I really want some customizations for the Star Fortress companions, as well.

The saboteur storyline is starting to feel like an abandoned plot thread, and although the choices have minimal effect, and 7.0's options are trivial (at least for an Imperial saboteur), they do affect the story. I can not speak to a Republic saboteur, as I do not have one, but for Imperial saboteurs being a saboteur affects things such as an NPC's death, the strength of the original faction coming out of Onslaught, and whether you make an NPC into an asset or not. I am not certain if a prompt would be possible since it likely would have to come after the character is created and by then the choices would have to have been made.

You are missing the point. When you start Jedi Under Siege Lana asks you which faction you want to support. If you choose your original faction you become a loyalist, if you choose the opposite faction you become a saboteur and have access to the saboteur choices during Jedi Under Siege, Onslaught, and Legacy of the Sith. You must make that choice before moving forward with the story. The question being asked is: which choice is made? If the Commander's Character token were updated so that it started new characters at LotS, how is the choice of being a loyalist or saboteur decided? Are you suggesting that the choice fall along faction lines again, just like the default choices in Eternal Throne and Fractured Alliances?

I think, with their current development capabilities, BW needs to return to 2.0 style updates and story telling where each release is a self-contained story rather than an ongoing multi-threaded narrative. Take for example the saboteur story arc, which began with 5.10 Jedi Under Siege, released on 11 December 2018. It has been four years and three months since JUS. The saboteur options in 7.0 were minimal and fairly inconsequential. At this point being a saboteur is starting to feel like an abandoned story element considering how central it was to 5.10 and 6.0. The Malgus and Mando plots are dragging on. Two mins of Malgus gloating Vizzini style does not move a story forward. How about when Gnost-Dural said he had a planet in mind for the Jedi's new home? Completely forgotten. And stop with the mandatory story flashpoints. Those should be optional.

Brrazz, the informative Jawa in the Cartel Bazaar, still allows us to spend Jawa Junk for a Jawa Intel module to boost Analysis Module acquisition, but does not allow for Underworld Syndicate Plans. Please re-enable the option to acquire Jawa Intel modules to boost Underworld Syndicate Plans and keep both options available throughout Season 4 and beyond. The option to continue to acquire reputation tokens for G.AM.E. and the Shadow Syndicate is greatly appreciated but the drop rates for Syndicate Modules and Analysis Modules is abysmally low. Being able to use Jawa Intel for both would make it feasible to complete those reputation lines before the servers shut down forever, and would remove some of the huge quantities of Jawa Junk that were introduced to the game during 6.0. Either make separate modules for each Season reputation line or modify the Jawa Intel module so that it works on any Season reputation line. Or if it already works that way then update the language to make that clear.

They are absolutely still dropping and the drop rate is abysmally low. Same for Season 2's underworld modules when you have Fen active. I wish BW would turn back on the option to spend Jawa junk to increase the drop rate for both. Actually, think I am going to go suggest that. Edit -- I just checked and you can still purchase the Jawa Intel module for G.A.M.E.

We can not say specifically how it will affect the game once it comes to live, only relay our experiences when it was on the PTS. For myself, I saw a graphics improvement and was able to up my settings from high to very high. But, the tree rendering engine was still being upgraded so on the PTS trees were not rendering. That could have been why I saw a performance increase, or it could translate to better performance on live. It is hard to say.

BitRaider is not longer an option. It was removed completely some time ago.

In order for any of your post to be taken seriously you have to explain how Cartel Coins generate credits. GTN sales do not generate credits (but they do remove them). Player-to-player trades do not generate credits. Both of those actions only move credits from one player to another; those credits have to already be in the game. The removal of the RAF program removed a prime source of Cartel Coins, which in turn resulted in fewer hypercrates being purchased, which resulted in a reduction in supply of random Cartel Market items being unloaded on the GTN, which resulted in prices going up (generally called inflation). Inflation due to reduced supply combined with the rampant influx of credits due to BW's 1) inability to create effective, repeatable credit sinks, 2) poor forethought when setting mission credit rewards, and 3) refusal to deal with credits generated by exploits, resulted in item values exceeding the GTN limit (the first such item being hypercrates themself), thus pushing sales off of the GTN and into direct trades, resulting in yet another lost credit sink as those sales were no long subject to the GTN tax, resulting in more inflation as fewer credits were being removed from circulation. SWTOR economics 101. You do know that all credits in the game were generated by the game, yes? Credit sellers do not have some magical way of obtaining credits. I mean, unless BW is actually supplying them. Whether by mission rewards, Conquest, random kills and loot, or exploits, all credits were generated by the game. Ever single one (barring BW shenanigans).

When I cancelled my subs, which caused my guilds to downgrade to F2P status, not only where the guild ranks reset but everyone in the guild was demoted to the lowest rank in the guild. The default setting blocks access to guild bank tabs. I have also had the situation where I did not log in on the guild leader within 28-days and leadership was passed to another character. When that happened none of the guild ranks or settings changed. The OP's story smells of shenanigans. It is certainly possible that something happened, that they encountered a bug, but I suspect that something else happened. In my prior guild, before creating my own, the guild leader was leading in absentia. This went on for over a year before the GM decided to pass leadership to someone else, but before they did they cleaned out the guild bank of all valuable items and credits. The OP's GM likely had another character in the guild and cleaned house before leaving, or perhaps could have changed rank settings before leaving and the OP was unaware.

The terminal is in the Supplies section, next to the GS vendors, not in the Stronghold section with the other stronghold terminals. I can confirm that they do transfer because I purchased the Carrick Station stronghold on Star Forge and the Vaiken Spacedock stronghold on Satele Shan. Then, during the transfer sale, I transferred a character from SS to SF, and then from SF to SS, and now I have both strongholds on both servers.

Galactic Season 1 ran for 22 weeks (27 April - 28 Sept 2021) and there was a 20 week gap between Seasons 1 and 2. Season 2 ran for 20 weeks (15 Feb to 4 July 2022) and there was a (slightly under) 16 week gap until Season 3. Season 3 ran for 20 weeks (20 Oct - 6 March 2023). Currently we are 2 weeks and 3 days since Season 3 ended. For an event that it essentially a 5 month sprint on a hamster wheel I quite like an equivalent gap between. Anything shorter just leads to burnout.

It was during their 5 September 2018 Twitch livestream. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/306300086?t=00h10m20s

Characters were not deleted during any of the server merges so are you certain that he logged into the correct account, as wrong server or account has often been the cause for missing characters.

You know what is funny? I did not see that by going to their Twitter, which I do regularly. I saw that on EA Answers HQ when I went there to link someone to a support article. EA had enough forethought to put their Twitter stream on the Answers HQ, but BW did not think to put it on their own forums. https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion-Technical/bd-p/star-wars-the-old-republic-en

No hints or suggestions for a fix, but they can post to the EA Answers HQ, which are the official support forums and are available to everyone regardless of subscription status. https://answers.ea.com/t5/STAR-WARS-The-Old-Republic/ct-p/star-wars-the-old-republic-en

According to their Twitter they took PTS down yesterday and did not even bother to post that here. https://twitter.com/SWTOR/status/1636373082964123648?s=20

Correct, this will not hurt brand new players who are just starting out. Likewise, this will have little effect on any established player. For anyone with a level 80 character recuperating these costs will be trivial. The group that this will hurt are those who are new, but not first character brand new. Those who have completed their first story, have had a taste of the convenience of QT, have earned a few legacy levels, have unlocked some of the travel CD reductions (only need legacy level 10 to fully unlock the travel reductions), but have yet to built up a credit reserve, who do not have a max level character that can easily offset these new costs, who are yet quite a distance from being in the established player category. That is the group who this is going to hurt. Just like when BW increased several in-game costs with 6.0, that was the group who were affected most. And just like when 6.0 dropped, with all those inflated in-game costs, the credit spammers upped their spamming to ludicrous speeds and went plaid on general chat.

You think that is evidence of credit farming? A seven year old video, from when F2P accounts still had a credit cap of 200,000 credits, and not one of those bots looted anything (yes, I watched the entire video). You say the bots do not sleep and are able to generate a million credits in two hours, which means 12 million per day, which means those 100 bots are generating 1.2 billion per day, and they are moving that 1 million at a time through the GTN. 12,000,000 GTN transactions per day. They must have a round the clock team working on this 24/7/365. What we did see in the video was a bot operator farming experience for their, likely F2P, bots, so that they could take them to the fleet and spam their advertisements. Your evidence is not flimsy, it is non-existent.

Everything you list is either impossible, improbable, inefficient, or unlikely with a F2P account, so how are these F2P bots farming millions of credits when they only have one crew skill, can only send three companions max on crew missions, can only craft one item per companion at a time, can not run Ops, can not acquire tech frags in any quantity sufficient enough to trade for RPM's or OEM's, are capped at level 60, earn credits at a lower rate than subscribers (surprise, they are not getting the same amount of credits from those heroics as are you) -- and then the real noodle baking claim, sales on the GTN only transfer credits, "they don't create them," and yet somehow a F2P laundering a million credits (because that is so many credits) somehow then creates new credits with no effort. Unlike you, clearly, I actually do play on a F2P account. Two actually. One that is pure F2P and one that is preferred due to a CC purchase (so still capped at level 60 with no expansions beyond SoR). When you are talking about F2P accounts it is abundantly clear that you have no idea what you are talking about. Now, since this has veered far off course from the topic of the thread, allow me to circle this back around. No, adding a quick travel tax is not going to severely impact brand new players because they are going to be mostly running around. On the PTS I created a new character, a Knight, ran the first mission, and the cost to QT from the end of the cave (where Orgus does his trick) back to the Gnarls taxi was ~250 credits (I do not remember the exact amount). Brand new players are going to run back. Established players will have enough credits to pay it. It also is not going to have much impact on established players. Most of us, those of us who have been playing for some time, have built up a reserve, so this minimal tax will just be a drop in the bucket. When you can easily make a few hundred thousand credits from doing dailies having to spend a few thousand for the convenience of quick travel is irrelevant. Players who are new but not brand new, who maybe have completed their first story and are starting their second, those people it may cause them to pause and ask whether they want to QT or not, but that will not last. Where I object to the quick travel tax is how it is calculated. In almost every instanced that I checked it was cheaper to take a taxi than it was to quick travel from one taxi point to another. I am not talking a little more. I am talking 10 credits to take a taxi or 500 credits to QT the same distance. The way they have calculated the travel costs are incomprehensible. BW acknowledges that players try to avoid costs, so if it is far cheaper to take a taxi than to QT, what are they going to do? Will this tax remove credits from the game? Absolutely, they will get you either with the tax or the taxi. Credits will trickle out over time, but this will not, and is not intended to, fix inflation. This is a microstep. Something that BW does all the time. They take these small, almost imperscriptible steps so they can say they are doing something, so they can say they are going to move slowly, and make incremental changes, and then move so glacially slow that they never actually get to the next step before they change their mind and do something else. How do we know? Because BW only has two modes of action: go at a snail's pace or nuke it from orbit. When they want to do nothing they make small, incremental changes. When they actually want to change something they go so far overboard, so over the top, so big that it is a paradigm shift (and then often have to pull back, revamp, and redesign because they did not think it through in the first place). This has been their standard operating procedure for years. They say they want to do something about inflation, so they introduce these changes: new travel costs, increased repair bills, etc., and yet running Onderon dailies on the PTS, with these new travel costs and repair costs, I still earned a few hundred thousand credits. Being charged to quick travel, being charged to travel to my stronghold (because that was, when I was on, still active on the PTS), being charged more to repair, and I still received a few hundred thousand credits for doing Onderon. BW has no real interest in fixing inflation because in-game inflation drives people to purchase Cartel Coins and then purchase directly from the Cartel Market. Or did someone actually believe BW when they said that they reduced the CC rewards in Season 3 because the free CC's from Season's 1 and 2 contributed to inflation. Rubbish. They reduced them because, and BW even stated this, people where maximizing their CC's gains by completing the seasons on multiple servers. And that cut into Cartel Coin sales.

I see the trend of blaming F2P and preferred players for the actions of credit sellers when those actions are things that are impossible for F2P and preferred players is still in vogue.

Season tokens do not transfer, same as other legacy currencies. The fleet strongholds are a legacy unlock, same as other strongholds, and do transfer when you transfer a character. You just need to visit the stronghold terminal on the fleet and activate it (at no cost).

Daylight Saving Time always breaks the flash sale. Why BW has not bothered to address that, or fix the flash sale timer, no one (out here) can say. I have a suspicion for why it happens, the flash sale reset falls back an hour at the start of DST, but I do not have a CS degree so can not say with certainty.

Agreed. I was on both Saturday and Sunday and there was never more than a handful of people on.

First test with feedback using a new character created on the PTS. Second test using a copied level 80 character in 330 modded gear with 324 accessories. Feedback on adjustments to repairing: Took my character to Onderon and completed a full circuit of the dailies (Republic side). This character is a Sage and uses their companion as a tank. For this test I completed all dailies before repairing. My repair cost ended up being less than 3k credits, which is about in line with live. This character is a ranged type using a tank companion versus my first test, which was with a new Shadow. The higher repair costs I was seeing on Tython could certain be due to the fact that I tend to play ranged characters with tank companions versus that being a new melee without a companion. That said, I went to Onderon with exactly 100,000 credits. After repairing, selling junk, and using quick travel twice I had 424,553 credits. I next tested what my repair costs would be after dying. So I dismissed my companion, angered a few grefna, and let them beat me to death. My repair cost: 21,161 credits, less than on live. Between my two, certainly limited, tests I believe that the changes to repair will have a fairly negligible impact on players. I did not test the cost to repair fully broken gear, but that cost has always been high, encouraging one to repair early and often (plus, I never allow my gear to get that broken and so have no point of reference for comparison). Feedback on adjustments to travel: Now this was interesting. Compared to my observations on Tython, on Onderon there was not a single taxi-to-taxi quick travel cost that exceeded the cost to travel by taxi. Standing at the Iziz Bridge taxi, the cost to travel to three taxi points: Republic Forest Camp, Republic Lake Observation Point, and Republic Forward Operating Base, were all 1000 credits. Travel from the bridge to Iziz Palace was 750 credits. If one were to quick travel from the same location the highest cost would be to travel from the Iziz Bridge to the Forest Encampment at a cost of 933 credits. All other costs were lower to quick travel than to take a taxi over the same distance. In the course of my normal route when doing Onderon dailies I would normally quick travel twice: once from inside the phased mission inside Iziz City to the Iziz Bridge, and the second from the Bag and Tag mission area to the Lake Overlook. Both trips cost less than 200 credits. In my prior post I stated that you had missed the mark by a few parsecs. On Onderon you were right on target. Then I went to Alderaan. I take back what I said above. You missed that target by more parsecs than the Kessel Run. Standing at the Pallasta Spaceport Taxi here are the costs to travel by taxi to each taxi location versus travelling via quick travel: From Pallasta Spaceport to (cost to taxi vs cost to QT): House Organa - 150 credits / 418 credits Shining Star - 300 credits / 857 credits Wardpost Duval - 300 credits / 1956 credits Wardpost Luurdes - 450 credits / 2841 credits House Trader's Circle - 600 credits / 4540 credits House Alde Library - 450 credits / 3365 credits Wardpost Landa - 450 credits / 2571 credits Wardpost Hurne - 600 credits / 2584 credits Panteer Refuge - 750 credits / 2004 credits I understand that part of the appeal of quick travel is the instantaneous travel and that it can be done from anywhere, but why have it cost so much more to quick travel than to travel by taxi? Again, all you will succeed in doing is annoying the players and removing convenience, and that does not make for a good credit sink. Part of the issue, I believe, with what I am seeing on Tython and Alderaan versus Onderon is the base taxi cost. On Tython it is 25 credits per hop, on Alderaan 150 per hop, and on Onderon 1000 per hop. I believe that the reason quick travel costs seems so high on lower level planets is that the cost per hop to taxi is low compared to the cost to quick travel over a similar distance. To test my hypothesis I went to Ossus. The cost per hop on Ossus is 1500 credits. The cost to quick travel from the Jedi Colony to any one of the three quick travel points ranged from 2617 credits to go to the Library up to 2734 credits to go to the Farms. Essentially 1000 credits more, certainly, but hardly as extreme a cost difference as to quick travel on Tython. My suggestion: Firstly, I stand by my suggestion from my first post: the home worlds and capital worlds should be no cost quick travel zones. I am not certain if this would be possible, but perhaps instead of making quick travel costs be based upon distance instead base it upon region similar to how travel by taxi is now. For example, to travel from Pallasta Spaceport to the House Trader's Circle costs 600 credits as each hop increments the cost by 150 credits. Move two hops closer, to Wardpost Duvaal, and the credit cost decreases a commensurate amount. Do something similar with quick travel where moving to the nearest QT point will have a cost of X, and for each hop along the route the cost increases. Even if the cost were twice that of the cost to travel by taxi I think most would view it as the cost of the convenience of instantaneous travel versus waiting for the taxi. I do not find the idea of assigning a cost to quick travel abhorrent, but rather how you have chosen to implement it. You speak of making changes to address player behaviours that have the intent of avoiding costs, but with the current implementation of quick travel costs all you will succeed in doing is causing players to avoid the cost of quick travelling. Also, on PTS for over three hours tonight and at most there were eight people on. Not a single PVP match. I certainly hope that you will afford some consideration to the fact that getting into a PVP match can be quick difficult.