Are you some of the players that love doing the LBLO runs well guess what once 6.0 rolls out you will be out of luck since all SM operations will nolonger have any lockouts so you can run the same op all day long if you want.

I do prefer to do full runs, but this is gonna suck if the timed weekly is still a thing we have to worry about.

Out of curiosity, where are you seeing this? Not that it's a bad thing, just curious. I looked on the PTS forums and didn't see anything.

SM ops are going to be treated like flash points. They can be repeated more than once a week, but boss progress won't be saved. It's going to make conquest even more of a grind, especially since they're upping the amounts for making personal conquest and for guild totals. As I see it, it's just another reason to drop the game when 6.0 hits and come back in six months to a year after they fix the mess they're going to make of the game.

Out of curiosity, where are you seeing this? Not that it's a bad thing, just curious. I looked on the PTS forums and didn't see anything.

 

This was in the interview with WCN and Eric Music and Matt P in the last few days .

This was in the interview with WCN and Eric Music and Matt P in the last few days .

 

Appreciate it, thank you.

Can't imagine the reason for this one. LBLO's were a way to slowly recruit people into caring about operations that were only doing them for conquest points.

 

For myself, I actually would like to run operations all the way through BUT only if they are super fast and easy. I've heard a recent rumor they are making them easier. So if it gets so simple that you don't have to worry about group skill anymore and can just use groupfinder, I'd be down for that. But again, only if you aren't going to wipe on bosses. I certainly have no interest in wipefests in a game this old.

 

Also, certainly hope they tune conqauest points to a fair pace per minute spent. Right now, the only benefit to conquest is the weekly rewards worth a little over 1 million credits. Certainly not something I'd spend hours doing. Up the rewards or lower the time spent, not increase the time spent.

While i am one of the many critics of the next conquest point increase, i won't see the removal of LBLO as that much of a problem IF they remove the Legacy Lockouts in conquest.

I hate the legacy lockout because if i do all the work on many toons i want to be rewarded in each one. But with LBLO, that would mean not only farm inside guild but alt farming as well.

Right now, with 150% SH bonus you get 7.5k for whtever Op is on conquest + 2k from GF Op. To that we can add experience to Conquest so basically killing the last boss of the current Op can almost make you hit personal conquest in less than 15 minutes. I consider 2/3+ of personal conquest points in one Operation to be fair. At least for the easier ones. Harder Ops should give better points as they require more time and skill.

 

And about to change in difficulty. It is being tested, but the goal is not very clear. I really can't say I would be happy with very easy Operations, because there is already a big gap from SM to Vet.

I really don't mind either way, but I would hate to spend an hour with bads in Gods, only to see the group falls apart before last boss (if not earlier), and not being able to get a new group to finish it. Even Ravagers is risky with pugs, because MnB is the 4th boss, and if the group can't kill it (which happens all the time), the time I spent on 3 previous bosses will be wasted.

 

Making sm ops easier is definitely not a good idea. They are already easy enough, and we don't need more players who saber strike through them and think they know how to play. We need more players who know what they are doing, and we are not getting them if SM ops are nerfed to Hammer Station level.

Are you some of the players that love doing the LBLO runs well guess what once 6.0 rolls out you will be out of luck since all SM operations will nolonger have any lockouts so you can run the same op all day long if you want.

 

Assuming true, that is when this actually does come out with Musco saying it? Then EV and KP are going to be played to death, for sure. they are the least longest OPs and the easiest to learn, even if they don't have many mini bosses along the way to drop the most loot. heck, they beat the complicated mechanics behind SaV, EC and ToS which aren't likely to be played that much at all. Now i think about it a little more, i'm not entirely sure if this is a good thing.

 

I really don't mind either way, but I would hate to spend an hour with bads in Gods, only to see the group falls apart before last boss (if not earlier), and not being able to get a new group to finish it. Even Ravagers is risky with pugs, because MnB is the 4th boss, and if the group can't kill it (which happens all the time), the time I spent on 3 previous bosses will be wasted.

 

Making sm ops easier is definitely not a good idea. They are already easy enough, and we don't need more players who saber strike through them and think they know how to play. We need more players who know what they are doing, and we are not getting them if SM ops are nerfed to Hammer Station level.

 

Well something is wrong and as you pointed out: it isn't going to make these OPs any more welcoming, so you can be sure for PuG's they will never get played now. Do you want to have these played more often or not? If you do, then make a suggestion how it can be made more welcoming for new players rather than just saying "be a pro" which isn't helpful.

 

The rate of attrition behind bosses like Master and Blaster is atrocious and speaks volumes to how difficult it is to play against them, so clearly whatever the idea was behind it backfired and it will continue to backfire as more new players come in and encounter the same problem, no matter how much you ask them to "be a pro" or help them, it will continue to be a problem to other new players. Even experienced groups can trip up on these bosses every so often.

 

just to make it a little friendlier and make it more welcoming to be played, something has to be changed.

Edited August 11, 2019 by Celise

Might anyone have a link to this podcast? I thought I had found it, but there was no interview

It sounds really weird for ops to not have lockouts. That will undoubtedly lead to a nerf in the quality of the rewards.

 

Not that they are good atm. Maybe this will only apply to story mode.

Edited August 11, 2019 by Nemmar

Assuming this is indeed true and not to say it isn't, but until something is officially released, I'll remain skeptical.

 

The ramifications across the board will undoubtedly effect anyone running Operations and ultimately lessen the population that wants to run them. Pugs are erratic enough as it is, something like this will all but kill pug Ops, other than the aforementioned KP and EV. You won't be able to hold onto an Op until the next day in case someone had to leave for whatever reason, it's late, work, whatever it is. You plow through most of the Op and get to the last boss or two and the group simply can't beat it, or the group falls apart, the group now disbands. You now have to start over if you want to run it.

 

I have no doubt the thinking behind this is they probably wanted to remove easy mode for completions, aka LBLO's and have people run all the content, they've done this sort of thing in the past. They may mask it by saying, we want people to be able to run any Op as frequently as they want, and maybe that is true, or maybe a little of both.

 

What needs to happen is whomever is in the Op has the option, whether it be the group leader or any of the other members to have the option to either A) Save the progress made before exiting the area, or B) Don't save and exit the area and all progress will be lost. If an option isn't available you can all but say goodbye to running anything remotely difficult via Group Finder.

 

Again, until something is officially released, I'll remain skeptical, notably detailing how, assuming it's true, it will be implemented. I've played a number mmo's in my time and I've never heard of removing lock outs in any of them. Something like this could be the proverbial 'nail in the coffin' for this game. I'm curious as to how they handle this because this is a huge decision.

Edited August 11, 2019 by Pirana

Removing Lockouts is a horrible idea. It will massively affect Progression raiding. Many guilds in HM/NiM progression continue to work on bosses that they haven't beaten yet later in the week. Removing the ability to save a lockout for at least HM/NiM would be a huge mistake for this game.

 

As for SM, I'd still leave the lockouts ingame, yes it's used for easy conquest by many, however is this really a bad thing? if more people are raiding because of that It means more people are doing the Ops.

Edited August 11, 2019 by Toraak

I'm of two minds on this, on one hand its great not having to worry about lock-outs anymore. As a casual player I pretty much just play story mode operations so I don't tend to do progression raid. This would allow me to do more and more operations and hopefully get my endgame gear faster. On the other hand, it'll also make it so that people will be able to farm specific operations without having to worry about the other ones which will screw people who are trying to do other operations.

 

Remember KP and EV having Nightmare Mode rewards in Hard More during Ops Priority rotation? I'm worried about something similar happening. Another thing I find concerning is the ability of not continuing an operation later, I've had groups who weren't able to finish a raid and even once I DC'd in the middle of Soa just to be kicked on the Fleet but I ran a group-lockout run later. If you remove the lock-out in SM you'll have to finish it, no 2nd choices.

 

Removing Lockouts is a horrible idea. It will massively affect Progression raiding. Many guilds in HM/NiM progression continue to work on bosses that they haven't beaten yet later in the week. Removing the ability to save a lockout for at least HM/NiM would be a huge mistake for this game.

 

As for SM, I'd still leave the lockouts ingame, yes it's used for easy conquest by many, however is this really a bad thing? if more people are raiding because of that It means more people are doing the Ops.

 

They're not removing lockouts from VM or Master modes. Those will still have lock-outs, and they're also looking into the possibility of allowing players to extend their lock-out to the next week.

They're not removing lockouts from VM or Master modes. Those will still have lock-outs.

If this is indeed how it plays out, no biggie.

They're not removing lockouts from VM or Master modes. Those will still have lock-outs, and they're also looking into the possibility of allowing players to extend their lock-out to the next week.

 

The more I think of it, the more I think lockouts should remain for Operations. When the new Dxun Operation comes out even SM will be progression for guilds. BW should keep that in mind for the new Operation for a reason to not remove lockouts at the beginning of the expansion or find a way to have a lockout for SM operations when they are new at the very least.

35 minutes in

 

It's the PLAN to remove SM lockouts, but they aren't 100% sure it will work smoothly yet w/o some internal testing.

Potentially extending VM & MM lockouts to two weeks is much more difficult and they're looking into maybe doing it at some point when they have time.

 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/143519/1523599

Edited August 11, 2019 by Darev

Not understanding the thinking by some that removing the lockouts will have any different effect on pugs/bads that already can't do the content...if all they're doing is skipping everything until the last boss anyway, how were they improving that way, either? If the goal is for those people to get better, I would think doing more than just the last boss would actually accomplish that goal.

 

Tbh I don't think people skip the op because of the difficulty of the preceding bosses--it's simply to "save time" and earn max rewards for minimal effort (except for maybe Ravagers, where the risk/reward for running MB is a bit out of sync and the LBLO is pretty welcome in most cases for any group)

 

These are two different things, imo, and either way, I don't really see them as positive effects on the population, such that removing lockouts would make things any worse. People already skip the harder ones altogether and run KP/EV more than anything else (notice how many LFG callouts when those two are in the GF and how few there are for the others because of the pug-killing capacity most of the others have)

Are you some of the players that love doing the LBLO runs well guess what once 6.0 rolls out you will be out of luck since all SM operations will nolonger have any lockouts so you can run the same op all day long if you want.

 

and what the heck is LBLO?????

This is a terrible idea. People forget that there are still new players to these OPs and removing the boss lockouts will just mean experienced players will be even less welcoming to newer players then they are now.

 

Sure an elite, experienced team can clear any SM OP in less than 2 hours, but if some members are little less experienced and you get a wipe or two than it can take 3 to 4 hours to finish even the easier OPs. Boss lockouts let the team disband and finish the quest another day, or for the plaeyrs to find a new team to complete it with.

 

The time commitment to run an OP is long enough already, that you really do not want to add risk that if a couple of players have a dc, or have to leave for some reason or the other, you will lose all progress. This will kill Ops for everyone but dedicated prog players. Or do you really think people will start a ravagers/tos/gods run on fleet when the odds of crashing and burning at some point are high?

 

If it's the conquest points that concern people than just change the requirement to killing all the bosses in the OP, not just the last.

The more I think of it, the more I think lockouts should remain for Operations. When the new Dxun Operation comes out even SM will be progression for guilds. BW should keep that in mind for the new Operation for a reason to not remove lockouts at the beginning of the expansion or find a way to have a lockout for SM operations when they are new at the very least.

 

SM should never be classed as any progression

and what the heck is LBLO?????

 

it's all over this thread you can work it out.

SM should never be classed as any progression

 

The 1st time anyone clears an Operation boss is progression, even in SM. So when an Operation first comes out you still need to learn each fights mechanics. If they implement this some guilds will actually take longer to get through SM possibly. Not the NiM raiders perhaps, but not every group are NiM raiders.

Edited August 11, 2019 by Toraak

Not understanding the thinking by some that removing the lockouts will have any different effect on pugs/bads that already can't do the content...if all they're doing is skipping everything until the last boss anyway, how were they improving that way, either? If the goal is for those people to get better, I would think doing more than just the last boss would actually accomplish that goal.

 

The difference is, who wants to carry bads through an sm op that might never get finished? They are not gonna learn anything if nobody is running pugs. People who know what they are doing will only run them with guildies and friends, because that way they mimimize the risk of wasting time by not completing it. I don't mind clearing sm ops with newcomers who are willing to learn and can do more than saber strike, but if I don't get anything out of it myself, like a chance to complete the ops or even a lock, I'll pass. It will be more and more difficult for new players to hop in and start clearing sm ops, and that will hurt the community in the long run.