Excellent work and write up thanks.

Howdy, I know something similar has been thrown around, but I thought I'd offer up something concrete. Basically the problem on the PTS now is that we can't actually test any of the new content because most of it is aimed at level 50s. Most of us have neither the time nor the desire to grind an entirely new toon to 50 and there appears to be no standardized method for importation. This, a workaround, involving 8 new quest npcs. Every character, upon creation, is treated to the opening cutscene and a starts in a conversation. They then immediately exit to the newbie area. That is where this NPC is. The NPC initiates a multi-part quest. First part of the quest is the npc having some (obviously non-voiced) dialogue about making this a testing character with a yes/no dialogue option. Hitting Yes on this grants the quest and adds it to your quest log, telling you to talk to the NPC again. Hitting no would have no tangible effect. Talking to the NPC again initiates a non-voiced dialogue that concludes quickly, but grants enough experience to take your character to level 50. It should also ideally flag this character for deletion next time there's a change on the PTS if not a set amount of hours (for book-keeping purposes). The quest isn't complete, requiring you to talk to him again. This time you select your advanced class, and get teleported to the fleet. Award is 1000 champion/centurion and 1000 columi/tionese commendations. You can change the numbers here depending on precisely what you want us to be testing in, but presumably a mix of t1/t2 is good for metrics. The result is a large influx of level 50 characters who can at least test warzones and operations, and presumably even the new dailies. These characters will doubtless have issues due to large number of quest flags not being enabled (I don't know how that's handled. If there's a big "episode 3 is complete" flag that can be marked that would be way easy). Regardless, a character ported over from live would be superior to one of these characters for testing purposes, but it could give us a way to generate raw data, especially in warzones. In short: give us a way to get a averagely geared level 50 to test content and to generate data you can use for balancing. As it is, there is no way for the vast majority of community to participate, and it's making us jumpy and irritable.

I think these are valid questions, and a lot of the hand-wringing that's going on is because we have no ability to play with the new changes. Also, a lot of things are getting overhauled, but we don't know why. Also I'd like to argue with the notion that people who unsubscribe are the targetted customer base. Really, once they left, who cares what they think? The people who are subscribing are the current customer base. If the game is being balanced based on data about accounts immediately before they unsubscribe, I think that's a very poor metric. Sure, someone may have unsubscribed after losing 15 warzones in a row, and of those warzones 13 of them contained operatives. I think that's a very poor reason to nerf operatives. In short, OP I applaud the questions you are asking and hope for some kind of response. What is the endgoal? We'd like to know.

Uh... wow. Some of these are quite amazing. I think the issue here is that all the simple outfits are already in the game. If you want a Palpatine-looking inquisitor you just get all the gear from Hammer Station. No point in making the same art assets over and over again. So for most people these things will just be a neatly distributed set of mods. But yeah... I think some of these outfits try too hard. Especially in the shoulders/head area. Also I assume the smuggler hats are the result of someone trying to design a "space cowboy hat".

Obvious troll is obvious.

At least you can change the colors, right? Not saying it's a great set or anything, but at least it won't have to orange.

Agreed, because even if you can just run into esseles/BT that negates half the function of this area, which is to gather an audience and to have rotating duels and the whatnot. Just have an elevator button in the cantina that takes you to the place. It'd be fun if it was cross-faction with pvp flagging disabled. Regardless, need a dueling area.

/signed

Letting us exchange champion tokens for warzone commendations would probably fix this at this point, since you can buy bm commendations with them. But of course that will prove to be too much effort.

My dry streak is at 12 today, but yeah, it's a cold, merciless RNG. I wish it at least had a streakbreaker mechanic, but I can't imagine they'll bother changing anything with the 1.2 overhaul coming up.

Yes, I know this is an ongoing problem and with luck it will be resolved by 1.2, sometime next month. In the meantime, this is just a place to complain to likeminded people about getting shafted repeatedly by the existing system for purposes of catharsis, not to debate pve/pvp splits or gearless pvp or whatnot. 10 friggin' bags now without a battlemaster comm. In the last week I've gotten 1000/1000 once and it's the only reason I've gotten any comms at all. I know the highest streak I've heard was 32 but man it's frustrating. In the meantime, I rack up tons of champion comms I can't use for anything but gearing up companions. I can't even sell them! Argle bargle. Ok it feels good to complain. Your turn!

Bumping this not so much for the ideas presented, because to face facts there are any number of things that could be done to boost operatives/smugglers, but to keep the idea that operatives/smugglers need some oomph, ESPECIALLY outside of the burst damage role alive. Concealment operatives (and whatever the smuggler equivalent is) seem to work okay in the bounds presented. You stealth up to someone, and either take them by surprise and kill them, or you don't. What seems to be underdeveloped is how the class functions in it's other roles. The healing is lackluster, as is lethality. Anecdotally, most ops/smugglers I encounter seem to be concealment specced, and I would wager the reason is that it's the role in which the class succeeds the best at the moment. Spice up the other trees and I suspect there would be more variance in the class. tl;dr: Smugglers/Ops don't seem to excel outside of the stealth burst role, and the class should have other things it an do well.

Hopping on this train. A good player will still be good with a operative/scoundrel, but they're not balanced well versus other classes, especially in healing/non-stealth dps roles.

The OP raises an excellent point in that Ilum is insanely-minimum-security prison boring if there is no one around and you have to try and ninja boxes from the 15 other people collecting boxes. Make something in the zone more interesting than box vulturing.

I'd say "Yes" as an answer because even though Ilum is currently far from well-implemented it CAN function. If both sides have roughly the same number of people and the same amount of interest you get raids fighting each other. The problem is that circumstances are currently far from ideal on most servers (mine is hugely empire skewed). A good first step is conceptualizing how long the daily on Ilum is supposed to take if things are not ideal. It taking too long makes the zone frustrating because even if you want two raids fighting each other you can't just phone up 59 of your closest friends to make it happen. Right now, the daily is basically undoable for the side who doesn't have dominance and extremely boring for the side that does. A simple fix: For the side that controls less points on Ilum, make it so that capping points counts towards they daily. They go shoot rocket launchers at wherever the enemy isn't. This encourages hit-and-run type gameplay and allows them options. The control is that in order to get points from this the other side has to control the minority of points, which means that only one side can get points from this at any given time. The big hole is that this may just encourage trading at center, but I suspect that being able to get valor in addition to daily points will discourage that. For the side that controls more points on Ilum, make it so that you have do something more exciting than finding boxes (which makes no sense anyways). A simple suggestion is that you have to go to assault closest to the enemy base and then trigger some kind of event that will cause a few hostile NPCs to spawn. Killing a wave gets you some amount of points. This also allows a chance that the minority side may be able to use this opportunity to gank you, as you're distracted with the mobs. Far from ideal, but shooting mobs is way better than getting boxes. Basic gist: we need a way for Illum to function when one side is massively dominant, in a way that makes it an interesting place to hang out at for however long the daily is supposed to take. Rig points for doing this activity so that the daily will take 30-45 minutes (on the long side, I'm not sure what the goal is), the important point is to make sure that it will always be faster (and better, due to valor) if you can kill the other side, but that there's a way to accomplish the daily if you can't.

Hey I have a medical operative that I stopped playing because the healing was mediocre and I had nothing else to offer in pvp. While I guess it may warrant a new thread, the medical tree needs review. Broken talents are intolerable, but even worse is that a lot of abilities in the tree are just worthless. You have to invest points in diagnostic scan just to get it to act like a extremely mediocre (being gracious here) ability. Even worse, playing a medic operative is boring! You can't do anything besides cast tons of spraypainting probes and then shoot darts at people. No pulls, no pushes, no way to increase speed, nothing to do for survivability. (the ability to make it so that your heals count after using Cloaking Screen is in Concealment? that makes sense!) A few random suggestions: 1. Make diagnostic scan do something in addition to what it does. Give a buff of some type, maybe increase healing received, maybe a chance to make the next heal spell cast instantly, something! 2. Some way to generate TA at range when damaging. It's not that I expect to be able to dps effectively, it's just that I want to be able to do something more varied then auto attack. 3. Make cover increase ability range, because right now all it can do is prevent you from moving while you're in melee range. 4. Give me some ability to help others on my team outside of shooting them with green darts. Sorcs can bubble people or pull them which instantly makes them 50 percent more interesting to play in pvp. Look, I realize I'm just ranting randomly on a forum, but dammit medical operatives are boring to play right now. Make them interesting and I'll start playing mine again, but until then I'll be playing a sorc since that's clearly what you want me to do if I want to buff/heal.

I think something should be done about faction imbalance, and speaking for me the two biggest changes that would result in me playing republic: 1. Being able to transfer items cross-faction to my alts without AH shenanigans. (the only big counterargument I've heard for this is that it wrecks the economy because people transfer items that are sold to the empire for cheaper or something. It seems like faction-specific items would already have a flag or be on the auction house at Nar Shadaa so who cares) 2. Some kind of xp boost for playing the underpopulated faction so I can level up faster. This seems ideal since it doesn't affect level 50s in the slightest.

Not so much a bump, but the OP has the right idea. Crafting is very bleh, and needs some oomph. I want to make my own lightsaber and have some kind of reward for having done so. I want to make cool things, and the current crafting system doesn't really allow me to do that, so fix it! A great jumping off point is buffing crafted items to be better than quest rewards, but make this part of the game worthwhile. I'll spare the "I'm gonna quit" type stuff because it's melodramatic, but having a worthwhile crafting system will add longevity and interest to the game.