The only reason I subscribed on Tuesday was for GS3 because I enjoyed season 2, and I played far from all servers to do that. But now I think I'll just let the sub run out again in 28 days, not spend any additional money on the game and check back in in a year or so. I don't particularly care for the blue weapons at all. Shame about the "vault dweller"-esque armor set though. Would have loved to make a "slum rat" playthrough with that one.

Yeah, I don't understand this either. It's throwing a spanner into something that has worked for years and that everyone liked and had come to terms with. Even worse, it completely puts the reward structure upside-down. As you said: if I want to unlock everything in collections, then I barely make enough CC to do that. Even a single silver item unlock from the crates will put me over the edge and I'd have to either fork out extra CC money or subscribe longer. This just feels like one of these horrible B-class MMORPG monetization schemes where all shop unlocks are just 5% more expensive than the closest package you can buy to make you buy the more expensive currency pack instead.

I think GS2 was a big improvement over GS1. I remember that I found GS1 annoying and tedious at times with how there were only two set weekly goals and one rerolling. The way it's been in GS2 I rarely had to do something I didn't like. And even if I had to do the occasional GSF or PvP, it was usually a couple matches and that's that. Most goals were fine too. The only weekly I'd look at reworking for GS3 and maybe replace with something else is the "kill 25 guards of the opposite faction" one. I was doing GS on Star Forge and I can't remember for the life of me that this was ever advertised for or that someone came back to do it. I get the intention behind the goal (promoting open world PvP), but the reality is that people simply don't seem to do it in the vast majority of cases. It didn't influence GS2 too badly because you didn't have to do all weeklies, but I'd look at those couple of goals that people don't really seem to do and maybe find a replacement for GS3. But the format of how dailies and weeklies worked this season was much better than the first. You're not doing eight flashpoints. You're getting eight points. If you select only the flashpoints named in the weekly goal and the group agrees to do bonus stuff, you can finish the the objective within a couple flashpoints.

The complexity of it all really isn't working in the game's favor. Especially not when there are four to five different types of gear that all upgrade with a different currency and may or may not upgrade to purple quality along the way (PvP vs. conquest). There isn't anything wrong per se with the idea that harder content rewards higher gear, but I've never seen it done it quite such a convoluted and messy way as 7.0. There would be much easier ways to keep MM operation gear at 328 and 330 without splitting up the existing PvP, conquest and flashpoint gear into so many different tiers. And especially to make it possible to "cross-upgrade." It's overall just one of the messiest implementations of "harder content rewards better gear" that I've seen in an MMO to date, and it is simply unnecessarily bloated for the average player.

So, I'm just trying to get this straight here: You made substantial gearing changes under the assumption that we could stamp (CM) weapons into our outfits, hence why armorings, mods and enhancements don't drop anymore for level 80. The second step was to announce that the weapon stamping feature would not go ahead next week, but rather be re-scheduled for a release anywhere from one to four months down the line. Whichever is closest to the release of 7.1. The resulting issue is that unless there is an emergency hotfix to provide hilts, barrels, mods and enhancements, which can be restricted to the weapon slots for all I care, then all the CM weapons we paid for already are useless for the next few months to come. Furthermore, you announce a $40 digital collector's edition for this expansion where half the features were delayed, and one of the items is a (currently) useless double-bladed lightsaber we can't use due to the gearing changes that were forced through? Is that time line accurate? If yes, find the issue...

Yes, the gal for people to argue for what they enjoy. It's completely out there, really...

That is just absolutely not true, and since this isn't true, it kind of kills your entire post since it is built on this assumption. Games do not have to be "difficult" to be fun. For example, I occasionally like to play Story of Seasons. A game that is not "difficult" by any means, yet is great fun to me. All the way back since the PSX days. Nothing suggests all aspects or even anything in a game needs to be difficult to be fun.

It's a standard MMORPG gearing experience ever since at least 2005. A new expansion releases and previous gear is replaced by new, better gear. There's been memes about this for ages. The things I farm to last (in most MMORPGs) are rare cosmetics, decorations, mounts, titles and achievements. Hence why I don't actually spend hundreds of millions of credits per character on golden augments. I get purple ones to the best of my ability for 1/10th of that price and call it a day. 306 gear with decent amplifiers and purple augments is good enough for 99% of the content I do. People have been over this time and time again: it is detrimental to a game's health if new players are treated as second class citizens and can't catch up with their friends quickly, be that with a boost or easy gearing. Nobody wants to join an MMORPG their friends are playing only to hear the words: "but we can't actually play together for 300 hours unless we sacrifice all our progress." It's good to have long-term cosmetic rewards and rare cosmetic items that can show how long you've been playing (e.g. the Founder title), but gearing being long and tedious has never really worked out. That's why MMOs have moved away from it for close to 15 years now.

Which is precisely why all this "doom and gloom" and "here is how to actually fix the Jedi Guardian" is pointless as long as the suggestion does not contain a streamlining of abilities. It's harsh, all things considered, but this change isn't really marketing to old veterans. It is very much in line with everything that has gone on the last ten years: to make the game easier and more accessible for casual players in an effort to collect on what is SWTOR's biggest strength: story. Streamlining attributes, legacy bound gear, the companion rework, solo story flashpoints with a godmode droid and so on. The game hasn't tried to be "complex" and "oldschool" ever since SoR's release in almost any aspect, so why are we surprised they are doing another step? At this point I'm not surprised they are streamlining combat. I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner with all the other changes since 1.0.

We saw the same presentation on live stream and I never assumed an advanced class (combat style) would be able to use a different weapon than they are now. I'm not saying your post is wrong on the fact they were a bit too vague with their presentation, but I'm just highlighting something: if you went out of that stream thinking your mercenary could suddenly wield a sniper rifle as opposed to your bounty hunter being able to choose the sniper advanced class, you weren't paying full attention. There's nothing in this image suggesting combat styles/advanced classes would be using new weapons.

Alignment is (short of a couple things) pretty much useless and among the easiest things to get to rank 5. You can set yourself to whatever alignment you need in the DvL toggle and passively get all the way up to it before you even realize. That said, I don't believe we're talking about rank V here. We're most likely looking at something like a rank III, which should be very easy to get to and recover from using the DvL system if you were really inclined to do it. And that said, if they want to be one of the counter classes, I'd argue there's no real point in going back and forth between the two. If I am making a Jedi Knight specifically to become a Sorcerer, chances are I want to be a dark side Jedi in the first place. The same goes the other way around. I doubt many people will switch their LS imp character over, but there's quite some usability for DS republic characters. The short version of this: no, I don't think this is a major flaw in the system. Chances are that if you want to actually use an assassins' powers on a knight, you're already thinking about going dark side to begin with. The amount of people who will make a light side Jedi, unlock an assassin by going dark, and then go full on back to the light side is probably miniscule at best. And even in the one-in-a-thousand chance you want to be a light-side Jedi with DS powers, the DvL system means it's literally going to happen passively while playing for a few days.

There is currently nothing pointing to an alignment lock. What the devs said is that you need to have an alignment to access a counter class. That means if you create a Jedi and want to use the Marauder combat style, you need to be a certain dark side alignment. What they haven't said, however, is that you will be locked into an opposite. Here's an example: once your Sith Inquisitor reaches Light III, you could switch to one of the light-sided combat styles and be a Sage. If you don't want to, however, then your Sith can just continue using the sorcerer combat style.

Yes, with some caveats. I would say that the CU wasn't an entirely terrible thing in principle. The combat had some serious issues that needed to be figured out, and the mind-above-all approach when it came to the three point system wasn't that great either. I agree that the pre-NGE versions were by far better than the post NGE versions, but I think the CU itself wasn't a bad idea in general. There were issues to work out. It was the crap execution of having it and then pushing the NGE past shortly later that did it. The CU could have been weathered and worked on. The NGE couldn't. True. And no offense, but I think it bears saying: EA isn't trying to market to ten-year veterans who spend $2,000 on the cash shop because there's a big chance that no matter what happens, you're staying regardless. Now, I know a ton of people will jump on my throat how they won't, but the sunk cost fallacy is no joke. WoW is (by all accounts) continuously getting worse too, has a decreasing amount of MAU, but an increasing amount of revenue Q/Q for a while now. SWTOR is currently the only option for a Star Wars MMORPG. And for better or worse, there's a ton of attention coming to Star Wars now. Book of Boba Fett, The Mandalorian, Bad Batch, Kenobi, Andor, the Ahsoka show and so on. It's clearly part of the strategy that SWTOR looks fresh and modern alongside that to pull attention. They don't want to stand there and tell new players: here's a game that ten years old, has gameplay from late-TBC to early WotLK from 2008, a graphic fidelity of an early 2009 PS2 game and so on. Enjoy! A modernization to attract and retain new players from all that hype will happen, whether we like it or not. Might as well give constructive feedback past doom-saying and "this is the NGE!!!" to make it work.

Jackie, thank you for finally addressing this issue. I've been with this game since pre-release during beta, and I have to admit that SWTOR's PvP - while not too complicated - was my favorite in those early days. I actually quite enjoyed participating in early PvP encounters and warzones shortly after the game's release. However, the current TTK is just way too high. Additionally, the visual clarity needs an update. Sometimes there are so many passive effects working in tandem in the current system and no way to quickly and reliably identify them for an average player. I hope that this in combination with the new UI changes can restore some clarity to PvP and reduce the TTK to where it is actually fun again.

No. For example, you cannot match a Jedi Shadow's and Jedi Guardian's abilities. Your character can either be a Guardian or a Shadow at any one point, and they supposedly can switch between the two at will, but you cannot match their toolkits. At any given point, you can have either all Shadow or all Guardian abilities. Not a mix of both. Yes and no. It will mean that some abilities will have to be reshuffled to create distinctive combat styles outside of base classes. At the moment, a Jedi Guardian and Jedi Sentinel are both extensions of the Jedi Knight base class. In 7.0, they will both be separate combat styles without a unifying base class. As such, they are currently trying to find their identities. That will entail some class changes, but a complete overhaul of all rotations is unlikely. For example a Vigilance guardian's base rotation will still be roughly the same come 7.0. Not that we know of yet, no. Sorcerers and Assassins will still wear light armor. Marauders will wear medium armor. Juggernauts will wear heavy armor. I highly suspect, however, that they might move to more adaptive pieces, considering we can be multiple combat styles ("advanced classes") on a single character. We don't know anything about how gear will work though, so that's my subjective speculation.

I think this is where loadouts will come in at the end. The idea is clearly that we will have different loadouts with varying passives and combat styles for different kinds of content, and then switch between those easily. Hence why they are also adding the functionality of saving our current ability bar setup. There's certainly a few things that need to be tweaked, but I feel it's very apparent that loadouts and the new spec system are supposed to work hand-in-hand in enabling different abilities across different kinds of content with ease. I get being attached to certain abilities as well, especially after almost a decade, but the current TTK in PvP is an issue. The fact abilities like Combat Roll and Blade Blitz exist alongside survivability and utility as baseline doesn't make balancing Huttball easy either.

I agree. There are certain parts that I found somewhat lacking in terms of creativity, for example the overall lack of enemy diversity during KotFE with its Skytrooper focus, but I overall can't really complain about SWTOR these days. I like most of the new character cast and the faction-division within the story has returned. That's more than we had for almost four years and what we are going to get short of a "one of" class quest like Rishi. We're never going to have eight separate class stories of multiple hours again. I'd agree with this as well. There are a ton of things that are usually cited as "having taken away identity", but I always find myself disagreeing strongly with it. For example, removing the companion restrictions was a great addition to the game. I hated how my only healing companion on my Marauder was always the one I liked the least. The same goes for stat names, the skill tree and so on. In my personal opinion, SWTOR's ease of access today and it's QoL improvements have (a few exceptions aside) mostly hit the mark and made the game better. And almost everyone I know who returns after a multi-year hiatus since pre-4.0 echoes that sentiment.

The amount of people who are playing this game solely due to that is probably fairly miniscule. No, this isn't to insult you and this isn't to discredit you if you like them. I played them too for the longest time. Both Mythic in WoW and NiM here. Even a game like WoW that continuously designs good, difficult raids at 8-10 bosses two to three times a year and relies on competitive content has a community where less than 4% of people will get a Mythic raiding achievement each tier. ~20% do the medium hardest difficulty (Savage/Heroic) and ~3% do the highest (Ultimate/Mythic). That's fairly consistent between the two biggest MMOs ATM. I wouldn't be surprised if about a few hundred people or so play NiM ops, but that probably pales in comparison to everyone who plays this game casually as "space barbie." And even many long-term players don't stay for the operations. Sure, they shouldn't neglect group content for story content and still put out some, but I very much doubt that the remaining NiM Ops or ranked community at this point could be categorized as "many" in comparison to the far larger, casually playing and occasionally dropping in crowd. Raiding is in seriously bad waters ATM. As many players grow older, they have far less patience and time to put up with raiding. The few that do mostly flock to FFXIV and WoW as especially the latter facilitates raiding much better and much more frequently. Not to discredit anyone who likes doing NiM operations, but I'd be seriously surprised if there was any data showing that a large amount of people in this game participated in regular NiM raiding. Espescially when the game is built with ease of access and easy story content in mind. I never heard anyone across any MMO discussion board say: "want good, difficult raids? Go to SWTOR instead of WoW!"

Thanks for your response, Jackie. As a little addition to this: please consider to make 306 gear and Commander's Compendium available for a single credit on the PTS in future test phases. Simply put a vendor selling them on the fleet. This would greatly alleviate this point. Thank you for the work you're doing.

Then I will apologise for attributing an argument that you did not make. That is what I took from your sample size comment. However, the points I have raised aren't unsubstantiated claims. They are very much fundamentally concepts when working with data. The idea was not to suggest that they're entirely disconnected, but that quantifying said connection and overlap due to the variables is entirely impossible. There's simply no way to tell a majority any one way across the entire game right now. My issue was with the perception of trying to invoke the silent majority to any one side. Which is also largely besides the point. Whether we like it or not, some form of simplification will happen. Plans like this aren't suddenly entirely scrapped. If pruning was ever in the cards, that is. This is a very early work-in-progress version...

I don't think this is necessary a good idea. The current idea seems to be alright: have a good amount of active abilities shared between them, and then provide passives and a few active abilities for customization. I think the current idea is good enough and your suggestion is a bit too restrictive.

Precisely, there's zero data. That's the point. I never claimed the majority liked this change. Currently, the majority of the playerbase doesn't seem to care. I've been hanging around quite a few Discords, Reddit and on general chat on fleet quite some time, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence they lean any one way particularly. Some are against it. Some think it sounds like a good idea. Your problem is the at large. You claim your opinion is shared by the majority/the larger playerbase. I don't. I'm simply saying it doesn't seem to go any one way at the moment at that the forums alone aren't statistically representative of the entire playerbase. I'm not saying the larger playerbase agrees with me. I'm saying making any assumption of what the larger playerbase thinks beyond of a mix is all conjecture and assumption at this point, invoked to merely strengthen your point because you think you're right and don't want this to happen. You don't even have observable data. I would be surprised if you've taken the time to turn a forum view (that will inevitably be skewed by your own perception) into hard numbers. And secondly, it's fine if there is some negativity on the forum. It's certainly not all positive. The problem is that the issues of extrapolation I mentioned don't go away. They are proven concepts. Vocality in a small area does not equal majority support. The largest part of users - which would form an average - might not care at all. It could be that there are two extreme camps and a large middle, casual portion of the playerbase that literally has no feelings on the topic either way. I'm not saying a large portion likes this. My issue is with you trying to strengthen your argument by invoking a "sample size" that can't work. Take that as you will.

I'm putting this into a spoiler to now blow up the thread, considering it's largely statistical conversation.

So the game without talents, specializations on classes, glyphs, additional power systems and a super basic gearing system is the new top dog in the industry? Well, then I suppose I really don't understand where Bioware could have gotten the idea from that simplicity sells. It remains an utmost mystery...

There's also a big difference between being vocal and being the majority. Between the people playing the game and the people actively going to the forums, which would be the entire forum userbase, the second one is already miniscule in comparison. I'd be surprised if even ten percent of people playing the game went to the forums frequently. And those that do are usually the most fixated on the game, so will react the strongest to change. Secondly, I could point out that there's a large amount of repetition in the names that frequently pop in the "this will be the end! IT IS NIGH!" posts and that there's quite a strong overlap of users between them, which in return reduces the percentage of people dead set against this change even more and makes it seem more widespread than it is. Let's not poke that beast though. People don't like logic on the internet. Grab a pitchfork!