What about an option to turn on chat bubbles for player /say, /yell and /emote chat?

Will customer support actually start closing spammer report tickets and/or will you change the system that these tickets don't count against the ticket limit? More often than not, I can't submit a ticket for a pressing problem because my ticket queue is clogged with spammer reports (some have been open for many months or even over a year...). Doesn't CS read those tickets, do they just forget to close them or what? The report tickets also aren't closable by the submitter either. Are you going to do anything about it? Also, it would be nice if we could ignore a spammer globally for all characters on the account so we won't have to do it on all of our 40 characters separately.

I noticed I always get a crash when Microsoft Edge is running (even in the background) while SWTOR is starting up. It doesn't matter whether VSync, Gsync, Game Mode or full-screen optimizations are enabled or not. If I close Edge, SWTOR starts up properly. I can then start Edge again and task out to browse the web and there are no issues. It's good to hear that you are updating the game, though. I assume the crash might also have to do with the way W10 1703 changed how D3D9 (which SWTOR uses) works (time for an (optional) engine update to DX12? That could also help with CPU-bound situations). Or maybe it's just the latest version of Edge (and possibly other UWP Apps) causing this.

That's great to hear. And cosmetic weapons would be great to have. That said, I sincerely hope you guys will also tackle one of the longest requested features to improve overall gameplay experience and convenience, the option to enable overhead chat bubbles for /say, /yell and /emote player chat which has been promised again and again since they were "temporarily removed" from beta to "improve performance" but pushed back all the time for over five years. Here is a useful conversation we had with SWTOR's own then-GUI developer @Cory Kolek about them a couple of years back which features some information that the devs appear to have forgotten about: I don't have much else to say on the topic than what was already said in that thread. I can get a bit more technical on the topic though. As it was said before chat bubbles were a huge performance hit on the game when we had initially implemented them in beta. We're talking upwards of 400Mbs of video memory used on chat bubbles alone. Nameplates had the same issue. We fixed nameplates but have not had time to do the same with chat bubbles. If you played in beta and saw our initial implementation of them they weren't very pretty or as fully featured as we'd like them to be. So, yes, we would like to implement them again, but when we do we want to do it right. Note that the cited 400MBs of video memory is peanuts these days where even low-end video cards have 2GB of memory (back during beta/launch 256MB-768MB was common for consumer video cards, with 1.5GB and 3GB video cards just beginning to appear in the high-end segment of the market), and a performance fix may not be as critical as it was back in the day. You can find more information about the topic in the following linked thread. The Timeline of official statements by Bioware behind the spoiler tag regarding the issue in it is a very interesting read): http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=415849#post415849 Since you guys are saying that you'll finally focus on things that improve the gameplay experience and convenience features, I truly hope speech bubbles will finally be on the list of priorities again. Many of us have waited for them to return for almost six years now, especially those people that loved them in SWTOR's quasi-predecessor Star Wars Galaxies that was shut down in favour of SWTOR. Heck, even Elder Scrolls Online which is based on a similar engine as SWTOR and where the devs outright stated they will never add them, has gotten chat bubbles before SWTOR, where the developers actually promised over and over again to fix and implement them "soon", which is just a shame. It's one of the convenience features that is essential to many MMORPG players still missing to this day, and the long wait for them without a light at the end of the tunnel in sight has driven many away from the game in the past. Hopefully some of them will return once a definitive commitment to the implementation of chat bubbles has been made by the development team. Thank you very much!

Maybe it turns out they're just unfeasible with the game engine they're using There were performance issues with chat bubbles in beta, yes, due to chat bubbles (just like nameplates before they got fixed!) taking up around 400 Megabytes of video memory. They were taken out of the game until they had the time to fix them, which at one point was high priority. But they forgot about it after launch (and with developer layoffs). Note that these performance issues were actually relevant back then when the common videocard had 128-768 Megabytes of video memory. Today with even the low-end cards coming with 2 Gigabytes (2048MB!) of video memory, it isn't really all that big of an issue anymore (For example, I had a 3GB GeForce GTX 580 video card during closed beta and didn't have any performance issues with chat bubbles enabled at all). Plus, it's an option one can still opt to turn off to improve performance in any case, just like nameplates, shadows, etc.. The GUI developers actually knew how to fix them (basically the same fix they did for nameplates just in time for launch, they would just have to adapt that), they simply ran out of time to do so in time for launch. And afterwards, it got repeatedly swept under the rug, as you can see by reading the timeline of official statements by Bioware in the thread Chat Bubbles: We need an option to enable them for say, yell and emote chat!. Later on, producers and community representatives were misinformed (and arguably also too ignorant or lazy to study the the first post of the aforementioned thread in it's entirety to catch up with the facts). Here is the actual explanation of then GUI developer Cory Kolek, who actually worked on these things, which is the one post that people should quote as it is the only one with actual "in the know" information: I don't have much else to say on the topic than what was already said in that thread. I can get a bit more technical on the topic though. As it was said before chat bubbles were a huge performance hit on the game when we had initially implemented them in beta. We're talking upwards of 400Mbs of video memory used on chat bubbles alone. Nameplates had the same issue. We fixed nameplates but have not had time to do the same with chat bubbles. If you played in beta and saw our initial implementation of them they weren't very pretty or as fully featured as we'd like them to be. So, yes, we would like to implement them again, but when we do we want to do it right. As you can see, the main reason why they haven't been added yet is because they wanted to get them scheduled to be "done right", which sadly never happened (well they were actually scheduled but with rather low priority and when the time came for them to work on them, a new producer took the helm they got bumped them off the roadmap because they had other priorities). With a new producer in KeithKanneg at the helm, hopefully this will change and he'll find at least some time on the roadmap to finally get optional chat bubbles for player /say, /yell and /emote chat back into the game, even if it's just in their most basic form that we had during closed beta (one could still improve on them in a later update). For many players, any implementation of chat bubbles is better than no chat bubbles at all!

I've updated the top post with Information section with a summary of facts about why chat bubbles have been removed from the game and what is needed to implement them so the developers and other players can easily see them in one place. Hopefully the developers will implement them soon.

0. Thank you very much for your update. What's the reason 5.2.2 is happening next month? Will there be no smaller updates in between? 5.2.2 sounds like a smaller update, perhaps you should call it 5.3 instead? 1. I hope that you can also get these things unlocked by reaching level 70. Or at least that it's a perk you can unlock for the whole account and are actually affordable. 2.Are you sure the engine can handle the higher speed? It's been having trouble with the current top speeder speed to begin with. Are improvements coming? An upgrade to a 64 bit client, perhaps, to utilize more RAM, an optional Vulkan/DirectX 12 rendering path might help, possibly a full upgrade to the latest version of the excellent Frostbite Engine that is used by all EA Titles nowadays (I realize the latter is unlikely unless you have a whole team headed by people from DICE working on that, but still)? 3. That sounds like a great quality of live improvement. I hope it will be a good amount. 4. Sounds good. Maybe dial the cost down a bit to make it more accessible, though. 5. The reduced cost and increase of requisition rewards are great - but wait, giving everyone a free Gunship and Bomber is your "solution" to Gunships and Bomber spam/nests ruining dogfighting with (what Star Wars is famous for!)?! No rebalancing so Gunships (for example, tuning down the railguns, making them true glass cannons and super-vulnerable in close quarters, etc.) and "Bombers" (drone/minelayers - why not make them real bombers like they are supposed to be in Star Wars and add missions where you have to take down enemy capital ships to give them more use) aren't that overpowered so that bomber pilots can't just sit in their nests AFK and have their railgun drones etc. rack up kills, XP, command XP, etc. for them anymore? What the heck?! Do you realize that will make even more people use bombers and gunships (and right off the bat) instead of learning how to fly proper starfighters Scouts (althoughs higher Tier scouts could use some balance tweaks as well) and especially Strike Fighters (the heart of Star Wars space battles!) be used even less? A bunch of Little deathstars that hide behind a field of automated drones that hit pretty much every time and can shoot you from long distances without you being able to get close (what do automated drones have to do with PVP - those are PVE things) is NOT FUN and DOESN'T FEEL LIKE DOGFIGHTING IN STAR WARS at all! Maybe you could limit each team to one gunship and one bomber active at once? But even so, do a proper GSF balance pass that makes every ship viable to fly is needed. For the Force's sake and don't increase and cater to the problems that have been ruining GSF even more! 6. What about the numerous bugs in GSF? Are you going to fix them? 7. What are you going to do about low population servers with empty queues that take eternally long to pop for PVE and PVP and no people to play with in PVP, PVE as well as Roleplay? Can we expect server merges to merge all servers in a region to megaservers so everyone can enjoy a healthy server population? It would be nice to just have one or much less populated servers for each region with all the guilds, guild perks, characters, etc. transferring to it automatically without cost to the player, just like it had been done with server merges in this game in the past. You should be able to adapt the PVE/PVP instances to create different language instances with comparable ease as well, for example, and create one European megaserver with PVE and PVP instances for each language. 7. What about that long-awaited and long-promised option to enable chat bubbles/overhead chat text for your client for player /say, /yell and /emote chat? Please tell me you have finally added it to the roadmap and are going to put an end to almost five and a half years of waiting, broken promises and stringing players along this time around. Since you haven't published the roadmap yet, there is still time to put them on it if you haven't already! And before people start spreading misinformation again, yes, there were performance problems with Chat Bubbles in Beta five years ago. They only applied to peopel with 512-768MB of video RAM, because they took up 400MB of video memory alone, which with the lowest end video cards of today coming with 2GB of video memory is a non-issue (or you can turn them off, it's an option). So it wouldn't be an issue even if the old, unfixed chat bubbles from beta were brought back. But it should be easily fixable, since it's the same fix they applied to nameplates before launch. Here is the actual explanation of then GUI developer Cory Kolek: I don't have much else to say on the topic than what was already said in that thread. I can get a bit more technical on the topic though. As it was said before chat bubbles were a huge performance hit on the game when we had initially implemented them in beta. We're talking upwards of 400Mbs of video memory used on chat bubbles alone. Nameplates had the same issue. We fixed nameplates but have not had time to do the same with chat bubbles. If you played in beta and saw our initial implementation of them they weren't very pretty or as fully featured as we'd like them to be. So, yes, we would like to implement them again, but when we do we want to do it right.

Congratulations! I hope that you will be the producer that finally has the balls to put the long-promised (over 64 months!) an option to enable chat bubbles for player /say, /yell and /emote chat which has been one of the most requested things ever since launch (and actually beta after they were "temporarily removed") onto the roadmap and finally make them happen. It's an embarrassement that even after so many years of promises SWTOR still doesn't have an option to display chat bubbles for spatial player chat. Don't even start citing the typical "performance problems" BS, chat bubbles taking up ~400MBs of video memory isn't a problem for today's video cards (it was during beta when video cards still typically had 256MB-512MB of video memory and they ran just fine for people with 1.5 or 3GB of memory even back then, so the problems from beta wouldn't even be an issue without fixed chat bubbles, but Cory Kolek (who used to work on the GUI) and crew knew how to fix them and just needed a producer to allot them time to work on it so please talk to him and his successors to make it happen. There really is no reason to not tackle them in this time and age. Allot some times to make them pretty or at least give us the "not-so-pretty" ones from beta so we can at least have the functionality. For reference, here is a quote from Mr. Kolek with the actual explanation on what exactly the problems with chat bubbles were: I don't have much else to say on the topic than what was already said in that thread. I can get a bit more technical on the topic though. As it was said before chat bubbles were a huge performance hit on the game when we had initially implemented them in beta. We're talking upwards of 400Mbs of video memory used on chat bubbles alone. Nameplates had the same issue. We fixed nameplates but have not had time to do the same with chat bubbles. If you played in beta and saw our initial implementation of them they weren't very pretty or as fully featured as we'd like them to be. So, yes, we would like to implement them again, but when we do we want to do it right. Nowadays, even the lowest tier video cards have at least 1GB-2GB of video memory with the high end having 12GB so the 400Mbs are peanuts. And that was before all the performance improvements in the game/engine that have been made over the years as well. And even so, with it being an option, people can turn it off to improve performance just like with other options that come with a performance hit. No more excuses. Please make it happen! Thank you very much!

Sounds good. It's about time we get some quality of life improvements. hopefully an option to turn on chat bubbles for /say, /yell and /emote player chat won't be far behind since that's been requested way more than galaxy map improvements.

With these changes, will we finally see the abolishment of the ridiculous chat restrictions between players of the other faction like we were promised a long time ago as well as be able to add friends with characters that play on the ohter side to our friends list? PS.: Will we finally get the even longer-promised option to enable chat bubbles for player /say chat? It's about time...

Sounds good. I like that any level 70 character can play it so people won't have to grind through KOTFE and KOTET on countless alts to play the dailies. I just hope those characters that haven't started KOTFE/KOTET can keep all their classic game companions when starting this story arc.

I like it. I don't like gambling boxes and will never spend cartel coins on those, but when I know that I can buy what I like directly I'm more receptive to it, as long as it isn't too expensive.

The problem I have is that I have a plethora of open spammer report tickets from the past year and can't write a new ticket due to it. When you will finally fix it so these report tickets no longer take up an open ticket slot and/or allow users to close them manually (you get an error when trying to do so)?

I still think the best way to combat credits sellers would be to sell credits in the Cartel Market at dirt-cheap prices credit sellers can't possibly compete with.

There really needs to be a much, much higher chance that you receive a gear piece with set bonus that you don't have yet in each command crate. It's hard enough to get CXP on a Guardian tank, especially if you don't find groups with a healer on dead servers (you say 30 minutes for a crate, for me it's like 4+ hours on average), but if you get the same gear piece over and over it's just frustrating (I've had 4 gloves now, what the heck do I do with them? There should be a way to trade them in for other pieces). I think that any activity should drop at least a bunch of unassembled components. That includes all story quests (class and otherwise), planetary, PVE, PVP, GSF, quests in the game including dailies, weeklies, heroics etc.. All bosses in Flashpoints, Uprisings and Operations should also award a bunch to every single member of the group, also, crafting should award unassembled components, as shold every command crate itself, CXP and command tokens as well and you should be able to buy all schematics that randomly drop from command crates for Command Tokens so devoted crafters can get them without having to grind PVP or PVE stuff they don't like. I'd also like to see all unassembled components (and all "Currency" in general), unassembled gear pieces, etc. be changed to legacy-wide, and possibly CXP as well.

Yeah. It needs to be increased considerably. At least as much so that expensive 10% bonus at least gives you some increase! I also think that everything that would give you regular XP while levelling should give you at least 1 CXP point, including taking down regular mobs. All quest payout needs to be increased alot as well, especially weekly quest payouts in all daily zones and heroics (20 CXP is just laughable for the quests, considering how much you get for relatively quick PVP/GSF matches). Plus it wouldn't hurt if the Ilum daily mission zone was restored to what it was before it was removed. Crafting things should award CXP as well and there needs to be a way to receive 230-242 schematics by simply crafting or via crew missions and not just operations and PVP dailies/weeklies. Right now it's just mind boggling that as someone that is mainly a crafter needs to do combat stuff to gain CXP ranks so you can receive higher end schematics when you are mainly a crafter! I'd also suggest that everything that drops from command crates and is currently bound should become bound on legacy, including Unassembled pieces. And CXP/levels should become legacy wide, too. I understand that there may have been issues to do the latter in time for 5.1, but 5.2 should be more than enough time to iron out these issues and set CXP to legacy wide. If not, hire some better coders (they could also implement/fix the long awaited chat bubbles for /say, /yell and /emote player chat option while they are at it).

Are you really surprised? After all, those are the same people that couldn't be arsed to implement chat bubbles for /say player chat which is one of the most requested features of all time implemented for over five years.

So this will be a story like KOTFE/KOTET and not more like Shadow of Revan? Does this mean to get to be able to access daily area we will have to play through all the KOTET/KOTFE with every character? Please reconsider and make the daily area available to every character or at least unlock it for the whole legacy once you got to that point in the story with one character. I like playing dailies as I can do those alone while waiting hours for the group finder to pop and I seldom find group content due to most of my friends quitting the game because of persistent the lack of chat bubbles (why aren't those in 5.2 anyway? Make them happen, we've been waiting well over 5 years now!) and the non-Legacy Command grind System RNG in 5.0/5.1 and the group finder almost never popping for any PVE content.

I doubt it. Otherwise, aside to the points you mentioned in your post, our communication options between players in the game wouldn't be so limited. Is it really too much to ask to add chat bubbles for player chat (including toggle on/off option), being able to /whisper / /tell to and from and participate in custom chat channels with opposing faction players, adding opposing faction players to your friend list (or, even better, add legacies to friend lists so you can see whenever your friends are on and talk to them on any character), etc.? I highly doubt it.

That's good. I hope that also means we'll finally get long-awaited features like chat bubbles for /say, /yell and /emote player chat and the removal of factional chat restrictions to improve communication with other players as well.

Warzone/GSF/etc. losses should only get the same as a win or at the very least only one piece less. You already get less of a CXP reward for loosing anyway (I also find this isn't a good idea, as it will only make the power difference between the mostly winning side and mostly loosing side bigger and the most inning side will always be stronger with the mostly loosing side having it harder and harder to catch up). On some servers the PVP is so lopsided, getting far less for playing with the loosing side will only drive people away and/or quit the match when it's obvious they are loosing (it often happens now, too) and warzones and GSF won't pop much anymore. By the way, do you also get Unassembled Pieces awarded for Daily/weekly PVP/GSF missions? One should get a bunch of those, just like it was previously with commendations. Also, the rewards need to be increased by alot or at least the requirement for having a previous Tier version to get a higher Tier one axed. The system how you present it now is not fun, and a game is supposed to be fun. Make changes before it's release so the system is enjoyable and friendly to everyone. The more people enjoy the game, the more they will play it. Grinding like mad is not an answer, same as RNG.

Will we get an increase the maximum number of outfit slots per character to 20 or 30? What about chat bubbles? Are they finally coming in 5.1? We've been waiting for them over five years now. That you still haven't implemented them even though they have been one of the top requests ever since launch shows everyone you have never been listening to the player base and aren't planning to.

Will those drop for everyone in the group if they drop or just one piece that will have to be contested for? I'd hope everybody that participates would get the reward this time around so people don't quarrel around, especially in pickup groups.

Very well said, and I agree as well. I won't be renewing my subscription because of the aforementioned things either, along with the continuous lack of speech bubbles for players in /say, /yell and /emote chat after five long years of unkept promises.

I didn't get any dark vs. light rewards delivered last week. Were they supposed to be in the mail? The companion wasn't in the mail either.