Bring Back Kuat Drive Yards!

The other week I stayed up late to join some of my guildies on the APAC server for a little activity called "doing flashpoints that aren't in the group finder". This meant running Colicoid War Game and Kuat Drive Yards.

I hadn't done Colicoid War Game in literal years, and I'd forgotten how quick and fun it was. I kind of found myself longing for reasons to visit it more often, but it's been out of the group finder for so long now (it was removed with the launch of Fallen Empire) that I don't expect it to ever make a return to the mainstream at this point. And for as much as I do love it, I also can't deny that it is indeed very different from pretty much every other flashpoint, which doesn't make it very accessible to the average pug. At least it gives normal veteran flashpoint loot now if you do decide to run it manually - I recall at least one occasion in the past when I completed it with some guildies and we discovered that it gave no loot at the time, which was shortly after it had been taken out of the group finder.

Thinking about Kuat's removal from the queue was a bit strange though. It was, after all, designed with the group finder in mind - in fact, the story mission still tells you to queue for the flashpoint via the group finder, even though that's no longer possible. (Fortunately it also progresses when you enter normally.) In fact, there was a period between its introduction and the release of Shadow of Revan when running KDY was all the rage for fast levelling. I had guildies who would do nothing else during double XP and I honestly found it kind of obnoxious at the time. I was glad when this behaviour fell out of favour after the levelling changes that came with Fallen Empire. However, Kuat stayed in the veteran queue for years to come... until it was taken out with 7.0, that is.

I've tried to find out what could've been the reason for this but haven't been able to find a conclusive and satisfying answer. One poster suggested that people would drop from it because it was too long, which instantly struck me as absurd, considering that we also have flashpoints like the Esseles, the Foundry and Directive 7 in the queue.

Another suggestion I saw was that it was too difficult, something that at least seemed to be corroborated by the fact that our little guild group had to discover that you need to be level 55 nowadays to be allowed to enter. (This sucked because one member of the group was 53 - which should have been more than good enough to do the flashpoint - and was forcefully excluded.) The minimum level used to be 15! Remembering that also seemed to make the idea of KDY ever having been too difficult kind of ridiculous, but then I recalled the time I made this video... the last boss in KDY (any of them) could definitely be a bit challenging depending on your group setup if everyone was low level. Still, even if it was maybe too hard for a group of level 15s, if they already raised the minimum level required to enter, I don't get why the devs couldn't have left it in the group finder in that form.

The only other idea I had was that it might be related to the fact that only the last boss in Kuat drops any gear, which definitely makes it kind of unrewarding compared to any other flashpoint. Surely that's not something that's impossible to overcome though? There's a bonus boss in every wing; if they added gear drops to those, you could get three per run in total, which is closer to other instances. Or maybe they could add some of those loot boxes that drop from the sky in other flashpoints after the completion of each wing? Heck, even if all of that is too complicated to implement, I still don't feel like "it gives less loot" is a reason to completely remove an instance from the group finder. I'd still rather have it there, with the risk of some people dropping group if they get it, than just being unable to easily find a group for it entirely. People already avoid certain other flashpoints for other reasons too.

Unlike Colicoid War Game, Kuat is not a stand-alone story that doesn't really tie into anything else. Aside from its lore connection to Galactic Starfighter, it introduces several characters that become more important later: Admiral Aygo for the Republic and Zasha Ranken and Lord Krovos for the Empire. Seeing the cut scenes with them should be accessible! And that's without even getting into the fact that it has a reputation track with rewards tied to it that can't be advanced anywhere else. I guess I'd even take a dedicated solo mode at this point (even though I'm not a fan of them in general). As it stands right now, it's technically possible to solo veteran mode at max level, but the last boss can be a major PITA and is likely beyond soloing for a lot of players that could otherwise clear the rest of the instance by themselves with ease.

It feels funny for me to be campaigning for the return of KDY to the group finder when there was a time when I rather disliked it, but that was so long ago now... as the saying goes, distance makes the heart grow fonder - and I've definitely not seen enough of Kuat Drive Yards in a while now. Bring it back!

Bioware Answers Some Questions About Flashpoints: An Interview With Michael Backus

A couple of months ago, a strange thought struck me. Star Wars: The Old Republic turns five at the end of this year and I've been maintaining this blog for just as long, but I've never approached anything from the point of view of a real fan site. But really... why not? For all intents and purposes, this is a fan site, and who else is going to ask questions about the nitty gritty details of gameplay or the everyday worries of a loyal player? Since I was still working on my Flashpoint Friday series at the time, I had flashpoints on the mind and decided to put together some questions to pose to Bioware via community manager Eric Musco. And he said this was fine! It took a while until I got my answers, but they did arrive eventually. So, without further ado - my first ever official interview!

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Can you tell us a little about yourself and your role at Bioware? [AKA: Who am I interviewing? I didn't know in advance who this was going to be as I wasn't sure who would be responsible for flashpoints!]

My name is Michael Backus, and I’m the Lead Designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic. I joined the BioWare team over 8 years ago and have spent the majority of my time on SW:TOR. My job really has two main parts: The first is to manage the Design team on SW:TOR. The second is to work with leadership and bring the vision of the game to life at AAA-quality for our players. That means sharing the vision with team members, documenting designs, and working with the team to flesh out the details of designing new features and gameplay.

Currently all flashpoints are set up to be PUG-able through the group finder. Have you considered adding a higher difficulty option that would allow smaller groups of friends to challenge themselves similar to what you experience in hard or nightmare mode operations? Some of us have very fond memories of Lost Island HM at launch. 

We have, but it’s always a balance between making Flashpoints accessible to more players versus building a custom experience to allow for a greater challenge but for a much more limited set of players. That being said, we are always looking at opportunities to deliver higher difficulty to players looking for that increased level of challenge.

At launch, flashpoints seemed to be set up to offer an alternate gear progression route to operations since they dropped the same set pieces, though one tier lower than you could get in raids. For a while there were even plans to have different difficulty tiers of flashpoints (Lost Island!), but all of this was soon scrapped. I can understand that the tiering system would likely have become unwieldy over time, but can you give us some insight into why set pieces were removed from flashpoints? I always thought that they made for great rewards. 

You touched on it a bit in the question. The main idea was to streamline gear progression. Building and maintaining so many different stat combinations and tiers of gear added confusion to the gameplay experience for some players and made it a much more difficult system to grow and maintain. It is much easier to communicate that set pieces come from Operations. Flashpoint gear progression was designed to be a stepping stone into Operations, so reinforcing that opportunity in the gear progression sent a clearer message.

Over time, flashpoints seem to have served a couple of different purposes. For example Hammer Station is a relatively inconsequential story, just something fun to do with your friends. The Foundry or False Emperor on the other hand are important encounters that were clearly meant to feel even more epic by requiring a whole group of people. The newest flashpoints have mainly been used to drive the main narrative forward (Forged Alliances et al.), but with the inclusion of solo modes for many of these, the lines between regular quests and flashpoints have become somewhat blurred. What do you see as the main purpose of flashpoints going forward? 

Going forward we want to expand the appeal by increasing the fun of playing these experiences. Early in the game’s history we leaned-in more on cinematic storytelling in group content, but since we have had such a strong response to the storytelling in Chapters we then looked at the value of making make group content like the Star Fortresses. More dynamic with a focus on the gameplay.

What's the most challenging aspect of creating new flashpoints? Are they very resource-intensive to make? If so, why? 

That’s an interesting question, mainly because what’s the most challenging can also be some of the most fun for us as a development team.

For instance, if we look at creating a new level, the amount of effort is quite large. We come up with a critical path for both the level and the gameplay. Then, we have to have the area blocked out and scripted so we can playtest it and make sure we’re doing something fun. Then, you have the time we spend on building the environment art—we often create new environments so an area has unique features or a different look to it. Then we have our artists work on making the area beautiful, which requires texture, lighting, and propping work. And that’s without getting into the other Art work we do to create a quality experience: New creatures and bosses, their abilities, and any animation or VFX time to make the level come alive.

Although this sounds like a complex process, it is still a lot of fun. I mean, we’re creating something new for the Star Wars™ universe. That means our Writers, Designers, and Artists are working together to come up with something new and fun, while consulting with our partners at LucasFilm to make sure we capture the feel of Star Wars and The Old Republic. So although it can be a long process with a lot of moving parts, it’s very rewarding when we see these areas completed and enjoyed by our players.

Do you have a favourite and least favourite flashpoint? Maybe one you're particularly proud of and one that makes you think "yeah, we thought that was a good idea at the time but we wouldn't do it again"? 

I really enjoy Colicoid War Game because we tried some very interesting things in that Flashpoint. It starts with a shooting gallery then contains some heavy group puzzle elements. In the spirit of ‘it was a good idea at the time’, we’ve found it’s a more difficult Flashpoint to communicate and isn’t terribly PUG friendly since it’s SO different from the others.

One of the main points of contention when pugging flashpoints is the matter of "space-barring"/skipping the cut scenes, as some people really enjoy them while others just want to get to the end as quickly as possible because they've seen it all before. Sometimes people can even get kicked from the group over this. Have you ever considered trying to implement anything to alleviate this conflict of interests?

It’s a difficult balance. We did extensive testing to try and minimize this problem pre-launch. We have a ‘decision timer’ that was tweaked to try and get the balance right, but it’s never perfect. At the same time, in a sense, we pioneered multiplayer dialog in the MMO space, so these were problems that hadn’t really been identified before. I think one thing that’s helped recently is minimizing cutscenes in the middle of Flashpoints such as Star Fortress to try and keep the action moving.

In 4.0 all existing flashpoints were revamped to be tactical. This has been great for levelling as it's easy and fast to get into groups for them now. However, in some places the difficulty still seems a little off for the new paradigm, for example there are no kolto stations around the bonus boss in Maelstrom Prison, and Jos and Valk from Blood Hunt are known pug killers since they have so many abilities that are hard to survive when you're low level. How happy are you with the way this revamp has turned out? Are you still monitoring people's performance in different flashpoints and making adjustments where needed? 

I would say we’re happy with how the revamp turned out. As you mentioned, there’s always additional balance we need to tune and we’re constantly assessing those issues and opportunities. One important thing to mention is how much we value when players report the issues they find, so please keep those reports coming! We definitely want to make these experiences as fun as possible.

Another minor downside of the 4.0 changes is that narrative cohesion is lost for new players since it's not obvious at which point in the levelling process each flashpoint is supposed to take place. Do you have any plans to address this, perhaps by having the group finder interface provide additional information about each flashpoint? 

In general, we want our class stories and world arcs to lead you to these experiences. There are definitely exceptions to this and we agree that’s not ideal. Right now, since this content is found in Group Finder we’re not looking to address this issue. That being said, it’s a great idea to give more information to the player, especially when it gives backstory or context to their experience.

Why were Colicoid War Game and story mode Kaon Under Siege/Lost Island not included in the 4.0 revamp? Are there any plans to make these more accessible/relevant again? 

These were part of the ‘good idea at the time, but’ world. As I said earlier, Colicoid War Game is very difficult to communicate to a new player in a manner that facilitates understanding of what you are supposed to do. It facilitates a bad experience because of how different the mechanics are compared to similar instances. Kaon and Lost Island leaned very far outside of our standard difficulty curve, and there isn’t really a simple fix to bring them more in-line with existing Flashpoints. We felt it was better to avoid funneling players into these experiences.

How come the heroic Star Fortresses weren't included in the group finder on release? Any plans to change this and/or to open them up to a wider range of levels? 

This was an oft-debated topic and we erred on the side of making the experience cleaner for as many players as possible at launch, while acknowledging the solution didn’t solve all possibilities.

We were faced with problems like:

• There are many Star Fortresses—each having their own location and not just being one entity. This means each location would be in Group Finder. If there are now 6+ options instead of 1, players are spread out, potentially impacting queue times for players. 
• We also assumed players would want the ability to go to a specific Star Fortress in order to progress specific content. We were very sensitive of creating a situation where players would have their queue pop and one or more group members didn’t get the Star Fortress location they wanted. This would force those players to leave the group and re-queue, creating a situation that everyone would dislike. 

Ultimately, I can tell you that we’re constantly looking at the situation and if player behavior or demand changes, we’ll revisit this decision and see if there is a better solution. For instance, if players have done their specific planet Star Fortresses and now just want to queue for them together, there may be a strong argument to add them to Group Finder as one entry.

Have you considered how the new flashpoint system will deal with new additions to the game yet? E.g. next time the level cap goes up, will they all just level with it? Would new flashpoints also be accessible from level 15 onwards? 

We’ve absolutely considered this and our goal is to continue to make all our previous gameplay areas relevant each time we increase the level cap. There is still considerable work involved in that process, not to mention testing time, but it’s something we feel is important for our players.

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions!

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While I didn't necessarily like everything I heard (R.I.P. Colicoid War Game), I certainly enjoyed some of the insights Michael gave into their thought processes here, even if there was still a good dose of "Bioware vagueness"™ in some of the answers. While I made a point of avoiding explicit questions about future content (you know they wouldn't have been able/willing to answer those), I also think he made it quite clear that going forward we can look forward to more content similar to the Star Fortresses in style. And yes, I know there have been rumours spawned by datamined info along those lines as well.

I hope everyone enjoyed this departure from the usual fare here! As usual, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Flashpoint Friday: Colicoid War Game

Today I'd like to bring a flashpoint to your attention that hasn't thrived in the wake of the changes introduced in 4.0. In fact, the opposite has been the case: this flashpoint seems to have been pretty much abandoned, which is a crying shame considering its qualities. I'm talking about Colicoid War Game.

General Facts

Colicoid War Game is one of the launch levelling flashpoints accessible to both factions that are relatively light on story and can be accessed from your faction's fleet dropship hangar. It was originally designed for levels 39-45... and is still only interesting to that level range, as it didn't receive an update to make it scale with level in 4.0. Worse, it was also removed from the group finder (which only shows you tactical, level-neutral flashpoints up to 50 now), and when I asked some guildies to run me through it so I could see the current state of affairs for myself, we found all the loot chests locked and the last boss dropping no loot. I've reported this as a bug, but I'm not sure it isn't intentional. Which is a real shame as Colidoid War Game is actually a very interesting flashpoint in many respects.

Fights

Colicoid War Game was the first flashpoint to which I dedicated a whole post on this blog... all the way back in January 2012, because it was so strange and defied our expectations of what this kind of content should be by featuring little combat and being heavily focused on puzzles and dealing with environmental hazards. In essence, it consists of four parts:

First, you are led onto a plain with four turrets. As soon as one member of your party mounts one, waves of colicoids and colicoid-shaped droids start spawning around you, which you are supposed to hold off with the cannons. At launch this event was pretty darn unforgiving as you had no opportunity to heal and the droids tended to shoot you as soon as they spawned. This was alleviated considerably when they changed the turrets to automatically emit a trickle of heals onto the people mounted on them. By this point the biggest challenge became to simply remain calm, as the turrets - very unintuitively - shoot without prompting, so you must only use the directional keys to aim then. If you end up doing anything else in an attempt to make them fire on command, such as press a mouse button, you'll end up dismounting instead. During my first run of the place, I was so good at accidentally dismounting myself that eventually my turret just vanished in disgust.

After two rounds of mowing down colicoids, you face a corridor with a few "trash" mobs. They are pretty hard hitters though, and there are multiple champions among the lot. Add to that the fact that some of the droids have an ability that temporarily makes them immune to all damage if you let the associated cast go through and you have the recipe for something that can be pretty painful for a pug... though at least this section isn't very long.

Next, you face the infamous force field puzzle. Your party has to split up to hold down various buttons to gradually unlock a way towards the end of a "mini maze", though you can cheese things a bit if you have someone with a leap in your party. To keep things interesting, there are also fire and fast respawning droid patrols that will knock you off the narrow catwalks to your death. Fun for the whole family! Like on the initial encounter with the turrets, there are two stages to this that you need to complete.

In the end you emerge into an arena that is very reminiscent of the battle on Geonosis from Episode II, where you have to fight three big beasts and finally one final giant colicoid war droid who is a fairly straightforward encounter but amusingly certain of his victory in his voice snippets. 

Story

Why do you have to do all this? Because the colicoids, an alien race of bugs whose non-sentient cousins players will have encountered on Balmorra, have issued a challenge that they will only trade their highly advanced weapons with whoever prevails in their crazy tournament, and of course neither the Republic nor the Empire can miss out on an opportunity like that (lest the other faction get there first).

Just before you get to the final arena, there is a brief cut scene where you see a team of the enemy faction emerge from the trials on the other side of a force field. You have the option to manipulate the local turret controls to make them fire at your competitors, which is pretty hilarious, though it doesn't affect the outcome either way as you don't get to fight them even if you let them live.

Conclusion

While Colicoid War Game's story is not particularly exciting, voluntarily entering a deathmatch competition is a nice change of pace from constantly having to hunt down generic baddies. It's similar to what the Gree event would do later by inviting players to pit themselves against alien droids to test their strength.

It's the mechanics that really make this flashpoint shine though. The turret fight is admittedly somewhat dull once you get the hang of it, but the platform puzzle never ceases to amuse me. It can create some very different experiences, from the pug that takes ages to figure out what to do, with people repeatedly getting knocked to their deaths, to the experienced group that clears the whole area within a couple of minutes. One might call it "the Huttball of flashpoints", eliciting either love or hatred in people, with little space in-between.

I was really quite upset when I realised that this flashpoint hadn't been given any love in 4.0, and even more so when I had to find out that it's also been removed from the group finder and had all its loot taken away. (All the screenshots in this post were taken in "better" aka pre-4.0 days.) I honestly don't understand why that is, as I would have thought that the puzzle mechanics would lend themselves particularly well to being adjusted for a role-neutral group - the only thing you'd really have to do is nerf the hitpoints of the droids in the second section a bit.

I sincerely hope that this complete neglect is only an oversight or at least a temporary measure if there are any particular challenges to this flashpoint that the devs are still figuring out. It would be a real shame to see this fun and unique piece of content go quietly into the night.

Using the new group finder, day 1

Today was certainly one of the more exciting patch days in TOR. Crafters were going nuts about augment kits, PvPers were itching to try out ranked warzones, and PvE players wanted to make use of the new group finder. While I've spent a lot of time PvPing as of late, I was firmly in the PvE camp today and my priority for the day was to try out the group finder as soon as the servers came up.

I was reminiscing about the release of WoW's dungeon finder last night and was rather amused when I went back to read the first impressions post I originally wrote on the day of its release. Has it really been only two and a half years? In some ways that post reads like something from another world to me now. How little did I know of how radically my dungeon running habits would change in short order... but I'm rambling. I decided to copy the format I used back then, do three flashpoints today and tell you in detail about how they went.

As an aside, general chat really cracked me up upon logging in today. The servers had barely been up for ten minutes and already people were whining that the group finder wasn't working because they hadn't got a group yet. Give people some time to log in, dummy! In-between those complaints, people were posting LFG requests in general chat as usual and getting told to use the new tool instead, which then led back to others complaining again that it didn't work anyway. It was extremely silly.

Flashpoint #1: Maelstrom Prison on my Guardian

My first order of the day was to queue up for Maelstrom Prison in specific on my lowbie knight. The Jedi Prisoner quest line is one that I like to do on all of my Republic characters, but I'd only managed to do Taral V on my knight so far. I made sure to queue up for Maelstrom Prison in specific and was surprised to get a group pop-up instantly. Not working, pfft! I zoned in... and found myself with a little shield icon under my portrait. Tank, what? But I hadn't picked tanking as my preferred role!

Unfortunately however, I apparently hadn't unselected it either... and that leads me to my first minor niggle with the tool: that it has all the roles that your advanced class can perform checked by default. I don't know why anyone thought that this was a sensible idea, especially considering that the game currently doesn't have a dual spec option or anything of the like.

Still, at the end of the day it was a user error, and I felt deeply embarrassed. I apologised profusely to my group mates and offered to leave, unless they wanted me to try tanking in my dps gear and spec. They all just stood there and stared at me in silence. Oh god, please don't give me the silent pug treatment in my very first run already, I thought. "Yes, no, anyone?" is what I actually put in chat, trying to coax some sort of response out of the group. One of them gave me the virtual equivalent of a shrug: "Up to you if you want to try it."

I went into Soresu Form and we gave it a try. And actually... it wasn't too bad! In fact, with all the droids that do knockbacks in Maelstrom Prison, I almost felt like I had an edge in tanking with talents like Unremitting. There were a couple of scary moments on large trash pulls and some boss fights when my health bar took a nose dive, but I mashed my survival cooldowns like crazy and the healer managed to keep me up at all times, something for which I gave him crazy kudos at the end. One of the bosses dropped a shield generator too, so I had at least the most important piece of tanking gear equipped by the end.

In the end what had begun as a huge embarrassment for me turned out to be a really pleasant run. My group mates weren't really very chatty, but I did get the distinct impression that they were simply happy to be there. They had no qualms about telling me that they didn't know how a fight worked and followed my instructions with no problems. At the end there were a lot of smilies and thank yous... and most of all I was happy to be able to say: "see you around".

At the end of the run I discovered that instead of porting me back to where I had been when I took the shuttle (aka teleport) to the flashpoint, we all got dumped outside the instance entrance. I thought this was a very good move though, as many flashpoints have quest hand-ins right outside, which you can easily do with your group this way. Not to mention that in nine out of ten cases being outside the entrance means that you'll end up on the fleet, which really isn't the worst place to be even if you were out and about somewhere else before.

Flashpoint #2: Colicoid War Game on my Operative

Next I wanted to see what things were like on Imperial side, and I had been itching to do Colicoid War Game on my agent anyway. However, I had to discover to my chagrin that for some reason the option to queue for that flashpoint was greyed out for me, even though the character was in the right level range.

Fortunately I managed to guess the reason for this correctly: I had a breadcrumb quest to talk to Darth Malgus (about the Colicoids), and once I completed that the flashpoint suddenly became available. As far as I'm aware Bioware has generally relaxed requirements to do the prerequisite missions for each flashpoint for the group finder, but I can imagine that me sitting on that intermediate step of talking to Malgus was causing an issue.

This time I didn't get an instant queue. After five minutes I got a pop-up, but someone immediately declined and it was cancelled. It took another ten minutes or so for me to get another one, but this time everyone accepted.

You might remember that when I first wrote about the Colicoid War Game, I described it as "both hilarious and horrible" and concluded that it would probably be painful to do in a pug. I did feel like challenging myself today though, and fortunately for me some aspects of the flashpoint appeared to have been nerfed with this patch to make it a bit more pug-friendly. For example the gun turrets now provide a slow but steady stream of heals while you're mounted on them, which honestly made the first section completely trivial. I think you'd have to fail pretty hard to die there now. However, considering that it was never my favourite part of the instance to begin with, I didn't really mind.

The fun part came when we arrived at the forcefield obstacle course. Nobody in my party knew how to do it, but I was happy to explain. Unsurprisingly we spent a lot of time waiting for people to run back after they had been knocked off and died, but at least it got people talking, which I quite enjoyed. In the end it didn't take too long for us to figure it all out, and the fact that Bioware nerfed the respawn timer of the patrolling droids helped too, without having a negative effect on the puzzle part of the section. I was kind of amused when our tank appeared to have gone AFK while manning one of the consoles, and then came back saying that his cat had spilled his tea on his lap.

Again the whole thing ended on a very amicable note and with many "see you around"s.

Flashpoint #3: A random hardmode on my Commando

When I logged back onto Republic side, one of our tanks had just come online and was marvelling at the new group finder interface. I asked whether he wanted to team up with me to try finding a group for a max level flashpoint. He tossed me a group invite and next thing I knew I had the window popping up to tell me that a group was ready. I didn't even click anything! This would become important later. Anyway, not surprised that a tank and healer combo resulted in an instant queue, we accepted the pop-up to find ourselves zoning into... Lost Island. Gulp.

Don't get me wrong, I've successfully completed it more than once by now, but it's not really something that I'd want to pug just yet. We decided to give it a go anyway, however on the first boss we quickly found ourselves running into problems. Our gunslinger (another former Luka Sene player, yay) was doing a pretty good job, but our dps Shadow wasn't exactly performing in a stellar manner. His gear wasn't terrrible but probably not really up to Lost Island HM standards either, and more importantly he didn't really seem to be doing much, spending most of his time standing at range and running away from things instead of damaging the boss. After the third wipe the gunslinger commented that we didn't really seem to have enough dps (in the most generically inoffensive way possible) and the Shadow offered to leave so that we could get someone else. After he did so I sent him a whisper to say thank you and that it wasn't anything against him personally, and he seemed to be in quite a cheerful mood still. This was probably the most amiable parting over low dps that I've ever seen.

We queued up to get a replacement, and as I looked at the group finder window I noticed that I was listed as a provider of both damage and heals. Remember how I said that it's all turned on by default and that I never got to confirm my role when my guildie queued us up? Yeah. I unticked the damage box and hit the update button, but figured that we were probably going to get another dps anyway.

(Insert foreboding music here.)

We got another group member within seconds, a twi'lek Sage. Everyone was like: "Awesome, two ranged dps, that's going to make this fight so much easier!" And we did almost kill the boss before hitting his enrage this time... even though it was with two healers. How sad is it that we didn't even realise that we had two healers until halfway through the fight? Even though it was close, we wiped again and the Sage said that "Shíntar was queued as damage" and that she was out. And true enough, that's when I noticed the little damage icon under my portrait for the first time. I can only guess that the update to my queuing status came too late or didn't work properly. Again I felt very sheepish. I couldn't really tell whether the Sage was angry about what had happened, but her curtness before leaving certainly made me feel guilty.

The rest of us were a bit unsettled and unsure whether the system was working correctly. We reformed the party but weren't able to queue up to continue our run. My guildie and I agreed that we weren't very keen on trying Lost Island again, even if it was a letdown for the gunslinger who seemed really eager. He was right that we had almost got the boss down, but considering that more difficult fights lay ahead and that we hadn't really been looking for that level of challenge when we queued up (user fail on my tanking buddy's part this time), it was probably for the better.

After a brief break we tried again and an instant group pop-up took us to the False Emperor this time, with a dps Guardian and a Sentinel (who was another former Luka Sene player, what luck). It was kind of funny when my guildie took a shortcut early on by jumping down a ledge, I blindly followed him and realised only as I was jumping that we were leaping right over a bottomless chasm. Fortunately I managed not to fall to my death.

"How many times have you done False Emperor?"
"About five to ten times, why?"
"It's just that that jumping shortcut reeks of someone who's done this place way too many times!"

Our dpsers seemed skilled, but we were barely two minutes in when the Guardian started to say "wait" repeatedly and that he had to answer the phone for work. We said that it was no problem, we were just going to continue clearing some more trash. Unfortunately he was still on the phone by the time we arrived at the first boss, though he kept typing out more comments asking us to wait and assuring us that he was trying to make it quick.

"I just hope you're not a doctor," my guildie quipped. "'Yeah, yeah, just give him some of those drugs. I've got a boss to kill!'" The guy laughed and said that he was actually a management consultant. Which was funny because he then continued to give us unnecessary advice about what to do, no matter how many times my guildie said "I know" or was already doing what he was being told to do anyway.

Mr Management Consultant also kept saying "go" a lot, which was kind of ironic considering that he was the one who had kept telling us to "wait" only minutes before. Nooo, not my first gogogo-er already! "Stop saying that please," my guildie told him eventually. Fortunately he obliged... until we got to HK-47 and he did it again, right after giving us another redundant tactics rundown. "Oops, I'm not supposed to say that, right?" "Say it again and I'll slap you! :P" my guildie replied. (I do love him so.)

Basically, the Guardian's attitude was slightly annoying, but not overly so. It helped that my guildie was making some light fun of the situation. In terms of skill we had no problems though and breezed through the whole instance in what was a new record time for me (though it was only my third run of the place I think). The culling of trash mobs that was also mentioned in the patch notes was certainly very noticeable in this flashpoint.

So what's my verdict on the new group finder so far?

At least on the high population servers, it works, even while being limited to server only. I have no idea what dps queues were like though. What with today being patch day, there were presumably also a lot more people trying it out than there would be on a more average day. We'll see how that works out in the long run.

In terms of how it affects player behaviour, I'm not sure what to think. Struggling to get people to communicate and running into my first gogogo-er on day one already is not a good sign, but I'll try to remain hopeful. For what it's worth I had fun today. And unlike on my first day of WoW dungeon finding back in the day, nobody quit at random, threw a strop, tried to kick anyone else or ninjaed anything, which is a good sign.

In terms of technical implementation, I'm impressed by how many different functionalities Bioware managed to roll into a single tool, though I haven't tried queuing for heroics, dailies or story mode operations yet. I just wish they'd make some minor tweaks to it, such as not having all roles selected by default, asking you to confirm your role and what you're queuing for when you're in a group instead of just letting the leader throw everyone in the deep end, and maybe adding some more sounds. I think there's a really quiet noise when the pop-up to inform you that your group is ready first appears, but everything else appeared to be silent, which felt a bit odd to me. I really missed having sound cues for entering the queue or having a new party member join.

I'd love to hear about other people's experiences with the new group finder (and in fact I'll probably be off to the forums now to have a look around for more opinions).

Colicoid War Game

It's been over a week since I did this flashpoint, but I still wanted to write about it because it really left an impression on me. I would describe my first experience with it as both hilarious and horrible, and I immediately found myself wondering whether it would turn out to be the SWTOR equivalent of WoW's Oculus back in WOTLK, a.k.a. an instance that took you far enough out of your comfort zone that most people ended up hating it and avoided it like the plague.

Obviously in discussing the details of the flashpoint, this post will contain spoilers about what happens in it, but I don't think that there's any reason to worry too much about it - there isn't really any story beyond what Master Satele tells you at the start, which is this: The Colicoids have lots of weapons for sale, but instead of simply handling trade like normal people, they want any potential buyers to go overcome a deadly obstacle course in order to prove themselves. What a ridiculous idea, why do we have to bother with this again? Oh, the Empire has already agreed to participate and we can't let them win? Sigh... I wouldn't be surprised if Imperial players got told in turn that they have to go because the Republic's already doing it.

Anyway, our group entered the flash point, saw some friendly Colicoids, entered the competition area... and was presented with four gun turrets in the middle of a field.

Nooo, not a vehicle fight!

Funnily enough, it wasn't actually that... vehicular? You just had to aim the gun at the enemies and it would shoot on its own. Silly us actually sabotaged ourselves on our first attempt because we expected there to be more button pushing, so we kept clicking and mashing keys, which just caused us to get dismounted over and over again. I even managed to make my gun turret disappear completely and we had to reset the flashpoint to get a new one, because three guns simply weren't enough. Take note, this is the first flashpoint where you definitely can't supplement your group with companions, you absolutely do need four real people.

Now, even though the gun firing turned out to be extremely basic, we still wiped on this encounter three or four times. How hard can it be to shoot a bunch of slowly advancing unfriendly Colicoids? Harder than you'd think, apparently. Specifically, there are some that start shooting from range, and if you don't target them fast enough, they'll seriously mess you up.

Anyway, eventually we finally got a message that we had apparently passed this trial, with me dead and everyone else on low health but alive.

Phew, let's move on... to another four gun turrets. Let's do the same thing again, only harder! /facepalm. Fortunately the encounter didn't actually seem to be that much harder, and we managed to beat it on the first attempt - though lots of enemies were still alive by the time the completion message came up, and they ended up killing all of us except our Shadow, who had the good sense to vanish when we got overwhelmed.

Still, that was the gun turret part of the flashpoint done. Next we died in a corridor full of rock-hard droids that wiped us until we made sure to use proper crowd control.

As we emerged from that corridor, I found myself reminded of... Huttball? What? Don't worry, they didn't actually make us play that in there, but the scenery with all the ramps and fire certainly bore a certain resemblance to The Pit. Some droids were patrolling the area too, so we pulled the first one... and learned that they all have a knockback, as more or less the entire party went flying into the lava below. This would quickly become a theme, because even though we knew about it now, it was still easy to accidentally get too close while trying to avoid the fire. Fortunately the rule of people falling down being funny still applied, but it was happening at such a high frequency that it came close to actually grating on some people's nerves.

All these things were just distractions though, as the real obstacle of the area were a bunch of linked forcefields that could be disabled if someone held a button down in a certain place. The idea seemed to be something like: one person holds down the first button, which opens the forcefield to the second button, so someone else then goes to press that to open the forcefield to the third button... it wasn't really too complicated, but I couldn't honestly claim to remember the details because I found that the droids and the fire were quite distracting. We only really muddled through because someone else managed to keep a clear head and figured out what to do in what order. It didn't help that the droids appeared to be on a short respawn timer as well, so someone caught on their own between force fields could suddenly find themselves facing a droid too. Good times.

Just like with the gun turrets, once wasn't good enough, and the Colicoids made us go through the whole spiel twice. At least it was smooth sailing after that: just a light side/dark side choice that was actually quite entertaining, a couple more mobs and then the last boss.

All in all, I had a lot of fun, but I have to say that I'd definitely be weary of pugging this one for a while. Vehicle fights, rapidly respawning droids that kill with knockbacks, and force field leapfrogging take a certain amount of patience to appreciate.