Fair enough. But seeing how infamous Parking Garage missions are in the fandom, I found that focus to be rather clever, myself.
I didn’t even remember that mission, I admit. Personally not a fan.
Maybe later? I could see that one being a bit more difficult to rework.
Templars version here:
Dont read if you did not play it in TSW as it can be spoilerish
http://legacy.tswdb.com/missions/faction/london-underground-templars
I’ve played it. I just didn’t remember it.
Also the Templar version was annoying.
Some money was made from CE as far as i understand, wouldn’t it be about time to allow some of this to SWL? Advertising would bring money in the shape of quite needed fresh players. 
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I don’t know how that works, I admit. That said, I get the feeling there’s some sort of barrier for that to happen.
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I share the feeling. It just makes me sad to see the game sitting between 2 chairs really, neither in the “lets push with it” boat nor in the “woooh maintenance” one. As such i am not feeling at ease in investing significant time in it. Maybe it is just a wrong perception though idk.
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I’m personally not that pessimistic. It’s pretty clear there’s still work done.
That said, even if there isn’t, I’m probably going to play until it ends since I’m still having fun with it.
Edit: I mean, I forgot who said it, but the reason the Faction Missions are tiered was because they wanted to experiment with it. And that’s a good sign for having things in the works.
I think that the E5+ requirement is because they monetize in part by getting people to advance and level, buying cache keys and other upgradey parts, or otherwise spend lots of time in game. It isn’t likely that will change much.
But lets be honest, the rewards cater to people who stay in the game longer, and help with the incredibly long scenario grind. Story wise, they are sidestories, and offer a glimpse into another part of the secret world that the main story doesn’t particularly touch on, nor the PVP any longer. And as we know from TSW, the general population doesn’t care much about sidestories.
So if someone only cares about the main story and isn’t going to play much beyond that, they aren’t really missing anything here.
Now as some folks are bringing up cruel delight and such, I need to point out that CD is not remotely effective without having put a lot of time into scenarios to get your crit rate up high enough that is reliable, and to level the signet to the point where it makes a real difference. Red levels are approximately required for that to be true in E10, which is a huge amount of effort put into the gear.
Furthermore, I can at least self attest that my cruel delight and anima touched weapon are the entirety of my self healing for scenarios and these new missions. Were I to need more than that, I would have to change my AA from full DPS to something else, and possibly swap out DPS abilities for healing ones.
Might that make things more interesting? Sure. But what is the net effect? It now takes even longer. That doesn’t actually help in the end. There is no ability for me to speed up the fight and do more damage. I already do as much as I possibly can, so forcing me to rely on more healing/tanking means I end up spending even more time in those fights, which is even less exciting.
I don’t know how other people run these missions, but I dare say that would be the same for most people, that making CD less effective would only make it worse without a more dramatic reduction in enemy HP to counteract that issue.
This. Only E8 but I expect it will be worse at 9 and 10 but the boss mobs are more a test of not falling asleep at the wheel while chipping them down.
My thoughts about the “new” faction missions?
While extra content is always nice, I don’t understand why so many people have been asking for some of these particular missions to be brought back.
They were not very interesting or fun missions in TSW, and from what I have seen so far they have not become better in SWL.
In short, my initial reaction is a big “Meh.”
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Personally I’m not a big “farmer” in the game and I take my time to play. Agents missions are for me a reward when you reached an elite level. The most interesting in this missions is an other side of the secret world and the increase rank faction.
I don’t aim the E10 level but make an agent mission for each elite level can deprive some people to an another part of SWL. Maybe a max elite level can be reach and you can acess at all missions but you need to finish each missions to unlock the others and, when you want increase your Elite level, you can retry missions at a level more harder. But force people to reach a certain elite level and make elite donjons, raids, scenario might encourage people who won’t play end game content, discover it and enjoy it, while initially, they thought the opposite
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This would be a hilarious problem with open world content. E10 Bob is running around lighting cultists on fire for his dailies or because thats how he gets his jollies doing his quests at E10. Little Level 42 Timmy walks into the area and gets SLAUGHTERED by monsters why above his weight class.
If you start separating people by E-level version of the map, we’ll go back to the single player game memes, because its rare enough as it is to see other players on maps.
No. Scenarios will always take a fixed amount of time. I could run an E1 Scenario at E10 power and aside from a minor difference in boss fight duration, the waves 1 and 2 will still take the exact same time.
Just shy of 300. Cleared all the story content in the game through SA without issue.
They made sense in TSW. They weren’t tacked on like this.
Pre-launch of TSW there was a push for faction pride, etc., launch faction pride = Fusang and these missions.
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It came up exactly once, and was, as I recall, qualified at the time as an old number. Hasn’t stopped people from banging on about it for a year.
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No, people have not in fact been “banging in about it for a year”, given it came up with the SA release:
https://forums.funcom.com/t/any-indication-we-will-have-more-group-endgame-content/1406/40
To be fair, that discussion did point in the direction of potentially more endgame content.
To also be fair, I’d wager practically everyone who wanted more endgame would have preferred manufactories to seeing what absolutely used to be “all players” solo content re-geared as highly gated elite solo content. These were the first and second of three faction missions in TSW, where VMC was a pre-Kaidan mission, too.
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Ah, memory was faulty then–I was remembering it as something said in Discord early on, and I hadn’t been in there for six months.
That quote’s still pretty clear that the numbers are old. And still pretty clear that Funcom plans to release a variety of things, not 99% story content and 1% anything-past-100 IP.
I don’t have it handy, but I clearly recall Tilty saying that when the faction missions came back they ‘will be harrrrrd’. So it’s not like this should be a surprise to someone who keeps dev quotes on hand.
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That 1% quote is very obviously qualified with this was the case when complaints about endgame repetition started trickling in, which makes sense that complaints about content would begin when people were beginning to run that content. I’m sure quite a few of us took our time through the story/levelling up first because between running most everything through multiple times during the beta, and having lost all that progress from TSW, motivation was probably pretty low for some of these players (mine certainly was)
There are players who actually only enjoy (or only have time for) the story-more and narrative side of the game. I don’t think that it is too odd to ask to put a story focused version of those missions to place in the continuity of the current story progression.
Though, you may be right and they are probably building the game as if their whole playerbase started at release and no new players are coming, so they can assume that anybody is 500+ by now because we “just have to play somewhat regularly”.
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“Hard” is not the same as “insanely IP gated”. I’m pretty sure everyone can name one or two missions they felt were “hard” when they first came across them (vaguely) “at level”, and odds are some would even cite missions as early as Kingsmouth.
More importantly, how exactly is VCM hard? it isn’t. Absolutely not. What it is is an IP-gated, tediously boring drag with insane HP sponges.
I honestly don’t see how VCM in its current form serves any purpose. Purely story-focused players might never actually see it, while, and this is the real kicker, equal-tier scenarios are in every way (most notably time-reward-ratio and variety) the superior option for grinding glyph distillates. And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t even like them.
Even disregarding whether VCM should even be IP gated content and whether it makes sense in it’s new position in the timeline (post-Kaidan instead of pre-Venice), the implementation in SWL is simply bad.
The same would be true of Into Darkness if it were a “kill everything” Action mission rather than a “kill almost nothing” Sabotage mission. Lucky it isn’t, so it actually has some actual replay value because it’s not 2-3 times as long as a same-tier scenario.
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