A few 16 man HM tips: We found keeping 3 ranged on the ground off the tanks kept the domes from spawning on the tanks but if your ranged are prone to dying it's probably safer to go with 4. Another tip which might help - we found that most people in our raid saw the blue domes consistently if they reduced the camera distance from their character for this encounter. Your mileage may vary.

The rabid casuals are out in force. Elitists beware!

The combat log is no better than any of the other current means we have available to us for time validation. It is not difficult to manipulate at all given that all in game time based information is based off your local machine time and not some sort of internal server clock. If this is the case with the combat log (and I believe it is, I could be wrong though), all it would take would be to change the time on your computer before a raid to make your kills appear to have taken place earlier than they actually occurred. This requires maybe 4 or 5 mouse clicks to do, not a great deal of effort. In the event that the combat log is timestamped based on an internal server clock it is still very easy to manipulate a text file. The loopholes that a handful of guilds have been abusing are being worked upon as Timelord has already indicated. More details on these changes will be available once they implemented.

I'd actually like to add one point to my original list and that is character transfers to the public test server. The test server as a testing environment is close to meaningless in it's current state because no one can really test anything. Players will always be the best testers, particularly in volume. Please add this feature before 1.2 is pushed to the PTS so we can ensure this patch is delivered as smoothly as possible.

I do have to admit the puzzle bosses were pretty fun (Ancient Pylons & G4-B3 Heavy Fabricator). Something a little different from the norm. These fights also do have slightly different mechanics on the higher difficulty modes which is one of the things we're really pushing for. I think the issue on these puzzle fights is more in tuning than anything else - the new mechanics don't really make the fight much harder if at all but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

This I don't really agree with. Essentially your post seems to be grounded in your experience in Rift high end raiding and assumes that we are asking for a similar raiding environment to be established in SW:TOR but this is simply not the case. The raiding system is fundamentally different and it boils down to the thing we have been talking about quite extensively in this thread - SW:TOR has 3 difficulty modes to work with. Rift simply did not have this feature in any form. We are not asking that end game content be locked to an elite few. My post and several others have basically indicated that the normal modes of said content are very well tuned and offer just about every play the chance to experience the content. I even state in my post that hard mode also should be a point of aspiration for even the casual raider and something that can be accomplished by the casual raider with time and effort. Nightmare mode however should represent a significantly higher challenge for the people that want that challenge. This takes absolutely nothing away from the casual player's capacity to tackle end game content. All this does is use a system that is already in place to try and satisfy two different audiences with divergent interests. I would really like for someone using this argument to explain how making the higher difficulty modes more difficult detracts from their ability to enjoy end game content - I simply don't see it. Using the existing capacity to differentiate difficulty in end game content actually opens up end game content to a broader audience in total than simply saying raid content should be designed either for the casual or for the hardcore raider. To me this feels like an especially poor strategy if this is truly what they are aiming to do. For one thing the legacy system is not even active at present so the incentive is currently non-existent. Even when the legacy system is implemented the incentive of playing through what are the same quests, apart from the storyline, just to unlock a few new races or other legacy vanity items will not keep players interested. I am not even talking about hardcore raiders with this - I simply don't see how such a weak incentive and repetitive content can keep long term subscriptions. Worse still is the fact that the leveling process is for the most part solo oriented content. If rolling alts is the content that is intended to keep players active and even if this were to actually work - which I firmly believe it would not - it would render the strong multi-player emphasis of the end game obsolete. This would be a major design problem in an MMO given that such games are inherently geared toward groups of players rather than individuals.

I was actually going to post something similar to this. It simply isn't productive for this dissolve into name calling where people call raiders basement dwellers who need to get a job and on the flip side casual players being referred to as people who want to be rewarded without putting in any effort. If anything this thread shows that these stereotypes are far too simplistic and almost meaningless as labels. There has been support from a broad spectrum of players, casual, hardcore and even those in-between, for the suggested changes. Opposition and criticism of the suggested changes has mostly come from more casual players but I have absolutely no doubt that there are raiders out there would not agree with the changes that I and others have proposed. That these players have not posted in disagreement in this thread does not mean that they do not exist. I would urge people coming from both sides of this argument to really think about what you are saying and to make compelling arguments for your case rather than resort to childish name calling. Resorting to insults is essentially an indicator that your argument has no substance or foundation. You are doing a disservice to the view you are trying to promote by resorting to this kind of behaviour.

I think the mostly positive responses this thread and several other similar threads have gotten indicate that they would not be re-tuning things for the sake of any singular "random person". The reason I am not using hard numbers is because admittedly I do not have them. I have never pretended to have them. This is in contrast to your own approach where you use hard numbers and they are (yes I am going to use a hard number here) 100% made up. Even assuming I did play as much you suggest this means that you are contrasting me with the casual player that plays substantially less. If this is the case why do you even care about the tuning of content you will never spend enough time to reach in any event? At this point I really think you are just trolling. If you want to post some more pseudo statistical gibberish be my guest. I've said my piece and clearly the number of others who feel much the same way are far from insignificant in their number. You only have to look at the response this thread and other similar threads have received to fathom that.

A few points: 1) The content is already made - no one is asking for content to be made for the hardcore crowd only. We are simply asking for Bioware to make use of the 3 difficulty settings and tune them such that the hard and nightmare modes represent a challenge. This does not lock anyone out of anything. Everyone still gets to see the end game content at varying levels of difficulty. 2) Your examples are massively exaggerated. If you can show me any statistic that says there are 100 casual players that actually raid for every 1 hardcore raider I'll retract that but I think the chances of that happening are abysmally small. 3) If the only thing for us to do is simply "roll an alt" I can't see this game retaining many long term subscribers. A large number of people simply have absolutely no interest in doing this and, even for those that do, if the only re-playability in the game lies in rolling alts the majority of the game's subscribers will move on to other things within 2-3 months. SW:TOR promised a decent end game and has the system in place to deliver such. Large numbers of people, myself included, bought the game based upon this. If the game's developers have no intention of delivering this kind of content I'm okay with that. I will feel that I was mislead but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it and will simply move onto another game that doesn't mislead its customers. Patch 1.2 will be the real test for SW:TOR. I'm eager to see what happens because I really think it will be a make or break point for this game.

Except that it hasn't taken weeks it has been in the game since release and has not even been acknowledged. This means they have had two whole months to fix this and have not even admitted the bug exists. If you think that is reasonable you have exceptionally low standards I must say.

Nightmare definitely feels pretty unrewarding in it's current state. Here's hoping they plan out the gear drops much better in the next raid tier.

It's really good to see some different perspectives here, both casual and hardcore, clamoring for harder content. I'm not saying every hardcore player and every casual player wants harder content but it does show that there are a broad range of players who very much want this.

You're carrying things to extremes. No one is asking for that kind of time-sink like a lot of EQ raids were. With that said we are looking to be challenged in these games and this is totally reasonable given that they have the difficulty system in place to accommodate this. Nor am I or many of the others in this thread asking for this game to focus upon hardcore raiders - at least not more so than the casual player. On a separate note thanks to others for a lot of the recent input. It makes me glad to see that I am far from the only person feeling this way about the current state of SW:TOR raiding.

I don't know, I really think this is more down to raid design than an inherent difference between 16 man and 8 man content. Current raid design certainly forces you to bring in more dps than 8 man. The raid makeup remains proportionately very similar for most fights though. I think though that if duel spec were added to the game the developers would have more freedom to develop fights that use 4 or even more tanks or a higher than usual number of healers. The difference is fairly negligible in any case. In the current tier of content the highest difficulty requires 1 tank for most 8 man content and 2 tanks for most 16 man content. I don't think either comes particularly close to the 1-2-1 balance you are looking for at least in terms of tank numbers.

Primarily the higher challenge although I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a bit of both. The loot though is essentially just some sort of indicator that says to the game's community that this person has done this particular piece of content. I do agree that vanity items could serve just as well to provide that indicator and I would be totally okay with this. I don't have a problem with that kind of game at all. It just isn't one that I want to play and it isn't how SW:TOR has been marketed. The very fact that the game design contains 3 levels of difficulty directly implies that there is meant to be differing grades of raid difficulty in SW:TOR. The naming of these difficulty levels in particular further implies that the game's designers want their raid content to appeal to both the casual raider and the hardcore raider. At the moment it simply does not succeed with the latter. I'm not offended - it's your opinion and you're certainly right that the hardcore raiding audience is much more niche than it used to be. I do have to say that your Farmville analogy is pretty poor though and does very little to reinforce your point. Let's compare it with a like analogy - NFL draws in a much larger audience than the NHL so hockey fans should just resign themselves to the fact that their sport of interest is a thing of the past. I don't agree with this sentiment at all. Just because one product caters to a larger audience does not mean that all smaller audiences are rendered obsolete. There is still a profit to be made in a game that caters to hardcore raiders even if a more casual game has broader appeal. The fact that SW:TOR has the framework with its 3 difficulty modes to cater to both audiences means that, with proper implementation, there is no reason that it cannot try satisfy both sets of customers.