Which "1st comment"? If someone is a paid shill their opinion is worthless. Right or wrong? Troll opinions are worthless too. Paid shills do exist. Trolls do exist. Right or wrong? If someone checks off a lot of "paid shill" or troll boxes for me I'm going to guess that person is one. Same deal with a lot of social media - the bad actors are not going to announce themselves. The worst of them will never publicly admit to anything. But many do give themselves away if you pay attention.

Before they started talking about our new feature they should have locked down what they were giving us ("only two combat styles" and "they are permanent decisions") and told us so that people with imaginations wouldn't get expectations dashed. But this is just a minor whine/gripe. I doubt they're thinking of ways to exploit this with the CM, they've actually been pretty good about things like that so far.

I didn't deny anything. I never said "everyone" who disagrees with me is a paid shill - far from it. I said there's one poster in this thread who probably is - there are plenty others I disagree with in this thread and I'm definitely not sure about the one... You're accusing me of making assumption and jumping to conclusions without reading or understanding my post or my points. Irony.

If the only argument someone has is that "they like the changes and their feelings matter" when in fact they are paid shills (or employees/salespeople/marketers) with no relevant feelings about the game, then I would say their "argument" -is- invalid. Maybe not to you.

If you look at some of the white knight posting histories, the things they talk about and obvious inexperience that belies some of their boasts - and then happen to notice that what one of them is saying and the way they post matches that of other posters with sketchy posting histories nearly identically in certain ways, it very much smacks of marketing. A lot of the posts look like what I would write if I was observing posting patterns on general gaming sites and was given a list of things to highlight and English wasn't my primary language. There were a couple swtor accounts on here from a few months ago that I was pretty sure fell into this category. I don't know about some in this thread and of course there's going to be people that defend BW because they like BW, but I have suspicions for at least one. If I was a game dev and I wanted to generate positive buzz or mute negative buzz about something happening with my game I would definitely pay people to do social media (including forum posts). It's easy, cheap and can be very effective. Even though not too many read all of these posts, buzz which can be started here is something that spreads. I would also pay people to attack my competition (I'd be very surprised if this game wasn't on the receiving end of that when it launched). And I would also pay some of the big streamers to look at my game (but that's not cheap). Marketing these days isn't just about advertising and trailers. Most companies have highly paid people with expense accounts that are told to shape public perceptions - many have ignored most facets of the internet up until recently but that's changing.

PVP in this game is more popular than raiding. Shortly after the game launched, when it had millions of subs, a dev announced "nearly half of all players participating in Warzones" - lots of people came here with an open mind to PVP, it should have received far more attention than it got (beyond just shutting down Ilum). But most players that have played this game for more than a few months have at least dipped their toes in both PVP and raiding.

LOL, I must have missed it - do you think you were defending Bioware?

Necro alert.

Can't modify gear (also, pve'ers get the best gear for duels and world pvp) = thumbs down. Arbitrary ability loss = thumbs down.

Bioware Magic Is Bull <== the link is broken because the word in *s is censored on these forums. The word starts with bull and ends with a 4-letter variation on crap. I get that some of you are bad players, you hate having options you can't use and since you can't use them no one else should have them either. If you want to right now you can take buttons off your toolbar but that's too hard for you, you need Bioware to do it to everyone, right? Guardians having saber reflect and blade blitz aren't the reason swtor's pve or pvp balance is currently broken. Sentinels with blade blitz and pacify aren't either. Leveling without them on a toolbar is not noticeably more challenging. They're just arbitrarily getting removed for the sake of removing them. Complaints about changes have existed in every expansion for every MMO in existence. But would any of you (that aren't being paid by BW) say that swtor is doing "well" right now? Since they're removing almost every change implemented in 5.0 and 6.0 would you say 7.0 Bioware agrees they were good expansions? Or even 4.0's design philosophy of targeting and catering to solo players, giving us lots of cut scenes and ignoring group content? For the game's 10-year anniversary, who really cares about the leveling experience? No expansion in swtor's history has had 7.0's negative feedback pre launch. The best I've heard from anyone outside of this thread is "it's not that bad" or "I'm looking forward to some parts of it". And while the number of people saying the game will die because of this patch is very small, the number of people saying they won't play it is actually very significant.

Sorry, the only moddable gear being 334 and available from the operation vendor -is- a huge deal. The only ones that will be able to use it or buy it will be raiders. Maybe when another raid gets released and the max gear level gets raised to 342 (or whatever) those of us that are willing to not use the best gear level available to non-raiders will be able to buy the old mods? That's assuming we get another raid. 5.0 and 6.0 had imminent plans to upgrade max gear levels too that never happened. And promises about "more content coming soon" and "this will be a great year for swtor" can usually be taken with a grain of salt.

For the record I hope I've been 100% wrong about 7.0. I've been wrong occasionally in the past, it happens. Having played this game for 10 years and invested a lot of time, energy and $ into it, I'd love it if this game started to become really successful and got handed more dev resources for content and non-hokey gameplay fixes/upgrades. I just don't see how the 7.0 we've been told about and played on the PTS could theoretically get us there. Maybe Sony has to buy EA first...

I know they have a group heal, maybe it stacks well with other sents when you got beat, but outside of having a group with nothing but other watchman sents and where the other team stands together and doesn't cleanse, it doesn't compare with the self heals from almost every other class.

Bear in mind those sentinels have lost a lot of their utility and cc. Someone who can -only- do melee damage should be better at doing damage vs someone else that has cc + movement buffs + self heals + range + stealth + whatever else.

Would you say that what's on the PTS now is "challenging"?

As much as we were sold what we're getting here, so was the company that is funding swtor. EA is probably generally not happy with Bioware lately. And while the guy saying "we're taking what we did for 6.0 and redoing all of it for 7.0" can obfuscate that a thousand different ways, someone saying to upper managers/investors "we're going to throw out everything we've worked on for the last year except for the story/content" might have some in depth explaining to do that could easily go the wrong way.

This is crazy news. I dove back into Wow for a little while there but then saw the disgusting behavior by the senior managers and it was easy to walk away. Now, I don't know know. I like the game, the pvp in particular, and have many characters established there. I really wish I'd bought the dip on ATVI stock...

That site isn't relevant unless you think swtor has 10.4m "players or subscribers" in which case it is relevant to show that you're nuts. I'd be very surprised if their 200k active player number has to do with anything also. Steam has charts since the game started on that service. The user number has gone down since last Jan/Feb - you would think it would have gone up in anticipation of the next patch. The Nov/Dec 2020 vs Nov/Dec 2021 is also down. From my perspective both the Star Forge and Satele Shan servers are less active than they were two years or four years ago but they aren't much less active. We used to be able to do /who commands to take server population snapshots but the syntax for that has been changed. Or it's just buggy now.

Would anyone say swtor is doing great right now with subs and server populations? Even with the addition of steam and the steady collapse of Wow's playerbase which flooded other games, all BW can afford to give us is tiny expacs and tiny content drips - your idea of massive success? Look at their marketing budget for 7.0, doesn't look healthy to me. Even with the youtubers sponsored and a few forum posters very likely paid for (if they aren't already BW staff), it hasn't exactly been marketed. Everything 6.0 did that people complained about pre launch is currently being thrown out so BW must agree with the complaints - if they'd listened two and a half years ago maybe they wouldn't have to do that, right? If they'd listened pre 5.0 maybe they wouldn't have had to throw that out or spend most of 6.0's budget rewriting their gearing? If they'd listened pre 4.0 maybe we wouldn't have as many cut scenes but maybe we wouldn't have lost so many of the mmo grinders 7.0 is targeting now? The number of people saying 7.0 is going to kill swtor is small. The number of people saying 6.0, 5.0, 4.0 would kill the game is small. But the number of people complaining, not just on these forums, and saying they won't play 7.0 is very large. Much more than the list of people complaining about 4-6. Expacs similar to what BW is doing in 7.0 have not gone over well in other games. Some of the people attacking the complainers just started posting a few days or a few months ago. Most of those complaining have years of history with the game and not all of them have spent that time saying the game is about to die.

I agree. If a publisher can't support a RPG with levels, stop pretending to. It's got to be confusing for the new players. They get a piece of gear but the stats on it and the stats on the character change depending on what planet/instance they happen to be inhabiting. In some cases a 1k hit to a pc is a love tap, in others it's over 50%. We've had several non-level based progression systems like command, renown and legacy "levels" that aren't tied directly to stats - stick to those.

And that's a lie. There were some threads, sure, but the very broad discontent with upcoming changes was nowhere near what we're seeing now. Compared to every other expac this game has gotten this is new. Whether it's on these forums, on youtube, on reddit, general chat on fleet or discord, very few people are excited for 2/15.

Have you played on the PTS and got your 322 set yet? It's grindy.

Many of us were "crying" for server merges before 3.0. That's when Bruce McClean gave us the "better than x-server" meme. And, as it turns out, that is absolutely when we needed them. Population hemorrhaging stopped after swtor got merges and has been relatively stable since then despite the fact that the game's had far fewer updates/expacs since the merges (which were over 4 years ago). If the hardware supports it, there's pretty much never a good reason not to do merges (or x-server). If your choices are 10 light servers or 2-3 busy ones, 2-3 busy ones is much healthier for the game and retention. Even if the number of players is the same, the perception will be that the game with 10 light servers is dying. If it looks like the server's dying players will be more likely to leave and new players will get the idea that there aren't good reasons to invest time here. There are always going to be a few players that say they like light servers for <reason> - catering to them has not ever been a good idea in swtor's history.

They also said we'd be getting level 400 command crates. And gear levels over 306. And that there would be a point to renown. So far they've pretty much abandoned every system right after they released it or very shortly afterwards. Will someone who just plays the conquests for gear have access to the vendors/currencies that sell level 334 mods when the top gear level is 342 (or whatever)? Or will that vendor/currency still be restricted to Ops players? There are still many questions.

The two most played mmos use quickbars as much or more than swtor. FFXIV is getting more and more popular/played lately - with kids, too. New World, which doesn't really have quickbars, is not being acclaimed for its combat - and my understanding is that most of its players are older, not kids overwhelmed by quickbars in other games. Don't let them fool you, BW is not overhauling combat or anything of the sort. They aren't making the game easier for new players or more accessible. If anything the lower levels for new players in 7.0 are a bit harder and more dull (basic abilities aren't showing up until many hours into the game). They're minimizing variety and the max number of abilities on toolbars so that it's easier to balance and harder for the best players to faceroll.