Why is his opinion more valid than mine? Or the developers?

Quicker respawns on Bounty Event quest NPCs. There. That's one time. But then we also have: Legacy Datacrons GSF Outfit designer Appearance designer Dyes Multiple rounds of Resolve changes Rancor mounts Heroic Terminal with teleporting Turning in quests without returning to the quest giver Adaptive Armor Strongholds (housing) ....

No. This is actually a horrible design philosophy. You don't create optional modes just because a portion of your users dislike a design decision. Especially so when that design decision is intended to serve a much larger portion of users and giving the option either increases your costs or degrades the experience of the others. I took a 60 to DK last night. It was laughable easy to walk around. I took a Level 20 to Hutta... and one shotted loads of mobs. You feel entitled to be godlike... the designers disagree. All indications say that this is part of a larger plan to normalize the interactions across planets and support more wide-ranging quest opportunities. Bonus points for cutting down on super-leveled PvP ganking and world bosses being solo-farmed by level capped characters. If you don't like it... don't play on the lower planets. There's your option.

A rebuttal in similar fashion: Don't like level sync? Don't play on lower level planets.

It's unethical because they agreed to let you have a game item that had certain abilities, then later decided that they didn't want it to have those abilities. Is that about right? Is it ethical for you to make an agreement giving them the right to make changes, then later calling them unethical for making changes? If you didn't think it was okay for them to make changes, why did you say it was alright when you signed up?

No, that can't be right. A "majority" of players said it was going to be horrible, so it has to be horrible. It's not possible that the "majority" made a judgement before even understanding the system. The "majority" would never do that. There's so many of them. [/sarcasm]

Not here... I have HK on a bunch of characters. Didn't bother on a bunch of others, because I didn't find him all that compelling. I don't really care if he changes because... I knew he was changing, and that he might change again. Welcome to MMOs. Furthermore, HK wasn't really all that much of a boost over a normal DPS companion. I mean, people kept insisting that he was, but in practice the difference was pretty subtle. Perhaps at mid levels you could make decent use of his unique abilities, but by endgame it didn't matter much. A 192-geared Kira seemed to run through mobs just as quick and with less management. I think the biggest boost to having HK was the extra crew member to run missions and stay ahead of crafting et al.

I know that people are mostly just venting emotions here and dislike applying logic, but I'm going to do it anyway: 1: You didn't buy Treek. You bought Coins and you got exactly what you paid for. You used those coins to buy a game experience, and got exactly what you paid for. 2: At no point did SWTOR ever declare Treek to be a superior companion. Whether you formed that view as an opinion or through some theorycrafting, it was never part of the advertising for Treek. 3: When you signed up for a SWTOR account, you gave Bioware permission to change the stats or behavior of your companions, your characters, your items, your abilities... really any part of the game they choose. This is something you told them you were okay with. This isn't some implicit agreement. It was stated very clearly in the agreement that you clicked "I Agree" on. I can be sympathetic that you paid cash for her and now don't want to use her, but you knew that it wasn't guaranteed that she would be unique forever, or "the best" forever... or for any period of time, really. You paid for coins, got coins. Used them to buy a companion, got a companion. Agreed to let them change the companions abilities.... but accused them of a crime when they did it.

There's nothing "dumber" about this. You seem to be using that phrase because you've seen other people using it for stuff they don't like, but you don't actually understand what it means. We knew they were collapsing companion abilities. There's no shock here. You had your super-special HK for years. You can deal.

You've demanded answers in other threads. In your OP on this thread, you said the information was "needed". The information isn't needed. If we don't get the information until the day of launch, it won't matter one bit to the players. There's nothing you could do with the information if you had it.

No. You specifically said you were posting concrete facts. Or are you suggesting that someone else using your account posted this: You made statements declaring them to be objective truth, but you refuse to post any sort of evidence for it, instead, you rely on logical fallacies, personal insults, and the Chewbacca Defense, of all things. Immature personal insults don't really improve your case. That's not the actions of a mature, reasonable customer seeking answers to some questions.

You know, I think that actually was the first time I can remember someone actually trying the Chewbacca defense in a non-ironic way. EDIT: Oh god. The Chewbacca Defense is on Wikipedia. I was totally expecting that link to run off to a South Park Wiki or TVTropes...

I'll take your usage of horrible logic to be an admission that you have zero proof.

No, actually its not obvious. The community on the forums --even including things like Reddit-- is only a tiny percentage of the actual player base and we've repeatedly seen actual real evidence that the forum community is not representative of the player base as a whole. So... the majority of a tiny non-representative fraction is not really convincing. Polls for games routinely skew results to the vocal minority of the player base. It's unfair to repeatedly make choices to serve this minority rather than serving the silent majority. Yes... a big long list of things that require so little brain power to think of that you'd have to be silly to imagine that you're the first one to consider them. The devs certainly have thought of them, but since you're not part of the dev team, you have zero rights to demand that they explain these things to you.

Haven't had much development experience, have you? Quick insight: Very few bug reports are ignored. However, bugfixing is not a simple or quick process and development resources are limited. Most of the bugs that are "ignored" are simply given reduced priority and allowed to exist because other higher priority items exist. Others are "ignored" while a couple developers work to rewrite foundation code that allows the fix to be accomplished. Others are "ignored" because their fixes are already rolled into designs that have future release dates assigned to them. And then we can repeat the old unfortunate truth: The primary purpose of PTS is not finding game bugs. Bioware has professional testers who are actually competent at reporting bugs in ways that are actually useful to developers. PTS is more about testing player behavior, server load, and large-volume performance. Most of the bugs that people complain about from PTS were reported by the professional testers a week earlier.

Yeah, the GSI and Dread Seed quests were the first issues that came to mind with the system. My suggestion is one way of about four or five that I came up with. The fact that I jumped to that issue with about 30 seconds of thought is a good sign that the developers thought about it right away, too. I'm sure they have some solution for it. Just how good the solution is remains to be seen, and will likely be something that could easily be debated in a couple ways. And it probably will be.

What other obvious things should they waste their time giving us official words on? I think we need an OFFICIAL answer on whether telling companions to attack will use the stats that scale to your level, or if they'll use Level 1 stats. And we'll need an OFFICIAL answer if med center droids still sell medpacks. And we'll need an OFFICIAL answer on whether we're allowed to wear level 60 gear when we are scaled down to level 25. Does it stay equipped? Does it go into our inventory? Does it drop the ground? We don't know. There might be a bug there. We better get an OFFICIAL answer. ... No. You don't need an official answer. You haven't asked a question that is even worth the time it would take to send an email to a developer. The official answer is very simple: "Yeah. We're not dumb We do testing. Bugs happen, but we saw the potential for this about two and a half minutes after we first conceived of the idea."

And you're presuming that they haven't had anyone test something so simple as running through each of the class quests. Bugs exist, and they will happen. But you're speculating about a bug that is brain-dead-simple to expect and test for. It's so simple-minded, that there's no point in trying to bring attention to it. It's practically at the top of the list for testing the basic functionality of the feature. It's on the level of emailing Toyota to tell them that there's a possible manufacturing fault with the 2016 Camry because the air bag might not deploy for some reason. Yeah. They already thought of that and its already on their list for testing, but thanks for pointing out the obvious.

The easy solution here is that the mobs spawn scaled to the level of the area they are in. Or rather: The scale level is set by map area, and all spawns regardless of quest are set according to that level (adjusted up and down as is normal). So for example, your GSI quest on Tattoine is in a Level 26 area, so you get scaled down to Level 31 (or whatever) and any mobs spawned for that quest get spawned as scale level +2-4 (level 28-30), since the quest can assume that you're going to be scaled down from at least level 50.

Wow. It's a good thing you pointed this out because I'm sure that no one at Bioware ever would have thought of it. [/deep, deep sarcasm] Seriously. There's nothing remotely insightful here. Yes, bugs exist, and it doesn't take more than a moment's thought to see the potential for issues with this many changes coming. However, if you think that that the scenario described wasn't heavily discussed by developers at Bioware many months ago, then you don't really understand much about development. This sort of bug is probably the most obvious thing to worry about with the system. Again, should we expect some sort of bug along this line? Sure. But its not something that's difficult to find or fix. If we see it, I would put my money on seeing it in some peripheral location or as some sort of bleedover from a non-instanced interaction. Something as simple as setting the wrong level in a class story instance is something the play testers would have been reporting a month ago. So... yeah. Wait on the bug reports until you actually play the game. You're not providing any useful information at the moment.

I doubt it will have an effect nearly as strong as you think. There are still plenty of planets that have intersecting quest areas that don't generate world PvP. The Alde Library region of Alderaan comes to mind. Despite being a crossroads of major story quest lines, it's never been a significant OWPvP battleground (in any of the servers I've been on). Belsavis was more active for OWPvP earlier in SWTOR's life, but that was sporadic and usually conducted by max-level characters fighting each other and not really taking interest in questing players. Even if everyone is down-synced to a similar level, they're still going to be over the level of a normal leveling character, and unless Expertise is totally removed by the down-sync, max-level characters will still have significant-to-huge advantage over characters still working their way up. If the Expertise still exists, the situation might even get worse as leveling players would have a harder time distinguishing a normal player from a down-synced PvP-god. At least when I'm ganked by a Lvl60 in RPvP gear on Tatooine, I know it's coming and it'll be over quickly.

Strongly Disagree. Far too often, macros are used just to create optimum set of actions with virtually no input from the user. It ends up being a feature primarily used by a small percentage of the community, and that small percentage gets a significant advantage over the rest of the players who don't. As a result, its a mechanism that further widens the gap between the very high level players and moderate level players, but requires zero brain power to achieve. While I'm sympathetic to your disability, that's an argument for special accommodations, not a global change to the entire game. There is a mild zoom mechanism. Check the bottom of the map panel for the magnifying glass checkbox. It lets you hover over an area and see a larger view. Still, on some maps even that view is pretty small. Strongly Disagree. See discussion over macros above. Mods are usually used to give players some concrete advantage for very little input skill. In the case where they are used only by a small number of players, that increases the elite-moderate-casual balance and makes the game much less friendly to casual players. You get the scenario where new players feel left out or face a steep learning curve as people tell them stuff like: "LFG The False Emperor, must have SuperHealToolz3 and AutoFairLoot4442". That sounds like... you're playing the game. You know that the mobs aren't there to help you get to your next objective, right? In many cases, they are placed in specific spots so that you cannot get past them. That's part of the whole point.

Because balance doesn't always let you do that. The number of variables involved can get overwhelming. "Building on top" of existing abilities was the cause of the increasingly wild fluctuations we saw before the move to Disciplines. Granted, it was amplified by the use of hybrid classes, but the desire to keep everything in place resulted in them chasing a goal that couldn't be reached. The thing to remember is that while you might see things as being obvious, others don't. Your example of Jet Charge is a very powerful ability for the powertechs, but that also results in a implicit threat to balance. Yes, by moving it you're going to upset people, but that's because no one ever likes being on the negative side of a balance change. There's no mathematical equation for determining perfect balance. It is a very difficult (possibly unsolvable) problem (Literally: It's a subset of the Bin Packing Problem). There is no algorithm known that can solve it other than an exhaustive search of all permutations. However, given that each permutation has a range of outcomes based on player-determined probability, there simply may not be a solution. Instead, game balance gets implemented in much the same way that nature handles balance for humans. It's accepted to be an imperfect system which is never actually in balance, but wavers back and forth, providing a dynamic equilibrium that doesn't deviate in one direction for long enough to cause problems. So... balance always changes, and it keeps changing so long as the game is still alive and adapting. KotFE is bringing a lot of changes. Balance is going to have to change with it. If it goes too far, it will swing back eventually.

Technically, no. SWTOR runs in two processes, which implicitly means it has at least two threads. Within those two processes there are additional threads to do various things, however, the bulk of the work is indeed done in just two threads, with each process having one thread doing the majority of CPU work. Of that, the "main" process/thread does ~60-80% of the work, So, while it has multiple threads, there is still a single thread that does most of the work of actually performing game actions. The second process and its main thread seem to be focused on the loading and management of other resources, rather than game actions. No. It's not obvious. You just associated it with the 32bit-64bit change because it feels like it should be big. Do some research on what 64bit architectures really are before claiming that its a solution to all such problems. Again: the main difference between 32bit and 64bit compilation is per-process memory limits. That's not going to do a lot to improve fps. If you want to claim that it is, then please provide some technical description of what mechanism is at play. If you don't understand the topic, then at least research it before you start making claims about what it can do. Again, if you understand how SWTOR and video games in general (or even just general software) works, you'll see that its not random at all. During the time that you are just looking at the mob, there is very little client-server interaction that is necessary. Your local client can easily fill in the gaps between server status updates with normal animations. The moment you start attacking, your client starts sending updates on your position, direction and abilities being used. The server responds with updates on your characters status (HP, resource levels), the mobs position and direction, its HP, the abilities (animations) its using and how far along it is... All those updates need to be synchronized and the local display needs to have that state reflected on a sub-second timescale. If any of those changes result in an animation difference, then that needs to be loaded, calculated and sent off for rendering. The more changes that need to be made, the lower your framerate is going to drop as the game spends more time calculating changes and waiting to render until they are done. Understand: The graphics on ESO are not notably more detailed than SWTOR. They just have more detailed textures. The simplistic ("cartoonish") graphics of SWTOR are not a result of simple graphics, but of the designed art style. You like the art style of ESO better? That's fine, but the model complexity is not higher than SWTOR (from what I've seen at least). As for the number of players on a screen at a time, part of this is indeed due to the method with which SWTOR uses for managing multiple player actions and server synchronization, but its also just as much to do with the simpler rendering routines used in ESO. SWTOR ends up using a lot more reflection, bloom, particle effects, dynamic lighting and customized shaders than ESO appears to. That doesn't mean that SWTOR is super amazing, it just means they have a more complex rendering routine. Being honest, it's probably more than they should have used, but it was the way they designed it. ESO seems to handle multiple players better than SWTOR, but it also has simpler animations and I'm not convinced it would handle the level of effects used in SWTOR all that much better.

Each studio has a tendency to have a different culture and game developers have a noticeably different life from developers in other fields, but not all that different, so I'll give you a quick run down on what I know from my experience, my interactions with game developers, and various interviews. For example: I am not a game developer, but I am a developer who works on a large internet-based service with loads of customers (more than SWTOR). Right now, I've got a list of about two dozen bugs, improvements or requests that are sitting on a notebook on my desk. I'm not working on any of those right now. Partly because I'm on my lunch break, and partly because I'm in the middle of another large project. The coding for that project finished (for me) last week, but I'm still working on it. We have to coordinate testing, work through configuration, set up deployment routines, run benchmarks and schedule reviews of the changes to make sure we didn't miss anything important. I've got a meeting later today to educate some other developers on changes I made last week, so they can integrate them with their code. I spent a couple days documenting that. I'll be doing more testing tomorrow. When I have time, I try to work through the backlog. Some of them are things that need to be looked at regularly, sort of like class balance changes. Some of them are things that need to be updated or fixed before other parts of the product are changed. I can't think of any time when I had nothing to do. Rather, I spend most days with a backlog of issues waiting for my attention and a ever-changing assortment of priorities assigned to them. I doubt Bioware is all that different. The developers at Bioware are almost certainly constantly busy, with a virtual endless backlog of things that want their attention. Class balance is just one of those things, and it probably sits around as a constant task on a couple people's plates, waiting for the weeks where some manager decides that its their highest priority. I'm hoping that's a joke. They have a salary. The vast majority of them will never even touch class balance, as they're busy on all sorts of other things. Class balance is probably a medium sized task that is periodically examined, and scheduled for changes along with other major game changes. I am hoping that was a joke, too. You didn't honestly expect that it was actually "perfection", right? Because you know that isn't possible, and that sort of static structure is actually bad for something like an MMO, right? The point of Disciplines was to provide a more stable structure and make it easier for the developers to balance classes in the future. Take note of that: The whole idea was executed with the expectation that more changes would be needed. They certainly never said it was perfection.