Where is the fun in SWTOR?
Electronic Arts.
Where's the fun in Star Wars The Old Republic?
With Knights of the Fallen Empire, you have removed features from the game that make it even less fun than it already was.
The Heroic Missions were a nice little thing to do when on planets: good for when you've reached the end of a Class Chapter and like to take it slow and easy. They were perfect for raking up Social Points when Grouped together, and on top of decent rewards they gave out, it also had a nice story-driven aspect to them...
However, with the Post-KOTFE version of Heroics, you have retooled them to be absolutely worthless in the long-haul and grand scheme of things. Where it once took 24 hours to reset, you changed it to an ENTIRE WEEK! Where you once got Modifiable unique armor and gear, we now get these damn Lockboxes containing nothing but Blue Gear! The worst is how they've been upended, you've made them "Auto-Complete" at the end when you do things.
No longer do players gain the satisfactory Heroic Mission Epilogue sequence, ruining the story-driven aspect of the gameplay, you could have at least given players the option to have Heroic Missions Auto-Complete function with an on/off button like you did with Exploration Missions. And when the best gear that you dish out in a Heroic Mission is a Blue (which is worth more than a Green but worth less than an Orange and Purple), you got some major issues.
Playing a character on a planet was a good way to really help one experience what can be done in the game, usually in the form of taking down monsters, completing story or Heroic Missions that offer good stuff, and having fun in a game. It's a good way for players to look-back on themselves when they return to a lower-level planet and see other new players go through what you yourself had just experienced a long time ago. More often than not, players also go back to lower-level planets to get a particular weapon or piece of armor that they heard about that drops off of a particular creature or mob on the planet, and dedicate a great amount of time to getting either for themselves, for an Alt, or for a dear friend or family member that also plays the game and can use that particular Blaster Pistol or Heavy Armor you just happened to find, its good for building character and making friends in a game. I remember talking in Gen Chat on Tatooine about a year back with several players, they were wanting some help in taking down a mob for a piece of gear and needed another 35 to help them out, I offered to help them and managed to help them take the mob down several times to get the item, all the while we were talking back-and-forth and eventually they offered me to go and join their Guild. To this day, I am still a member of that Guild.
However, with Level Shifting, things have changed... slightly terrible and not that much better. While I can understand why you were doing this, I just want you to know that such a feature didn't need to be on permanently, especially when you consider that every single trash and strong mob in the game at the time shared the same Respawn timer of 5 minutes! Which I have calculated you have reduced to somewhere between 2-4 minutes: making the "Gold-Farming" problem in the game much more of an actual issue! Also thanks to your efforts, all of that classic unique gear no longer drops off of the named mobs anymore, all that we seem to get is gear that is meant for our actual level in the game, instead of the particular gear that once dropped off of our favorite mob back in the day. If you wanted to make a Level Shift feature to the game, that's fine; just give players that do it a choice of being able to turn it off.
Seriously, I've started an Imperial Agent about a week ago, and she got to level 30... WITHOUT EVEN FINISHING HER STORY ON DROMUND KAAS!
Classic Flashpoints like Heroic Missions were great, they encouraged players to work together to face off against major threats facing the galaxy, and in return players got their hands on good-quality Armor and Weapons that for the most part were named and designed to be unique to that Flashpoint, giving players a chance to indulge and - just like I mentioned earlier with planet drops - decorate their characters to stand out from others, even dedicate themselves to running through the lower-level Flashpoints Solo just for the chance to get a particular piece of equipment from the Flashpoint (after all there is no need to argue with players over gear if you can easily crush the opposition inside of it by yourself). These items that players equip themselves with tend to give the characters a personal ID for whenever someone logs on to play as them, and just makes us like to play as that character even more. I have a Mercenary Bounty Hunter, and she carries around a pair of Hammer Station Precision Holdout Blaster Pistols, which are beautifully-rendered and designed in this game that they actually are the most elegant-looking Blaster Pistols I've ever seen here, and because of that I constantly purchase modification upgrades to keep them up to speed with my level, while I can appreciate the "Star Wars" flair of other weapons, you can't change someones personal taste.
However, after Knights of the Fallen Empire: the Flashpoint gaming experience is gone from Classic Flashpoints altogether, outside of The Esseles and The Black Talon where the mobs are all level 10, every single mob in the other Classic Flashpoints are all shifted to be Level 65: I can't even walk around the first corridor of Hammer Station BY MYSELF ANYMORE! And even when you're with a group, it's just as bad and boring than when you're on your own: you have removed all of what made running through Flashpoints even worth it: you got rid of our gear drops, replacing the cool-looking Unique Oranges with Carbon-stamped Boring Blues and Purples with fixed stats attached to them. This is a big no-no, as it just makes Classic Flashpoints not even worth playing in. One of my fellow Guild Members had a nice Credit Farm inside of the Flashpoint Kaon Under Siege, he would go in there, kill all of the mobs and sell all of the loot for more credits.
And what is up with putting these new Level 10 Players in Flashpoints that are mainly designed for Level 50s? Even with a Level Shift, there's still the matter of special class abilities, character and weapon statistics, and even player knowledge to take into account when tossing them into something as massive as The Battle of Ilum Flashpoint. The old system back then where a level 20-30 player could group for the Athiss and Mandalorian Rage Flashpoints made sense because the player was properly geared and had the statistics for handling that level of content! Your Level Shift for Flashpoints; is like telling a baby how to drive a car and expecting them to drive you on a cross-country roadtrip and back home again! And forget getting decorations in Flashpoints now, since you seem to have removed all of the Classic Flashpoint Decorations altogether: you could have simply attached them as a reward at the end for completing the Flashpoint mission in a similar-vein to how you reward players that complete Solo Modes Esseles and Black Talon with a Lhosan Duster Speeder Mount, but you didn't even do it.
I've been on many servers in the game, and Pre-KOTFE players are all complaining about these issues I have brought up with the game. And while I think that this Knights of the Fallen Empire may be a great expansion to a great game, these tactics you've put into the base game are NOT going to help you get future subscribers through the Free to Play service. Instead it will just scare them away from the game and possibly even cause long time subscribers to even delete their characters and cancel their subscriptions. Taking away features in the Base Game is not the way to go about things.
