Not exactly. This is how it worked at launch, up until 1.2. Then, for a while, it was changed so that you could only do one at a time, and the game wouldn't let you activate a second identical crafting mission until the first one finished. You wouldn't even get a casting bar. Oddly enough, the patch notes stated "Players can now send multiple companion characters on a mission granted by a Mission Discovery if the player had more than one of that Mission Discovery." Then, at some point in 1.3, it changed again, to a case where it would let you activate a second one, but you wouldn't actually gain the mission again. At this time, you can't run the same mission twice, but you can lose the item if you click on it while the same mission is either ready to run, or being run. So it isn't a full reversion to the original behavior, but rather a worst case mix of the two behaviors. The current schematic problem is a full reversion to the behavior at launch time.

Pretty much. Prior to Grade 6, the rich yield missions are the only ones that can result in purple mats, and then only if you crit the mission results. At Grade 6, there are no rich missions (at least not for grade 6 mats), so I think Abundant missions get the ability to crit for artifact mats, but I'm not certain because I run so many rich grade 5 slicing missions (where these crafting discovery missions come from) that I usually have enough of the artifact mats that it's not worth fishing for more from crits. This is especially true for Grade 6 Bio mats from Diplomacy, the blue (or "prototype" grade) mats are pretty much vendor trash, but the artifact mats are greatly desired.

The missions they're talking about saving are the crafting missions that come from discovery items. Those all reward better than rich rewards, and if it's a mission skill, always get you the "artifact" grade materials. You can't "save" other missions, as your missions get reshuffled fairly often, so even if you don't run a non-discovery mission, it might not be available after zoning, logging, or even just sitting around 10 minutes or so. Basically, these missions are valuable because they get you the artifact grade materials every time, but with this bug, you're getting half as much materials as you should unless you crit the mission.

Today's patch was purely client side, so I knew it wasn't going to fix this issue even before I saw the patch notes. Hopefully later this week or next week, but I wouldn't count on it. When green slicing cash boxes were returning less than intended, it was fixed in about a week once someone actually managed to document what the problem was. This problem was documented much faster, at least.

Neither having the rich return less than the bountiful, nor having only non-crits affected by this change would make sense in this case. In fact, I can't see any case where the first makes any sense, and I can't see the second making sense unless they want to make crits more important in crafting, in which case it doesn't make sense to not widen the gap on the moderate/abundant/bountiful missions as well.

As a programmer who's had stuff like this bite me in the rear, I can't agree more with the latter, and I've suspected the first as well, because of the frequency that old bugs have returned, new features reverted to previous state, etc.

As near as I can tell, all non-crit Rich or higher missions are only giving half the rewards since 1.4

Agreed, new was the wrong word, it's back as of 1.4.

I can almost promise you this is a bug. Why? Because the return for Rich Thermoplast Flux missions also got cut in half. It went from 32 to 16 for a non-crit. Why am I confident this is a bug? Because a Bountiful Thermoplast Flux mission still returns 24. So either it's a bug, or they blew the nerf, having a Bountiful return more makes no sense. And no, this isn't a mislabeled mission like the old Rich Grade 6 missions were, as the Rich missions are more expensive than the Bountiful. Bingo, I just had a Rich Thermoplast Flux mission crit, and it returned 40, which was the pre-patch number for a crit for that mission. So it looks like the results are getting cut in half for all non-crit Rich missions that I can remember the pre-patch numbers for, crits aren't being affected, and non-Rich missions aren't being affected.

There's a new bug (as of 1.4) that makes this even more important. If you right-click on a recipe you do know, you get the cast bar for learning it, it goes away, and then you get the "You already know that schematic" message.

Yes, and ALL that effort had already been made so that the characters could show emotion during cut scenes. Really, all they did here was make it possible to have a "default" facial expression other than neutral, and give us a way to set that default. And even that was through slash commands, so it's not like the UI took much time. As a programmer, this really seems like something someone either prototyped or specced out, showed it off up the chain of command, and someone decided that the amount of work needed to complete it was minimal enough to not significantly impact any other ongoing development, so it got thrown in almost as a freebie. It's called low hanging fruit, and I've never seen a major software project that never had something like this happen.

Not so much, really. Not saying that what they did is better and more viable than all of these solutions, but at the very least, it's debatable. From what I've seen in our guild, inactive players seemed to get lower priority on keeping their names. to be honest, given what our guild roster looks like, I think that's what they did for the duplicates. Can you imagine the rage of all the lvl 50 mains who's name got sniped by someone that didn't have work/school when the servers came up and they lost it to low level alts? I suspect that the people pushing this idea think that many of the people that lost names lost them to inactive players, which given that we don't know all of the factors that went into who got to keep the name, probably isn't the case. Again, from what I've seen in our guild roster, inactive players seemed to be more likely to lose a name. Doesn't work, you don't have a legacy until one of your characters finish the first chapter of their class story. If you make them declare a legacy name at lvl 1, then this becomes a more restrictive version of the fifth idea. I don't see that as addressing the main problem, just a requested feature on top of what they've done. Possibly viable, as really you're just allowing a single space in the character name, though I'm not sure I'd trust the devs to find all the places that this would break, let alone come up with decent fix. Would mean more typing when sending mail or whispers, but just about any solution would. We'd still see problems on server merges with people upset that they lost some obvious Starwars reference, since all those characters have well known first and last names. And the second. Someone else coming up with the same suggestion doesn't make it different or more viable. and the fifth. Reasonable, though I'm not sure how viable shoehorning this ID system into the existing game would be from a programming standpoint (yeah, I program for a living, so I tend to look at suggestions from that point of view). The rest are all duplications or variations on what has already been said. Not so sure we differ so much as say that there were only two ideas here that would actually be more fair, three if you consider surnames and legacy names differently. Of those remaining ideas (all of which take the "first name isn't unique approach"), I don't think either of us are in a position to say whether the devs could have implemented them before free-to-play launches, and handwaving away any difficulty in a solution isn't really providing a solution.

I think it should be pointed out that this question and answer was before they started talking about how free-to-pay would affect the subscribers, so it's fair to say that that answer isn't specific to paying subscribers, so they may be saying that that's what free players will find there. With that in mind, here's a few things that free players will have to pick up in the cash shop that paying players already have access to. Increased (or removed?) limit on number of flashpoints a day that they can run, with paying customers having no limit. Increased (or removed?) limit on the number of warzones a day that they can run, with paying customers having no limit. Increasing the number of character slots, which will have a lower limit than paying customers. The ability to run operations, which paying customers can already do. In my mind, all these would fall under the "content and feature access" category, so it's possible that that's what they're talking about. However, there's also no indication that that is all he was referring too. I'm not assuming that they're going pay to win, but if I reach the point that my subscription alone doesn't leave me satisfied with the game, I'll leave, and having people having gear functionally better than mine because they paid more would certainly reduce my satisfaction. Not a threat, as I don't expect it to be necessary. On the other hand, I wouldn't be shocked if they did go that way, as I'm slowly losing faith in the gaming industry as a whole.

Well, it may be a bit of the first and some disagreement on the latter, if you're saying secondary stats are better point for point. I've been playing around with SimulationCraft (WoW's SimCraft adapted to SWTOR combat models) for my Sage (haven't played around with the other classes yet), and in every case (at lvl 50), my primary stat (willpower) has been above secondary stats, with power being the only one that comes close, and even then, not by enough to make up for the fact that power has a lower item budget. This was true when I first started raiding in Tionese grade gear, and is still true in mostly optimized BH/campaign gear. Armor gets you endurance and your primary stat, DPS Mods get you endurance, your primary stat, and either power or crit. Enhancements get you endurance and two secondary stats, and I think the higher level enhancements have more variety than the lower level ones. I'm pretty sure I've seen enhancements where the two secondary stats were the two you want, but I'm not sure, since it's not one that I'd use. From what I've seen of the non-modded gear, it tends to trade off primary stats for secondary stats. While that may be a good tradeoff if you're seriously short on secondary stats, that case just doesn't happen at or near lvl 50 with modded gear, since modded gear will have two or three secondary stats on every piece. And with the item budgets you see when you start getting into OPS gear, diminishing returns plays a serious factor in stat balancing. Power doesn't suffer from diminishing returns, primary stats might suffer from diminishing returns on the crit you get from it (I don't know, I've heard conflicting info), but not from the damage/healing you get from it. All other stats suffer from diminishing returns that are programmed into the conversion formulas. For example, the same amount of crit rating that gets you 1% crit when you've got a very low crit rating will get you noticably less crit when you're at higher amounts of crit. Now, my point of view is strictly as a lvl 50 in Tionese-quality gear or better. It's probably a bit different as you level. There, I tend to stick with modded gear because I can craft prototype or artifact level mods of every type every 2 or 4 levels. On the other hand, it's not unusual to go more than four levels without an upgrade for a given slot if you're using crafted non-modded gear.

Exactly. I know people that already think that space missions are too hard, and free flight space combat would just make it that much worse. In a world where end-game raiding is more casual than it's been in the past, do you really think that they're going to go hard core on a mini-game? Would I enjoy a free flight space combat sim? Since I already play one, the answer is probably yes. Would I enjoy it as much as the one I already play? I doubt it. Depending on how involved it is, I probably wouldn't use it as filler while I'm in queue for whatever I'm in the mood for, either.

Because the developers don't want it in the group finder until they can put gear restrictions on what you can queue for in group finder. Basically, they said that EC Story mode requires at least Columi gear, but there's no way in the current Group Finder to restrict it to characters that have that gear, or to even tell the players that that is what is expected. If they were to put it in groupfinder now, there would be people turning up there in blues and maybe even greens because they don't realize that EC Story requires better gear than KP/EV Story modes do.

Agreed on both counts. Assuming that you're talking about companions with maxed out affection, the normal crit chance is what, 20%. The highest bonuses equal 5% more, so you're talking about getting 25% more crit results (percentage of crits, not of attempts, so going from 20 crits to 25 crits out of 100). +5 crit chance bonuses are few and far between, +2 is much more common, at which point you're talking 10% more crit results, and unless you're doing a LOT of crafting, that's going to get lost in the noise.

I don't remember where, it might have been in this interview, but someone official said that part of the reason that "what comes next" is hard for even them to predict is because they have different teams working on different things. What comes next is a matter of which project gets finished next. So this sounds perfectly in tune with that. They've got a team working on HK-51, and a team working on something in the Belsavis area, and which one of these we get first depends on which one gets done first. You call this obfuscating, but given the reality of how they do their developing, promising one before the other is just asking for predictions to be wrong and then they get called a liar. As a side note, if they're a bit sloppy with whatever source code management they do, this could also explain why fixed problems tend to break again, because some part of the fix doesn't get propagated out to all the working branches, or the merge isn't done right.

The only recent comments I've heard is that it will happen after the forced transfers take place, which I think it sounded like that should be happening this month. Which isn't to say that paid transfers will be coming immediately afterwards.

Why? The whole point of the legacy system is so that your characters benefit from each other. I've been an altoholic in every MMORPG I've ever played, and my most advanced characters have almost always been suppliers of money and items for the lower characters.

Any of them that's not a main? You do realize you can mail credits to alts, right? Now that the tooltips on the character legacy options specify that they're not legacy-wide, I've got no complaints. It's a little odd that all the legacy stuff added in 1.3 wasn't legacy wide while everything that came before was, but that's about the extent of any problem, a violation of the principle of least astonishment, which while that might have been a point when 1.3 came out, it's a little late to argue that, since the only people it would apply to would be those that hadn't played since prior to the 1.3 release. I'm surprised that there's anyone that buys legacy stuff that doesn't know about this by now.

I'm not seeing it. I run dozens of grade 5 rich and grade 6 missions every day, and I crit fairly often, and some days I'm getting missions faster than I can run them (admittedly, I've got more slicers than I do toons to run the missions).

I think you worded it correctly, I just don't know the correct answer, since I don't pay attention to the names of the missions unless I run them frequently, and in this case, I don't. 'Slicing missions that return "Grade 6 Sliced Tech Parts"' is the best answer we can give unless we've got the names memorized. If you look at the bottom line in each mission description, it will list what it returns. With that answer, we don't even have to worry about which faction you're part of (missions sometimes vary between factions).

Correct. The only way to get a crafting mission that guarantees them is to obtain the artifact-grade 340-skill slicing mission discovery, then run the mission it grants. There's a reason that those mission discoveries go for so much in the GTN.

That changed at some point, you no longer need to do the initial quest chain to unlock the dailies. I was rather surprised by this one time when I headed there on a lvl 48 that hadn't even finished Hoth yet just to grab some datacrons, just to find all the dailies awaiting me. And I agree that Ilum/Belsavis dailies are the most effective way to level 47 to 50 as far as time spent, though if you're in the mood to do 12 hour days, limiting yourself to just those would be a bottleneck.