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3.3 and why it was patched in (Devs and Musco should read since they forgot)


Lhancelot

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Just going to post this here, I posted it in the PVP section also. Thanks to Aceite for finding the 3.3 patch notes.

 

http://www.swtor.com/blog/pvp-economy-and-ranked-rewards-restructure-game-update-3.3

 

Below is what was written by SWTOR devs regarding 3.3

 

Community News

06.01.2015

 

PvP Economy and Ranked Rewards Restructure for Game Update 3.3

 

Hello PvPers! As some of you may have heard on the Bad Feeling Podcast, we are making a few changes to Warzones and Ranked Warzone Arenas. Alex covered several of these changes in the interview but for clarity, and as an official jumping-off point for discussion, we wanted to go over the changes and the reasoning behind them here. Please feel free to join us in the discussion thread linked below. Let’s get started!

 

PvP Gear Cost

 

We think that getting a full set of PvP gear is too much of a grind. This is so much the case that only about 2% of PvP players have a full Dark Reaver set. Having at least Exhumed gear is a barrier to entry to being successful in PvP for the majority of players, so we looked to reduce the time and cost of getting there. We have reduced the entry PvP gear costs by roughly a third, and a full set (not min/maxed) will now cost about 4075 Warzone Commendations. For the Dark Reaver/Ranked set we didn’t reduce the price as much, but Ranked Warzone Comms will no longer be used to buy them; pieces will now be purchased with Warzone Comms and the previous tier gear piece. (Ranked Warzone Comms have been removed from the game, but we’ll touch on that more in the Ranked Reward changes found below.) A full Ranked Gear set will now cost about 16,525 Warzone Comms, much less than the current price of around 29,000 Ranked Comms. The exact prices are still being finalized, but this is the spirit and intent of the changes to PvP gear prices that you'll be seeing. In addition, the character cap for Warzone Comms will be raised to 200,000 and the Daily/Weekly Missions will have increased Credit rewards. These changes will make it easier and faster to gear up and get to a competitive level in PvP. Our hope is that the reduced grind makes for a more enjoyable Warzone experience.

Increased Warzone Rewards

 

We found that the Warzone Experience and Credit rewards were not keeping up with the rest of the game, so we'll be giving them both a boost. Players can expect to receive double the XP and double the Credits for a completed match.

 

Legacy Lockbox

 

When we fixed the unintended ability to transfer Warzone Comms to other characters within a Legacy, we got lots of feedback from players requesting a legitimate way to make those transfers. After some discussion, we have come up with a solution: Warzone Commendation Legacy Lockboxes. Each PvP Items vendor (on either Fleet), will begin selling a Warzone Commendation Legacy Lockbox that can be purchased for 99 Warzone Comms and will contain 99 Warzone Comms. The Lockbox can be transferred between Legacy characters.

 

Ranked Reward system

 

The current Ranked Warzone reward system indirectly promotes players to stop queueing after they have gotten to the tier that they feel they will end up at for the Season, which lowers the amount of people who participate for the duration of the season. To combat this we wanted to give reasons to queue for the entire season without implementing something draconian-esc as rewards for playing each day of the season. We have come up with a system that we feel gives players a reason to play all season long and keep the Ranked population competitive and having fun.

 

Ranked players will no longer receive specific item rewards at the end of the season for reaching a certain rating in a Ranked Season. Instead, players will be granted a number of Season-specific tokens based on the tier of rating the player achieved. These tokens will be used to purchase the ranked rewards the player wants after the season has ended. For example, if you don’t like the Silver tier title, the Bronze tier title can be purchased instead for less tokens. In addition to receiving a large amount of Season-specific Tokens at the end of the season based on the tier placed (enough to buy the entire tier of rewards), players will now receive these season-specific tokens for every match they play based on match outcome and performance medals. A player that wins the match with max medals gets a larger amount of Comms than a player that gets the minimum number of medals and loses, at roughly a 1:18 ratio. We believe that this system of awarding Comms based on performance of the team and the individual will create a distinction between just playing and playing well.

 

The intention here is to encourage players to be engaged over the length of the season and continually attempt to improve and compete at a higher skill level. The better you are and the more you play, the more rewards you will be able to purchase. Since highly skilled players can still play the minimum number of games and earn the Gold tier rewards at the end of the Season, we feel this is the best of both worlds of rewarding both skill and time investment.

 

End of Season Rewards will be available for purchase from a vendor in the Combat Training area of each fleet for the entirety of the following Season. For example, Season 6 rewards will be available during Season 7 and will be removed from the vendor when Season 8 starts. If you have unused Season tokens they will be converted automatically into Warzone Comms when they can no longer be redeemed for Season Rewards. This gives players a large window to purchase the Season-specific rewards and still get something back from leftover, unspent Tokens.

 

In addition, there is at least one Reward per tier that is exclusive to the tier (cannot be purchased) so you can still show off that you earned the Reward based on skill alone.

 

As a few examples of the participation level needed for the Gold tier mount, a player who does not place in Bronze or above would need to play more than 60 games per week for the entire season at a 50% win rate, earning max medals each match, while completing every daily and weekly to purchase the mount (but if they lost every game and got the minimum number of medals it would take about 5000 games in a season to accrue the Comms needed). This gets easier for players that place in rating tiers, but a Silver rated player would still need to play more than 18 games a week, winning half their games, achieving max medals each match, completing every daily and weekly for the entire season while not purchasing any other rewards to afford the mount. These numbers are ballpark but we feel that they have a good balance between being physically obtainable so players will feel like they have the ability to achieve them, while still being a significant challenge and investment.

 

One more note, Top 96 players will be rewarded enough Season-specific Comms to purchase every reward for the season, in addition to their exclusive reward. They are the cream of the crop and have earned it.

Miscellaneous PvP Changes

 

There will be two other small changes to PvP in Game Update 3.3, one for regular Warzones and the other for Ranked.

 

In Warzones, capturing an objective (on Alderaan or Voidstar, for example) will no longer be interrupted by AoE effects. This change should reduce the stagnation on objectives and allow for more diverse defensive strategies.

 

In Ranked Warzones, in order for a character to enter the queue they will need to be wearing gear that gives them max expertise. This will prevent inexperienced players, who may not be ready for Ranked play, from entering the queue until they have the appropriate gear.

 

We hope you enjoy these PvP changes and look forward to your feedback!

 

The SWTOR Combat Team

 

Essentially what Snave and others are pointing out is that the grind should not be frontloaded for gears as it is.

 

In 3.3, they understood this and even talk in length on why they made the early sets of PVP gears easier to get.

 

They said to get the dark reaver set, yes it would take longer but at least with the entry level gear set it would be easy for players to get their foot in the door and participate without too large of a gear gap between themselves and those in top tier PVP gears.

 

I just want to know, how in 2 years time a dev team goes from being logical to totally illogical regarding gearing?

 

3.3 also included more options to move accrued comms through legacy making it so the players had more freedom and choices with how they spent their winnings, essentially enabling them to gear their alts easier.

 

All of the fun aspects of the gearing system have been stripped away and replaced with a very inconsistent gearing system relying on RNG and a heavy grind mechanic now.

 

This is stupid, and an awful direction to take the game. Period. This company knows it too.

 

Just 2 years ago they patched in huge changes at the time to make the gearing system better, yet now they revert back to a system they themselves removed due to being too grindy!

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Just going to post this here, I posted it in the PVP section also. Thanks to Aceite for finding the 3.3 patch notes.

 

http://www.swtor.com/blog/pvp-economy-and-ranked-rewards-restructure-game-update-3.3

 

Below is what was written by SWTOR devs regarding 3.3

 

 

 

Essentially what Snave and others are pointing out is that the grind should not be frontloaded for gears as it is.

 

In 3.3, they understood this and even talk in length on why they made the early sets of PVP gears easier to get.

 

They said to get the dark reaver set, yes it would take longer but at least with the entry level gear set it would be easy for players to get their foot in the door and participate without too large of a gear gap between themselves and those in top tier PVP gears.

 

I just want to know, how in 2 years time a dev team goes from being logical to totally illogical regarding gearing?

 

3.3 also included more options to move accrued comms through legacy making it so the players had more freedom and choices with how they spent their winnings, essentially enabling them to gear their alts easier.

 

All of the fun aspects of the gearing system have been stripped away and replaced with a very inconsistent gearing system relying on RNG and a heavy grind mechanic now.

 

This is stupid, and an awful direction to take the game. Period. This company knows it too.

 

Just 2 years ago they patched in huge changes at the time to make the gearing system better, yet now they revert back to a system they themselves removed due to being too grindy!

 

Um, they got a new Producer in August just before 4.0 in December. He's the same guy that told use "RNG was exciting"

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Well done, Lhance.

 

They can't have forgotten. I went over my theory in the pvp forums. TL;DR is that the aim with 5.0 is to retain subscribers via the "carrot on a stick" approach. They went back on what they did in 3.3 because they figured that they were losing subscribers due to players gearing too quickly. Once players are geared, many lose interest, stop playing, and cancel subs. I'm in no position to debate that since I don't have the data that BW does. If this is what they believe, I'm inclined to trust them on this.

 

Some of us geared 10+ characters. We never lost interest or ran out of stuff to do. Others just play 1-2 characters, geared quickly, got bored, lamented about the lack of new MMO content (understandably), and quit.

 

I think it was a mistake to get rid of pvp gear. Were it up to me, I would revert the pvp gearing to basically how it was in 4.0: bring back expertise (so that best pve gear cannot be earned via pvp), drastically slash the time it takes to get pvp gear (remember 3.3), add cosmetic rewards purchasable via Unassembled Components and Command Tokens (throwing a bone to PVE / solo players here). The "carrots" should be stuff like unique mounts, weapons, titles, pets, decos that people can get via currency earned from all ingame activities. You can adjust the cost of these things to keep players going. Just don't make gear be the carrot in PvP.

 

For PVE gearing, yeah the EV / KP dropping 224 gear was over the top. Dial that back and then you might keep your raiders around a little bit longer, except for the hardcore ones who wanted new operations.

 

PVE is about gearing and progression. I don't think PvP should be that way. Tying the two together is not wise, IMO.

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have you noticed this only now.

that buggs my since the game launched.

while other gamecompanys/devs implement things and test them on the long terms befor releasing,

buy-o-ware only throws elemnts in without finetuning or testing.

then they tune around it in the hole cycle. instead of thinking through and adjusting befor they throw it online and do fixes.

and THIS happen since release of 1.0

 

they dont think it through, and guess why the community is so full of rage and hatred.

but now we know why. they change their devs team more than once in a year. there is no point in anything they do, only implementing parts without testing or thought out in long terms..

thats why we always get ultra nerfs instead of adjusting in a soft ways.

 

- implementing

- alpha testing ( early access )

- finetuneing ( beta testers all get access )

- tuning till it fits

- next DLC

- rinse repeat!

 

or why ya thinking they removed the bugg reports from their hp. so nobody could hate on this corner of the forums :rolleyes:

 

we let them get away with it since start, so why should they change anything.

and while they need to fix their **** the hole cycle between addons, they dont have time to create new stuff.

isnt this obvious enough :o

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Total 180' turn in attitude. Which means when those same people get on a live stream and pretend to be really excited about RNG and say they really care about the players experience, you know it's complete crap and an outright lie.

 

All they are doing is following the agenda of one new person at the top of the food chain. That person is ruining the game and needs to be replaced.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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PVE is about gearing and progression. I don't think PvP should be that way.

 

It's pretty clear they put no thought into it.

 

Obviously lesser geared players will be at a disadvantage in PVP, but not only that; the grind to get gear sets is so slow it's not fulfilling enough to keep you interested in doing it.

 

The RNG only adds frustration. RNG is discouraging. RNG is not encouraging.

 

It's like having to walk 100 miles to a slot machine that MIGHT win you a thousand dollars, but then again you might win nothing. How many times are you going to walk 100 miles and win nothing before you just give up? Probably not very many.

 

Um, they got a new Producer in August just before 4.0 in December. He's the same guy that told use "RNG was exciting"

 

I don't know how much dev control a producer has, but even if this guy is new there's no excuse to basically take advanced dev work that was done on the gearing system for the past 2 years and implement the very same type of gear grind system that was running prior to 3.3 which was phased out 2 years ago.

 

You'd think a new producer would have done some research on what changes were made in the past already, and known better than to make huge gamebreaking changes that essentially reverted the game back to an archaic state that had proven itself unsuccessful and extremely unpopular.

 

If this is the case, it's sad and pathetic that someone would have that much control over the development of the game costing resources/money, time, and energy from a dev team that has proven capable of improving the state of this game.

 

I have to admit, I have seen games that took a turn for the worst, and eventually died due to their mishandling of the game.

 

That being said, I have never seen a game put dev work into changing an awful gearing system then literally a couple years later spend tons of time and resources going back to using the exact same type of awful gearing system that was removed.

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Total 180' turn in attitude. Which means when those same people get on a live stream and pretend to be really excited about RNG and say they really care about the players experience, you know it's complete crap and an outright lie.

 

All they are doing is following the agenda of one new person at the top of the food chain. That person is ruining the game and needs to be replaced.

 

Ben isn't new. He;s just new as producer. He was working on the game before launch and should have learned the lessons then.

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think about this.

maybe their intension was that right from the start to go with this, and now they try it for a 2nd run :o

cos now there are low minded casuals flooding their game, instead of real mmorpg gamers :eek:

 

But they've said they listened to players and were going to spend a majority of this year getting back to MMO content.

So isn't that sort of thinking working against themselves,

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But they've said they listened to players and were going to spend a majority of this year getting back to MMO content.

So isn't that sort of thinking working against themselves,

 

listening and acting to those are 2 separate things :p

buy-o-ware can only handle one at the time , what they have shown us so far :cool:

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I think these guys just counted on the fact that most of us are Star Wars fanatics, and figured they could feed us recycled content in the shiny new GC wrapper and that we would continue to consume for the privilege of playing in the only Star Wars MMO on the market. I know it's a totally cynical view, and I'm not happy for subscribing to it, but I can't get past it. I think we are the victims of an extremely cynical approach to customer relations.
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I think these guys just counted on the fact that most of us are Star Wars fanatics, and figured they could feed us recycled content in the shiny new GC wrapper and that we would continue to consume for the privilege of playing in the only Star Wars MMO on the market. I know it's a totally cynical view, and I'm not happy for subscribing to it, but I can't get past it. I think we are the victims of an extremely cynical approach to customer relations.

 

Been happening for years, its just so bad now that everyone can see it and even lots of the old whiteknights have changed their tune.

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I don't know how much dev control a producer has, but even if this guy is new there's no excuse to basically take advanced dev work that was done on the gearing system for the past 2 years and implement the very same type of gear grind system that was running prior to 3.3 which was phased out 2 years ago.

 

It of course will vary from company to company, but generally Producer in the video game world is a fancy, hollywood-like title for a Product Manager. As you know, in some companies they wield tremendous decision power (like at Square Enix on FFXIV) where as Ben may be just a meat shield for someone higher up.

 

I don't know, but in general, product managers usually always have a lot of sway if they know what they are doing, even to higher ups. Because Ben and team do not play or use their own product however, I imagine that have no capacity to intelligently discuss the wants and needs to do the things that would help the product grow (isn't that what companies have product managers for in the first place).

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Seems he's the one to blame for this stupid RNG agenda

 

I don't know. Yes, James was responsible directly for a lot of the problems in the 1.x era when he was producer and creative director on the title. However, he has moved up the chain and while SWTOR is still under him, he has a lot of other responsibilities as well.

 

I personally believe this is Ben's direct baby. When he wrote that letter about all the exciting things coming, blah, blah, blah, that was him talking. I think he had a vision for what he thought would make this MMO great again (a return to solo story). The timing of the change in focus is too coincidental to not think he was involved.

 

Now that the subs started to crash, he was probably getting heat from the upper echelon at EA and came out with this desperate method (GC system) of trying to retain subs.

 

The issue is, he was completely wrong. I mean, after all, it is the first video game he has worked on and the first title he has ever been in charge of. I think, because of intense internal pressure, in all honesty, he is not thinking clearly (or the better way to say this is he doesn't have enough experience to know what to do). So he goes forward with this half-baked system in desperation and, in an effort for him to save face with the company, he is going to destroy a good product in the process.

 

Won't be the first guy in this industry to take a title down with them in flames.

Edited by Wayshuba
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I don't know. Yes, James was responsible directly for a lot of the problems in the 1.x era when he was producer and creative director on the title. However, he has moved up the chain and while SWTOR is still under him, he has a lot of other responsibilities as well.

 

I personally believe this is Ben's direct baby. When he wrote that letter about all the exciting things coming, blah, blah, blah, that was him talking. I think he had a vision for what he thought would make this MMO great again (a return to solo story). The timing of the change in focus is too coincidental to not think he was involved.

 

Now that the subs started to crash, he was probably getting heat from the upper echelon at EA and came out with this desperate method (GC system) of trying to retain subs.

 

The issue is, he was completely wrong. I mean, after all, it is the first video game he has worked on and the first title he has ever been in charge of. I think, because of intense internal pressure, in all honesty, he is not thinking clearly (or the better way to say this is he doesn't have enough experience to know what to do). So he goes forward with this half-baked system in desperation and, in an effort for him to save face with the company, he is going to destroy a good product in the process.

 

Won't be the first guy in this industry to take a title down with them in flames.

 

But of course Ben has to tow the party line. He can't say RNG is crap etc. he has to talk it up and promote it. I'm not saying he isn't involved, but if someone higher up has an idea, no matter how stupid it is, and they want it implemented, then it's up to everyone else to do it and then promote it even if they hate it.

 

Edit

If Ben actually listened to player feed back and what they want and what they hate, then 99% of all issues wouldn't arise or they could be reverted.

These guys will never admit they've made a massive mistake and revert something to the way it was. They would prefer to move forward and make small inconsequential changes that make the game worse than it was.

Other game developers will sometimes man up and grab their balls if there is massive backlash. They know it's better to admit and revert as to not lose players, then to continue down the path of doom.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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It of course will vary from company to company, but generally Producer in the video game world is a fancy, hollywood-like title for a Product Manager. As you know, in some companies they wield tremendous decision power (like at Square Enix on FFXIV) where as Ben may be just a meat shield for someone higher up.

 

I don't know, but in general, product managers usually always have a lot of sway if they know what they are doing, even to higher ups. Because Ben and team do not play or use their own product however, I imagine that have no capacity to intelligently discuss the wants and needs to do the things that would help the product grow (isn't that what companies have product managers for in the first place).

 

It should be a prerequisite to play the game as part of their job. Maybe not the actual coders etc, but the community managers and producer should play and they should be playing on an ingame server, not an offline one.

They shouldn't have to do it out of hours, there should be time allocated for them to play at work, but playing out of hours should be encouraged.

If they were actually part of the community and player base themselves, we probably wouldn't even need to post issues because they would already know.

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