As stated earlier, the key to MT is to avoid a pay to win through itemization. It is also key to make all progression available with or without MT. I would like to see appearance gear, exp pots, etc sold directly from EA. They might as well bank on that easy money. Then I would like to see a real money auction house for the players. Keep only the very best items bind on pickup.

So, biochem is clearly overpowered in this game. The vast majority of people who PVE/PVP often have it. Simple solution is to make Rakata and future better ones Biochem only. Make the level 40 reusables accessable to non biochem. Or increase the quantity of blue stims produced, as they are too expensive (~10k credits) and the average person never uses them.

Darthdarious: that is because you are too dense to realize I am saying ToR has to do it better than WoW to gain/keep subs and explaining why. Diablo: I agree the base starter and medium gear from raids and comms is an awesome system, especially since you can craft good stuff and augment it. However, I do have an issue that you can slice and gain credits plus all the materials out of thin air. That ruins the economy and the value of crafted materials. They should increase the slice cost and time. Other mmos also take fuel (credits) to craft. The reverse engineering doesnt give much back either and should give more. Everynoe should be able to reverse engineer everything. PvP needs rated and cross server badly. Hopefully they could also do a ranking system in the rated like starcraft or HoN. How it works is that your teams average rating determines the rewards and rating point you get or lose if you win. This gives more incentive to not overstack a team. Resolve works ok, but its lame so many things can root you still and gives advantages to warriors and tank powertechs especially when you have a dumb team that fills resolve on a ballcarrier or healer for no reason. I do sell tons of stuff on the GTN, like 50mil worth. The market isn't bad but they should only show the cheapest of an item so it isnt so easy for people to undercut you. IE: you list a full stack of something someone is going to undercut you for sure. If they can only see that there is 1 at that price and dont know the quantity, they might not choose to undercut you. When people get undercut constantly they stop putting low mats on sale and focus on big money items like t6 materials. Adding a 3rd day wouldn't hurt either. Totally agree that its tedious to figure out how much it cost you to get your mats. This wouldn't be a problem if you could simply sell them for a lot thou. Increase timers!

I already quoted you and agreed in other threads lol

Depends what your time and economic picture looks like. $20 or $25 transfers are almost a certainty in the future.

I see no reason why they can't take their lowest pop servers and merge them. Or remove the server and allow those people to transfer free to any server. Most companies do $20 transfers beyond that. Maybe they will listen to you, but I dunno. With content constantly updated every 3 months, there won't be a huge rush to play when xpaks come out, so the servers can handle a larger, but less active population. Agree with all. The pvp is so imbalanced at the moment. I also hope they prevent the duping that other games experienced when they did cross server warzones!

Exactly.

I would also like to see group space missions that have randomization involved. You could practically write a macro to beat space missions because they are exactly the same every time.

If you have time read my post. It goes into why people are anti social, which is the fault of the reward structure. Agree with all the rest. Transfers ftw!

Totally agree. This game so far doesn't feel much like star wars. The enemies are so generic. Give me a true boss or army to fight.

I don't post often, but I have been playing mmos for 15 years, so I know most of the reasons people quit them. I will start by saying that the churn rate of this game isn't any worse than other big mmos. WoW has huge churn and the majority of people that play it quit it. But, WoW didn't have any MMO that had more than a million subscribers to compete with (much less 9 million). It also didn't have many high quality free to play games to compete with. It was sort of a virtuous cycle for Activision when people kept up their subscriptions. That kept many of their friends subscribing and more of their friends trying the game than if those people had quit the game quickly. There is nothing EA/Bioware can do about that. However, this game has a huge barrier to entry in that it lags on "good" laptops that are a just year old with decent graphics. Many other people on computers also lag, even at the lowest available settings. Whereas, WoW is starting to make their game available on tablets, which are relatively weak in power. Most computers can run several instances of WoW at once. Few laptops have issues with other MMO's. Performance is an issue... I have 6 battlemaster toons and win most of the time. Point being I have credibility and do not complain due to my own incompetence. Lag in warzones is problematic. People are able to exploit their location and make it look as though they are walking off a bridge when in reality they are somewhere else. I can freeze a guy in the middle of the fire pit and he will be sitting there for 3 seconds, while the fire is burning, and suddenly he warps far past the pit (clearly the game now says that is where the person was the whole time). There is all kinds of frustration that needlessly emanates from this fact. My hardware and internet are not the issue. The servers are or the way they get info from people is. Also, even on my i7 computer with a legit crucial SSD, it takes 30 seconds or longer to zone into the open world zones. That is rediculous when you are trying to requeue a warzone. Of course, the devs could make an option to auto-requeue the whole group, but I digress. Most games do not have these issues in this day and age. I could play two instances of Everquest 2, which has comparable/better graphics than this game, and not have the same issues (so long as spell particles are turned down). Do something about this. The biggest complaint people have is hollow server populations. This is more of a function of the game not rewarding group play enough. The solo rewards are wonderful in this game... do not change them. Instead, fix the group rewards. I assume that the game is intended to be extremely easy to get into, with the goal to have people get invested in their characters. Smart move. The difficulty curve is perfectly fine... I even applaud it. Where the developers went wrong is making all of the rewards cookie cutter. Tier 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 with different names and appearances, but the same stats and effects. Maybe this was to save resources at launch, but the very next thing that needs to be done (beyond bug fixes) is adding rare loot that feels unique... Let me explain it this way: I have seen people run zones/flashpoints, that they absolutely hate, as many as 50 or 100 times trying to get 1 thing they have their heart set on. In Everquest 1 and 2 and other MMOs people would run zones that were 1 or 2 expansions (2-3 years) old, because there was intelligent itemization implemented. The key is to make items that are not overpowered, while not undermining the viability of those items for a while. A wonderful example would be a piece of gear in EQ2 that had a small chance to proc a 10% base damage increase. This was an item that everyone on the server would want, but few had. However it wasn't the end all, be all item because it had poor stats. In PvP you wouldn't typically use this item (imagine no expertise or hitpoints on it). On a punishing flashpoint or raid boss you wouldn't wear this item. But you had tons of fun using it on trash and on easy encounters. This is the extreme example or course. Point is, instead of making 20 flashpoints that everyone hopefully loves, the developers are far better off making fun and fairly challenging zones, but putting most of the effort into the reward structure. You should also realize that people do get excited for rare loot even when their friends get it. People wouldn't mind the frustration or repetition, if they felt like there was something gained at the end. Out of my last guild, the majority of players did not run each flashpoint more than once (to see it for the first time). Now add all the players that already know flashpoints are below average rewards. Then add all the players who have better gear than the flashpoint can offer. Now it becomes clear why so few people run flashpoints or log in as much. Plus, there are probably many more people that know they can't beat the hard enrage timer with a bunch of undergeared (new) people. Normal mode flashpoints are not very rewarding, so at least add a rare chance for hard mode loot. My experience: The first time I did Black Talon, I was amazed. All the way through Directive 7 flashpoints were fun. One area where the devs went wrong is making hard enrage timers. The zones are still easy for my friends, but that is a lazy system and makes for either too easy or too hard outcomes. Everyone knows the argument that a hard enrage makes no logical sense as well. If the monster could hit 2x as hard, why doesn't it do it when it is about to die, even if you kill it fast? Diablo 3 has a better solution, such as spawning extra monsters or adding another managable mechanic, rather than making the monster hit 2x harder. I also don't do flashpoints or OPs anymore, because it got old without anything to look forward to (loot). It especially wore on my guildmates when some people got their cookie cutter set of t8 gear and quit the game (temporary or not) after we wasted their time to help get them gear. This happens in all games, but in most MMOs, even the most selfish people had to stick around longer than the month it takes to get a full set of t8. I have seen and expect it to continue that people will get most of the gear they want from raids and quit soon thereafter. I know there are guilds with 90% retention rates out there, but I bet few raid guilds can accomplish this given the reward structure. I can essentially take 6 months off from the game and come back and get a full set of t9 gear without missing a beat. End game should not be that trivial. Starter gear is great. Fix the end game. To be clear, I am not saying aspects of the game require limited skill. I am saying many people will feel disinclined to play for these reasons, even if they don't realize why. Side note... 8 mans are too easy and 16 mans are just frustrating, without any extra reward. It makes no sense that most guilds run 2 seperate 8 man raids rather than a 16 man. It also sucks when my 8 man raid is finished and the other one can't clear their zone. Bad for the community. There also needs to be a heirloom system to let you transfer bound items between your characters on an account. Reason being... a healer would be willing to heal for people, even if his main incentive is to do a zone for alt loot. A tank would tank a zone for others for the same reason. I guarantee you that this makes it easier for people to find groups and less complicated to run zones. By the way I do want to give props to the devs for the spec system. That is very useful in this arena. Promising rated warzones soon and not delivering is a big mistake. This is exacerbated by two facts. One, queues take up to 15 minutes or longer outside of prime hours. Two, people (on republic side especially) can game the system by queing two 4man groups at the same time. Effectively, they are bringing an 8 man premade against, at worst, a 4 man premade and at least 1 or 2 "noobs". In other words, I have seen republic teams win every game they play for days straight. I play on both sides of this, so I can tell you the typical way this plays out is one or more people quit within the first minute of the warzone. This makes it hard for the remaining players to even get their medals(rewards). Rated warzones or at least cross server queues would fix this immediately. The experience would be better for both sides. The premades would have a challenge. The unorganized groups would have sliver of a chance. Also, I would add one more mechanic/skill to each class that you have to target with your mouse like aes, but make it easier to do. Putting AE's down in this game is far too tedious. especially if you arent looking down at the ground. Reason why you need this: it's possible to beat everything in this game just by using your left hand on the keyboard. I won't mention what my other hand is doing I know it's long. But, I hope either this gets to a dev OR they already know the gist of what I am saying.

I listened and found it very interesting.

Exactly

Microtransactions are an inevitability in this game because it is price discrimination, which is the most profitable pricing model (and it's not even close). Hopefully, as some have suggested, they will make all microtransaction items available to be earned without real money as well as with real money. Some of us will spend 20 hours to get a mount and others will spend $25. This way, Bioware can make ~$100 a year from the average player and $200-$10,000 of other players. Yes, some players will spend thousands of dollars on this game a year. If you didn't know, EA is already partnered with a microtransaction company by the name of livegamer. They helped Sony do microtransactions for their games. Now you have two kinds of microtransactions. You have a store with mounts, potions, appearance gear, etc. It is guaranteed that we will see that in the future. But there is also the exchange system (player to player) that livegamer has produced for Everquest 2 and other Sony games. This is the equivalent of the Diablo 3 real money auction house, except you had to mail your items to a website, instead of buying items in the game. They make this palatable by making some servers exchange servers and others non exchange servers. So, they would make new exchange servers and you could transfer there free of charge if you want to participate in such an environment. To make an exchange palatable in Diablo 3, there is hardcore mode, which does not participate in the real money auction house ("pay to win"). Every smart developer finds an exscuse such as this. EA/Bioware can do seperate servers or who knows. Besides, you can't sell Rakata gear on the exchance anyway can you? So it isn't a clear "pay to win". It is just pay to get a shortcut (prototype/mastercraft gear). But lets be clear: As more and more games see the success ($$$) of Diablo 3, they will implement these systems and most players will not care. And they shouldn't care, because everyone who doesn't have their head in the sand knows that there is already a black market in every game in existence. Diablo 3 hardcore mode will have a black market. This game has a black market. Everyone gets a "Hi my friend buy 1m gold for $9" mail daily. You can buy any piece of gear for 5 million credits. You can buy a fully geared rakata character. Do you expect EA/Bioware to ignore the millions of dollars in commissions it could be making? Maybe for now the answer is yes... It is only a matter of time though. Here is why: You know why WoW sold 4 million mounts? It isn't because 4 million players bought them. The real reason is that less than 1 million players bought them and many traded them for in game currency. Yes they were tradable and Blizzard was genius for that. If we all understand that 2% of the players are probably as rich as the other 98% of us then you also understand this is why EA/Bioware has to move to microtransactions. You expect EA should let Activision have a higher profit margin per customer so that you can live in ignorance? And that is only the appearance/mount store side of the equation. In my opinion, WoW will add an exchange soon (~1-2 years) after D3 becomes a success. They will placate the angry voices by lowering subscriptions 10-25%. You might wonder why it makes sense money wise as they will lose ~$10million or something a year on the face of it. Well, WoW is going to have to move toward free to play anyway. By lowering the sub cost they will hold on to more subscribers and keep them away from games such as this one. The free to play model derives all of its money from xpaks and microtransactions. Wow can be a hybrid of that and continue to dominate. This is the future. If you want this game to prosper, this is the way it has to be. Many people think real money taints the experience because someone paid to win. That happens regardless. Knowing that, do you want this company to be able to compete long term or not?