They are different numbers, the point is they have been calculated and it basically works. I use exactly the same gear on my sentinel and my guardian except for off-hands, several of them even share the same spec. They are effectively "different styles" but, in the end, are doing the same things outside of advanced class abilities. BW has done the conversion calcs. I promise that's the easy part of this.

A few mirror classes are handling the calculations ok. Merc and Commando, Scoundrel and Operative, Gunslinger and Sniper; the sets have the same abilities but each mirror uses different weapons, "different styles", to get the same things done. We're not talking about infinite weapons and infinite choices.... Force users have 3 weapon arrangements, tech has 5. A lot of the work is already done for several of the conversions, like for a merc that wants to use a cannon. And it's not like sages do much with their weapons. Oh well. Maybe for the 20 year anniversary.

Stealth is not meaningless, it's super helpful for defending and in duels and for attacking nodes guarded by "not too good" solo visible dps and for setting up or avoiding traps on bridges or next to fire pits. But yes, Sin tanks weren't the most broken class (nerf operatives and anni maras and sorcs and tracer round and...) - I was referring to my first impressions. As for the post you were responding to "it's not going to happen" was as far as I got thinking about it, I wasn't really agreeing/disagreeing.

We still don't know how big the story will be. And there's a new raid. Elom/Manaan with new daily areas could be Ossus (+) or it could be Onderon (-), hard to say at this point. From what we've seen so far the xpac's pretty much everything we could have hoped for at this point. It would be great if EA doubled down on SWTOR and put another few hundred mill into developing and overhauling the game. But EA doesn't do that sort of thing and I doubt there are many EA execs that think BW has earned that kind of investment even if they otherwise might have considered it.

When this game first came I out, I still remember one of my first impressions "tanks with stealth and burst and heavy cc, what is BW doing?!?"... ;>

I'm really not sure what the issue is. Some say "animations" but... lots of games with as much or more style as this game give characters weapon choices. WAR (another EA mmo) had the same problem as this one - one weapon choice per class. I think it was a design choice - the early devs seemed to prioritize making classes easily recognizable and distinguishable. To that end early outfit options were similarly very very limited. All I can say is "they were wrong". I can see how adding a bunch of new animations (even with re-using many existing ones) -now- might be problematic given resource limitations, but for a "big" update supposedly focused on that feature it might have been do-able. Other games like City of Heroes have added significant numbers of animations/options into their games for specific updates in the past. From what I can imagine of the new system, if its introduction goes the way I suspect it will, there is going to be mega fury when players log in and discover that their LS sith characters are suddenly using (what were formerly only) Republic advanced classes (styles). I'll be fine with my empire characters switching, I'm looking forward to it actually, but I doubt many people will be.

I have a few sets of knights that are named similarly where one's the sentinel and the other's the guardian - I would be much happier and have played the same amount of time (if not more) if I could have just played one character and switched styles instead. I have well over 60 75s (on 2 accounts). The bulk of my play time is spent on a small handful of characters. I got the achievements/titles for playing all classes to 300 cps, 100 renown. And for beating that eternal championship thing on all classes. But I've created very few new characters since the last server merge. And even though I'm done making lots of characters, I'm still one of the most prolific players (but I'm sure I'm not winning any contests for "most prolific" - I've just been a regular player for most of the last 10 years, even a dozen hours a week adds up).

You aren't "ruining" anything. If you want them back and don't want to play through all of the story and all of the alliance alerts, just use the terminal.

Remember - it's not a paid expac if your subbed anyways. They're completely changing the new character process and the endgame process. They're significantly changing what everyone can do with their characters. A raid is included (I don't raid but am happy for raiders). PVP is being changed. Based on what we've heard and without using my imagination too much, this sounds like the biggest update since KotFE at least (which was well over 5 years ago at this point). But we still know very little - griping about what the expac isn't is very premature.

Sounds good. We're still light on details but the "combat styles" is a lot to absorb all by itself (my sent using a dualsaber or my guardian using dual sabers - I'm looking forward to the variety). If there was an update that just revolved around combat styles I would call that the best update this game has had since SOR. And I'm interested in the "load outs"... I have a lot of characters, will I be able to share gear sets with all of them without having to use my legacy bank every time I log in (and before I log out)? If you completely change the endgame gearing process again please give us as many details as possible as soon as possible. It takes time for some of us to wrap our heads around those.

Macs are already running their own version of Unix. Windows lets you run linux as a subsystem - I get my bash fix there (powershell is so lol). And I use vim in visual studio and instead of Notepad++. It's not perfect but it's almost a "best of both worlds". I'm using windows 11 now and am able to run the game.

It's a good catchup mechanic for those that want rewards that other people earned (by staying subbed over the years and/or completing events). It's a bit of a faceslap to veteran players though. The new apartment is nice I guess for those that care about housing.

Yes, I'm not contradicting that in any way. I firmly believe SWTOR will keep going -until- there's something to replace it (and I doubt that there is anything being seriously worked on to do that). MMOs in general are easy/cheap to maintain and this one in particular is probably still making a lot of money from its cartel market. A couple years ago someone was bragging about this being a billion $ revenue game and it still gets listed on just about everyone's "top active mmos list" even if it's not at the top of them.

Nothing Smedley says can or should ever be taken at face value from any historian, he just didn't want to talk in that interview (or couldn't, legally) and his statement shut some people up.

Windows 11 - 32-bit PCs won't be able to install it. The only reason they shut down SWG was SWTOR - that game had very few players towards the end but they otherwise would have kept it running. SWTOR is getting lots of money from the cartel market, way more than it costs to maintain it. Especially with the recent success of the shows and the lists of imminent new ones coming out, getting rid of a successful SW game seems very unlikely any time soon.

You may have misread my post: I'm not leaving swtor because I don't have the gear or because I'm not doing well in pvp. My frustration with swtor pvp has nothing to do with gear. And while I've been playing swtor almost exclusively for almost 10 years now, that's still a minority of my time pvping in mmos. Twink fighting in the old days of lowbie Wow was hilarious to me (my rogue or hunter could often one-shot half the enemy teams); from what I've seen Wow is not that bad now. I have no problems with starting at the bottom of a gear grind. And I have plenty of time.

Funny, I've been diving back into Wow myself for the last couple weeks. I feel like I've done everything I can in this game at least for now and there's tons I haven't seen in Wow from the last decade or so. I'll be keeping my account active here until we get details on the 10-year. Not that it's everything or the only reason I play but every progression system here is largely pointless after a quickly reached cap; I've got two accounts (well over 60 75s) and top characters in each are effectively identical despite the fact that one account has a lot more played time. (I'm taking a break because of pvp issues - the game's far more frustrating than fun lately)

3 factions was done with another EA MMO (WAR) - it's totally do-able. That wasn't the reason that game crashed and burned. For my part I'm expecting something big for this year and I would stop playing tomorrow if I thought this game wasn't going to get improvements down the line. Hype does keep people around and looking forward to the future. Stagnation does not.

I don't know why BW waits so long to announce incoming xpacs/patches. When people know they are coming and they have something to look forward to they will stick around through quiet times like we have at the moment. But BW -is- working on something significant for the 10y anniversary which is probably going to arrive in less than ~5 mos. If you want to take a few months off between now and the xpac to reset your burnout, more power to you.

Forced? Who's forced? When I get GSF or Operations requirements in my PO list and I can't switch them out I ignore them. I'm not forced to do anything. Just because someone's in a pvp game and they lose badly doesn't mean everyone on their team is "forced" to be there - one sided games didn't just start happening a week ago. And the number/variety of people doing pvp hasn't suddenly multiplied as far as I can see. If you think you're "forced" to do something in this game you should seek treatment (whining and blaming devs isn't treatment). Pre-mades are an issue but there are many other threads discussing them.

Lol if you were going by my post which mentions them, I pretty much spelled out why an engine upgrade is very unlikely. And I was only mentioning them as an example to illustrate how investments in this game are probably handled by EA and BW execs at this point. There was no implied hope there. I would love it if it happened but an engine upgrade is a wish not a hope.

I agree that other games make more than swtor, especially if you only look at any given 6 month or 1 year time period. My point was only that I don't think any other SW game has made as much as swtor (well over a billion $ at this point) has over the lifespan of the game. And this game still pulls in $10s of millions in income even with a relatively negligible budget. That's one of the strengths of MMOs - even mediocre ones don't die and don't require a lot of money to maintain. As for xpacs and the major movie releases, they were both shown to result in significant subscriber bumps for 4.0 and 5.0 even if they were only temporary (going by statements made by Charles Boyd and numbers gleaned on SuperData). The main question is how to turn EA's investment into returns (either big short term returns or significant long term ones or both). If EA gave BW $50-100m for an engine upgrade and one year later was still making the same amount of revenue or only a little more than they did before the upgrade, they might suppose that money was wasted. Investing in current long term customers just to make them happier probably doesn't compute with them.

Something "big" is happening for the 10-year anniversary which occurs at the end of this year. That's all we know. For roadmaps and predictions, BW doesn't give us details for things happening much more than 3 mos in advance. We found out about 4.0, which was the biggest expac for this game, in June or July of that year. Logically, EA should be investing in this Star Wars product as it's probably their biggest money maker out of all of their Star Wars products and especially because Star Wars is popular again. But they aren't going to tell us much on these forums until something is very imminent.

swtor has lightsaber warrior types that were relevant/useful in pvp. Wow warrior-types were in a bad place in 2011/2012 and heal/cc-spam was off the charts, so I dived into the pvp here until recently (6.0). It's funny because I disagree with just about every design choice this game has made (trinity, classes copying Wow, cc-spam almost as bad as Wow, Wow-invisibility, companions, no flying mounts, no ship command, planets with small, mostly empty zones, bad engine for crowds, clunky movement on slow mounts, etc) but I still like the game for "lightsabers". I've played all the other classes to at least 300 command ranks each and 100 renown each but none make any "sense" to me, I wouldn't play this game for them. The stories are nice but I was done with the stories in 2012 and everything since then has been very short. I'm looking at other games lately because, more and more, the lightsaber warrior types are just a dumb choice from a gameplay/pvp perspective. First 'MMO' for me was the turn-based Neverwinter Knights on AOL. Then played Gemstone, then Dragonrealms, then a long list of other games with one foot in the door of several at any given time. I was focused on pvp in my graphics games. Except for City of Heroes which had no pvp at launch but it was awesome anyways because flying/jumping/superspeed/costumes and later housing - all much more fun than similar offerings in most other games before or since.

This game had lots of content for KOTFE and KOTET. People came back to play for them. Then they left, even with fairly steady chapter updates (for KOTFE). Of the new flashpoints, I don't know anyone that wants to play them more than once or twice. The new story content is great but it doesn't keep people playing regularly in an MMO. I know full well that it will never happen but this game's engine needs an overhaul. Updating the engine the right way allows for more customizations to characters, to homes, to ships. It fixes issues with combat. It opens the possibility of flying mounts (and jetpacks), of war zones with vehicles, of war zones and raids with more than 16 characters, of fleet and guild ship invasions, of more sandboxy planets and more interesting live events. And it can make the addition of new content easier/faster and less bug prone. As Khan tells us: "Add content or improve a system and you may gain some, but improve the engine and you gain a thousandfold." Often you have to step back before you can make the leaps forward. Millions of people out there were interested in playing a good Star Wars MMO ten years ago. Many times that would love to play a fun SW game.