One fix to implement that would pay results....

iceman00

Mentioned it in one of the troll threads, so figured I'd start a fresh one.

 

Right now, the pve in TOR is way too easy. While leveling, If a heroic/flashpoint says bring 4 people, bring 3 instead to make it remotely a challenge.  If you bring 4, it becomes way too easy, especially if any of your characters can use static barrier. 

Another problem is the paltry group content.  Right now, maybe 10% of quests on a planet require grouping.  Now a lot of solo players like it that way, so even a moderate increase (say 33% of quests on a planet require a group) will probably generate too much QQ.  If you group up for the normal garden variety quests, they become beyond easy.  You might, if you aren't paying attention, have to use a heal once or twice.  But die?  not really.

So a compromise.  Include an NPC (or a menu setting) that allows you to set the difficulty of a quest, any quest in the game.  Jack up to the highest difficulty setting, and you need a group to complete even garden variety quests.  NPC's become stronger, more numerous.  In exchange, you get more XP for kill (XP is still the same amount for completing a quest), more loot (not better, but more), etc.

This isn't too hard to implement.  POTBS was able to do it, and it worked.  If that stunningly incompetent dev team can do something like that, Bioware can include it. 

So you instantly have a lot more quests requiring groups, but those who want to solo can keep their solo game.  (Class quests would be exempt from this system.)  And even something like Hate machine (for those who just started the game) cranked up on lets say 5x difficulty (in POTBS, there were 6 settings), that quest becomes a lot of fun for those looking for a challenge!

Note that this is seperate from the "end-game" heroic and hard-mode ops.  That tiering is fine as is.  (though perhaps make "hard mode" a bit harder, as a lot of 50's complain that hard mode isn't that hard.)

 

Thoughts?