Mine finally finished patching at about 14GB. Maybe Bitraider isn't smart enough to fix individual corrupted files inside the larger .tor containers and has to replace the entire several hundred megabytes to fix a few kilobytes of bad data? If so, then Bioware made a pretty bad choice of patch client and should probably ask for their money back.

KotFE came out to about 14-15GB for me. 4.0.2 has so far run to about 10GB to get to 80% completion. Why on Earth are they so large? My entire SWTOR game folder is 32GB: did KotFE really need to replace nearly half of that data? Did 4.0.2 need to replace a third of it for a maintenance patch? I've seen another player get snarked at and told to "learn how to use a computer and stop screwing up your install so you don't have to download it all over again", and he was only reporting 8GB. I accept that it's entirely possible that I did manage to wreck some files, because I started the update at about 15:00 GMT and cancelled it about three hours later (at less than 50%) before I'd seen the official advice to just let it run, no matter how long it was going to take. A couple of hours later I tried to run it and got that "unspecified error" message. I gave up for a few more hours, then started it up again about 21:00 (when it was still reading 50% completion) and it's been going ever since. For the first four hours of that it was barely managing to get any data at all: for the last two, it's essentially maxed my ADSL connection. So I have a few questions. Obviously I'd like an official response but I'm no way naive enough to expect that anyone in BW's CS department will even read this, let alone find it interesting enough to give it a response. Therefore I'm going to politely ask that anyone else who responds to it keeps it constructive: stick to stuff you know (or at least have good reason to believe) is correct, rather than speculation, please. 1. How big was this patch supposed to be? 2. Did stopping the launcher at 50% cause damage to the files that were patching? 3. Is the launcher normally able to stop and start the patching process without fouling the files? 4. If stopping the update did cause damage, then is the root cause related only to this particular patch, or should we expect similar problems with future patches?

...and I'm waiting for the punchline. It'd better be damned funny.

Could we get the ability or option to show our or other players' companions in the spare party member slots when we're grouped, rather than having them appear as nothing more than a tiny portrait and health bar under the player portrait? It would make it easier to see them and keep them alive if you're healing and the companions are DPSing or tanking.

I fully agree with the idea of being able to fill a group with our companions. It's more realistic that you'd take a full group with you when you have six (or seven, or twenty) companions in your crew. Just put them in the party member frames instead of other players so that you can still control them and change their roles.

If it's a PVP companion, exactly how do you use it in PVP? All companions are PVE companions, regardless of how you get them in the first place. Now that I have 4X, I have no intention of PVPing again so I have no idea whether he continues to get influence from subsequent PVP matches, but I'd be surprised if anyone, PVEer or PVPer, who actually wants to level his influence will do it solely or even mainly by playing PVP matches.

This is one of those little things that would make a large difference and, had this game allowed UI mods, would have been solved by a player about a week after the game had been launched. Instead, despite it being brought up many, many times since launch, we're still waiting. I am pretty short sighted. I wear contact lenses most of the time, but their effectiveness varies a lot depending on how long I've been wearing them, how dry they are and even how often I blink, so more often than not, I don't have 100% sharp vision. Add that to a tiny cursor that doesn't stand out all that much from a very busy background and I can pretty much guarantee that I have to try quite hard to find the dratted cursor most of the time. BW, please add the size option.

That works for DPS hilts, because they exist in off-hand sabers. Since there's no such thing as a dual-saber tank, and the tanking shields use armourings, there are no off-hand tanking items with hilts in them. Yeah, it's possible that they drop, but certainly not guaranteed. I've not seen a hilt of any kind drop from heroic Star Fortresses, though I haven't done a lot because I'm not really doing FPs all that much right now. So my artificer can't make a blue 200 hilt because they don't exist, I can't buy one in some OH item and hope I learn the schem, cos they don't exist. My only choices are to buy DPS off-hands or wait for RNG to drop me one in the FPs and Ops I don't often do. That's just weak.

That was a DPS hilt, I assume. Is there any way to get a tanking hilt from crystals gear? I'm stuck with a 192 on my Guardian and since I'm not running FPs/OPs right now, I don't know how to upgrade it.

Given that Artifice no longer makes enhancements, how about unstickying this thread?

The current top-end crystals, the +41 stat versions, date back (if I recall correctly) to v1.0 of the game, back when the cap was level 50, and there have never been any new ones since then. Isn't it about time there were? They're already nearly 100 rating below the other modifications you can get in game and they'll only get comparatively worse as time goes by.

That's something I'd also like to see, but I've seen it suggested enough times on these forums that I've mentally filed it in "quality of life things that will probably never be done" along with thinks like "useful sorting options in the cargo bay" and "sticky mail compose window so I don't have to open it and address it every flaming time when I'm sending multiple mails to the same character". Not a QoL thing, but in the same file: "craftable colour crystals that are actually on a par with the rating of the rest of your gear". Or, for that matter, any colour crystals above rating 136.

Or at least let the new window show when a companion is running a crew skill so that we don't summon them and inadvertently cancel the job. Even a confirmation window saying "X is busy, do you really want to summon him now?" would do.

Aha, I did not know that. Nice one.

Me too! We should make a team! Though obviously not a full one, otherwise we're just forcing ourselves to endure PVP while handing easy victories to the opposition. We need some PVPers on our side to endure hell with us.

I'm not sure what the OP thinks mods could do to reduce the number of clicks he performs, unless he wants a mod that gives you a window that tells you which toon to heal and then gives you a keybind to drop the best heal on it. Clearly that's not in keeping with the spirit of the game. That said, if he heals the way I do, he clicks on a bar in his raid frames with his right hand and then presses the button on his keyboard to fire off the desired heal. If that's the case, I think his estimate of the number of mouse clicks may be a little low. Some rough numbers I just made up that I don't think are too wild: Tank takes 50 heals per boss fight. DPS takes 20. Healers take 10. 2 tanks, 4 DPS, 2 healers in an 8-player group, so about 200 heals per boss fight (assuming that the number of times you click on someone without healing them is about the same as the number of times you heal the same person two heals in a row). Assume that you have about 10 trash fights per boss but throw a tenth of the heals, that's about another 200 heals, so about 400 heals per boss, including clearing to them. 5 bosses in a night, 2000 heals and about as many mouse clicks - you can do the maths for more bosses (I can't remember the average number of bosses per operation) or more players if you want. I reiterate that I just made those numbers up, but they don't seem particularly bad based on my history of healing. About the only way to reduce the number of clicks, assuming you heal like I do, is to allow mouseover targetting - you'd never have to click on a player at all if you didn't want to. This could be done without macros, but would be better with them so that you could choose which specific abilities you wanted to use it with. As others have pointed out, developers have full control over what they allow in their macro systems, so once you've implemented the system, it would be relatively simple to enable only a limited set of approved functions. Limit that set enough and I'd guess that you eliminate the possibility of game-breaking mods. What I'd really like to see is quality-of-life mods: one-screen cargo bays with automatic sorting and categorising, for example. Even the most rabid of the "mods will break the game for everyone and only losers who can't play want to use them" party can't argue that QoL improvements are bad for the game. On the contrary, anything that reduces player frustration can only help a game.

Oh, I didn't realise we were being silly, Clearly I'll stop talking right now in light of your amazing insight.

Then why can't I at least also be allowed to make the concious decision to turn the damned highlight off so that I can see when something I might want to do appears in the list?

Tell you what, if they ever do introduce mods, don't use them, or to play with anyone else who does. Set up a guild of like-minded people and ban the use of mods within your guild. Problem solved.

OP's aware of that, it's in the first line of their post... blktiger: You might not have to use another bar: companion abilities are keybound and default to Ctrl-1 and so on. If you're happy to use keys instead of clicking, then just use those keybinds or change them to ones you prefer. If you only want to click on them, then you're out of luck for now, I think. I'm not sure whether the bar's missing deliberately or due to a bug (off the top of my head, I can't remember whether the keybind to toggle between the two bars is still in the preferences) but if it is a bug, I expect that BW'll fix it sooner rather than later. FWIW, I prefer the big bar myself, if only because I can move it around. I rarely click on it except to toggle the comp's automatic ability use: mostly I just hit Ctrl-1 to point the comp at an enemy and Ctrl-2 to pull them back.

The current UI system hasn't been around for over three years. The devs looked at it, looked at player feedback, and decided that they would add additional functionality to the UI. More than once. Take the glowing borders that appear on buttons when that particular ability is made available or enhanced by a proc. Or should I assume from your "ain't broke, don't fix" stance that you've never enabled any of the additional features, or that you've actively disabled any that were enabled by the devs? I'm guessing that you consider yourself to be a competent player, probably better than average. Actually, based on your responses, I suspect that you think that you're better at this game than almost everyone else playing it. Good for you, and I hope that you're right. Now imagine you didn't have to scan two, three or four places on your UI as well as two, three or four places in the game world every second. Imagine how much more of your focus you could put into watching the boss, your avatar and its surroundings for those tiny clues that few people, you among them, are able to see. Think how much better even you would be? Don't you want to be better? I know I do, and I'm not even pro. Look at fighter pilots: they have HUDs, and they're some of the most capable, highly trained professionals in the world. You might even have a HUD in your car so that you can see your speed without having to take your eyes off of the road, if it's a new enough car. In a few years that'll probably be standard on all cars. Why not in this game, for pretty much the same reasons? And if you, a total pro, don't want to use it, then you can turn it off like you did all the other UI improvements. You can continue to use the original UI, without countdown timers or ability highlights, more than 3 bars, moveable and scalable elements and so on. And if you're using ANY of those features that didn't exist in SWTOR 1.0, then maybe YOU have a PLAYER PROBLEM too, even if you don't want to admit it in public.

One of the quotes about this game that has stuck in my mind is that the game is not about what's happening in front of you, it's about what's happening on your toolbars. When I'm playing WoW I have timer bars either side of my toon that show the progess of my buffs and debuffs and some chosen cooldowns, None of this is information that isn't already available to me in the standard interface, it's just presented in a way that's clearer and frames the action. This allows me to watch the fancy graphics that the developers spent months or years creating rather than the toolbars that probably took 5 minutes. In SWTOR the toolbars can show the progress of a cooldown as a bar, a number or both. You can get something similar for your buffs and the target's debuffs, though I don't think you can get numbers. To work out whether you need to and are able to reapply a particular effect may require you to look in two or even three separate places, depending on how you set up your UI. This is inefficient. You could move your toolbars and buff displays to somewhere more central, but you then have the risk that you'll click on something by mistake when trying to click on something in the world. You can't separate the target debuffs from the target frame, so either you move the target frame to the centre of your display, or you still have to look elsewhere. Yes, there are some indicators in the game world that show you that you're able to use something, like the glowing eyes that my guardian gets when he's able to use Riposte, but given that I generally stare at the back of his head rather than the front, it's pretty hard to spot in the general chaos of a fight. In my opinion it's perfectly acceptable to want to take the information that the game already gives us and display it in a better way that doesn't require us to take our attention away from the fire we're about to step in, or the boss action that's about to kill us. If the game developers don't want to allow players to create mods to solve these problems then they'd better damn well add them to the game themselves.

The companions list in the crew skills window seems to be ordered almost at random. Given that there are no more companion-specific crew skill bonuses, there's no reason other than influence (and specifically the duration/crit bonuses from influence) for anyone to pick any companion over another, except when they don't want to send their currently summoned companion away. When you're in the crew skills window you can see the influence (even if you can't necessarily tell the difference between a level 5 and 6, or 10 and 11 companion) but when you look at the list in the mission or crafting window there's nothing to show the level of each companion. Yes, you can look to see how long the job will take them, but you'd need to check every companion in turn to work out which one was better. I suggest that the companions list in both the crew skills and crafting/missions window be ordered by the companion with whom you have the most influence at the top. That way you can be sure that you'll get the best returns by picking the top six companions, rather than having to check them all every time.

Flip your question: why should the game continue to remind you about something you choose to ignore? If the alert is constantly flashing to say that the Pierce/4X mission is still waiting for you, it will mean that you can't tell if/when a new alert appears without looking in the alert list, which defeats the purpose of having a flashing symbol to tell you that something new has appeared. Think of it like email. You don't want your computer to tell you that there's new mail all the time when there isn't.

I think that at this point, I've had more schematics drop in the past three days than I've had of the meat in the last few years. Can't even see much point in making the stuff, given that it's such a feeble buff.