KotFE Alliance Crates Missions - A Backwards Step?

So we are still a month or so away from Chapter X of Knights of the Fallen Empire. Like quite a few people now, I have a handful characters which the Alliance Base on Odessan. What does that mean? It means we need to get each of our KotFE alliance departments to rank 20.

And that means doing a lot of Heroic Weeklies, or repeating the C2-N2 Inflicting Comfort Mission, in order to earn alliance crates. With later levels of influence requiring at least 6 crates, that’s 24 crates to increase 1 level across all 4 departments. Now, I’m fine with the rewards of this – you can earn quite good credits and the gear drops are not bad either.

But you need crates to increase Alliance Influence and also to be able to storm the Star Fortress shield bunkers – five crates per shield bunker.

But grinding Alliance Heroic missions is just hard work and I wonder if this step is just a bit of a backwards step for a SWTOR Expansion pack which is supposed to be focused on Story and Choices.

Alliance Crates Bring Out the Best and Worst in People

I’ve been playing SWTOR for over 2 years. And I have finally had a seriously negative experience, while trying to complete a Heroic Mission on Taris. The mission in question has a seriously slow re-spawn rate of the Rakghouls in question. So I stayed in one respawn spot, rather and run around the whole area. And one player, decided that I was spoiling his need to rush through, swore at me and immediately blocked me.

In the need to get through as many crates as fast as possible has brought out the worst in human behaviour – the selfish kind that ignores that SWTOR has a community at the heart of it.

But it also brings out the best in some – some people have grouped with me to speed up the collection of kills, or to share single targets. And that’s what people’s attitude should be.

But by making KotFE about forcing people to fight in Heroic Areas is not story-based and totally detracts from the Story-driven Focus that I enjoy in Fallen Empire. Bioware have done such a great job of the Cinematography and the plot lines, and this ‘stop gap’ storyless episode before Chapter X does not do the game justice.

I love SWTOR and Fallen Empire, I just feel they lost their imagination a bit in the Alliance Crate grinding. What does anyone else think?