<Scions of Brutality> is an Imperial, U.S. Eastern Timezone-based, social, mostly-PvE, Imperial guild on Star Forge. We're looking for people who are interested in helping to build a community of friends with which to conquer SWTOR's challenges. Over the last decade-and-a-half, our organization, through its various chapters, has perfected the "people over pixels" mentality, and while we encourage everyone to play their very best, we strive to maintain an atmosphere of camaraderie; choosing to build people up rather than tear them down. Right now we're making a big push to round out our Operations team to begin our regular raiding schedule of Mondays and Fridays from 6PM EST to 9PM EST. We need a healer, up to two tanks and a couple more DPS. So if you're interested in running regular Veteran Ops and possibly up to Nightmare mode, come join our guild! We'll also be planning regular events like Datacron Crawls and World Boss hunts, and you can usually find us hanging out on Discord while mowing through FPs and the occasional Warzone or GSF. If you'd like to know more, or if you're ready to join, head on over to our website today! Alternatively, you can message Chiroth or Mysticha in-game. Thanks for reading, and may the Force serve you well!

Here we are in 2021 and I had this issue, too. This suggestion also worked for me (I had to Alt+F4 out of the game and then relaunch.) I tried reloading the UI first, but that didn't work.

Any halfway decent group should be able to show you the ropes in Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace. Those are the introductory Operations and as long as you all have voice comms (e.g. Discord, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, etc.) folks should be able to talk you through each of those fights pretty easily. Once you feel comfortable in EV and KP, you're probably ready to tackle all the rest of the ops. Furthermore, if you're really interested in learning operations, there are quite a few video guides on each of the Ops and their encounters (such as this one) that you could study beforehand to be extra prepared.

You are right. =( Let's remedy that. I still stick by my idea that raiding should be the means for gearing for raiding. You go into raids, the bosses all drop loot, so you can gear up your raid team and prep for the next tier of raiding. If that 's how it worked, I wouldn't have any problem with Galactic Command for myself. But for others, the folks who maybe just dabble in raiding, but mostly spend their time doing other activities, I wouldn't have an problem at all if there were a more-or-less guaranteed way for them to get set piece drops through GC. I think, rather than have specific slots drop at particular tiers, Bioware should take a(nother) page from Blizzard and do something similar to what they did with Hearthstone. When you open packs in Hearthstone you have a chance to get a legendary quality card. Of course, the standard drop rate on legendaries is pretty low. However, while unconfirmed (I think) by Blizzard, Hearthstone "scienticians" (heh heh, Simpsons) have posited the theory that there exists a "pity timer." Basically, if after opening 30ish packs, you haven't gotten a legendary card, the pity time kicks in and starts drastically increasing the chances of receiving a legendary from opening packs such that you won't get too far past 40 packs per legendary. I think SWTOR should operate similarly. If they've already implemented a pity time for set pieces, it needs to be set waaaaaaaaay lower. EDIT: And also be per-character. Don't want your pity timer going off when you've played an alt for a change a pace.

Let's say you do GSF - it has the best UA Components-per-activity in the game right now. You get 8 for a win and 3 for a loss. Let's assume a 50% win rate, meaning you get 11 UAComps every two matches, or an average of 5.5 UAComps per match. In order to get your max tier main hand, which costs 570 UAComps, you'd have to complete about 100 GSF matches. Let's say you can get 3 GSF matches per hour (queue times + time played... I think I'm being extremely generous assuming 3 per hour), that means it'll take you over 33 hours of played time to earn one max-tier item. Now you have 13 more items to max out for a grand total of an additional 5575 UAComps. If you fully gear your character, through the best, most reliable way to gear, it'll take about 1858 more hours. There are only about 720 hours in a month. Maybe you're super active and average 40 hours a week in SWTOR. Every minute you play is devoted to GSF. You'll need almost 47 weeks (five weeks short of a year) to max out your character. Maybe you'll get lucky and get a couple pieces from Command Crates, but that'll likely only save you a few days. Again, that's by doing nothing but GSF. If you like Ops, FPs, Warzones, etc, your time to max tier will take longer. I should reiterate, that we've looked at some "best case" scenarios regarding win rates and queue times, as well. I expect, in the real world, it would not be uncommon for a 50% to 100% increase in the estimated times. Oh, and then you do it all over again on the second of your dozen+ alts. Almost a full year, to fully gear one character. /smh

This! It's really, really difficult to gear your raiders, in aggregate, with RNG from crates. Sure, one or two of your folks might get lucky and get their six-piece bonus pretty quickly, but what about the couple of unlucky friends you have who, like me, only managed to pull 2 set pieces from 90+ crates? If six of your raiders are all ready to go into Hard Modes, you have to leave the two behind - which sucks because we're all friends, and I don't want to leave them behind. Sure, the last bosses drop pieces, but now we're having to farm entire raids just to get two people the 4 other set pieces they need. That means slogging through hundreds of trash mobs and dozens of trash bosses just to get to the juicy loot center of your Operations. Heaven help you when you get to SnV and have to face 6 trash bosses before finally getting to the one that drops your gear. Bottom line: NO boss should be a trash mob. Bosses are bosses for a reason!

Are they really though? So far, all I've heard are some very nebulous assurances that they'll do "something" to make it "better." It's the "something" and the "better" that should concern us all, because they thought RNG crates would be "something" that would make gearing up "better." So far, players have two primary complaints about the RNG crate system: 1.) First and foremost, the rewards in the crates are terrible and unrewarding too much of the time. 2.) Getting the next crate takes too long. As of right now, they've only done "something" about the 2nd complaint which has been to make us get the Disappointment Boxes more quickly. I mean, if the water fountain dispenses 90% sewage and 10% potable water, increasing the rate at which the sewage flows out doesn't really make your drinking experience any less disgusting. For me, the idea that raid bosses don't drop gear is just ludicrous. If they wanted to tell raiders to piss off out of their game, they couldn't have said it any louder or more clearly than this. Maybe the scope of GC isn't quite as broad as the NGE, but the attitude behind it and the unrelenting support for it from the developers, in the face of much negative feedback from their playerbase (both before and after implementation), is exactly the same.

Yup! I agree, 100% This is the only way to make Galactic Command a positive experience for Subscribers. Devs do this and they keep my subscription (I'll even resub my alt account, which I recently canceled due to GC.)

Just like Sony was about the NGE. Where's SWG now?

That's good to hear. Could you maybe try to get a list from the developers of the ideas for Guild QOL improvements they feel are good ideas and willing to work on. I'm not saying they need to list things that are coming out by next month or anything (though if there are some things that will, that would be very welcome news), but just stuff they've seen and gone, "Yeah! Yeah, a guild calendar is a really good idea. That's something we'd like to bring to the game." Such feedback would go a long way toward letting us know that our ideas are being heard and addressed. Thanks!

Honestly? Not really. (side note: are you just here to talk about Rampart?) I'm not trying to be mean, and I only offer the following because I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you genuinely have misread what everyone is asking. There is so much more that I am so much more eager to learn more about than KotET. How about someone addressing five years worth of questions about guild management improvements? How about five years worth of questions about PvP balance issues? How about five years worth of concerns on the illusory nature of player choice in in SWTOR? How about five years worth of concerns about slow-to-non-existent developer feedback? That's just to name a few of the things people are actually "eager to learn more about." Again, I don't want to give the impression that I don't appreciate you showing up here in this thread. I do. However, it seems like you've missed the mark on exactly what it is we're asking for, and I suspect you're only doing as you're directed, so maybe you can take this information I've provided to the Powers That Be™ and see if they'll deign to address our concerns.

I can name one: Star Citizen. It's not even done funding yet. $123,564,224 in crowd-funded donations and counting as of this post. But then look at the scope of that game. You'll walk around a planet, head to your hangar, climb into your ship, fly out of the hangar and then up through the atmosphere and into space. Next you'll Quantum Drive over to a space station in the system, land there, get out of the ship, walk inside the station, buy some cargo, go back to your ship, load the cargo and take off. Next you'll Q-Drive over to the jump point, navigate it to the next system, Q-Drive to the planet, fly DOWN through the atmosphere and land at a mining station where you'll unload your cargo. Provided, of course, that you weren't intercepted by pirates, on your way there, who would have disabled and boarded your ship, wherein you would have engaged in CQB, FPS-style, to eliminate the threat before continuing on your journey. Even though that game is still in development, much of that gameplay is in and working, and improvements are being made fairly rapidly. Even if the total funding exceeds $300M, that'll be a bargain for the type of gameplay Star Citizen is offering. It would be hard for me to believe that EA isn't casting a jealous eye on that pile of donated money Chris Roberts is using as a foundation for his nascent gaming empire. If they can get it through their little grey, cubicle brains that vision leads to profit, we may yet see SWTOR live up to its potential.

Looking around these forums, throughout the years, I can see that not much has changed. There's still a black cloud of negativity that haunts the General Forums area, leaving the atmosphere tinged with a vibe of nihilistic doom and gloom. "Everything's broken," "The game's terrible," "SWTOR should just die in a fire!" Certainly, this sense of foreboding is often exaggerated and overstated; however, there is still plenty of room for honest criticism. I like this game, I think, though it may be more accurate to say that I like the idea of the game. I like what the game could be, but isn't yet. Maybe this is a problem a lot of us have. We muddle through, enjoying the bright and shiny bits where we can find them, all the while hoping that Bioware will come along, and rub away the tarnished parts to reveal a valuable treasure beneath the grime. The good news is that I don't think this is a totally unreasonable thing to hope for, in the coming years. These days, the MMO market seems to have settled down. Game companies have come to realize that WoW's success was probably either a fluke or just the perfect juxtaposition of timing and design. No other MMO (and there were many contenders) was able to duplicate WoW's blockbuster status. So now the market has "cooled off." Even WoW is a shadow of its former self (if a giant one, still), and that's the perfect time for SWTOR to grow its player base. Folks who are moving on from WoW don't have a great many alternate choices for scratching the MMO itch, and with new Star Wars movies hitting the big screen over the next few years, SWTOR is actually in a pretty good place; with one caveat. They have to actually polish up those grimy spots. If your roof leaks when it rains, you can't blame the clouds for water damage in your home. You can't solve the problem by buying new windows. You have to replace the roof. Likewise, if you step on the scale and it shows you being 100 pounds overweight, you can't attribute those results to big bones or water retention. You have work on your diet and exercise. Problems can be fixed, but only after you've correctly and honestly identified them. SWTOR has problems. Maybe the developers know it, but it's hard to tell because many of these issues have been here since the beginning. As players, we identify these problems and give feedback on them, not because we want to destroy the game, but because we want to see it made better. We want it to grow so we'll have more friends to play with. We want it to shine so we can tell everyone, "See! I told you there was something amazing underneath all that dirt and dust!" Now is a really great time for EA to invest some money into SWTOR, revitalize its development team and make sure they have the resources they need to take the feedback we're giving and have a good, honest look at their thought processes and design philosophies. Then they need to enact positive changes in those areas to build SWTOR into a successful oasis of fun in the MMO wasteland.

The free-to-play model is for failed MMOs who couldn't hack it as a subscription. Market saturation and mismanagement are, in my opinion, the top factors contributing to MMO failure. However, the king of MMOs, World of Warcraft, is still a subscription-based MMO and raked in over one billion dollars in 2013. The next highest MMO was also subscription based. If cash shops offered better revenue, both WoW and Lineage 1 would have converted over a long time ago.

I don't see why they don't just make subbing a better deal. I prefer MMOs with subscriptions; because, in my estimation, "There's nothing more expensive than a Free-to-Play MMO." Also, I like paying a set amount and receiving all the content. I hate all the nickle'n'diming F2P games put its players through. I understand wanting to offer content a la carte to folks who aren't interested in a sub, but their F2P time should really just be an appetizer that leads to their subscription....and when they do finally subscribe, it should be one of those "light from heaven, angels choir" type moments that leaves them wondering how they ever got by without paying $0.50 per day. As it stands, I feel like my subscription is just okay. It definitely saves a lot of the hassle of being F2P or Preferred, but is hassling people really the best way for an entertainment company to operate? Also, I feel like there's a lot of content I miss out on as a subscriber. I mean, there are still all the stupid lockboxes (DCUO lets subs open theirs for free) and all the past subscriber rewards that I've permanently missed out on (meanwhile the premium digital content from my Collector's Edition has been made available for $5 to everyone.) Bioware isn't even consistent in that regard. I just wish my Sub here in SWTOR was more like my WoW or DCUO subscription.

Indeed. It would be nice to know whether this is something Bioware is even willing to work on. Maybe they don't feel like these tools and improvements are necessary, but I think that would be rather shortsighted of them. When it comes to retaining players in an MMO, and maintaining their engagement with the product, I believe a sense of camaraderie is far more important than how many levels, dungeons, NPCs, loot drops or PvP arenas there are. I mean, there are still diehard Everquest players out there who keep logging in on a daily basis because their friends do. Guilds, usually, are the ultimate expression of this sense of community among players, and the easier Bioware makes it for us to form and maintain them, the easier it will be for them to retain players and even turn them into customers. However, the silence on this issue is deafening and demoralizing.

Faction: Republic Guild Name: Symphony of Blades Guild Leader: Evoss Officers: Chelsay, Zedax Kal PvP: Casual PvE: Casual with Progression aspirations GSF: Light Role Play: Almost none Website: https://sob-swtor.enjin.com

Over the years, numerous people have made many great (and often, obvious) suggestions for improvements to the Guild system, in particular to the interface. Things like an in-game event calendar, event log (e.g. who joined, was promoted/demoted, who left, etc.) and many other suggestions. I've been nearly five years, and none of these suggestions have been implemented. Should we just give up and deal with it, or are these changes in development or likely to be in development in the near future? Thanks in advance for the information!

Do you like getting to the juicy loot centers of raid encounters? Do you like getting hit in the face while doing so, or maybe you prefer to patch up the aforementioned faces? Well have we got a job for you! <Symphony of Blades> is a highly social PvE and Warzone guild and we've started raiding together, with pretty good success so far, but we need more healers and tanks (who are dependable) to make fielding an Ops team a little easier. We've been doing 8-man raids, but would like to do 16s, and ultimately, we want to field two 16-man ops teams. Our regular day to raid has been Saturday at 5PM Eastern. We'd like to add another day, but that will depend on peoples' schedules. So if you can show up just about every Saturday at 5PM and want to main or off-tank or main or off-heal, message one of us <SoB>s in-game, shoot a mail to Archellion or check out our website at: http://sob-swtor.enjin.com. PS We use our Teamspeak server while raiding.

Yes, please! My guild has a website, but no one ever signs up for it. It's really difficult to organize activities for our members without some sort of centralized communication. A guild-wide mail option would be a big help. Piggybacking on this suggestion, may I also suggest an in-game calendar for the guild, whereby officers can post events and players can sign up for them?

Well, I'm glad it worked out for you. Unfortunately, I've had a few of my Preferred-status guildies move on to other games because of the punitive nature of the system. Really, my suggestion is just about providing more options. Rather than SWTOR being only either F2P or sub-based, my suggestion adds a third, Buy-to-Play option that has proven successful with games like Guild Wars and Black Desert Online. More options means more customers. More customers means more revenue for EA/BW. More revenue means more content for the players.

TL;DR: Keep things mostly the same, add $30 "All Access" pass, enhance sub rewards and make it easier to be a preferred player. I remember, back in the '90s, when I first heard about Everquest, I thought to myself, "Wow! An RPG that never ends!? Yes please!" Then I found out that it was going to cost $9.99 per month to play this wondrous invention and my joy turned to sadness, "Screw that! I'll never pay a monthly fee to play a video game. What a ripoff!" Well, Future Me hopes that Past Me got some seasoning for those words, because it wasn't too many years later that I was forced to eat them. You see, I had heard that Star Wars was getting an MMO (SWG) and, lucky me, I actually got into the beta! Within about 30 minutes of beta access, I had come to the conclusion that MMOs were the best type of game ever, and I was more than ready to pay $15 per month to keep playing them. Since then I've tried many different MMOs but was only able to justify continuing my subscription on one or two (which, sadly, did not include SWTOR when it first launched.) That said, I actually prefer the subscription model. My favorite saying about Free-to-play games is, "There's nothing more expensive than a free-to-play game." I'd rather do away with the nickel-and-dime hassle of the F2P model and just get pretty much everything delivered in one tidy, small, monthly fee. I'm subscribed to SWTOR right now since it offers enough entertainment value to be worth playing, and if I'm going to play an MMO, I want to do so as a subscriber. However, I understand that not everyone feels this way. Some folks just can't justify a monthly fee to enjoy a game, and there are enough of them out there that MMO developers can't simply write them off. Enter the free-to-play model. Ostensibly, this model give players the opportunity to try out the game, free of charge, and then pay only for the content they desire via small amounts of money. There are definitely some good examples of how to make F2P a viable and attractive option for folks who are on the fence or low on cash (DCUO and Star Trek Online spring to mind, even EVE.) Unfortunately, SWTOR does not fall into the category of exemplary free-to-play models. I understand that MMO companies need revenue, and there's a real science in how to get F2P players to convert to paying customers (see for a developer's point of view on the F2P model), but I feel SWTOR falls too heavily on the "stick" side of the equation and doesn't offer enough "carrot" on the other. Several of my guild mates are Preferred players and the more I learn about the things that are taken away from them, the more I wonder how they can justify playing the game. No artifact gear (that's about $12), crazy small credit cap, super limited races, 15 levels unavailable... the list of things you can't do goes on. I understand you can't have "carrot and stick" without some stick, but even as Preferred, the system is downright punitive. It worries me that too many people will struggle so mightily with the free version of the game, they'll be completely turned off from buying anything. I think there's room for improvement, and I think BioWare is actually already taking steps that would make this idea work. Since their goal seems to be the release of smaller, but high-quality content "nuggets" every month, I think it would be nice if BioWare would keep things more or less the way they are now (maybe laying off the "stick" penalties a tad), but then offer a $25-$30 "All Access" package that awards people who buy it with most of the benefits of subscription (max level cap, full gear access, Rise of the Hutt Cartel, Shadow of Revan, no escrow - or at least a couple million credits as a cap, etc.) then sell KotFE chapters for $10-$12. Of course subscribers would automatically get all the new content, and maybe they could get it early (i.e. the latest chapters would only be sold on the Cartel Market 30 - 60 days after they release), maybe the sub rewards could be beefed up in quality and/or quantity, and one or two other considerations could be employed to enhance the "carrot" side of making a subscription attractive. Anyway, I just want to see more people be attracted to SWTOR and would like a payment model that encourages players to convert more than it discourages them from being free/preferred.

♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ If you like Vasarian Brandy, and getting caught in the rain If you're not a dirty jawa, if you have a verbobrain If you like making love at midnight, after Kessel Run escapades We're the guild that you've looked for, join our <Symphony of Blades> ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♬ ♪ 11 years ago, the Lightninghoof server in World of Warcraft was blessed by the birth of the greatest guild ever known (to its members, anyway): Symphony of Blades. This ragtag group of misfits roflcoptered their way through raids, BGs and arenas (oh my!) and in the process formed lasting friendships that carried over from game to game - including Star Wars the Old Republic. Alas, SWTOR at launch was but a shadow of its current self, and so most of our members fell to the withering gaze of Real Life, doomed to wander the Earth handling responsibilities or simply vanished to greener gaming pastures. But good news, everyone! <Symphony of Blades> is back in action, and we've already acquired a great crop of fresh recruits to help conquer the galaxy in style and hilarity. So find out how you can become an <SoB> by visiting our website or messaging Evoss, Vaaro or Archellion, in-game, today.

Is the Elite Watchman Destroyer assault cannon not in game?

I don't know if even Blizzard can, right now. They seem to have strayed far afield from the things that made WoW so good compared to everything else on the market. Blizzard, in my opinion, will very likely end up being a victim of its own success and never be able to recreate it (especially since much of the team that created it in the first place has left for other companies.) As for Star Citizen, I'm very interested in its development. I think it'll either be the greatest game to date or one of the biggest flops ever. The game promises so much, but so have others (e.g. Horizons, Fallen Earth) and it runs extreme risk of death by feature creep.