Boosts Abound

Bioware continues to announce additional changes to the Galactic Command system at what I consider to be a pretty impressive pace. I just wish they were able to apply this enthusiasm to something more interesting and fun than fixing a broken endgame!

Aside from various CXP gain increases for specific activities and additional ways to help out your alts via the legacy system, the most interesting part of this latest announcement, to me, was that they are holding a (C)XP event until the release of the next major patch at the start of April, effective from this Tuesday. Going above and beyond anything they have done previously, this isn't just going to be double XP, but a 250% increase to both Command and regular XP.

I think Bioware's willingness to introduce a boost of that size for a whole two months and on such short notice shows that the current rate of Command levelling must be really slow for most players and that they expect to permanently increase CXP gains by a pretty significant amount. However, running it as an "event" first gives them an opportunity to milk it for additional PR, and if they change CXP gains at its end to "only" 200% of the old rate (just as an example), they'll still come out of it looking pretty generous. I don't think we'll see a reduction back to anywhere near the current levels once it's all over. It's hard to go back once you've opened the floodgates to that extent.

Of course this doesn't solve the issue of the Command crates' contents being useless way more often than not, but they've said that they are still planning to look into that as well. The main thing that actually worries me is that it's been suggested that Bioware might then also use the next major patch as an opportunity to add another tier of Command levels. Just imagine finally being able to make some progress with building a set during the event, and then they immediately make your gear obsolete again! I'd hate that, or at the very least I would consider April way too early to take that kind of step. Expect much outrage if they do.

However, the thing that has me most baffled about the upcoming event is that it's going to increase normal XP gains by 250% as well. I've expressed a strong dislike for things like double XP weekends in the past, so I'll admit that I'm coming at this from a biased point of view, but even I could see the benefit of changes such as allowing players to level up via the class story only. This however? I do not see the point at all. Levelling is already super fast anyway, why boost it by another 250%?

Only in my last post I was writing about how as a long-time player there is little incentive to want to rush alts to the level cap right now, but I dare say that for new players, levelling too quickly may even be detrimental to their overall experience. Level sync has fortunately alleviated the issue of outlevelling content before you're done with the story, but that doesn't mean that it's not a problem at all. As soon as a player hits fifty for example, he or she starts running into quests on the fleet and on his or her ship that will casually spoil the end of the class story in their intro, at a point when the power-levelled character is unlikely to be anywhere near it yet. And that's without even getting into things like giving people time to get to grips with their character's abilities.

I just don't see who the 250% levelling XP portion of the event is supposed to for. Or are there people among my readers who actually find the notion enticing? I'm genuinely curious.