Difficult Decisions

Blaugust has come and gone, and has left me feeling rather down. I've never been into the whole "daily posting" aspect of the event, but the badges on my sidebar (only visible on desktop, sorry) are a testament to my consistency when it comes to participation, as I've been able to proudly show off my silver award (earned by making 15+ posts throughout the month, in my case spread out across multiple blogs) four years in a row.

I thought it was going to be a given that I'd earn it again this year, but I stalled out at thirteen posts. During the last days of the month I kept trying to think of ways in which I could still squeeze in another couple of posts to hit my usual milestone, but in the end I just couldn't muster the enthusiasm for it.

I expected the month of August to provide a lot of positive inspiration for posts in the form of SWTOR's patch 7.1, but that didn't really pan out the way I expected either. The story update and new daily area were okay, but the new operation was honestly just a shock for me.

Back in March I actually gave the new tuning for operations introduced with Legacy of the Sith a thumbs-up. Things seemed a bit on the tough side, but Bioware had been clear about their long-term gearing plan for this expansion and I had faith that they would come through and eventually give us access to better gear that would make things easier.

However, the more 7.1 got pushed back, the more we started to feel the squeeze. I wrote about class imbalances and how my ops team was increasingly running up against a wall, unable to find any more bosses that we could kill with our skill and gear level. I was looking more and more towards patch 7.1 as the source of our salvation, seeing how it was supposed to both give us our first new operation in almost three years as well as give us access to better gear. Unfortunately, the reality of that has turned out to be nothing like I imagined.

I've expressed some of my annoyances with R-4 Anomaly already, but really, it's not just the new operation itself, but also the fact that Bioware back-pedalled on the whole gear upgrades thing at the last minute - on the PTS, Rakata gear was upgradeable beyond 330, giving raiders a chance to improve their gear even if they couldn't immediately kill anything in the new operation on veteran mode, but for some reason they decided not to go with that for live, only allowing daily and flashpoint runners to increase their item level to 330 but not letting raiders have any progress outside R-4 veteran mode.

So my ops team is basically no better off than it was before 7.1, just that we now also have a new and horribly overtuned operation to wipe in.

I don't like writing posts like this because it's a game and I generally try to focus on the positive aspects of the hobby - if I don't like something, I prefer to just avoid that part of the game instead of whinging too much about it. The problem is that running operations has been such an integral part of my SWTOR experience for over a decade now that it's impossible to ignore all this. My ops team consists of people I've known and played with for years, and since we hang out multiple times a week they're one of my primary social circles.

And here we are, stuck with nowhere to go in terms of progression, basically because Bioware has decided that after ten years of raiding some of us are not good enough for their game anymore. This stinks! We've been trying to find some sort of solution, but it's difficult because outside of our shared interest in progression raiding, people have very different gameplay preferences. I eventually had to say last week that I need to step down and at least take a break from all that progression stuff because it was just depressing me. That's not how a game should make you feel.

Because of how integral running ops is to my experience, it's been a long time since I felt so down on SWTOR as a whole. The last time I wrote about hitting a wall in operations to this degree was proabably back during Shadow of Revan - but that was a different time, with much faster patches, and we got the announcement that the Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion was coming up only two months after I wrote that post. There is no such relief in sight right now.

I also find myself thinking back to the early days of Galactic Command and how it made me not want to play. That one didn't have anything to do with difficulty, but instead was tied to a bad gearing system that made a lot of our efforts feel futile, which again sounds somewhat familiar - but again, at least there was some relief in sight back then as Bioware was already working on tweaking the system.

This time I'm finding it much harder to be optimistic. The other day there was a dev post that said that they "continue to look at Operation difficulty. The team continues to tweak and adjust R4 and other Operations to ensure a fair balance", but I'm not hopeful that this may result in useful action any time soon. Even if Bioware does end up nerfing the operation or changing the way gearing works in a few months, things have already been out of whack for so long that any changes may well end up coming too late for my ops team.