Well since it's starting to look like Blizzard is having an apocalypse of its own, copying its dumbing down might be a happy-ish coincidence in terms of attracting WoW refugees... I mean j-rpg aesthetic probably won't tickle everyone's fancy.

I got super triggered because I'm maining a guardian, know the class best, and will keenly feel the loss of skills I'm accustomed to. I suspect I'll be less worked up about "trimming" of the classes I don't play as much and might even appreciate the dumbing down... and I think that this might be a common theme going forward. People super into specs will hate losing aspects of it and/or skills whereas the casual player base at large and newbies are likely to see and feel the positives.

Most people will stay. But most abused spouses stay so that's not saying much. Once again the existing playerbase get the stick as BW chases the carrot of enticing the new playerbase. Which never pans out and won't this time either. Not when due to no marketing $$$ of note few people outside existing playerbase are even going to know about this. And word of mouth certainly won't be great to put it mildly.

Every expansion added an ability and bloat got to be a real thing. Some classes are more ridiculous than others. Having said that, nuking the way classes feel and play now is a lolwtf way of going about it. Worse yet, the abilities are still there, but you can't use them because they're mutually exclusive. That's not "meaningful choice" one would in any shape or form enjoy, that's salt to the friggin wound.

I get it that the ability bloat has to be addressed... but in that context keeping slash, that's the dictionary definition of garbagio ability, that doesn't see any use past the early game or complete bottom tier last resort filler, while forcing choice between saber reflect, a staple defensive utility, and blade blitz, a stable movement skill, is frankly put perplexing. If you're doing this get rid of useless abilities or better yet, follow the suggestion someone posted a thread about to roll abilities together.

We all know "choice" is an illusion. Everyone seriously invested in the game metagames. Stat distributions, rotations. They'll do the same with "skill choices". It's not going to be "meaningful customization", it'll be the right and the wrong pick once the theory-crafters crunch out what is optimal. But then again ability bloat is an actual thing... and maybe psychologically it goes over better to give artificial choices for the few that'll be inclined to pick the inferior option for some reason than to prune a bunch of abilities and gut the rotations.

There is more than enough class flavor to justify leveling one of each class. Above 8 toons, however, can see how it's a bit hard-pressed now. Beyond sentimental attachment to alts primarily made to get the other AC, no real point. DS/LS paths I guess? Metrics must show BW that people regularly playing many more than 8 toons are in the minority.

It's people trying to do the quest that get salty indeed. It's funny how things are cyclical in this game. BW cares about PvP toxicity for a while, then they stop and put in a reward system that hinges on winning throwing gas on the fire. Atm it's the hilarious combination of the galactic seasons daily encouraging super casual participation while at the same time having the not so casuals grind wins for the weekly. A blind, deaf, comatose lobotomy patient could tell you how that is going to end in a decent percentage of random matches.

The fact that the premier advertised features are basically a respec feature and UI/qol improvements is deflating indeed. But it is what it is. This game's hail mary large investment in an attempt to revitalize it came and went with kofe/kotet. Once you accept that you're just happy that it's not completely in maintenance mode.

If people are forced into combinations to do specific content, that's already a thing... they just use alts. Now I guess you just won't have to relog as much. And most of us casuals will now only really ever need to level 8 toons as opposed to 16 for each AC so yay.

Character customization wise there's the appearance kiosk you can use to change how you look. Combat styles are basically AC respecs on steroids, not just giving you the other AC but all 4 force/tech ones. Same way you can respec talents now on the fly or how you chose your advanced class in the first place.

The rotations are indeed tedious. I seriously doubt that people without the Kai excel spreadsheet with information when he's going to be selling what are having "fun" going to him every reset hoping against hope for say an apex set-piece and getting disappointed. There is no good reason this information isn't in-game. I know it's not cos Kai is a copy of the Warframe rotating vendor, but just because it's copied it doesn't mean it's good.

I was in-game and it was freezing for a couple of seconds at a time before CTD. Upon restart of the launcher, it seemed to have re-downloaded the 3.6a update. Stuck on the loop now. Fixing the installation finds no issues. Test client is accessible and lets me enter the (empty) PTS server select. So looks like a live client hiccup.

Just thank our lucky stars that the daily/weekly quest is match/matches played and not won...

Might just be me but it feels like there's more class specific variance sprinkled throughout the otherwise same options, not just the few obviously different ones. Which is super nice and really adds to the re-playability. and I always wondered why isn't done more. The only added effort to have a ton of class specific lines is on the part of the writers, and with all due respect to the crew, not as if they're writing novels worth of stuff for this game at this stage lol. Story content is probably gated by the ability to craft scenes for it, so might as well compensate by going ham on the VO variance in the scenes we do get.

Atm it just feels as an alternate way to get one toon to 50k invasion instead of grinding TC. Which isn't' bad I guess. Hopefully the credit catch up mechanic isn't too bad because this has the potential to be one of those "why does my MMO feel like a 2nd job" things that people end up doing but hating. Daily logins had wiggle room to not feel terrible if you missed to just log a day or two. This both requires activity and is potentially very penalising.

It was a rocky post launch for sure but the part of the issue was perception. First expected greatness. The would be WoW killer. The next big thing. It got plugged in The big bang theory show at the height of its popularity for petes sakes. And then of failure when it inevitably didn't live up to it. First people disproportionately flocked to the game like moths to a flame, to check out what the fuss was all about. Then it fast became "damaged goods" and "TORtanic"... Some of that could have been avoided by a perfect launch and a perfect first content cycle... some of it was always bound to happen. WoW was a once in a lifetime thing. Everyone was going to fail replicating that.

One approximation is to check the GTN for Cartel Market items and compare the in-game credit cots with the RL currency cost of the CC required to purchase them from the CM. Probably wildly varies from item to item based on supply and demand at any particular time, but the most sought after items will be the CC costliest and will hover in the same credit ballpark. Last I was checking for a 5.5k CC lightsaber it was around 400 mil credits on the GTN. 5500 cartel coins sets you back 35 EUR on Steam. At that ratio 1 million credits comes to 13,75 cartel coins, which would be less than 10 cents EUR (0,0875). Hypercrates are 5400 CC and atm around 500 mil credits on my server's GTN. So I guess that's roughly the ballpark.

How are folks surprised at this stage? I lost count how many times the gearing/progression system got reworked/"augmented". They don't do these things cos they're on some quest for the perfect system, they're doing it to re-dangle the carrot of grinding the existing endgame content for the 7th time. Metrics probably showed them the critical mass of people grinded for the BIS set bonuses of the whole "horizontal progression" thing and playtime went down. Presto, next trick in the bag. If you don't have resources for proper expansions this is what you have to do. We'll see if that changes next cycle now that Anthem is dead and buried.

I think it's generally a bad idea to try and encourage something by restricting something else. Better thing would be to expand on the (neigh non existing) practical aspect of strongholds and make some of it guild ship exclusive. As it stands the main value in strongholds I see is that you can concentrate all the banks, mail, GTN and vendors for super easy access. Coruscant/DK foyer ftw. BW should tale a look at WoW Garrisons in terms of adding genuinely valuable (not harvest a node on an insane CD) practical guild/guild ship exclusive functionality imho. Potential credit sink there too. Sure in WoW they got nerfed into the ground cos they felt it isolated the player base too much, but tbh, playing an MMO in isolation is kind of SWTOR's entire "schtick". And making it a guild thing you'd really foster cooperation if anything.

It's a pretty safe bet that the cause of delays when they happen is out of BW's control. With OPS both BW and player are dependant on the mail service. E-mail delivery delays are not uncommon due to a plethora of reasons down the chain the e-mail travels. I feel ya, had the same issue. Installed the phone app for the security key and never looked back. Really can't recommend it enough, ditch the OPS asap. You even get some monthly cc for using it if I'm not mistaken.

But you are talking options that so few people would utilize I have a very hard time imagining how one would justify spending development time on it. I mean you can point at half a dozen forum thread asking for harder leveling but fact of the matter is the first thing that ever happens in a new zone is people figure out the path of least resistance through its content.

Start a fresh alt and try to lvl your way up through all that story and especially kotfe/kotet. That's hardly a fast slog. The pace is tailored to the story. Leveling 70-75 is uber fast primarily because there is not much leveling content. How would you slaw the pace and and still keep a fluid leveling experience that leaves you capped at the end? Having to grind sub 75 group content for levels would not be good.

Big overhauls of what's under the hood is probably a rather bad ROI. If it just runs 15fps better on fleet and Illum PvP is a thing 10 years after it was supposed to be, no-one outside existing players will much care. That news won't exactly grab anyone on IGN.com. If you're sinking funds into engine development and probably enhanced assets to go with it, at some stage you have to ask yourself, why not just make a TOR II instead and cash in on the starting hype all over again. I mean yes, EA/Activision seem to have caught the "remake" bug, but that's because they're cashing in on it all over again, retail price of a new AAA game for tinkering with old products. What are they going to do in this game, push out an engine update as a b2p expansion with AI enhanced textures? Hmmm, when I say it out loud... I'd actually pay for that =P

Base game yes but the post launch support and Anthem Next was Austin based afik. Christian Dailey that broke the news is the BioWare Austin studio director as per articles I read as well. As dirty as it may feel, we have to thank our lucky stars over this one. If BW Austin tripled its staff working on Anthem, at best that'd be new resources at BW Austin not spent on SWTOR and at worst further SWTOR developers moved over to that project... realistically a combination of both. EA probably did the math and came to the conclusion that with SWTOR being a partially subscription service its better kept around from a financial standpoint. This probably does not mean a SWTOR renaissance, but at least we can assume we're spared the bullet to the back of the head for a while longer.