Thrice-A-Weeklies & Limiting Content

When I talked about the systems changes that were meant to be coming with Legacy of the Sith, I mentioned that one of the more low-key changes that I was worried about was that daily and weekly missions were now always going to be removed from your log if you hadn't completed them by reset time. I dreaded this because pretty much all of my characters have been in the habit of carrying half-completed weeklies around with them for months and even years, to finish "one day" when it suited me.

Now, I'm happy to say that the reality of this change hasn't actually bothered me at all. In fact, it was really refreshing to log into various characters after the expansion launch and find their quest logs almost empty. What pleasant decluttering! What new-found clarity of purpose! I actually dig it.

Also, with all the complaining about UI changes, I'd like to say that I quite like the little clock displays that they've added to dailies and weeklies in the mission tracker to give a visual indicator of how much time you've got left until they reset. It's very clean and clear.

Another change that came with this and which I hinted at in my first post about Galactic Season 2, but which wasn't really clearly communicated beforehand, is that many weeklies now have lower requirements for completion but can also be done three times a week instead of just once. I do think that both of those things are overall beneficial to players. For example, the weekly PvP mission used to require ten wins, but now it's only four, which makes it more realistic to complete within a week and lessens the pain of being unable to carry over progress from one week to the next. And the fact that you can do it more than once a week is nice if you're really into a specific activity (such as PvP), as it means that you can earn rewards on the same character repeatedly instead of having to switch to an alt. Nonetheless I can't quite shake the feeling that it's all a bit weird and unintuitive. I wouldn't expect something called a "weekly" to be repeatable three times a week. Not that I have a good alternative name; it just feels strange.

There is another facet to these changes though, and that is limitations on PvE content. This seems to be tied at least in part to the new gearing system, but I'm not sure that was the sole reason for the change. Over the course of ten years and with level sync in place for almost everything, SWTOR has become a pretty broad game. Not everything is equal in terms of effort vs. reward - or how fun it is for that matter - but simply put, there's a lot of content that you can do that will benefit your character in some way and never becomes completely irrelevant. I generally think that's a very good thing, but I can definitely see some downsides to it too: such as new players being overwhelmed by choice and feeling directionless, or existing players becoming too spread out across different kinds of group content to keep queues popping reliably.

What I'm trying to say is, I can understand the basic impetus behind funnelling players into a more limited number of activities at specific times, and that is exactly what Bioware has done. Nothing's strictly gone away or become inaccessible, but for example only certain daily areas are featured in the activity panel from one week to the next. If you want to do any of the others, you have to travel there manually and will get significantly fewer rewards for your efforts.

As far as daily areas and heroics are concerned, I guess I don't really care as I'm not someone who runs these a lot either way, and for operations something similar was already previously in place in the form of the featured group finder operation, which changed every week. However, for flashpoints I feel this change has honestly been kind of bad. SWTOR has over thirty flashpoints at this point in the game's life, all of which can be level synced, and I think that's actually a great selling point for players who like this sort of small group content. But there's a reason people were clamouring for an automated group finder back in 2012 - because they don't like having to rely on manual group formation or having to be in a guild in order to do group content nowadays. With that in mind, taking the majority of flashpoints out of the group finder in a given week comes pretty close to making them inaccessible, and that sucks.

It's made worse by the fact that Bioware has stuck with the change they made in 6.0, which was to limit access to flashpoints based on their original level, despite of the ability to scale characters upwards (which was why my little Nautolan Shadow that I levelled at the start of 6.0 saw way too much of places like Hammer Station initially, because she just didn't have access to much else). Thing is: With this new system you can't level a character through flashpoints anymore even if you were happy to mostly be limited to Hammer Station, because a lowbie might not have access to any flashpoints in the group finder for 50 levels.

Case in point, in week one, every single one of the nine flashpoints up as part of the limited rotation had a minimum level of 50, meaning that if your character was below that you saw nothing in the group finder. I actually found out about this because I was driving around the Lower Promenade on Nar Shaddaa when a random 30-something character whispered me to ask if I knew why he couldn't access any flashpoints. I thought it was a bug at first and even reported it as such, until I read up on it and it slowly dawned on me that this was apparently working as intended.*

At least as far as flashpoints are concerned, I just can't agree with this change at all, and I can only hope that Bioware will at least reconsider it. Especially as I think they could still achieve what they seemingly wanted to do with this update by perhaps adding a tab called "featured" or something to the group finder, which has the flashpoints of the week in it, which give special rewards, and then have the rest in a different tab or something. Players would still be incentivised to queue for the featured flashpoints in that scenario, but at least lower level players or those who simply want to do different content wouldn't be completely locked out of the ability to find others to play with.

*Update: Apparently at least this particular change may not have been intended, or they changed their minds about it quickly. Either way a fix allowing low-levels to queue for flashpoints again is meant to come with patch 7.0.1 according to Keith's latest post on the forums.