Not what she said, and not even what was implied at all. Marauder and Sentinel have been the "jack of all trades, master of none" thing for a while. They are not exceptionally strong, espescially since they lost some burst window DPS due to the ferocity change in favour of more reliable mechanics a few weeks ago, but they aren't as weak as DPS guardians/juggernauts and Vanguard/PT either. They are very much the "guy in the middle" thing. That means people who main Marauder and Sentinel don't really get that much of a reason to change. They are never "too weak" for PvP, and thus they don't need to change. That means most Sentinels and Marauders you see are probably mains or well-played alts. The chances to meet a sniper or mercenary who is just re-rolling for the FOTM are much higher than meeting a Marauder who is doing just that. It can create the illusion that the class is OP when it beats the current FOTM, but it's really just a matter of their players being used to even the fine nuances of the class as compared to a reroller. Anyway, I do agree with the OP. Whoever does balancing at Bioware seriously needs to step back a litle and evaluate his decisions. There's tons of stuff we could argue was "meh", but whoever had the idea of taking away the 30% DR during stuns from sins and shadows was drunk or high. It made them into a burst victim. Until your resolve kicks in, you're either dead or a few percentage points away from dying. They have very few good DCD as DPS, and now even their DR is gone.

Log into WoW or FFXIV and tell me that the PvE content on the hardest difficulty/setting is cleared by PvP players faster than the people who are used to progressing in PvE content and know the tricks. It doesn't happen. No, I don't care whether this is "your experience" or "your opinion": It's not happening. It's PvP players uptalking their skill over PvE players. I have done extensive heroic/progressive raiding in WoW during early Legion and in most of WotLK and BC. There was never a situation where a good PvP player jumped into our raid and outperformed the good PvE players in a heartbeat. Being used to your class obviously gives you an advantage at learning the fights, but there was never a situation where PvP players cleared content in WoW faster than dedicated PvE players. I'd even go as far as to say that with how unforgiving the last heroic/mythic tier was in the Tomb of Sargeras, the chance of a PvP player simply clearing it were almost nonexistant, let alone clearing it faster than the dedicated guilds. The amount of hyperbole in this thread shows that tons of high-end PvP players rarely play PvE in any capacity on a NiM/progression level. The simple issue is that it's not "as easy as imitating a video." Just as you claim you have to know 24 builds and adjust to them in a second, you have to know tons of different mechanics and adjust yourself to them fairly quickly. It's nice that you know the boss does some AoE field, but that's completely meaningless if you can't focus on your DPS, your cooldowns, your procs and constantly keep an eye out for the two mechanics that are going on at any given point. We don't need to argue that both playing progressive raiding and playing high-end PvP both take a good amount of skills, but none of those skills trump above the other. They are highly situational. PvP skills aren't inherently better than PvE skills, and being good in those skills doesn't translate to being able to stomp PvE players who need "naturally inferior skills." It's just the usual PvP player grandstanding over "those PvE scrubs who hit a computer enemy all day." I respect your opinion Trixxie, but I completely disagree. Entirely. Giving out materials to winning teams and not rewarding losing teams in any form other than just a bit of GCXP and a few credits, which let's be honest here are mostly peanuts these days, will just encourage people not to queue anymore. There's a simple reason for that: The people who have been playing long will establish a monopoly on the new materials and will just farm the silver/bronze players into oblivion. So one or two exceptionally good teams, which there are on any server even with the flawed ranking system as it is, will just farm people into oblivion. Very soon, the supply of new players in ranked will dry up again, and granked is back at a spot where you have three or four teams competing, but farming incredible amounts of credits for basically lacking any kind of competition. We can certainly have a discussion about the quantity of rewards: Should the weekly reward 5 of the expensive mats, or 4-5 of the half priced datacores? Should it be more like 2-3 with no daily rewards? Should the rewards be entirely switched from Charged Matter items to the datacores? But taking out any kind of incentive for lower end players to do ranked would defeat the point of trying to get more people into granked. If one or two guilds with two or three good teams could simply put a monopoly on the materials by farming at any given time, then we're hurting the system even more badly than now.

At this point, I am entirely convinced that the ranking system in it's current form simply doesn't work for SWTOR, and that the concept "tiered rating with four digit numbers" is a lost concept on SWTOR. Those four-digit ranking systems with multiple tiers work wonders for games with a big population that can sustain them. LoL, WoW and the likes work very well with those systems because you have a ton of competitive, dedicated players who promote PvP across all leagues. They work well because stuff like queue syncing, win-trading and the things described in the OP do not work. They can't be done, except in very rare circumstances. You can't queue sync in LoL ranked, Overwatch or WoW due to the sheer amount of players in the queue. It's increasingly difficult. In SWTOR, even with the current server merges, the population isn't big enough to sustain such ranking systems. One example: Even on Darth Malgus, I still have times during the early evening/afternoon where I meet the same names/enemy team multiple times in a row. And if there are currently only gold rated players queueing in solo ranked, then I am put with/against gold rated players on a silver character. The system would work if there was a healthy population on all levels, but there simply isn't any, so the matchmaking sucks. That system is entirey flawed since one aspect of having a tiered rating system the likes of OW, WoW and LoL is to put people of equal rating against each other. What's the point of having three tiers when rating/tiers mean jack sh*t for queueing purposes? What's the entire point of the system if it's basically: "You are miles below that player in skill and activity, but we are going to put you against him anyway! And if you lose, you do lose ranked. You're miles below him, but you'll be penalized for going against him and losing anyway!" Inbetween the small population, the penalties for loosing against people of much higher rating, the trolling without repercussion, the possibility to queue sync in a way that leaves out any kind of penalty due to missing matchmaking and other important factors, the ranking system has come to a point where it has become utterly meaningless. You can even see that the system is utterly broken by looking at the Leaderboard. There is a twenty percent difference between the second and the third place on the Scoundrel leaderboard. There is a 33%(!) difference between the first spot and the fifth spot on the Sorcerer leaderboard. We are talking about a leaderboard that has hundreds of spots. In a system that is healthy and competitive, you should not have a difference of 1/3 between the first five spots of over a thousand ranked individuals. You should have a difference of ~1-5% between the top 20/50 so that it always stays a good competition. Look at other games and how close top PvP and PvE guilds compete for spots. Look at how frequently new people enter Grand Master and Master leagues in LoL, and how competitive that top end of PvP is. The system is so close to being given up on because the system, through many mistakes in the past few years, has been broken beyond anything else.

As a little side note: Amazon EU is still selling the CC keys and subscription time directly. One example can be found here: Amazon DE 5,500 Cartel Coins. Seems to be an Amazon US problem, really. If you have a credit card, you can also buy from Amazon.uk and Amazon.de without any issues. At least that should be the case. Last time I checked, digital currency codes were not region locked, but I am not sure here. It does not say anything about that.

They definitely did pay for a new server infrastructure. You cannot just put two cabels into a new slot and call it a "mega-server", espescially when you have to handle the entire software/host side of the equation. Merging servers was definitely coupled with an investment into the server architecture to make sure everything goes smoothly. We are probably not talking "huge investment", but an investment nonetheless. And they definitely increased the server capacity during the past year. It was in one of the developer streams. The point still stands though. Closing the game right after the lootbox controversy, during the SW prime era, right before/after an SW movie launch and just a month after the server merges that at least slightly revitalized the game would make them a laughing stock among news outlets even more than they are right now.

I would also love to know what the matter there is. We can safely leave the doomsaying out. Amazon does not have any more serious information than anyone else. They are not getting special e-mails from EA. You could buy Marvel Heroes until literally a week before it shut down a few weeks ago. Secondly, EA recently paid for a promotional deal with NVidia and they paid for the new server hardware during the merges barely a month ago. Finally, EA could sell game time cards and CC cards until literally an hour before server shutdown. So leaving the obvious doomsaying aside for logic, I would really love to know what is going on there.

Alright, first of all: You do not need to give me the "we all want this to be a fair and competitive environment. Most of us, anyway." speech. Competitive players are as much about taking every (unfair) edge they can to beat out the competition. More to the point: There are two options here that Bioware can pursue: They take out the materials for losers/alltogether and watch the queue drop dead again. In this scenario, nobody is the winner. Granked will be pretty much dead on every server, the queues will pop once every two hours, and we are back to the square at which nobody gives a sh*t about granked and does not see the value of ever changing/adding/updating any system because it would be wasted resources on the twenty players per server who do it. Additionally, we are back at square one where the same fifteen players meet each other over and over again by just swapping out some FOTM classes. There is no point in "being the best among them" when the sample size is twenty players. The other course of action is to keep the materials as they are and thus take the revitalized queue, effectively giving granked an infinte supply of potential players that might pick it up even half seriously. And since neither you nor any other "veteran" are the authority on when a team qualifies as an "actual" ranked team, even the new bronze pickup team is as much of a ranked competitor as you are. In this scenario, you actually have a good sample size of players to compare your rating to. A rating system with points only makes sense when the sample size is big enough. When there are only twenty players for granked every season, then ranking becomes absolutely meaningless.

So a team with full 242-248 gear and season 8 rewards aren't serious teams? Who made you the sole decision maker on what teams are serious or not? Fact is, the moment a team decides not to throw and put up a fight, it becomes a ranked team. Whether it rewards mats or not doesn't really matter for that. Besides, I don't see whether it makes a difference what you think those teams are. People make some credits and group ranked is popping. There are some good and fun matches, and that's what ultimately counts. If you want to be an elitist pr*ck about it and take it so seriously that only the most hardcore people should ever do a ranked match, then you're seriously the minority in most MMORPGs. Whether a team is inherently good or bad doesn't matter for them to be serious about playing PvP. And judging by the fact that we actually won rounds/matches against people who stacked FOTM and had rewards from previous seasons, even the "serious" teams aren't that much of a hassle in this game.

I started to queue for team rankeds based on the rewards alone. The funny thing is that by the end of the rounds we played, we actually came out evenly with three wins and three losses on our tank/scoundrel healer/sage dps/gunslinger. We went up against some "serious teams" from the other faction and actually won without that much PvP experience. Overall, it was a pretty enjoyable experience. Two of us were in it for the mats, two others to break silver rank, and we overall did decently enough. No flaming and toxicity, but simple conversation about what went wrong in any given round we lost. And that's the thing: Giving out those materials is a win-win for everyone. Highly equipped PvE players who have tanks and healers can queue for it, do their job, and then get materials as a reward. People who are serious about it can form groups and "farm", or rather "attempt to farm" the people farming the mats. I get my six mats after a few matches, you get some ranking if you're good enough. It's a win for everyone. If you queue with four friends, you can't lose.

A high demand for the item coupled with a wrongfully high supply of credits. The source of the credits has been fixed, and only those who used it now have the credits to buy the goods. This is in no way normal supply vs. demand since the supply of credits was limited to a few players and was way higher than anything someone who didn't use the exploit could ever make in a reasonable amount of time. That's what he was trying to say, and it is actually correct. This is not due to your average supply and demand since supply hasn't increased. The credits flooding into the economy are ill-gotten gains from a fixed exploit.

I think this is the biggest problem. The new pack items have been subject to an exploit. They'd usually go for 10-20 million for a full set, and ten million for an entire gold set is a normal price in this hyper-inflated economy. However, a few exploiters have bought tons and tons of those boxes and re-listed them for seven to eight times that amount to create a monopoly. The issue is that this monopoly was made with ill-gotten credits, and thus is a direct result of an exploit. The issue is that the few people who actually got them fair and square don't even realize what is going on, and seeing a few people post tons of them for 100m to 80m for a single upper body crate, they just follow suit and post for 79m. The result is four to five pages of Revered Master armour sets upwards of 75m that nobody is going to buy because supply is reasonably high, demand is reasonably high, but the prices ignore supply and demand. And these things aren't selling. Seeing that Keith wants the imput from community opinions, here's my take on this: Put the robes on the CM for direct purchase at the same price level that other previous armour sets were sold. Let's be honest: You can attempt to find the people who exploited the hell out of this and take away all the CM items that were purchased with ill-gotten credits, but the general mentality on SWTOR will keep prices from going down anytime soon. It was listed as 90m, so 90m is the price. People will continue to associate this price with the set and put it up even as supply dwindles, espescially when tons of 80-100m boxes suddenly vanish from the market. The association will be that they sold, and not that Bioware banned tons of exploiting accounts. The only thing that will fix the insane prices is a controlled influx of supply. For a week or two, offer them on the CM for 2.5k CC. Supply will go up, and the GTN will be flooded with pages upon pages of the armour set. As these don't sell for 80m per crate and there are a dozen pages up, people will begin questioning whethet they can sell it for that much. And then que in general chat, which will make a somewhat immature case for saying that nobody will pay 80m for an armour set that is available on the CM. Over time, prices will drop into the natural 10-20m range. I'd normally say: "Screw this, who cares?" if we were talking about any ripoff golden set, but we're literally talking about the Star Wars look here. I doubt anyone wants the kind of publicity that in two weeks, people want to satisfy their Star Wars craving after TLJ and log into a game and see that the most basic and recognizable look for two of the most iconic classes costs hundreds of dollars in gambling boxes or basically months upon months of farming to buy a horribly overprized item on the auction house. https://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_small/4/41224/2509545-jedi1.jpg Come again? Your big idea is to make the most basic and iconic look in Star Wars exclusive to a few people so that others have to play space barbie?

Alright, we can have an honest conversation about this: The basic idea is that you don't see the benefit of operations because you don't run them/like them, and that means you are willing to "sacrifice" them if it brings more content for your enjoyment. You base the idea that operations are not worth the effort on a lot of assumptions which you have no proof of, but you continue to say people who agree with you "know what they are talking about," whereas people who disagree don't. This conversation, in all honesty, is just a continuation of the dozens of other conversations we had all throughout 4.0. People continued to claim that operations aren't necessary, they aren't feasible, they don't keep player retention up and all that other "focus on very little content" nonsense. The end result was that for the second time in this game's life, the clear lack of operations and hard end game content caused the developer plan to fall into a dark abyss. Raids are part of any MMORPG setup out there. Games which contain raids are STO, LOTRO, FFXIV, WoW, BDO (world bosses and castle sieges as large group activities) and GW2. To compete in the MMORPG market, a game needs to have some raids delivered on a semi-regular basis. The same goes for PvP maps and other kinds of content. This doesn't mean that operations should be the sole focus of a game, but they should be included in the release line-up to give every player a small reason to come back once in a while. For an MMORPG, it is most important to keep the sense of "I will eventually get content" up and going. When a game delivers frequent content of each type, then I am lenient if a game update doesn't contain my specific content because I know that the content I will enjoy will eventually receive some love. This is why I think that the new PvP map and the GSF rebalance are a good step into the right direction: They give some attention to players that have sorely lacked it for over a year, or three years in case of GSF. Eventually we'll have to stop this pointless discussion and accept that raids simply belong into an MMORPG together with instances, PvP and roleplay. That means they are always feasible if done correctly. Let's assume Bioware announces that the new digital expansion they are working on, and at this point with both the cantina live stream confirmation and the dev stream FAQ stating they are working on an expansion, has some of each content. A new raid with four or five bosses, a warzone, a GSF map, one or two flashpoints and a new SOR esque story, then it will finally be a step into the right direction for an MMORPG such as SWTOR. And it doesn't matter whether you believe the "Massive" belongs into SWTOR's description. SWTOR is an MMORPG, and thus it has to compete with other MMORPGs. Raids are far from unfeasible because they are a good way to offer content to a large group of the playerbase. You're sorely mistaken if you believe only raiders run content too. Most content is accessible to everyone and can be done casualy by everyone. Most of my guild members ran Tyth and Aviena & Esne in the past because it gives some nice materials, tokens and GCXP points. They don't have to be raiders to appreciate the occasional raid coming out.

Playing WoW and STO, mostly. Watch some Netflix inbetween. Oh, and I'm building some new furniture. Point being: Nothing that justified keeping my subscription up beyond reserving my names for November.

No offense, but this patch could have been 5.4.1 without any issues. There was just some re-balancing of classes and GSF, a customization or two and a new CM interface. Oh, and they reduced one of the most rewarding experiences in the past few months to be a pile of garbage. With all due respect, I think no other game would make such a patch a "5.X" thing. It'd be a "5.4.X" at most.

I really don't think it is. Whether they lied to us about how the perk should work or gave us a nonsensical lie about why they wouldn't or couldn't do it, I think it doesn't change the underlying trust issue created in this incident. Apparently anything Bioware promises might not be delivered or delivered completely different, and the only thing Bioware will ever do about it is claim "technical difficulties or limitations" and expect us to accept that and continue paying. It is unprofessional, and I really can't remember another developer doing this. The one thing you don't want to do is deceive your community. People can be reasonably understanding when it comes to missing resources, time constraints or anything else, but citing "technical limitations" for everything that doesn't go as planned feels deceptive as hell.

I am very well convinced it was a lie because technical limitations is blatantly wrong. Many software engineers have pointed this out in this very post. The system can at least distinguish between different base classes that are mirrored. I can log into my sage and get the achievement for Commanding Consular, whereas I will not be awarded the mirrored Inquisitor achievement, which is Commanding Inquisitor. Whatever technical limitation there was on the same base class (i.e Sage and Shadow), it definitely doesn't apply to mirrored classes (i.e Shadow and Assassin). There is a system in place that can accurately read out the amount of base classes in your legacy that have a GC rank of 300. This doesn't solve the issue of having the same base class on 300 multiple times, but it solves the issue of people having mirrored characters. You cannot tell me, who trained as a software engineer before switching fields, that there was no possible way to write a function, SQL query/function or other method to distinguish between the mirrored base classes when there apparently is a function to do this for the achievement system. The perk is tied to the achievement system as a perk. While they might not work on the same layer, they can certainly interact with each other. There is no apparent reason to have it be restricted to pre-300 characters either. The system can clearly support giving bonuses to post-300 characters, as is apparent with the stacking +10% buff on GCXP within the legacy system. If I was really malicious, I would guess that the person who coded the perk built in an if clause that checks whether the character's command rank is at 300, and if it is, it doesn't grant the bonus GCXP. You might also remember that the server name "Hot Prospect" couldn't be changed due to technical limitations just a week ago. When the complaints started to flood in, the server name was promptly changed to "Satele Shan." As four software engineers have already pointed out, two of which probably more senior than me because I have five years of experience working in high-demand coding for large company applications, there is no apparent technical limitation on any of this if the person coding it put in thought and effort. And if there is, I'd love for that developer to come on stream and explain the technical limitation while we listen. Let's see if it holds up to scrutiny. It's improbable or nigh impossible that the system can't run an SQL request to check the base classes as mirrored, considering it already does that in the achievement system. The achievement system can set flags and grant rewards (titles, coins, decorations), so they could easily set a flag. And if they were really commited to delivering the perk as a benefit to the community, they could have proposed to make it 50% per mirrored class so that more people could gain the 100% buff from the get go or lower the chance. Or possible even make it a 100% and total it out on 400%. As someone else has pointed out, we'd still only be getting around 300 GCXP per daily with the bonus, and roughly 8-10 levels for completing the master mode weekly quest. Or as someone else pointed out, they could have made three more +25% GCXP perks purchaseable. There was a good amount of solutions available to bring it closer to what was described in the roadmap and what people were leveling and playing for since the perk was announced, yet they didn't. And instead of telling us they are looking into some ways to possibly amend it, they brush us off with an excuse that's shady as hell and tell us to "have fun leveling through GC!" Another thing that doesn't add up is their patch integration process. You're telling me that up until yesterday evening, nobody except the person coding the perk knew that it wasn't implemented as specified two weeks ago. So, in the past week, no coder ever called/went to Keith's/Eric's desk and told them: "Hey, a little heads up. We can't put it in as you described, but we have to use mirrored classes." And then Eric couldn't put this into the initial patch notes or simply make a post titled: "Heads up about the new command perk" during Monday afternoon? Normally, you sign off a patch before it goes live, and you don't do that four to five weeks in advance. At any point last week, someone had to check the patch's final release document and compare it to what was promised/intended, and that person should have noticed the change. Who checks what stuff goes into a patch over at Bioware? You want to tell me that only the coder knows what goes into a patch? That he could change how this thing works during the last two weeks and nobody notices the work he did wasn't what was "ordered" up until the patch goes live? I'm not sure where that software engineer learned his trade, but within the high-demand environment of the German company's coding division I worked and trained at for five years, as well as in my vocational school, we had to give weekly reports on our progress and discuss possible alterations of the intended structure and function to the Lead Software Designer who oversaw the project we were working on. Can we definitely prove it was a lie? No, not without Bioware admitting as much, but the evidence reeks to high heavens. As someone else has pointed out, I think Kilran's quote fits here: Either this was intended and this is an excuse post that "isn't meant as an excuse," or they really had no idea and have to re-evaluate their development process. This isn't the first time something like this has happened.

I did not compare the two. I stated that one has to admire Blizzard for how well they can code and design. One thing doesn't imply the other. Calm your jets.

One has to admire that Blizzard will rarely say that something isn't possible, but rather opt to say the truth and admit it isn't feasible. They usually scrap stuff because it is a bad idea, isn't feasible in the long run, didn't deliver the intended results or they just had a cup of coffee and thought "what were we thinking there?" I can't remember them during the past three years that I've been back ever saying something "can't be coded." I remember that Ion once commented on how it was difficult to change the sixteen space standard bag because it was hard-coded into all kinds of systems, but he said that they are working on that too. It's not a question of if, but rather when this happens. Gotta' hand it to Blizzard: Their development game is usually pretty neat. They usually find a (sometimes messy) way and the game keeps running.

Are you suggesting that coding something that doesn't break on first day and actually works by using a workaround is possible? Blasphemy! If it can't be done in a day, it can't be done!

Why wouldn't you after the roadmap, patch notes and everything else up to the release states it is "per character", and not "per advanced class/base class/faction"? It's hilarious how this was clearly communicated blatantly wrong, intended to work entirely different than it is currently doing, and people come in here rationalizing this new approach. Guys, it's not the perk. It's the sentiment behind how this was changed. They could give us 1% per ten characters and there could be a good reason for it. The issue is the nigh to nothing communication that this was changed up to AFTER the fact, and the sheer amount of nonsensical excuses given for why this doesn't work per base class/mirror class. As I have previously pointed out, the game can distinguish between a warrior and a knight reaching command rank 300 for the achievements. As the person above me posted, and as someone who has learned software engineering as a trade before changing fields, I believe it is night impossible the system couldn't at least be build around the idea of distinguishing between each of the eight base classes. They could give us 1% per character for all I care, but at least communicate and be honest about your sh*t design choices.

You don't get a bonus on them. The perk restricts it to pre-300 characters. So if your mains are at 300 and you have no intention playing the sub-300 characters, you don't get any bonus from it either.

Eric, we understand perfectly on how the perk works. Most of us do so, anyway. That's why there is this frustration. Full stop right here. It wasn't "fairly general" at all. It was entirely detailed and thoroughly explained how the perk worked. There was nothing "fairly general" about it. There was a detailed explanation on what the perk is, what the perk does, how you can unlock the perk and how the percentages are accumulated. You did not add two things to the roadmap though: 1. The fact that each of the characters has to be of a different base class that can't be a mirror. 2. That the perk does not work at or above legacy level 300, which essentially only makes it worthwhile for leveling more and more alts. This is not keeping it "fairly general", but taking out important requirements that can change hundreds of hours of conscious gameplay and class choice decisions. Both of those completely change how this perk is used. Whereas previously the perk could have worked for usage on a main character too, it now completely invalidates the perk for anything of the sort. The way you communicated vs. the way you designed this perk completely contradict each other in more than just "fairly general assumptions." Essentially, the perk is only valid if you love leveling tons of characters through GC. Apparently Keith loves doing that, but most of us don't. For everyone who wants to focus on a main character at GC 300, that perk is virtually useless when compared to what we were meant to know, which was that it would "double our GCXP gain if we had four characters at 300." Whatever possible technical limitation there was on base classes, there was none about having it apply only to pre-300 characters. That is some pretty important information for anyone considering to get the perk. As a communication sciences student, there is a pretty big gap of understanding and reason between "You get 100% bonus GCXP" and "You get 100% bonus GCXP below the max level." The later one completely invalidates the perk for people who want to focus on a main after the four characters. Previously, people could level three other characters to return to their main and gain more GCXP. Now that the patch hit, people have to see that them leveling one or two more characters for that purpose might be in vain because the perk doesn't apply to their main at 300, nor does it work if the classes are mirrored. As for the technical issues: I have no access to the game's code, and thus I can only make some general assumptions, but I assume that the only way to count the legacy percentages was to tie it to a similar system than the legendary flair system, whereas the flag for each class is set. Even then I do not understand why you couldn't use base classes. It'd be one thing to claim that you cannot distinguish between Sentinels and Guardians since you have to use the base classes, but you clearly can as the system can recognize it. You actually added an achievement that proves the system can recognize it. It's called "Resolute Commander." And, obviously, all the achievements tied to it: Commanding Knight: Reached Command Rank 300 with a Jedi Knight character. Commanding Warrior: Reached Command Rank 300 with a Sith Warrior character. The system can clearly differentiate between two of the same base classes here. As I am not awarded the warrior achievement when I am logging into my GCL 300 guardian (Knight), the system can clearly differentiate when the mirror class on the other faction doesn't have the appropriate command level, and it can see when a single base class reaches the appropriate command level to grant the achievement. While this wouldn't necessarily solve the issue of the same base class, it would solve the issue of mirror classes. That means people who, for example, only main force user classes could be granted the perk because the system could see that their four base classes are different. You still couldn't play four assassins to get the bonus, seeing the system couldn't flag them, but you could at least play two classes and their mirrors. I'd like your software engineers to explain that one to us, because as someone who finished training as a software engineer before going into communication sciences, I really only see a partial issue here. And what limitation causes the perk only to apply to pre-300 characters and be unusable for anyone who wants to focus on a main after finishing four characters? I am curious about that one too. No, I will not. In fact, I think me and quite a few other players are tired of the hamstring that is GC. This community has voiced their issues with GC time and time again, yet the system and it's associated perks and mechanics keep pestering us month after month. I have no intention to rank up a sixth, seventh or eight character through the GC system beyond the four mains I already have. This perk is virtually useless for people who don't like to level up dozens of characters through GC and pretend the endless grind for more and more GC ranks on characters you will never actively play is fun.

Funnily enough, I don't think it is emphasized enough how easy some employees at Bioware think it is to level each character to 300. Or as someone said on the development stream: "I am leveling my twelfth character, so I don't want to hear any sh*t about how hard it is to level through GC." No, it's not hard. It's tedious. And whenever there's some release and easement of that tedium, there seems to be some little requirement that they haven't told us about...

Not according to Bioware. My pureblooded tank assassin plays in exactly the same manner as my cathar telekinetics sage. They are basically the same class, really! *sarcasm* It wasn't "explained improperly." It was stated completely false. Both the patch notes and the roadmap from last week never mention anything of class restrictions, mirror class requirements or the likes. Even in the patch notes, the perk is specifically described as adding 25% per character up until a maximum of 100%. They completely left any class requirement out for convenience's sake.

It always surprised me that people seem so alright with an Arcann romance, but when I tell the same people that I'd very much like a Senya romance, the questions the likes of "But she's..." begin to roll in. Both in terms of fairness and story consistency, an Arcann romance doesn't fit in my opinion. Let's talk about fairness for a moment. As somebody else has pointed out, some of the romance options of old haven't even returned yet. And as someone who mains the four force classes and a smuggler, I am somewhat biased against the fact that "Arcann with Romance" is on the list of returning companions, whereas Doc and Nadia are nowhere to be seen. There's also a point to be made about balance in possible romance options. KotFE romance options were limited to Lana, Theron and Koth. It was a bad twist that the second one betrayed us, but now introducing a new male LI just to "make up for that" sounds...strange. I know how so many people will now spin this into a "but heterosexual males get so much! Blah Blah!" when this could be easily avoided by adding another female post-KotFE LI into the mix. Hey, Sana-rae is interesting enough! Another thing I don't get about this fairness thing is this: KotFE and KotET were already written in a way that majorly shafted dark-side characters. Not only did Koth, who is a light side alligned person to begin with, leave you as a purely dark-side character, and thus take away the third LI option, but Theron betrayed you two, and thus making it into a very singular option of Lana. And now the first new LI that will be introduced in a long time can make up for that, but that option is inherently light sided to begin with. A dark side Arcann doesn't exist. He's dead. While I don't think all of those concerns necessarily "restrict" someone from writing an Arcann romance, I think they should be considered nonetheless. And as for story reasons, it has been pointed out several times: Arcann killed billions (if not trillions) of people in a temper tantrum, stole five years of your life, hunted you across the galaxy like an animal, swore to cut his father out of you and did many other unspeakable things. This apparently seems quite alright for a romance character as long as he pretends he is sorry for a few months. I guess that more than makes up for those trillions of dead souls. Arcann wants to restore his honor and atone for his sins, hm? I'll quote someone from another game slightly out of context, but I hope you get the idea: Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honor matters. The silence is your answer. So apparently "genocidal maniac who said he is sorry and wants to make up for it" is superb and important romance material, whereas Senya, who you slightly bonded with during your talks in KotFE, is "too old", Sana-Rae is "too minor", Scourge is "just weird and not romanceable", Bey'wan Aygo is "a dog" (hey, whatever floats your boat) and Acina isn't even being discussed because "branching story." But genocidal maniac who killed billions is the supremely important romance to get through? Would anyone care to explain to me how this is anything else than shoehorning stuff in? There has been tons of voices for different LIs in the past two years. It's not like Arcann is the only one who was ever mentioned. Not even sufficiently so. There have been tons of suggestions for different LIs and dark side companions.