Player feedback on the massive number of changes to the base game in Star Wars: The Old Republic, as well as all the new content in the Legacy of the Sith expansion has gotten a few responses recently. First, Project Director Keith Kanneg published a response to the community and specifically addressed fixes in the works, along with new content. Now, Design Director Chris Schmidt is following up on Kanneg’s post to give more context to what is coming in the 7.0.1 update.
Schmidt’s overall response is intended to give more context to how they arrived at some of the changes that are coming. Like Kanneg, he also reiterates the importance of testing on the PTS.
“For 7.0, we had a vision for how players could experience repeatable content, and how the game would incentivize and reward content around the galaxy, especially to highlight our new shared tagging feature that we’ve been very excited about, “ he says, before emphasizing the team’s intention to let players group up more easily for the same content, even if they had different goals in mind for completing them. What happened with this “Featured Content vision” was that It just wasn't performing like they had hoped and instead was causing friction for players.
Changes coming in 7.0.1 include scrapping the intent to open all Veteran Flashpoints at level 15, and instead keeping their existing level restrictions. All Flashpoints will be available each week instead of rotating in and out. Additionally, all Weekly Missions for dailies and heroics will be made available all the time.
To work with this, rewards are getting some more changes, to reduce materials gained through deconstruction but increasing the materials rewarded by completing the weekly Group Finder missions.
Other changes will come across future updates to reduce discrepancies between the difficulty, length, and time to completion in all Flashpoints. The beginning of these changes is now on the PTS.
Schmidt’s entire post is worth a read, with all of the available details on the changes in 7.0.1 and beyond, including what’s on the PTS now, as we look towards efforts to improve SWTOR.
