The Blue 336 relics from MMFPs are the same as the Purple 336 relics right now, aren't they? At least for SA and FR?

Lana "died" under the floor for me around the first fight with the big cat. After that, she was never around again and that's when I ran into this Malgus bug. I think this might have been due to me space-barring the dialogue leading into the first fight in the flashpoint. Maybe it misplaces her by space-barring there. But yeah, as soon as you notice Lana not keeping up with you in the rest of the Flashpoint, you've got a bugged instance. That said, there are some points where her AI struggles to keep up with you, particularly after you use rocket boots for instance, but usually she'll catch up and engage in fights after you get to a teleport distance. Seems like there are a lot of places in this FP with the very irregular, narrowed, and walled-off terrain where she could bug out and contribute to the Malgus bug taking place.

Probably one of the early throne or chair mounts, but I'd never actually plunk down credits/coins for such frivolities.

The clear objective they are pursuing is trying to mine for increased subs from casuals. They won't care if they lose most operations players, PvP players, and GSF players if it brings them a greater net of subscriptions for a longer period from casual players. Basically, they seem to be trying to get the story casuals to sub in a little bit more quantity for a little longer, however tying it to RNG gearing seems to be a counter-intuitive move especially when the story requires nothing more than the greens it gives you. Personally, I think they keep taking the shortcuts for immediate gains at the expense of a deeper strategic approach that would lead to better long-term results, but the game IS 5+ years old, so you won't get the big investments you need to pursue a longer-term strategy built around quality and innovation. From what we can piece together, 4.0 started fast but faded fast. We can reasonably surmise that it didn't meet long term expectations for holding or growing numbers simply because they radically changed the game's business model for the next major patch/expansion (5.0) that came within just about a year (13 months). In fact, they knew it so early, they were able to start working on the biggest changes well before the 5.0 launch. The biggest boon they made in 4.0 was tying initial access to subscriptions. This allowed them to make claims about huge "subs", but really only because they didn't sell it similar to a one time purchase or DLC like RotHC or SoR. The trailer also probably helped bring back a little spike of launch day players that left long ago, plus the Ep. 7 hype, pushed them above a typical expansion with 4.0. But then people burned down that content and left again because Bioware gave an "out" to getting the monthly content to follow. You could just come back at the end and for another single month of sub you could get the previously released monthly story content. This led to a spike at launch, a likely steep loss in population after Chapter X bombed as an elaborately voiced but poor quality "alliance alert" rather than any compelling story, that then gradually faded and did not spike back up anywhere close to 4.0 release when Chapter XVI finally came along. They could have done it other ways. The way they tried to do it in 4.0 probably didn't get them to their own desired full level of results (or beyond) for the life of that entire expansion, so they had to change the business model again. Very simply put - Successful. Business. Models. Do. Not. Do. That. Basically if 4.0 worked fully, or even mostly, for their BUSINESS, they'd double down on it and add to that model. At worst, they'd grant monthly chapters to subscribers for that month they are subscribed and then lock down and sell the ones you missed for something like $2 to $5 each chapter to try to get a little more revenue from players that want story, rather than just giving it all away for one flat $14.99 month. And given that most of the monthly chapters were glorified alliance alerts that ultimately wouldn't alter the final chapter of KotFE much, they absolutely could have done that. Think about it - they were almost designed AS IF they would be released that way: And thus, Chapter XVI could have EASILY been done, and almost WAS done, without any ramifications from Chapters X-XV other than to add some context and lore, most of which had little relevance and did not pay off in KotFE or its outcomes. I'm not saying they absolutely designed the chapters with pay-to-access if missed in mind, but it's very plausible they could have worked the story in a fashion to handle that kind of business model. If 4.0 worked, they would not wrap up its story in a shorter arc of total chapters in 5.0 with a final chapters binge which was likely already heavily in the can, production-wise, by late-Spring. Also, they would not radically change base game systems to try to hook players onto an illusory gear treadmill while they desperately try to figure out what to do next, post-5.0. It is generally more expensive to radically change things like they have done than it is to just layer content onto existing systems. The former only needs a lean team to work with existing tools setup as the framework into which they pump content. When you change entire systems, as in the latter case, you are messing with the framework itself which frequently requires more and different people to be involved and thus more investment $$$. At the end of the day, their number one objective is not to please all sectors of the game population. Their number one objective is to meet the goals for revenue set out by their bosses, else risk losing their jobs. One would think such objectives should align with each other, but apparently they are just leaning on the strength of the IP to bluster through any big mistakes. If that means repacking the game, so be it. If that means changing the game's business model radically, so be it. If that means forsaking the veteran players as lost revenue because the net revenue of turning over the bulk of the player base is higher then fighting to retain vets, then so be it. If that means releasing another blur trailer for hype and then trying to convince customers that re-hashed content re-boxed in an RNG wrapper is the most exciting thing ever, then so be it. That's not how I'd go about it, but ultimately they can only do so much to a 5+ year old game built on an even older engine for which principal development teams have been shuffled to other projects.

Let me help you out there. You've heard of someone who hated those stories now. The class stories were exposed as terrible by double and 12x XP events and by the DvL event. It disassociated them with planetary stories if you did only class stories. The best example is probably Sith Inquisitor. In no way is it good whatsoever, and I'm sure a lot of people are shocked anyone could say Inquisitor was bad because it's often cited around here somewhere in the top half of the eight stories. SPOILERS - SPOILERS over 3. Hero plot armor - It applies to all classes and it's not a spoiler to say so because it's obvious - this is an MMO. You respawn, you don't "die" and reload. This is ESPECIALLY the case for the idiotic decisions the Sith Inquisitor frequently is forced to make amidst 3 horribly dumb tree choices) - if you are stupid or arrogant (frequently all the class story heroes/anti-heroes are), there are zero consequences compared to if you are a saint or humble (or vice versa regarding consequences if you think the Empire would consequence the heck out of a light side user). This is BECAUSE it is an MMO. You can't die and reload from the last save. You have to respawn instead and the game world can't truly be altered by your choices, because thousands of other players picked differently than you. For this one reason alone (an MMO is multiplayer open world and single player is not), no MMO story will EVER equal the possible heights of the greatest single player game stories. The fact this is an MMO also prevents some pretty obvious choices from being put on the table at all during those stories. Nearly all choice moments in those stories come do to 1 Spare/Save, 2 Shrug, 3 Kill/Destroy. The first time through, the stories were ok (not good or even great), because they were intertwined with the faction planetary stories that you practically needed to do at launch to keep your XP and gear gains going enough to actually beat end chapter bosses. There was an illusion that the class stories fit into broader galactic events, but that's actually not the case. None of them really grabbed me (not even the "sacred around these parts" imperial agent "story"). I felt Knight was the closest to original KotOR experience, obviously. But on replays that focused solely on the class stories, I found them all to be ultimately terrible as stories go. None of them would make my top 10 of video game stories, and none of them deserve the Bioware sticker-reputation they have for just being made by Bioware. The stories did not live up to the brand reputation, which is why I now consider (among other real world reasons and these last two expansions) Bioware storytelling to be nothing more than an empty marketing tag at present. That's not to say there are not a few good moments in most of them. That's not to say that they don't deepen a lot of lore for Star Wars (new lore usually being what most Star Wars fans confuse good story to be). And really, the starter worlds are the best parts of many stories. I think Bioware really NAILED it on the starter worlds. For some reason, I still look forward to rolling through Tython or Hutta, for example. But after that, things fall apart quickly for every class and class-only focused replays expose all of them as weak, with repetitive dialogue, that rely HEAVILY on STAR WARS lore to get lots of people to think they are good. In the end, I think the hands down best stories in this game were the Taral V, Maelstrom Prison, Boarding Party, and Foundry Flashpoints, followed closely by the Ilum arc with Malgus (including the Flashpoints). And even those fall a little short because they are railroaded results in order to protect the MMO base world and future use or non-use of those characters to all players in a standard way. You can't take a second or third option with them... you MUST end up at the place the railroad demands. That's no more a "choice" than the choices in KotFE/KotET. Most people just don't notice it, however, because they think they just completed a class-based choice-fest that defines nothing in terms of long term game world results other than your personal preference for your characters personality. In the short term do some characters (NPCs) live and others die? Sure. But any that had that choice in any part of this game are effectively dead to the game world and future use because SOME players might have killed them where others spared them. That's not choice. That's an illusion, and in this day and age it is a tired one, at that. Nearly everything else has been unremarkable at best. Dread Masters had potential, but their evil was too shallow and generically psychotic to make them interesting (and screen time far too brief to be anything other than shallow). Plus for a lot of people the full arc was gated behind ops. Now I didn't find accessing that story and gating it like that to be a problem personally, but I know others did.

Any idea if this was fixed for Chapter 3 by the patch? It's not in the notes, but was just wondering if anyone had tried it and maybe it didn't make the notes.

Even if they announce changes to the CXP amounts and rate of gaining boxes to the benefit of the players in one or more ways, it doesn't mean much. What will go unspoken is they can just change the back end drop table chances to keep your chance to get the most wanted pieces at the same grindy target goals they desire.

Also bugged. Got the e-mail that contains the summon item, but no Alliance Alert. Character in question with the bug completed all of KotFE and KotET prior to today (and account meets all the DvL requirements). Another character that completed KotFE but not started KotET also has the bug.

Just adds more fuel to my crazy theory that the mandate for this game is two fold - First: Cartel Market. Second - Use the relatively stable CM income from the addicts to introduce game features and changes that test the limits of Star Wars IP addiction by pulling one inane decision after another, each worse than the last. Once they identify the precise point the fans actually break, they'll use that for feature and price point modeling on future game design decisions across all Star Wars game titles to come.

I kind of just shrugged my shoulders when they announced the drops would be discipline specific because I knew they could just tune the RNG to be worse from the player's perspective. In this way, they could maintain their internally targeted average time to gain a complete set and maintain their time-of-play grinding targets for players. Nearly the entire community celebrated it, but it was such an obvious cave-in by the devs that it was extremely apparent they could just fiddle with the RNG numbers to keep the grind just as long as originally intended. Face it, with this system, they just have to change the drop table if people are going too fast. The only way they change it to the players' benefit is if they bleed subs and related CM sales at a sudden and catastrophic rate. Everything else is just static to them.

Actually, has it even been confirmed yet that every single Command Crate would drop a gear piece, or an upgraded gear piece? If it's based on many other RNG systems I've run across in my gaming experience this way, I wouldn't be shocked if even the top tier boxes dropped the equivalent of Story Mode gear the most with Hard Mode and Nightmare tiers being much, much more rare.

This is basically what tore our 4 guild raid teams apart at launch and left us with 1 team. At launch, the drops were class specific and whatever your bosses rolled might have been worthless to much of the group if the few players suitable to the drop already had it. This led to resentment by the players that were getting nothing while other "lucky" players had little choice but to vendor trash the excess pieces that duplicated what they already had won previously (pre-legacy transfer systems). I guess at least this system guarantees everyone that put in equal effort an individual roll. However, given the absurd rarity of current things like flashpoint decoration drops or anything on the high end of packs (be it DvL or otherwise), call me extremely skeptical of the chances for an actual BIS roll result even from the highest tiers/ranks until they clearly demonstrate otherwise.

Not really interested in KotET at all. The story for me was massively underwhelming and did not live up to the historical heights of the Bioware storytelling reputation. The original class stories did ok the first time through because it was wrapped in a successful illusion of many other quests and dialogues, but even on repeat play through of those stories now I quickly get bored, log out, and go play something else until I feel like bopping into Star Wars for a little bit again. In particular, the increased companion effectiveness and rates of experience gain have exposed many flaws of the original class stories as well. I have actually tried replaying all of the class stories with multiple genders and alignments in a focused fashion and just get less impressed by the stories every time. Other Bioware titles from the past, even those with less unique story lines (such as one per class here vs only one for the main character in old stuff) still hold much more interest for me from their simple inherent quality and little twists. So then with KotFE, they doubled down on all the things that actually were not the best parts of the original class stories in an effort to make a story driven expansion. This was likely due to a desire to try to entice back players that claimed they left after launch because of story droughts. Unfortunately, they lacked the resources to bring back 8 stories, and instead took us down to just 1 story for any character now. They further took away any reason to need to do anything else to try to get through the story successfully by overpowering companions, reducing the need for gear, and reducing the need for any meaningful use of your palette of skills. They gave passing/minimal efforts at repeatable content (EC) or group content with KotFE, gambling that the story would carry the day. And I suppose, for a lot of people maybe it does. But from watching my guild and my server population evaporate, I'm not convinced it worked. And if KotET is released the exact same way that KotFE was (I don't think it will be), I don't actually think it means KotFE worked. I think it just means they don't really have the capacity to do anything bigger than KotFE at the moment. On top of that, KotFE added little to no incentive to run group content because the rewards are not particularly relevant (worthless hard mode flashpoint loot for example), and they couldn't successfully tease the gear carrot as a treadmill anymore since gear rating for the actual story is 100% unnecessary. Again, if the story is the focus, I guess that's fine, but erasing gear relevance all but guarantees many people only briefly log in to play the story and then hit pause for a month or more. That's even more true if there is nothing remotely approaching a consensus that the story is good or great, or even has universally agreed to replay value. It doesn't, and the complaints are more than just a few haters and trolls; there are many nuanced and well reasoned posts about problems with the story. If it was truly acclaimed, nearly all negative feedback would be on par with mere trolling, but I'd say a noticeable portion has been effectively critical and serious without trolling. And if players aren't logging in daily or weekly to see the splash screen advertisements or open the cartel market, then they aren't buying and using as many CCs, so it's a problem that could become a feedback loop for them. Hence why I again think they'll slightly alter the purchase model for KotET somehow. Then there is level sync. I actually think level sync was necessary, but unfortunately the way it was implemented tripled down on the irrelevance of gear. Some other MMOs that level sync do a percentage of your stats at each sync step based on your endgame gear, so your stats are always slightly better at lower levels if you actually try to max your gear out at endgame. But now, if I wear green 190s or purple 224's, I'm the same as any other level-synced level 65. So if they don't change how level sync works in KotET, that will continue the irrelevance of gearing for nearly all of the game outside of PvP and the extremely limited amount of Nightmare Ops runs that might still exist. KotFE introduces no relevant changes to a stale gameplay style of very old MMO sacred cows of extremely poor AI, regularly respawning, mostly static mobs with no changes of note in the state of the zones. The appearing out of thin air skytrooper spawns were a lame attempt to mix things up, and I think it failed miserably. Some other games have innovated in the directions of events or things happening in the zones besides static mob spawning and wandering. A few of them were released around the same time as SWTOR 1.0, and they have excelled far beyond SWTOR in these regards to offer interest and fun in their zones, rather than the same stale mobs. Unfortunately the SWTOR engine and mob lock system all but guarantee that no major innovation or change is possible along these lines. And on top of it all, my biggest reservation about supporting KotET is that the way SWTOR has gone through its life to this point is sending the message the Star Wars IP will be used to emphasize micro transactions for stylizing your in-game avatar with minimal investment into gameplay features and innovation. To me, the lack of quality in the story and the decline in gameplay compared to my (possibly unreasonable) expectations comes across as lack of reinvestment in the game to actually make it better, in favor of gimmicks and keen marketing. That gives me huge reservations about future SW games to the point where I likely will never again play one without very solid positive feedback from other people I know and respect actually playing and telling me they enjoy it before plunking down my money. For years I supported this game through 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, but many of my out of game Star Wars friends really couldn't understand it. I think most of it was playing with in-game friends and guildies in endgame content. Now with 4.0, I understand my out of game friends' early boredom with the game when they tried it and left before even getting out of the starter worlds on a single character. Also, when people don't have incentive to group up and play together, I feel it lowers the replay value and enjoyment for a significant portion of the player base that will just walk way. A large segment may stay for story, but I think another large segment that wants group play is hanging by a rapidly fraying thread. With KotFE, I wanted the story. I really did. But it fell short of the quality I expected. I feel like I got duped by the company standing on its marketing credentials of, "Bioware Story Telling!" without the company actually putting the full investment into delivering the "epic" part of that story telling that was always implicitly understood by invoking the Bioware brand. Not again. Not again. TL;DR - I'm not looking forward to KotET. I will not be renewing my subscription no matter what KotET markets to us because I no longer believe the marketing and I don't enjoy the game, its story, and the direction the game systems took. Some of this might have been forgivable had the story actually been good. For me, and many people I know, it wasn't. I've lost confidence in the game and its brand due to overuse of the marketing invocation of, "traditional Bioware story telling!" that fell far short of delivering those traditional peaks. My skepticism over this will spread to all future Star Wars and EA game titles until they prove they are about more than just invoking brand reputation.

Not really sure why removing an incentive for casuals or PvEs to dip their toes into Open World PvP and catering to people complaining that this was a problem made it to their board of limited resources, but OK. I'm sure there is a small segment, as in minuscule, portion of the population that is well served and advocated for it for reasons other than solely to make even more Open World PvP trolling possible. However, I'm pretty sure this is going to give way more mileage to the trolls than anyone who wanted it for legit reasons.