Level 50 Content - How did BW screw up end game this bad?

[alwaysalldays]

Well the end game in not the best. But i dont think WoW classic was the best neither. - i started tbc

yeah wow endgame to start with was terrible. took forever to really get anything worthwhile....

i also think they're just getting us used to how it works in tor. we'll see a lot more stuff soon (and i think a lot more often than we did in wow) with - hopefully - more interesting fights....if we don't i'm sure plenty of people will just stop playing, and BW will know this fact as well.

let's we get it soon!

[Katt]

Number one reason to never jam through content. Why not take the time and enjoy it instead of just rush rush rush to end game . Gotta be 50 gotta be 50 , shit gotta be 60 damnit someone beat me FK, oh rush us to 70..... See in the end that is a never ending cycle and takes soooo much fun out of a game.Take the time to enjoy the game it isn't going anywhere and more than likely you're not going to be number 1 player in the world.

[lovecraft]

Level 50 character progression in TOR has been done terribly bad and it ruins the feel of end game and shorten the longevity of fun of the game.
The end game was designed so terribly that you would have thought they didn't even have 1 person with MMO experience on the design team.
Beta feedback regarding this issue was of course ignored, probably due to having to ship in a rushed fashion. Heres a little story........

Sounds like the start of a rant here...

Ry'zen is now level 50!

Awesome, what do I do now?
Got a couple quests that send me to Belsavis and to Ilum, couple of cool chains there that take me around new areas. Oh wait what is this, dailies?

Aww I hate dailies but I guess its not too bad since they are new and a couple H2s and H4s that give some nice purple gear.
What can I get for dailies? Oh shit a vendor, got some nice stuff on it. 120 comms?
WTFBBQ thats insane, thats like 10 days of doing dailies for a piece, grrr, np I have grinded out worse things in a game and if i push it i can get those pieces in under a week.

Again ranting but, I'll bite.... 120 commendation for 1 piece of gear. If you do all of the ilum and belsavis dailies for 5 days you'll make the daily commendations (25 x 5 not including the space mission daily which would make 27 total) for those pieces plus a nice amount of credits a day, 15 days got you both implants and your earpiece, all your armoring, enhancements and mod for your stuff. Modifying your gear to pre-normal ops artifact modifications can't be any easier than what I just wrote out

Dailies are done, what else should I do? Lets go run a hard mode flashpoint with some friends and see how that pans out.
BT, why does it gotta be BT I hate this place,. Oh whatever wont be too bad with spacebarring. We are going to b spacebarring right guys?
"Dude, did you get the daily/weekly?"
Did I get the daily, what do you mean, there are more dailies, bleh, k Ill grab it?
Run was pretty damn easy, trash was a joke, I got 2 purples and some alloy thing from last boss.
No idea what all these different commendations are but I got like 5 different kinds from the run and the daily.

If you played WoW during BC and was farming the marks for the epic then. You had no daily or weekly to give you a nice boost in those marks and back then only the last boss dropped an epic..... Starting to sound your looking for a reason to complain.... Here your ranting about just 2 quest one that is getting done because your doing the flashpoint and the other that is getting 1/3 done. Ask yourself this why not take them.

That was pretty cool, kinda boring running a slightly harder version of an old FP with the same cut scenes and all, but whatever I got some shineys.
What now, oh shit I havent PvPd in a while, guess I could go see how that goes.
"Dude, did you get the daily/weekly?"
WTF are you talking about now, there is another set of quests to get for PVP too?
"Yeah dude, you gotta finish them you get purple boxes with gear sometimes"
Purple boxes with gear? Fuck yeah sign my ass up lets do this, queue up.

----14 minutes later Queue pops ------
Huttball, cool I like Huttball, this should be awesome
---- 2 minutes later Match Begins------
"Dude its a full premade from "Sith Happens" in full BM gear, this is gonna suck"
----3 players have left Huttball ----
Nah even if we lose we'll get some comms and valor right? Lets see how this goes
FORCE LEAP BITCHES!!!
*stunned, 4k, 4k, 6k, stunned, 6k - dead
Wow did you see how fast I died? like 3 seconds
"Dude you shoulda trinketed"

Well we lost to that pre-made after they scored 5 times in 5 minutes and then camped us for the remaining 10.
But the good news is I got my daily done after that and it only took 9 matches.
5 wins and 4 losses, it didnt count 2 of the wins for some reason, not sure maybe its a bug or something.
But I got my daily done, and I had enough comms to buy another purple box! I got 2 of these mofos now!
Box 1..........BLAM -Empty WTF, oh shit ANOTHER commendation, wtf do these do anyway?
Box 2......... BLAM -Champions Legs of the fallen badass, FUCK YEAH.
Wait a minute, I got legs earlier in that BT run, bah, ok lets see what these PvP ones are about.
Damn, Im no pro but these PvP legs are BADASS, why would i ever wear those crappy ones from that boring Flashpoint?
Guess ill throw them on a companion

With expection of the last 3 lines here, Sound like more ranting. Yea sometimes PvP gear is better than HM FP gear. Rest is just another rant, if you run into a premade, sucks to be you, it happens. Everyone runs into them. If you enjoy PvP then make a premade with some of your other guildies or people on your server.

Well PvP was fun, well not really but I did get some purple legs out of it, so thats nice.
What about raiding, how does that work in this game, lets see if I can find a run.

1. General - LF 1 more DPS For Normal EV, vent required, pst"

Going to hop in that shit, sounds fun.

---You have been invited by Herpsandderps ---

Ry'zen (Ops) - Cool so what planets should I head to for this stuff, Ilum?
Coolguy-Solo (Ops) Nah man just fly over to that northern ship its all here.

Hmm, all the raids are on one ship, kinda wierd, but convenient, lets do this.
Coolguy-Solo (Ops) Dude, did you get the weekly?

No shit, there is another quest like this for operations, wtf man my log is almost full due to those 16 grey quests I still cant abandon.

Most quest can be abandoned, If you can't take the 10-15 mins to knock them out. Your 50 they are walk in the park. More complaining here..... Also back to the point when you was complaining about the daily and weekly HM FP quest. Why not take it. More commendations to better gear you.

Big Robot boss kinda cool, I got some purple token or somethings one more of those alloy things and some more currency.
WTF is with all this currency, Im gonna have to get one of my nerdier friends to do a spreadsheet for me or something
Gwar or whatever his name was easy, got my weekly done too! Oh yeah and another purple piece, that makes 2 this run, AWESOME.
WTF are these pillars, whats that guy doing at that console

Herpderps (Ops) Loot is in the middle get the box

Hmmm, ok no idea what happened there but whatever Im game. Loot, hmmm another purple, thats 3 for 3? I love this loot system! My lucky day!
Solo council – interesting fight, I pwned my guy
No loot though, WTF, jk Im not greedy.
SOA, cool fight, kinda repetitive with the phases but overall I had fun, seemed kinda easy though overall.
Although this is the normal mode so that makes sense, wonder what loot is like.
…..BLAM Lightsaber, OH SHIT YEA, gimme that.

In my opinion your sounding greedy, not only that but I would be one to think that you like hearing the sound of your own voice. (Mods just stating my opinion not calling names). Wait to you try the ops in hard mode, we'll all hear you complain about how they drop TOO MUCH loot

Lost on the mount roll but that’s cool cause I don’t have the credits for the training, DAMN YOU MISSION BASED GATHERING

2 days of dailies for get you the credits for your speeder training

Little under 1 hour in that place and I cleaned up, 4 pieces, bunch more currency that I have no idea how it works.
Guess Ill ask the fellas tomorrow, but for now it was a hella good day for a fresh level 50, BOOYA.

- end of story -

-end of rant-

This same person from this story went on to run normal Karaggas the next day and was lucky enough to score 2 more pieces of gear and of course some more mysterious currency.

grats to you

Issues
Dailies/Weeklys – Way too many of them to keep up with, does not add anything fulfilling to the game in any aspect.

Here's the total daily/weekly count:
- 2 Daily and 2 Weekly from Combat Training Mission board for PvP
- 2 Daily Flashpoint from the Supplies Mission Board (One for Normal FP and One for HM)
- 3 Weekly Mission from the Supplies Mission Board (2 for OPS [1 normal and 1 hard/nightmare] and 1 for HM FP)
All of which are at the Imperial/Republic Fleet

Ilum
- 6 Daily quest there.

Belsavis
- 11 Daily quest there.

Space Missions
- 1 Daily Mission

PvP gear is easy to acquire and is superior to HM flashpoint gear (outside of final boss Columidrops)

Depends on what kind of pvp gear it is. BM gear and some Champion gear I won't disagree. Although to get that you would have to grind the hell out of pvp and would probably gear up faster doing flashpoints

Side note Opinion: Level 50 PvP for a fresh 50 is terrible, RNG loot system is frustrating, and the bugs surrounding wins not counting is a letdown.

not going to disagree there

Currency system is dreadful, convoluted, and does not give players a sense of accomplishment or working towards a goal.
Saving up currency to buy a piece that drops elsewhere is terrible design, you could potentially save up for weeks (and it will take weeks) and buy a piece and the very next raid day you receive that item as a drop

It's not really that bad

Operations – Gear drop rates way too high, only running normal mode for 2 weeks, most players will usually have 75% of their gear. I saw most players usually get 12 pieces out of 20 boss kills, this does fluctuate though.
Normal mode operations for the most part are easier than the HM FPs, and sometimes are shorter, which leads to…

Not everyone get something from a normal more ops outside of commendations. HM drops a lot more items

HM FPs are not worth running (outside of final boss drops of columi and alloy), currency from bosses and completing is near useless.

After a point, if you still need gear for your toon they will still be worth running

After a few weeks you have zero need to run the 4 man content, could possibly have all the daily gear from mission support vendor(or given up because of boredom), and all you can do to progress your character is wait on Hard Mode/Nightmare Raid nights (if youre guild can even do them), or try to grind through PvP ranks and gear disparities to gear for PvP.

I'll agree to a point, Although, they are planning to sell new high end crystals like the white crystal (which is slated to be very expensive)

I still play TOR on my lower level characters, 10-49 WZ’s are really fun, but have lost all faith in level 50 content and I don’t want to mention Ilum PvP. I think these issues have turned off a lot of players and I am not sure BW even realizes that these issues are apparent.

Looking to have my faith restored in the game, but it has been a roughy first ~ 3 months.

You look like you looking for incentive to play your lvl 50 toon. If can't have fun playing with your friends then why play?

[Kakokun]

I'm not really sure what you were expecting. A next-gen mmo?

---------- Post added 2012-02-29 at 01:41 AM ----------

The PvP bag system is just underwhelming, I haven't seen the new changes theyve made to it, but it was so terrible for such a long time I just stopped PvPing on my 50. /shrug

Translation: I haven't played endgame content recently but I will whine about it anyways.

[Hellfury]

The endgame is horrible the only solo content its some dailies that u can run over and over, and FPs that get outdated once u have full columi from normals ALONE.

Tionese wtf that tier is for? Iam sitting at 500 tionese crystals and 200 tionese comendations I dont know what to do with this? You may say Companions I saw what for? I just use them for the frigging dailies and I stoped running as I got my rakata earpiece and implants already.

I done all quests and bonus series from every planet, only time I use my main now its 2hours every week to clear the hard, my guild doesn't do nightmares they cba because there isnt a incentive for it besides epeen and they only care with rakata gear and that alread drops in hards.

PVP??? NO I cant, see I have this horrible bug where my FPS goes to very low numbers and becomes impossible to play once I set foot in a WZ or Ilum for that mater.

So the whole endgame content atm its 2-3hours of clearing hard mode operation, if u dont PVP there isnt much to do and if ur solo player there is even less.

[Roxinius]

What am I seeing here? Ugh. I'll just tell you my experience with the shitty PvP currency. I've been Battlemaster for well over a month now, the first two weeks I did all the dailies, and how did I get rewarded? A shitty RNG system rewarded me with enough for one piece of gear; a lightsaber for 3 tokens. The past 2+ weeks I haven't even logged on to the game that much because PvPing is pointless to me. I'd rather grind my way up and buy a Battlemaster token than get handed shitty luck while others get the tokens and gear up faster by chance.

Don't give some lame excuse, because playing a game like that isn't fun to anyone

To top it all off, i recently logged in to the game a few days ago just to mess around in PvP. Did the dailies and got 2 tokens. After that I just said screw this game.

maybe you should have read the patch where bioware said they were reducing the chance for gear tokens in favor of giving you more chap/cent token but i guess no matter what people will expect gear to be handed to them for no work

[Bane123]

maybe you should have read the patch where bioware said they were reducing the chance for gear tokens in favor of giving you more chap/cent token but i guess no matter what people will expect gear to be handed to them for no work

Yea, that's great and all. I have hundreds of champion tokens just doing nothing with it. fun fun fun

Anyways, that's it for me, I don't care about this game anymore. Edit: I just realised I mixed up tokens with commendations, so i guess that can be misinterpreted, but just switch tokens with commendations, guess that's due to me not playing the game that often anymore. But whatever

[vizzle]

People are just sick of the WoW system. We didn't quit WoW to join another WoW, dunno why TOR thought we would. (And I'm sure some people love the system, grats to you guys, but some of us don't)

I honestly don't see how people can call dailies as content. Dailies are the epitome of lazy design, where you make 1 quest and hope that players will keep doing it over and over and over again, for a reward that doesn't really matter. Oh, it gives BiS earpiece?! Who cares, it's not like you're having trouble downing bosses.

And no, I wasn't a PvP undergeared scrub. I was full BM gear, so I'm not complaining about that. At 50, TOR is really... empty.

[Enosh]

5 wins and 4 losses, it didnt count 2 of the wins for some reason, not sure maybe its a bug or something.

did you write this post some weeks ago because I have never had this happen since some 2 patches ago

[jearle]

Number one reason to never jam through content. Why not take the time and enjoy it instead of just rush rush rush to end game . Gotta be 50 gotta be 50 , shit gotta be 60 damnit someone beat me FK, oh rush us to 70..... See in the end that is a never ending cycle and takes soooo much fun out of a game.Take the time to enjoy the game it isn't going anywhere and more than likely you're not going to be number 1 player in the world.

Jam through content? Its been 3 months, if this post was in December this post might be valid

---------- Post added 2012-02-28 at 09:11 PM ----------

did you write this post some weeks ago because I have never had this happen since some 2 patches ago

No I wrote this post today, the story was suppose to incorporate some of the buggy aspect of pvp and end game with some humor to get a point across.

[vizzle]

Number one reason to never jam through content. Why not take the time and enjoy it instead of just rush rush rush to end game . Gotta be 50 gotta be 50 , shit gotta be 60 damnit someone beat me FK, oh rush us to 70..... See in the end that is a never ending cycle and takes soooo much fun out of a game.Take the time to enjoy the game it isn't going anywhere and more than likely you're not going to be number 1 player in the world.

Yeah seriously, what jearle said. Nobody is jamming through content. The game is nearly 3 months old. My grandmother could be 50 in half that time. We didn't rush through content... if you're not 50 yet, you're just really slow. It shouldn't take 3 months to get to 50.

[jearle]

Translation: I haven't played endgame content recently but I will whine about it anyways.

I havent PvPd in the 50s since mid January you are correct there. Between level 50 PvP and Ilums terribadness (which is dependant on server and faction of course)

You people should look at someones post history before you try to flame. I have been an avid supporter of this game, on these boards longer then most posters here.

Don't get all defensive because I'm "dissing your game" this is my game too. The end game content and character progression is just balls right now.
The first time you do everything it is cool, cause its new, but after a few weeks it is underwhelming.

This post was obviously a rant, tried to mix in some humor about the bugs (which were/are fucking annoying come on) and the terrible gearing system.

I have fun on my alts all the time, the game is great pre 50.

[Chaotica]

in 1 week on my freshly lvled 50, i was in full columi gear, only needing rakata, and most of it was done by doing the HM flashpoints,,, that was the major turn off for me, and the reason i decided to cancel my sub.

when its too easy, its just no fun


edit location: oh and on the other hand, i could easily play again, if only the server i was on wasnt all oceanic players on a west coast server : (

[Leonard McCoy]

Yeah seriously, what jearle said. Nobody is jamming through content. The game is nearly 3 months old. My grandmother could be 50 in half that time. We didn't rush through content... if you're not 50 yet, you're just really slow. It shouldn't take 3 months to get to 50.

It depends man. I have plenty of friends who maybe have only 2-3 days a week tops to play who aren't 50 yet. They have wives and kids and 401k plans and take their time to play. That doesn't mean their slow necessarily because when they do play with the limited time they have they manage to get fairly far.

[Awfulist]

As someone who only does pvp there wasn't anything to do at 50 besides huttball. On my server the two open world pvp zones were empty 100% of the time. Maybe once cross server warzones are implemented I will reactivate.

[vizzle]

It depends man. I have plenty of friends who maybe have only 2-3 days a week tops to play who aren't 50 yet. They have wives and kids and 401k plans and take their time to play. That doesn't mean their slow necessarily because when they do play with the limited time they have they manage to get fairly far.

And still, just because some people aren't there yet (even though they're not slow but just limited) doesn't mean you can't tell people who got to max level within the first 1-2 months as fast. There are plenty of level 50s on every server now, not everyone "rushed/jammed" their way there.

[Vrachara]

Wow, what an awful story. To not delve into each and every point, you being surprised by stuff like it taking more than a single day of dailies to get enough commendations for gear, "not knowing" what commendations are in instances (seriously? every single planet and you're confused by it at end game?) and the existence of dailies/weeklies for instances is just silly. And yes, "silly" is a euphemism.

Being surprised that you're being rolled over in PvP by a more experienced, organized and geared group is naive. But granted, that isn't great design (though I personally haven't seen a [much] better one for MMOs).

Now, as for your actual points. I agree that endgame is pretty much nonexistent atm. I should note that I don't mean that in the "it doesn't compare to WoW's raiding" way. I actually think it does, especially for a new MMO. The issue is that there's nothing to do outside raiding/flashpoints and a few dailies and that combined with the closed nature of worlds and absolutely no need to step off the Fleet for anything other than dailies at 50 (which are also pretty useless), results in a real problem.

Your note on gathering is a little misplaced imo. It's got nothing to do with your lack of credits, that's just your own incompetence or your server's economy (though my bets are stacked on the former). You can make plenty of money with missions, hell, Slicing makes money out of thin air, which, while retarded, makes your "I don't have mount training at 50" all the sillier. That said, I agree with you that mission-based gathering is bollox as it removes one more thing we could be doing and one more thing we could be out in the world for. Then again, with the current linear layout of planets, I can't say I'm complaining that I don't have to spend more time out there.

Which is the underlying issue atm and the biggest one at that imo. Unless BioWare starts making some open world content, TOR is not long for the MMO market. Making planets corridored and even going so far as to put completely unnecessary exhaustion zones on open planets is just stupid. Hell, it's not like the world isn't already destined to be spliced up enough due to the nature of a Star Wars MMO focusing on planets rather than zones.

Contrary to BioWare's impression, you do NOT need a linear experience in order to tell a good story, other games have been doing it for years with an open world design. The problem is, this isn't some kind of limitation imposed on them by lack of time for development or something. It's a clear design decision and those don't just change overnight. This isn't something you can sit down and think "oh, they'll fix it with patches", this is something that'll take at least until the next expansion to do, when they'll have a chance to move away from the current content and add more planets, with a chance to do different design. The issue is that they likely don't see this as a problem.

Personally, I don't have high hopes for TOR. It'd take a change in design philosophy and those are damn rare. Even with that change, they'd need to put in a lot more work than they are atm and they'd need to put it in in places that they don't consider anywhere near high priority.

[Ashgar]

SWTOR was a good single player game from 1 to 50. At 50 there is nothing to to do after you've grinded to Battlemaster and got your gear. If you do two to three successful runs of normal mode/hard mode operations there is 0 reason to do flashpoints. There's no incentive to do them and the gear is just worse. I even got another character to 50 and already bored to tears. Pvp is poorly done in this game, Ilum is a joke and unless you play with a premade the 50's bracket isn't fun to play in.

[WoWGoneBad]

you know i gotta say that I myself and sadly dissapointed with the endgame of swtor.

this guys has some really good explanations. i got to 50 did all my dailies for 2 weeks got all the mods to turn me into a purple beast WITHOUT purple gear and ran a karragas palace within 4 hours got 1 rakata 1 columni and after taht the next day i did HM EV and got MORE gear to boot and i did NO HM FPs. tell me why should i do ANY HM FPs if i can just wait a week grind my Ilum and belsavis heroics and be raid ready hmmm.

1 week Ilum and Belsavis heroic farming gets you 5 23 mods 5 23 armorings 5 23 enhancements. you have 5 modable pieces of gear chest/helm/legs/feet/hands and if you have em bracers so why go through the bother of sitting in fleet going LFG LFG LFG LFG LFG so and so HM when i can do it easier with dailies

you say go run dailies BAH to dailies i make it a chore now to do them just to get creds to help pwrlvl my alts crafting and MAYBE find a decent piece of gear on GTN and buy my stims since my biochem is FAR to low to supply me with anything.

BW coulda done more with endgame with their patches so far like add in new story lines for each class while also adding new content. but we get the usual run your dailies, go do your pvp dailies, do your HM FP dailies.

DALIES DALIES DALIES DALIES this is the MAIN reason i quit WoW, ther is sooo much more a game can do to keep players interested and ?BW needs to see that.


I now have ALL alt slots full and do more lobie lvling rather than go on my 50 and go through the daily grind over and over and over again.

SWTOR is a REALLY fun game at the begining but it slows down WAY TOO much at the endgame, but I do understand that it is still an infant in terms of game progression and will still play it on my alts and keep running my 50 through the daily. I really love this game and will stick it out through thick and thin just like i did with WoW for 6 years.

SWTOR will get better i know it will but atm it is not that great. I will see all you republic peeps in the 10-49 pvp bracket or on the planets im lvling on.

LETS GO KILL SOME IMPS

---------- Post added 2012-02-29 at 04:46 AM ----------

SWTOR was a good single player game from 1 to 50. At 50 there is nothing to to do after you've grinded to Battlemaster and got your gear. If you do two to three successful runs of normal mode/hard mode operations there is 0 reason to do flashpoints. There's no incentive to do them and the gear is just worse. I even got another character to 50 and already bored to tears. Pvp is poorly done in this game, Ilum is a joke and unless you play with a premade the 50's bracket isn't fun to play in.

the only time i find Ilum a great place to be is every tuesday reset of the weekly. then its a reall battle fest of imps and republic. but after the weeklies are done everybody just fadses away and keeps to their Ilum PvE dailies. really sad man cuz i LOVE to kill Imps when the FPS lets me do it

[Vulcanasm]

I won't quote your entire post, but I'll add this: Not only is there no endgame except a few totally generic raids, but they're shit-ass easy and they're loot pinatas. We did one real night of hard modes, one-shotted 3 hard mode bosses, and killed two more after a handful of tries apiece. Each one dropped 3-4 Rakata level epics, 2 epic patterns, and 2-3 rare crafting items. We had people still in half blues.

Many of my guildmates were so amazed at what a joke these fights were that they stopped playing afterwards.