I will confirm this and agree wholeheartedly with the frustration brought on by the complete redesign of the Companion system and many of the game mechanics. You tampered with too much and the game experience suffers greatly for it.

I didn't play the originals, so maybe that's where the idea came from. I do know that the current crop of WoW developers have inserted content like this. I found it to be an unnecessary distraction and somewhat broke the flow of the game. It just seems an odd choice to offer it up to subscribers as a "reward".

This, to me, seems like a pretty lackluster reward for Subscribers and I have to wonder why are creative resources being allocated to something that is such a stark departure from the base game? Yes, I know it's not something we directly pay for, being promoted as "bonus content" and it's optional, but I play RPGs to play my character, not some pre-fab content I couldn't care less about. This is really a slap in the face to subscribers who support the game financially month after month.

I'm pretty well convinced that Bioware hired some of Ghostcrawler's old gang, maybe even some of the incompetent new development team from Blizzard. It's like they're remaking the game for some imaginary untapped player base.

I'm not at all pleased with the homogenization of Companions with this expansion. Bioware seems to be shooting themselves in the foot here. I spent a lot of ingame currency as well as cartel coins on Adaptable armor sets for my companions. Now that everything is scaled and all those mods I bought are worthless, I'm wishing that I had kept a lot of the original Companion gear. Akari's armor and Jaesa's robes are a couple that come to mind. After all, who kept these once they were out leveled? After everything gutted from the game this patch, it would be a nice gesture to mail us a package of the unique original armor for each Companion we have unlocked.

With all the homogenization that's occurred with this patch, it makes me wonder if they didn't hire a bunch of Ghostcrawler's destructive dev team from World of Warcraft. Companions are little more than pets now. I wish I'd known they were going to pull something this before I sold a lot of companions' unique armor to free up space. Basically, the devs just simplified the game to make things easier for themselves.

I am feeling a little NGE'ed here.

I'll admit, I haven't been following the Expansion changes that closely, just figured I'd play the game and continue on when I'm ready and the initial bugs are shaken out. But this sounds like SWTOR has been Activisioned!

I'm really close to maxing Binary Star rep, It would be nice to see the Stronghold packs brought back for a week or so,

Cross-servers are not a panacea. They come with a whole new set of problems that will likely turn even more off from the game, just like they did with WoW. While it may seem to be a solution for your particular issues, there is a complete loss of server identity and they often create even more headaches where resources and mission objectives are sparse. More is not always better.

http://www.swtor.com/user/ce/snp

I agree wholeheartedly. I could honestly care less what guilds do and the banners are a damned eyesore. At least subscribers should have the option to turn the thing off.

Shared Cargo hold for all Legacy characters and instant travel to and from make Strongholds worth it to me, even if you never open up any of the extension rooms. Right now is a good time to get the basic ones. because they're cheaper. Just make sure you get the Stronghold mission from the holo image at your Fleet and in the cities. It grants you a lot of worthwhile stuff for the Stronghold (including the shared storage locker) and can be done at level 15. Good luck.

Prepare yourselves for the invasion of the Skint Armada!

OP is spot on. Games that have attempted to focus extensive resources on PvP have ultimately failed. From my observations, PvPers are never satisfied and migrate from game to game like locusts. They make a lot of noise and developers seem to be unable to filter it out, so they wind up disrupting their own game in the never-ending quest for balance and fresh content that will keep this small segment of the player base happy. SWTOR is a story-based game. I can see why Bioware would get this epiphany about this "huge" PvP segment. Creating more story is problematic and resource-intensive. It's much easier to create content that throws two groups of knucklehead into a box and let them butt heads with each other. The trouble is that that won't satisfy this particular consumer long. Meanwhile, the less demanding and much more easily contented segment of the customer base who is here for the story and for the world, begin to feel neglected and fade away quietly. PvPers simply aren't sufficient to maintain something as costly as an MMO and will be the first ones crying for the game to go free-to-play. Good luck with this, Bioware. Who are you going to piss off next week?