I think I haven't seen the conquest week The Dread War for six months already, maybe more. Are you planning it in March or April? It's the one I'm missing for a full set of achi Please reply

This is as good time as any to write about what I think of the state of the game. Having been present at the start and being sub for extended periods of time including today. I have written about this before, but a recap due to the merge seems to be appropriate. United forces "megaserver" merge I monitored server attendance via low-level characters on server fleets for the last year and saw numbers dwindle. Apparently the server merge is an emergency measure to retain player base shrinking because of cross-server migration. EU Red Eclipse experienced a huge inflow of French players just recently and similar processes are apparently going on elsewhere. The merge itself can only be praised, of course, as a huge win for the dark side, me moving to Darth Malgus. The Leviathan is going to be stillborn I suspect though. Actually this merge is long time overdue, to be honest. From the very start it seemed quite dumb that the Star Wars gaming community should be divided into almost 100 separate realms rather than playing on a single big one. WoW did exactly that in 2004 and faced player grouping issues later, these issues were already quite obvious in 2011. Arguably, Blizzard had little choice at the start because clustering was relatively new and making separate realms with low numbers on each was thus justified. But in 2011 we already had EVE online's example of one world for one game working on a big server cluster. What made Bioware use an outdated model back then is still a mystery for me. For crowded locations there could be the problem of client-side graphics of course, but it should be less challenging today than in 2011 and it's solveable via instancing and reduction of graphics quality in the client. So perhaps it would be wise for Bioware to move on with the merge process and end up with one server for the SW:TOR world (with the possible exception for mainland China, of course). The language barrier Personally I have no problems understanding English. Then again, I hail from an obscure ethnic minority with a tongue twisting native language. Thus I can serve as a first hand witness to problems plaguing the players that do not know neither English nor French or German. The Bioware policy to ignore other national languages is readily explainable of course, since the US and EU players provide the bulk of the revenue. It can be argued that corrections to this policy could be beneficial for the revenue stream as well as for the karma. The following statements rely on my assumptions only, hard figures and statistics were never made public by Bioware. It seems that players from the third world constitute the bulk of free-to-play and preferred players and on average spend more time in the game than players from EU and US. In other words they are the more dedicated player group and their enthusiasm is mostly wasted because they can't understand most of the lore and leave the game frustrated, all due to the language barrier. It seems unwise not to use this energy from the Poles, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Spanish etc. Arguably, expanding the presence of 3rd world players could boost the overall attendance of the game, including paid players too. Possibly, they could become paid players via various types of incentives. There are a few things Bioware could do in this direction that seem reasonably easy and budget to me. One thing would be to include other language subtitles in the cutscenes. The minimal list of languages I can think of would be Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Polish and Russian. Polish goes into the list because of the significant number of Poles on the late Red Eclipse (new Darth Malgus). Russian is spoken by a lot of people inside as well as outside of Russia, including Ukraine, Israel and Kazakhstan. Latin America would be glad to read Spanish subtitles, Japanese would be grateful for their kana and kanji. Adding subtitles to the main stories seems manageable and not too expensive to do and most probably won't lead to total revamping of the game. Another positive modification could be introduction of Unicode symbol support to chat and a new model of extended chat management. Being able to write in their native script rather than tortured English would bring you good karma from all Greeks, Japanese, Russians and other obscure symbol users concerned. To get a hint on how to properly organize game chat channels one could turn to the IRC model, or, again, to EVE online (which relies on IRC heavily). Creating a chat channel and managing invites and access rights in it could be a social boon. The mmo-style games are about social interaction, think of it. Paid and preferred The objective of the game should be to earn money for the company, no doubt, but it's rarely done by insulting the customer. I have created a free-to-play account and leveled two toons and I must say that the word "astonishment" pretty much describes my feelings towards Bioware attitude to f2p. I couldn't use this and that, got reminded to pay up or miss opportunities every now and then. That would seem ok to encourage a person that has money for the sub but it must be absolutely frustrating for a person with no funds. It is my sincere opinion that most of the rectrictions should be revised and cancelled, leaving in place only a few, that are really worth paying for, e.g. wearing purple gear or attending warzones or ops. As of now, not being able to watch the story for Makeb, Revan or Zakuul hardly makes any difference for an f2p Polish or Japanese speaker, and restrictions on trade or mail use are just outright frustrating and humiliating. Please investigate the game you're running and lift useless or frustrating restrictions for f2p and preferred. There need to be but a few to make a person want to pay up, really. Also these free-to-play users can neither post on forums nor write tickets and so their voices are laregly unheard. I can understand concerns about bot spamming the forums but leaving a sizeable part of the community speechless is something I would not expect from a US company. You'll say OK, but if these players are so poor then why bother about them at all, just let them be... I would argue that given the proper incentive these guys could become the most dedicated player group in the game, because of the free time and enthusiasm. They could be given the option to gain subscriber status if a rich subscriber player would be willing to pay for them in return for various in-game services. One sound model for such expansion of the subscriber base exists in EVE online, the PLEX system. PLEX is a game item that one player can purchase for real money and then give it away or sell it inside the game to other players. The PLEX is a consumable game item and grants 30-day subscription for the account upon consumption. In SW:TOR this probably could be facilitated via the Cartel Market once the cartel coins inflation is dealt with. Speaking of the inflation: (1) The CC referral program in the form that it exists should be scrapped outright. I do not know players that signed in due to this program, but I know some that were cheated out by click buyers. Overall it seems the present day referrals make some players collect clicks and then convert massive amounts of CC to credits via GTN. It is my sincere opinion that a successful referral should pay only once, the moment a new player pays for his sub, and the payment should itself be a subscription extension rather than CC (2) More credit sinks should be added to the game to cope with the surging prices. E.g. a guild ship or guild stronghold could have optional functions like Target dummies or Bolsterizers or Mission terminals that would require monthly or weekly payments from the guild bank to maintain them. Open-world PVP and flagging rules Recently there were a few cool developments in open-world action that didn't seem cool at all at first, but could be used to add spice to gameplay nevertheless. Introduction of strongholds came with a bug that allowed imperials to sneak into Coruscant and newbie planets Tython and Ord Mantell while republican guerillas in the same manner trashed Dromund Kaas and Korriban and Hutta. Tickets were written, screenshots were posted and tempers flared but all in all it was a great event while it lasted, until the bug fix. Battles on the Senate plaza attracted a lot of viewers and participants and were fun. I would argue this bug had some social merit and was worth studying rather than just plain fixing. I will explain my point in more details below. Another development was the deliberate introduction of PVP-focus that moved all PVP-activity to separate instances in all locations on all planets on all servers. Some of the locations became fully peaceful zones, PVP-flagging became there impossible. The new PVP-instances instantly became and still remain mostly deserted, players venturing there only to do heroics in crowded locations, or to kill a world boss for a second time, or to wintrade kills of each other for pvp-achievments. A few exceptions like the fine PVP matches by Stroke My Wookie guild do not break the overall rule. The introduction of PVP-focus was most probably the key factor for the sudden death of TOFN server a while ago. Motives for the introduction of PVP-focus were never properly explained by Bioware and are still unclear to me. Possibly it was at least partly due to the excessive amount of whine from KIA on newbie planets and capital worlds while the stronghold bug was up. Nevertheless there is some juice in this lemon, as outlined below. Active open world PVP greatly livens up the game but should never be mandatory, that is the main point. This is why PVE-instances are actually a great boon, players on PVE no longer risk being suddenly killed by other players while staying there. But in order for the PVP-instances to work properly and stir emotions some incentive to go there should be introduced, perhaps in the form of bigger resources or easier questing. Riskier instance rules could also be introduced, in the form of FFA-instances. Most probably with the new hardware it would be relatively easy to create one more instance for all locations without overstretching the server resources. A three-layer model of risk/reward seems to be appropriate here. It could work as follows: (1) apart from PVP-instances another layer of risk could be introduced with the tentative name of FFA-instance, where any player outside of one's guild or group would appear hostile, similar to the Ilum FFA zone in the Gree event (2) resource output from nodes could be recalibrated to reflect the risk/reward: suppose in PVE it could be reduced to 2-3 units from node, in PVP to 4-5 units, in FFA it could remain 7-9 units as it is now everywhere (3) all mobs' dps in open world could be recalibrated to reflect the risk/reward: increased for the mobs in PVE, left the same in PVP and reduced in FFA (4) all mobs' hp in open world could be recalibrated to reflect the risk/reward: boosted in PVE, left the same in PVP and reduced in FFA (5) all players regardless of faction could be allowed to access all planets with some resrictions as a tribute to the stronghold bug. Iin some locations players should be restricted from visiting PVE instances. E.g. on Tython an imperial should be allowed only to PVP and FFA instances while republic players could play on all instances, all new characters starting in PVE by default (6) A new cross-faction chat channel, possibly called "World" should become avaliable to both factions on all planets. It should cover the entire location the same way "General" chat does and it should be ticked off by default so that the smack talk from it would not reach those who prefer peace and PVE Guilds and game management If only one thing about guilds is to be done then it would be wise to assemble a council of leaders of the largest guilds and ask them for advice. I'd point out some obvious issues and suggestions: (1) A new level of guild organization is needed, a guild alliance, with alliance chat channel. I know a lot of low-populated ethnic guilds that would benefit from such an option. Besides, all too many a player like to have their personal guildships and guildbank and create a guild just for sole personal usage or close friends only, but still they would like to be a part of a greater community without leaving their guild (2) Player rights in a guild should all be accounted for and placed on one screen only (i mean guild bank access and flagship and stronghold decoration). The guild master should be able to edit roles on that one screen rather using three screens as it is now. Assigning flagship keys in a 500+ guild is a horrible task at the moment (3) Guild list filtering and member selection with tick boxes for group operations should be avaliable for authorized roles. The way memeber selection works at the moment is a nuiscance, you can easily kick or promote the wrong person by a simple misclick (4) All GM would be happy to see the join-leave history for guilds with dates, nicknames and legacy names, or am I asking for too much already? You lose the legacy name of a kicked player the second he quits the guild unless you kept written records in your excel file, which is as inconvenient as it sounds (5) and we would like to see the ledger and guild bank access records for all time for all members, rather than measly two weeks and 100 guild bank operations. It seems only logical Bioware should have some sort of player feedback other than forum posts and Musco puns. A council of leaders of the largest guilds would be fine for a start. Also there are earnest guys out there (including myself) that report game issues, spam and ill behaviour all the time. Hopefully one could implement some sort of user feedback quality evaluation and have all accounts rated on a scale from "attention whore" to "golden voice of reason". Hopefully such a system would allow Bioware to weed out bugs and design blunders faster than they apparently do. One easy example of a long needed improvement is handling spam reports. As of now deleting an RMT spam mail takes one click, while reporting it takes three (report-spam-ok). Also a spam report counts towards my open support tickets so if I diligently report all spam I see I'll have a ton of these open tickets hanging in the support box (as it is right now). Just a day ago I could not open a ticket about a pressing game issue because of these reports. A while ago I had the same problem and deleted all my spam reports to file a ticket. The issue is still present today, this time I googled a solution for my issue and let the tickets be. Possible solutions: (1) reporting spam both from mail and from chat should be made one-click (ideally a special menu item called "report RMT spam" or "report credit seller") with no "thank you" clickable at all and (2) reporting spam should not count towards open tickets. (3) hopefully you will implement some kind of player trust weighing system for faster spammer blocking. Thanks for your time reading this

This is as good time as any to write about what I think of the state of the game. Having been present at the start and being sub for extended periods of time including today. I have written about this before, but a recap due to the merge seems to be appropriate. United forces "megaserver" merge I monitored server attendance via low-level characters on server fleets for the last year and saw numbers dwindle. Apparently the server merge is an emergency measure to retain player base shrinking because of cross-server migration. EU Red Eclipse experienced a huge inflow of French players just recently and similar processes are apparently going on elsewhere. The merge itself can only be praised, of course, as a huge win for the dark side, me moving to Darth Malgus. The Leviathan is going to be stillborn I suspect though. Actually this merge is long time overdue, to be honest. From the very start it seemed quite dumb that the Star Wars gaming community should be divided into almost 100 separate realms rather than playing on a single big one. WoW did exactly that in 2004 and faced player grouping issues later, these issues were already quite obvious in 2011. Arguably, Blizzard had little choice at the start because clustering was relatively new and making separate realms with low numbers on each was thus justified. But in 2011 we already had EVE online's example of one world for one game working on a big server cluster. What made Bioware use an outdated model back then is still a mystery for me. For crowded locations there could be the problem of client-side graphics of course, but it should be less challenging today than in 2011 and it's solveable via instancing and reduction of graphics quality in the client. So perhaps it would be wise for Bioware to move on with the merge process and end up with one server for the SW:TOR world (with the possible exception for mainland China, of course). The language barrier Personally I have no problems understanding English. Then again, I hail from an obscure ethnic minority with a tongue twisting native language. Thus I can serve as a first hand witness to problems plaguing the players that do not know neither English nor French or German. The Bioware policy to ignore other national languages is readily explainable of course, since the US and EU players provide the bulk of the revenue. It can be argued that corrections to this policy could be beneficial for the revenue stream as well as for the karma. The following statements rely on my assumptions only, hard figures and statistics were never made public by Bioware. It seems that players from the third world constitute the bulk of free-to-play and preferred players and on average spend more time in the game than players from EU and US. In other words they are the more dedicated player group and their enthusiasm is mostly wasted because they can't understand most of the lore and leave the game frustrated, all due to the language barrier. It seems unwise not to use this energy from the Poles, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Spanish etc. Arguably, expanding the presence of 3rd world players could boost the overall attendance of the game, including paid players too. Possibly, they could become paid players via various types of incentives. There are a few things Bioware could do in this direction that seem reasonably easy and budget to me. One thing would be to include other language subtitles in the cutscenes. The minimal list of languages I can think of would be Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Polish and Russian. Polish goes into the list because of the significant number of Poles on the late Red Eclipse (new Darth Malgus). Russian is spoken by a lot of people inside as well as outside of Russia, including Ukraine, Israel and Kazakhstan. Latin America would be glad to read Spanish subtitles, Japanese would be grateful for their kana and kanji. Adding subtitles to the main stories seems manageable and not too expensive to do and most probably won't lead to total revamping of the game. Another positive modification could be introduction of Unicode symbol support to chat and a new model of extended chat management. Being able to write in their native script rather than tortured English would bring you good karma from all Greeks, Japanese, Russians and other obscure symbol users concerned. To get a hint on how to properly organize game chat channels one could turn to the IRC model, or, again, to EVE online (which relies on IRC heavily). Creating a chat channel and managing invites and access rights in it could be a social boon. The mmo-style games are about social interaction, think of it. Paid and preferred The objective of the game should be to earn money for the company, no doubt, but it's rarely done by insulting the customer. I have created a free-to-play account and leveled two toons and I must say that the word "astonishment" pretty much describes my feelings towards Bioware attitude to f2p. I couldn't use this and that, got reminded to pay up or miss opportunities every now and then. That would seem ok to encourage a person that has money for the sub but it must be absolutely frustrating for a person with no funds. It is my sincere opinion that most of the rectrictions should be revised and cancelled, leaving in place only a few, that are really worth paying for, e.g. wearing purple gear or attending warzones or ops. As of now, not being able to watch the story for Makeb, Revan or Zakuul hardly makes any difference for an f2p Polish or Japanese speaker, and restrictions on trade or mail use are just outright frustrating and humiliating. Please investigate the game you're running and lift useless or frustrating restrictions for f2p and preferred. There need to be but a few to make a person want to pay up, really. Also these free-to-play users can neither post on forums nor write tickets and so their voices are laregly unheard. I can understand concerns about bot spamming the forums but leaving a sizeable part of the community speechless is something I would not expect from a US company. You'll say OK, but if these players are so poor then why bother about them at all, just let them be... I would argue that given the proper incentive these guys could become the most dedicated player group in the game, because of the free time and enthusiasm. They could be given the option to gain subscriber status if a rich subscriber player would be willing to pay for them in return for various in-game services. One sound model for such expansion of the subscriber base exists in EVE online, the PLEX system. PLEX is a game item that one player can purchase for real money and then give it away or sell it inside the game to other players. The PLEX is a consumable game item and grants 30-day subscription for the account upon consumption. In SW:TOR this probably could be facilitated via the Cartel Market once the cartel coins inflation is dealt with. Speaking of the inflation: (1) The CC referral program in the form that it exists should be scrapped outright. I do not know players that signed in due to this program, but I know some that were cheated out by click buyers. Overall it seems the present day referrals make some players collect clicks and then convert massive amounts of CC to credits via GTN. It is my sincere opinion that a successful referral should pay only once, the moment a new player pays for his sub, and the payment should itself be a subscription extension rather than CC (2) More credit sinks should be added to the game to cope with the surging prices. E.g. a guild ship or guild stronghold could have optional functions like Target dummies or Bolsterizers or Mission terminals that would require monthly or weekly payments from the guild bank to maintain them. Open-world PVP and flagging rules Recently there were a few cool developments in open-world action that didn't seem cool at all at first, but could be used to add spice to gameplay nevertheless. Introduction of strongholds came with a bug that allowed imperials to sneak into Coruscant and newbie planets Tython and Ord Mantell while republican guerillas in the same manner trashed Dromund Kaas and Korriban and Hutta. Tickets were written, screenshots were posted and tempers flared but all in all it was a great event while it lasted, until the bug fix. Battles on the Senate plaza attracted a lot of viewers and participants and were fun. I would argue this bug had some social merit and was worth studying rather than just plain fixing. I will explain my point in more details below. Another development was the deliberate introduction of PVP-focus that moved all PVP-activity to separate instances in all locations on all planets on all servers. Some of the locations became fully peaceful zones, PVP-flagging became there impossible. The new PVP-instances instantly became and still remain mostly deserted, players venturing there only to do heroics in crowded locations, or to kill a world boss for a second time, or to wintrade kills of each other for pvp-achievments. A few exceptions like the fine PVP matches by Stroke My Wookie guild do not break the overall rule. The introduction of PVP-focus was most probably the key factor for the sudden death of TOFN server a while ago. Motives for the introduction of PVP-focus were never properly explained by Bioware and are still unclear to me. Possibly it was at least partly due to the excessive amount of whine from KIA on newbie planets and capital worlds while the stronghold bug was up. Nevertheless there is some juice in this lemon, as outlined below. Active open world PVP greatly livens up the game but should never be mandatory, that is the main point. This is why PVE-instances are actually a great boon, players on PVE no longer risk being suddenly killed by other players while staying there. But in order for the PVP-instances to work properly and stir emotions some incentive to go there should be introduced, perhaps in the form of bigger resources or easier questing. Riskier instance rules could also be introduced, in the form of FFA-instances. Most probably with the new hardware it would be relatively easy to create one more instance for all locations without overstretching the server resources. A three-layer model of risk/reward seems to be appropriate here. It could work as follows: (1) apart from PVP-instances another layer of risk could be introduced with the tentative name of FFA-instance, where any player outside of one's guild or group would appear hostile, similar to the Ilum FFA zone in the Gree event (2) resource output from nodes could be recalibrated to reflect the risk/reward: suppose in PVE it could be reduced to 2-3 units from node, in PVP to 4-5 units, in FFA it could remain 7-9 units as it is now everywhere (3) all mobs' dps in open world could be recalibrated to reflect the risk/reward: increased for the mobs in PVE, left the same in PVP and reduced in FFA (4) all mobs' hp in open world could be recalibrated to reflect the risk/reward: boosted in PVE, left the same in PVP and reduced in FFA (5) all players regardless of faction could be allowed to access all planets with some resrictions as a tribute to the stronghold bug. Iin some locations players should be restricted from visiting PVE instances. E.g. on Tython an imperial should be allowed only to PVP and FFA instances while republic players could play on all instances, all new characters starting in PVE by default (6) A new cross-faction chat channel, possibly called "World" should become avaliable to both factions on all planets. It should cover the entire location the same way "General" chat does and it should be ticked off by default so that the smack talk from it would not reach those who prefer peace and PVE Guilds and game management If only one thing about guilds is to be done then it would be wise to assemble a council of leaders of the largest guilds and ask them for advice. I'd point out some obvious issues and suggestions: (1) A new level of guild organization is needed, a guild alliance, with alliance chat channel. I know a lot of low-populated ethnic guilds that would benefit from such an option. Besides, all too many a player like to have their personal guildships and guildbank and create a guild just for sole personal usage or close friends only, but still they would like to be a part of a greater community without leaving their guild (2) Player rights in a guild should all be accounted for and placed on one screen only (i mean guild bank access and flagship and stronghold decoration). The guild master should be able to edit roles on that one screen rather using three screens as it is now. Assigning flagship keys in a 500+ guild is a horrible task at the moment (3) Guild list filtering and member selection with tick boxes for group operations should be avaliable for authorized roles. The way memeber selection works at the moment is a nuiscance, you can easily kick or promote the wrong person by a simple misclick (4) All GM would be happy to see the join-leave history for guilds with dates, nicknames and legacy names, or am I asking for too much already? You lose the legacy name of a kicked player the second he quits the guild unless you kept written records in your excel file, which is as inconvenient as it sounds (5) and we would like to see the ledger and guild bank access records for all time for all members, rather than measly two weeks and 100 guild bank operations. It seems only logical Bioware should have some sort of player feedback other than forum posts and Musco puns. A council of leaders of the largest guilds would be fine for a start. Also there are earnest guys out there (including myself) that report game issues, spam and ill behaviour all the time. Hopefully one could implement some sort of user feedback quality evaluation and have all accounts rated on a scale from "attention whore" to "golden voice of reason". Hopefully such a system would allow Bioware to weed out bugs and design blunders faster than they apparently do. One easy example of a long needed improvement is handling spam reports. As of now deleting an RMT spam mail takes one click, while reporting it takes three (report-spam-ok). Also a spam report counts towards my open support tickets so if I diligently report all spam I see I'll have a ton of these open tickets hanging in the support box (as it is right now). Just a day ago I could not open a ticket about a pressing game issue because of these reports. A while ago I had the same problem and deleted all my spam reports to file a ticket. The issue is still present today, this time I googled a solution for my issue and let the tickets be. Possible solutions: (1) reporting spam both from mail and from chat should be made one-click (ideally a special menu item called "report RMT spam" or "report credit seller") with no "thank you" clickable at all and (2) reporting spam should not count towards open tickets. (3) hopefully you will implement some kind of player trust weighing system for faster spammer blocking. Thanks for your time reading this

I had the same issue which made me drop the chapter on master mode If there is some solution I'd love to hear it

refreshing the thread

refreshing the thread

refreshing the thread

The bolster to lvl 60 on Eyeless was designed to allow low-level players to take part in their first operation during the event. Unfortunately, when the level cap was raised to 65 the bolster did not follow suit making it useless, since the boss and minions were also raised to 65. And now the lvl cap is 70 so lvl 60 bolster is laughable i'd say. I hope this time you will fix this obvious bug and adjust bolster to max level 70 as it was intended to be.

The bolster to lvl 60 on Eyeless was designed to allow low-level players to take part in their first operation during the event. Unfortunately, when the level cap was raised to 65 the bolster did not follow suit making it useless, since the boss and minions were also raised to 65. Now the llv cap is 70 and lvl 60 bolster will be even more useless. I hope this time you will fix this obvious bug and adjust bolster to max level 70 as it was intended to be.

Yeah, this will be all about guilds. First of all, guys, you have my deepest gratitude for the legacy column in guild window, it helps a ton to have it. Don't stop there yet, I'll tell you what is still missing and desperately needed in the guild interface, yes. (1) We need a history of Join-Leave with DateJoin-DateLeave-Name-Legacy-EditableGMNote fields. It is a pain to keep all that in Excel, besides when a guy joins, grabs some stuff from the guild Cargo Bay and immediately leaves you sometimes just don't have time to check and write down his legacy name so that everyone would know never to accept his toons again. (2) Credit ledger of a player should have an additional column that would show his total contribution to the guild, apart from the recent two weeks. (3) All guild permissions (I mean all of them, that includes permissions on the Guild Rank screen, permissions on the Guild Cargo Bay vaults, the Stronghold and Guildship keys, and the right to move the Guild ship and the right to summon via Guild ship) could be moved to one comprehensive screen and all permissions could be tied to guild rank. That would make a single screen for setting permissions. The task of giving out a specific set of permissions would thus be reduced to assigning the proper rank and configuring it. (4) Guild bank Item deposit-withdrawal history could be more useful if it were limited by time rather than number of lines. personally I would be glad to see the last year or 6 mo at least. Ideally the history could be kept indefinitely and be downloadable to cvs or excel. Yes and the vaults should have significantly more cells per one tab, the tabs could be scrollable probably. (5) On second thought, the right to use flagship summon could be separated from the right to access guild funds. As of now permission to use flagship summon is sometimes abused when a new guild member grabs his weekly limit for summons from the guild bank and quits. Also the right to move the guild ship could be separated from the gold key allowing to invtie/kick and decorate. (6) Mass mailing via the guild list should be available for the GM at the very least. Ideally this should be a function configurable via a permit/deny box in guild ranks so that it could be delegated to officers. As of now mailing 30-40 guild members is a pain in the *** because of the antispam delay. Thank you for your attention

Yea, I bet it was intended this way, but one could have asked around. Almost all player interaction is in fact PVP, and usually produces dissatisfaction because one side wins, the other loses. Your GF flashpoint groupie that suddenly ragequit probably lost, perhaps it was his nerve he lost but anyway. The guy that was patient enough to get a unique drop from seeker droid mining, he showed it off and the other guy that got jealous - he lost. One clicked the node faster than the other, one hit Valen Korik first, one grabbed the irradiated rakghouls etc, you name it. It's all PVP and there are usually two sides, and one does complain. It is inevitable. As of now the game admin respond to such complaints with attempts to level the playfield: for the unique mount there will be a similar one in the Cartel market, crowded heroics will get instanced, leveling has become lightning-fast, resources are ridiculously plentyful etc. I can understand this kind of policy, but it does take the competition out of the game, and gameplay does get dull the very moment complaints get their satisfaction. I am merely trying to suggest a feature that would leave the present policies mostly intact but still add some competition to the gameplay. IMO ongoing conflict is the main spirit of any action MMO, much more than cooperation. And regulating the extent of this conflict rather than eliminating it altogether should probably turn out more beneficial for gameplay. In this context I'd say that moving all pvp action to a separate instance looked more like elimination to me. There are several models of grading the extent of conflict in an MMO, but they all have common features: (1) a player is free to move from minimal action areas to maximum action any time (2) the areas overlap and/or movement between them is pretty easy and does not interrupt player dialog (3) there is substantial incentive for the players to spend a lot of time in more riskier environments. Thank you for your attention

There will be no wishful thinking here. Game admin knows all too well that numbers are dwindilng and the short answer is "pvp focus happened". Let us assume that kicking open world pvp to a separate instance was done under severe pressure from influentiial pve-whiners and the decision won't ever be reversed. Let's see how it can be mended to revive open-world pvp and overall player interest. Throughout the text I will hold as an axiom that pvp is the spring that brings life to any MMO, the player should be allowed to choose his exposure to it, but never be free of it altogether. At present the game admin is tending to reduce pvp to strictly timed and regulated 4vs4 or 8vs8, which is a grave mistake in my humble opinion. Pvp fights 16vs1, "this is my resource", "i clicked first" and "all the mobs are belong to me" are also fun and should be encouraged. As of now the pvp instances are mostly dead, used only by heroic grinding groups when mobs are scarce in the pve-space. That presents an opportunity to liven up the game. If mob HP in the pve and pvp instances are rebalanced separately, say a 5% HP increase in PVE, and a sizeable, like 20%, decrease in HP in the PVP for the same mob (remember it was done once on Ilum, the Gree heroic), that would create incentive for players to venture in the PVP instance and trade the risk being killed for faster quest advancement. That be (1). Since no one can hit each other in PVE instances anymore, all players could be allowed to travel to all planets, the Empire and Republic are technically at peace after all. Thus newbie planets and Capital city planets could have a functional pvp-instance where newbies would be free to go on their own risk and evil players from the opposite faction would wait for stragglers (or a vigilante ops group). Due to game design that won't include two Balmorras and two Tarises, of course. And yes, Ziost and other no-pvp-instance planets need functional pvp-instances too. That be (2). Yes and resource nodes of the pvp-instance could produce a tad more than in pve-instances. Like 4 units per node in PVE, 7 units in PVP. That be (3) If this gets implemented and works well an extension could be considered, adding a FFA instance, where players would be mutually attackable regardless of faction. Incentive to go to this lawless instance could be created by further reducing mob HP, say by 50% from normal. The FFA area worked wonders with the Gree event on Ilum, before pvp instancing happened. These additional instances and different stats for mobs could create some extra server load but this, I hope, could have a budget solution, incomparable to the material losses that dull gameplay produces now. Thank you for your attention.

it still takes three clicks: report, confirm, second confirm deleting is just one click

Thanks for the heads up on mail spam, the spam itself is quite annoying in fact, nice to know it is in your focus now. Please note that at present deleting an RMT spam mail takes one click, while reporting it takes (suddenly) three. Also reporting a spam message counts towards open support tickets so if I vigilantly report spam it means I have a ton of these open tickets hanging in the support box. Some time ago I couldn't open a ticket about another issue because of that. Not sure if it is still the case atm but i ran into this problem and had to delete all my open spammer reports before filing a ticket about a game issue. Also quite annoying is the fact that sometimes I continue to receive RMT spam from the same character a couple of days after I have reported him. Could mean that the name was re-used of course, but poor reaction time of support is more likely. This particular issue seems to be improving lately, though. Possible solutions: (1) reporting spam both in mail and chat should be made one-click (ideally a special menu item called "report RMT spam" or "report credit seller") and (2) reporting spam should not count towards open tickets. Possibly there (3) should be a procedure of player auto-suspension upon receipt of a reliable amount of RMT reports, pending subsequent manual review by support staff. What would "reliable" mean is up to the game procedure. of course

A game token "30-day subscription" should be avaliable as a direct purchase for cash via the store (or via the Cartel market possibly for something around 2000-3000 CC). The token should be tradeable and sellable via the GTN. Activating such a token should be equivalent to a one-month subscription i.e. remove all restrictions, grant full access to all game expansions and grant the player preferred status upon expiration of the 30-day subscription. Having had a lot of discussions with players from third-world countries I would tentatively predict that there would be a sizeable amount of players that would pay for the game solely via these tokens. These people are now mass quitting after playing for a couple of weeks because of unability to buy subscription for various reasons, mostly low family or personal income. Potentially these people are one of the most loyal category of players because they have tons of free time and by gaining subscriber status they will have more incentive to spend it in game. Letting the more affluent pay for the less so by trading a paid subscription for game credits would be in line with the policy that allows similar trading of various Unlocks and Consumables.