SWTOR already has a number of credit sinks but an issue that can occur with credit sinks is that the population of players that have the most amount of money in a game aren't necessarily spending credits on those items, features or unlocks. Another issue that someone brought up in a thread not long ago are gold farmers. It was mentioned in the thread that SWTOR's credits on gold selling sites are so worthless at this point that you can get a billion credits for around $10.

You didn't post the topic that long ago and it's still early in parts of the world. It's also a subject4/topic that's been posted and talked about several times already. https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=996458

Voice acting is not the part expensive of SWTOR, it never has been. Back in 2013 at GDC SWTOR's (then) director James Ohlen confirmed that voice acting was not what made SWTOR costly to develop. It was a myth that the internet built up about the game. The expensive part of SWTOR comes from creating choice-based narrative in an MMO due to the amount of QA that is involved in testing all the different variations that can result from both narrative and gameplay. https://www.engadget.com/2013-03-29-gdc-2013-james-ohlen-on-how-f2p-saved-swtor.html FF14 allows for its story to be more doable in their game because they're not doing cutscenes every time you speak to someone. They're not having to do unique class-specific areas, quests, etc, beyond the short job quest chains they have. There is no cost-saving measure for SWTOR's story while still retaining the large number of cutscenes & dialogue options/choices. The uniqueness of the class quests is what makes them expensive and time-consuming. Not the voice acting.

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That's because your race is basically cosmetic in SWTOR. There are maybe a dozen lines total in the game that acknowledge specific races and most of them appear in the Sith Warrior (Pureblood) & Imperial Agent (Human, Chiss, Rattataki) storylines. In terms of story, you're playing your class more so than your race, and the things you're doing tend to supersede your race. For instance, if you're a Knight you're the Hero of Tython, if you're a Trooper you're the leader of Havoc Squad. That's how the world/universe recognizes you. There's also you being able to play as a Cathar and ask what a Cathar is on Ord Mantell. On top of that there's basically the entirety of Taris where somebody would take notice that you're a Cathar but they don't and that's because they were never gonna go back and redo or update a bunch of VO just because they allowed more races to be playable, especially when the vanilla game barely acknowledges them.

It be cool but I imagine it's not possible for the same reason class quests aren't replayable which is due to the way the game flags story content in the vanilla game. KOTFE was designed with replayability in mind while the vanilla game unfortunately wasn't.

True, what I should have said is that it wouldn't have seen any real or significant growth as a result. If you appeal to the crowd craving challenge you might get some new players and lapsed players returning but you'd also lose players and make the game a turn off to more casual players so there wouldn't be any real advantage because the numbers would probably be back at around the same place regardless if it's made easier or more difficult.

Yeah it's unfortunately very MMO in that regard of stretching things out and padding content to artificially lengthen the experience. I really enjoy the starter planets. You only ever have like 1 to 3 quests in your log, your hitting story beats fairly quickly, you get fairly familiar with the layout, know where everything is, etc, but then once you get to the bigger planets it's like - Run into this quest hub area & pick up several quests all at the same time and hope that you can keep track of them all in your head after spending 15 or so minutes talking to all the different NPCs in the hub area. - Travel across a vast stretch of nothingness to get to the quest area(s) & spend like 30 mins to an hour doing all the quests. - Go back to the quest hub area and turn in all the quests hoping that you remembered what they all were or that they didn't muddle together. - Move onto the next quest hub area and repeat the process all over again. That's of course all while still trying to do your class quests and keeping track of what's going on there as they themselves become fewer and further between during the Chapter 1-3 experience. I understand why they built it all out the way they did but it just doesn't work well in the end and it definitely clashes with the story aspects of the game.

Making the game more challenging or difficult doesn't get them millions of new subs. It just satisfies part of the audience that's already there. SWTOR at the end of the day just isn't the type of Star Wars game that many Star Wars fans want to play, nor is it the type of MMO that many MMO fans want to play. It's not good or strong enough in either one of those directions. It really doesn't matter if the game asks nothing of them combat-wise because as I explained earlier there are plenty of gamers who aren't necessarily looking for that, who enjoy a power fantasy, and so on. Chances are there's always going to be a bigger audience of people that want something that's simpler, more casual, etc, which is why Bioware continues targeting that audience with all the updates/changes they've made to make the game easier or streamline it.

The short answer is because the idea of numbers going up is appealing to people, stats, damage, money, etc. Why do they need to add more armor sets, weapons, locations, etc? Why can't people just be fine with everything that's there? If this is your issue with things why not put all the information you just posted in the first post? Why do you keep making these topics trying to disguise what it is you're doing/saying like you're trying to conduct a survey when you really just want people to tell you that 7.0 is bad? "Hey so what do you guys think of this? It's bad right?" (after several people reply) "No, see here's what the actual problem is and why you are all dumb." Why bother with the pretense? You already know your own views and issues so why not post those from the get-go? People aren't validating your passive-aggressive questions from the get-go so you might as well be more upfront from the get go.

I would not say that is the case outside of MMOs and see that's another one of SWTOR's problems. Many people who want to play the game or engage in the Star Wars experience of it all generally don't want to engage with the type of combat SWTOR offers. The other issue is that if you enjoy tab targetting combat in an MMO there are other MMOs that do it way better which means SWTOR isn't appealing to the audience that wants a more "Star Warsy" game nor are they really appealing to the tab target MMO crowd. Challenge isn't necessarily what the majority of people coming to SWTOR are looking for, or MMOs in general. When Wildstar launched one of its biggest criticisms was that it was too challenging. There's nothing wrong with making a challenging game, there have been great successes with games like Dark Souls however those games aren't 100 million dollar budget MMOs that are trying to attract the widest possible audience. Something like SWTOR can't have it every way. It can't be a Star Wars game, that's challenging, with a focus on story, and an MMO all while trying to attract the widest possible audience with the expectation that it would be as successful as WoW. All of those things aren't going to mix well and ultimately one or multiple of those elements is going to conflict with the others. True.

There's like a single-digit number of those animations/abilities. They're few and far between. It's also possible that animations from other tech class abilities can be used in their place.

None of them play like SWTOR, they're either turn-based, allow all of your attacks to hit multiple enemies, etc. SWTOR's problem is that its combat doesn't really appeal to any large audience of people. It doesn't offer strategy/challenge nor does it offer the type of power fantasy people enjoy from other games, notably other Star Wars games. There are plenty of people who love playing Dynasty Warriors or games that are power fantasies that allow you to just stomp enemies and while SWTOR is easy it's style, feel, and flow of combat doesn't give that feeling or type of engagement nor does it (generally) satisfy the typical/average MMO player either. So, what you're left with is a system or style that ultimately satisfies no one. SWTOR really needed to do its own thing with its combat from the outset instead of just copying what WoW did. Even Wildstar, a MMO that was made by ex-WoW devs did its own thing with combat. Same goes for other MMOs that were developed in the same time frame as SWTOR like GW2 and ESO.

Is this your first character? People will play the same way you're playing early on but once they're on their 8th character or whatever they've done it all so many times they want to skip past it. The other issue is that a number of people consider the combat to be too boring and too much of a slow down to engage with. The solution isn't to "everybody should just fight all the mobs" but rather If you/they (the devs) want people to engage with mobs then they need to make the combat more engaging, less tedious, etc. Look at games that have a focus on combat like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry. Do you see people skipping past enemies in those games? Even when looking at other Star Wars games like Battlefront or Fallen Order you generally don't see people trying to skip past enemies. Why is that? Note I'm not saying SWTOR needes to have combat exactly like any of those games but maybe take a look at what gets people wanting to engage with combat in other games and why they don't want to do so in SWTOR regardless if they're playing Flashpoints, solo PVE or whatever else.

A Techblade class could be introduced for tech-users that recycles all animations from Knights/Warriors while only having to replace the few Force-specific animations like Choke/Stasis. Doesn't really require new animations or balancing since it just be using the already existing balanced skills. And I imagine that's how the first newly added Combat Styles will be. Variations on what already exists in the game. Not anything that has to be built from the ground up. Not that they will never have something completely different but more like I would expect to see something built from the ground up much further out.

"This thing really sucks right? You're upset about it aren't you? Validate the expressions I've put forth." (New Topic - On Repeat) The attitude & overtly passive-aggressiveness of the topics makes it all very confusing. It's like "I want people to validate me but I want to ridicule them and their time spent on this game." Weirdly not a lot of people in these threads seem to be like "Yeah, you're totally right TC!" I wonder why that is?

After 7.0 there won't be classes anymore. They've said they can add more Combat Styles in the future. I can't imagine they'll add more Origins though.

This isn't the right place to discuss this also this isn't a news story that just broke today. It popped up a while ago. This should be in the Star Wars Discussion section, not the SWTOR General Discussion section. It's not a specific thread about a very specific topic. https://www.swtor.com/community/forumdisplay.php?f=251

Aren't you just describing what happens whenever any MMO raises the level cap? I'd imagine the answer to the "how will you feel?" type questions will be "the same way I felt the last time the level cap got raised."

I don't know the situation with HK-51, adding HK-55 might have created issues with the existing pathing directories for HK-51, but the old/existing/vanilla companions didn't get muted they just don't have new VO after a certain point in the game so they no longer have ambient dialogue. Adding new VO for the original companions requires 33 different actors multiplied by 3 given the additional languages the game is recorded in brings the total to 99. There are 16 voices for the player characters, times 3 is 48. So if they wanted to do an update that had or required new VO for the companions and our characters it would require 49 actors just for the English version of the game and 147 across all languages. It's also not a money issue but rather a time issue. Re-assembling a cast that large takes a lot of time and it's why the return of the existing companions is/was so spread out from 4.0 onwards.

What you're describing falls in line with traditional MMO combat, ie WoW, but other MMOs like ESO and GW2 offer something a bit different as did Wildstar when it was still around. While making the combat like Dark Souls would be going too far SWTOR needs some kind of update or refresh to its combat. It doesn't have anything to call its own and what it does have doesn't hold up to the competition.

I'm guessing the blaster would be in the player's off-hand the entire time as that's what would be easiest to do/animate, especially if it's an off-hand weapon that uses the existing blaster models in the game because that's how all the current animation sets work in the game, ie Sentinel/Marauder & Gunslinger/Mercenary.

Right, but we don't know specifically how it happens. Does the option just pop up via a menu or do you have to visit an NPC to do so? That's what I meant about us not knowing the specifics. We know a lot of the broader elements of what all is happening but not all the exact specifics and/or details.

ESO and SWTOR are very different games and SWTOR's engine is quite infamous and notorious for the problems or limitations it has. ESO did start out development on the Hero Engine funny enough which is the same engine that powers SWTOR however ESO used Hero Engine as more of a blueprint or staging tool while developing their own engine/tech alongside it and as a result ESO doesn't have the same limitations as SWTOR. I believe there is still some code from the Hero Engine in ESO which is why you see the Hero Engine logo when booting up ESO.

It doesn't seem too complicated - Classes are being renamed "Origins" - Advanced Classes are being renamed "Combat Styles" - You can only use 2 Combat Styles per character - You will be able to set Loadouts. Think Outfit tabs but for gear & skills - You can use the Light/Dark Side styles once you've reached Light/Dark 5 That's basically the gist of it. We just don't know all the specifics involved, for example where/when/how you pick your second Combat Style It also doesn't help that all you're/w're seeing is text right now. Once there's a UI in place I'm sure it'll all be easier to understand, especially if you're creating a new character.