That's the most confusing part of this. They seem to have an agenda that they aren't telling us. Any experienced dev should know these sweeping changes made to all classes will cost them a significant chunk of their most loyal players. And without them their servers are going to turn into ghost towns. They have to know from just a few years ago that ghost town servers don't retain new players, even casual ones, at all.

More funny. Time to give FFXIV a shot I guess.

Choosing between blade blitz, guarded by the force and vanish. You only get one of them. LOL!

Explain how I was changing the goalposts. I repeated myself several times. Was it the "bashing isn't the same as disagreeing"? LOL! OK... Something else you're wrong about. You haven't "shown" anything. I did claim you agreed with the article you linked. If you say you don't agree then you don't. You did apparently think her opinion about the new expac is relevant and/or significant in some way; I don't. This is all coming from you posting a link to a currently or formerly BW affiliated fan-site. Whether or not she was in fact being totally from the heart in her article (for all I know she was), she had reasons to not be. It was the exact opposite of a credible source for a review or for anything, the same as linking to someone's facebook page but worse because (was/is) affiliated. And again I don't care about other games. I've watched a few youtubers but not the ones that are part of any obvious programs, especially not the ones being critical. All I know is Anthem's affiliate program was different than SWTOR's is even though they're both EA. If you want to post links to videos of people bashing games they had deals with without losing those deals maybe I'll take a look at one or two.

I've listened/watched/read most of the content creators. I like them fine. ootinicast just had a poll about the latest pts patch reception and less than 10% of the people that tried it liked it. I used to listen to Bad Feeling podcast every week until it stopped with 6.0. I've seen most of swtorista's non-twitch videos. Xam Xam, Snave, Vulk are/were all good for this game, we need more like them, not less. Eric Musco started out as a podcaster and he's been great for swtor, too. BUT influencers are not objective 3rd party sources of different perspectives on major changes to the game. They're good sources of info, especially when they're given previews (which doesn't happen much in this game), but they can say "this is gonna be great" 'til they're blue'er than Chiss cosplayers I won't care. One of the reasons <I think it was> Eric cited in an interview or stream a long time ago for the Influencer program was to help guard against waves of bad sentiment like that which came initially with 3.0 and was sortof a surprise to them. That was probably the biggest and best update this game has had, but it was received poorly. And this is where posts like those from Xam Xam come in, as an example.

Got a quote? She's not allowed to bash the game/company. She's allowed to disagree (do you see a difference or not?). If she wrote articles like "Combat styles are death of game" and put them on the front page of her site she'd be losing her influencer status sooner than later. Feel free to prove me wrong. But, as a content creator, she has reasons not to want swtor to fail - a really poorly received update could hurt it which hurts her traffic too. Ergo, biased.

Me? I'm a player. I'm coming from the perspective of what's good for players like me in this game. I'm more objective than Xam Xam. I never claimed to be objective. Linking an article on a 3rd party gaming site could imply that the site had some sort of independent game enthusiast/journalist writing the article. In which case there would be at least some implied objectivity. That is not the case here.

Strawman all you like, she's free to disagree with various things (bashing BW/swtor repeatedly would be another story). But it's in the best interest for her site that swtor does well. By itself, that means anything she publishes on her site could very easily be biased. Other than maybe one or two of them, I don't trust any influencer to be 100% objective or candid (besides which they are under NDAs), no one should. The best you've got is someone posting an essay on their own swtor-affiliated/promoted site instead of the forums and you agree with her.

She's the propaganda wing of swtor, her web site is all about swtor. Whether you've seen ppl bad mouth other games on youtube in the past doesn't really matter - there's no way her "perspective" is remotely objective.

Lol! You don't have a position. You quoted an article from a content creator as if it was something it wasn't. Keep trying.

I'm talking about swtor and things I've overheard from people who used to be content creators (not sure if they still are or not but they stopped creating content awhile ago). If you want to talk about some other game go to those forums.

Swtor has a "content creator" program. If "content creators" bash the game they get kicked out of the program. And aside from that, content creators want swtor to do well because when it dies so does their content creating. Youtubers bashing wow have an audience because wow still has millions of players and there's a lot of angst to capitalize on. Furthermore many of them are taking money from multiple sources (Square Enix, for ex).

The author thinks that combat styles is an overhaul of swtor's combat system. And Ms Haywood seems to think SWTOR isn't going to be a tab targeted game in 7.0. She's just guessing and assuming on too many things to list, riding high on vagaries from Jackie's pr post. She's also wrong on too many things to list. Furthermore, the author's not a neutral 3rd party reviewer, she's a Community Content Creator. Part of her job is spin.

I use guardian leap in pvp especially in Huttball - if I'm carrying it's a great way to move far or up levels. If BW wanted to simplify things they could make charge work vs allies.

I don't have anything to argue about on the rest of your post. To the above I'll just point out that new players aren't dealing with more than a few keys unless they do things to skip the leveling process. I don't care about players that skip the leveling process and then complain about too many buttons. Similarly I don't care about players that "return" for a month or two every couple years and forget everything about their layout. They should give themselves time to relearn the game or stick to story content with just a few buttons or not bother.

Since KotFE's broken bolster system, yes. I was referring to when the max level was 50.

The only reason the game's easy on lower level planets is because of the garbage bolster. My characters that were in their mid-high level 40s in full blues and purples were having plenty of problems with Corellia and class and world quests and that was with more abilities than they are giving us on test. Of course overleveling story content became easier and easier over the years and without bolster reducing people's levels that was easy too. My point is that plentiful dcds aren't the reason solo story content became very easy.

Reducing kill times in pvp is about reducing healing and tanking/taunt mitigation. From what I've seen it's more likely that more players will be playing tanks in pvp because they are going to be much better in duels and fights without healers. To an extent those conditions exist now, they are getting worse with 7.0. In the case with more tanks, kill times will not be going down in pvp.

And a lot of people do. The last time I counted on an old server (a couple years ago) there were more people in pvp instances than in flashpoints (MM or Vet). I suspect that participation has dropped since then, the last couple years has had bad pvp in general, but I'd be very surprised if even story mode raids have "tons of participation" by comparison. When swtor was first released, one of the dev blogs noted with some surprise that just under half of everybody was trying warzones. Interest has always been there and it's always been one of the top queueing activities in swtor.

I can't imagine doing the Eternal Championship with what I had on test. That's something I normally use my dcds to get through.

Combat styles isn't the issue. Neither are loadouts. We don't have details on those yet, we weren't working with those on test. They aren't overhauling or changing combat, at least not so far as I've heard mention. I'd be at least interested in seeing an overhaul of guardians and classes in general. I've changed specializations for expansions in the past a couple times without complaining. This is not any of that. This is someone with scissors looking at my character sheet and deciding arbitrarily "one character, one 'load out', shouldn't be able to do all of that".

We've "gotten used to" the game as it was given to us in 2011. The number of keys to bind hasn't become significantly worse over the last decade unless you think 2 or 3 more keys to bind on top of the 25+ we started with is a lot. BW isn't making the game "less clunky" with 7.0, they're just reducing the number of abilities we're going to have access to at any given time. In every other game I've played that's called a nerf. A lot of the people who like the idea of these changes haven't seen what's going to happen to the characters they actually play. Wow did the same thing SWTOR is doing now and they regretted it. The patch that started it is still remembered as the worst the game has ever received. If you want to start playing 7.0 now you're free to: just take your current character and unbind half the keys. Let me know when you start having fun with that.

My guardian started the game with over 25 things to keybind @50. Over the last 10 years he's gained 4 new things and lost a couple (that I don't miss). My level 75 guardian on test has less active abilities, far less, than my level 50 had in 2012. That's not an accident or a bug, it's by design according to the explanation we were given.

That's not what this patch is addressing, though. This patch is reverting my guardian to something less functional than he was in 1.0 but he will still have his stun, his pushback, an aoe snare if he wants it and an aoe mezz if he wants it. And current dps guardians aren't one of the classes anyone's complaining about going up against in ranked. And he's losing his cc-breaker of all things. Or it's getting "changed", who knows if it's for better or worse they won't say. Currently it's gone. One of the other things complained about is tanks. Currently the tank guardian is much better in a fight than one or two dps guardians. Does it sound like they're thinking about pvp to me? No.

That's actually the dumbest, slimiest argument you could make. "But what about the crippled kids?" There are things I've never been able to do physically. When I'm on the field does that mean everyone else has to tie their shoelaces together? Or rather make sure everyone always ties their shoelaces together in case people like me want to play? No, I would hate that more than anyone.