You are absolutely correct. No business model supports the minority, it's just bad business.

 

I'm in the majority that likes easy raids.

You are also in the majority that thinks you cant have both, its as easy as making things harder. The people who enjoy a challenge will get it, and the rewards, you can have it after new content is released and they nerf the **** out of what we are willing to work for but you aren't or can't.

Well, having different modes with as much of a disparity as you suggest would be fairly expensive. Not in total, but in the relation between dev-time, qa time and eventual player base.

Very few line-manager or product owner will greenlight a development costing a couple of weeks of expenditure which will only be used by 5% of the user-base, if there are other alternatives.

Nightmare mode should be harder, and drop various mods and enhancements one level above the default rakata stuff, designed to tune your existing rakata pieces that you get from hardmodes. They should be itemised as such to allow min-maxers to experiment with stacking or balancing various secondary stats in different ways. Currently if you want todo this you have to get rakata or columi tokens for certain pieces in your or someone else's set that have the secondary stats you want and remove them, without wanting the rest of it.

 

Tionese should also probably be buffed slightly so it's not completely worthless and champion gear should be nerfed slightly (or have more stat allocation used for expertise) so it's not hands down better than Tionese for PVE.

 

Slightly less loot should drop from 8 mans and a bit more should drop from 16. Last night a fresh 50 in our guild went to EV8 normal for the first time and in 1 hour clear time got 3 of the main Columi set pieces. If he's also moderatly lucky now in Karaggas this week he can then pretty much go straight to hardmode/nightmare mode and never bother farming anything below that. He hasn't even done a HM flashpoint or really ever need to from a loot perspective.

There is definitely a lot I agree with here. I def think Nightmare should at least drop mods one level over the 58's that are in Rakata, to give you some semblance of reward for the difficulty, and like you said also to allow you to more easily customize your gear outside of getting doubles and ripping mods out of wasted gear.

This is why there seem to be hundreds of "I'm coming back" posts on the rift forums. Bw. Failed on this one, let's face it, without the star wars theme this is a terribly mediocre game

To be fair, Trion has done a lot of great things since there epic disaster of 1.1 - 1.4 patches. I know quite a few people who have gone back, or even just kept playing and they agree Trion has made a lot of great steps to correct course, so kudos for them for keeping at it.

Well, having different modes with as much of a disparity as you suggest would be fairly expensive. Not in total, but in the relation between dev-time, qa time and eventual player base.

Very few line-manager or product owner will greenlight a development costing a couple of weeks of expenditure which will only be used by 5% of the user-base, if there are other alternatives.

What are the alternatives? As of right now, they might as well merge Hard/Nightmare modes and save themselves the time and trouble because there is almost zero distinction between the two. If they aren't going to make better use of their existing gear and difficulty settings then its wasted. I'd rather them work harder than work less and leave a poorly designed system in place that discourages a significant amount of people.

Three tiers of difficulty should mean they are more than capable of meeting everyone's needs without excluding anyone.

agree with original post. bump

Thanks for the support =)

I agree that the difficultly for the Hardmode and Nightmare versions need to be significantly harder and in every difficulty there should be a new game mechanic in addition to the increased health pool, damage output, and shorter enrage timer.

In my opinion, hardmodes should require more raid awareness from every player and should require significant work on a boss before achieving a first kill. Now, nightmare should be exactly that a nightmare, it should require excellent raid awareness properly coordinated cooldowns, which should be tuned with the hardcore raider in mind. The people that thoroughly enjoy/love researching a boss encounter, theorycrafting, trying multiple strategies, and strive for the genuine feeling they get after spending multiple days/weeks getting a boss down.

SWTOR has the perfect set up for all different types of players from the extremely causals to the hardcore raiders. The three mode structure allows for every single person, who enjoys PVE raiding, to get exactly what they want out of the game. Normal modes would allow the most causal of players to experience the content, hardmode for the semi-hardcores and nightmare for the hardcore players.

As for loot, it really shouldn't be that big of a factor all it has to do is prove an increase over the lesser version and scale appropriately with the next "raid version" in mind.

Example) The gear you receive in hardmodes should be an upgrade from normal mode and should provide enough increase in stats to slightly reduce the difficulty of Nightmare.

I hope that Bioware is truely listening to its customers needs, wants, and expectations to ensure SWTOR's long term success.

I disagree.

Now it's too late and unfair to change it like u propose.

There just should be tier 4 on nightmares and everything would be ok.

Now first of all, stop comparing an under 2 months old MMO to one that is a year or more old.. OFCOURSE Bioware will adjust stuff like this in a years time..

That being said I somewhat disagree with the OP.. I do agree that there are too many tiers and modes and stuff, that it seems completely unintelligable for the average player.

First of all, I believe that the current multitier system is only in place to make the first endgame content last a bit longer.. I'm quite sure that if we look at the current raids and call them "tier 1" then tier 2 will only have 1 more set to gather.

So how would I do it?

Hardmode flashpoints:

Token sets - Tionese/exotech.. HM's drop tokens mostly with 1 piece dropping pr. group on the endboss in a flashpoint

Normal ops:

Columi gear as now plus tionese tokens, and some bonus stuff like crafting mats and schematics

Hardmode Ops:

Rakata gear, plus the same bonus stuff

Nightmare:

Rakata gear with the same bonus stuff, but in addition a small chance of really rare schematics, mats for these schematics, tiny tiny tiny chance of dark purple drop.

16 man modes in any difficulty:

Drops EXACTLY the same as 8 player modes (just MORE, to accomodate the more players).. Difficulty should be adjusted to match the 8 player versions.. 16 man modes should ONLY be for guilds with that many willing players. It should NEVER contain unique stuff that small guilds would never get - or have a very hard time getting.

OP is spot on.

99% spot on. the part about getting set bonus isnt accurate because the set bonus on sith warrior /jedi knight is worth about as much as an afk raider.

just as a reference 1 rage off your less then 20% health on target move compared to bounty hunter merc 15% crit on tracer missle.

The current raidlootsysem is completely broken.

It`s messed up.

I can not imagine how this got through testing.

No, thats not true.

I can, but it doesn`t cast a good light on Bioware.

Not only is 16 man harder to do, but not more rewarding then 8 man, and thus will not be played in higher quantities (when the people have no incentive to play it, its a useless raidsize), but the loot as itself is not balanced by any means for the difficulty modes, like the OP explained. Thats just fail, and everybody knows it.

Loot is the base of your raidsystem.

If you mess that up, you got a real problem.

Fix it Bioware!

Not kidding. But my guild is already like GONE. We started raiding 16 man, cleared several bosses EMPIRE realm first nightmare mode. But since 2-3 weeks no one logs in anymore.

We decided that we will clear both instances 8 man mode ( since we no longer have enough players for 16) once a week until new content is release, so we gather once a week to raid for 2 hours and between that time no one is online. Why? Because the game is boring. You can content skip the hardmode flashpoints and just go into raiding for gear.

We went nightmare with 3 green twinks and still cleared the instances pretty easy. Pure demotivation. Gear is meanigless in this game, since the encounters are made for brain deads IF they aren't buggy.

I just hope bioware tunes the next raid instance right. Just make NIGHTMARE mode really a nightmare for the sake of progress and hardcore gamers. Casuals can have they easy mode story normal mode. No one will care, just throw the more competitive bunch a bone, since your pvp has failed hard to deliver that.

Right now, there is no reason to pve, since you don't need the gear and the encounters can be cleared one with one arm.

And don't get my started on the combat log. Most fun as a raider i had in rift/wow was just to compare dps with my fellow guildmates in order to form some kind of a friendly competitive enviroment which we could enjoy.

Now first of all, stop comparing an under 2 months old MMO to one that is a year or more old.. OFCOURSE Bioware will adjust stuff like this in a years time...

i am sick to death of people saying crap like this, 2 months old? lol 5+ years in dev.

LAST YEAR testers told them there would be problems with pvp and pve, did they listen? no.

so now we have all these problems on ilum/game being unstable at 20 players and with hm/nm's

game is fail guys, sorry but its true. they got some things right, but the MMO part they totally failed at, quit the game. come back in a year.

lol if you could see what that have planned for 2012... well you would just laugh.

remember this post (if you have any hopes of bio fixing the broken/boring things) and if you are still playing at the end of this year come back here and let me know if you think i am right.

the ONLY way things could change, is a major scare. say even 60% of you canceled your subs in protest. maybe then...

btw i am not trolling, ill be honest and say i realy did enjoy the game to a point.. lol over a month of dailys and boring easymode pve. bah. casual game is fail

it woulda made a realy good sw the old republic 3 on xbox/ps3 with online coop lol

Now first of all, stop comparing an under 2 months old MMO to one that is a year or more old.. OFCOURSE Bioware will adjust stuff like this in a years time..

This is a flawed argument that is too commonly used. For this argument to work, any MMO you compare would have to be equal. Equal development time, money spent, talent etc. Nothing in life is every perfectly equal though, esp not when you compare WoW to SW:TOR. The reason I'm so hard on BW, is this game was in development longer, had the benefit of years of hardware/software/technology improvements and spent a staggering amount of money beyond what Blizzard spent. Yet BioWare has practically replicated every single one of Blizzard's early failures.

So while BW had years of hard lessons learned by other companies to pull from, years of development and design almost a decade after WoW and more money than any game company has ever had to initially build their game.. BW has managed to to learn nothing, use an Engine that should never have been used for a game of this scale and has little more than voice acting to show for the money spent.

Am I tough on BioWare? Hell yes. Because for a company with their talent pool and reputation, this game largely doesn't live up to their own quality standards.

Most of my problems with this game is the loot table/loot. I don't like how going from columi to rakata is like barely anything. Not only do I pretty much look exactly alike, It's barely a dps increase.

I agree. Some things I can't figure out either are why Columi and Rakata are completely itemized differently from each other rather than being a direct upgrade assuming Columi was even itemized properly to begin with or vice verse.