Well, here's something I hadn't seen myself doing, but I guess it's my turn for the ol' "I'm unsubbing" thread. I was originally just going to put it all in the unsubscribe box but apparently it's limited to 2,000 characters. So here's my feedback in all its glory, wall of text inbound. As always these are just my own opinions. Hopefully some of the criticisms make its way to someone who can turn things around with this game, though I doubt it. It's been fun these past years on the forums here and in game. I wish you all the best. ------------ I am unsubscribing for a multitude of reasons and failures since post-3.0, culminating in everything you have released (or have not released) with 4.0. You no longer produce content that makes an MMO an MMO, and what content already existed for that has been invalidated in many ways. You supposedly made all flashpoints useful by bolstering them, but in the process you have completely removed any reason to run them. Previously you would use them as a stepping stone for PVE content, as a means of gearing up. Now though you don't need gear for any content. Questing, because you're sync'd down means that your gear is capped and therefore doesn't matter. Doing flashpoints and story operations, you're bolstered and therefore gear doesn't matter. There is currently zero incentive to run flashpoints except for the "fun of it". Your addition of the forced syncing for planets has made it so that any prestige of reaching a high level is lost and forces you to get aggro from every mob you come across, despite being many levels above them. Even assuming that I liked being syncd for planets, they way you implemented it is poor. As mentioned above, stats are simply capped as opposed to making it something dynamic based on your relative gear level or quality, so whether you're a level 65 in level 30 greens or current top end gear it's all the same when you go visit Coruscant. The stat level that you've chosen to sync players to is such that everything is trivially easy. I can still one-shot many mobs, and steamroll through the rest. So the stated purpose of sync, to make lower content relevant isn't even true when it's just as trivial as it was before. You've also made it so that your level is the same regardless of where you are on a planet, despite planets encompassing a range of levels. So the lowest level of a planet's range is even that much more trivial. One of the most egregious examples of how dumbed down you've made your game with this level sync system is fighting the bosses at the end of your character's story on low level planets. Darth Baras for example is supposed to be a boss you fight at level 50, but he is located on Korriban, and so is placed at the level of Korriban. This turns what is supposed to be an epic conclusion of the entire build up of your story into a steamroll of a level 10-ish enemy. It's a pitiful anticlimactic battle. The changes which greatly boosted companions didn't really help with this either. And what did we sacrifice all of this for? So that you could reuse old content that released with the game, put a new grind system on top of it that makes absolutely no sense in the context of the story, and call it "new content". Oh, and in the process you've absolutely destroyed most sources of gear in the game. You removed all of those orange quest rewards and drops. The meat of your big 4.0 content? The big story you've been touting for months before release. It lasts a mere few hours even if you complete all of it and watch all of the cutscenes. The fact that the camera work is some of the best this game has shown does little to make up for the fact that the story lasts a very brief amount of time, is so linear that it holds almost no replayability, and just flat does nothing to hold me as a player. I actually tried to do the story on a second character after I completed it on the first and I could barely stomach going through the same thing a second time, despite picking completely opposite choices. The quest design was awful, I felt like I was being railroaded between a series of cutscenes with multitudes of adds thrown between me and my objective as nothing more than speed bumps to inflate the time. That and, for example, the amount of times I had to run back and forth through the same boring drawn out areas of that swamp on Zakuul I wanted nothing more than to just get it over with. For the story itself I felt like my character was nothing more than a side character, despite being "the one and only savior of the galaxy". I did nothing personally to drive the plot forward, I was merely a puppet to be driven passively through the plot by the NPCs that are supposed to be side characters. It didn't help that nothing about the story really made me feel like the character that I leveled from launch. All of that history might as well never have happened. I am generic "Outlander" #6891247, not the BA bounty hunter I used to be. Not only because of the story, but the new alliance grind, and the new influence grind makes KotFE incredibly alt unfriendly. The idea that I would grind heroics over and over to max out the alliance rep on more than one character is laughable. You've already made all other reputations legacy wide, why would you not do it for this? I can't imagine that many people will do this for more than one character let alone all of their alts. It certainly doesn't help that the rewards are questionable (or nonexistent) and the content I would have to grind is all old stuff I've done since launch. Then there's the influence grind. It's incredibly long, arduous, and expensive. I got one companion to 50 influence and I'm not sure I'd ever want to do that again. This is especially true given that the main method of gaining influence is through companion gifts, which have to be given one at a time at 3 (I think it's 3) second intervals. Your recent change to have all companions on all characters (plus a bunch of other random companions) has turned what was a personal band of characters you connected with into an overflowing collection of no one you care about. There's nothing personal about them anymore, they're just a bunch of identical skins with no real connection. Like some of the other things listed above I'd say that this is a pretty alt unfriendly system as well. I'm not going to recruit them all on more than one character because why would I? They're all the same, I'll make do with whoever I get by default. Or in actuality, I'll just avoid even starting KotFE on my other alts. I don't have to lose all of my old companions and I'm not forever stuck with blinking lights telling me to gather more companion skins. To top off the bad decisions in regards to alts recently is the fact that I can't even customize most of the new ones. They're stuck with whatever you gave them to us in. What's even the point of this? Are you so in love with your versions of the companions that you don't dare let us change it? Bugs are another huge issue you've been suffering from and it's only gotten worse recently. Every patch is plagued with more bugs than fixes, and even those fixes cause more bugs. Important problems take months to fix, some are still not fixed. Anything that's even vaguely not critical is basically set off to the side to never be fixed. An easy example of this is you still haven't fixed an issue with the camera sensitivity bar. It used to work such that you could select any value from 1-100, and now you can only pick something like 0,26,52,78. Effectively the only value you can really choose and expect to still be able to play is 0. This has been broken for over a year or two. Your quality assurance is abysmal. Even the stuff that is found before release isn't fixed before it goes live. Most of your biggest exploits in recent history are a result of known issues being ignored for months. Bugs permeate just about every area of the game now. Your developers, or those who manage them, should be ashamed of the quality of code that is being produced. Now all that aside, the biggest reason that I have decided to stop playing is your flagrant disregard for everything end-game PVE. From your lack of new content that has only gotten longer every time you actually release anything (despite Eric saying to me directly at one of the cantina events that you never want to wait as long as you did between the Dread War and Shadow of Revan again), your abysmal handling of bugs (estimating taking two months to fix bosses not turning around, hah), removing NiM content, screwing up gear rewards, and no current plans to add new content, it's all been a big middle finger to the PVE community. I came to this game for the story, but I stayed because of the friends I made and the content I ran with them. Despite being a "casual guild", the biggest thing that kept our members active (and me active) was the operations content. Without any desire to continue to run the same old operations that I've been playing for years I have no real reason to keep logging in. I have greatly enjoyed and supported this game. I've played since beta continuously (compulsory I'm a founder statement) and put in more hours than I care to admit. I would love to continue to feel this way, but your recent actions have removed what I have enjoyed about this game. With the level of incompetence that has been displayed it almost seems like it has to be the case that you are deliberately trying to push your playerbase away. Whatever the real cause I can't continue to support this game with my money. TL;DR Game is no longer fun. No you can't have my stuff.

Just as an update here: I have officially ended my sub and it will be expiring in 19 days. It's unlikely that I will continue crafting them after that.

That's funny, because I was thinking that by releasing their recent updates BioWare has demonstrated they know nothing about coding either.

Don't know what you're talking about, I played a ton of games in college. Also, for the dedicated it's not terribly difficult to afford a guild ship for yourself.

You must have missed the part where BioWare doesn't do anything to dataminers and they've admitted that there's nothing they can do to stop them. The only reason they don't let people discuss it here is CYA. Who would have thought that people who likely can't post on the forums anymore would flock to a popular third party to discuss the game. Do you even free speech bro? They can police their own website, they can't police others'.

LOL /5char

[citation needed]

I think here is a good place to give some before/after examples of why 9,999 was such a great change for my characters. http://imgur.com/a/fbH2r

This reminds me of a "fun" discussion from a while ago about whether or not people are allowed to call scams scams.

Mail times out after a certain time and gets deleted. I think it's like 30 or 60 days. You can still quick travel to your stronghold from anywhere, you just can't use it to get to fleet or your ship. Personally I never use those anyway. Going to fleet from your stronghold spits you out in the starter world departures zone, whereas using the fleet pass puts you in the main area. So I always use the fleet pass anyway. If you need to go to your ship you can buy the quick travel to your ship, it's not that expensive. Then again, is there really much of a reason to use your ship if you're not still leveling? Most important places can be traveled to directly from the fleet quick travel terminals.

Wasn't a good portion of the people working on ShadowRealms former SWTOR devs? Heck, apparently Eric was supposed to do CM for both. Plus at least a few devs were also moved from SWTOR to ME:A. So we already have proof that they are willing to funnel devs out of SWTOR to work on something else. With whatever this next thing being at Austin (unlike ME:A which is primarily being worked on at another office) it's very likely they will be taking more people from SWTOR.

Things get solved?

You know there's an input box that you can just type the number you need.

Been playing since early access, and a couple of the beta weekends if we want to include that too. I used to play every single night for probably 3-6 hours, and more on weekends. Starting probably midway through 3.x I've found myself playing less and less though. At this point I'm barely playing. Did the KotFE content in a couple days, did the 4.1 stuff in an hour, but other than that I mostly just log for a few minutes in the morning to craft and relist on the GTN. I used to log in for our raiding nights at least twice a week, sometimes a few other nights to help out other groups, but recently our raid group disbanded in SWTOR so I don't even do that anymore (we're in the process of moving that group to a different game).

I don't think it was mentioned already, but I'm pretty sure that when you go preferred you will only be able to queue up one item at a time for crafting. So instead of being able to craft 30 items at a time it will be only 6. (I haven't unsubbed before so I can't confirm the above from first hand experience, though I probably will be unsubbing soon)

Add to the long list of things they won't likely patch for a long time, if ever.

Of course player boxing should be allowed. In fact it's encouraged by the game. Why do you think they included the legacy punching abilities?

Why is 999 OK, but not 9,999? Do you have some strange need to have full stacks or something? How about this, any time you get a stack that's bigger than 999 you break it up into a separate stack. If they had gone with your suggestion and done stacks of 999 then I would have had a few materials that would be in multiple stacks. Instead, with the size of 9,999 all of my materials fit in one stack, nicely in my legacy storage. If they were going with the limits imposed by the value type they used in the database then the number would be a power of 2. 99 and even 9,999 is an artificial limit imposed by the designers.

I'm not personally too concerned about allowing people to hide, but it's a concern for some players with the current implementation so I wanted to include it. I don't ever really look at other people's legacy names (you have to physically be looking at their nametag and they have to be showing it) so I wouldn't be able to accurately say. However, many people aren't very clever and I'm sure there are many duplicates of common legacy names. Also, for anecdotal evidence, my fiance has the same legacy name as me. But more directly to my point, people will already impersonate officers by claiming to be their alts, including naming their characters similarly. For anyone so inclined, it's not hard to copy someone else's legacy name. This may all be moot though if what one of the other posters said is correct. It's possible that instead of actually displaying the legacy name itself (as the name of the column would imply) that it will instead display the name of a character you select. As character names are unique, unlike legacy names, this is less of an issue. I agree with this. I however was not happy with my understanding of the legacy column, given what I know already about dishonest players. It would mean that the current (somewhat arduous) task we already have of keeping track of alts would have to stay in place. We wouldn't be able to rely on the column for what it is supposed to be for. I hope they continue to make improvements instead of stopping with these.

You may be right. That is at least a better solution than straight legacy name, which is what it sounded like they were doing. Calling it a Legacy Name column is a bit of a misnomer in that case. I can definitely understand that being a potential issue. It's certainly something they could get around if they chose to (I'm imagining them storing an account as joining a guild as opposed to each individual character, and then having information on each character on whether or not they choose to associate with that guild or something), but anything like that would likely be a non-trivial rewrite of how the current system works. I'm not surprised that they would go with the easier solution in that case. Still disappointing there wasn't a better solution.

The guild ship hooks and bulk moderation will be greatly appreciated though.

It's nice that you're bumping the guild limit, and that will certainly help. But, why not just change it to account limit? You already track the number of accounts in a guild. That would remove any headaches of alts completely. That's really the biggest downside to the current limit. It's not so much the number of people as it is being able to hold all our members' alts. If everyone has 8 characters then you can only have about 62 people in your guild currently. The change to have a legacy name column is frankly an awful idea. Well, let me rephrase: it's a great idea that will be implemented awfully. Legacy names are not unique. So you're going to have people who have the same legacy name on different accounts that will appear like they are the same person. So you've just made it even easier for people to impersonate officers. As it is now, any guild worth their salt is going to have a method of identifying alts and tracking that information. With something like this, anyone who relies on this as a replacement is going to be going off of potentially false information. Sort by legacy name, set all characters with the legacy name to officer. Oops, you just promoted joe-shares-the-same-legacy-name to officer as well even though he shouldn't be. He now has full access to your guild bank. A much better solution would be that it would be displayed as a drop down tree. Main character has an arrow next to the name which you can expand and it shows all of their alts. Impossible to fake being a part of the same account because it won't show together. Another part of the legacy name column that will be a mistake is that you can't hide under an anonymous character anymore in that guild. Some people have alts that they don't share the name of so that they can either get some alone time where they're not bothered or they can play some "undercover boss" to see what happens when they're not around.

I don't think the OP is saying give it only to those who were affected. I think he's saying make it available to all synthweavers and armormech. And I agree that would be a good change. But you know, that would be too smart of a change so they won't.

Maybe because they had four months to make this tiny amount of content and released it as a buggy mess? If they did proper testing we wouldn't even need this "hotfix" patch. How can you defend their testing practices when we're waiting on a patch that has to fix several major bugs?

That may be true for new players or returning players, but for those who've been around for a long time there's next to nothing to do. It's all old rehashed content that I've been doing for years. A new 20 minute story once a month or less isn't exactly enough to keep those people around.