Flashpoint thoughts

As a celebratory end to her flashpoint review series, Shintar of Going Commando interviewed Michael Backus of Bioware, responsible for SWTOR's flashpoints. First off, I think it's really awesome that she did this, and that Bioware took the time to answer. Flashpoints have not gotten much attention lately - people tend to talk more about class or expansion stories and raids - but they're a beloved part of the game to me and an important part of the 'vanilla experience'. The interview fuelled passionate discussions about flashpoints, both on Shintar's blog and on Reddit. I hope that Bioware is following this valuable feedback closely. The post gives a rare insight into the current state and direction of flashpoints and prompted me to write down the following thoughts.

Star Wars: the Old Republic has traditionally used flashpoint to flesh out story developments.

It will continue to do so in the future, but probably without cut scenes and player choices

The future: low difficulty and few cutscenes

It looks like easy and non-narrative flashpoints in the style of the Star Fortresses are the direction we're heading towards. I am not surprised to hear the first, because it fits the general trend of tuning down the difficulty that we've seen the past couple of years in the game (faster to level up, heroics effectively made soloable, bolster in storymode operations etc). It is interesting to hear this officially confirmed, though. For casual and solo players, this is great news. For players that like to get more skillful at the game by challenging themselves, it is not. The latter group was elaborately reminiscing Lost Island's hard mode difficulty on Reddit.

Although I mourn the loss of narrative in upcoming flashpoints - I'm a sucker for immersion, story and choices - Backus explains that this is to address the issue of "space barring" through cut scenes. As much as I'd want to, I don't see another way of handling this problem either. I'm not a great fan of Star Fortress style flashpoints, though. I don't know, they somehow feel generic.

I'm always excited to find out what my fellow players choose and who wins the roll

Incentives to play

The truth of the matter is that there are not many incentives to play flashpoints. At the moment a lot of people (me among them) are doing them for the Dark vs Light event. After that is over, though, the incentives are mostly the storytelling (a one-time incentive, when you haven't seen it yet) and conquest objectives. What about gear, you say? People don't generally use flashpoints to get gear these days, because storymode operations don't require gear. (Shintar asked about this but got a very inconsistent answer, saying that flashpoints are intended as a stepping stone into operations. While in fact, right now, they are not, partly due to not dropping good gear.) When my guild gets new members, we take them through a storymode operation, give them all the loot, then head straight to hardmode. I don't mind this, as the gear treadmill is what attracts me the least to any MMO. However, it is a bit odd that flashpoints don't drop anything useful. Even the flashpoint specific gear as been removed from the loot tables. I used to run flashpoints just to get those for cosmetic reasons. Which brings me to the following.

Some cool Star Fortress decorations. I just wished the flashpoints themselves wouldn't feel so generic.

Decoration drops

There's one thing I've been missing in the interview and that's decoration drops. At one point in time, someone over at Bioware had the brilliant idea of flashpoints dropping really cool decorations. I'm not being sarcastic here, I loved this. I used to drag my guildies into flashpoints all the time to get these decorations (perhaps they are less sad about this change, hehe). Seriously, though, what happened to decoration drops? They have simply stopped dropping. For me, they were a major incentive to run flashpoints and I'm puzzled by why they are gone. The best I can think of is that it simply was an unintentional side effect of an implemented change, because, as far as I'm aware, there are no patch notes covering this, nor was it declared as a known bug. One could also think that it is a deliberate change to make the cartel market decorations more exclusive. I can only hope that Bioware realizes that people will continue playing and paying for their game when they are having fun doing their excellent content, content that gets repeatedly played only when there are incentives to do so. People don't login exclusively to decorate their stronghold; even I don't (gasp).

Flashpoints as a way to improve your skill at the game

This brings me to another incentive to play flashpoints: as a springboard to operations. In flashpoints you get to test out your role in a micro-environment. Because there are just four players, each individual has a relatively higher amount of influence on the outcome compared to an 8- or even 16-man operation. For instance, if your healer is doing a lousy job, you'll definitely notice this in a hardmode flashpoint, while it could be compensated for by the second healer in an operation.

Right now, scalable, low level flashpoints are offered on "solo" and "tactical" (a euphemism for "easymode") difficulty. This effectively means that people only get to practice their class and role at level cap when they do hardmode, unless they're playing with inexperienced players and get challenged by needing to overcompensate for other players. There's no learning curve if you're playing with people who know what they're doing. Let me elucidate this with an example.

Yesterday, I was tanking some flashpoints with some friends on our Dark vs Light characters. One of them was new to healing and played a sage. She had not read through the skill tree beforehand and was just pressing buttons at random, but we didn't know this. As we were all executing game mechanics correctly (threat on the tank, killing adds first, moving out of circles, interrupting dangerous ability casts - the usual palette of any skilled MMO player), we barely took any damage at all. Indeed, our healer was complaining that she didn't have to do anything. 

It was only until the group finder gave us Maelstrom Prison that we found out she had no clue what to do. In this flashpoint, the special skills of bosses seem to be bugged: their damage does not correctly scale down and is truly exorbitant. We wiped hard on the second boss because our healer all of a sudden had to, well, actually heal. Because this happened, we helped her with how to play the class and we made the rest of the flashpoint in one go. If it hadn't happened, she still wouldn't have a clue.

What I'm trying to say is that players need to be challenged in order to improve. Tactical flashpoints are fine with pugs, but I'd love the option to do hardmodes with my friends on low level characters. It would make me actually enjoy them. Right now, doing flashpoints feels more like a grind for the event. It would probably make things more interesting if I would pug instead of play with my friends. But then again, isn't playing with friends what MMOs are supposed to be about?

Conclusions

Flashpoints are a cornerstone of Star Wars: the Old Republic and provide cool stories to play through together with others, as well as a potential sandbox to test your class out in a multiplayer environment. However, they don't reach their full potential in offering diverting gameplay due to a lack of incentives (availability of higher difficulty settings, rewards in the form of quality equipment, decorations and cosmetic gear) to be played.