Hi Everyone, I strongly agree with the other comments about the new Manaan area and the new story. I was not expecting any new story at all, and I was gleefully shocked when, not only did I get new story, but I got tons of interaction with old companions. Talos has always been one of my favorite companions, and I'm thrilled to see him show up again. He is the sort of character that makes SWTOR feel "real". If there really was a Star Wars, Sith and all these ancient ruins, there would definitely be characters like Talos. His attitude is refreshing too. I also felt like the writing for Kira was better than the writing for any companion has been for a long time. She is a favorite for a reason. Finally, I was happy to see Lana and Theron play real roles again. I hope the story-telling moves more in this direction in the future. I was not surprised at how good the daily area was. I knew it would be graphically incredible. But I was surprised that the story was good. It all made sense. It fit. Now I have to say that, ever since getting addicted to GSF, I have quit doing group PvE. For group content now I only do PvP and GSF. So I won't have anything to say about raids or flashpoints any more. Also, since I can't figure out how gearing and bolster work together anyway, I've given up on caring about gear. That said, I wish the team would go back to the (quite successful, by the way) 6.0 philosophy that all content is end-game content. I can't think of any reason other than self-sabotage why they abandoned what worked. I also don't understand their class balance choices but I hope those improve in the future. Now that PvP is so drastically improved, I would love to go back to the old days where I could feel comfortable bringing, not just any class, but almost any spec into an 8v8 warzone and know that I can be successful. Sure, it's fun playing the best specs. And the new ability to add a second class to any character does mean that I can bring any character I'd like into PvP. But still. Overall, though, 7.1 is a huge success in my book. I look forward to where the story is going now and I'm excited to log on every day.

Yeah I completely agree with this. I totally forgot how much this has helped pvp, because I'm now used to it. I also agree with those mentioning that shared kills have been a bigger upgrade than I thought they would be. When they first announced it, I was like, "who cares?" But actually, it improves my experience more than I expected. And it reduces toxicity. Now I do have many complaints about 7.0, but I've written about those extensively elsewhere. My original post was not meant as praise or condemnation of the expansion. I just thought maybe the devs would find it useful to find out what aspects of the expansion I appreciate.

Hi Everyone, It seems like things have stabilized since the expansion was released. So I thought I would write about the 4 things I really liked from the expansion. Maybe that will be useful to the team at Bioware. 1. The new Manaan area. OK, this is the sort of scenery I've been wanting to be able to play through since the game was released. It is so atmospheric that I really feel like I am in a movie. I'm looking forward to the new Manaan daily area, and I don't remember ever being excited about a daily area in any MMO. (Although, Oricon and Ossus turned out to be great once they were released. But I wasn't anticipating those.) Request: Any chance we might be able to use the night-time Manaan background in our current stronghold? 2. GSF pops immediately whenever I log on. Now I don't log on at all hours, but whenever I log on, if I want to play GSF, I can. And usually with very little to no wait time. I am finally, after months and months and months, close to the upper edge of average at GSF. It's now my favorite part of the game, despite the grueling learning curve. Not sure why everyone is playing so much, but for me it's that I can get one character per day through conquest by doing a few GSF matches. Request: Any chance we can get a bare bones pve GSF mode? I'm talking about using the same maps, and just having targets (preferably moving, but even stationary would be fine.) I want a mode where I can learn the basics of how to play new ships without screwing over my team. 3. Galactic Seasons 2 This was pretty much exactly what I was hoping Galactic Seasons would be when I first mentioned the idea. A massive improvement over Season 1. I love that you included all sorts of past content, like the GSI quests. I also use a lot of the weapon rewards on several of my characters. The progression through the levels seemed smooth and appropriate to how much I was playing. I did a lot of content I haven't done in years, and never felt like I "had" to do some boring part of the game. Request: The automatically granted rewards this time around were cooler, but we still need better rewards to purchase with the tokens. Any chance we could get companions that are currently only available to one class (like Vector and Nadia) to purchase? 4. Loadouts and being able to play a second class on each character. These have revived the game for many of my alts who had cool stories that I had created for them, but I didn't necessarily like playing the class. And combined with loadouts, I can't imagine how I used to play the game without these two new features. They are great. Request: I see that you are addressing class balance, and that was what I was going to request. Instead, I'll request something that other people always ask for. I understand why you don't want people to be able to switch classes in pvp and NM operations. But I feel like we should be able to switch pretty much anywhere else in game. Alright, there you go. These are my four favorite things from the expansion. Take care of yourselves, everyone.

I just want them to finish the Manaan stronghold. Or somehow give the option to have the new Manaan area background and atmospherics. That would be dope.

To the OP: I get where you're coming from, and I think your idea is worth thinking about. But honestly, right now, PvP would be in great shape if only the class balance wasn't so poor. And class balance is something they should fix anyway.

Oh I see what you mean now. Right, in general, the best way to farm medals is to win. But there can be specific instances where trying your best to win doesn't get you the most medals. Well, I guess what I would say is that most of those specific instances are not going to happen in competitive games. In nearly all competitive matches, your best bet for maximizing medals (again, by the end of the match) will be to try your best to win the match. Most of the time, if farming medals at the expense of trying to win makes sense, it's because the player is in one of those mismatches where it's become clear that the losing team hasn't a prayer of making a comeback. In those situations, giving people incentives to win won't really help because the losing team thinks they can't win no matter what they do. In fact I'd argue that's the single biggest problem with the current system--you can tell when your team just has no chance. So I guess I still would prefer people farm medals than they just quit the match.

It's PvP. You don't need to give an "incentive" to win. Winning is the incentive. And you already get medals for playing to the objectives. In fact the best way to farm medals, given the way they are currently awarded, is to win. The only thing I would add is that you would want to make sure to only award points for medals at the end of the match, so players have to finish the match to get their points.

You know what, I hadn't realized this til you posted it, but you're right. They already use medals for Galactic Seasons. Why not use them for dailies and weeklies? Medals have the benefit of also rewarding players for sticking through a match that they get dropped into as a fill in player. Even if the match is a lost cause (and in my experience, matches I get filled into usually are a lost cause) you can still get your medals.

I'm being completely serious. For a big chunk of 6.0, Uprisings were my absolute favorite PvE content in the whole game. Then they announced they were going to improve them. After they "improved" them, I stopped playing them. That was one of the first signs of the attitude at Bioware that created the mess that is 7.0. But I'm not joking. For a good long time, Uprisings were my favorite thing to do outside of PvP.

Hello, I am following the same link you are. It says there are nine months, not seven months, going back to June. And it says week from Monday, March 21, 8342 peak, which is lower than any previous weekly peak. FURTHER EDIT: /facepalm! I figured out what I did wrong. We haven't reached the peak yet for this week because we haven't hit the week-end yet! Oh geez. Well anyway, the original claim is incorrect. The weekly peak is not below 6.0's worst weekly peaks, or at least we won't know that until the week-end. Because this week's peak will almost certainly be at some point on a week-end, not on Tuesday.

My phrasing was sloppy. I'm looking at the peak players per week, and yes it's the lowest point since they started on Steam.

To the OP: That was a good post. Very thorough. Only problem is that it's so obvious what has gone wrong, that if Bioware can't see it then it's because they adamantly want to not see it. Also, if anyone is interested, SWTOR's weekly steam numbers have now dropped below the absolute lowest point the game ever reached in 6.0. Kind of sad.

I'm not sure why you replied to my post. You are talking about something that is very interesting to you but not, perhaps, very interesting to me. Anyway, I was talking about numbers. And this is a fact, not an opinion. Looking at the numbers, there is no way to tell whether player activity is dropping, or whether it is leveling off to the exact same trend line it was at during most of 6.0. You will need a lot more data to come to a conclusion about that.

This seems right to me. I use the Steam launcher only because it seems avoid bugs that the game's regular launcher suffers from. And when I look at the Steam numbers, it's too early to tell whether the numbers are dropping or whether they are flattening out.

This is some of the best news I've heard in a long time. I hope you all do go through each flashpoint individually, because this is a solution that admits and deals with the problems in the actual game, as opposed to simply trying to figure out new ways to manipulate player behavior. Thanks very much for this, it gives me some real hope.

/shrug. Well, they are already reverting two of the most unpopular changes: the new UI and the rotating group finder/weeklies. They also see that they need to address all the bugs. If they fixed the bugs, fix the UI and change the rotating group finder, will I be happy with the other changes in 7.0? For me, yes. PvP is massively better now with the ability pruning. Every time I play Huttball it's so much more fun than it used to be. I can no longer dominate an entire Huttball match with just my operative healer, which I could do before. I've also noticed a massive decrease in the number of teams intentionally not playing to objectives. PvP is great now, which is why I frankly hope the PvP revamp never happens. Combat styles are awesome. Loadouts are great. I don't even notice the new scaling, but like others, I just wonder: Why can't we finally have a PvE story instance, and a PvE hard instance? What's the big deal. If other people want to play on easy mode, who cares? It doesn't affect me. So anyway I think that with the 7.01 improvements (which are really just going back to the way things were before), I do like the expansion. All the other changes just mean I play fewer alts, but that doesn't matter because of combat styles.

It has been years and years since I've looked forward to logging in as much as I do now. In particular, PvP has never been so much fun. Also, I couldn't resist responding to this: You know, I've played exclusively in PvP instances since they were created. And it's always been the case that, on the rare cases I run into players from the opposing faction, they nearly always ignore me. The only real exception to this is events like the Rakghoul event and the pirate event. It's even more so this way now. I think most of the people in PvP zones are just trying to complete their missions in peace and quiet lol.

It has been fixed on the PTS, so that is good news. There are still a couple of bugs but it is way better now.

Perhaps, maybe, just maybe.... This expansion will teach Bioware that the "solution" to problems may very well be worse than the problem itself. Math problems have solutions. Real life problems involve trade-offs.

Yeah it sure is. One of the things about this expansion that I can say was, absolutely, no doubt about it, a big improvement. I just hit 18, got another token, got the other stronghold.

This is what I want to know. Because most of the issues were detailed by players on the PTS. So why wasn't there another delay? 7.0 clearly wasn't finished. Anyway, by some weird stroke of luck none of these bugs are affecting my characters. And here is another bizarre example. I always play in the pvp instance anyway.....

Wrong. Up until the unbelievably stupid decision to make weeklies and dailies only count wins, I never saw entire teams intentionally play with no respect for objectives. After the change, it started to become common. The change produced the exact opposite of its supposed intent, which would not surprise anyone who has any knowledge of how players react to things.

I've always felt like the deal with Tau is that she's a tortured soul because she's a tortured soul. Like, that's how her personality works more than because of any set of horrors she's dealt with. For instance, how moralistic and perfectionist she is, like how she treats Lana. If you are that perfectionist about ethics in a war with shifting alliances, yes, you are going to end up a tortured soul. As characters, I think Tau, Arn and Anri are really well-written.

I agree. They did a fantastic job with Arn in the new expansion. He is rapidly growing on me, like Nadia did when Ossus came out.

You know what? We've got some minor disagreements, but I more or less agree with your list. I think if only the new UI, particularly the inventory UI, wasn't so bad, there would be massively less negativity.