I left the game 8 years ago because of stupid decisions by the devs. They removed or altered many things I enjoyed doing daily. I still miss being able to solo old flashpoints to farm unique gear styles. No, story mode isn't the same thing. I came back 2 months ago to give the game another chance. Looks like I'll be leaving again.

Subscribers = long term, dedicated, and usually, quality players. For the most part they're also the backbone of a healthier community. A larger percentage of the rest are less of the above to some degree. This is only a guess, but I would bet that subscribers are willing to spend more money on the game than the average non-subscriber as well.

Well... for everyone but agents, and smugglers who now have an aoe that only drops nerf footballs, and might cause a minor bruise, at most.

Yay! Someone who has a brain, and can understand a point is so refreshing on these forums.

One more example of you not knowing anything about the subject. A healing spec merc can aoe, but a op can't? Get off your high horse. OS was no more an I win button that any other AOE. It had a longer cooldown, and it took longer for all the damage to hit. Not to mention it's a level 48 ability, and everyone else has a hard hitting AOE much earlier. You're just not worth reading. All you bring is hyperbole, and fanboyisms. /ignore welcome to the club.

He didn't mean 4K dps, he meant 4k damage over 12s, and no it wasn't OP. It's not even worth using on anything at all now. Nothing, zero, nada, it's a waste of time to even cast, and has no usefulness to anyone in the game. If it was instant cast, maybe it would be a little useful, but as it now it's pointless. What they should have done, since it's actually stupid to call it orbital strike, or freighter flyby when you aren't out doors....is made it a probe droid of some sort that followed, and exploded missiles around a selected target's area.

Yeah, pre-cu SWG was boring. The skill system was okay, but just like every other mmo, there's always a few combat builds that were optimal, and most people played only those few. You can't believe anyone who says the NGE was a wowified. For the most part, the sandbox elements were still in game, but they eventually added NPC missions, and heroics. The PVE missions were greatly needed, and offered something besides afk skill grinding. A year after I went back to SWG, they changed the combat into something closer to pre-cu. The changes to class, and stats systems were whittled down, and levels added, but they were easier to balance. Not only that, but the handful of alpha builds were gone too. That's not to say the devs didn't make mistakes even with fewer classes. Just like this game goes through buff/nerf cycles, so did SWG. Overall, I enjoyed the NGE system. The pre-cu bored me into leaving SWG a couple of months after launch. The launch was not good at all.

That's exactly right! Fixing the controls to be more like XvT would in no way detract from KB/mouse usability, but would make the use of a flight stick a viable option. I miss my twisty handle for rolling into the tightest turns on ships with great pitch. If they wanted to fix accuracy, they would have hit boxes be as close to the model meshes as possible, lock blasters forward, and shorten the effective damage range to 2KM. Then there would be no need for mmo evasion powers, or stats, and hits would be more about skill. That's never going to happen, of course, and I won't touch it again unless they upgrade to something better than the previous tunnel shooter with free flight mode. It's missing way too much in the controls area for me to find appealing.

LOL I'm happy that others finally took notice of the usage earlier in this thread. It probably would be entertaining.

That's true. I would have no problem with them at all if they refrained from veiled insults, condescension, and passive aggressive content intended to elicit escalated responses...IE pushing people's buttons with the express intent to get them moderated. At least those with a better than basic reading comprehension level can see that they're baiting.

I said the same earlier too. Sorry for using another of her tactics that I call "the cherry picker".

LOL, that is a perfect imitation of her. It questions someone's intelligence, and uses a smiley face to keep the mods distracted from the insult that would have had any other poster's comment removed.

Just so I am accurate, I just played a shelved character wearing a mixture of EWH/BM, and purple 66s. She had 1676 EXP as she was while in a WZ. Swapping out 2 pieces of 66s with 1 WH, and 1 BM (gloves, and boots) should have raised my EXP, but it didn't. It actually didn't change with just the gloves, but the boots alone dropped my EXP by exactly 50 for some reason. Six pieces of gear were 66s, 1 EWH head, and 1 EWH double saber. Artifact crafted ear/implants, EWH boundless relic, and BM boundless relic. Oh, and blue 66 wrists. Though the boots I swapped had 66 armor, and mod, while the enhancement was a old WH 61. The boots I swapped into were straight BM 58s (which lowered my EXP by 50). The gloves had 66 armor/mod, but a blue 66 enhancement, and I swapped into straight 61 WH. I can't quantify any damage differences, because the old pvp gear was stock survivor, and not stalker. However, it is interesting that boots with 66 armor/mod, and 61 ENH raised my EXP by 50 over the BM boots. That's a significant number. I don't think there was a 50 point difference per mod between old WH, and BM, but there may have been.

You're kidding me right? Are you seriously claiming that WH 61s are better than purple 66s with bolster? That's like 1250 expertise, and lower stats compared to 1500 in 66s with bolster.

What does it matter if people are joining in pve gear? They're better off wearing full 66s+ than sporting the old WH stuff. Most of my characters spent their badges prior to the Makeb expansion. I had to go through the whole process again at 55 wearing pve gear. At least they get a bolster now with around 1500 expertise, and you can't blame the people who didn't pvp before 55 to cap their badges. There's no rule that says you have to do that, and maybe they didn't want to pvp while leveling. The same old boring WZs might be less fun to do than questing, and running FPs. Which is what I did on my tenth to thirteenth characters.

It all depends on your point of view, but the only one I see on the list that deserves mentioning is iWipe. The ones you list as warriors I see as condescension excreting trolls who go out of their way to bait others into retaliating with flaming responses.

Chicken, or the egg. Active players will determine that, but they go hand-in-hand.

I'm with you on the active players. There's a tipping point at which active player loss could snowball into dramatic profit loss. I'd say they still need to keep enough players happy to make it worthwhile for everyone. Which they failed to do at launch.

We know they said the game could be profitable under the sub structure with 500K subs. That would have to be the base line. $7,500,000 per month, or $90 million a year (which seems awfully high to make a profit). A large portion of that $66 mil number would go well towards that, with cash shop purchases covering the rest. At some point they will have paid off the production costs, if they haven't already. You would think that the income requirements to make a profit would drop in the coming years. The only question after that is how much profit will they consider as acceptable. There are no guarantees that they can maintain the 2013 numbers for several more years, and with fewer people cycling through over time, it's not likely.

A penny over would be claimed as profit, but I should have said how profitable.

That 66 mil included POGO subs, and depending on the percentage of total sub income from that service would drop the 350k swtor subs even lower. A little, or a lot, only they know. Since we don't know the debt accumulated by swtor, nor do we know how accurate SuperData's info is on "extra income", then we don't even know if the game is profitable. People can assume anything, and make arguments to support anything.

I'd rather have SWG back as it was when it closed, but the Repopulation is shaping up nicely, and I am happy to have taken part in the crowd funding of it. If SOE is coming up with something along the same lines, then I'll likely try it.

Maybe if there were fewer annoying things in game that set people off, there would be less complaining. The thing is they keep adding even more, or changing things contrary to what player evidence shows. It sometimes seems like the devs are going out of their way to tick people off instead of actually improving the game.

LOL that's so absurd. What we had at the end of SWG was 1000X better than when it started. There's something wrong with you pre-cu people. I hated it. The game was freaking boring, and there was nothing to do except run mission terminal garbage, and grind skills. They lost more subs BEFORE the NGE made it to test server than they lost after the NGE. Much like what happened to swtor who lost 1.3 million subs after the first 3 months of release. Most people didn't want to play the trash that was the pre-cu, and i was one of them who left out of sheer boredom after the first couple months. I guarantee you there's more people out there who claim to have played pre-cu, and loved it, than the total number who ever played it at all. Better yet, there are more people out there who claim to have been Teras Kasi masters than played the game. If someone hadn't talked me into trying SWG again 4 years later, I never would have known how much it improved. Skill systems, and the reduction of classes aside, there was a lot more to do. There were a couple of things I wished they'd kept, but it wasn't game breaking for me. All I know is that when I went back there were several servers still showing full at times, and the population didn't drop off all that badly until the announcement that is was shutting down. After that is when it went downhill fast. Who could blame people for leaving after that? What's the point of investing more time in characters that were going to be taken away in a few months?

I've seen them do that too, even those of the same faction. If you don't have a character, or companion out that can taunt, then you're out of luck. Several tried that with me, but I could taunt them back, and get my kill.