[2022] 7.0.1 Rotation Removal

Hi folks,

I wanted to follow up on Keith’s post here with a little more context, background, and most importantly some changes you will see in the 7.0.1 release.

First, a little peek behind the scenes in the world of Game Design. When designing changes for a game as large and complex as Star Wars: The Old Republic, there are many things that need to be taken into account. Between the interplay of lots of different systems and features in the game, and understanding how any change to one can affect the experience of all the rest, it’s sometimes difficult to fully simulate on paper how the sum of all the parts fit together into a greater, cohesive whole.

So we prototype, test, iterate, and test some more. Some of these may be public test opportunities of a particular piece of the puzzle we’re curious about on the PTS, but internally the test and iteration cycle repeats as often as possible. To understand the mindset of a variety of players, we gather feedback from as many places as possible to measure against the goals of the updates, in order to see if that cohesive whole we’re going for is lining up.

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.

One major aspect of this was ensuring that some of our various systems which reward players for being active in the game, such as Conquests, Galactic Seasons, and Weekly Missions, have a bit of interplay between them to ensure if players wanted to target a particular sort of reward (like gear, cosmetic, or guild ship upgrades), there would be other players completing the same content in any given week, regardless of what rewards they were after.

This brings us to our Featured Content vision. We intended to reward featured content over non-featured content in a more substantial way for a few reasons:

• To make groups easier to form for similar content, even when reward goals differ
• To make it easier to get help from other players via shared tagging in heroics and dailies
• To make Operations more accessible to players who've never tapped into Story Mode before, by adding more options each week in Group Finder.

Many aspects of a design like this are extremely difficult to test at scale outside of a live game environment which houses many players piling into the game, all with different ways that they play, and all with different backgrounds and interests. Using our Public Test Server enables us to gather some early feedback, since it’s the closest thing we have to a live game environment, but it’s not a perfect substitute for the live game when it comes to how systems interact at scale and the data that provides.

So this brings us back to our Featured Content vision. The team worked hard to deliver on that vision, but when we saw how it was performing at scale (in a live environment), and especially taking your feedback into account, we decided to work on some changes that we believe will address many of the friction points in that vision.

• In 7.0.1, we will not be making all Veteran Flashpoints available at level 15. Instead, we will retain each Flashpoint’s existing level restrictions, and make all Flashpoints available in Group Finder every week.
  • We will also adjust some rewards, reducing slightly the number of materials gained by deconstructing gear earned by running any individual Flashpoint, and boosting materials rewarded in the repeatable weekly Group Finder Missions.
  • We are also committed to addressing some long overdue discrepancies in difficulty, length, and time to complete among all of our Flashpoints. That work will not be in 7.0.1, but will be patched into the game over time as we assess each flashpoint individually.
    • The first step in this direction can be seen on the latest PTS build that went live today:
      • Enemy health in the Spirit of Vengeance Solo-Story Mode has been reduced across the board
      • Enemy damage and health have been reduced by 20% in Veteran and Master Modes of Traitor Among the Chiss, Crisis on Umbara, and The Nathema Conspiracy
      • Enemy damage and health have been reduced for the Jakir and Selden, and Tau/Malgus encounters in Objective Meridian in Master Mode. Additional adjustments will come in a later patch for other difficulties.
• In 7.0.1, we will make all Weekly Missions for dailies and heroics available all the time.
  • To compensate for the addition of all the extra weeklies, they will be repeatable 2 times per week as opposed to 3 as they are currently.

Legacy Operations and the new weekly Operation Missions will remain in rotation each week, as well as story modes in Group Finder, primarily due to how they tie into specific Conquest objectives in order to make finding a larger group easier.

Once R-4 Anomaly launches, its Weekly Mission will be available every week, to highlight the new content and gear that comes with it. We’re excited about this one, and encourage everyone to take a look and try out the bosses on the PTS!

Thanks for your time, care, and passion. We’re excited to get these changes to you and look forward to hearing what you think!

-Chris