No comment. Reason? I came back to the game in January after quitting in 2012, and although I had a 50 (max level last time I played), I did not use her, but started a Consular at level 1 (actually deleted and re-rolled a 36 because I had totally forgotten the story by that point). By the time I got to KOTFE I think chapter 14 was about to come out, so I really can't say what it was like to do 1-9 and then wait. Again I played like 14 chapters at once. So I didn't really get to witness this difference. However, I also did not like the KOTFE story at all and from about chapter 4, I just wanted it to be over with -- I only kept playing it because I wanted to come out the other side and be able to team up with an old friend of mine who was also finishing up KOTFE. So to my mind, I guess having a huge chunk available at once would be better in a 'rip the band-aid off as fast as you can' kind of way. Best aspect: Nothing. Honestly, I did not like a single thing about the KOTFE story. I thought it was terrible. I have made many posts about this so I won't belabor them here. Worst aspect: Where do I begin? How do I choose? There are so many candidates. I have to say, V in my head. I absolutely freaking HATE that mechanic and I rolled my eyes every single time there was a V-in-you-head scene. This was the first time probably ever in SWTOR that I was sorely tempted to spacebar the story. I will not comment about Ops or PVP because I don't do those. I pair up with a friend to do pair-doable content, or I solo it. Anything that requires an Op is content I never see. Same with PVP. No. I don't grind. I never grind. I hate grinding. I do content for the story. Making me do H2s on planets my character has already fully mapped.. H2s she's already done... is a freaking waste of my time and clearly a stop-gap to paper over the fact that they do not have enough content in the level 65 game. Yes but that's like asking me if I would rather travel to the dentist for a root canal instantly or be stuck in traffic for an hour before I get there. Worse. It's jarring. I've not tried to solo a 2+ mode SF, since I have a good friend and we have done them together. I honestly don't give a darn who groups to do this or who solos. I never do stuff like this more than once so once my friend and I are done with them I don't notice what happens with what other people are doing. Yes, they are way too repetitive. But then so is most of everything else in KOTFE outside of the cutscenes. What would I prefer to make it less repetitive? To do it once, and be done with it. Why would anyone think I would want to just do the same exact content over, and over, and over again? I don't use the group finder so I have no comment. It's irrelevant. Whether I am capped to 3 or 4 levels above the world or am 20 levels uncapped, there is absolutely zero challenge throughout almost the entire game because everything is always the equivalent of a grey mob to me, from like level 19 on, faster if you do all the H2s on the starter world. Not affected it one way or the other. My friend and I play together, and do not level without each other, so we are always within 1 level +/- of each other. Whether we were sync'ed or not would not matter. Hate them. Hate the alliance. Hate the grinding. Hate the 'leveling up' of their loyalty. It's a grinding mechanic meant to try and give some (slight) purpose to making you repeat the same (lame) content over and over again. Detest it. I'd love to group-select nearly every contact in my queue and dismiss the whole darn lot of them other than Lana and my class companions and take on the entire freaking Zakuul empire just the handful of us. No reward is sufficient for this grinding misery they try to make you do. P.S., I haven't done it. My alliance guys are like ally level 5 or something. I don't give a pile of bantha poodoo about the allies. They have zero effect on my game play. What, so I can't click on some glowies in the SF mission that I don't want to keep doing over and over again anyway? Yeah, I'll pass. Yeah. Get rid of 'em. I'm torn about this. On the one hand like that I can go along with the companion I choose regardless of role, because they can take any role. With my Consular, as soon as I got T7, he became my perma-hench for all soloing unless the story forced me to take some other fool like Kaliyo or Theron. I just set him to heal and forget him, In the past I would not have been able to use him because both he and I would be tanks and it's silly to have 2 tanks. On the other hand, I no longer even notice who my hench is because they are all basically the same. I'd argue that the role-switching is less of an issue than the fact that companions are generally OP. I would say they are on par. I played 65 levels with a healing hench as a Shadow Tank. I think I died like 3 times outside of my friend and I trying to 2-man hardmode FPs (because we're idiots). I thought healing was OP. But then we made a smuggler and a trooper, I'm the trooper, and we're both DPS, and I put my hench on tank, and it's just as OP as healer. I bet DPS would be the same though I rarely play with a DPS hench, mostly because I don't feel like having to pull aggro off of them when they're being stupid (which they usually are). Good. Ever since Dragon Age introduced it I have utterly despised the companion mini-game of trying to gain affection for the hench by which convo options you pick with other people. So anything that minimizes it, I am in favor of. I stay in character. If Elara Dorne doesn't like it she can go take an escape pod to the nearest backwater world. Same with the other Henches. I think the companion grind is idiotic and annoying and one of THE worst aspects of SWTOR (along with the alliance grind). How is it that I can have a hench with me for something like 58 levels, do 100% convo options the hench approves of (light side Consular with Qyzen), and *still* only be 30% of the way to max affection (15 out of 50)? What, 65 levels of grinding is not enough, they want me to grind 200% *more* to make him like me? It's stupid. Which is why my highest comps are all < 20 affection rank. I cut out answers to a bunch of stuff I don't care about, like Strongholds and Conquests. SUMMARY Here's the thing. I like the stuff from the original 1-50 game in SWTOR a whole lot. I have very little love for anything they've done in the 51+ game. I find most of it boring, unoriginal, repetitive, and grindy. Which is why I just play a class through all the story and world missions and some of the enjoyable H2s and then stop at Ilum now. I see no point to going further and definitely no point to going on to KOTFE with any but my first level 65.

My BH was ruled by greed, so any time he had a chance to demand money for something, he did. My SW is cruel and likes to kill stuff, so any time she has a chance to kill, she does. My JC was kind and gentle, and believes in second (third, fourth, fifth...) chances, so any time she had a chance to spare someone, no matter how much they deserved it, she did. My soldier doesn't care much for light/dark but is fanatically loyal to the Republic so any time she has an option to say anything pro-Rep, she does, no matter what.

OK, fair enough, but,this points out one problem with the way it is structured: you have to play through multiple times to see that the choices matter. The consequences of, say, doing the thing that upsets Koth into leaving, are not evident to someone who didn't do that. So to anyone who played through it once, that person would not know you could lose the Gravestone at the end. This is not true of the class stories. When you do certain things they clearly have immediate consequences. For example, as the Trooper there is a point where you can stop to disarm a bomb or let it go off and kill someone. I chose to let the guy die... and next time I was at my ship holo, I got dressed down for it by the General. The action had an immediate consequence. If you do all the things that prevent you from losing companions, then it looks like there were no consequences because one of the two possible consequences is a lack of outcome. You can't know there was a consequence when something doesn't happen. This makes it appear that even the few consequences there are, aren't even present. For example, I only know it is possible to lose those few companions because of the forums. If I hadn't read the threads here, I wouldn't have known you could lose the Gravestone, Koth, etc. It's not apparent from anything that happens in the story -- not at all. Also, I would argue that, other than Koth, no significant companions can be lost. By the end of KOTFE, you have like 97 companions (hyperbole). Other than Koth, Theron, and Lana, they're all interchangeable and completely indistinguishable from one another. So I lose Kaliyo. Unless I'm a BH why would I care? I have zero past relationship with her. But the other problem is that they DO present you with choices that seem like they should be impactful. The biggies are (1) whether to accept/reject V, (2) whether to kill Arcann, (3) whether to kill Senya. All of these are clear-cut choices with Dark/Light options etc. They are clear either/or situations. And they should have MAJOR consequences. But none of them do. The story happens only one way, whatever you choose in these instances. So the 'choices that matter' are mostly-trivial ones that affect who is on our companion roster (when we have way more than we need anyway), and the really important choices, like whether to kill a major character, really don't matter at all. Sure we have. You're not reading carefully enough. Honestly I would have ZERO problem with this. I consider my level 65 who went through KOTFE to be effectively 'retired' now anyway (story wise, I cannot use her for ANYTHING else now, as a RPer, since she has moved into a different timeline from every other planet in the galaxy other than Odessen and Zakull). I didn't like the KOTFE story so I am not really looking forward to KOTET and not sure I will even play it. So I'd have absolutely NO problem with them saying that because of my choice, the Eternal Empire was defeated, my story is over, and my character cannot be used for future expansions. This really would be a consequence... and I'd be fine with it. However, I do not think that they needed to do anything this drastic to make choices matter. But you are also buying into a false premise. BW wrote a story where they are going to use Arcann in season 2, and consequently they could not let you kill him. They why give me the choice? Just don't... and I won't complain about it so much. The choice is a lie... and so are many others. And THAT is actually worse than having no choice given to you at all. If that's so -- if they don't have the manpower to do anything other than ONE storyline -- that's fine. Then don't tell me choices matter. Just be honest.

Well, works about the same way for the Consular.

You don't even have to go outside of SWTOR to find stories that make sense. The Havoc Squad story for the Trooper makes sense, at least throughout Chapter 1 (all I have played so far). The JC story made sense (Chapter one was stupid, but it made sense... I didn't have to ask anyone to explain it to me). Same with the SW story, the IA story, the JK story. Are there dumb parts to these stories? Sure. Are there some minor points that don't really make sense, plot holes, etc? Of course. But the basic premise of each story can be explained in a couple of sentences and all of them are easy to understand and better written (and have more choices and far more consequences) than the KOTFE story. And BTW, to the 'wait till season 2 to get season 1 explained' crowd... I did not have to wait until chapter 2 of the trooper, SW, IA, etc. story to understand what the heck was going on in chapter 1 of those stories.

I didn't space bar through it... but now I kind of wish I had. After all, I don't think I'd have understood the story any less by skipping all the cutscenes and story parts, than I understand having watched them. It still makes no sense to me. I can't remember what movie it was, one of these artsy high-falutin' ones, you know the type, only played in art houses and high critical acclaim but only like 50 people ever go see it. And I'd heard it was 'great' from the culture snobs where I work, and this friend had seen it and I asked him about it. He said don't bother. When I asked why he said, "I sat there for 2.5 hours, and when it was over I had to get someone to explain it to me. Then, I had to get someone else to explain the explanation. And I *still* don't understand it." KOTFE reminds me of this. The story doesn't make sense, I come here to see if anyone can explain it, and nobody really can, and when someone tries, someone else always had to come in, quote their post, and then explain the explanation. The whole thing reminds me of a great quote from Roger Ebert: “If you have to explain to the audience why your story means something, then it doesn't.”

Plaga... You nailed it. It's a walking contradiction.

I've just gotta say something here. I know E.M. won't read it, but what the hey. That may be true, but it's really not a sufficient excuse for the convoluted and incomprehensible nonsense that made up the main plot of KOTFE. There are multiple threads with people who are defending the KOTFE story having to write walls of text full of head canon just to explain what the hell happened in the main storyline -- things like who Valk really is and how he can be both Valk and Vitiate at apparently the same time, things like that. The story is a tangled mess of spaghetti. A lot of it -- and I mean a LOT, not just Valk -- makes utterly no sense, right now, at the end of sixteen chapters. It is simply not acceptable (nor is it wise from a narrative perspective) to write a story that cannot be comprehended until the 2nd installment -- and no good storyteller does that. Expand and force people to reinterpret what they think was true -- yes. But make it incomprehensible until book/movie 2? No. Consider some of the best first stories in a longer sequence. In Star Wars ep. IV... you understand the whole movie as it happens. Nothing is incomprehensible. Are you wrong about who you think Vader is? Maybe ("from a certain point of view"). But Ben Kenobi is able to explain in a couple minutes screen time everything you need to know during the original Star Wars movie, to understand it. When ESB and ROTJ came out, yes, you had to revise your thinking. And re-watching Star Wars after that gave it a new meaning. But at the time in 1977, I did not have to wait until Empire to understand what the heck happened in ANH. Or take another example: The Hobbit. The book stands on its own and is completely understandable. Is there more to the story, especially the One Ring, that you find out later? Yes. Does the reading of LOTR force you to re-think what you thought you saw happen in The Hobbit? Sure. But *during* reading The Hobbit, you understand all the scenes as they happen. You aren't left going "HUH?" at the end of the riddle scene. Finally, take the example of Harry Potter. A lot of stuff happens in that first book that seems to mean one thing, only to mean something else in later books. Again you have to revise your thinking. For example in the very first chapter of Sorcerer's Stone, Dumbledore says that Voldemort has powers Dumbledore could never have, and McGonagall says "Only because you're too, well, noble to use them." This can be taken 100% at face value and the story completely understood. In later books, we find out what they're talking about -- the Unforgivable Curses (Cruciatus, Imperius, and Killing) and even later we find out about Horcruxes. Only in book 6-7 with Horcruxes do we at last understand why Harry did not die that night of the opening chapters However, during book 1, none of that info. is necessary to understand what happened in the book. Again, you are not left at the end of Sorcerer's stone going "HUH?" In KOTFE, at the end of the whole entire 16 chapters, I and a lot of other people were left sitting there going "HUH?" The story makes no sense, chapters contradict each other's basic premises, and everything is a spaghetti mess. I contend that even if there is a reason behind some of the stuff and you clean it up in KOTET it is too late. The damage has been done. The impression of the story being a random mess of ideas pulled out of a hat cannot be undone. This doesn't even account for the fact that I honestly don't think you people even noticed half the self-contradictions you put into the story so I have no faith that you will explain them or correct the record in KOTET.. Meh... I'm tired of ringing this same bell over and over again. BW used to be about good, tightly plotted, logical stories that made sense and were fun to play over and over again. No more.

A friend and I ran 4 of the 6. Now, this is a guy who does heroics and FPs over and over again to farm them. I do not... I do them once per character and that's it, unless I have no choice. Even so, he seems to have no interest in doing the last 2 SFs. It's pretty bad when a guy who farms stuff won't do the things. I mean he doesn't mind the repetition in general... but the SFs are just so bad and so boring compared to most of the regular FPs that I guess even he cannot take it. Me, I don't do farming at all so it is even worse for me. But honestly I don't like most of the KOTFE content so the SFs are just more of the same IMO.

Oh wow. I had not heard that. Yeah I can only imagine what the ending was like if this was the 'good' one. As for teaming up with Arcann. Yeah I would hate that, as a player. My JC character might still do it but I will hate every minute of it. That's if I play KOTET at all, or if I get that far in it. Right now I'm 50-50 whether I'm even going to bother since I so thoroughly despise KOTFE and the horse it rode in on.

See, here is the problem. Look at the walls of text that have to be posted to attempt to explain what the heck is going on with V-man. This proves one thing: It's too complicated. Look at the Darth Vader story: He was a Jedi Knight who started training too late, after he formed attachments. As a result, he let his passions get the better of him, turned to the Dark Side, and destroyed the Jedi. Two sentences. Simple, easy to understand. Ben Kenobi was able to explain it ("from a certain point of view") to a 100% naive audience in 1 minute of screen time back in 1977. Bam. Done. You could NOT explain what the freaking heck is going on with Vit/Valk to a naive audience if you had an entire movie to do it. How do I know? Because if you add up all the hours playing KOTFE and doing the story, it probably would just about equal the running time of a (long) movie, and we are here on the forum with threads upon threads and pages upon pages of people trying to figure out and explain what the freaking heck is going on in this story. That means it is too complicated. Even if deep down under all the bull-crap it turns out there there is something that makes a certain kind of sense, it doesn't matter at that point, because it's too darn complicated and people have already stopped caring. Multiple bodies... absorbing life forces... dying and not really being dead... being in two or more places at once. It is all just too complicated and completely unnecessary. Why not just make Valkarion be a NEW enemy? We could have fought him for the first story (KOTFE), killed him at the end, and then had him invade our minds and try to convince us to work with him in KOTET. Hell he could even be the Emperor's not-quite-as-evil younger brother. ANYTHING but what they did would have been less complicated. They needed to create a villain they could explain in a couple of sentences. By failing to do this they completely hosed their entire story.

This reminds me of a quote: “If you have to explain to the audience why your story means something, then it doesn't.” – Roger Ebert They wrote an entire story, KOTFE, that makes no narrative sense. Even if KOTET clears things up, it just amounts to them having to write a 2nd story to explain the first story. Yup, I agree with this also. BW violated the basic rules of good storytelling and good GMing with KOTFE.

I didn't even notice they did this. I always just delete them anyway.

Wow, this *really* nails it in a nutshell. I mean, it's not like i didn't know what all was wrong with this story but you have encapsulated the entire problem with the base plot, in a couple of sentences.

I just want to correct something. I shouldn't have used the word 'spam.' I did not mean to imply that in January, General Chat on the various planets was full of gold spammers or that kind of thing (though certainly there were some of those). I meant that it was spammy in the sense of very active, text scrolling a lot on my screen, lots of people chatting back and forth. I saw that in Jan, Feb, March... and since then it has dramatically petered out. To the point that General chat on most planets is dead silent for hours at a time, at least on my server at my play times (what it's like otherwise I cannot, of course, say).

No. You have not missed anything. The people who like the story will insist that it all makes good sense, everything fits just fine, and those of us who say it's confusing must just be cognitively impaired. But I think a lot of them are either not reading the story carefully and just 'going with it' thus ignoring plot holes -- or should I say plot-grand-canyons -- or else they have made up a bunch of head-canon that makes it all work in their own minds. That's why I like the post above quoting the actual text of the codex, which is self-evidently self-contradictory. So... it's not you (or me). It's Bioware. They either (1) made up a story that makes no logical sense (probable) or else (2) made up a story that does make good sense but they have presented it badly (possible, but less likely than option 1). My guess is that option 1 is correct, the story looks like a mess because it *is* a mess. Most probably because to put a chapter out a month, they had to have different people working on different chapters and the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.

I dunno. When I re-joined the game in January, Gen Chat was so spammy I had to tab away from it most of the time, even on higher-level worlds. Now, other than fleet, Gen Chat is so quiet I mostly don't notice the tab is open.

Plaga... That is an epic post, man. The self-contradictions in their own story are all right there in the codex. I mean yeah, eventually they might explain everything. But to expect people to be completely confused by the main 'antagonist' for a year or more is just ridiculous. Much of what they say makes absolutely no sense and much of it is, as I say and as you pointed out, self-contradictory. One of my favorites is the claim that Zakuul is some kind of utopia where the people are basically free of want and all their needs are met... this is stated in multiple places and in the codex. And yet... there are missions in KOFTE where you go to the underworld of Zakuul and clearly encounter homelessness, want, need, and poverty. So their own story in the missions contradicts their own entry in the codex. Ultimately it is simply not narratively believable, even in a universe like Star Wars where one expects to suspend lots of disbelief, that the same guy who destroyed entire planets to achieve selfish aims (immortality) was simultaneously able to rule benevolently over a Utopian empire. It's like saying Adolf Hitler could both rule Nazi Germany like he did, but yet also be Winston Churchill or FDR at the same time. Nobody capable of what Hitler was capable of doing would be able to pretend at being a Churchillian or Rooseveltian figure for very long, and certainly not for centuries. His true nature would have to come out eventually.

Absolutely, yes, I would take that choice, even if it meant the character had to be retired. (I would appreciate being able to move all her stuff into the legacy vault first, or perhaps having it all auto-end-up there....). I so thoroughly despise the story at this point I would not care if I was unable to continue it. In fact I am unsure that I will regardless. Case in point.... In one of the early chapters, remember that scene where V-man freezes time, and tells you that unless you accept his power, Lana will die? I like Lana. As a player, I didn't want her to die. And at this point I still believed their whole PR shtick about 'choices have consequences.' I sat there looking at the options and thought, darn, I am going to have to play the rest of this story without Lana now if I reject his help. I know this did not happen but at this stage I honestly believed this would probably be a consequence. I still rejected his power. Now, we both know it had no effect, but I couldn't have known it would at the time, with all the hype about choices mattering and all... I believed I could be majorly screwing myself not just story wise but gameplay wise without this important follower. But I still did what I thought my character would do. For all intents and purposes, Li-Ya, my only level 65 and my only character who will ever go through KOTFE, is a 'retired' character now. After all, in-character, she cannot reasonably interact with any pre-KOTFE character since that would involve time travel 5 years into the past. Meaning there is no point to doing anything else with her BUT the next story (KOTET), and as I said I don't like KOTFE and KOTET is supposed to be more of the same. So it would be zero skin off my nose to have her 'die' in game, or even be unplayable (though I would appreciate if she is not deleted outright, so I can still screenshot her and stuff before never being able to log into her again). So yeah, absolutely... I would be willing to accept perma-death as a consequence for a story option, if that were what it took to actually be able to make the right choices for my character.

I've said it before... instead of using our existing level-capped characters, BW should have made the 'Zakuul Knight' a prestige class, and had us run through these 2 expansions with the new class. This would have made the 'only one storyline' thing make sense -- all they would have needed was 2 actors (one male, one female) instead of bringing back all 16 of them (8 males, 8 females) to read the exact same lines of dialogue as each other. Would have saved money, and the whole 'grey side of the Force' thing probably would have worked better with a ZK than with a JC or a SW or what have you.

Yeah, that is the part that I find baffling. Why have these fights at all if they are so easy you can sleepwalk through it? Do that many players *really* enjoy having zero challenge to 99% of the fights? And if so how can these same people 'love it' that the boss fights take away all but their DPS abilities and are thus 'harder'? Wouldn't people who like the one-shotting hate the Arcann battle, and vice versa?

Well... Except that the way most of these choices find out, you save the person right in front of you and then you find another way to save the millions of other people you are supposedly sacrificing with that one decision. For my consular, she always believed that the Force would make things turn out right, that if she handled the problem right in front of her with compassion and kindness things would always turn out right in the end -- and in TOR, they pretty much always do. You'll find *another* way to save the billions of people you supposedly just sacrificed. And maybe it's having that faith in the Force and that good will prevail in the end, so long as you do good things right here and now with the people in front of you, that is the mark of the light side.

Actually that is a really awesome idea. I sometimes go back and do legacy stuff with my level 65 precisely because she does NOT gain xp for it so I can just check off the legacy boxes without over-levelling even worse. But of course, that is not possible for everything nor for class/story missions on other characters. Your solution would be simple and is also player friendly.

Right, it's not like SWTOR is the only MMO in which there are boss fights and players can use mezzes. In City of Heroes, the way they did it was the *duration* of the mez would often be affected by enemy class. So a stun that works 5 seconds on a minion would work 4 seconds on a Lieutenant, 3 seconds on a Boss, 2 seconds on a elite boss, and 1 second on an arch-villain (or something along those lines). It's not perfect, but at least there it is not stopping you from using one of your abilities... it is just making the effect less because the enemy is so much stronger. Also, in COH, mez was not either-or... it was a quantitative trait. So for example, Monster X has 10 points of stun resistance. Your stun, which lasts 30 seconds and recharges in 25 seconds, does 6 points of stun effect. You hit him once, and you have not overwhelmed his stun defense. But if you stack it by re-initiating it before the effect wears off (you have a few seconds to do this, *if* you have properly enhanced the recharge rate of the stun), then it will overwhelm his defense. Alternately, if you work on a team, 2 or 3 of you stacking stuns on the guy can overwhelm his defense and engage the mez. Thus, for AV or EB fights you often had to think about what you were doing and time your attacks appropriately if you wanted to engage a mez effect. This increased the difficulty without negating half the effects of your powers. The problem with how TOR does it is that it is like the devs are flat out admitting they have made all PCs OP. That's the only reason they have for turning off like three of my most effective powers... my stun, my interrupt, my AOE KB (which also interrupts). Those abilities make me too powerful and would make the fight against Arcann or any other elite boss too easy... thus, the abilities are OP. And of course, that's why all the *other* fights in KOTFE (the non-boss trash fights) are also too easy. Because they let us keep those abilities against the trash mobs, and that makes them even easier (or at least it could... I can't imagine anyone bothering to stun a trash mob, since they die so fast it is not worth it). Also let's remember they take your companion away for the Arcann fights too. Again, because with the companion it would be too easy. The comp could add more DPS or could heal you and your HP bar probably wouldn't move AT ALL against him with a healing comp. It is really kind of funny in a way that also makes me sad. These devs GAVE us these abilities with this level of effectiveness, they GAVE us companions and made them uber, and then these same devs take them away from us because the abilities THEY gave us in the first place make us OP w/r/t the boss fights. Maybe they could try just not making us OP next time? I dunno... that's probably too radical a thought. In any case, the fact that they have to take away your signature or prime abilities for the boss fights pretty well proves they don't know how to balance their combat systems.

If you like that, that's fine. I'm not saying I want them to turn it off for everyone. I just wish they would give ME a way to turn it off, so I can level more slowly. I don't like speed-leveling.