I generally agree with the OP and resent the idea that the game should provide rewards to everyone with very little input.

My guild recently stepped up from 8-man Hard to Nightmare and one shot the first 4 bosses in EV in a little over an hour on our very first attempt (still having trouble with the buggy, RNG nature of Soa). As the content stands we have been able to (nearly) down the hardest content in the game by raiding once a week. It just doesn't make sense that it should be so easy for a semi-casual guild.

My personal MMO experience has ranged from very casual to hardcore progression and ultimately the lack of challenge present in the endgame (regardless of reward) doesn't keep me interested.

I love having an easy difficulty setting for casual players to step into at their leisure. There should also be a very difficult setting for skilled players that wish to challenge themselves. And the higher challenge should absolutely come with a higher reward. There is nothing wrong with being proud of what you've accomplished and having something to show for it.

I really hope the new operation will be much harder and make us busy for longer then current rakata tier, which is on farm since first clear.

I must admit I like what they did, EV and KP are very good raids in my opinion, some new and interesting mechanics, change of scenery, puzzle solving, that's really great. but what I dont like is the lack of diversity in loot, This boss drops boots, this one drops offhands and so on, this is really borring, loot table should be much bigger.

In next raid I would also like to have 2 new tier of gear. Let normal mode drop rakata, hard drop t4, and nightmare t5, or at least t4.5. make significant change in difficulity level between hard and nightmare, so people dont skip hardmode before entering nightmare and we will all be happy and busy.

unfortunately, other MMOs have the 3 steps in SEPARATE raiding areas and not the exact SAME raid and mobs.

 

I think that's where SWTOR/BW went wrong and thus we are all confused as to the vision of the gear progression as compared to the 3 levels of difficulty.

 

other MMOs you gear up and move through the raid content and unlock other areas by gaining experience in the zone and slowly getting gear (and implement CRAFTING in to MAKING the next tier of gear). instead ... BOOM ... here's some gear! instant gratification!

 

SWTOR is somewhat of a hodgepodge/all-over-the-place and doesn't seem to be thought out very well in this regard.

 

"hey! are you done? do it AGAIN but HARDER!"

Ahh, you bring up nostalgic times of BC in WoW. This was the design setup they did, but lets be honest... The resources needed to do something such as this isn't worth it for the company.

The hardcore player group is very miniscule compared to the casual player, and to develop an entire raid instance for them wouldn't be economical. Don't get me wrong! I miss the "attunement" days of EQ1/WoW BC, where you had to run the gambit of dungeons to gear up for the next one, but I don't see them making a comeback due to budget constraints for developers. The tree tiers of difficulty system seems to be the best way to appease everyone. The best thing they could do to give the Hardcore Player-group a shout out like "we care about you guys too" would be to make a hidden boss in the raid that could only be engaged with certain difficult tasks being performed. WoW did this in Ulduar with Algalon, and he's still revered as one of the toughest, most exciting boss encounters in WoW history.

I'd actually like to add one point to my original list and that is character transfers to the public test server. The test server as a testing environment is close to meaningless in it's current state because no one can really test anything.

Players will always be the best testers, particularly in volume. Please add this feature before 1.2 is pushed to the PTS so we can ensure this patch is delivered as smoothly as possible.

This is probably one of the worst aspects of SW:TOR. Response times are the worst I have seen in an MMO with the possible exception of Funcom games. Solutions are rarely found for any problem submitted and the vast bulk of the time you simply receive a generic template reply which indicates that they cannot assist you with your problem but that it has been forwarded on to the appropriate department so that it does not occur in future. With the number of bugs present in the game since release this kind of customer service is entirely inadequate and unacceptable.

Nice post overall, this I wanted to comment on. I remember BioWare hiring people through EA jobs for at home customer service in game, and I honestly feel that the low quality is due to this. But I hope at least that regardless of who responds to us the reports are being dealt with and that 1.2 truly has as much bug fixes and updates that has been mentioned and they continue to retool the game to how the community reacts. They're doing it, and ahead of the curve for the most part. Their goal I believe was for more story so if they can get the endgame in the right place I will stay here for a long time. I also feel that there are not enough people in PTR, or possibly even aware of it.

I agree with the OP on the whole.

I'm from a guild that runs casually but regularly. Raiding is the main event of the week for us and its been this way for years in WOW.

I want to add something that bugs me regarding raiding at current - group set up.

I expect to run with the same group each week in the same roles. Tank numbers pee me off at the moment. Current content (even 16 man) needs 1 tank mainly - with some encounters requiring 2 and some none. Its ridiculous. How can I have a standard group with the encounters varying so much?

I would like fights to be designed around a 2 tank, 3 healer, 3 DPS (or whatever) group every single time. Ok - the odd execption is allowed but most fights should have a mechanic in them to engage and challenge each role.

This is especially bad atm where we do not have Dual Spec. A tank or healer can't just swap spec and be something else... you are asking them to run as a crap DPS with tank/heal talents. But Dual spec is certainly not the answer: tanks prefer to tank, healers prefer to heal.

Taking tanking as an example (as I am one) i think BW really need to think about 2 tank roles in their encounters. If one tank is on the boss, they need to ask 'OK, what is the other tank doing?'

They can be tanking an add(s), waiting to taunt off due to a debuff, taunting the boss for a big spike in damage or even running into things to suck up damage. It doesn't matter what they do -its that they need to be doing something.

Other questions that need answering at design stage:

'What are the healers doing - what do they need to watch out for?'

'What stops the DPS from just standing still and mashing buttons all through the fight?'

I'm in agreement with the OP.

We aren't really a hardcore raiding guild mainly because there's nothing hardcore to raid. We raid at most 11 and a half hours a week. We took our time getting 16 players to do 16 mans, walked in and cleared 16m normal in one try with 50% of the raid never having raided in SWTOR. We then flipped it to hardmode and 1 shot the first 4 bosses, after 3 attempts on Soa he was down. The next week it took us 7 or 8 attempts and Soa was dead on NiM mode, we one shot everything else. KP has gone the same way. Jarg and Sorno was the only interesting fight in there and took us a day to figure out. We 1 shot Bonecrusher, got foreman in 3 or 4 attempts once people quit being idiots and getting hit by rocks, and 1 shot fabricator. We had some bug issues after being lazy going to karraga and lost 3 people on trash pulls that couldn't zone back into our version of the instance. We didn't really want to reset it so we took 1 shot at Karraga with 13 people and got him to 45%. We walked back in the next day with our normal raid team and 1 shot him. Now we raid for an hour and a half on Tuesday and Thursday, everything gets killed, and we go about our merry way, it's not enough to keep me subscribed right now once my 3 months runs out towards the end of march.

Was doing a search for "operations difficulty" because I am getting bored of doing the same things all the time, and I came to this post.

I believe that at this stage, mid August, that it is still relevant.

Nothing new to do, and no reason to continue to do the current content.

step 1 - level to 50

step 2 - do dailies to gear up for hard modes and raids

step 3 - geared with raid gear, dailies are too easy and boring, so raid.

step 4 - raid, raid, raid. what is there to do now that raids are boring.

step 5 - level alts to 50 through the same content

step 6 - in the desire not to be bored we leave for new content - another game

step 7 - rinse and repeat...

Was doing a search for "operations difficulty" because I am getting bored of doing the same things all the time, and I came to this post.

 

I believe that at this stage, mid August, that it is still relevant.

 

Nothing new to do, and no reason to continue to do the current content.

 

step 1 - level to 50

step 2 - do dailies to gear up for hard modes and raids

step 3 - geared with raid gear, dailies are too easy and boring, so raid.

step 4 - raid, raid, raid. what is there to do now that raids are boring.

step 5 - level alts to 50 through the same content

step 6 - in the desire not to be bored we leave for new content - another game

step 7 - rinse and repeat...

As you stated this is a 6 month old post.

Most of the complaints listed by the OP are now irrelevant with the addition of EC, the only valid complaint is that Nightmare mode EC still hasnt been implemented & that there was only 4 bosses. A new raid coming in approx 8 weeks.

This game never has catered to special snowflakes and never will, going F2P has shown that their target audience is the unwashed masses.

As you stated this is a 6 month old post.

Most of the complaints listed by the OP are now irrelevant with the addition of EC, the only valid complaint is that Nightmare mode EC still hasnt been implemented & that there was only 4 bosses. A new raid coming in approx 8 weeks.

 

This game never has catered to special snowflakes and never will, going F2P has shown that their target audience is the unwashed masses.

Well, 5 bosses. Nightmare Pilgrim is relevant. Easy, but relevant. But you're right. Next tier better have as many bosses as Peter from Office Space.