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Thread: Tier 3 Imperial mission needs Dev Attention
Calrist wrote:
Hey Everyone,
I'd like to start off that I'm not really one to ever post on the boards, nor am I one that complains a lot. I take pretty much everything in this game as is because I am a huge star wars fan, and also because I know how hard the designers have to work to try and make everyone happy, because I am a video game designer as well and I know what a rough job it can be.
The reason I felt the need to write a post about the tier 3 1st Imperial mission is because it is so grossly unbalanced as to be not only unfair and frustrating, but so that it made me consider giving up the game for a couple of months, just so that they could balance them. I haven’t beaten the mission yet but I spent a total of 5 hours trying to defeat them both solo and with group members and have so far managed to fail more times than I would like to count. Now I don’t want this to be a flame thread or anything, I am just trying to point this out to the Dev's in hopes that they will do something about it.
First off, I will talk about how the mission is structured, based on my knowledge, and then about how far I got into the mission, and then break down each individual part.
As far as I know, this is a 5-7 part mission, which is absurd in and of itself. If you are going to give a player a mission, especially one that is as challenging as this, then it should be broken up into parts instead of taking 6 things and clumping them together.
The difficulty of this compared to the tier 2 missions is not even close to being on a smooth scale, so the ramping is off the charts in terms of difficulty. For everyone who doesn’t know game lingo, the ramping of a game or series of missions should be a smooth upward scale, with the next step being a little bit more difficult than the one before it. This is to prevent frustration and keep the game enjoyable to everyone. I have only managed to get to the part of the mission where you are required to inspect a ship, and to get to that part I was barely alive.
The first part of the mission, and the only part as I was led to believe because of what the trainer said, is an escort mission. This is a difficult mission to begin with, especially if you are stuck with only the TIE/In because it seems everything else on tier 3 is faster than your ship in most cases. This part of the mission consists of escorting a transport through the Endor space and fighting off waves of starfighters that are trying to get the transport back. The first problem with this mission is that you have to somehow keep an eye on where the transport is, in addition to fighting off wave after waves of enemies. This problem was solved in earlier missions because what you were supposed to either escort or destroy was marked with a waypoint so you could always orient yourself to it and keep an eye on how far away it was from you. There is no option to tag a ship so you can keep an eye on it, so as a result I have failed the mission because I got too far away from it.
The he starfighters come at you in 6 waves of 5, and despite the fact that you somehow have to fight them off, one at a time, there are many cases where if you are not fast enough, another wave approaches, leaving you to deal with 10 fighters at once, an almost obscene amount of ships to take on at once. The ships that come at you are an assortment of Tier 3 ships, limited to Y-wings, X-wings, and Z-95 Headhunters.
Once you have successfully destroyed all of the ships. Or at least held them off long enough for the transport to escape, the rest of the fighters disappear, jumping off into hyperspace as well, and leaving you with a mission complete message. Shortly after that you get another system message saying that there is a mission in progress, and that you have to recapture a freighter…?
This seems odd since you just watched the freighter that was your responsibility jump into hyperspace. Heading over, you find that it is a freighter and it has an excort of a B-wing and 4 A-wings. This is a pain because A-wings are incredibly hard to hit unless you are in close range, and you can’t stay in close range for long because of their speed. The biggest problem with this is the difference in ships, you are suddenly thrown at a much higher class of ships, that have the advantage of both speed (A-wing) and firepower (B-wing) on you. This is difficult enough to get past, but once you have gotten the freighter back in Imperial hands, you are presented with 3 waves of 5 A-wings and B-wings. This is a near impossible task to undertake solo, and is difficult enough with a group of people.
We managed to hold the A-wings at bay until the ship jumped out of the system to safety. Upon jumping, we believed our troubles were over because we thought the A-wings would jump as well, like what happened in the last part of the mission. We were wrong and suffered dearly for thinking that way as 12 A-wings suddenly had nothing else to focus on expect for my party and I. This is a major flaw because the enemies jumped away in the first part of the mission, it makes sense that they should jump at this part too.
After a frantic jump to Area 435 we were presented with another system message, saying that we had to inspect a cargo ship, which certainly sounded easy enough. As we made our way towards the ship, we see that we will pass the space station, so we believe that we will be able to stop and get repairs. We were wrong because before we got to the space station, which was still approximately 3000 meters from the mission objective, we were ambushed by a variety of X-wings, B-wings, and A-wings, all of whom were intent on destroying use, which they achieved quite nicely, because I never even got to see that ship that my group was supposed to inspect.
After the first 2 or 3 times I failed the mission I decided to gain enough experience to gain access to the TIE Interceptor, which has quad lasers and the ability to hold a much faster engine. After gaining that much experience, I went back to Yavin 4 in an attempt to get trained, only to be told to do the mission again, without the option of being trained in the superior equipment that I felt I needed for the mission. This seems flawed because not only can I not fly a TIE Interceptor now, but I am also capped experience wise, so all the other fights I get into mean absolutely nothing aside from whatever loot I might get.
I also decided that I would get a concussion missile launcher, and the missiles to equip on my TIE/In, in hopes that it would make the mission easier to handle, only to find that every time I managed to lock onto an enemy and fire a missile, they deployed Chaff and the missile did no good whatsoever. This makes the investment I made into the launchers and the missiles worthless, and I cannot even begin to justify how this should change. There is a definite balance issue when 10 out of 10 missiles are ineffective on enemies, and have only given me cause to think about saving money by not buying more ammunition.
With all of that having been said, I would like to reiterate that I am not blaming the designers for how hard the first mission is, nor will I stop trying, because I have seen that many people have managed to complete the missions. This is only a post in that I hope the dev’s will see a well thought out description of a problem, and attempt to correct it. I would like to say that so far I am thoroughly impressed by JTL and I hope SOE keeps up the good work, and that the designers get the credit that they are due, because designing a game is a hard job. If you have any comments please feel free to post them and hopefully we can help others get a more balanced Tier 3 mission.
OK, now I can read it. 
In my opinion the tier 3 missionsare ok difficulty wise as long as you have a couple of wingmen, if not then you are effectively gated, which can be very frustrating. I've said before I think what we need is a way for the difficulty to be scaled depending on how many there are in a group, so if you are solo it is slightly easier.
Also I think you should have the option of pausing your progress somehow, maybe after a couple of sections or whatever, some of the tier 3 missions can take over an hour, which is pretty annoying if you suddenly have to go afk or even logout.
I'd like to start off that I'm not really one to ever post on the boards, nor am I one that complains a lot. I take pretty much everything in this game as is because I am a huge star wars fan, and also because I know how hard the designers have to work to try and make everyone happy, because I am a video game designer as well and I know what a rough job it can be.
The reason I felt the need to write a post about the tier 3 1st Imperial mission is because it is so grossly unbalanced as to be not only unfair and frustrating, but so that it made me consider giving up the game for a couple of months, just so that they could balance them. I haven’t beaten the mission yet but I spent a total of 5 hours trying to defeat them both solo and with group members and have so far managed to fail more times than I would like to count. Now I don’t want this to be a flame thread or anything, I am just trying to point this out to the Dev's in hopes that they will do something about it.
First off, I will talk about how the mission is structured, based on my knowledge, and then about how far I got into the mission, and then break down each individual part.
As far as I know, this is a 5-7 part mission, which is absurd in and of itself. If you are going to give a player a mission, especially one that is as challenging as this, then it should be broken up into parts instead of taking 6 things and clumping them together.
The difficulty of this compared to the tier 2 missions is not even close to being on a smooth scale, so the ramping is off the charts in terms of difficulty. For everyone who doesn’t know game lingo, the ramping of a game or series of missions should be a smooth upward scale, with the next step being a little bit more difficult than the one before it. This is to prevent frustration and keep the game enjoyable to everyone. I have only managed to get to the part of the mission where you are required to inspect a ship, and to get to that part I was barely alive.
The first part of the mission, and the only part as I was led to believe because of what the trainer said, is an escort mission. This is a difficult mission to begin with, especially if you are stuck with only the TIE/In because it seems everything else on tier 3 is faster than your ship in most cases. This part of the mission consists of escorting a transport through the Endor space and fighting off waves of starfighters that are trying to get the transport back. The first problem with this mission is that you have to somehow keep an eye on where the transport is, in addition to fighting off wave after waves of enemies. This problem was solved in earlier missions because what you were supposed to either escort or destroy was marked with a waypoint so you could always orient yourself to it and keep an eye on how far away it was from you. There is no option to tag a ship so you can keep an eye on it, so as a result I have failed the mission because I got too far away from it.
The he starfighters come at you in 6 waves of 5, and despite the fact that you somehow have to fight them off, one at a time, there are many cases where if you are not fast enough, another wave approaches, leaving you to deal with 10 fighters at once, an almost obscene amount of ships to take on at once. The ships that come at you are an assortment of Tier 3 ships, limited to Y-wings, X-wings, and Z-95 Headhunters.
Once you have successfully destroyed all of the ships. Or at least held them off long enough for the transport to escape, the rest of the fighters disappear, jumping off into hyperspace as well, and leaving you with a mission complete message. Shortly after that you get another system message saying that there is a mission in progress, and that you have to recapture a freighter…?
This seems odd since you just watched the freighter that was your responsibility jump into hyperspace. Heading over, you find that it is a freighter and it has an excort of a B-wing and 4 A-wings. This is a pain because A-wings are incredibly hard to hit unless you are in close range, and you can’t stay in close range for long because of their speed. The biggest problem with this is the difference in ships, you are suddenly thrown at a much higher class of ships, that have the advantage of both speed (A-wing) and firepower (B-wing) on you. This is difficult enough to get past, but once you have gotten the freighter back in Imperial hands, you are presented with 3 waves of 5 A-wings and B-wings. This is a near impossible task to undertake solo, and is difficult enough with a group of people.
We managed to hold the A-wings at bay until the ship jumped out of the system to safety. Upon jumping, we believed our troubles were over because we thought the A-wings would jump as well, like what happened in the last part of the mission. We were wrong and suffered dearly for thinking that way as 12 A-wings suddenly had nothing else to focus on expect for my party and I. This is a major flaw because the enemies jumped away in the first part of the mission, it makes sense that they should jump at this part too.
After a frantic jump to Area 435 we were presented with another system message, saying that we had to inspect a cargo ship, which certainly sounded easy enough. As we made our way towards the ship, we see that we will pass the space station, so we believe that we will be able to stop and get repairs. We were wrong because before we got to the space station, which was still approximately 3000 meters from the mission objective, we were ambushed by a variety of X-wings, B-wings, and A-wings, all of whom were intent on destroying use, which they achieved quite nicely, because I never even got to see that ship that my group was supposed to inspect.
After the first 2 or 3 times I failed the mission I decided to gain enough experience to gain access to the TIE Interceptor, which has quad lasers and the ability to hold a much faster engine. After gaining that much experience, I went back to Yavin 4 in an attempt to get trained, only to be told to do the mission again, without the option of being trained in the superior equipment that I felt I needed for the mission. This seems flawed because not only can I not fly a TIE Interceptor now, but I am also capped experience wise, so all the other fights I get into mean absolutely nothing aside from whatever loot I might get.
I also decided that I would get a concussion missile launcher, and the missiles to equip on my TIE/In, in hopes that it would make the mission easier to handle, only to find that every time I managed to lock onto an enemy and fire a missile, they deployed Chaff and the missile did no good whatsoever. This makes the investment I made into the launchers and the missiles worthless, and I cannot even begin to justify how this should change. There is a definite balance issue when 10 out of 10 missiles are ineffective on enemies, and have only given me cause to think about saving money by not buying more ammunition.
With all of that having been said, I would like to reiterate that I am not blaming the designers for how hard the first mission is, nor will I stop trying, because I have seen that many people have managed to complete the missions. This is only a post in that I hope the dev’s will see a well thought out description of a problem, and attempt to correct it. I would like to say that so far I am thoroughly impressed by JTL and I hope SOE keeps up the good work, and that the designers get the credit that they are due, because designing a game is a hard job. If you have any comments please feel free to post them and hopefully we can help others get a more balanced Tier 3 mission.
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