I recognize that opinions are subjective, but BOBF is definitely the red-headed step-child, compared to Mandalorian. And the PT had at least one good movie (ROTS), whereas the ST had zero good films. So, you were saying?

That's actually an entire separate issue and is not what I was getting at. At least currently, though, since tertiary stats scale down, you are correct. Having purple 330s might shave off mere seconds in a heroic, versus wearing greens, or even 306s. The difference is negligible, at best. Gear really doesn't even matter in raids much, right now, unless you're doing Vet/NiM ops.

That's fine. Your take is reasonable. The person I directly responded to was not. The person I responded to was belligerently angry and saying that the money they spent should have earned them the best gear in the game. I still question the need for the gear. You can do all story content in the game in green 318s or worse. You don't need purple 330s. But at least you're not expecting the best gear for nothing but money, like some people do.

You got max gear on all those characters by working for the gear. You earned it, at some point. You didn't log in at the launch of 6.0 and find a full set of 306 gear with gold implants in your mailbox, courtesy of Bioware. You earned it. You may have easily earned it (because 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0 made gearing easy), but you did earn it. The only thing that changed with 7.0 is how easily you earn it. Don't take my stance here as defending Bioware. I'm not. I am a hardcore raider and I hate this new gearing system, too. It's atrocious. I was talking **** about the system before it launched and it's worse than I thought it would be. I'm not happy with the new gearing system. All I'm pointing out here is that spending money on a game does not entitle a player to the best gear. SWTOR, in the history of SWTOR, has NEVER been P2W. That's not how this game works. Anyone thinking that $15 a month entitles them to the best gear in the game is objectively delusional, because the game has never, ever, in its entire history, given out the best gear available in exchange for a subscription. It just hasn't. There is no reality that exists where that would be true. Dr. Strange checked the multiverse and he can't find one. That's not how SWTOR works.

Lightning Sorcs are struggling these days. That sounds reasonable to me. Marauders are currently overpowered. If they were struggling, it wasn't because their gear sucked. This is the only example here where I can see some merit to the "better gear needed" argument. Not that you'll be running Umbara all the time. Most players quit when they load into it because that last boss is just obnoxiously difficult for most groups, even in 6.0. But sure, I'll throw you a bone on this one. You say yourself here that the DPS were new. The problem here wasn't the gear. And depending on what spec those Snipers were, it may not have even been their skill. There's only one Sniper spec that actually parses well in 7.0 right now. Throwing BiS gear at people for minimum effort for 2-3 expansions in a row is how the playerbase got to the point where it looks like half the DPS you run with don't know what the **** they're doing. They don't learn their class, because they get carried by fantastic gear and better players and think they're doing fine-- and when push comes to shove they can't pull their weight. Maybe all of the bad DPS that you say you were with were just new, in which case, good. Hopefully they'll get better over time. If you know a player isn't pulling their weight, and you plan to complete the content that you can't complete because of a certain player, then yes. Either quitting and reforming with different people, or kicking the people weighing you down is, in fact, the answer. You may not like it, but it sounds like you're never going to clear a semi-difficult FP with that Marauder.

When you buy an RPG of any kind-- or at least a AAA RPG-- you aren't just given the best gear at the outset of the game. You ramp up your gear over time with hard work-- such as procuring loot from dungeons, buying them from vendors, crafting them, going on some asinine fetch quest, or if you're in an MMO perhaps trading for it. You pay a set amount of money for this RPG, but you don't get the best gear just because you paid for the game. You are provided the opportunity to earn the best gear, but it's not just gifted to you. Before you raise your hackles and come up with a retort, this analogy applies to other video game genres, as well. In Call of Duty multiplayer, you have to unlock all the different weapons, weapon accessories, and paints by leveling up in multiplayer and you can level up faster by being a better player. In Forza or Need for Speed, you aren't given the best cars in the game at the start of your save. You have to buy them with money/credits you earn as you play and upgrades are sometimes story-gated. You paid the same amount of money as hardcore raiders to have the opportunity to work for your gear, not so you could just have your gear. If you didn't understand this before paying for a subscription, that's not on Bioware. That's on you.

This bug also occurs (although much more rarely) on the first boss fight, and during the cutscene after you interact with Malgus (assuming this horrendous bug doesn't stop you from beating him). The latter occurs 100% of the time. I literally hear my character cry out in agony as it falls through the terrain, in spite of the cutscene continuing unabated. On one occasion, a Shadow Stride caused me to fall through the map for about 60 seconds before I actually died. And pushes of any kind initiated by the player seem to be able to do this to trash mobs. I don't want to upend your investigation/troubleshooting process, or anything, but it really seems like the problem isn't with the attacks that are occurring. It's with the terrain. Or at least, that's the bottom denominator.

"I knew that if I kept playing it would consume my life." "I just like WoW better." -this person has since moved onto FFXIV

I mean, my overall point was that "temporary" may be a questionable term to use if its going to be here for the foreseeable future. By your logic, all max gear ratings are temporary and there's no point grinding for gear, even if you're a serious raider. You're just going to have to regrind in 20 months when another expansion drops, so why bother? /s But this was kind of a sidebar to my larger point: That this system is objectively bad and doesn't actually make things fairer for the average player. The removal of the Need/Greed/Pass system only inundates players inventory with more junk and makes things harder to get when players that would normally Pass on something are forcibly given an item they don't care for anyway.

So, you think the drop rate of items, which directly impacts how easily you can get an item, has no relevance to the removal of the Need/Greed/Pass system, which also directly impacts how easily you can win an item? Alright, I'll take that, as long as you accept my offer on this bridge I'm selling you.

I know. I'm one of them, but I wasn't specifically talking about personal loot. I was talking about the overarching system that now exists, which is what OP asked about. If you'd bothered to actually read, you would have understood this and not made this farcical statement. The other one of the three also is specifically complaining about the removal of Need/Greed/Pass, not Personal Loot, which we've had as a system since at least 6.0 (being able to loot a dedicated set of gear, that may or may not be useful to you, for the preferred discipline of the character that you are playing) edit: So out of this extremely small and anecdotal sample set, only one person is complaining about personal loot, and even that's not entirely clear as they didn't specify what, exactly, they were complaining about.

I've seen the opposite reaction on Discords. People either haven't been commenting on it (probably because they didn't realize the change was implemented-- my GM didn't realize loot rules had been changed until we were discussing it last night) or generally dislike it. Also, you're arguing against an argument that nobody has made. No one said the personal loot system was bad. Most folks aren't even arguing against the removal of Master Looter. The main problem is the removal of Need/Greed/Pass.

I'd love to know why you think any of these things are irrelevant, and would also love to know how you answered each of these on your own.

Where did you get that idea? The only way I can see you derived that is if you read as this being an interim step to another "improved" system somewhere in the far future. Onslaught was released in October of 2019. If SWTOR doesn't significantly update or change the loot rules issued in 6.3.2 for a similar length of time, then it looks like we'll be stuck with this system for a year, at minimum. And given the questionable nature of whether or not the current system is actually an improvement, I hesitate to ask for a newer "positive" change.

I will forgive Bioware for not giving us a hood toggle after 10 years if they revert this loot system.

The loot rules, as they exist in the update provided on 8/31/21, removes the opportunity for most players to have a chance of getting decos, forces players to take items that they don't want, makes 10-stack DT runs that much more difficult to organize and creates friction between players. The Need/Greed system allowed everyone to have a fair opportunity to get some of the rarer items that dropped from PvE content, but now SWTOR is arbitrarily dictating who will get what and leaving the information of WHO received what available to everyone. This is going to create instances of people begging others for items that they want, booting players when said items aren't given up, and people "ninja-looting" items that they don't even need or plan to use anytime in the near future (e.g. a Mercenary running off cackling with a piece of Endless Offensive that dropped in a EV HM run). The latter will become an even greater problem as people are searching for new set pieces in the 7.0 cycle as they re-gear their toons.

It's garbage. Don't need those mats that you always pass on? Too bad. You have them anyway. Were you hoping to get a roll on the Sacrificial Sphere from Temple of Sacrifice this week? Brace yourself, because Need/Greed is out the window. Someone gets it randomly and good luck tracking down who won it and convincing them to roll for it, if you're in a PUG. I'm also mysteriously getting green gear on a full 306 toon. So figure that one out. You will not enjoy this system.

Bioware, I visited the forums again for the first time in years to say: Don't listen to the naysayers. This system is so much worse than they're saying it is. Please, for the love of god. Change it back. I don't know whose hairbrained idea it was to implement this change, but I can't believe that Bioware Austin had a popular demand for this. Sincerely, An Incensed Player

I have a mouse. The exact type of mouse, as well as my computer specs, are really not important here, as you will see momentarily. Whenever I play a game-- literally any game that isn't SWTOR-- on my my PC, I have no issues. Today, on 5/24/21, when I opened up SWTOR, I encountered the most bizarre bug: My mouse cursor, across all systems on my computer, starts to track up and to the right at a slow, but noticeable pace. If I click out of SWTOR, it doesn't matter. It continues to happen no matter what I'm doing on my computer. Except when I close SWTOR. Then the uninitiated mouse movement stops. This anomaly does not occur outside of after I've clicked "PLAY" on the launcher and when I've closed the game. It only occurs while swtor.exe is active.

It's great to see this amount of delusion on a gaming forum. Always nice to get a reality check and see that my critical thinking skills are still quite sharp. Lets debunk this entire post, shall we? It's very easy to turn this statement on its head in full. You could try to make your case that KOTFE is better than one expansion or the other. I think most would agree that you'd be indisputably wrong, but that's a whole different bear. You stated that it was better than both of them combined. Between the two previous expansions, you got 2 full planets... Y'know what? Rishi was about the size of Dromund Kaas. I'll throw you a bone and say it was only about 1.5 full planets. You got 6 operations, 2 new warzones, at least one arena, both class story AND faction story, a slew of Flashpoints, several new (the operative word here is "new") Daily areas and a couple of overpowered companions. In KOTFE, you get one planet about the size of a very beginning starter world (Zakuul), and a Daily.... hub, if you will (Odessen). If you'd like to say 'don't forget about Denova' that planet was so small and existed for content so minor that if you would like to count that as plus for KOTFE, then we'd have to go back and give an honorable mention to Manaan for the argument againts KOTFE being superior to the two previous expansions. But I digress. You do technically get 6 Flashpoints (Star Fortresses), but the content of each of those Flashpoints is so clearly recycled, even to the casual player, that I don't think you can really say that each of them is unique in their own right. You do get a single warzone and arena, which is nice after the considerable PVP dry spell in SOR, but that's still less PVP content than what was provided in ROTHC. There are zero operations, zero Daily areas (the "Daily" areas are old Heroics, not new content), and the multiple stories motif, a staple of SWTOR since launch, was eliminated in this expansion. Nevermind that you can't run story with friends or strangers anymore, but that's ALSO a completely different bear. The only thing KOTFE wins out on here is the number of companions, some of which, all of which are overpowered. Indeed, SWTOR remains unique for its fabled Bioware storytelling. It's storytelling has clearly been handicapped in this expansion, whether it be due to budget or creative differences among the writing team. At this point in time, I think the only way we'll ever know what on God's green Earth happened to the story in KOTFE and why it got completely derailed is if Edge or Game Informer runs a massive post-mortem on SWTOR when it finally gets shut down (whenever that may be). It's clear, though, that even if we have differing opinions on the content of the story, its still inferior to the two prior expansions for a couple of reasons. In ROTHC, you still had very unique split-faction stories, everything fully voiced, and since class missions had been temporarily halted, you could run every single quest in a group. In SOR, they took a clear step away from group and faction stories by introducing personal phases and outputting nearly identical faction stories. Class stories did make a return, however brief they may have been. KOTFE completely eliminates faction stories and also does not any reappearing class stories. Case closed on that one. You clearly haven't played Mass Effect 1, 2, Dragon Age 2, or vanilla SWTOR. Bioware is, or was, renowned for the agency it gave players to have different outcomes in their stories. This kind of changed when they were adopted by EA, but the change wasn't immediately apparent, although the examples are glaringly obvious. I don't want to write an essay on why Mass Effect 3's ending was terrible since we're not even discussing that game, anyway, so I'll just skip straight to why KOTFE isn't a return to Bioware storytelling, as opposed to drawing comparisons between the best example of what is...... Not Bioware storytelling. The player, regardless of their class, is railroaded onto one story that barely changes course throughout the whole of the expansion. The whole "Your choices matter" statement was clearly misleading, as sometimes the Chapter releases made no sense in the context of your character's history. Why is my Chiss Bounty Hunter being approached by the self-exiled Grand Master of the Jedi Order in the backwoods of a world my compatriots stumbled upon and introducing me to the ghost of a former member of the Dark Council? Why is my Jedi Battlemaster performing a shady gold heist? Vanilla SWTOR's story, both in class and in faction, were very much more tailored to your classes, and could have wildly varying consequences depending on your actions. KOTFE clearly does not have this much narrative depth and does not provide the player with much of his or her own agency. These are both cornerstones of Bioware storytelling. Bioware has always been a story-centric MMO. To think that it has not been just shows that you haven't spent much time with the game. You even said yourself that people left the game after it first launched in large part because there was hardly any end-game. Most of the game was story-fixated. Your post is pretty much just bunk. You can be happy with KOTFE. There are a handful of things to be happy for. It probably has the highest quantity of story out of all the expansions thus far (even if there are differening opinions on the quality of it), you can get a boat load of companions that aren't restricted to certain classes, there has been a slight resurgence in PVP content, you can earn credits far easily than you previously could, and the summer event has yielded the return of extremely rare and sought-after items posted on the GTN (and in Cartel Packs) for semi-reasonable sums. There's plenty of reason to like KOTFE, but you mention just about none of them in your post.

Sure, as long as you are still subscribed by the 28th.

He doesn't say that. He says players on July 1st will get early access. Players that are still subbed on the 28th will have access. He didn't talk about what would happen if your subscription ran out in-between the 1st and the 28th. If my subscription ends tomorrow, I don't get access, right?

This. Right here. If it wasn't for the delay I would have been eligible for both early release and the Chapter itself. Now, if I want to play the new chapter, I have to extend my subscription for at least a month. This, of course, is silly and I also feel cheated. Quite frankly I don't care about "early access". I can wait two extra days to play it, but it pisses me off that I now can no longer play Chapter 16 without shelling out, yet again, more money. Either give out free sub time, Bioware, or make sure access is given out to people subscribed as of July 1st. It is atrocious that as you are delaying for, presumably, working out a kink or two so you can release it bug free (which should be the minimum goal for any company producing a deliverable to a customer/client) that you've moved your eligibility marker for said deliverable by nearly an entire month.

How much interaction or influence does the Community Team have with your Customer Service end? Is it now completely outsourced or do you have an in-house team that tries to assist customers? I've been going back and forth with Customer Service since the Eternal Chamiponship released. All 3 Weeklies did not work for me, on multiple characters, and I even saw mention of the issue in General chat on the day of release, so I know I am not an alone in having these problems. I contacted Customer Service via an in-game ticket about this issue. They gave me a canned response about how to troubleshoot Class quests. But wait! It gets better! I reply, citing the old ticket number, saying, look, any human being can see that the response I received was completely out of left field. Could I get some help actual help with this issue. An actual human gets back to me. He apologizes for the issue I'm having, but says I'm pretty much SOL on this (I'm paraphrasing, he said this in much nicer words) and suggested I complete the Weekly much earlier in the week next time. I ran through the Eternal Championship the first day of early access. I could not have done it sooner. So, I get back to the guy (he left me his personal name, this wasn't just Customer Service robot P0-82 or some nonsense), explaining this, and also explaining that I had a very similar issue just recently that I was, in fact, able to receive help with. I then received another copy/paste response, this time, about my Legendary status. I never have had a problem with Legendary status, nor was it ever brought up during any of the exchanges that I have described here. Please Community Team. I already refiled a ticket (most likely in vain), but you gotta help me out here. Customer Service has clearly run its course and, with all due respect to whoever is working that side, proven itself to be incompetent. What are my options here?

The patch downloaded and installed completely after I made a new patch folder (I still have the old one, I just renamed it). I appear to be able to log into any character without issue. Haven't seen that other error about the null reference, yet.