Or do something like a "season of seasons" where they all come back as a filler season. This way people could get items they missed, increase reputation for titles and allow new or returning players to get those things.

Yup. If it is about the credit economy, why would something that has no credits involved be taxed? If players want to barter mats for things,etc ...let them.

So companies are buying CC items or in game items and then selling them for actual money? The only way that works with CC items is if they sell them cheaper than the CC amount, which costs them money, rather than making them money, which does not make them a profit. As for in game items, what are they selling for actual cash? Most stuff is either bound or is not all that difficult to get in this game.

If I am giving a friend a dye kit, CC armor etc with no credits attached, why should I be charged for it? I went to give my sister in law (who just returned to the game a month after I did) a Blue/Grey dye kit that I have had since it first came out in a CC pack and it wanted to charge 800k . Why should players be charged for giving items away? If the trade tax is really about stopping people who are avoiding a GTN tax, then shouldn't it be based off of the credits involved? If players can be scaled to planet while keeping their abilities, setting code that bases the tax on the credits involved in the trade should absolutely be feasible to base the tax on credits rather than the item unless the trade tax is not about people who avoid the GTN for their sales.

Even if they do nothing else, they should eliminate taxes on trading if there are no credits involved. I got back into the game in late Dec and got some family members into/back into the game with the offer of assistance since I had a decent amount of creds (in the millions not billions), but if I want to spend my creds to get them good looking gear, give them old cartel dyes I have had sitting on a toon for years, it costs in the hundreds of thousands if not the millions to give it to them. You cannot tell me if they can scale level to planet they can not charge a tax if no credits are involved. Unless this is not about avoiding a GTN tax.

Maybe I am off base here with this suggestion, but rested doesnt work as it is. Rested will still accrue even if you log out in areas that arent safe. As such, three veteran flashpoints have gotten me at least one and a half levels (from mid 78 to 80). Without rested that progression was much slower paced (and better imo). Wouldnt a button to turn off rested be an easy thing to do? There used to be a thing you could buy during double xp events that did that, so it wouldnt be too difficult.

They need to set the weekly to "wins count twice" like they do GSF, even if they moved the weekly to 8 matches with with wins counting twice, it would be faster than wins only.. Its easier to take getting rofl stomped if it actually counts towards the weekly. AS to premades, I solo queue these days and at least on SF it isnt the premades. Its all of the no calls, no guarding, bad guarding (on the cap), etc. I was in a hypergate today that had 4 of the same guild (guessing premade) and although we died a lot we were able to pull the win by playing denial.

People were saying this since shortly after arenas came out. I would rather have longer queues than 4v4's,but thats personal taste.

Premades have been a thing at launch and after 7.0 seem absolutely necessary to be able to complete the weekly in a timely manner. I stepped away from the game for four years and came back last November. I didn't pvp all that much until recently and I can tell you it is a skill thing more than anything else. All the bad habits I saw in pvp when I left the game in lowbies, I am seeing in end game 8v8's. No calls, guarding directly on the cap ,mezz breaking,etc. I am not the best out there,I am not even good, I am just competent (and admittedly am terrible at arenas). It isnt difficult to do the thing, but nobody seems to want to. I have watched the entire team go to cap a point in everything from Alderaan and Yavin to Hypergate. I have watched everyone guard one side in Void Star. At least back in the early days with 8v8 kickball ranked, they made certain people knew what to do. This is one of the biggest arguments in favor of premades. At least then you arent as likely to have to play 20 matches or more to get the weekly done.

Can confirm the cartel coin issue as well

Keith, You and the development team seem to be catching more than a bit of flak from the 7.0 update. Let me try to put it in perspective for you from what I have seen first hand on Star Forge. At both launch (centurion boxes) and with the bolster gear in PVP, as well as the base one piece gear for PVE at those times, and the reaction was people hated it. This was known and well documented. Except, in 7.0 the development team tried it again and expected a different result than they received, which was the exact same result that was received both times prior Conquest was doubled and rewards were halved (credits) with no attempt to add jawa junk or anything else to the reward to bring it somewhat back up, while knowing mats go for ridiculous amounts on the GTN due to the inflation (about a factor of ten) from four years ago. The new gear ,as bad as it is (both in looks and functionality), still requires a grind. Except that grind with wins only counting for ground pvp for the box gear for the weekly takes far more time at 4 wins than 8 matches would with wins counting twice. Yet this is the gear we are supposed to have for PVP. Which leads us to the next point of the PVP debacle: People have been complaining about premades since launch. It has been the largest complaint and the longest running, one with the longest necro-threading that I have seen in the forums . Except in order to complete your weekly in a reasonable time it is best to form up a premade. The new implants were advertised as a replacement for the set gear from 6.0. Except (at least for vir/df sniper/slinger) some of them are as usless as giving a prize winning bull human breast implants. Removing the cool down on takedown is useless for a spec that procs takedown. It is also the only implant that gives accuracy and even that is bugged since it gives alacrity. At this time there is no implant that gives accuracy and def/shield for a sniper has not worked well in the past.. A better movve might have been the third ability from the Victors set since all forms of healing were removed from the class. The forced use of one piece gear (rather than amorings,barrels,mods and enhancements) might have worked where it concerned weapons. Except the weapon customization did not launch. Nor will it launch in 7.0.1. It may be on the PTS in a few weeks and then after some more testing it may go live in May/June (if we are lucky). Admittedly that is reading between the lines of the developer statements,but it fits the standard times I have seen on fixes since the launch of the game. This also means that cartel market weapons and the ones from galactic seasons are absolutely useless for end game characters until the weapon customization utility goes live. However long that may take. I could list all the other issues that the people above stated in addition to my own here, but at this point I think you can see the issue. I will put it in more of a laymans fashion however, if you'd rather:: If someone offered you a steak dinner and brought out a can of Steak Alpo dog food and said that this was the steak dinner they had talked up to you (for as long as the interviews with the media and the announcements for 7.0 had been circulating),would you be upset? I mean both of these correlate fairly accurately between what was said and what was delivered. Quality aside, both could be said they gave out the thing they said they would and both would be correct. From a certain point of view...

Tried doing the Eternal Champion after a 4 year hiatus. I beg to differ that healing companions are not useless. When a rank 50 companion keeps trying to DPS on the Nocturno & Drake Raven fight when they are set to heals...it's a problem. Never had an issue with the Eternal Champion (getting Bowdaar) mission until now. That is a problem. Edit: After about 10 deaths,Torian started healing more than shooting

Bought the stronghold and made it public after doing the grind. I wanted to see what other folks choo-choo strongholds look like. Cannot get into the Traders alliance to do so. If you cannot access the directory and I did not see a second directory at fleet,then exactly what is the point of being able to make the train public again? Because you have a public stronghold people cannot access and it is not like you can go to the other directories,use a drop tag and select the train.

Much like the chiss commentary on hoth if you are a chiss playing an agent,can we get some of these based off of class. For example mocking Theron for just changing his hair cut (without dying it) and thinking it is a disguise. Bad tradecraft and Cipher-9 would know that. If you put the billion credit bounty on Theron,that is about as bone headed a move with everyone looking for him looking for what may be the largest bounty in history.

I would have thought that since the Cartel Bazaar added the weapons from the Chevin Event that those weapons would have had tuning slots as well. The do not however,which is odd since the items cost a rediculous amount of items to get.

Rename the underwater observatory to "Underwater Observatory A"Add 2-3 other rooms to the elevator and call them Underwster Observatory B,C and (possibly) D. That would go a long way to dealing with it. You could even keep the same backgrounds and the like from the windows and floor bubble. Change the colors of the fish,coral etc if they really want to spiff it up.

Here is my review after unlocking the the newest stronghold (I now have all strongholds fully unlocked). I will list pros and cons first,then give a detailed review with some opinions. Pros: It is a stunning vista,the architecture feels like you are on Manaan. The phrexian shark swimming was great. This is probably the best pictorial background to date in SWTOR. Cons: It is too expensive for what you get. The hooks seem cluttered,especially in the initial exterior area. The hallway (first unlock) is extremely cluttered where it concerns hooks. Tatooine is 9.5 mil fully unlocked,has 900 hooks(at least mine does at 100%),7 unlocks,11 interior areas and 2 exterior areas,one of which is extremely large. In comparison Manaan is 9 mil fully unlocked,has 650 hooks,4 unlocks,5 internal areas and 2 external,one fairly small. If Manaan was a similar size (interior areas,hooks etc),even if it was a couple of million credits more,I would consider it a win and honestly one of the best,if not the best stronghold to date. Instead it does not feel like a stronghold,it feels like an apartment. Honestly it feels rushed,especially when you look at size vs cost and the number of hooks in half the space. If you are using it as your toons getaway,or such and you want to spend the money and essentially treat it like your toons vacation cabin on a water world or an agents,smugglers or trooper squads safe house it is perfect as such. If you want to treat it as a training facility for groups of Jedi (i.e. a satellite academy), a Mandalorian clans secret stronghold,a Sith compound for a Sith and his or her followers,a crimelord,pirate,privateer or smugglers base,a Republic or Imperial secret training or research facility or an Alliance or Zaakulan embassy complete with research,debriefing,security barracks and all of the other things such things entail,it fails spectacularly. The largest reason is with all of those things I named you need a vast majority of them inside and away from the public eye. Sadly all of the Strongholds previously allowed all of the things I named above. This was due to the number of interior areas. This is the greatest detriment of the Manaan Stronghold. A potentially easy fix is to set the elevator so it has 2-3 more observation areas at the bottom (even if they were exactly alike,which means no new programming other then adding them). Even if they charged for them (though I would reduce the price with the current prices for the hallway) this would make the stronghold more viable and it is a simple add on.

I absolutely think ship balance needs to be looked at,just as it was when the initial rebalancing happened that added serious cool downs to barrel roll. I can say personally that when the other side starts showing almost nothing but gunships and I am getting TDM after TDM I stop queuing. No ship has the speed or range to close into overlapping fields of fire (which has become a common tactic) and survive in order to take them down. With TDM what happens is you cannot close and if you do not engage you get penalized. If you do engage you need to swap to a gunship so you can damage the opponents and which point it becomes World of Tanks in space and not Star Wars. I personally prefer not to play gunships as they dont feel Star Wars like in any fashion. Until GSF launched there were few if any units that had near capital ships range that were not capital ships in any of the novels and certainly none of the films.

One of the biggest complaints I heard both on BC (when I was on that server) and have heard on EH by new players is they cannot do anything before they get killed. A large part of this is they dont understand how their missile evade works,what each ship does and how to line up shots on a moving target. With ground PVP you have 10 levels of PVE before you can queue. This allows you to learn how your character works. It is in essence the introduction to how to play the game (that is what the four starter planets are there for). The tutorial does not give an equal compensation for that. To be brutally honest I dont think anything other than GSF PVE is going to. The rail-shooter space missions do not handle like GSF,they do not have the abilities of GSF and you cannot control where your ship goes like you can in GSF.

Set Bolster to 242. This would still reward people in Tier 4 but keep it within 6 (technically 4 since the fourth tier blue 244 gear has the same stats as the third tier gold 242 gear) which then focuses on skill more than gear.

The other thing I would like to see is a serious overhaul of GSF. Most new players get into a match,have no idea of how to line shots up or much of anything else (the tutorial is against stationary targets last I checked), get utterly annihilated and stop playing after completing intro. The game gives 10 levels of ground interaction via PVE before you can queue for Warzones. Give some GSF PVE. Set squadrons up where you have story missions (that later turn into dailies) that give ship req. First is very basic,as you get transferred to a higher ranking squadron closer to the front,they get more challenging. An example of this would be on Coruscant the basic mission is "Find and destroy 10 Black sun smuggling ships and their escorts" and is your first GSF mission for PVE. Dropping prices on ship components keeps those in GSF involved and helps balance (which needs to be rebalanced imo when looking at various ship damage/ranges/speeds etc) ,but does nothing for the guy first going into GSF.

If you are going to add Mandalorian themed items as a reward,add in Mount: Basilisk War Droid Pet:Strill Weapon:Mandalorian heavy repeater (cannon) Canderous Ordo carried one in KOTOR

There is no serious incentives to OWPVP. The Imp Rep armor looks good,but the Pub one is hideous. A suggestion might be good looking legacy gear and a OWPVP rating (much like rep is on Iokath) and specific OWPVP vendors. Another might be to have missions for "kill X players on Iokath" with rewards being unassembled components or for that matter cartel certs so the vendors can be used that are on fleet. Also do OWPVP kills grant CXP? If not why not? If so announce it and increase the amount,since players are a more difficult kill than champions. One of the best things I have seen in an MMO to encourage OWPVP was the GCW thing from SWG. Build phase (allowing players to build defenses that were PVE mobs and such) then attack/defend phase. Use tier 1 mats for it since they are severely underutilized and have no use in conquest and set up a specific area for it. Run it every two hours for build phase and alternate who is attacking and defending. Give specific rewards for it (we can call them Iokath War Tokens for sake of argument). Have rewards link to armors and weapons that are unique to this. Suggestions might be a sniping rifle that looks like some of the regular rifles with scopes on them (say the EE-1) or assault cannons that look like rifles (closer to Canderous Ordo's from KOTOR) or Light clubs (looks it up...it has the same mechanics as swinging a lightsaber), light shotos,etc. I.E. unique weapons that can be gotten nowhere else that people want for their look. With mortar volley being the only thing a cannon would be needed for on commando's,put a grenade launcher under a rifle. With range being 35m on snipers (lets face it gunslinger pistols have the same range and said range increase is no farther than that of a small child throwing a rock) a rifle looking sniper rifle might intrigue people. Put up a contest where players show off their armor creations using existing armors and use the winners for each type (force and non or by class etc) are the armors given. This allows you to use reskins. It could end up with things like "Mandalorian sniper armor" or "Revanite Council armor" (from the old revanite mission on DK) or "Battlesage armor" or "Hitman Armor" (for those who get a little dark with their gunslingers) or "Reconnaissance commando armor" etc. Admittedly these are examples I came up with off the top of my head,however you all have players who love putting together new looks with stuff off the cartel market or mixing that stuff in with the crafted or various legacy armors. That is a usable asset. For that matter put an obscenely high price on "Species Unlock: Wookie" (yes many star wars fans would play it,even though it doesnt speak basic) and give them something to push for. If you give the right incentive it can work. I cannot count how many jokes I have heard at fleet since launch talking about if they ever make Wookie playable someone is going to make a 'Sin or Shadow named Bigfoot or Sasquatch. Or people laughing their butts off at the idea of making a jawa Juggernaut name Utunii,even though the gear wouldnt size and they would always look like a jawa. For most casual gamers OWPVP is not its own reward. So give them some if you want it used.

So in essence we did the grind for all those pvp comms,only to get shortchanged for them (much like the green crystals compared to what legendary companion gifts actually cost in credits) only to go back to pvp comms when they first came out after centurion tokens were removed and as such must grind forever again? And bolster has been nerfed down to where it favors pve grinding again (like it did when champion bags were around) ? Not the wisest move in the world,Eric. It certainly doesnt treat those subscribers who PVP very well either.

If you cannot see how equating a grindfest (and admittedly it is a grindfest) with people leaving the servers because the xp was so high that people finished all content in a week at launch (which is what I stated in the post), is a straw man argument,then perhaps I should explain. One was "There is literally nothing to do. There is only one operation out,minimal flashpoints and its only been a week" versus "I am going to have to do this forever to get my gear". On one hand you have people who within a very short amount of time had done everything the game had to offer because they turned the game into a grindfest at launch and got bored because all endgame content that was out had been completed and the other is complaining that they have to do a grindfest at all. I hope that helps. As to fixing the issue? If they bolster (which as I said would be the most likely "hotfix") operations up to basic bottom level gear needed for the operation (much like they do warzones) that stops the most common complaint of the casual gamer. I understand you didnt ask for it. People didnt ask for smash to be uber powerful or commandos and sages to be nerfed in 1.2,they didnt ask for orbital strike/freighter fly by to be nerfed (by 70% no less) after RotHC came out. Nobody asks for changes when changes happen that the developers decide need to happen. It comes out,people get upset and either get over it and learn to adapt or they leave.Maybe they come back and maybe they dont. Its been the same with every major MMO since Everquest first came out.