A game of chess tends to devolve when one of the players decides their bishops get to also move like their queen. Hybrids try to make bishops into queens. The game was designed to have the SWTOR equivalents of pawns, bishops, rooks, knights and queens.

"Millennia" is the plural form of "millennium". I apologize, but it was a burr under my saddle.

Certainly leadership requires cooperation. The student must approach it as a student. You can't effectively lead without someone following. And it is certainly the responsibility of the learner to be up front and honest before it is too late. I felt it needed to be said that those who know have some responsibility for the quality of the experience. The thread was all about exalting 'us' and deriding 'them' without even looking at the fact that no relationship is one-sided.

I've found I have a better game if I simply ignore the XP boost and simply play each planet all the way through. All the XP boost really does then is permit me to skip any missions that I find tedious. If I don't use XP boosts for non-class quests I stay within reasonably appropriate level for the content, by and large.

I think it is good for individuals who are idealistic about 'the Good' to play through Republic class stories since they show where idealism can get complicated. It is a positive to see how grey the good can get. And it is also good to see the downsides of the dark side. Human beings learn best through play, whether a child or adult. I think the stories told by BW's writers are culturally significant.

I don't want to throw water on things but expressing exasperation that too many people have no clue isn't a solution. There's a reasonably old saying: "It takes a village to raise a child." What I mean by that is that rather than expressing your frustration at them and offending inexperienced players (or accelerated experience players) take the time to give them the clues they need. Explain what will happen and tell them what they need to do. If you do, then you will find success more often, experience less frustration, encourage young players, increase positive attitudes and make friends. Leadership provides its own rewards. It is one thing to recognize that some are clueless, but improves your experience as a leader when you accept the responsibility to teach instead of complaining about the hand you were dealt. Leadership widens and improves the pool of players you can PUG with when your regulars are scarce.

I bet you write better English than I can write in your language. You shouldn't have to apologize for what is a true accomplishment, but I understand how thoughtless some of us can be...

You can go back to previous planets by the time this becomes a problem and harvest grey heroics for comms. It takes a bit f time but it works.

More likely the math grows wonky when hybrids build out to 55, and when that trend is projected beyond 55 the designers find a problem with the original design. Projecting the numbers out beyond the original level cap would have been out-of-scope, out in no-man's-land for a project team. Your assertion that if BW didn't want hybrids possible they wouldn't have made it possible in the first place doesn't hold water. From all I have heard 'getting rid of hybrids' wasn't the cause, but a consequence. The cause was a plan to provide more content. Squelching hybrids before was a patchwork measure intended to get the game through until a real solution could be engineered properly. I think disciplines is exactly that engineered solution.

Then again, some of those side quests contain lines that really shouldn't be missed if you enjoy good humor.

Depends on how well they have planned and prepared, really. They could recycle planetary topographies furnished with, for example, ruins and populated with variants of other-side quests. Given the vast quantities of xp needed at top levels I could see such a strategy buying them significant time for the creation of truly new content.

Your wit, so suitably adapting the words of the Bard, is a breath of fresh air. Thank you!

I think 'Disciplines' is an effort to bring Heinlein Tech Stage II into Stage III. Most likely results will be marginal, but at least the skill system in SWTOR is evolving, so it will likely evolve again somewhere down the road assuming our players haven't turned to fossils in the old system and can no longer adapt to a changing environment.

People's rights and privileges may not be relevant to the aesthetic and cultural issues involved.

Doesn't that depend on what you value? What is it that you want to get out of the game? To (hopefully) illustrate my point, if a player plays SWTOR to compete with other players then that player will value what makes him competitive, what makes his toon a contender. It is all about the leaderboard. But if a player plays SWTOR because he holds down a high-stress job and wants to play to relax, to enjoy and participate in a good tale of an evening after work (what the unemployed call a 'casual') then the player values something else besides the leaderboard. So what the XP-Boost will be 'worth' for each of these examples is radically different.

That depends on what they are playing for. It's really elementary. You describe 'casuals' as mistaken, which carries an implication that what you value and why you play is the correct way to play the game when all that is really happening is that they are playing differently from you. Capiche? For me your style of play is work, something I get paid to do, not something I pay to do.

I'm sure that in the shadow of your overwhelming brilliance I must seem retarded, but to what purpose do you point out my failings publically? Just as there are builds that work and builds that do not, the 'optimal' builds are as required as gear recipes. They are well known: look at Dulfy's for evidence. Those are cookie cutter builds just as much as what you are screaming about like a no-name extra in the Godzilla movie.

To the best of my knowledge we don't know that current pure builds exactly translate, and it seems unlikely to me that they would. I suspect that the developers have tracked our successful builds and seen what we want to do, and this revamp will most likely result in their interpretation of what we have tried to achieve. If you and me were in their positions attempting to reconcile what our players do with what we can build a future with, I doubt we would simply go with current pure builds. Looking at the build they showed in the reveal, their interpretation looked different from a pure build in the current trees, and it looked pretty strong. I don't think we are brighter than they: I doubt they are cutting corners. They saw what we were doing but they needed to limit the potentials to simplify future design. Most likely nobody will get everything they can dream of, but neither do I expect the result you fear.

If there is less variance in the builds PvP will more heavily emphasize player skill. That should play into your hand, right? If everyone is max gear then all that is left to make a difference between winning and losing is who you are, your talent, your skill, and not what you have and not someone's trick template of a build (which is definitively cookie cutter already).

Leave fossilization to the dinosaurs. When the environment changes we adapt.

Had you never til now figured out why the cat likes the underwear drawer?

And yet, despite your expectation to never understand those people, you somehow deem yourself insightful enough to assert that they don't want to actually play. I suspect 'they' want to play, but their play and your play may look seriously different.

Hm. I disagree, but here is how I disagree. You're right we won't see anything new until something new is really needed. Most people usually say, and rightly, that it is common sense to avoid 'fixing' what ain't broke. Yet were that invariably the case we would still be hunting with pointy stone -tipped sticks. Remember Robert Heinlein? Technology goes through three stages: Something new demands a solution, so somebody innovates and invents a technology The new technology is great but it is cumbersome or unwieldy, inefficient, so to overcome those failings it grows increasingly complex and difficult Finally the new technology is refined, eventually simplified, and made elegant. Then everything is the 'don't fix what ain't broke' world... until something new requires invention. We will see development and evolution when it is absolutely necessary, and not before. Before we see anything new in MMOs, what is old and cumbersome with MMOs will get better.

The new gamers come from a different culture than we did. I talked with my son about it and he agreed, although he did have some odd takes on what the 'Love' generation was actually like. But talk to anyone who employs both young people and older people and they'll tell you about some serious differences between generations, their respective attitudes, the different ways they approach personal relationships... everything. So I don't think I can agree with the OP. Maybe his experience is with different groups of people, but No. The younger set of players is different from the older set.

The inaccuracy is in your reading, friend. I said you can run a planet, not purely class stories. It takes hours to do all the missions. The nice thing about the 12X xp buff is that you don't have to do every last mission. If you just don't feel like spending an hour seeking a rakghoul infection you can skip it. The rest of the planet runs as normal. Nice xp buff, certainly form class missions, but then you're on to the next planet trying to scrounge up new armor, mods, and enhancements just like old times. Were I going to make a recommendation to the devs about it I'd say tone down the 12X to maybe 8X and make it permanent for subs.