My god, you people need to listen to yourselves lol. QAnon swtor posters. It's always amusing checking in to these forums every 6 months or so and seeing the 10 same people still posting doom and gloom while still playing the game.

Delaying the expansion for raid content which almost no players actually participate in seems incredibly silly. The changes are clearly targeted at bringing in new players since the SW IP is finally going places again.

1) Warzone matching making to limit healers and tanks in each game, even if this lengthens queues. Some type of UI warning that too many of X are queuing would be fine. (note: probably shouldn't apply to lowbies, since there aren't as many people in the pool). 2) Remove Guard from dps. 3) Nerf Guard slightly, probably to 30% or so. 4) If you can't temper back the survival abilities of each class, damage simply needs to be increased across the board. Getting blown up in 1 sec might not be fun, but warzones with 0 deaths and infinite fights on the doors in Voidstar are the worst possible outcome. Focused DPS need to die quickly without defensive cooldowns up and still be killable with them active. One healer shouldn't get killed by one dps, but they should have to spend 80%+ of their time staying alive when focused. This is where the problem with Guard comes in - you either have to balance the game assuming everyone has it or no one does because it is too powerful. Two DPS should still be able to kill a healer through guard over a reasonable period of time, assuming no peels. Basically, lowbie warzones are better than max level ones because people actually die

Time to kill is way, way too high. Unfortunately, a lot of it is a compounding issue. -Healers solo are pretty strong -Defensive cooldowns are really powerful -Guard is really powerful and now available to DPS -No limitations on tanks/healers in queue If you put all of that together, it can create games that are an absolute nightmare (like where no one can even capture a single node on Hypergate). A flat-out healing nerf would be a nice bandaid, but it runs of the risk of making healers too weak solo just to compensate for the ludicrous survivability once all of the above are stacked. Some suggestions: -20% healing debuff in warzones -nerf guard from 50%->30%. If possible, either remove guard from DPS or further nerf it to <20% -maximum 2 healers per side in an 8 person game, or 1 in an arena. Some individual classes also need adjustments (like mercs, obviously) but in general this would help a ton.

It's not nearly as bad as I thought. Sitting in 230s at a whopping GC level 34, I was only about 2k hp below a guy wearing lots of 240s and some 236s. Hardly the end of the world. That said, the fact this whole thing isn't legacy-bound in some fashion remains a disgrace. One of the best parts about this game historically has been its alt-friendliness.

I'd like some real answers on what the intent of the changes are. Before this patch, bolster seemed great - everyone could easily compete and gear didn't make a huge difference. Does BW want this to change? Because there is no way I'm going to grind 100s of cxp levels just to play warzones. This is bad enough on one character, let alone several.

ESO is probably bigger competition for swtor given the style (story). WoW is still the king of raiding (and all group content) by a country mile. FF combat is incredibly slow and clunky by comparison.

This is the wow model that Bioware tried (and failed) to copy already. Blizzard has the largest, best-funded staff in the MMO world and they still can't develop raid content fast enough for their players. Wildstar also tried this (super hard raids!!) and failed spectacularly, at least in its first incarnation. The EQ raiding progression model for sustaining an MMO is all but dead. The pool of MMO players is very different than it was. Players want different things and spend money on different things. Bioware decided to redesign the game to capture more of the new market and it's probably a very wise decision.

I feel like the Imps biggest advantage is a 4:1 ration of operatives to scoundrels.

The majority of the playerbase. Especially in a game like this.

I think a lot of people don't realize how horrible the elder game system is yet since they aren't there, but I have a few ex-raiding friends in big wow guilds (Blood Legion, etc) and their rants are pretty amusing. Like, aside from the crippling bugs, the amount of hoops people are going to have to jump through to do anything puts WoW to shame. Maybe Carbine will nerf it before the masses get there, but anyone who expects to have remotely puggable group content, even just small dungeons, is in for a huge surprise. Almost everything in the game is designed to be incredibly elitist, for better or worse. That said, I completely agree on the multiple game thing. There's no game on the market that produces anywhere near enough content for people who play a game daily. And I don't mean 40+ hours a week - even mid-range players can exhaust everything very quickly. Thankfully there's a huge selection of f2p games these days.

Like another poster said, ability and class-design wise this game has a lot more in common with WoW to the point of being incredibly derivative. But the actual structure of the elder game in Wildstar is pulled right from the shelves of vanilla/TBC era wow raiding: attunements, difficult heroics, massive gating, competitive arena, horrible repair bills, tedious questing design, you name it. I mean, their marketing has been very clear at directly targeting disaffected wow players who hate the idea of raids being accessible.

Always been skeptical when a company says "we only need x subs" to keep the lights on. It's very difficult for any team to resist investor pressure, and even worse when they are a subsidiary of a giant publishing corp. If management wants them to swap models, they will. The only big exception to that from the recent game flurry is ESO, just because Zenimax is a private company and won't be facing the same types of pressure (they are also banking on the console release - the PC version of the game has clearly just been an extended "beta"). That said, if Carbine has been stubborn enough to design their game around Blizzard design docs from 2007, they'll probably hold on as long as they can.

Uh...GW2 made 28 million in profit last quarter, and they add content biweekly. (Whether you are interested in said content or not is a different question).

Because they actually make more money that way. If it was only EA that was doing this, it would be easy enough to assume they had miscalculated. But almost every F2P MMO I can think of uses gambling boxes in some form because it actually makes more money than selling things outright. Why? Psychology. There's an enormous amount of research on how people respond to getting fixed rewards vs RNG rewards. There's a great piece lurking around somewhere speaking about why Diablo 3 loot was so unsatisfying because of the AH due to this quirk, and there are plenty more that speak to the idea of commendations vs RNG drops. And of course, there's also the fact that hiding rare items inside a dice roll obfuscates their value. Did you see the reaction to Bioware listing a dye for $20 even thought that was probably less than it was actually worth before when it was in the box? They would probably need to list the Varactyl at $50 or something, in which case people would go nuts. This way, they can hide the rarity better and dupe people into thinking "I'm the lucky one."

They suffer from battered gamer syndrome. Someone needs to do a study, the SWTOR forums have several excellent specimens.

This is one of those largely meaningless absolutes that gets thrown around a lot. Just because someone has a green button to heal doesn't mean anything by itself. Having the raw capacity to heal or tank is irrelevant; it only matters if those are useful abilities in real situations on difficult encounters*. In all but a scant few situations, the answer to this is "no." *I specify difficult encounters because that is the only place balance makes a discernible difference in pve or pvp. When everything is easy/noncompetitive, the magnifying glass gets very small.

I'm honestly really surprised they were willing to come out and say they aren't working on any more class stories. It seems much more in their interests to be vague and keep people dangling with their subs active as long as possible.

If you really believe that this game exceeded expectations (or swallow that line from EA when given to you), I'm not sure what to say. Has the game rebounded since f2p? Absolutely. But saying the initial 6 months were anything but a colossal disappointment is just being disingenuous. You could start with the fact that a massive number of abilities in the game are ripped almost directly from WoW 2007-08. The JK is a WoW warrior. The sage is a WoW priest. Classes in MMOs tend to share a lot of similarities with one another, sure. But this goes beyond "well of course the healer has a heal!" They have virtually identical abilities that were just renamed. The WoW clone mantra is definitely overused, but again, denying that huge swaths of the game are derivative is just being disingenuous. Arguing that you are okay with the "clone" aspects is different than rejecting their existence.

There's still a significant difference between gambling based on skill (e.g. poker) and gambling based on total luck (e.g. slot machines, the lottery). Boxes in games are the worst common denominator because, like slot machines/lottery, they prey upon people's ignorance of probability combined with manipulative psychology. In a sense they're even worse because there's no potential payout of real money.

Why does match to chest even matter? If you get the dye once in GW2 you can apply it to all pieces as many times as you want. And it's not like dyes are cross-character here...

I personally just find it hilarious to compare the dye system in SWTOR to the one in GW2. The GW2 system: -has a billion different colors -in general, the colors look much better - once you 'unlock' a color on the character, you can use it as many times as you want -dye come from random world drops, not $ gambling packs. You can also buy them at auction for in-game gold. You can basically look at this as either ArenaNet being morons for not exploiting what is obviously a very profitable way to milk money from people, or as consciously putting their customers before profits. Or perhaps a third option which is believing that good will is more valuable for long-term profits than short-term exploitation.

That actually was a major problem and is an excellent point. 2v2 arenas were a terrible idea (in terms of making the competitive and awarding the same gear as others - their existence was fine for people who wanted it). 5v5 was always dramatically better, and tournaments were 3v3 for a good reason. The other major issue in WoW was that Blizzard likes to reinvent the wheel pretty often. Now don't me wrong - I actually kind of enjoyed the fact that the game changed a lot every expansion because it kept things fresh. I also think iteration and a willingness to make significant changes is a very good thing™ for an MMO company. BUT that type of "big change" model also made it basically impossible for them to ever settle on respectable balance. By comparison, SWTOR is pretty much a static game. I quit for over a year, and when I came back my Guardian was basically the same class (compare this to wow classes were most of them have had massive overhauls at one point or another). I think the combination of a 4v4 arena + a relatively static class design will end up making balance pretty decent. Not at first, of course, and not if the developers take an extended pvp vacation...but at least the framework is there.

Exactly. Also, many WoW players tend to forget that a lot of cool abilities in the game only came about because of Arenas. I mean, Hunters are a completely different (and better) class because of abilities they needed to add for balance.

Since they've full-on adopted the WoW model of two factions being largely meaningless outside of who you can group with, I wouldn't count on it. This is one of the central problems of having factions in PvE-centric MMOs. Customizing content for each faction takes too much development time and resources, so instead they throw generic third factions at you over and over and over again.