SPOILER: Romantic return of Vette for the warrior.

Dps companions work just fine. Obviously the higher the influence level the better and easier it becomes. Get a comp to level 10-15 and it will be noticeably more pleasant. I've cleared the star fortresses and the Eternal Championship with DPS companions on both a sorc and op healer. The only time I ever had to turn them to tank spec was the final boss in the Star Fortresses. Other than that the DPS companions have been great. It's easier if you use keybinds for your comp attack and follow commands, but you should be using those anyway. I found the melee companions a little easier to heal than the range ones on the harder content purely because they are easier to move out of stupid, but otherwise, pick your favourite and go for it. It's effective and easy. It's also a very easy way to do heroics while watching TV too. Let the comp worry about what to attack, you just pull and heal.

I took great pleasure in the beginning of KotFE to send Darth Marr out crafting for me. No, no, I don't care about your stinking ship blowing up, go scavenge for me minion! He's condescending, judgemental, closed minded, and a naive simpleton. And a ****. Everyone disagrees with us at some point and we don't judge them as characters because of it, we just accept those traits that gave rise to those opinions and love/hate them as normal. Koth however, is nothing BUT his opinions. He has proven to be loyal only to himself and his opinions on multiple occasions. That is not a trait we trust... or can like. He rates and judges everyone against his opinion. Opinions that everyone has to agree with and support "or else" are very dangerous things. His is the kind of stupidity that gave rise to witch trials. There was no reason for him to be like this, it was just sloppy writing.

Way too much RP for me. I don't like him because he is sloppy at his job, doesn't think ahead, and I find it highly unlikely someone like him would ever have been promoted in military service. His unicorns and rainbows view of Valkorian was always going to be a problem given our history with him. Maybe he was once good at being an unconventional soldier taking orders and perhaps he should have stuck at that. I don't think it was necessary for the writers to make him such a blindingly stupid character. He could still have objected to our view of things without being so happy-shiny or annoyingly preachy and ignorant.

It insta-killed me too.

I suspect I'm right about what the dev's intent was, however, it got mangled before we eyeballed that post. It goes without saying that BW need to raise the bar a little on what qualifies as adequate writing skills. There are far too many posts that contain ambiguities and overall carelessness. They are writing for people with varying English comprehension abilities and they really can't afford to be this sloppy, never mind as conflicting as this post seems to have been. BW's communication skills have been poor for some time now; communication just isn't a priority for them so this nonsense probably isn't going to go away anytime soon.

I guess they don't want us to be able to make a profit from crafting alone. They require us to do something else AFTER we've crafted or gathered, like make and sell an item or GTN the mats. Not that I object to that concept, but they kind of left all these things running for a long time that didn't tick that checkbox. Then when they change it, they're sneaky and underhanded about it; seems a bit of dodgy way to do things.

I didn't read that the same way at all. This is my understanding. If you were subbed on July 1 then you qualify. This condition is binary, a yes/no status. If no, then you're done, do not pass go do not collect $200. The last line was about subscription, not qualifying. What he was saying in my understanding was that if you dropped your sub between the original delivery date and the actual date, then you would still get the content as though you were subbed when the patch landed. It wouldn't be fair to bar you from that content that you would otherwise have received had they stuck to their scheduled delivery date. He should have added the word "Qualifying" in front of that third line for people who skim over text, or for whom English is not a first language. Of course its possible I'm altogether wrong but that is how I read his post.

I connect from a half a world away and use a tunnel VPN to keep my latency down as much as physically possible. I was disconnecting way too often and pingplotter was reporting a terribad tier 3 server in San Diego that my normal internet tries to use. The VPN tunnel software gives me an option to choose my exit point. This fixed my disconnect problem. I can now rotate through exit points until I find one that completely avoids San Diego. This is not the sort of problem BW can do anything about. Run pingplotter and see where the problem is. It will show up fairly quickly if it is a network issue, even your own router. If nothing shows up, then the problem is more likely on your PC.

This was a thing when they first brought in the keys. You could only have one key on each account and if you removed it, you couldn't add another. That is why people find old posts that warn against removing keys. But whatever was causing this (I'm assuming it was the tech of the old keys), no longer exists and you can add and remove to your hearts content now.

I rolled a tank jugg and a healer consular to get me to eternal.. then realised I didn't want to do the FPs on a class where I had to know what I was doing so rolled a merc. Not going to do Legendary. I will keep the jugg, can never have too many... probably ignore/park the other two. I already have more than two of everything so I'm not worried about these. Maybe use them later to transfer a legacy if the need arises.

Also many of us who are happy to stop after Eternal have finished it, short of chapter 16. So thats a lot of people who were uglying up the start zones that are now back to camping out in their SH's while they queue for things or build more SH's, or whatever it is that floats their respective boats.

The standard of play in PVP has crashed in the last couple of weeks. If all the good players were on new alts as part of the event the bar wouldn't have been lowered so far. My money is on a lot of people having reached their limits on what they will tolerate from BW at the same time as Overwatch hit its stride. Many have probably dropped to preferred to wait out what they perceive to be BW's poor choices. The Ops crowd probably did likewise but to different games.

The problem for me with this light versus dark polling is that all things are not equal. If you go Imperial you can easily play light or dark. Dark comes pretty easily as self centered, homicidal nutjob is part of the job description, but light isn't a stretch either. Light is often far more pragmatic and turns out to be best for the empire over your own ambitions. So both work. But the same is not true for Republic. There, light side comes naturally, but dark is much more difficult. Dark choices there clash with the responses from the NPCs a lot more. The whole "I killed everyone because reasons" doesn't sit well with the "you're now a jedi master because you're awesome". I guess with all that I'm saying that in the long run, light side probably has an advantage. I realise a lot of people will spam quests and characters to try to stack the deck, but probably the bulk of stats will come from people playing through normally. And there the bias will probably come into play. I would like to see them put the losing companion in the CM so that the chunk of people who missed out on their preference can still get it. I think there will be tears before bedtime on this type of polling. And if this polling for the comp is the entire basis for the structure of the event they came up with, then I'm not really impressed. It's flawed from the start; people may have a strong preference that will be unsatisfied and that becomes quite a big issue if they put a lot of work into it.

BW's promotional verbage for this event implied that the drops from the boxes would be good... but for me so far they've been far worse than standard cartel crates. They have a high number of experience boosts that are next to useless, overloaded with bottom of the barrel crystals, and one gold item from the entire "reward" regardless of how many boxes in the reward. Often as not that gold item is supplementary armor to a set that would cost you millions to buy the other two parts. I got silver and bronze stuff, most things I had already as they're the crap that sells for less than 10k on the GTN and I'd already bought them. Can't even vendor them either. Padding the crates with exp boosts was pretty low... even Jawa scraps are better than those. Really disappointing. Seems the rewards for doing this event are the guaranteed items like the mounts/titles etc. The crates really don't qualify. I'm about halfway through champion and my disappointment is starting to outweigh my interest, knowing they're just going to keep trolling with the boxes. I'm sure they're having a great laugh in the office about it too. Given the items are bound and can't find their way into the GTN, and these boxes are time and progression limited, as in we can't really repeat them, would it have killed them to give us a bit of a break with the RNG and up the odds in our favour a bit?

Unless of course, we get her back later in the story somehow.... They wouldn't really be able to tell us to calm us down and it's all ok in the long run. It's hard to tell the difference between story preserving silence and what normally passes for communication from BW though.

I had the same experience with the bonus quest. It seems the first doodad to activate the troopers is bugged and we could only use the second one. BW didn't get Guss done on time so no alerts this time out. Story ran pretty much as expected though how Scorpio shafted us wasn't terrible. Scorpio was a high level comp on at least one of my chars so not overly happy about losing her. The credits earned from heroics has been halved, the discount on new character slots is only 25%... Yeah, this chapter... totally awesome. BW is really nailing consistency. Horrible decisions and spotty quality. On a bright note I died when I fell through a hole in the floor... that was fun, I always enjoy finding new and interesting ways to die.

Probably to encourage us to do the new event rather than the heroics. They do seem to be falling over themselves to make some pretty awful decisions. Maybe EA needed a new tax loss .....

It's too hot here to be doing any of that outside stuff. I need to find a spider that raced through the door and over my foot like someone had set it's arse on fire. A ~15cm spider is a lot harder to find than you'd think. I've also picked up Arc Survival from the Steam sale.. .it's decent but kind of annoying with the limited console controls. The port is good but it's still like playing with one arm tied behind your back. I'm looking at a couple of smaller MMOs that are still in development. Here's hoping EA don't convince them to sell out. Forsaken Legends is interesting... sandbox not theme park so it holds a lot of appeal to an old timer like me. Then again, maybe I'll just clean up the balcony that I keep putting off and find whatever it was that terrified the spider enough to want to face certain death rather than stay out there.

BW communication skills strikes again. I can't find this written anywhere. Would love to see the link if you have it.

Having to get level 5 valor is laughably easy. You don't even have to win the warzones, just show up, follow the group and stumble around shooting anything red. Now if they would change the 21 tactical requirements to just showing up and stumbling into walls then I'd be a happy camper.

Legacy names aren't unique on a server.

I really don't think Gus counts as a force user..... he's funny as hell but one thing he patently isn't is an all powerful force user. And thats not even going anywhere near how he's a goddamn fishhead. I use Xalek on a lot of characters even with his hideous bony face as he has amazing abs and looks good in tight pants. And he feels tougher than the other comps. I'd use Lord Scourge if he was an option in a heartbeat. But yes, the noteable absence of hot, male forceusers is unfortunate. And given it's always been this way in this game, I really don't see it changing. BW don't do change.

You're assuming they want founders to stick around. When a game caters to new players at the expense of the long time players, the last thing you want is those old players hanging around whining about it in the forums. They've gotten a lot of money out of the founders already, and how much more they will give over is probably questionable. So, they're going for the churn. New players in, siphon their cash and spit them out for newer players. New faces means the old stuff is new again and the devs don't have to build much new stuff to satisfy the content locusts who've outstayed their welcome. Older players come back every few months to check out if anything has changed and enough will cycle back to keep the money coming in. Until they don't.

I think what they're going for is long time subscribers will buy a transfer to a new server to activate their current legacy there. They will then somehow complete all the requirements. Then they will maybe buy a new slot on their original server and pay again to transfer back at least one character to bring the achievements and pay for unlocks to bring items back. And perhaps they're relying on guild peer pressure to push people to do it together to get that top tier grouped stuff done. That's a lot of cartel coins that would get hoovered out of the system or new purchases made. Not only does this entire thing keep people who take part busy, but also opens their wallets. Of course the price on transfers having gone back up again was totally unconnected to this event and it never crossed the pointy haired managers minds I'm sure. All my friends have already gone to Overwatch. I suck at FPS but this is making Overwatch look more like its worth trying. That purchase price is a big stumbling block but I dunno... this event is ... infuriating.