbers. I would say 2.0 till 3.0 was the golden era where subs had to be on its peak, but that is my impression. It is because i could see a lot of people on fleets on all servers in EU (i played on Progenitor and TRE was full, TOFN was full), forums were full of posts and there were discussions on many other websites about swtor.

 

All this made it seem the game is doing fine. However, what we dont realize is that all these forum discussions could still be the same 1000 ppl or so. The fact that there are a lot of ppl on fleet and forums may not be a guarantee for a healthy game, still we have nothing else to use a hint for the game status. We simply dont know the numbers!

Exactly, numbers on fleet or activity in forums means nothing. There are many casual players who only log in once or twice a month but they pay a subscription just as much as a player who logs in daily. You sometimes see those players on fleet, without a guild, with their blue gear and 0% flashpoints and operations achievements. They mostly keep to themselves, so you never notice them, especially since they spend most of their time leveling alts, or doing dailies (or with 4.0, heroics).

Only BioWare has the true numbers, and we have to trust that they interpret the data correctly and will not run this game into the ground.

i would say that yes, progression is dead, but not because of gearing. As a long time progression raider, i don't really care about the new gearing system and substituting one type of grind for another is not important to my mind. If we were still playing, we would get the gear, irregardless of which mobs we have to kill to get it. Progression raiding is all about the challenge of working as a team and hoping it comes together. At the highest level, everybody in the group already has full bis gear on their main and a lot of alts. Even if we kill the boss, he is not going to drop any gear that any of us can use. We weren't there for gear, we were there for the challenge. Personally, i don't care about gear or level or cxp or any of it, i was just there to kill a challenging boss, but for 2 years now, there has been nothing new. That is what killed progression raiding in swtor.

qft!!!

So sad... where did this game go wrong? When you really sit back and think about it, it had it all. Star Wars story for leveling (best leveling experience in any mmo). Daily quests, difficult 4 man content, and challenging 8/16 man content. I don't understand how it couldn't succeed with that model. I mean they didn't pick the best engine, but that shouldn't have destroyed the game. Now it's just a freemium model with no end game and a new system that is basically a time trade for a slot machine pull... So sad... I guess my dream for a great SW MMO will remain just that.

Totally with you.

My guess: Pressure to produce good numbers on short term prevented any kind of extra work that doesn't pay off right away - which is plain necessary for products with a long life span. But corporate execs are trained to push for and control short term success strategies. Apply techniques that are fine for consumables to an MMO and you can be sure, though they may not be killed by it right away, they're forced to slowly fade away.