I just think this whole concept is flawed. It's a season pass event like most online games are doing nowadays. Which is fine, imo. The problem is that unlike other games, this is an MMO with vastly different avenues for players to find their enjoyment in. So while other games can focus on their core gameplay, an MMO has no "core" gameplay. So when other games have dailies and weeklies, they will always revolve around how the players are already playing. But for an MMO with tons of different things for players to do, having dailies and weeklies that pool randomly from different areas of the game, you're going to simply end up disappointing the majority of players because for every 1 daily that focuses on one aspect of the game, there are X number of other parts of the game that a portion of players will prefer playing instead (where X is greater than 1). So basically, this whole thing is literally a convoluted way to irritate your player base.

I can't comprehend the thought that was put into crafting in 6.0. Completely throwaway stuff requires buckets of end-game mats that take hours to farm... and in the process of farming, the game literally drops gear that is better than the stuff you were going to craft. There is no point in putting the effort into crafting now except for a handful of certain things, like stims, augments and augment kits. Everything else like mods, gear or weapons is completely pointless to bother with. It seems like it was literally designed to discourage people from crafting. Why should I run 2 operations and a handful of flashpoints for mats, when I can just get the BiS stuff from that same content? I always believed that crafting should be the only way to get the game's best gear. The mats for that gear would drop from end game content and would make there way to crafters so they can craft the gear for use. That makes much more sense than the two pronged system we have now (gear drops vs crafted gear). Because that way all aspects of the game are tied together. They could even add in a more robust crafting mechanic that allows for better results based off of the materials used.

Scaling tech is a bad idea in more ways than one. First and foremost, it eliminates the point of actually gearing up. If you're going to implement scaling tech, then you're basically trying to fundamentally change a core baseline of the game. You might as well remove all leveling mechanics entirely and make all gear cosmetic while making people's "skill" be based solely on how they set up their set bonuses, utilities and tacticals/amps. Secondly, how do you balance the loot when a group is made up of players of various levels? If you run EV HM with 7 level 75 players and 1 level 50, how do you balance the loot if a level 75 wins a piece vs if the level 50 wins? Now, I fully understand WHY you want to have scaling tech. It keeps old content relevant longer so you don't have to rush new content out. But it just does not work with the game's gearing and leveling systems. I suggest that instead of scaling player effectiveness, you scale the loot. 1. If you are BELOW or AT level, you get the loot relevant to the target level. 2. If you are ABOVE level, you get commendations/materials as loot. The amount you get would scale depending on how much above the target level you are and would bottom out at about a 10 level difference. In addition to the above, you SHOULD include the OPTION to scale content to the group if the group wants to attempt the content for the challenge (or for a weekly mission or whatever). But doing so should basically eliminate any loot drops, or normalize them as comms/mats.

My first reaction to set bonuses going back to shells was kind of hesitant... but then I thought about it and I honestly don't see a problem with it. If you're sending your gear to be used by more than one character, then it makes no difference if the bonus is on the armoring or the shell since you're equipping both anyway. Attaching the bonus to the shell strips the bonus of item rating and stat allocation. Meaning you could technically use a set bonus that is 100 item ratings obsolete without having to worry about it impacting your stats. Keeping the bonuses on the armorings means that old set bonuses become obsolete as new tiers of gear are introduced. The outfit designer overwrites the appearance of all gear. So even if you don't like the way the shell looks, your outfit overlay will be covering it up anyway. The only better solution I'd have is to actually make a new type of item modification that specifically houses set bonuses and a new item slot inside of gear that is specific to those new mods.

A couple things, I don't think that the F2P wallet should be increased. I think the Subscriber wallet should be nuked. There are a few ways to go about doing this: Option 1: Make some sort of in game event that completely trashes the credit value and inflates it to idiotic levels. Like, make the credit almost completely worthless (vendor sells level 5 medpack for 5,000,000 credits). Then introduce a new earnable currency (exactly the same as the credit) but have it's value like the original credit value. Basically, make mobs barely drop it, make mission rewards stingy, make vendor give pennies when selling them items, etc etc. You can also have a credit to new currency vendor that would convert at a rate of like 100 : 1 or something ridiculous. Option 2: Basically the same as option one, except instead of having a new currency, the current credit is just forcibly revalued. They could break it into a decimal (like cents) value such that 1,000,000 credits would become something like 10,000.00 credits (That way people wouldn't complain that BW stole money from them, just that if you had 10 credits, you now have 0.10 credits). Then, vendor prices, mob loot and mission rewards would all need to be reworked to reflect this change. Now, as far as non-credit related stuff goes. There needs to be an option for Free and preferred players to do ops. Even if it's super limited, like 1 or 2 times a week and they get no loot. It's just sometimes my ops group falls through because someone forgot to reup their sub in time and it's annoying. The fact that you pay for a sub should mean that you get full features regardless of if someone else pays or not. So, when it comes to group content, you should not be given the shaft if someone in your group "can't do it."

There should be a vendor on the fleet that allows you to take unassembled gear tokens you get from ops and convert them into unassembled components. There are a number of applications for this, but the one I'm most interested in is the fact that my ops group is completely geared up to the point where the unassembled tokens mean nothing. So, why not have a vendor that allows us to break those tokens down into components that we can use for something else? My main toon has like 10 tokens in her inventory that I just won by greed rolls and couldn't pawn off on other players. Being able to turn them into components would be quite useful.

I don't see this as being a problem. I don't really see how it's unfair as long as there is some sort of threshold that you must cross in order to gain eligibility for credit. Pros: -You aren't required to find a group for open world content, thereby increasing the amount of people willing to do the quest. (This should actually increase the chances of groups forming despite the fact that they are no longer required) -Eliminate the need to "queue up" for world spawns. Allows you to get missions done quicker and more efficiently. (Just because a group isn't required for credit doesn't mean multiple people aren't required for the kill.) -Creates a sense of fluidity in the world that's less mechanical than it is now. -Lowers the risk of multiple groups competing for a kill (IE One group pulls a WB, then another group pulls it out of range and resets it just so they can pull it themselves). Cons: -You're somehow put off with the idea of someone you don't know getting credit for a mission that has nothing to do with you? -Mission loot distribution would need to be re-evaluated Honestly I can't think of many cons. Someone getting credit for something that you're putting work into doesn't really impact you, so I don't see why it should bother anyone. If you do 90% to a mob and someone comes in and does 10%, the credit that the 10%er got does not take away from the credit that you got... so I fail to see why that is a problem. Now, there is something that does need to be looked at and that is mission loot. For example, if the mission isn't to simply kill a mob but to loot a specific item from it. One option is to just doup the item for all participants. Or, another option is to base it off of how much work someone put into the encounter. Groups would be considered one entity and be edible to roll on the item among themselves, thus incentivizing people to group up since a lone DPS can't generally out DPS an entire group. So, the entity that puts the most amount of work in would be given the loot. If the effort is close, like within 10-20% (like one person does 60% and someone else does 40%) then the loot can be rolled on between them. Anyway, doing it that way insures that freeloaders that just come and tap it's butt one time before it dies don't end up with full credit. EDIT: How about this: "World groups" Basically, it's like an operations group, but it's encounter based. So, you attack a world boss along with 10 other players. All of those players are then automatically placed into a "world group," regardless of if they are already in a group. In fact, premade groups would be defined by coloring or spacing. This allows rolls like tanks and healers to actively help out on the fly without having to ask for an invite. So, basically, say you're a healer and you come upon a group working on a world boss. You get in range and either attack the boss or heal one of the other players. Suddenly you get an operation frame of all players currently engaged with that boss. -You can have the option to disable this from happening. -You can also have the ability to simply close the frame when it comes up. -Leaving combat before the encounter is finished will force the frame to disappear. -Finishing the encounter will not cause the frame to disappear until you actively leave/close it yourself.

Well, I queue my abilities up so that they fire instantly. I'm not doing any delays and I'm popping all my GCD-ignoring abilities on CD or on proc... so I don't really see what else I can possibly do. And I know this because I'm doing my same rotation, but I'm able to fit in an extra ability that I wasn't able to do before I swapped my gear in almost every cycle. It's at 109.93% (my augs are 236, so I still have room to add 5 more points to it) Looking back at the parse logs, it seems my original 3 parses I missed an average of 7.7% and my post 3 parses I missed an average of 7.8%. A tenth of a percent seems to be a reasonable margin of error, imo.

I'm no expert when it comes to all the math and theory crafting. I just do what the guide tells me and report on the results. So, I followed this guide for my Watchman Sentinel and used the high-alacrity build defined here. Prior to me adjusting to the high-alacrity build, I was set up like this (and I'm not claiming this is BiS or anything, it's just what I happened to have): Alacrity: 4 Enhancements, 7 Augments Critical: 5 Enhancements, 4 Augments, 2 Crystals, +Stim Accuracy: 1 Enhancement, 3 Augments, +Stim So, for me to swap to the high-alacrity build this guide described, I ended up adjusting the following (some where 246 rating): +266 Alacrity (+2 Enhancements, -2 Augments) -220 Critical (-1 Enhancement) -24 Accuracy (-1 Enhancement, +2 Augments) I did 3 parses before I swapped my gear, averaged them. Then did 3 parses after I swapped my gear and averaged those. The results where: Average APM increase of 1.3 Average DPS decrease of 82 points (9290 --> 9208) Average TTK increase of 0:03 seconds. I noted while parsing before the swap, that I trended to start with a high burst (10-11k), level off to my average, and then stay constant for the entire parse. However, after the swap, my trend changed to starting with a low burst (7-8k) and slowly ramping up over the majority of the parse, only finally leveling off at my finish at around 40-30% range. So, in conclusion, I'm doing an extra 1.3 abilities per minute, but each ability is notably weaker. I can't honestly say that this is an improvement or not. Because basically, I'm doing more moves, granted in the same amount of time, just to do approximately the same overall DPS. However, my instantaneous DPS seems to be much lower, hence the long ramp-up time. So I don't even see this good for burst windows (granted I am a DoT spec.)

I think that one of the best parts about the guild ships is that each deck is disjointed and only connected via an elevator. That should allow you the ability to create entirely new decks and merely add them as destinations on the elevator. For guilds who have completely opened up their guild ship, I think this would be an excellent idea to allow them to continue progression. They'd be like mini-strongholds that guilds can continue working together to expand upon without having to open up an entirely new stronghold location. In addition to this, another option would be the idea of having a vanguard vessel that would travel along side your guild ship and you could travel to via a shuttle taxi (like inter-fleet transport.) Though that would require a little more effort than simply adding a new deck to the flagship. ...oh yeah, and more hooks please.

There are far too few hooks on the guildship. My guild has 14 / 15 rooms open and all 775 hooks slotted and we still have entire rooms that are empty. And some of the rooms that do have decorations are very sparsely decorated that they might as well be empty. I see there being three solutions to this: 1. Increase the total hook usage cap by 50%. At least. Preferably more. 2. Change the way the cap works to be per-floor rather than one cap for the entire ship. 3. Change the way hook caps work to be proximity based. So you can put down as many decos as you want in your stronghold, just not densely packed in one room / location. Suggestion 2 and 3 would be in the case the issue is performance/optimization based.

Yeah! Let's screw up the game's economy even more! I've always wanted to spend 20,000 credits for a medpac! Please don't do this. :|

It's how these types of virtual economies work. When the game originally launched, having a few million credits made you amazingly wealthy. Nowadays, that's only a few dailies worth. People tend to confuse "price" and "value" when it comes to currency. A lot of people say that the GTN is overpriced. But it isn't. Not at all. Notice that all of these super highly priced items only started showing up around when 4.0 came around. Before that, it would be ludicrous to see a weapon priced over 15 million credits. Let alone knowing some people would actually pay for that. Contrary to popular belief, all GTN sellers didn't have some secret meeting and decide to increase their prices 1000+%. What happened is inflation. And an extreme case, at that. So, during the 3.0-4.0 period (especially during 4.0) credits were dropping from missions like leaves from a tree. People were all to happy to except the fact that doing dailies and heroics granted you millions of credits for hardly any time investment at all. To most people they think that merely making more money will allow them to buy highly priced items easier. But that's now how it works. When there are a fixed number of products to buy in game and a freely generating currency, the value of each item will generally stay the same (only changing as demand changes), but the value of each individual unit of currency will drop. For example, lets say I had something on the GTN worth 1,000 credits. Now, lets say that there was only 1,000 credits in the game. That means that the value of an individual credit is 1:1. However, as you add more credits into the game, that DOES NOT change the value of the listed item. It's value remains the same, but since the value of a single credit has dropped, it therefore takes more credits to equal the same value it was priced at before. So if they suddenly change the amount of credits in the game to be 10,000, that means that each individual credit would be valued at 10:1. For every 10 credits now, is worth 1 unit of value. To put this in perspective, a highly priced saber listed at 50 million credits today, if listed on the GTN during 2.0, would probably cost 5-10 million credits. This is not "greed" or "price gouging." It is literally the value of each item represented by the value of an individual credit. And since the value of an individual credit has nosedived, the price of all items on the GTN skyrocketed. And to reiterate, the VALUE of those items hasn't changed. But their prices did because the value of a CREDIT changed.

I knew this was going to happen the moment they announced the world PvP. Is it really that hard to comprehend? PvP, especially open world PvP, is content that only exists if players choose to participate. Just because ONE player wants to do it, they are at the mercy of the rest of the players wanting to do it or not as well. Open world PvP needs two things in order to work in this game: 1. Play incentives - The rewards you gain by doing this content cannot be obtained through any other means. You want those rewards, you do open world PvP. Period. 2. Objective incentives - Just because there might be unique rewards for doing open world PvP, it doesn't prevent people from using it as a means to simply farm said rewards. There needs to be a "larger picture" so to speak. In order to prevent farming and ganking, objectives need to be placed so that they level the playing field by simultaneously giving people something to do as well as preventing one side from obtaining any sort of overwhelming advantage. For example, the more objectives you meet, the more rewards you earn but also the more vulnerable you become. On top of that, the more objectives you complete, the higher the reward will be for someone else defeating you. If those two points aren't met, then no one will play the content. Much like how no one will opt to use a knife in a gunfight.

Can't say for certain that this holds true still, but over the course of me playing these past few years, there have been instances where I'm asked to travel to a certain planet to continue a quest but the quest doesn't update upon getting to said planet. The reason being is because I would use some form of priority transport. For example, if I needed to get to Tatooine, I'd use the Outlaw's Den priority transport. However, after traveling to the hangar area of the planet, I found that the quests still did not update. It was only when I boarded my ship and selected the required planet on my galaxy map did it update. So, if I'm correct, the new map shouldn't have the issue of missing quest flags because it's the map interaction, itself, that triggers them.

There is no need for it. The only thing it would do is clutter up the interface with pointless information. Because you don't have ONE threat bar. You have threat for every active enemy in the pull. So if you pull a mob with 5 enemies, you will have 5 threat meters. There isn't really any information you're going to get out of having that. Not even that, but a lot of people have issues with built-in parsing utilities. If you REALLY need a threat meter, take it upon yourself to download starparse and use that threat meter.

I don't understand how that equates to her being broken. Does she still heal? Yes? Then she isn't broken. She's just slower at it. I don't use companions I don't like. And boy, do I not like Treek. I certainly wouldn't spend any real money on her. But, oddly enough, I still have her. So equating "real money" to "rebalance your comp" is a stupid point. The amount of money you spend on her doesn't mean she needs to be any better or worse off than any other companion nor does she need to be balanced the same. It has absolutely no correlation what-so-ever. Treek does what Treek does. If its comparatively worse than another companion, then don't use Treek for that role. Simple as that. The money you paid is irrelevant because it was used to access her easily. You paid for the privilege of activation, not for the effectiveness of the companion.

I find the whole bonus thing to just be a bad idea in general. It doesn't entice me to try new content. In fact it does the exact opposite. It drives me away from doing the content I want to do. Why? Because the content I want to do is never the bonus when I have the chance to play.

Do not need. Do not want.

Actually, I disagree with this. If there was some sort of guild leveling system, then conquest could be ranked in terms of tiers that are based off of guild levels. For example, during a conquest week, there might be 5 planets to chose from. 2 of them are tier 1, 2 are tier 2 and 1 is tier 3. Tier 1 could consist of low leveled guilds with members ranging between 1 and 10. Tier 2 could consist of mid-leveled guilds with members ranging between 11 and 50. Tier 3 could consist of high-leveled guilds with more than 51 members. Perhaps it could go higher? Who knows. It would make conquest more competitive by putting guilds of similar makeup against each other. It would result in more guilds participating in conquest since they'd actually now have a shot at winning.

I agree with most of your points you have made. Except for this one. EV/KP should most certainly drop gear. It should not, however, drop gear that is obtainable at harder difficulties in other ops though. The issue isn't a matter of elitism in not wanting EV/KP to provide certain pieces. It's about the game's incentives for playing. For example, lets say EV HM dropped a piece of gear that was also obtainable from HM ToS. This creates a lowered incentive to do ToS. This, in terns, creates a lull in the pool of players willing to do ToS. Let me put it another way: Back in 4.0, one of the hardest pieces of gear to get was the offhand token. It only dropped off final bosses, unlike other pieces which were pretty varied between EV and KP alone. Because of this scarcity, I ventured to do those operations that dropped the offhand more often than I would have had they not dropped that piece. In fact, I may not have even attempted to do them had any other easier fights dropped that piece. So, no, it's not a matter of elitism. It's about the game's longevity and incentivizing players to try content out of the comfort zone.

I don't see how that would address the issue. My point is being able to simply get the Macrobinoculars and seeker droid items without having to actually start the quest chain.

I realize it's simple enough to just start these quest chains to obtain these items, however I think it would be a nice feature to be able to unlock a usable pair of macrobinoculars and seeker droid from the character perk screen in the legacy menu. The requirements would be simple: -Complete the Macrobinocular quest chain on one character on your legacy. (Or seeker droid quest chain for the seeker droid) -Requires Legacy Level X -Purchase with Y amount of credits (or cartel coins)

One thing that has kind annoyed me for a while is the cooldown text feature and how it doesn't use decimals to better convey the amount of time remaining in the cooldown above a minute. For example, lets say I activate my Party Jawa. The Party Jawa lasts for 3 minutes but has a 5 minute cooldown. The way that it currently works is that, upon activation, the cooldown text would read "4m" meaning 4 minutes. But, if you knew anything about the ability, you'd know that the cooldown ISN'T 4 minutes, but rather 4 minutes and 1-59 seconds. The reason why I use cooldown text is so I don't have to hover over the ability in order to see how much more time I need. But, when an ability has a cooldown longer than one minute, then I still am required to hover over it to see the precise time remaining. Why is this so? Does it not defeat the purpose of having the cooldown text to begin with? I like to plan ahead and there is a big difference in "4m" meaning 4 minutes and "4m" meaning 4 minutes and 40 seconds. So I wanted to suggest adding decimal points to represent the amount of seconds in each minute. Simply convert each second into a decimal .0-.9. This converts to one point every 6 seconds. Going back to the Party Jawa with a 5 minute cooldown. If you used this decimal system, then upon activating the ability, the cooldown text would read 4.9m. 6 seconds later it would say 4.8m. It would drop by .1 every 6 seconds. (Because 1 minute is 60 seconds and there are 10 decimals from .0 to .9. 60 divided by 10 = 6 seconds. ) So, if am waiting for something like a raid buff or a battle revive to come off cooldown, I can look right at the cooldown text and see something like "2.3m" and know approximately how much longer I need to wait. Because "2m" meaning 2 more minutes is one thing, but "2m" meaning 2 minutes and 59 seconds is something else entirely.

If you're in a situation where you can simply read the ratio of friendlies to enemies, you can determine where you need to be. You can even keep an eye on the mini map to see how many friendlies are left on the side you aren't even on. Meaning in that situation, you shouldn't even need "." or ANYTHING in chat to let you know what's going on. But in a situation that's 4 vs 4 on either side, and the other side gains a disadvantage, they might call for help. But you don't know what direction they are calling from. You could look at their name to see if they are within range of you on the ops frame, but that takes a few moments that you might otherwise could use actually helping them out. Perhaps they are calling for help preemptively? Seeing that they will need assistance because they know full-well that they can't handle the enemy players that are coming. No amount of map reading or context clues will tip you off to this. You NEED communication. EDIT: There has actually been a time that I recall when i was on the side being attacked and someone said "help left!" I was on the east side, generally known as "right" when you come out of the spawn. But the guy who said "help left" was actually saying it in relation to the map, IE he meant to say "Help east!" Me, already being on east, aka "right," looked at my minimap to see one person defending the other door. I thought "Shoot, I don't have a lot of time, there is only on more person left..." So, as fast as I could, I ran to the west door, aka "left" only to find one person standing there defending and no enemies. By the time I face-palmed and got back, they had almost taken the door. So, the person who called out for help was actually one of the people on the side I was on to begin with. And, no, before you ask, there weren't 8 enemies on the door when it happened, which added to idea that the missing enemies were potentially attacking the other door. Miscommunication causes confusion. I don't care how simple it might be to think it through or understand their true intention. If it can be made easier, then why the hell shouldn't it be made easier?