Another patch has come and gone, and Bioware/EA/Eric have still not fixed the bug where you never lose duability and therefore never have to repair. This is a slap in the face to all swtor players. Credit sinks play an important role in the stabilization of an MMO economy. Over the last year, credit sinks have progressively been removed from the game. The result has been ingame inflation. If the durability bug is not fixed soon, I will have no option but to unsubscribe. Who wants my stuff?

You already have some good answers, but here is some additional information. The availability of the good missions is not the same across all tiers. Grade 11 is fine. For most professions, the mission that I want is usually available immediately or after one zone switch. Grade 6, for example, only has Abundant and Moderate. There are no Rich or Bountiful at this grade. In other grades, it can vary. For example you might find that at one grade, there is no Rich Diplomacy mission. At another grade, there might be no Rich Biochemical Compound mission.

There have been posts in the thread from people under the impression that Bioware had promised or committed to removing the items gotten from the exploit. That's not the case. It was said only that it was a possible action open to them. People are now getting back from their 24 hour bans and are reporting that no change has been made to their ingame characters except for the removal of patterns learned through reverse engineering. People still have their chestpiece and optimized enhancements, and cargo bays full of Matter Transubstantiators and unused chestpiece tokens. It seems clear that the unearned gear has not been taken away. Hence the OP. I can't speak for others, but for me that is a large part of it. Let me be clear. Bioware have sent us a message. That message is, we're all bark and no bite. We're going to talk tough, and try to scare people, but we cannot handle large scale exploiting. I don't know why this is. It could be that they want to handle it better, but they don't have or can't commit the resources that would be required to truly handle it. I don't believe that it is a failing of character on their part. However, the outcome speaks for itself. The lesson for players should something similar happen in the future should be obvious. Eric's post outlining the actions is a great post. It's well written. The praise started almost immediately. The problem is that when you find out the details, when you find out what the action taken actually is, you discover that it is misleading - Exhibit A being the people who have posted in this thread who thought that Eric had promised that the unearned gear would be taken away, when he did not. Most of the offenders got a punishment so light that they are literally laughing at Bioware and those of us who did not exploit.

In my guild we have a general rule that we don't use exploits. The first time we became aware of it was when we were approached by someone asking for a SM lockout. Once we knew it was out there, we actively discouraged our members from using it. Now the process has come to an end, with the issue patched and the punishments handed out. At the end of it all, I feel like a chump. I'm an idiot. There are 50 pages of posts in this thread debating the rights and the wrongs. There are exploiters defending themselves, others attacking the exploiters, and plenty of criticism from all corners for Bioware. Above it all, we have Musco's heartfelt words. The bottom line is that the exploiters won. The fact on the ground is that people who used the bug were smart to do so. This is because those who took the risk are getting to keep their rewards. The characters still have their chest pieces, enhancements and tokens that they looted. They still have the credits from any materials that they sold. They still have the items that were crafted from the materials they obtained. Some people used the bug 20 times, or 40 times, and got a 1 day, or a 3 day ban. That is a price well worth paying for what they got. I am dumb. I should have exploited. I will know better next time.

You shouldn't get ultimate comms for 55 content. However, there is also the fact that right now there are only two ops at 60, with only 10 bosses and that just isn't very much to do per week. This is compared to the previous situation where there were 4 ops to choose from. But, we can't even do that much because the only ops version that can be reliably completed in a pug is 8M Ravagers. 8M Tos and the 16M of both Ravagers and ToS cannot be done by an ordinary pug. (At least, they could not from launch date a month ago until today's patch.) The casual SM ops community is absolutely in a bad place right now. What's needed is not to send people back to 55 ops -which is what has been happening for the last month - but to nerf Ravagers and ToS Story Mode. We got some of that today with Bulo and Walkers being nerfed. I hope it's enough, but I just spent an hour wiping on Underlurker 16 SM with a guild group, so currently it's a fail.

You've already been called out on this, but I'm going to do it again. You don't speak for everyone. Your expectations are not everyone's expectations. You have some valid points, some that I agree with, but your lead in is going to put other people off. There are players who constantly seem to have unrealistic expectations, and then are constantly disappointed when those expectations are not met. Then they come onto the forums and complain. Exhibt A is the OP's complaint about the class missions. The class mission was EXACTLY of the scope that I expected. In my opinion, the dev posts here were very careful not to over hype the class missions. We were told that we would get one quest, and that's what we got. Would we have liked more? Of course. Were we promised more? No. That the OP took something small, and then in his own head imagined it up into something bigger is exactly why the dev posts have to be super cautious. That then leads to less dev posts, which lead to people complaining about lack of communication. They can't win. On total XP gain, I broadly agree with the OP. The first character that I wanted to level hadn't done the Forged Alliances FPs. On the first day, I went and did them solo while the rest of my guildies jetted off to Rishi. I ultimately dinged 60 with the final hand in from the final story quest (no 25% boost). Most of my guild mates who went directly to Rishi ended up between 50% and 150% of a level short of 60. It seems the XP map 55-60 includes doing the 4 Forged Alliances solo. That sucks for mains who had already done it. Assuming that extra real content is a non-runner for cost reasons, some extra 'bring me 20 wolf pelts' type quests to make up the difference would have been better than nothing. Rep gain on Rishi: I agree, too easy. No heroics: Don't agree, this is not an issue. Side quests don't have cinematics: Don't agree, I liked the change. Most people spacebar through cinematics on the second and subsequent times anyway. Sometimes even the first time. Resources require 451 skill: Yes, this is a minor irritant, but it's so easily overcome that it's not worth complaining about. Basic comm system: Meh. Gear is easy to get in this game. Might as well keep it simple. Don't agree with this complaint.

I've been playing my vanguard tank, doing SM ops, and I love the new system. The choices between the various utilities for my class are very well balanced. I much prefer it to the way it was at 55.

My guild has topped our leaderboard on all bar two weeks since it started. Initially, it was awesome. A lot of people came back to the game and got involved. As it's gone on, it's become more of a chore. Now, I can't wait for us to get all the planets and be done with it, which is maybe 6-7 weeks away. There are things that could and should be done to revamp it. I'd welcome some way of getting smaller guilds. It does lessen the accomplishment when 90% of the server don't care about it, or at least proclaim loudly that they don't care about it. (Yes, all of you 'I don't care about conquest' posters, mission accomplished.)

On my sage, for solo content I DPS with Nadia, because she has by far the best gear of my companions. It's great fun, stuff dies really fast. In answer to the thread title question, no, absolutely not. Happy that they are gone.

I really like conquests the way they are, and for the most part things have not gotten as bad on my server as on the Shadowlands. However on balance the OP is probably right. Crafting is a great source of points, and is the best route to victory no matter the week. I don't think it's quite as bad as they make out, as there is a bit of handwaving going on regarding how easy it is to acquire the mats for at least 25,000 war supplies - which is my estimate for what it took to get to over 40 million points. But a bit of a nerf / tweak to the system seems necessary.

Before I give my opinion, I have a question. Where did all the mats come from? Yes, if you send out all your companions to make war supplies, you can generate points very quickly. However, it take about an hour's worth of gathering to get the mats. If you buy the mats from the GTN, the cost can range from maybe 20K to 50K. What was the GTN like on your server? With two guilds going at it like that, did the war supplies mats shoot up in price? I ask these questions in good faith. Some info about me and my guild: We've won a planet on four of the six weeks. We lost the Trade Emporium week by a tiny amount. We thought that we had won, but the (smaller) guild behind us used a big crafting bomb in the final few minutes to add close to a million points that we had no time to respond to.

There is another thread on the forums discussing this issue, filled with hate on both sides. I hope this thread does not go that way. I'm a buyer beware person mostly. However in recent weeks the practice of listing a normally cheap item at a high price has started to irritate me. I have not fallen victim to it. I am careful. What annoys me is that I have to be so careful. On the GTN, I click to sort by price. Then I click again. Then I click again for a third time (and sometimes even a fourth or fifth time) to make absolutely sure I'm looking at the cheapest item, not the most expensive item. And I do that every single time I view an item on the GTN. The careless people who have been scammed in the past, I don't believe they should get a refund. However, I think the game team should recognise that there is a quality of life issue here. As long as 1 in 100 people fall for these scams, the scammers will continue to post their mis-priced items, and the rest of us will have to continue to dodge them. By taking some action to reduce the possibility of these incidents, you reduce their profitability and therefore their prevalence. I have some suggestions. I don't know how difficult each of them would be to implement: 1. Have a 'cooling off' time after purchase during which the transaction can be cancelled. This could be 5-15 minutes. You might impose a fee or penalty on the purchaser for exercising the option. You might limit it to transactions over a certain credit amount, such as 500K or 1 million credits. The downside of this option is that there are people who want their purchase straight away. 2. Change the interface so that only the cheapest items are shown / can be bought. The downside of this option is the difficulty of implementation taking into account both absolute price and price per unit. Sometimes items are listed in a stack of 99 at a lower price per unit, but a buyer might be willing to pay a higher price per unit because he only needs a few units. Also, sometime people are interested in how deep a market is. For example, are there only a few items for sale, or pages and pages of the same item? 3. Have a pop-up warning if someone is about to buy an item for a price other than the cheapest price. This is similar to suggestion 2, but instead of changing the display, you just give a pop-up warning if the buyer is about to do something that does not make sense in terms of price. Again, you run into problems regarding stack price vs price per unit. There is also the fact that pop-up messages don't seem to help, discussed more below. 4. Have a pop-up warning before any purchase over a certain amount, such as 500K or 1 million credits. On the upside, I imagine this would be the easiest to implement. On the downside, it would be the least effective. For one thing, when you click BUY, you already get a a pop-up saying 'Are you sure you want to buy THIS ITEM for THIS MANY credits?' Yet it doesn't seem to protect careless people. Would a second pop-up really help them? Maybe. Another downside is that it wouldn't help someone accidentally buying a 4K item for 400K. In fact, it could in theory lead to a raft of overpriced items listed just below the protection threshold - in effect just moving the problem. For sure, there is a problem. For sure, I'd like Bioware to do something about it. However, I'm a smart guy, and I've thought about the problem, and I'm pretty sure there is no simple solution.

My guild has deliberately closed recruitment recently. After we appeared near the top of the conquest leaderboards in the first week, we got a surge of applicants. We want to win planets in the conquest, but we have a small officer corps, and we want to keep the guild at a manageable size. We could have gone down a path that leads to becoming a mega-guild, and that would help with getting conquest points on the board, but we decided that the downside of becoming bigger outweighed the upside.

We've had no official answer on this, but speculation is that it is related to the really early days of the game when there were lots of servers, and @Master Thon was one of them. And Master Thon got merged into the Progenitor. So the game still remembers Master Thon as the original server for the guild. Or perhaps it's the origin server of a founding character. I've talked to exactly one person on the Progenitor who claims to remember a Master Thon server - everyone else says their guild originated on the Progenitor despite the @ Master Thon suffix. What I am sure of is that all of the guilds on the conquest board are on your own server now. There is no cross server stuff happening. So you can just ignore it.

The information you received was wrong. You control a planet until another guild conquers it. Obviously, it can only be conquered by another guild when it comes up in the weekly list. The reason your guild does not control Hoth is because there was a problem which affected the week one conquests. A hotfix patch was needed during week 2, which required the servers to be reset. When the servers were reset, they 'forgot' the conquests, and went back to the default 'no guild controls this planet' Bioware have since fixed the main issue, so a server restart should not cause the same issue in the future. However, the week one winners were not restored to their planets. As of right now, this affects the guilds that won Hoth and Ilum in week 1 (Voss was up for conquest again in week 3, and has a new controller anyway). As evidence, go to Corellia or Balmorra right now, and you'll see that the guilds that won those planets, nearly two weeks ago, are still named there. CZ-198 is a separate issue. At launch there was no title associated with conquering CZ-198. We don't yet know if this is an oversight or intentional. A thread drawing attention to this did receive a dev reply saying that they were looking into it.