I hate swtor so much but I still can't quit because this is the greatest group of people I've ever met in an mmo. I don't think there's a better guild out there for an RP curious individual who still wants to do the traditional mmo stuff (raiding/pvp/etc) -Tai

It's so easy to quit SWTOR, but it's somehow exceedingly difficult to quit Penumbral. I never posted in this while I was playing but I still hang around one of the better communities I've ever had the pleasure of being a part of so it seems somewhat fitting to write my piece here~ ~Tai

and Should tell you that the forums are just a bandwagon of vocal minorities. People will complain and gripe and be upset with EAware but then fiercely defend the game that they continue to patronize and which continues to patronize them. That said, while I do understand some of your frustrations I do think it's a bit of a fallacy to deem your complaints to be objective when some of them are very subjective in nature. For instance, I don't particularly find cartel market spam or content locked behind paywalls to be negative aspects of the game, while I found the major performance issues to be very significant, which didn't really register much on your radar at all. Just my 2cents, I also recently unsubbed for a variety of differing reasons, I wish I could give away all my stuff before my sub time runs out.

24x300

Ironic, because you failed to read my post on the first page describing how our group typically avoids it, the pull isn't telegraphed, but the impale is, and it's possible to pull Darok far enough away from Arkous or Jakarro when you get targeted for impale that if you get pulled you don't land on Jakarro.

I guess easily telegraphed mechanics are just too hard for some people.

Looking for another one of these, if anyone has one hidden away somewhere, name your price

I honestly don't think it would matter if they did this. There's tons of 1-60 founder age players who have no clue how to play their class. I'd wager in most MMOs only <5% are people who are actually optimally proficient with their classes, it might be less in SWTOR because swtor is far more cd oriented and rotation heavy than something like WoW. On top of that, many servers in this game have population issues that this could help alleviate over time, sure you don't want to see clueless john in your groupfinder but at least there's a body there you can teach and play with vs sitting in a queue that doesn't pop because there aren't enough players. I think people overrate how important leveling is to learning a class. Very few end game builds play anywhere remotely similar to what people are doing while they're leveling.

You can minimize this effect, Darouk target switches to whoever will get Impale next. If Jakarro has Impale already and is on Arkous you can just run Darouk really far away and outrange Arkous' pull so you can't get pulled on Jakarro once the Impale goes up on you. If Jakarro is on Darouk instead you can keep running Darouk in a circle so Jakarro is always behind him and if you get pulled you won't die right away. If instead, Jakarro is the next target of Impale and you already have Impale you should be really far away from both of them to avoid being pulled onto him. It's easy because Darouk won't move at all if he's on Jakarro and Arkous will not move while channeling. There are times where it still happens, but our groups very rarely lose anyone to Jakarro anymore.

I didn't expect them to say anything. But even players and rampant exploiters on my server have not been actioned or reported any actions against them. It isn't just bioware that can affirm actions were taken you know.

What part of that conflicts with what I said? Their lack of disclosure further reinforces the concept that very little action will be taken against you if you exploit. Again, I don't care about exploiters at all, I think the industrious ones that moved a Hard Mode Coratanni Lockout to my server which hadn't cleared the first 2 bosses in that operation at the time were ingenious. What I care about is the stance that supports exploiting as the objectively beneficial way to play.

I actually did just cancel my sub, I came back in October after being a beta preorder player and quitting a few months after launch to play through some stories on the 12x exp boost and found myself an enjoyable guild and continued playing a lot longer than I had originally intended. I've invested about 2000+$ since I've been back in the CM, either for myself or by buying CC cards for guild members and friends (because it's the holidays and giving gifts is fun for me), so it isn't like I don't have an investment to continue on, but the Slot Machine really is the final straw. My issue isn't really that they changed it, or that it became whatever it is 'intended,' but that they again, released an exploitable piece of content and then let the early exploiters run away with it while telling people it wasn't a problem. I know lots of my guild members were more moderate in their use of the slot machine because they had read that it was working as intended, (I had bought 4 crates to get enough for our guild ship before I had to be out of town right that weekend to attend an out of country wedding, so I myself also missed out on reaping the rewards), and ended up expecting it to be around and useful for a longer period of time vs spending all their waking time macroing for jawa junk. This is just like the Ravagers exploit where people who got in early have an undeniable advantage over people who got in later, or didn't participate, yet there's no affirmation of any action being taken to curb that type of reward. To be honest, I don't really care what other people choose to do in the game and although I feel like the Jawa Junk fiasco has created a lot of monopoly issues on essential materials on our server, it isn't something that can't be overcome with time. What I really am objecting to is that by their decisions and actions/inactions Bioware is pretty much telling me that if I want the most beneficial edge in this game I need to be on the ground floor of every exploitable mechanic and abuse it until it's fixed with no fear of repercussion and no reward of integrity.

Exactly. Please refrain in the future.

Like your entire posting style is sensationalist rhetoric. You proposed a false clause to start with (that your change would produce a benefit) and then went on to generalize that the benefit would be so great that it would eclipse any possible cost. Both of these statements are clear exaggerations and empty of any actual substance, which would be what an objective oriented cost-benefit analysis could produce, rather than specious conjecture backed up by... nothing?

Yes, and it's irrelevant here.

Both of those contentions are illogical. Neither party knows the cost, thus they cannot know if the benefits can outweigh them or not. ????

I highly doubt you know the cost, so I think it's illogical for you to say the benefits will outweigh them.

Cartel Packs always contain the following: 1 Rep item (green/blue/purple) 1 set of Jawa Scrap (green/blue/purple) OR a Cartel Certificate 1 Companion Gift item (blue/purple) 1 Consumable Boost Item 2 CM only 'Rare' items They will never add more CM 'Rares' without increasing the price of the packs, so asking them to remove the other 4 items will just result in new filler (like when they removed old random crafting materials and replaced them with jawa scraps instead). If you're asking for them to have packs that have more goodies in them you can be prepared to pay a proportionally higher price for those packs.

I just want to clarify that the slot machine doesn't make 192 rated craftables easier to come by, no one is gated by the jawa junk materials when crafting 192s, they're gated by the Exonium / Matter Transubstantiator which are only found at the end of HM FPs and 16M SM or 8M HM ops bosses respectively. That's pretty much the reason for the cost of those 37 mod items, you have to run the ops to get those materials (unless you exploited Coratanni on a lot of different alts). To be honest, for most servers, the majority of those crafted items are from people who exploited Coratanni to get more mats than intended. Having said that, I don't think capping GTN solves the problem you're facing and it creates an entirely different slew of other problems.

I worked in Data Warehousing for 5 years for a major financial institution and attended many conferences on Data Warehousing in that time (in business intelligence now). While I don't disagree that what you propose is possible, many companies are simply not at that level in terms of intelligent data usage. Lots of companies don't even have the capacity to collect all the relevant information from their legacy systems in a warehouse architecture. But I think having the information is only the first step of what you're asking for, they've expressed they have various data points, we don't know how comprehensive those points are, and we don't know what kind of manpower they have to interpret that data, nor the accessibility of it to convert it into meaningful results.

This would be an extremely lenient outcome that would probably just encourage people to exploit in the future.

I think people who think there is an objectively correct outcome here are being idealistic. But I will say, if you go too lenient, not only do you risk people continuing to exploit, but you will have people who didn't exploit feel like they missed out on the chance to exploit. There are always people who genuinely believe in the ethical course of action but also those that are deterred from the unethical course of action through threat of punishment. Those are the ones that become bitter and more likely to exploit in the future when they see previous exploiters go unpunished. Too stringent is also dangerous, people think it's not wide spread, but several of the leading guilds on our server, which is one that is low pop and did not even have an 8M HM clear of Coratanni (someone had to move the lockout here to spread it) have people that I've noticed have participated in the exploit, I don't know how many times or how much they each did it, but I do know that banning all of them is very likely to cause significant damage to the server's community and stability, and we're one of the less egregious offending servers to my knowledge.

Well now that the exploit is closed and we can talk about it freely, the issue is because of the actual Coratanni encounter. One of the things SWTOR does do that a lot of other games don't is use the environment as part of the mechanics in their boss fights, with Coratanni, you have to change locations twice, before arriving at a third location to receive the loot. The issue at launch was, if people died on either of the first two locations, but the team still completed the encounter, they missed out on both the credit for the kill and the chance for the loot (this happened to our MT who died on the second phase). To fix that, Bioware patched in a check that allows people who make it to the end after the boss is down to still receive credit, the rationale obviously is the team must have cleared the encounter for them to be able to speeder travel there, and if they did so, then they should've been awarded credit along with everyone else. The mistake and exploit of course, likely stems from them trying to fix the issue too quickly for the players and not realizing that it's possible for players who were not present to now use this failsafe in order to acquire loot for themselves, even though they weren't participants in the raid at all. It's further complicated by the fact that SWTOR doesn't separate lockouts by raid size, only by difficulty, so it allows people to take an 8m hardmode clear, and then pass it on to each one of their alts or friends or w/e as a 16m op that allows them to zone in and get an entire boss drop's worth of loot for themselves. That's 2 198 set chest piece tokens, 3 198 pieces of offset gear, and up to 2 implants along with possible decorations or mounts. They can also do it once for SM if they wanted to. If anyone thinks that it was intended for you to be able to receive loot for downing a boss without... downing the boss, then I don't really know what to tell you. Though if you participated in the exploit once or twice you probably won't receive much, if any action, they really need to go after the people who were truly industrious and moved their lockouts from the originating (and more progressed) servers to other ones, I know a lot of people on my server have 16M HM Coratanni achievements with no other HM achievements to speak of and a server progress that hasn't even cleared it.

This is a much harder distinction to make because you have to define clearly what casual and hardcore are. You can easily alter the definitions to make that statement true or false, as well as change that statement based on overall total revenue or per person spend to alter the outcome as well. Opposed to the subs/non subs which is easy to define.

You have to consider that SWTOR is a game with a sub and micro trans, while proportionally, casuals are more likely to outspend hardcores by overall volume (rather than per customer spend, which is much more likely to go towards whales) it's very unlikely for f2p/preferred to outspend hardcores on both metrics. The reason being is the most bang for your buck in this game is the sub, so by definition, as soon as they begin to want to spend money they should be buying the sub.