Black Talon is only meant for 2 people. If you're doing it on Story mode, which is where you get the bot, then it's meant to be just that.. Story Mode. Same with most of the solo missions. Some of the other story mode flashpoints are more challenging, but most of them are easy and don't even need the bot. Most of the vanilla story is pretty easy now. Not sure how long you've been gone, but you don't get the challenge like you used to. Some of the newer flashpoints on Veteran mode can be a bit of a challenge, but you're really looking at MM FPs and Vet OPs for the same sort of challenge we used to get. Some MM FPs can still be a biznatch. Once you get to KoTET/FE you can choose your story mode difficulty. Some of the non-vanilla heroics can be a bit nasty still, like a certain one in Black Hole. There's still a few Heroic 4's floating around as well.

Really? Because I run into almost none. The vast majority of problems I encounter are people trying to troll or act the a-hole, just because they can. Even the people that have the problem with the spit emote in this thread don't seem "triggered". The way I read it is that the OP probably had a bad experience with someone trolling and/or harassing them, and their annoyance/anger is just aimed in the wrong direction. It happens to all of us.

There's always been some people that get their knickers in a twist over nothing. I'd hardly say it's many people though, even in this thread where it's like a 5:1 ratio of people who dgaf about the emote.

Well, it's not consistent for me either, but it's getting worse. One day I can log in and no problems. Next day every character gets it at some point. But when it's getting worse than it used to be.

This is the second heroic area that I've gone to today where I cannot actually complete the heroic because of disappearing world. It's not just a small angle, it's an 180 degress in some cases. The first location was in Black Hole, Chasing the Shadow mission. The almost the entire of the second floor was glitched out. The second was Coruscant, Trouble in Deed. The only part of the world that wasn't glitched was from West through to North by North East. It was almost 270 degrees of the view was glitched out and invisible. This really needs to be fixed. This isn't happening on just one character or on any specific graphics setting, nor just in heroics.

The reason I posted what I did was to clarify the situation because you seemed to be conflating a lot of things together and lumping them under inflation. I just snipped your post because I'm used to doing that on other forums.

They're not stealing your RL money. You're thinking of the credits in game as having an inherent value, they don't. The item you sold had the value, the credits are valued based on what people are willing to spend on the items that have real value. Say you buy something that's worth 10$ and the market dictates that it's worth 100cr. Each of those credits is worth 0.1$. If by the taxation of the GTN and various other fees the selling price of that item is now 50cr, then each of those credits is now worth 0.2$. Taking credits out of the system actually increases the value of them, not decreases them. People who are pumping money into the system without it being taken out are the ones who are reducing the value on those credits. As things stand, in a year you'll have lost a ton of value on all the credits you have if inflation continues to rise at a crazy rate.

Those credits that they exchange the CM items for are generated in the game and traded for the CM item. Actually buying the CM item and selling it doesn't generate any more credits, it just shifts it from one player to the other. The generation of the credits, that causes inflation, comes from different sources; Missions, selling items to vendors, etc.

This is an incredibly important think to take note of I think. For as long as I can remember I've seen activity on the GTN that seems to be botting, and I'm convinced it all ties back into the credit sellers.

No offense, but that isn't accurate at all. I started a new character from scratch and by the time they were on Voss they had well over 1M from selling junk, doing some heroics here and there, and doing a handful of FPs on the way. Every mission I'd quick travel back to the nearest point and speeder it, and when I was done with the planet I'd go all the way back to the start if needed (like Hoth, for example). The prices are a bit steep when you very first start, and that definitely needs to be addressed as it can cause problems. But you don't need to play the market and you get more than enough credits to quick travel to the nearest speeder.

The gear inside, my bad for not making that clear. It's not a lot of commendations, but it does trickle in slowly if you're accruing a lot of it. I normally get around about 9-10 after each planet. You should definitely get the commendations on your conquest the moment you level. I tested it just this past week, I frantically got a character to just below 76 before the new conquest came in, did a heroic and it popped over.

I really do wish that one of the biggest ways that they add "difficulty" to this game wasn't by stunning/throwing your character about, from players or NPCs. Like, I get it with a boss, but it just gets frustrating that the biggest difficulty in most content is having your ability to actually play the game interrupted. Give us some big, nasty attack we need to interrupt or avoid, and stop making the enemies recast it faster than we can possibly interrupt, knock-back or circumvent with our own CC. I'd much rather be fighting a group of NPCs where one of them might do this unholy big attack that'll seriously injure me than being immediately stunlocked for 5-10 seconds the nanosecond I enter combat.

I think you need to get one character to 80, and then every character at 76 will get the commendations. Not sure if the 80 character is still needed, but when I popped a character over to 76 (already have 80's), the conquest reward switched to commendations. Also, with regards to getting the commendations, if you deconstruct the gear you get from doing solo content then you'll get commendations out of it. Similarly FP-1 stabilizers from FP gear, and OP-1 Catalysts from Ops gear. Doing a weekly for a planets heroics will give you a green box of gear that'll give commendations when you deconstruct it. You'll also pick them up as random loot in most content, but it's not exactly a sure bet. Edit: Also, don't try to upgrade all your gear at once. Get a blue piece of FP gear that's cheap to upgrade (I chose bracers) and then upgrade it to 336. There's a couple of guys 2 bays over who will give you a quest for deconstructing gear at various item ratings, and once you do that you can buy modification items at that rating. You can buy FP-1 stabilizers from the conquest vendor for 200 commendations a piece, but honestly you don't need to be super geared for anything solo or SM/Vet.

I'd love there to be a reserve option but I can see that being really abused. If there's a big work order and someone reserves it, then that's essentially first come first serve anyway. If that person doesn't complete the order, then the one placing it has just lost out on time waiting for it to be done. Plus, that could easily be manipulated to take an order out of commission, not fulfill it, just so the more expensive ones are sitting at the top of the list. Personally I'd just be happy with work orders. I hate having to mess around with everything I put on the GTN being immediately undercut by 1 credit if it happens to be the lowest price on there. Being able to go to the GTN and just throw stuff into a work order would be pretty awesome.

Interesting because I've noticed the lack of CC on my snipers, along with mercs and PTs, when it comes to PvE. Sniper isn't so bad, because you can build for being CC immune for a large portion of the time but bejasus, the amount I get knocked around on any class other than a knight or a sniper is kinda ridiculous. So much of the game was built around us having the ability to lock down an annoying NPC for a bit, but now that's gone and the gameplay is more annoying than ever. Especially in places like Ruhnuk where you have massive amounts of bullet sponges in one area that also knockback/stun.

When the cap was 65 we got something like 18.5k from doing a heroic, for example. Now we get just under 28k. Other missions can reward up to just under 40k, things like weeklies and story missions, but they're hardly a good source of income/time. That's a 150% increase in quick, repeatable missions. Whereas there's been almost a 30 fold increase in items from even the end of 5.0 /start of 6.0. And that's just working from my memory of things I used to sell regularly, god only knows for CM items. So I'm really not sure how you get the idea that the ability for players to earn money has kept up with inflation. Crafting is possible, I guess, but you're still sinking millions of credits into making it efficient. It takes 473 rank 5 purple gifts (at maxxed legacy perks) to get from influence 1 to 50. It takes over 200 too get from 40 influence to 50, and that's a massive stretch to even approach that from conversations alone, so you'd be looking at tens of millions just to get started crafting. We're talking something like 75 heroics just to top a companion off. Selling off mats really isn't that viable unless all you're doing is farming them. At the current prices it's something in the order of 250 purple scavenging mats and 200 of the mission only mats to be able to afford a single augment. Gold mats will fetch a good price, but that leaves the issue of the time lag in getting to that point; You have to sink a fair bit into gear before they're really going to be in excess for you, but once you get to that point.. granted, that's viable. But you still run into the issue that at even at 50M a pop, you're still only getting 1 purple augment a piece at that price. If all we were talking about was buying cosmetic items then I'd really have very little issue with the prices on the GTN. But augments, stims and medpacks are pretty darn needed if you want to do any sort of serious content in the game, and those are currently priced well outside the viable range for newer players unless they're going to sink even more real cash into the game than the subscriber fee.

That's the sort of thing I hear all addicts say. You have a problem, you should seek help.

Whatever is done with the GTN, I'd like to see something done to keep the prices in line to reasonable levels for newer players. I accept that there's going to be inflation in a game that's been around for over a decade, but the current situation where people can easily buy up cheaper stuff and just relist it immediately at a higher price causes problems for newer players getting pretty important bits off of it by raising inflation even worse than it already is going to be from the influx of credits. For example, augments and augmentation kits. On my main characters server, augmentation kit MK-11's are going for 4.5-5M a piece, and blue 73 augments are going at roughly 5M a piece. At those prices if someone didn't engage in crafting their own augments, it would take 133 million credits to augment a set of level 80 gear. That is far beyond the scope of the income that they would get from almost anything other than buying Cartel Market items and selling them. A heroic rewards around 28,000 credits for completion. That would require them to complete 4,750 heroics for them to get a set of gear augmented. For me, that's not an issue. To be honest, any prices on the GTN aren't an issue for me, as I've been in the game since release day, I have a maxxed out crafter for every trade and anything I truly want I'll just buy. Or sell some of my stocked up older pieces and then buy what I want. But for a new player that is incredibly daunting and nigh-on forces them to get in on the Cartel Market gravy train.

I've used that emote before, and never at a player to be harassing. It has a place with being silly and daft. If other players are using it for harassment purposes then the players are at fault and should be punished. Or there should be a system to actually prevent players from using on those that ignore them. If you remove one emote, then they will just find another way to harass, that's the nature of harassers. For context to understand how I have used the /spit and /flirt emotes, it was/is actually in the same interaction, with my wife; My bounty hunter is female, and her sith is female. We have this ongoing joke about how Torian is dreamy and how I'm angry with Andronikous for showing me up with all his lovey mails he sends. So if she pulls out Andronikous I'll be all, /rude, /spit and she'll be going /no, /rude gesture at me. If she's on her bounty hunter and has Torian out, no matter what character I'm on I'll be going /flirt, which will have her going /no, /rude, /spit at me. Absolutely nothing harassing about that. It's just a bit of a laugh between us alone. It's silly and it makes us giggle. Edit: Not to mention the multitude of times I've /spit and /rude'd at annoying bosses as a tank in our groups.

That used to be the case, but it's completely disabled if you're queueing for, or in, a group finder group/instance. Your only option is to leave the queue or group. To be honest, it's not just veteran FPs that this is really bad for, I could see it being an issue on story mode Ops; There's plenty of times I've solo healed an SM-OP, and for a lot of them the standard practise is to just take a single tank, or with an off-tank who switches when needed. The normal thing in those situations is to just have one of the DPS fill those slots in the group finder and swap role as needed, but that's not an option any more either. It's been a hot minute since I did operations, so that may not have been the practise in the last year or so. But it certainly was for the entire time I was running them on the regular.

I think this is a really big point too, actually. I've just been getting my eye back in for healing, but yeah.. that's stupid.

Getting more than one healer or tank ever since they allowed any group composition has always made the experience a lot longer and more frustrating for everyone involved. If you get duplicated support classes in a group there is absolutely no need for them, and you've just extended the time it will take for the FP to be done significantly, which just breeds resentment for anyone playing those support classes. The option has always been on the table for you to switch spec either before you go in, or while in it once they allowed respeccing on the fly. There is no need to take that away or to not implement some sort of workaround.

Yeah, that too to be honest. It's just silly. I've not had that happen since I came back mysef, but I imagine it'd be just as frustrating.

I've just come back from a long break, gone to do a group finder for the day and ended up in group with a second healer. So, I just say, "Do you want me to switch to DPS?", as a good team player should offer to do if they have the option. Can I do that? Nope. Can I leave the instance and do that? Nope. Do I get locked out from group finder for almost 20 minutes for trying to do the right thing? Yep. So, where in the past I could queue as healer and switch as needed to help the team out, we now have a system that actively punishes you for trying to play a support class and happening to accept a group queue invite at the same moment as someone else? Or I can cancel the queue invite, which is a similar waste of time. If you're not going to let people change their discipline then you need to make sure that you're not allowing multiple healers into groups. Or multiple tanks for that matter. It's ridiculous that this is a thing and it needs to be removed. There's no reason for it on Veteran flashpoints.

Just wanna throw in that there are some MMOs with decent crafting. ESO is one of them. It takes a long time to get all of your traits maxxed out but you can craft some pretty desirable gear. It won't be BiS (most of the time) but it certainly allows you to build some nice set bonuses. Sad thing is, it used to be possible to craft some decent gear on SWTOR. Now it's pretty pointless unless you're talking augments or stims. The current end game crafting is stupidly over-complicated to boot. Crafting green parts so I can make blue parts so I can make purple parts to make one item. Pretty ridiculous. Their either inability or refusal to deal with bots has also made it no fun for most people as well; You can garuntee that if you try to put something craftable or collectable on the GTN at a reasonable price it will be undercut within 10 minutes by a page of the same items priced 1 credit lower. By the same character names that have been logging on every 15 minutes for the last 5 years. When Zakuul first came out it was literally swarming with bots collecting materials. I'm not 100% sure that they didn't address that because it helps them sell stuff off of the Cartel Market (Hey, everyone has millions now! Just spend 30$ to buy an item people want and you can make loads of money!).