People in this thread need to learn more about the Pareto principle. This item is a very clear example of it. To say it quickly.. about 20% of a shop's products make about 80% of the shop's income, while the 80% other items make only 20% of the shop's income. Why even have those 80% other items you might say? Well because if you don't have a complete enough set of items to buy, people won't come to your shop to get those 20% items, but chose to go to a shop that does sell those few items they do have that you do not. It is a simple marketing principle about making sure your stock of items is broad enough to make sure people spend money in your shop, and not others. Having items like this, or Huttsbane, are all about that same principle. You release these items for a very small subset of your customer base, in this case probably Roleplayers looking for a 'civilian' outfit, to make sure your stock is complete enough. Once people feel they can get everything they want from you, they will stay more loyal to your shop. So.. from just the Pareto principle, you can say that for every Valiant Jedi set, or for every other good looking set everyone will love, you need to have 4 less universally enjoyed sets to ensure your stock is broad enough to appeal to your entire market. Understand this principle, and you understand why Bioware 'wastes' slots of 'armor development' on these things. and yes, they are just skins already available in game made adaptive. A simple, quickly made item is perfect to be in the 80% group.. while the star sets, the unique ones, need to be in the 20% group. Cost vs Reward.. they never expected you all to buy this item.

Terror from Beyond came with 1.4.0.. Let's see what free content, aka content a subscriber did not have to pay for, came out since then.. 1.5.0: HK 51 Activated (11/15/2012) Added both the HK quest line and companion as well as a new daily area and a new world boss in that daily area. These are all free for subs and cost F2P players extra money. Also, Nightmare Mode for Explosive Conflict was released here. And anyone who says NM Mode is not new content should try them more often.. they add new mechanics and always new drops as well, so far also always one new mount, so these are actual new content. Also, someone who doesn't buy the operations unlock has no access to it, but it is free to subs. 1.6.0 Ancient Hypergate (12/11/2012) New Warzone added to the Warzone roster. Clearly new content, and free for subs to play as much as they want. Chances are someone without the warzone unlock doesn't even run into this warzone every week, considering how little matches they can play. 1.7.0 Return of the Gree (2/12/2013) New event/daily area with multiple new world bosses, one instanced so needing operations unlock, has been added. So yes, you don't need to unlock the event like you need Section X, but you can't experience it entirely either without getting the unlocks. This same patch also delivered Reputations, but those are for all players not just subs. So I won't count that here. 2.0 Rise of the Hutt Cartel (4/9/2013) Expansion, some minor things for subs as well even those that didn't buy it.. but nothing worth mentioning. Still, it is normal that even subs pay for what is new in an expansion (and you claiming it was promises free.. RotHC was NEVER promised free.. the closest thing to a promise was a quote "Makeb is the biggest piece of non-expansion content ever made." So please stop beating that dead horse.. it isn't the pony you think you were promised.. you were promised the horse..) 2.1 Customization (5/14/2013) First patch without content for subs. Though it was an extra patch on a 4 week schedule, and came with a promise of a new patch 4 week later with content.. which will be a Nightmare Mode operation (see my earlier comment concerning Nightmare Modes) So.. looking at facts and not your own biased view of things.. there have been MANY new things that were free for subs and not for others. So sorry, your thread's base is, actually, a is baseless whine. Have a good day.

So.. since when has PVP been about content?

hahaha "Being the team player you are, you let everyone know the node is being captured.. on your run back in." My suggestion: Mr. Defend Away From the Door Guy ?

No Daniel didn't.. he actually said the exact same thing: It was part of design but never made it into the game at launch.. the game at launch is exactly the same as "the original design team's implementation." Implementation does not equal design. So in no way did Damion say anything different than Daniel did. Daniel just said more, that it was considered but left out for budget reasons. While Damion, in the transcription, only said it was not part the original implementation. Same end result, different way of saying it. And this is exactly why language is such a horrible way to be specific about things, people misunderstand stuff way too often when not listening or reading specifically enough.

I'm sure TOR would run smooth as well if it used DAOC's level of graphics and interaction. So a moot point really, engines get better over the years and computers get better to handle engines as well. My current PC runs Unreal Tournament a lot better than the one I had when it came out as well.

Also, once again.. There is still gearing in PVP, stop claiming there isn't. Get Conqueror gear and go have better gear than others, just not enough better to rolfstomp faceroll them like you would be able to in pre-2.0 PVP. I do not think the blame here is Bolster, but I think the blame is not being able to beat others in PVP just because you spend more time doing it and get better gear because of that. I hope you do find that white whale/unicorn/pot of gold in whatever next game you choose to play. But honestly, I doubt you will. I'm sorry.

Although I think it would be awesome if they did this, I doubt the community will accept it. Simple fact: no fix to performance will work for everyone. Another important aspect to keep in mind is that, fixes to performance may cause crashing issues to people using hardware/software setups that have not been tested (because it is impossible to test everything). So we will have an 8 week update that, without a doubt, does not solve all issues for everyone and even creates new issues for some that gets sold as a "performance and bug fixing" patch. How well do you think that will go down? Personally, I'd rather they just sneak it in between content updates more often. I hope to see more than 4-5 lines of actual bug fixing and performance improvements in the patch notes of major updates.

I agree with this entirely, and prefer to avoid responding to people that have clearly posted in high emotion. The only moment I do feel the need to point out their huge flaws in reasoning is when they claim their clearly biased opinions as unshakable facts and keep defending them as the be-all end-all of the debate. The only thing that can /thread any debate is the actual facts of the matter, but too often people twist words and deliberately chose to ignore certain aspects for the sake of making their points to gain support. Those moments are far from posts of high emotion, but are clear moments where someone is basicly just bashing for bashin's sake. And those moments deserve reality and fact checks. And becoming angry when someone refutes your opinion with facts is a horrible, horrible way to respond to anything.

Yet is misses the other side of the coin entirely. Quite often I see threads with posts that are either complete hyperbole, based entirely on slippery slope arguments or actually state provable facts wrong. Very often, I chose to mingle myself in those debates merely to ensure that the objective facts of the matter stay true. More often than not, this gets me called things from white knight, to fanboi to even Developer-in-disguise (because of my name I guess..). So really, it is not just the people with criticism being called haters or attacked for their views, dirt is being thrown all ways here and that creates a very unhealthy environment to have a debate. I far from feel this game is flawless, but I simply accept it is a Freemium model where non-essential gameplay elements of the game are Cash Shop items. I feel in no way entitled to anything except access to my characters and full access to levellings, PVE and PVP from my subscription. Yet whenever I point out that, clearly personal, opinion as an opinion.. I get called a fanboy for not feeling entitled to more for the monthly price of not even 1/5th of my weekly groceries bill.

Let's quickly review the reviews! General point is that it is a new direction, while the Cartel Store was announced to focus on cosmetics. How is character customization not in that definition? Also, the article is full of false claims (cather promised to be free, subs would get 100% free access to all features, etc), while also putting false pricings on the cost of customization to include initial unlock costs as well. Finally, he also claims 'this is what we get for our $15,- subscription' while ignoring the communication that 2.1 is an 'extra' patch within the normal 6-8 week patch cycle and that a 2.2 will come 8 weeks after RotHC launched. Overall, 10/10 for presenting facts wrong, 1/10 for writing an actual review and nothing worth responding to as the reviewers focuses on twisting words to fit his own needs anyway. Mostly, this article focuses on the writer basicly publicly apologizing for stating something wrong in an earlier article about Customization pricing and then detailing how it is priced. The shame and shock of being wrong come out of the article, but not any real problems are mentioned, just a bit of sadness that he couldn't get any customization without cartel coins. Also, again nothing to respond to as the reviewer basicly just assumed things would be different than they are. Just an article that states the changes, nothing reviewish really. So also nothing to reply to. Stating a web poll that was openly and publicly trolled by both 4chan and reddit to get EA on top again as a source for real negative reviews is.. interesting. Comments on articles =/= reviews. And the outrage is not as big as anyone here claims. As always, it are the same bitter old Star Wars geeks that just can't get over themselves and their dislike of something. So yeah.. nothing new to see here, moving on.

That is the 40CC change combined with the 200 CC unlock of the pack of customizations. You can also take the long route and first unlock it for 200CC via the Cartel Store unlock items and then spend 40CC to just change it.

My point went way over your head clearly. I admitted WoW has a barber shop. But that barber shop is very limited compared to a full recustomization. Full changing, so not just hairdo and color, is cheaper in TOR than it is in WoW. This while TOR actually has MORE customization options than WoW has. While I'd also like some very simple stuff like hair changes to be able to be bought in game, you can't claim WoW's recustomization is cheaper when even it's cheapest full version (15 Euro recustomization) is double as expensive as TOR's most expensive version (8 Euro worth of Cartel Coins for changing every option). So yeah.. hair and hair color is more expensive in TOR, changing skin color or race is a lot cheaper in TOR.

Still isn't absolutely though. Also, whiners, let's compare prices here: WoW offers very minimal cosmetic changes in game (last time i played it was literally limited to only hair styles), if you wanted a full recustomization you needed to get a race change because it reset everything. While a full customization costs 15 Euros, while full recustomization and race/faction change costs 20 Euros. ( --- edited line when finding out new facts --- ) At the same time the OP said 8 Euros for a full recostumization was way too expensive and everyone jumps on the "yeah it's too expensive!" bandwagon. Yep.. real objective facts being presented here. Let's present some real facts here: People are passionate about things like their names, looks and even the servers they play on. To be able to change these things has many MMO's charging for the service. Both subscription and F2P MMO's. Also often these services are available in game for ingame credits, but those options are most of the time more limited than a full recostumization (example, WoW's barber shop) Also very often they only have 1 fixed price to 'recustomize', meaning you have to pay full price for even minor changes like eye colors. TOR chose an implementation which allowed you to pay minimal for minimal changes, and pay more the more you wanted to change. TOR's full recustomization and race change is still cheaper than the market leader's full recustomization and race change functionality. Which can even be 'an extra service' on top of a subscription if you use your monthly gifted cartel coins for that. But for some reason.. EA are nickel and diming their customers. Really objective reasoning here guys.

And because people are so passionate about looks is exactly why a game should charge for changing them. People spend money on stuff they are passionate about. Case closed.

Your definition of "absolutely" needs some clear redefining if you already proove it otherwise in the next line. Also, there was the Collections tab and a bug fix to PVP for all players, including subscribers. Also, this patch is basicly a 'bonus patch' as this one is 4 weeks after RotHC and a next one will come in another 4 weeks time.

To OP, from patch notes: New Feature! Collections provides a one-stop interface which is accessible from the Inventory Window or Cartel Market and tracks many items available from the Cartel Market, Packs (Cartel and Contraband alike), Cartel Reputation, and even Friends of Star Wars™: The Old Republic™, Pre-order, Collectors Edition, live fan events and more. More details under General. That's a general QOL feature. I'd also call that whole Escrow Credits thing a QOL feature for F2P and Preferred players. So yeah.. /thread. PS. Side note: one major exploit seems to be fixed because Augments are taken out of the calculation for Bolster.

Has it ever occured to you that some people: - Have very little time to spend on specific games? - Prefer to play many alts and therefore may not even have 1 character on max level yet? - Spend their time on side activities while levelling and therefore may take longer? - Do all that while being F2P and not in a guild (meaning a lot less XP gain) All of these reasons have nothing to do with sucking. And you just showed one MAJOR issue with MMO players in general.. thinking that having less time to spend, or less focus on a specific activity in the game, means you "suck". Newsflash: Spending more time on something does not mean you are better at it, just more experienced.

Agree with every word you said.. especially the bolded areas. And this is why I keep saying: The concept of Bolster is the better solution than Recruit gear is. It simply needs a better, simpler implementation than what they are going for now.

Yeah, we don't want those scrubs in our glorious PVP! We only need our own group of people who DO know what to do. /sarcasm The amount of entitlement because you do know how it works in this thread is mind boggling to me. Let me put it this way: Right now, that scrub only has their lack of experience causing them to not be effective. Not their lack of gear, or their bad decision in selling something because they needed the credits to *gasp* buy their level 50/55 skills. The issue with Recruit gear is very clear in that it is a great solution, to a certain group of people. Also the point of: "yeah but just grind a week or two and you have full partisan" just proves how little people understand how new people come to enjoy an activity (hint, it isn't by getting their ***** handed to them for 2 weeks before they can even become marginally useful). The system is designed to cater to the new, without damaging the experienced or removing their incentives entirely. Right now, the system works perfect for the new, but still has issues for the second group. Those issues need to be resolved. Going back to Recruit only solves it for the experienced, not the new. Or, to put it this way: I am 100% happy that since 2.0 I have not once had to inspect someone's gear and then whisper them in a friendly manner about the fact that they did not have Recruit gear and were therefore not having the best possible PVP experience. The reactions always go from honest thank you's to getting called any curse name under the sun. Why should I have to burden myself with that?

I don't remember the exact quote, or even how it was quoted (I think it was an interview..) but it basicly boiled down to them saying that there was nothing to announce concerning a new warzone, but that the focus was now on improving the systems of PVP first. I believe it was an interview concerning RotHC and the question basicly was: "RotHC doesnt have a warzone, what's in store for PVP players?" or something.. My google-fu failed me though, so I cant give you the exact quote. It is pre-RotHC and most news items concerning TOR PVP nowadays are around complaints concerning Bolster.. so other news is swamped out.

Thanks for posting Rob's words Eric.. though one part made me wonder.. specifically this: To that end, we reworked the Bolster system to not function off player level (as it did pre-2.0) and instead use the power level of the items a character currently has equipped. Why was this solution chosen and not more simply looking at the fact if an item has any expertise or not? I asked this before, and I'll keep asking until that design decision is explained. This sounds like a very complicated thing to do, when a PVP item can also simply be defined by "does it have expertise on or not?" and if not, just give it a set of pre-defined base stats instead of it's actual stats. It solves the same issues, but a lot more simple. At least at level 55. Now, I do understand that pre-55 you need to give lower levels slightly better stats than higher levels because they simply have less powers and less skill points to spend in the skill tree. But couldn't this also simply be solved by changing the Bolster stats for each level instead of for each item itself? Finally, I see a certain risk with "side" stats like Crit and Surge when giving a base amount of stats. Some specs simply favor one or the other, or even some playstyles within a spec do. But this can also be solved by simply giving the same balance of those stats to items that already exists, right? My point is: many of the problems and exploits seem to be found when playing around with power level of the items equipped. Either by removing augments, using low level augments, or by simply going for lower power level items over higher ones to get better stats. And when I read this line I quoted, I saw this main source of exploits also seems to be the basis of the entire system. Therefore the question: Why was power level of items equipped chosen to be the basis of the system? And not a combination of level of the character and already existing 'side' stats, while taking into account if an item is already PVP item or not (and then not changing anything). Please find it in yourself to be open on decisions like this as well.. and not just the logical ones where you answer the "remove bolster plox" trolls. Because every reasonable person can see why it can't be removed now.

A while ago, an announcement was already made that, for now, the PVP Developers would focus on developing new or improved systems for current PVP instead of focusing on delivering new warzones. Bolster was one of those new systems, one that removed the huge gear gap (once it works bug-free). Probably the next major system will be improving Ranked Warzones? Or possibly changing the PUG matchmaking to solve some issues like premades and teams of new players being steamrolled? Or something else we haven't considered entirely yet? PVP is still being developed, just looking at warzones being delivered is a PVE-ers mindset to PVP.

Exactly.. pre-55 bolster needs to somehow boost lower levels in stats because they lack powers and points in skill trees. Otherwise, a level 10 won't ever stand a chance. But this same solution the OP suggested is also something I had already suggested very shortly after 2.0 hit Live and it really is the simplest solution. The moment they added this 'check' if something is PVP gear by checking for Expertise, was the moment they also should have just realised that all non PVP gear should be totally ignored and just given an amount of base stats similar to the old Recruit set. A good solution is a simple one... and this one is so simple it can be summarized in a very simple check for each gear slot: IF Expertise = 0 THEN INSERT Base PVP Stats for slot That will really achieve the goal of levelling the playing field for PVP starters without Expertise in slots, without creating any balance issues. The one explaination we never received from Bioware is the reasons why it wasn't made this simple. I cannot imagine this simple solution was never brainstormed in any design meeting. So please Bioware, tell us why this simple solution wasn't good enough? What were the Cons that made this solution not viable compared to the more complex system that was eventually chosen? And do these Cons still live up to the Cons of the other system that was eventually chosen? We are not calling for Bolster to be removed here, as many people do see the plus sides of the system in general (despite the many hundreds of people who do call for it's removal regardless, they are just a very vocal and often very uninformed group). But please give us a bit more insight into why this simple solution was not chosen. Or, even better, if this is something that is right now under consideration once more or not?

Actually.. Bioware has never made official statements aknowledging exploits they have not fixed yet for as much as I remember. They only come back to it afterwards, not wanting to give people that have not yet heard about it an idea to start using it. So, their silence can be a sign they are fixing it. But please Bioware, fix it soon!