So I finally got to see The Force Awakens tonight. (GREAT Movie) But what really depressed me a little bit was the fact that there were NO advertisements for The Old Republic prior to the movie. I saw Fallout 4 ad 3 times. Star Wars Battlefront once. Some phone app Star Wars game once. Two other games once each. Heck, they even had the ad for the World of Warcraft Movie. But NOT a single one for The Old Republic. This was there BIG chance. Throw out the Outlander Trailer. Throw out the Choose your Destiny Trailer. Throw out ANY of the trailers that this game ever produced in front of that movie. Get your damn name OUT there. But NO, your marketing or budgets (Probably budgets because of idiocy at EA) would NOT allow you to do this WHY?!?!? People were PUMPED. People wanted to LIVE this adventure. The reaction to Star Wars Battlefront advertisement was cheering and LOTS of talking over the next ad in line. All you had to do was put your damn ad there, and you FAILED. WHY?!?!?!

There will be two endings to this Story Arc. The first will happen if you use Valks power even one time. The game will check ALL of your prior Light/Dark side choices back to your starter planet. If you have made more Dark Side choices than Light Side choices you will get a 30 minute movie of Valk taking over your body and vaporizing the universe with it. That Character is then DELETED from your account. If you either did NOT ever use Valks powers (And some of the later choices will mean the life or death of your Love Interest if you have one), OR if you did use his powers but have more Light Side Choices than Dark Side choices for your Character, then you force Valk from your body and discover that he is in fact the Great Serpent thingy buried on the Eternal Empire capital. You then get a New Raid to go and beat him into unconsciousness again each week for phat lewtz... If you beat him 4 weeks straight, he is placed back in his coma of a couple of thousand years and you can wait for the next expansion to come out. If you do NOT beat him each week for 4 weeks straight, you get a modified version of the 30 minute movie from above of the galaxy ending, and again, that character is DELETED. Oh and for those that think they can dodge this by NOT doing KotFE, when the last chapter is released, BioWare will start a hidden clock ticking. You will have 3 months (Of real time, subscribed or not) to get a character through the end of KotFE including the 4 weekly raids, or that character will be DELETED (Start at 60 token characters will have 2 months to do it). There NOW choices have consequences...

I lost EVERYTHING I did tonight from the time I logged on, about 7:20ish PST till now. On EVERY character I played. All of the auctions bought and sold, all of the tradeskill patterns learned, all of the inventory management. Everything is gone. Considering I had bought and sold about 2 million worth of items tonight, that really hurts... BioWare, fix your ****...

I lost EVERYTHING I did tonight from the time I logged on, about 7:20ish PST till now. On EVERY character I played. All of the auctions bought and sold, all of the tradeskill patterns learned, all of the inventory management. Everything is gone. Considering I had bought and sold about 2 million worth of items tonight, that really hurts... BioWare, fix your ****...

Actually, I do believe they were planning on making Companions Influence Legacy wide, but it got cut do to time lines. I say this because my Jedi Sage was my first through KotFE, and when I recruited 2V-R8 I was VERY nice to him and got the tag on him that stated that he was overjoyed at having found a master that wouldn't threaten him anymore. I next ran my Sith Warrior through, and when I got 2V-R8, I threatened him. Now BOTH may Jedi AND my Sith show that 2V-R8 had his hopes smashed at ever finding a nice master... That leads me to believe that some coding, that either is not, or will not be entirely implemented, is still affecting the Companions in the game.

Oh and one more thing, there are MULTIPLE posts by WOTs Community Development Team per day on their Forums, clarifying situations, announcing new information, excetra. AND usually once per day a Forum post by one of the Lead Developers that directly answers players questions (Granted, that is ONLY on the Russian Forums, but the questions and answers are translated to English)

WoT has around 35+ maps in its current rotation for Tier 6+ Tanks. WoT has 25+ Tank LINES (Equivalent to Character Classes here) that goto Tier 10. WoT has given away AT LEAST 26 Tanks to ANYONE who wants to earn them this year (Every 2 Weeks is a Mission to complete 25,000 Experience 10 times on a particular Tank Line, if you do so, you get a Free Tank, which has gone as high as Tier 6 (Equivalent to $25.00 tank), plus multiple additional missions for FREE Tanks (Including 2 missions for Tier 8 Tanks ($50.00 cost tanks)) and has given away 3 free Tier 2-4 tanks just for logging in. In addition to the above, they run 25 to 50% discounts on different items almost EVERY Week. In addition to this they offer bonus to experience each and every day, with larger multipliers on the weekends. The true difference is that I feel World of Tanks REWARDS me for subscribing, while Star Wars: The Old Republic PUNISHES me for NOT subscribing. This means, when my 14 year old nephew asked for a game to play, I recommended WoT and NOT SW:TOR. All of this even though I ENJOY playing SW:TOR MUCH MORE than WOT. Oh and World of Tanks puts new content into the game every month to month and a half... AND they first place that content on a Public Test Server to find and remove bugs, and get player feedback on it, BEFORE they force it onto the player base...

Lets see, in the last 25 years I have bought like 15ish games (NOT counting MMOs) Of those, like only 8 have been bought on or near release for full price. Meanwhile I have purchased and played, Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, World of WarCraft (Collectors Editions through Wrath of the Lich King), Dungeons and Dragons Online, EverQuest 2, and maybe one or two other MMOs that I have forgotten. But the MMO that I have, by FAR, spent the most money on was World of Tanks. A game where I don't even like the primary focus of (PvP). A game that offers EVERYTHING the same whether you have spent thousands of dollars on it (Like I did) or not a dime (Like a friend of mine did). A game created on a shoe string budget, by a third rate developer, that has the BEST monetization of its player base in the Free to Play realm. A game that has MULTIPLES of the amount of players and EARNINGS of this game, that was created by a Triple A Company and backed by a Triple A Publisher. So gee, maybe when looking at how to monetize a Free to Play game, this company can take a look at the BEST in the Segment to learn how to do it better? Because right now they don't seem to be doing it to well.

You are right, as a Free to Play you get screwed in this game, as opposed to other games out there. Games that are making MORE Money and have MORE players than this one, that were NOT developed by Triple A Studios...

No, the Cliff Notes are that Free to Play inhibits people from recommending this game to others, and that Level Synch currently offers nothing positive to max level players, and how to change these things based on a game that is doing better player and money wise that Star Wars: The Old Republic is.

This post is about the actual mechanics changes that came with 4.0 and NOT the story. BioWare always does great story, and I would not even think of disputing their specialty there. The first thing you need to realize is that I LOATHE PvP. I do NOT like fighting other players, at all. Yet, I went from SW:TOR to World of Tanks in 2012 and stayed with WoT for about 2 years. WoT is a game that ONLY has PvP content. WoT, like SW:TOR is a Free to Play game that also has a subscription portion that gives you rewards. I liked World of Tanks, I LOVED Star Wars. Yet, I have only given SW:TOR like $400.00 in all the time I have been here, meanwhile I gave WoT several thousand dollars. But World of Tanks has the HIGHEST Monetization Per User in the WORLD. To put this in perspective, World of Tanks gets about $6.00 per user per year. League of Legends is only like $1.10. I have heard that SW:TOR made about $100 Million last year, World of Tanks made over $700 Million. The largest group of WoTs players is located in Russia, with an average annual Income of about $10,000.00, and yet, they still make multiples of the annual income of a game with its largest player base located in the US with an average annual income of $39,000.00 (SW:TOR). Why? Why would I spend more money on a game I only like as opposed to a game I loved? The answer to this is the differences in the Free to Play portion of the games. In SW:TOR, as a FTP player, you are PUNISHED. You have less action bars to put abilities on, you cant get some rewards, you cant go some places, you cant do some things. Meanwhile, in World of Tanks, there is NOTHING that a Free player can NOT do that the biggest whale ever can. NOTHING is locked away from the free to play player. ALL of the events are doable by anyone. All of the Raids are doable by anyone (Clan Wars in WoT). The ONLY thing being subscribed to World of Tanks gives you is 50% more Experience and 50% more credits. Both games have a store that allows players to buy mostly cosmetic items (Granted WoT Tanks can be a bit pay to win with reduced level of opponents seen; however, SW:TOR is the same way in that FTP players can NOT gain or equip Artifact items). WoT runs weekly and monthly missions that give away, or reduce the price on almost everything in game, including the MOST sought after tanks in the game, to anyone who plays the game, FTP or no. SW:TOR rarely gives away anything as significant, and then only to those that are subscribed. Star Wars was developed by a Triple A developer with a $300 million dollar budget, World of Tanks was developed by a mostly independent developer who prior to creating the game had mostly created electronic board games, yet WoT has more players, and a bigger income than SW:TOR. The difference is in the Free to Play and monetization models and the time it takes for a person to "level up". Yes, World of Tanks has levels, in that you gain experience to unlock new modules for your tanks and eventually, new, more powerful tanks. World of Tanks also has different tank "Lines" (A LOT like the different classes in SW:TOR), in that leveling up one tank line usually does NOT impact another tank line in any way. The difference is the time it takes to get to "max level" in the two games. In SW:TOR, it takes about 2 weeks (Or less) to gain max level on a character doing normal playing methods. For World of Tanks, it usually takes a couple of months, of normal play, to get "max level" in a tank line. The different leveling speeds are the key here. People spend money in World of Tanks on what I feel are bonuses (Increased Experience and Money). People spend money in Star Wars: The Old Republic to offset Penalties. One way feels good, the other way feels less bad... How Patch 4.0 could have changed Star Wars With Level Synch and Patch 4.0, Star Wars introduced large, unlimited amounts of experience into a game that only needs a very small finite amount of experience to "finish" it. Once a player (Like myself) has hit level 65 on the 8 different classes, and has legacy level 50, this unlimited experience (In the form of Level Synch) is a NEGATIVE to them as compared to Patch 3.X. The problem is that Patch 4.0 did NOT introduce anything to absorb all of this new experience to make it meaningful. So once a player has reached the max experience in game, its all wasted. What should have been introduced in 4.0 is Legacy Advancement Points (LAP). These are points that a player receives when they are playing on a max level character after Legacy Level 50 has been obtained. Each LAP takes 1,000,000 (1 Million) experience to earn. These points could then have been spent on Legacy Abilities that affect ALL Characters in that players legacy. Some Examples of Legacy Abilities would be an addition amount of Critical Hit Chance from 1% to 5%. Each point of the bonus would cost 5 LAPs. Other Examples would be unlocking the per Character Legacy Skills for the entire legacy at a cost in LAPs equal to the cost in CC. Many more examples can be obtained by looking at the EverQuest Alternative Advancement System. But the goal would have been to introduce, at a minimum 2,500 Legacy Advancement Points worth of buyable things. This is 2.5 BILLION experience to max them all. Now, here is where the Monetization comes in. Change the Free to Play Model of this game so that FTP Players get the EXACT same benefits as subscribers, EXCEPT for Experience and Money (Preferred Status would disappear totally as there would be nothing to distinguish it). Next, redesign leveling so that a Free to Play player would have to do EVERYTHING to stay equal level to the planets they were playing on. (Everything being ALL Class, Planet, Exploratory, Flash Points, PvP Matches, Galactic Star Fighter, and Rails PvE Space Missions.) And make it so that FTP Players do NOT get level synch and make it so that missions and monsters go grey and offer the basic 6 experience once they are 6 levels above the mission or monster. (NOTE: This would NOT apply to PvP or GSF Match mission rewards, or Tactical/Heroic Flashpoints (BUT NOT Solo Flashpoints), or Raids, FTP Players would still get full experience for these activities even at max level (As it would be almost the ONLY way the could get experience at max level). Meanwhile Subscribers would have the OPTION of turning ON Level Synch, which acts just as it does now. And would allow them to gain experience where ever they went. And it would allow Subscribers to stay on level for their Class Quests just by doing the Story and Main Planetary Missions just as now). Doing the above puts an extremely distant goal line in the game for experience, so that VERY few players would ever reach it (Having every Legacy Advancement Ability), while in the mean time giving them MUCH shorter goals that they can reach (Individual Legacy Advancement Abilities). It takes away ALL of the negatives that are associated with being a Free to Play player in this game (One thing I will NOT do is recommend this game to ANYONE who can NOT afford to pay the subscription fee, meanwhile I happily recommend World of Tanks to anyone who is interested in Tanks or PvP combat, and this is solely due to all of the negatives associated to the Free to Play form of this game). And institutes ONLY positives for being a Subscriber (Increased Experience Gains that are actually useful). Now, how to monetize this even more. Allow 1, 3, 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 180, and 360 day subscriptions to be purchased, and unlocked in game, via the Cartel Market. Set the price of the 30 day Cartel Market subscription to be the amount of coins that $15.00 would get you minus 500, and allow them to be listed on the GTN. This will allow players to spend In Game Credits to buy Subscription time that someone else has actually paid for. Now, because we are allowing Subscribers to gain increased credits, we need a REAL credit drain in the system. The way to do this is to allow the 1 and 3 day (ONLY) Subscriptions to be purchased with In Game Credits. Now, assuming that the 1 day subscription usually runs 250 Cartel Coins, and the 3 day would run 700 Cartel Coins, we need a conversion rate. I would suggest 5000 credits to 1 Cartel Coin. So that the 1 Day Subscription would run 1,250,000 Credits (1.25 Million Credits) or the 3 day for 3,500,000 Credits (3.5 Million Credits). This does three things, it creates a real credit sink in the economy that can actually destroy large chunks of credits, it sets a floor on the amount that 1 credit is actually worth, and it allows those players that have more money than time a way to transform money into credits with OUT having to visit a 3rd party site. Doing the above would have made this game recommendable to anyone. Easy to enter. Have long term goals. And allow BioWare/EA to monetize it with a potential higher rate of return. It would have made Level Synch a BONUS to players, and not the penalty that it currently can be (For some). In short it would turn the current Negatives of the game into Positives. And remember, the negatives are so severe that I didn't play this game (That I loved) for a couple of years, and instead played a game that has PvP (Which I LOATHE), and gave that other game many multiples of the money I have ever given this game...

Ahh darn. That will learn me for posting up theories based ONLY on in game knowledge. Then why in the heck is he talking to her. The game hasn't established enough connection there for this to happen... Unless its more stuff that is in the books, but not in the game?

Ok, who else thinks that Theron is the Love Child of Satele Shan and... Seeing as how people like the person named above only appear to those they have a connection with, and the Shadows of Revan story didn't really build that much of a connection between these two, it just jumped out at me that this could be a possibility.

This is TERRIBLE advice. Most of the Blue items made by ANY of the Crafting Skills require 6 or 8 Exotic Isotope Stabilizers. This is 150 to 200 Glowing Crystals. For this many glowing crystals, you can buy ANY 216 moddable gear piece from the vender instead. (Which is equivalent to the Upgraded piece of gear you would have the SCHEMATIC for after creating and re-engineering the blue item. NOT only that, but the resulting Purple crafted item takes another 8 MORE Exotic Isotope Stabilizers to create in ADDITION to the weekly Conquest reward item. So, assuming you actually followed this advice, you have spent 350 to 400 glowing crystals and done your Conquest Weekly to receive 1 static stats item of the 216 level, when, instead, you could have had TWO (2) 216 items from buying them directly with Crystals instead... Whoever is in charge of the tradeskill change has their head so far up their bum that they can see the backside of their teeth... Utterly moronic ********...

I am a hard core tradeskiller. One of my primary activities in MMOs has always been to participate in the building of items via tradeskills. From UO where I was a Woodcutter/Fletcher to EQ where I started as a Jewelry Crafter and eventually went into all the Trades via AA, to EQ2 to WoW. Tradeskills have always been one of my foci in games. Star Wars: The Old Republic, HAD one of the best tradeskill systems I had ever used. VERY easy to create basic items, but EXTREMELY deep if you got into it. (Each Green item (NOT Mod) had an additional 18 patterns associated to it that could be reverse engineered). When the game first launched, I fell in love with this tradeskill system. I loved the system so much, that my first 8 characters were: Main, Jedi Consular for Cybertech, Trooper for Armortech, Smuggler for Armstech, 2 Jedi Warriors for Biochem and Synthweaving, and another Consular for Artificing. I also had yet a third Jedi Warrior that was my Slicer. I chose my classes to play based on the Companion Benefits brought to Tradeskills. So easy to make something, yet, after this being my primary focus for the ~12 months I have actually played in game, I had MAYBE 20% of the possible recipes learned. But every time I logged into a character, I would queue up 5 of whatever the next item on my list to click destroy on for a chance to learn a new pattern. My other companions would be sent out for either Underworld or Treasure Hunting materials (Or Diplomacy or Investigation), and other raw materials. In a system with hundreds or thousands of base recipes, the Re-Engineering brought the true total number of patterns to tens of thousands. My longest term goal was to research ALL of those recipes. Then Patch 4.0 hit and utterly destroyed this easy yet incredibly deep system. No longer is Cybertech content to just have Salvaging and Underworld Trading, now I MUST have Slicing as well for both Mods and Enhancements. Now I can NO Longer create blue items for my characters unless I decide to go run hard mode dungeons, or do Conquest, that I have NO clue how to do, or even how to find out what to do, and I have NO interest in participating in Guild v Guild competition when it is just me in my 1 person guild (ALL my other friends have left the game). What is even worse, is that all of these blue items (Ear Piece for Cybertech etc) take SIX (6) of these hard mode dungeon or conquest drops EACH. In addition, my earrings, which used to take 2 metal and 2 compounds and 2 fluxes now takes 24 metal and 24 compounds and 24 fluxes. In addition to 8 Underworld Trading blue components. This is the same amount of materials that BREATPLATES takes, and MORE than the 100 shot MISSILE MAGAZINE for my SHIP costs... And for a good Re-Engineering result, I make them in batches of 5. So that is 30 Exotic Element Equalizers, 120 Metals, 120 Compounds, 120 Fluxes, and 40 Underworld metals for 5 chances at a new recipe... This is versus 10 metals, 10 compounds, 10 fluxes, and 10 Underworld metals for 5 chances pre-patch. In addition to this, I can NO longer just make the item once I have the metals, compounds and fluxes, I now must make a sub item before I can even begin on the real one. And this was a system that is supposed to be FASTER? EVERY ONE OF MY RECIPES HAD THEIR MATERIAL COST AT LEAST DOUBLED. That means, at a MINIMUM, I have twice the collection time. But it gets even better, EACH of those sub components has to be created individually, and takes 4 minutes and 3 seconds a pop (At 10,000 influence), and I will need 60 of these sub components to make my 5 items for my chances at Re-Engineering for new recipes. So Pre-Patch I would run 1 rich metals and compounds mission, 1 moderate flux mission, and 1 rich Underworld Metals mission at roughly 35 minutes each mission to obtain enough materials to make 5 ear pieces. Each Ear Piece would take about 35 minutes to create (Blue Quality) Total time spent = 5 hours and 15 minutes of which ONLY the Ear Pieces had to be ran Serial (For the additional 5% crit chance from the Ship Droid) ALL the rest could be ran in parallel. So in game time was only 2 hours and 55 minutes. Now rich missions NO longer provide exactly 10 components per run, I have seen 8, 9, or 10 returned per mission (Rank 8 Missions). So assuming an average of 9 pieces for each Rich Mission, I will need to run 14 Rich Metals, 14 Rich Components, 14 Moderate Fluxes, 5 Rich Underworld Trading Metals Missions and who knows how many Conquests or Hard Mode Flashpoints for the 30 Exotic Element Equalizers. But wait, these missions had their completion times greatly reduced... they are now 20 minutes to run instead of 35... (At 10,000 Influence). This means I only need to run missions for 15 HOURS and 40 Minutes to get the raw materials, again, NOT counting the Exotic Element Equalizers. But then the FUN begins, I need to take those raw materials and make 60 sub components from them, at 4 minutes a pop for another 4 HOURS of just making sub-components. Then I get to spend 17 minutes making each ear piece for another 1 hour and 25 minutes. So this new system, instead of spending 5 hours and 15 minutes to have 5 attempts at a re-engineered ear piece, I can now spend 21 HOURS and 5 minutes PLUS the time it takes to obtain the Exotic Element Equalizers for that same 5 chances to Re-Engineer for new Recipes. Hey McFly, QUADRUPLING my creation time is NOT Faster. 5 Hours is MUCH less time than 21 HOURS. And for all you people who having been buying Tradeskill items from the GTN, please do NOT be shocked when the prices of blue items triple or so, the component cost has gone up by AT LEAST that much. But that is NOT the ONLY fun part. For my Mods and Enhancements I now need the blue and purple quality SLICING components to make the Purple versions of these items. (ALL of the orange gear parts now need SLICING Components to create them, Armors, Mods, Enhancements, Barrels, Hilts, Crystals, and Augments). But for some reason MOST of my Cybertech recipes NO Longer take the Purple Underworld Trading Metal to make. (All of you GTN Players can dump your Noobium (Grade 8 Underworld Metal) and stock up on Grade 8 Purple Slicing Components to make a KILLING.) So now my self contained Cybertech (For the last 4 years) needs a 4th Tradeskill to make their BASIC recipes, but we didn't get a 4th tradeskill slot... So now I must have another character feed blue and purple slicing components to 5 other tradeskills that now need them. (Cybertech Mods and Enhancements, Armormech Armoring and Augments, Armstech Barrels and Augments, Synthweaving Armoring and Augments, and Artificing Crystals and Hilts, I am NOT sure right now if Biotech will need them as well, but I would bet on it). So slicing will become even MORE profitable than it currently is, I guess 100k for missions and free money lying around planets was NOT enough, now its going to get probably 100k per purple material as well... Do me a favor, FIRE the sadistic ******e who created this new system, it SUCKS. There is NOTHING FUN about it. There is NOTHING relaxing about it. There is NOTHING exciting about it. It just looks like work. Work to get the components, work to create sub recipes, work to create the final product. Big deal, you upped the chance for Re-Engineering, who cares, its too much trouble to make the BASIC item, let alone the re-engineered one.