This is spot-on for me. 1) Players need to tamp down their expectations. It has been said repeatedly they have a limited staff right now. Everything in the company is going towards Anthem. 2) I've been making this point for a while now. The majority of this playerbase doesn't even like to group up to do flashpoints, let alone an ops. Remember the Darth Hexid promotion? The requirement was to run three flashpoints or warzones on any difficulty through the group finder in order to get her. You would have thought BW said to run every single ops on nightmare mode, or have a 2k+ group rating in ranked warzones because of the amount of protest you saw on the forums. Everyone has been playing solo since around SOR. So, yeah, not sure who this ops boss is actually for.

That can't be true. Drew Karpashyn wrote KOTOR, the Revan novel, and the Jedi Knight story among others. He's basically responsible for the entire Old Republic era the way we know it in gaming. Seriously. To say you've never heard of him is to say you've never really paid any attention to Star Wars at all.

These threads are always kinda fun, but I think people need to realize this game doesn't have the support staff or money to do barely anything other than what they are doing now. Games like FFXIV and WoW have the kind of staffs to do stuff like that. We need to be a bit more realistic with what we expect to see. Now, if SWTOR gets a new publisher and an influx of money, then you never know. Stranger things have happened. Look at LOTRO. That game is on its like fourth or fifth publisher.

The majority of the game's population has always been Empire. It's been a problem from day one. There were MANY of us who tried to tell BW back during the beta that they were showing entirely too much Sith/Empire love in all their marketing and cosmetic designs. Empire had the best looking armor, the best looking animations, and in many cases, the best class and planetary stories. The first Blur trailer was of Malgus and the Sith destroying the Jedi Temple. All the marketing and buzz was Sith, Sith, and more Sith. And occasionally, "Oh, here's a Jedi." What the OP is seeing has been a problem for seven years. Welcome to the Republic!

Story actually scales exceedingly well in FFXIV. In fact, that's the main reason why I haven't been playing SWTOR too much these days. Because all of my gaming time is spent over there simply because I am 100% engrossed and invested in the story. And when I say scale, I mean, it truly scales. What starts from level 1 continues and builds all the way up to max level across multiple expansions. It's not like WoW or even SWTOR, where each expansion is kind of their own thing. In FFXIV you are required to complete all the previous expansions' Main Scenario Quests (MSQ) before being allowed to start the new content. Admittedly, that can be annoying, but it really emphasizes that the most important thing in a Final Fantasy game is the story. And it pays off in huge ways. Now, I agree story is not sustainable in the way its set up in this game. Each class having their own story and then continuing those stories for years to come is impractical for an MMO. That requires too much staff and resources. But one on-going main story for everyone can be done. And that seems to be the current direction of the game.

I don't think they have the staff anymore to do something like this. But to be fair, even large MMOs like FFXIV or ESO find adding another playable faction as a metric crapton of work.

What you call agendas I simply call bad writing. Rey being OP, the Force itself being a tad OP, scenes that didn't need to be there, wasted characters - you can thank JJ Abrams for most of that when he broke several tropes in TFA. Primarily because he didn't have a real story. People on the right and the far right are the only ones who see agendas. Particularly with strong women being in positions of authority making life and death decisions. But that's not surprising. Conservatives see agendas in virtually everything. They would see an agenda in their salad dressing if it wasn't white enough.

There is no forced agenda unless you want to see one. TLJ was not without its faults, but the amount of hate it got was just way over the top. I understand some people will like it and some people won't. But the hostility and toxicity of the fanbase towards the film matches a lot of the vitriol I've seen directed at this game. SWTOR was never perfect. But it wasn't a bad game.

The problem with this is while it sounds good on paper, I'm not sure it would be successful. Star Wars fans are pretty terrible (in general) and always say they want something different. Then someone comes along and actually does try to do something different, and everyone loses their crap. But if they do something that's very traditional Star Wars, like good vs. evil and all that, then everyone says, "Boring. This is just a retelling of the originals." It's quite honestly a no win situation. If I was an established writer or producer you couldn't pay me enough money to write something in this universe. Fans are untenable.

Old Makeb and Oricon. An endless sea of unavoidable mobs stacked on top of each other at every turn. Really bad design.

I am here till the bitter end. I was here back in 2008 when BioWare and the old LucasArts made a cryptic announcement about "a new interactive game", and used to participate in the thread on the now-gone BioWare forums. Then I was here for the official announcement and the unbelievable hype. The debate about the game's release date, the classes, the playable species, all of that. On Fridays they used to have some sort of big reveal or developer video, and the community would wait breathlessly all week for any new bits of info. If nothing new was revealed, the forums would absolutely meltdown. Hell, if the update wasn't released by 10am PST on Friday, the forums would implode. If you don't believe me, I'm sure you can google it. It was hilarious in a sad way. (The community was pretty terrible back then. But then again, Star Wars fans in general are among the worst in all of fandom. That is not debatable.) So I've been here from the beginning, and I'll be here when they turn the lights out.

Even though I said earlier it would be hard to redeem a character like Vaylin because of the way she's written, her redemption would be more justifiable than Arcann's. Vaylin was raised in a cage. Taken from her mother as a little girl, then tortured physically and mentally until adulthood. Until she snapped. The only thing that remained - the only thing that saved her - was her rage. Arcann, on the other hand, was raised as a prince. He and his brother had everything given to them. By all accounts, they never wanted for anything. They were heroes to their people, and feared conquerors to their enemies. So when he rebels against Valkorian, he's really acting like a spoiled brat. The trailers showed that clearly. In fact, if you chose to kill Arcann, his father actually had the best line that sums up the character perfectly: "You were a child." So Vaylin actually does make more sense in terms of redemption.

Ah man, why'd you have to Godwin the thread. Took more pages than I thought, though. So, there's that.

The problem is, redeeming Vaylin is tantamount to redeeming the Joker. I just don't see it happening. Also, I do agree with the above poster who said that the writing for Vaylin was over the top in KOTET. Her lines were cringe-worthy and it felt like the devs were trying super hard to make her scary and powerful. It didn't work. Her conditioning didn't elicit any feelings of empathy from me, either. It felt forced. No pun intended.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, pretty much all LIs are pansexual now. So there's really no such thing as "straight" or "gay or lesbian." They are simply love interests available to everyone. So, I guess I should've just said, another female romance option.

I should also mention that, even though I'm a guy, I've actually romanced a couple male characters on two of my female toons because, hey, my female toons need loving too! I just want to see another straight male option. Because the more the merrier.

I also want to add that there needs to be another romance option for straight males, though.

As outlandish as Star Wars can be sometimes, Valkorian is the only character I know of that has ever cheated death by jumping into bodies. Believe it or not, aside from occasional Force ghosts or holocrons, when someone dies in Star Wars, they actually stay dead. Now I supposed you could say that Vaylin learned the possessing bodies technique from her father, and managed to take over a cloned body, which I think is what Palpatine did in the now defunct EU. But that's getting into silly territory. Even in a fantasy universe.

Except she has a kill option. But then again, so did Arcann. So, I give up. Most LIs didn't have a kill option till much later in the game. Like Aric, Kaliyo, Torian, Vette and Malavai. Those kill options weren't until the expansions, years after vanilla SWTOR. But whatever, I don't think it really matters anymore.

Depends on who the company is. WildStar is still running and that game is arguably in worse shape than SWTOR. Same with Age of Conan. And that's while sharing the market with another Conan MMO. And by the same developer, to boot. But I can't picture EA doing that. Look what they did to WAR. That game had a dedicated (albeit small) playerbase but EA decided to sunset it. This game might survive just because it's Star Wars, though.

Valentine's Day is a Hallmark holiday. Nothing more.

Saddened.

Well, the Rakghoul Event is something I always thought should just be around Halloween. Life Day is our version of Christmas, so space zombies could be our version of Halloween.

This has actually turned me off to Anthem. And that's saying something because I've always bought every BioWare game sight unseen since KOTOR. Been a huge fan of theirs since that game. But the development of Anthem has really rubbed me the wrong way. I don't like the way it feels, and I especially don't like the fact that it has pulled resources away from other beloved titles, such as Mass Effect and Star Wars. At this point, I feel like it's not just SWTOR that is fighting for its life, but BioWare itself. If Anthem flops, I think EA shutters the company. If Anthem is a huge success, then BioWare continues on with some momentum, but I don't see them funneling any of the money they might make from Anthem back into SWTOR. Everything going forward will be about the continued support of that game. It's telling that a lot of folks said KOTET felt like the end of SWTOR. Looks like they may be right.

Has BW given a date when UCs will be legacy wide? Because right now, I have a ton of alts I'd like to play but am not because I'm still doing the GC grind on my main. I had read that the devs really want to reward playing alts and am wondering when that's actually going to happen.