A Poem for Version 5.0
{ Parody of For the First Time In Forever from Disney's Frozen }
For best effect, imagine the italicized text to be spoken by someone with an Australian accent.
It's time for the end of version 4
We won't do featured hard-modes anymore
They say these new "Uprisings" will be great!
This year I've helped my group stand tall
wrote up a guide you may recall
Finally we've reached the download date
But they've axed the old way of gearing
It'll be totally strange
What on Earth's the reason for this change?
'Cause now it's forced grinding forever
And no new end-game in sight
Try to form ops groups, however
it's to farm the mobs all night
I know that just to say it ain't classy
But I'm really getting boned
'Cause if it's forced grinding forever
I'll just be alone
[Spoken:] In New York I met everyone!
Natasha and Darin: SO FUN!
Tonight I gave my raid group a call
no way could I convince them all
and one just disappeared without a trace
Oh! A PUG is a painful, long affair
and finally I resort to prayer
and get a half-way decent group in place
But then we just get these schematics,
which is totally bizarre
Nothing like the game I've played so far
With this forced grinding forever
It's just tragic, there's no fun
Like casinos, pull a lever
And then your Jedi wins a gun
And although I need helmet and chest piece
I've won three sets of pants
But with the forced grinding forever
It's just a random chance
Your feedback's in, January
we'll be making a change to CXP
We feel ... that we'll ... tweak it just so
that you can choose the piece you want, although...
Ranking up is still the way
But that'll take 'till May
The CXP will stay
It's agony this way
It's still tied to tokens from the crates!
The crates?!?
Still it's forced grinding forever
I know it's spin, but hear my plea
You're ruining this game I love
It's exciting, you all just wait and see
I can't invite the Free-to-play's
But we'll...
'cause they all got the shove
It's real, just deal. Hey wait, don't go!
Before it all ends in sorrow,
I just really have to say:
If you don't get your act together
if it's forced grinding forever
No one's going to stay! (No!)
Historical Note:
This was originally written and posted in late 2016 (It even got a lot of upvotes on Reddit!) shortly after the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic's version 5.0.
You see, this release had a few new "features" that were a total slap in the face to anyone doing operations (like myself and most of my friends):
1) They announced that they would not be making any new operations for the game, continuing the drought from Version 4 when all the new content was single-player storylines and had no new multiplayer content at all. (Previously, in versions 2 and 3, they had added at least one and typically two new ones for the major game version upgrade).
2) Players who didn't subscribe to the game (the "Free-to-play" players) were no longer permitted to do operations AT ALL. Previously, they had been limited and could pay to unlock the ability with an item called an "Operations Pass" that allowed them limited-time access. In 5.0 those items were completely removed from the game.
Thanks to this, the pool of available people who could do operations instantly shrunk to a fraction of what it had been before.
But worst of all . . .
3) They changed the system for acquiring gear to a 100% random loot box scheme, rather than the straight-forward Beat-a-boss-Get-a-gear-piece system it had always been up until then. To make matters worse, the gear that could be awarded from those random "Command Crates" was deliberately prevented from being the best available until you'd earned enough "Command Experience Points" (CXP). In order to get crates that would drop the best gear, players had to earn at least 200 such crates from doing general content in the game. For the vast majority of players, this would take several months, and it was obvious enough that this system was deliberately rigged to prevent players from getting back to best-in-slot gear quickly.
This meant that, quite literally, one day we had the best gear and were working on clearing an operation, and the next day we were no longer geared up enough and could not possibly be ready to go back into that same operation for a couple of months.
The backlash from this was so huge that in the very next content update (version 5.1), they walked back the biggest two of these changes, announcing that they would be working on and releasing a new operation named Gods from the Machine, and returning gear token drops to the operations bosses.
However, EA still couldn't completely give up on their FIFA-style random loot box model, so turning in those tokens (the process where you convert a generic item into one usable by your specific character) still required you to spend a secondary currency that was awarded . . . you guessed it . . . from the random Command Crates. This made the gear token useless to you until you'd separately acquired enough crates.
To this day though (well into Version 7 as I write this), Free-to-Play players--even former subscribers--still can't do operations at all.
The line about "it's to farm the mobs all night" is a reference to a new practice that had developed among players to earn Command XP by going into the Karagga's Palace operation and, rather than fighting the first boss, players would instead repeatedly kill the many enemies that are present in the large outdoor area where you first enter the op. People discovered that this was a very time-efficient way to earn CXP, and so . . . of course . . . the devs patched the game so that none of the enemies in KP prior to the first boss awarded any CXP at all. Like I said above, the system was deliberately rigged to prevent players from gearing up quickly.
Also, the line about "New York" was a reference to the Cantina event that the developers had held in 2016 during the New York Comic Con. I had attended that event and had the pleasure of meeting some of the more well-known folks at BioWare like Charles Boyd and Ben Irving (I missed meeting Eric Musco, who was hanging out in a different area of the venue), and got to spend most of the evening with Apostrophe, one of my online friends with whom I'd played quite a bit but met in-person for the first time. I even made a little button that I wore which said "Hi! I'm Dianiss" since I was at that point a little bit Internet-famous (by which I mean not at all except in very specific circumstances) due to the popularity of my Sage Healer guide on Dulfy.net.
I was also honored to meet and talk to voice actors Darin DePaul (the voice of Emperor Valkorian) and Natasha Loring (the voice of Vaylin). Both of them were delightful to speak to and were gracious enough to record custom sound bites for us in the voice of their respective characters.
Incidentally, when the developers announced that there would be no new operations in version 5.0, they got booed . . . loudly.
They didn't mention the new Command Crate system AT ALL (and is it any wonder?!?).
And . . . yeah, one of the guys on my raid team at the time really did just disappear without a trace.