Better a player who stays, than someone who is here for a month.

I like when my loot belongs to me, thank you very much.

The reason 12x brought people back was because it made the game piss easy, and removed all work required to accomplish that self-esteem boosting feat of getting level 55. The people attracted back to the game by this are the type that aren't going to stick around. That, not putting in the work to level, understand their character and understand the game, will continue to not put in work or effort to understand the end-game and run that content. There is no reason to think that just because it's made easier to get to end-game by a factor of 12, magically 12 times more people will play end-game. Reality is that people who like it piss easy won't stick around, and won't try more than a handful of times to do end-game content. Why? Because end-game content is just more of the same as what you experience on the way to end-game. The only novel thing is operations, and there's no reason to run them more than once if you aren't gear grinding or comm farming. To wit? People who won't put in the effort to get to level cap at the normal XP rate (which is incredibly easy already when compared to other MMORPGs) aren't going to put in the time and effort to do ANYTHING ELSE either.

This would be perfect.

What the people clamoring for permanent and easy to get 12x do not understand is that XP rates that mean you consume a teeny tiny portion of the game, and all in about a day of playtime, after which you find yourself at end-game, under-geared and not prepared to consume any of THAT content, is not good for the long term health of the game.

This is the case. Skill costs have been set to 0. That is all. You still have to "buy" them, just now for 0 credits.

The current state of affairs is actually a nice compromise between the convenience of Terminal-dispensed dailies, and full cutscene dailies. Speaking of, we haven't had full cutscene dailies since Ilum and Belsavis. Black Hole? 1 cutscene, only on Imperial side. The rest are terminal-dispensed. Makeb? Oricon? CZ-198? All terminals, no cutscenes.

Because I might want it sometimes, and not want it other times. For me, 12x was nice. But it also eliminated me and my girlfriend leveling TOGETHER.

You should take a lesson in poll design. Your options are horrible. It should be a straight Yes/No.

I draw the comparison between 12x XP and private servers of various MMO's with insane XP rates. Essentially, there's no staying power. People don't stay. They consume, they max level, and then they leave because they're bored.

Look at all those possibilities! And 99.99% of them are bad. There is one optimal distribution per tree, per role. One. If you didn't take it, you were gimping yourself. Disciplines makes it official: there is one path, and it provides the same or more utility and strength than was previously possible because of measures they were taking to block and limit Hybrids. The Utility system provides more opportunity for meaningful customization than the skill tree EVER did.

I would absolutely prefer that it not come back. But if it does, please for the love of God include the ability to toggle it after it has been purchased.

At the bottom, and on the tooltip when you mouse over the 12x XP on their feature page.

Easy 200k retraining skills on my Commandos. Skills I had already paid for, even. Over 600k at level 60 ALONE. Comparable figures at 57, 58 and 59. This is ONE character. Repeat that on 9 others that I retrained abilities on to get ready to take them to 60, and on a few characters I have partially leveled towards 60. The costs are NOT "maybe 50k per character".

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm pleased and will wait patiently for the change to go into affect. But I'm totally smarting too, having spent several million credits on training in the past three days, and if I had been slower, or waited three days, not even a week but three days, I could have saved millions. I'm not wealthy in-game, I have a modest sum of credits. I spent a not-insignificant proportion of my total wealth on skill training that in a few days would have cost me nothing.

Refunds not feasible? The following are known: 1. What skills a player has access to. 2. What they cost to train at the various levels and ranks. 3. What skills a player has actually trained and paid for. With that information it would be possible (perhaps not EASY, but absolutely possible) to essentially do the process in the reverse direction, adding up all the various ability costs and refunding that amount. Essentially all you would be doing would be zeroing out ability costs going forward, and then a script that reads player data to determine what skills you have, comparing it to a database of skill costs, tabulating that information and refunding it. You could even have cutoff points, as I rather expect they have logs that would indicate WHEN you trained a particular skill. So December 2nd forward (since the last two months ability costs were 0, it'd be odd to receive money for those) all abilities trained could be tabulated and refunded. The costs aren't dynamic, they're static and known.

You're really not in a position to know anything at all about if there will or won't be one.

Uh, yeah? I have literally spent 2 million or more credits on training skills alone, since TUESDAY. And they just now announce, oh, we're going to make them free? That's awesome! But I just halved what little credits I had to train up skills. :|

I have 19 characters. I play all of them to some degree. They all more or less still play the same way. The game more or less still plays the same way. Disciplines isn't even a particularly radical change. It streamlines and simplifies a process that was needlessly complex for the results of said process. In point of fact, through utilities it provides more customization and options than were previously available to you. The game has not undergone some huge shift. It plays almost exactly the same.

Please don't.

You must not have been to Yavin.

Uh? Why would the total be equal. There would always come a point in the lifetime of SWTOR, that a Lifetime account would be cheaper than just subscribing on a monthly basis. Unless the Lifetime account is unreasonably expensive, of course. In which case why not just subscribe? Honestly, I don't see why Lifetime accounts are, or should be, a thing, from a business point of view.

Bioware, you have divorced Hammer Shot's heal function from the skill. Now, they are independent skills, each with their own slot on the Quickbars. Before, if you targetted an ally, it healed! An enemy? It did damage! Now, one heals, the other does damage. Personally this has been a huge negative impact in my QOL for healing. Can this be fixed, so that the two are combined and function the way it was previously, with the two abilities in one?

And here I quite liked that. I right click the character, the quest box pops up and I can peruse it while my character and the NPC talk in the background. No loading, no cutscene, no loss of control, just smoothness. Fabulous.

Mountains out of molehills. It's 7 days. Sit down.