more content for 50-55... brb banging head on brick wall ok, thats done, so... Ilum Black Hole Section X Makeb operations flashpoints tactical flashpoints PVP Oricon CZ-198 and you cant get to 55? maybe you should do more than just one thing on the list for exp, if you did the whole list you would probably hit 57-60 before ever starting the prelude flashpoints for SoR. Dont just sit there and expect a single planet to get you from 50-55 lol

For the large part communication from the community team has always been sporadic at best. You'll see a yellow post every few days, but maybe a tenth are about any issue the community raises. The things that get regular responses are anything where the cartel market isnt working (oh no we cant buy coins *every bioware employee is woken from sleep for an insta fix*), QoL issues that can get an easy generic response, or questions about poor phrasing or missing parts of patch notes. When the game started they actually had a functioning and participating community team, but now it seems that the community team is more likely just the janitor sitting down at a pc on his breaks to type a few things before he gets on with his cleaning... which is probably the only job at bioware where any bug issues get fixed (hello spray can and boot).

dulfy isnt too bad, reddit offers some choices as well. I think a fair few of the dulfy guides are actually written by Zorz members who are typically regarded as good solid players (at least for their progression raid teams), but you would want to actually look at who the guides are credited to. If your relearning a class or laying a new spec reddit will probably offer you more basic rotations to ease into. Actually, with reddit you could even post requesting rotation assistance and ask for easy/intermediate/**** my resources are by the wire tiers of rotations.

Stockpile your basic comms, can get vendor 186 from it at level60, from the missions through Rishi/Yavin you can get blue slotted class specific gear for pre lvl60. Also, for a couple hundred basic comms, you can gear up on fleet at 55 in full blue armoring/mod/enhancement/hilt/barrel. Vendor 186 will be entry level gearing for SM ops, but for gearing if you can afford it, or craft, then doing full augmenting in MK-10 and at least blue augments will offer a large gain in stats. Also, the Ruusan relics are a good cheap buy, blues on most servers are around 20k and purple around 100-120k. with the relics dont be afraid of the idea of spending a little more to buy one with an augment slot (spending an extra 20k here saves the cost of a kit and the 42k to slot it in). When you start to gain elite and ultimate comms, the temptation will be to spend them early for a shiny, but be patient and get the offhand first, it will offer you the greatest gain in dps/healing.

easy enough to test, buy a 140 piece, look at vendor price before timer expires so you get the comms back then repeat for 100 comm pieces. you will find the 140 comm items are only a few k more than the 100 comms ones and over 3 pieces the credit gain is larger from the 100 comm items (3x 100 comms = 300 comms, 2x 140 = 280 with 20 comms in hand, the maths when you look will be dead easy to figure out)

after you gear characters as best you can in the horrid high endurance vendor 198 best bet is just to buy items that cost 100 comms, let the timer wear off and vendor if you want to sell them Just please make sure you buy the 198 offhand first, the hilt/armoring/barrel in it is still BIS and the best gain overall from all the vendor trash

this but with a small modification... go to Makeb at 47 Also max out class quest and flashpoint legacy buffs, these become especially important once you get to the prelude and Rishi quests. Kill all trash mobs in the prelude flashpoints. Rishi/Yavin storyline quests are currently counted as class quests as far as the legacy exp is concerned

nobody plays FFXIV? lol.... Kinda suggest that via subscription model, and introduction to the Chinese market, its a game with a more reliable income pattern

lol On a more serious note, they stated at the cantina tour that on Friday morning they had already decided what action and against who it would be taken had been finalized. This delaying the announcement is nothing but an irritation and maybe an attempt to give people time to spend more money in the cartel market before doing whatever "action" they decide on. What I find funny is that bioware stated they know every last little detail, who learned schematics from exploited items, how many items they sold, where mods and gear went, how many pieces, etc..... yet a large portion of the time if you ask customer service to restore items, achievements or things like not getting credit for completing group finder you get a response of "we are unable to track this" or "we were unable to verify your participation" or some other line. Does this mean then that for the last 3 years customer service was just telling lies and couldn't be bothered? Whatever they do is going to blow up in their faces, 3 years of mostly inaction against game based exploits (action mainly being taken against cartel market exploits) and now suddenly taking action is a rather pathetic back-flip to do. Too harsh and many may leave, too little and some may leave. What has compounded this issue is the pathetic state of the purchased expansion that was left to go without patching for 4 weeks with ops breaking bugs, game breaking lag and ability delay. To stop the exploit right at the start 2 simple things could of been done... a dev notice of "we know this exists, use it and you face permanent bans" (probably with 20 more lines of drivel attached to it) and doing server restarts at the weekly rollover point to prevent the lockout being carried. Hell, the server restarts would of even helped a little with the lag issues. 2 simple things, but they were too difficult to do when only the janitor was left on shift in the building right? Bad timing, releasing a massively buggy expansion then running away for holidays and just praying that it would be all good until they got back. Maybe Bioware will now be smart and do a change of policy where they post acknowledgement of an exploit as soon as they know of it and with the acknowledgement also a line of "use it and we will action your account". This, and probably banning those that sold the exploit in general chat or transferred it to other servers, would probably be the most acceptable outcome for the majority. Some will want greater action, others will argue its biowares fault for releasing a pathetic product that was full of problems of which the exploit was one and then having the gall to charge for the product.

server isn't down, they just banned the whole server for the massive use of exploit on Harbinger

or just halve the rate of gain for them, since you seem to get 60-70% of the cost back in just rep items (RNG depending), a reduction would be more than enough to lower the price of stuff but not carve the guts out of every mats and crafting market. Its meant to be gambling, not pull the lever for loot, the odds of not getting anything are rather too small.

I said "MUDflation" which has a different meaning to "inflation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudflation since you like wikipedia The cost of gaining the jawa scrap items is lower than the cost of running mission for mats, thanks largely to the price return you gain on selling rep items, particularly in the case of purple mats. This leads to a devaluation of previously gained mats, which due to price wars between players selling items leads to a lower cost for the finished product. Players that buy may be happy, but this then controls the way mats need to be acquired in order for a crafter to remain competitive. Yes, this is simply money trading hands, however now with easy methods for getting credits, (dailies, leveling, pvp, ops trash) the amount of credits going into the economy vastly exceeds the amount being spent in the money sinks that are designed to create a balance. Now, since you like to tell people to read up on things before talking about them, try to realize that what exists at the moment is actually deflation. Deflation in the value of good, where the same amount of currency buys more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation So, buy reading the definitions of inflation, deflation and MUDflation, which of the 3 is accurate?

that is the problem... you shouldn't be able to make that kind of money on a lowbie. This is going to abused to kingdom come by gold sellers. Think the spam is bad now? wait until they have alot more inventory to try to push. This is also going to lead to greater inflation on items of desire (vanity, mounts, etc) since so many have more credits. MUDflation at its worst

yup, I got a level17 with 27k credits up to 1.8 mill before I got bored with it. For an idea on how broken this is, I was in the second wave at early access when game first launched, got to 50 before the end of early access and with slicing as a crew skill (pre nerf) I got up to 1.5 mill credits which was considered broken. Now I have done better than this in under 2 hours on a character that has yet to get halfway through Drommund Kaas.

Actually, from the rep items, you made 1,605,500 credits, so you fell 894,500 credits short of the initial purchase price of tokens. Just for the sake of accuracy. But apart from that, yes the machines are horribly broken and have done more harm than any exploit to date (including the cartel collection crystal one)

lol, not an exploit but this has had a far greater negative impact on the game economy than any exploit to date has. After getting a new character to drommund kaas I went, at level 17 and using the credits I had, played the slot machine and went from 27k to 1.8 mill in a couple hours. I had to pause and wait for sales from my first round on the machine since I started with few credits. This was done during the price crash (so a few hours before this post). This is the worst addition to the game to date

soon (wherein "soon" is determined under the Bioware trademark version of "soon")

I wonder, if bioware ever bothered to list all the exploits that have existed, how many people would suddenly discover that yes, they too had exploited at some point. Since the policy is to never acknowledge an exploit (even in some cases after being fixed), most people arent aware of the exploits that have existed in game over the years. PVP farming on Ilum pre 1.2 Moving Gharj to the door to fight and not on platforms in EV Ilum gree event bolster leveling Dragging boss in Athiss away from initial point in order to not get adds Dragging boss in HM mannan away from initial point to not get adds and avoid "flow" ability win trading in pvp (especially ranked for season) hiding in objects in pvp Nefra exploit Bestia exploit bugging out doors/objectives in pvp so you dont get interrupted on capping jumping over the fence area in voidstar to get an early start as attacker farming the infinite respawn nodes farming the overpaying fast spawning Rishi chests entire group being knocked up on thrasher fight since (pre-fix) it then couldnt damage anyone skipping all the trash after minefield in EC those are a few of them (all that I can remember off the top of my head atm), but basically in every flashpoint, operation, pvp zone and the PVE world there have been rampant numbers of exploits. Most go unnoticed by gamers and are fixed on the quiet, but there is tremendously high odds that everyone has, at some point, directly participated in an exploit, be it large or small.

they are victims of a low quality, untested product that they paid real world money for they also exploited an ops boss Bioware is guilty of charging people for a product that in no way is a quality item bioware is also guilty of not halting the exploit in any way (a simple warning post on forums and server restart each week at lockout rollover time would of prevented this) bioware then took a 3+ week vacation from fixing any of the issues (lag, exploit, multiple bugs in every aspect of SoR) yet somehow bioware managed to staff the cartel market for The 12 Days of Christmas Cash Grab so... they released a low quality untested or barely tested product without support, charged for it, knew about exploits but didnt address them, and are now coming in to "punish" exploiters... with punishment having been given no definition. If anyone gets banned they can easily demand (and get) a refund for the purchase of SoR, plus whatever time is left on subscriptions. also, here's a thought for people; even if its say a 3-7 day suspension, if bioware doesnt also suspend the subscription from ticking over then by denying service while still charging for that service constitutes a real world money fine... which will breach laws in some countries.

My personal opinion, if after all these years of exploits in game, bioware steps up and starts stripping gear, credits or banning, then bioware should take a look back and apply the same punishments to prior exploiters. Be it PVP, FP, PVE, ops, crafting, there have been dozens of exploits and its a bit unbalanced to start hitting now.

Plenty of games ban, but the factors of cost, how many, history of action taken, workload required to figure it all out will always be considered. Notice the "history of action taken". For all the exploits that have existed in this game bioware has only a few times banned players. Exploits have existed in pvp, pve, flashpoints, ops, GSF, events since the start. Out of the multitude only a few times have players been banned (things like the cartel market collections). That is what leads to the expectation of inaction.

And that's a loss for just one side, one server for 1.5 hours. Most of those, being subscribers, would also be spenders in the cartel market (personally I spend up to $100 per month on average in the market). Add cartel losses to the sub losses and the per month loss starts to rapidly climb. "All exploiters need to be banned" is not a financially viable option. CS has told many many people that after an armoring/mod/enhancement has been pulled from an item it rapidly becomes difficult to track what happens (and that is for people wanting to get a single item restored), so there is a good chance that there is no ability to delete or differentiate gear. The credits gained may also be problematic, how do they differentiate what item was made by an exploiter and what item was made by a crafter that bought exploited mats? Then how do they separate schematics learned from exploited drops versus those gained from comms and raid drops. With costs associated with and workload required for any of the more draconian "punishments", the greater odds are for warning letters, permanent infractions and possibly 1-3 day bans for most. A small number (the originators and those that carried it across servers) may get more severe penalties. A small possibility for the future may also be a policy change where Bioware acknowledges the existence on an exploit (if they cant immediately hot fix it) and warn that further use will result in bans.

uh oh, I did math near the pitchfork and torch mob, better run before they go "exploiter!" and start to build a bonfire some quotes that seem apt to all the rage, nastiness and people calling for mass action in this thread; "It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare." ~Edmund Burke "Those that are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in their actions." ~Charles Caleb Colton "The loudest voices we hear are those who advocate conflict, divisiveness." ~John C. Danforth "Those who speak the loudest often have nothing to say..." ~John Reyes

5000 I am betting is way under the actual numbers. After server reset, on harbinger, there was between 70-90 open instances for the first 1.5 hours. At that point my group left ravagers, too much lag from all the instances. But figure 5 minutes total for someone to exploit, average 80 instances, that is a total of 1,440 characters that went in in that time. Even if you figure on average everyone ran the instance on multiple characters (say an average of 2 per person since not everyone is a speed leveler), that's 720 unique accounts in 1.5 hours. Not only that, but that was at a time outside of US prime time so the hours later the pace would of picked up. That is for 1.5 hours on one server on imperial side, in one week, never mind the pub side and all the other servers. just putting out observations and some number estimates for people to think about before saying its on 1%, 500 people, or other such off the wall numbers. Also, don't forget, Bioware stated that this has become far more prevalent and widespread than any other bug exploit before it.

except that doing the exact same thing with a boss in Athiss got fixed since it was in fact considered an exploit (in that case so as to not spawn adds) That is just one example, my earlier post on page 65 listed out examples of exploits that a variety of people have been using over the years. Want to be that most of those calling for blood now have at one time or another done one of these or other exploits? My post was sarcastic and meant to show the mob frenzy people that they should take a closer look at their own gaming history and realize that at some time they also probably exploited. There are few or no "black or white" players with regards to having used exploits throughout the history of the game, only shades of gray (and its more than 50!)