Fen Zeil Customization

 

We want players to have the opportunity to express themselves through their Companions, and customize that experience. For many that is dressing their Companion in any outfit they desire, and while we want to offer that option there are often times when that becomes more difficult to support, both technically as well as when we wish to maintain character integrity.

 

Our outfit system allows players to equip themselves (and sometimes their Companions) in outfits which reveal skin (such as the torso, arms, legs, hands, and feet). This requires that the character has the appropriate art made for each of those regions. There are many characters in the game which currently do have the art to support this, and attempting to work around this would not be in the best interest of the player or look of the character.

 

Other times we opt to keep a certain look or style to a Companion to maintain the integrity of that character. While we may offer alternative looks for them, their outfit is part of what makes them unique and definable at a quick glance. There is never any question of which Companion just ran by when it is Nico or Arcann. Fen Zeil is a character we wish to maintain this integrity with.

 

Understanding however that customization is important, we created some additional skin variants for Fen which players will be able to earn and/or purchase throughout the Season. We did this with the intent to offer players more immediate options should players desire them, while maintaining the character integrity we believe is important for him.

I'm sorry, but you are using a lot of words here to explain a rather simple thing: you have no body textures for a Duros character besides the head and the hands. That is neither new nor surprising. Fen Zeil falls into the same category as the Star Fortress companions. Each of them are alien races that were not originally conceived to be available for players to use for their own characters or companions. As such, no assets were produced. and now you don't want to make these assets for one companion. That's it.

Just be honest and upfront about that and don't bring in things such as "character integrity" as an explanation why you can't change a companion's look. If integrity was such a big deal, then why were we ever allowed to have characters like Shae Vizla, Mandalore herself, dress up in a slave girl outfit? It just doesn't add up.

I've not done the maths, but I have done 3 weeks of GS. Based on my experience, some weeks it will not be possible to complete all 7 GS weeklies doing true solo only content (no GSF or PvP or FPs) based on the weeklies offered. I already fed this back.

https://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=9990665&postcount=26

There is also an error which resulted in some solo weeklies not being re-granted after the reset (CZ-198 in particular) so even a solo weekly GS objective could not be completed. This was not touched in the Dev response.

 

Right, but with GS1 you could finish way ahead if you didn't do all the weeklies too. I'm hopeful it's the same thing this time, but again... I haven't done the math... I'll be pretty peeved if it's not the case.

About the bug - the GS goals should change every week, so not being able to do the CZ-198 weekly the next week shouldn't be an issue. What's important is that the available weekly coincides with the GS goals. But I haven't tested long enough to test that...

I'm sorry, but you are using a lot of words here to explain a rather simple thing: you have no body textures for a Duros character besides the head and the hands. That is neither new nor surprising. Fen Zeil falls into the same category as the Star Fortress companions. Each of them are alien races that were not originally conceived to be available for players to use for their own characters or companions. As such, no assets were produced. and now you don't want to make these assets for one companion. That's it.

 

Just be honest and upfront about that and don't bring in things such as "character integrity" as an explanation why you can't change a companion's look. If integrity was such a big deal, then why were we ever allowed to have characters like Shae Vizla, Mandalore herself, dress up in a slave girl outfit? It just doesn't add up.

This. Just say there are technical challenges that make it difficult for you, if people aren't understanding, well they've had to be or leave for 10 years with tons of other aspects of this game, so it's not like it's anything new or shocking.

"Character integrity" and recognizing a companion at a glance when you walk by them doesn't even make sense. That just makes spoilers more likely. As it is now, the big name displayed is "Bob's companion" or whatever, the companion name is in small print if you hover over them. Which is a good thing. Being able to customize outfits to make a character unrecognizable also reduces spoilers. Story: better recognizing someone else's companion at a glance is bad, actually. Personalization: it just makes the game feel more samey and makes your accomplishments feel more meaningless, if everybody is running around with the same identical companion.

So yeah, I don't buy that excuse at all.

Hi all,

 

 

Galactic Season Point Distribution

Finally, I would like to chat about the point distribution for Season Objectives and the intention behind this decision.

 

As mentioned in an earlier post, we can effectively break the Season Objectives into 3 “types” based on their time to complete, complexity, and access. In short, they can best be defined in the following way:

• 6 Solo-oriented Objectives
  
  • These are intended to be completed by solo players, and are balanced toward being complete in 30-40 minutes. These offer players 6 Galactic Season points for a total of 36 Galactic Season Points if all 6 are completed.

  [*]3 Multiplayer-oriented Objectives

  • These are intended to be completed with or against other players, often involving queue times or some other manner of more coordinated effort between multiple players. They are balanced toward being complete in 60-80 minutes, with their potential queue times being considered as a part of this time to complete. These offer players 12 Galactic Season Points for a total of 36 Galactic Season Points if all 3 are completed.

  [*]1 Subscriber Objective

  • This Objective is intended solely as an option for Subscribed players, and will require content included in expansions outside of what we offer in our Free content. The completion time of these may vary anywhere between 30-80 minutes, and will vary week-to-week between being Solo-oriented and Multiplayer-oriented.

 

Due to the time and effort required for multiplayer-based Objectives, as well as the smaller number of them in total, they require additional points to balance out the total options for players to make informed decisions on. Even in the event we lowered the overall requirements for the Multiplayer-oriented Objectives to maintain the roughly same time to complete estimates as the Solo-oriented ones, those Objectives would still require an additional padding of points to compensate for the added complexity layer of accessibility.

 

Last but not least, I recently sat down and talked about Galactic Seasons 2 in an interview with This Week in Aurebesh, and I encourage you to read through it!

 

I hope that helps shed light on some of the more prevalent feedback we have seen! We would like to again thank everyone for their feedback! It has been and continues to be extremely helpful for us in shaping Galactic Seasons!

In other words, you want solo players to do multi objectives because that is what you think everyone should play. No thank you. Done that at launch, not doing it again, except when all my guild is online and that is getting less and less due to what you are doing.

Here's my short summary of the play-through with a new char (Jedi-Botschafter - Schatten - Infiltration - active play time ~40-55 hours (play time in total (incl. pauses where game was running in the background: ~65 hours)).

Up until around completing chapter 3 (char was lvl 49 there), the balancing of the solo content (class stories) seemed a bit harder compared to <= 6.x, but in general was okish.

Content in between level 50-60 (chapter 4-5) however was really slow and time consuming. With this DD spec, it felt like I was doing less damage than a main heal char does in <= 6.x. In particular the three FPs: Tython, Korriban, and (to a lesser degree also) Manaan seemed way too hard. Even though I was able to finish the story level content there, especially the boss fight with the second last boss in the Tython FP took so long, that I had trouble killing the two droid adds in time before the next two spawned.

KOTFE content (char was level 60-68) felt again okish (aka: seems like at lvl 64 the unlocked 'Psychokinese-Explosion' skill made quite a difference and noticeably raised my dmg throughput), even though again in general I seemed to be doing quite low dmg for a dd spec.

KOTET chapter 1-3 was again ok (char level was 68-70). However, in chapter 4 fighting the 'Läuterungsdroiden' is completely off balance soloing them with this spec/char. I tried to complete this step now a dozen times and basically am not able to complete this one solo (tried up to reaching level 73). Hence, had to give up continuing playing through the story line for now.

Update: after around 72 hours of gameplay reached lvl 80 and got my companion to rang 15. With that combination was finally able to get past that part of chapter 4 and completed it. This certainly feels too hard a challenge compared to the other content.

Bugs I spotted, I reported through the in game feedback system.

UI feedback on the feature to swap the combat skill: It's quite nice being able to switch the skill directly, but doing so resets the buttons on the quickbar (drops the skills you lost, and puts in all the new ones); so going back and forth between two skills, you'll have to do quite some re-arrangement of the quickbar every single time.

Would be great, if SWTOR could save the positions of the skills/buttons in the quickbar based on the combat skill you have and when switching these, restore the corresponding setup.

From anecdotal experience of just playing stuff on the PTS, I was surprised how well I progress at the GS2 without specifically trying. I would occasionally take a look and see if I had something easy to finish off an objective and specifically go do that content.

Both good and bad as a result. I feel it's good from the point of view that it seems to be rewarding for a reasonable amount of content & effort, bad in the sense that it didn't really give me any fun ideas or content to say "hey, let's do this today!" and then putting me into an interesting experience I wouldn't have had otherwise.

For Seasons 2 I had a lot less feedback than the PTS in general. Overall, it's definitely an improvement on Seasons 1. The reason I play SWTOR is for the story so it's nice to have some story and lore integrated in more fully with Seasons 2.

Seasons 2:

Issues:

• It isn't apparent what we do with the reputation for season 2, can we buy things from a vendor? Will more story happen?
  
• The daily/weeklies swap isn't my fav but I get why it was done. I just wish you could swap out a weekly if it's really something you don't enjoy in the game (ex: some folks just can't stand PvP or GSF)
  

Positives:

• It's great to have more of a story related to the season
  
• The reputation gathering and booster is pretty cool, some strategy is required and that's neat
  
• I love that the rewards are more plentiful, especially for F2P/Preferred folks. That was a major downside for Seasons 1. It could still be more, but hey, improvement!
  

Please do something about the weeklies failing to be available even though they are required to meet an objective. This week it's the turn of Onderon in the GS Objective: Coreworlds Daily Sweep. It's not possible to obtain the weekly for the area either the mission terminal or your character's activity log, meaning this objective is impossible to complete if Onderon is your preferred choice. We are forced to do x2 Blackhole (not my favourite area) on two different characters instead. The Onderon weekly is not available for any of my characters (both characters created and levelled all the way through on the PTS and my level 75s I copied across). It might be because Onderon is still linked to the PTS experience when it no longer needs to be (since you can't travel from the fleet directly to Onderon any more).

EDIT: And to frustrate matters even more, the Blackhole weekly is not available on any of the characters I transferred over meaning I will have to level a new character high enough just to complete the GS objective (if I could be arsed). Grrrrrrr

This is very frustrating and if GS required weeklies fail to appear at launch prepare for the many, many rage threads.

Edit 2: And now I'm being forced to do Chapter X: Anarchy in Paradise for the GS weekly objective. YOU KNOW VERY WELL THIS IS ONE OF THE WORST CHAPTERS IN KOTFE (beaten only by Chapter XII: Visions in the Dark)! Why inflict this Skytrooper torture on us (without even offering us a Skytrooper as a companion as compensation for said torture)? Even the walker chapters are better than this. /cry EDIT 2: And it's vet or master mode which I forgot and ran the whole stupid chapter on story before I remembered /double cry

Please do something about the weeklies failing to be available even though they are required to meet an objective. This week it's the turn of Onderon in the GS Objective: Coreworlds Daily Sweep. It's not possible to obtain the weekly for the area either the mission terminal or your character's activity log, meaning this objective is impossible to complete if Onderon is your preferred choice. We are forced to do x2 Blackhole (not my favourite area) on two different characters instead. The Onderon weekly is not available for any of my characters (both characters created and levelled all the way through on the PTS and my level 75s I copied across). It might be because Onderon is still linked to the PTS experience when it no longer needs to be (since you can't travel from the fleet directly to Onderon any more).

This is most likely due to the changes to weekly missions for the new gearing system. Double check your Conquest window to be 100% certain, but if a weekly isn't one of the "highlighted" weeklies for the new gearing system, it's straight up unavailable. This goes for pretty much everywhere as far as I can tell. It's not available in the activity finder, it's not available on the planet's mission terminal, the respective Conquest objective is removed, etc.

They clearly need to go through and fix any instances of Galactic Seasons objectives pointing you to these weeklies when they're not available, but the fact that it's completely unavailable in the first place seems to be the new gearing system working as intended.

This is most likely due to the changes to weekly missions for the new gearing system. Double check your Conquest window to be 100% certain, but if a weekly isn't one of the "highlighted" weeklies for the new gearing system, it's straight up unavailable. This goes for pretty much everywhere as far as I can tell. It's not available in the activity finder, it's not available on the planet's mission terminal, the respective Conquest objective is removed, etc.

 

They clearly need to go through and fix any instances of Galactic Seasons objectives pointing you to these weeklies when they're not available, but the fact that it's completely unavailable in the first place seems to be the new gearing system working as intended.

Of course it's due to that. But it's terrible planning not to make weeklies coincide with the corresponding GS2 goals.

They clearly need to go through and fix any instances of Galactic Seasons objectives pointing you to these weeklies when they're not available, but the fact that it's completely unavailable in the first place seems to be the new gearing system working as intended.

Personally, I think what they need to do is put all of the activities back in the game and give up on their horrible plan to try funneling everyone into only a handful of activities every week. The solution to not enough new content to do is not to reduce how much old content can be done.

Personally, I think what they need to do is put all of the activities back in the game and give up on their horrible plan to try funneling everyone into only a handful of activities every week. The solution to not enough new content to do is not to reduce how much old content can be done.

Agreed, the funneling sounds terrible.

Personally, I think what they need to do is put all of the activities back in the game and give up on their horrible plan to try funneling everyone into only a handful of activities every week. The solution to not enough new content to do is not to reduce how much old content can be done.

I couldn't agree more.

This is most likely due to the changes to weekly missions for the new gearing system. Double check your Conquest window to be 100% certain, but if a weekly isn't one of the "highlighted" weeklies for the new gearing system, it's straight up unavailable. This goes for pretty much everywhere as far as I can tell. It's not available in the activity finder, it's not available on the planet's mission terminal, the respective Conquest objective is removed, etc.

 

They clearly need to go through and fix any instances of Galactic Seasons objectives pointing you to these weeklies when they're not available, but the fact that it's completely unavailable in the first place seems to be the new gearing system working as intended.

I did check the conquest objectives on various characters just to make sure before rage posting. Nothing there

It might be an idea if there have a separate section in activities for the GS specific heroic/daily area weeklies and then have everything else listed as previous so they're still easily accessible. Accessing weeklies from our activities bar is a qualify of life thing currently in live that I'd rather not lose.

Personally, I think what they need to do is put all of the activities back in the game and give up on their horrible plan to try funneling everyone into only a handful of activities every week. The solution to not enough new content to do is not to reduce how much old content can be done.

Yes, yes, yes!!

There are far too many good things that are broken or "fixed" or changed that don't work or don't make sense, I can't see them being corrected before in time for a Feb release. I'm still calling a delayed March release and if all things we've reported are sorted out, I'll be happy with that.

Got to reiterate that requiring wins in GSF and/or PvP is the best way of alienating potential players.

I've enjoyed both in GS1, but if a win is required, what's left of my sanity will force me to skip them.

Please don't do this.

Got to reiterate that requiring wins in GSF and/or PvP is the best way of alienating potential players.

 

I've enjoyed both in GS1, but if a win is required, what's left of my sanity will force me to skip them.

 

Please don't do this.

Requiring wins is a good thing, on my server [star Forge], GSF and pvp was inundated with people that outspokenly said they dont care and spent the entire time standing idle/getting farmed in pvp OR crashing on purpose to end matches quicker in GSF.

As it is you're given a list of 10 objectives a week to complete, you can easily skip GSF/PVP each week and do another weekly GS2 mission to earn points as you only need to do 7 a week.

Requiring wins is a good thing, on my server [star Forge], GSF and pvp was inundated with people that outspokenly said they dont care and spent the entire time standing idle/getting farmed in pvp OR crashing on purpose to end matches quicker in GSF.

 

As it is you're given a list of 10 objectives a week to complete, you can easily skip GSF/PVP each week and do another weekly GS2 mission to earn points as you only need to do 7 a week.

I won't even get 6 a week because I don't group.

And I'm on SF but still, people are idiots and it's really frustrating to lose 20 minutes because you're grouping with idiots (again... that's why I don't group lol, I'm too old to get frustrated in a game and that's just not fun anymore).

Requiring wins is a good thing, on my server [star Forge], GSF and pvp was inundated with people that outspokenly said they dont care and spent the entire time standing idle/getting farmed in pvp OR crashing on purpose to end matches quicker in GSF.

 

As it is you're given a list of 10 objectives a week to complete, you can easily skip GSF/PVP each week and do another weekly GS2 mission to earn points as you only need to do 7 a week.

Sounds like treating symptoms and missing the problem. If people are feeling compelled to play content they don't enjoy and ruining it for others, that means the structure of it is broken to begin with. Forcing them to win is just trading one problem for another. You fix them not trying, but never address why they behaved that way in the first place, which seems pretty obvious, as far as I can tell how this system worked... they felt compelled to do it to complete the given objectives with no better option. This is what happens when MMOs try to force people into content they don't enjoy to get rewards, especially timed rewards, they will find whatever way they can to cheese it, so they can get the rewards on time.

If someone enjoys the content sans rewards, they will take it more seriously. If they don't enjoy it and feel compelled to do it anyway for the rewards, they will ruin it for others. I don't think it's more complicated than that. If this system is not supporting people playing whatever area of the game they prefer to complete the objectives and get rewards, then it's a fundamental failure and will continue to cause the kind of problems you ran into, no matter how many symptoms they try to treat. For example, forcing wins... what's stopping someone from idling as before, if they see their team is doing well and can carry them? And why should people who do enjoy that content be at a disadvantage for completing the objectives just because they are unlucky sometimes and end up on the losing team?

Just a heads up, when 7.0 hits live servers you may want to make sure that Galactic Seasons objectives match other weeklies.

 

One of my GS objectives for this week is: "Legacies of the Underworld". Complete 8 flashpoints (1 point). Earn bonus progress for completing Directive 7, Mandalorian Raiders, Cademimu or Spirit of Vengeance (4 points). Earn additional bonus progress for defeating their bonus bosses (3 points).

 

None of these 4 flashpoints are part of the rotation of this week. So you are really required to run 8 flashpoints (1 point each) to complete this. It can't be hard to have these requirements coincide with the flashpoints selected for the week...

 

Especially when you consider the fact that I mentioned a couple weeks ago: these juicy weeklies (giving 12 season points) are easily forfeited by completing solo objectives. If you are sitting in queue for 8 flashpoints, you are most likely going to do solo content rather than waiting doing nothing, which means that you are going to earn Underworld plans, completing missions, etc. and just completing other GS objectives without even trying to. Once you have done 7 weeklies, you can't complete the other ones. I can see a lot of frustration if that kind of weekly can't be completed unless you do nothing else.

To complete what I said earlier, here is one of the GS weeklies that I had this week:

Coreward Worlds Daily Sweep

Complete [WEEKLY] Daily Area: Black Hole (x2)

or Complete [WEEKLY] Daily Area: Onderon (x1)

None of these are available on the Activity finder this week (Section X, Oricon, Makeb).

https://i.ibb.co/pKM1Jzj/20220124215051-1.jpg

With the change to how weeklies now work, you can't go to the daily area to pick the weekly from the mission terminal since the only way to get the weekly is through Activity finder. So it was impossible to do this GS objective.

I really hope when it goes live you that you make sure that GS objectives match the weeklies from Activity finder.

To complete what I said earlier, here is one of the GS weeklies that I had this week:

 

Coreward Worlds Daily Sweep

Complete [WEEKLY] Daily Area: Black Hole (x2)

or Complete [WEEKLY] Daily Area: Onderon (x1)

 

None of these are available on the Activity finder this week (Section X, Oricon, Makeb).

 

https://i.ibb.co/pKM1Jzj/20220124215051-1.jpg

 

With the change to how weeklies now work, you can't go to the daily area to pick the weekly from the mission terminal since the only way to get the weekly is through Activity finder. So it was impossible to do this GS objective.

 

I really hope when it goes live you that you make sure that GS objectives match the weeklies from Activity finder.

Make sure to put this in bug reports.

I wouldn't be surprised if that stuff made it to live...

Hi all,

 

We have looked at some of the reports about Season Objectives not lining up with Featured Content (Flashpoints/Heroic Areas/Daily Areas). We are seeing a discrepancy between the Objectives players should have versus what they actually have. It is fully intended that Season Objectives will have you participate in content which is listed in the Activities Window and Group Finder.

 

We are looking into what may be causing this.

 

Thanks!

Yay thank you!

Hi all,

 

We have looked at some of the reports about Season Objectives not lining up with Featured Content (Flashpoints/Heroic Areas/Daily Areas). We are seeing a discrepancy between the Objectives players should have versus what they actually have. It is fully intended that Season Objectives will have you participate in content which is listed in the Activities Window and Group Finder.

 

We are looking into what may be causing this.

 

Thanks!

Another issue with the current Heroic weeklies is with 'GSI Valued Partner Initiative'. I understand that you need to complete the seeker droid as well as the macrobinoculous questline to unlock this. On the PTS doing these quests is however impossible due to the lack of finding other players to form the required group (2-4 players required to complete the questlines). So it's nothing one can achieve there right now to fullfill the requirement to unlock the PTS rewards. Past two weeks I had the black hole heroic line and wasn't able to complete it due to the issue reported above... Kind of disappointing to spend so much time on the PTS to get the PTS rewards, just to end up being blocked from that by these blockers.

Hi all,

 

We have looked at some of the reports about Season Objectives not lining up with Featured Content (Flashpoints/Heroic Areas/Daily Areas). We are seeing a discrepancy between the Objectives players should have versus what they actually have. It is fully intended that Season Objectives will have you participate in content which is listed in the Activities Window and Group Finder.

 

We are looking into what may be causing this.

 

Thanks!

Hooray!!! I was one of many moaning...erm I mean giving constructive feedback about this. The CZ-198 weekly disaster in particular.