An Ughnaught engineer/Jawa scavenger(LS/DS) class would be fun, relying on traps, grenades/bombs for damage and stuns, as well as buffing/healing gadgets to support other group members. It doesn't have to be competitive in terms of parsing, just a different jack of all trades playstyle option that doesn't excel in anything in particular, sort of like what bards are in Fantasy RPGs. Another idea for Ughnaughts/Jawas is droid controller class who basically sends out droids to accomplish various attack/heal/buffing combat tasks. I know it sounds like the companion system except it will be multiple droids and can be changed on the fly mid-battle, with more micro-management choices, kind of like what beast masters/summoners are in fantasy RPGs.

Honestly, those QT, SH, Priority transport costs are pointless. It's like persistently poking at players but the annoyance level is hardly worthwhile given the tiny amount of credit they will remove from the game. For example QT will only start to add up for people who play story missions a lot, as in "do mission/QT to turn in/advance story", rinse repeat 10 times on each planet. Weeklies runners use it *maybe* 2 or 3 times per weekly(Manaan/Ruhnuk/Ossus/Onderon/Rishi) and for some weeklies only once(Oricon/Ziost) or none at all(CZ-198). As an alternative, just remove the credit reward from weekly missions upon repeat completions. For example, first time completion each week (per character) grants credits as normal, repeating it only grants conquest/reputation/item/tech frags but no credits. This way casual players who run through the weeklies once per week per character won't have their already scarce income stream limited, and hardcore conquest players can still get what they need and won't even bat an eyelash at zero repeat completions credit rewards. Additionally, HM/MM Flashpoints and Ops completion credit rewards and mob credit drops can also be removed. Only serious or hardcore sub players do these contents and few if any are dependent on these incomes to begin with. Hell, if removing credits is such a huge thing that must be done, apply a credit cost to groupfinder activities. First 10 times (legacy wide) each week is free, after that every queue pop will cost say.. 1-10k to enter. The more you do, the higher the entry fee. This is coming from someone who PVPs at least 20 matches just about every week. That's my piece.

Make sense. The sequel trilogy pretty much demolished any chances of future major cinematic projects based on the Luke/Han/Leia New Republic timeline, unless they retcon the whole damn thing, which has already been rejected as an option if I recall. Anyway, the new cast is not nearly popular, strong or memorable enough to carry on by themselves. Once Disney has had their fill of the Disney+ FOTM, fill in all the gaps with as many streaming series as they can squeeze in, they might have no choice but to look backwards at the Old Republic era for a treasure trove of source material.

Yeah, if EA is truly interested in bringing about a SWTOR revival, then the conversion to 64-bit is a must. But that's really just cosmetics. With the game economy the way it is, the wonky end game gearing progression system, and crafting being essentially neutered, they have a long, long, long way to go before making this game attractive to the mass market.

I started the game as a founder, quit for like 9 years and came back last year. I'm honestly surprised it is still around after seeing only 5 servers, I think it originally started out with 20 or something? I'm guessing the delay in 64-bit implementation is like everything else lately, lack of manpower budget. Quite frankly, I think EA/BW is at this point just forcing the game to chug along in the hopes of Disney may eventually pay up for the TOR IP, with the Andor series "Belsavis" easter egg the latest example of Disney's possible future direction. The fact that the game is still around could be used as a bargaining chip to drive up the price. Just a conjecture but who knows, might be true.

It's the middle of the night where I am, I'm sure going outside to watch the moon and stars here would be a lot different than watching them from back home in the US, really broadening my horizons.

Yeah, EA is at least consistent in that. It just surprises me that they don't even know the difference between "available" and "mandatory". If the 64-bit client were truly an optional update that "available" seems to suggest (but strongly encouraged or becomes mandatory by a later date), I would of held off the update for now and let it download another time, say when I'm out at work or something.

There are only so many trans-pacific fiber optic cables and since it is the middle of the workday in the US and with me having to connect to a US server for the update, yeah, I'm f*****.

Whether it is SWTOR or any other online game, the vast majority of players don't bother with forums. This has been true since the days of Ultima Online and Everquest. And I would disagree that game launcher "patch notes" is not an official game communication channel, considering the "patch notes: game update X.X.X" is a straight up line-by-line carbon copy of the forum/website patch notes with the exception for that one line. Why the discrepancy?

Maybe it's because I'm overseas at the moment. Excuse for me actually needing to leave the US to broaden my horizons from time to time, only to be hit with an unexpected re-downloading of the entire game, all for a supposed "available" update. Why wasn't it called mandatory then? A elementary school student would know the difference in meaning between the two words.

Correct me if I'm wrong but in the launcher, all the patch notes said under the highlight section was "The new 64-bit will be available to all players". Do take note that it said "available" instead of "mandatory", nitpicking perhaps but choice of words are actually important in order to convey accurate information. It is only if you clicked on "details" in the launcher's top left and then "Patch notes will be posted on March 27th here" will you find the following line; "We did want to point out that this game update contains the 64-bit client, so please expect a larger download than normal. Players should expect a 35g download for 7.2.1". Do tell me which link players tend to click on more often when they start the game launcher and see an update in progress. There's obviously an inconsistency or omission in communication here.

Well, I'm now a little over an hour in and sits at 32.1GB remaining, the speed fluctuates between 800KB/s to 2MB/s... not the fastest internet out there but decent enough IMO, still looking at 10 more hours of waiting. There goes my playing day.

Umm, why?

Stuck at work and can't play yet but this part, if true, is quite baffling. Every time BW releases new planets/area (see Oricon and Makeb), they crank up the mob density and aggro range only to scale it back drastically later. Haven't they learned their lesson after all this time?

Here's some behind the scene insight. Truth is, the sand people and Jawas are in cahoots to be BW's bantha suppliers. With them having the reputation of being unscrupulous traders, they probably pulled a "bait and switch" on BW.

I put a couple of Koreallis mounts on the balconies of the solarium to serve as cosmetic taxis to get to the ship.

I suspect BW went with hooks because it's a modifiction of their placement system. Still, there is little doubt that it does stifle player creativity quite a bit. Add in the fact that the decorations have perscribed hook size requirements and limited X Y axis movement, essentially BW is pre-determining where our items *should* go with little room for deviation. It would be akin to a publisher telling us "hey, go write that novel you've always wanted to write but hold on, we have already picked the characters, chronological timeline and general theme for you". BW could fix this by doing the following three things: 1. Cover the vast majority of wall, ceiling, and floor spaces of strongholds with small or medium hooks. 2. Changing all decoration hook requirement to small. 3. Increase the X and Y axis modifiers greatly.

Well, I chose to suggest this skill tree based system out of pragmatism more than anything. After all, it is really just a modification of an advancement system that is already in game. I'm not a developer or programmer but in practice that should cut down on the development time and resources(?). With that said, adding new abilities for every companion as part of the customization option would require a lot more work for BW due to animation reasons. To correlate that with my skill tree suggestion, most (if not all) companions would then require their very own unique skill tree instead just one tree for each role type. For a feature that BW has seemingly put on the backburner (or forgotten about), it doesn't seem realistic to have that level of expectation in my opinion. Edit: Forgot to address the deficiencies regarding the existing damage abilities for healer companions. That could still be addressed by the skill tree without adding in new abilities. First and foremost, consider the fact that companions do not have secondary resource pools, with ability cooldowns being the main method of limiting their effectiveness and sustain. Next, using my illustration above, let's say that the damage focus talents in the skill tree are as follows: Tier 1: Increasing all direct damage dealt by 3/6%. Tier 2: Increasing armor penetration of damages dealt by attacks by 5/10%. Tier 3: Damaging attacks have a 50/100% chance of applying a DoT effect that does X amount of damage over X number of seconds. Tier 4: Increasing the amount of DoT damage by 10%. Now also assume that the various utility talents in the tree is as follows: Tier 1: 5% increase to alacrity (which after 3.0 would not just impact activation time and ability cooldown but also GCD,from what I understand at least). Tier 2: 3% additional critcal chance to all damaging and healing abilities. Tier 3: 10% increase to all critical result. * The other tier 1 utility could be a damage reduction boost for the companion which has nothing to do with damage output. The numbers I used are subjective of course but I digress. With 11 available points at level 60, you can select all of those talents I mentioned with the net result being harder hitting direct damage, additional DoT damage, more frequent and larger crits, all of which are refreshing at a faster rate. In theory at least, that should provide a fairly sizeable increase in the damage output by this healer companion. Of course it would still be far inferior to the damage output of pure dps companions but that's the way it should be.

Instead of disciplines, I would actually suggest skill trees for our companions. The structure for a healer companion's tree could look something like the following: ---------------- (healing focus) --- (damage focus) --- Tier 4 ----------------- █ ------------------- █ ---------------- ----------------------- (0/1) --------------- (0/1) -------------- ------------------------- / ----------------------- \ ---------------- Tier 3 --------------- █ ---------- █ --------- █ -------------- --------------------- (0/2) ------ (0/1) ------ (0/2) ------------ ------------------------- | ------------------------- | --------------- Tier 2 --------------- █ --------- █ ----------- █ -------------- --------------------- (0/2) ------ (0/1) ------ (0/2) ------------ ------------------------ / --------------------------- \ ------------- Tier 1 -------------- █ ------ █ ------ █ ------ █ ------------ --------------------- (0/2) -- (0/1) -- (0/1) -- (0/2) --------- Edit: Ignore the dash marks, wouldn't display correctly unless I did this. For tank companions the focuses could be defense and damage while for dps companions the focuses could be single target and AoE. Anyway, more specifics regarding the skill tree. Starting at level 10, we will get a single point to spend and one point every 5 levels thereafter for a total of 11 at level 60. You will also need to spend 3 points each tier before you can advance to the next one up. And just like our current character skill trees, to gain access to certain talents in tiers 2-4, you would have to max out the talent preceeding it. In the above example, it is the talents on the outside of each tier connected by lines. The talents in the middle of tier 1-3 are more utility in nature (alacrity boost, crit chance boost, surge boost, damage reduction, etc) without prerequisite as long as you have access to the tier. Now with only 11 points to spend the player can't max out both healing and damage focuses. The best he can do would be to take all 4 tiers of healing talents while reaching tier 2 of the damage focus, foregoing all utility talents in the process which may not be such a good idea. Lastly, there would be no ability talents thus eliminating the need for a unique tree for each and every existing companion. I think something like this will give the players more flexibility to adjust their companion's roles without completely altering it. For example, a dps character may want to maximize his healer companion's healing output as they are squishier. In contrast, a tank character may forgo the extra healing talents for their healer companion, being sturdier and all, instead opting for a bit more dps to kill things faster. Edit 2: Someone mentioned field respec as an unlockable perk which I forgot to mention. That would be a good idea and can be done as easily as adding "save, cancel, reset points" to the corner of the skill tree pop-up window.

Established by who though? There is no interbank benchmark for TOR virtual currency exchanges. BW can't set the benchmark because it would cross over into Second Life territory and along with it potential regulatory headaches. In effect this "ratio" was concocted by the player base and as such it is exceptionally fragile. Think about it, if one person decided to blow $2000 on CM items and start undercutting everyone, he can effectively inject complete pricing chaos onto large sections of GTN for days if not weeks. Or, one can make the argument that even someone who is selling a CM item at the rate of 100 credits to 1 CC on the GTN is still making a profit. Keep in mind that every person values credits, CC and real life money differently. As a result not everyone is going to turn to that "1000 credits per CC" ratio to measure their level of profitability. For example, someone who has a annual income that is well-over six figures could be perfectly content with pricing their CM items at a much lower ratio because any credit they get out of the deal is still profit to them in the end. If they happens to need more credits, no sweat, they can always go back to their high disposable income to generate more virtual revenue. Essentially they are selling their products in bulk so you could call this the TOR version of the Costco wholesale retail strategy. An unregulated economy comes with all sorts of pitfalls and this is just one of them.

Therein lies your problem. There is no "long established" exchange rate between CC and Credits. It was never a fixed exchange rate but rather a floating one. Even in the real world exchange rates are prone to huge fluctuations given economic conditions so within the game it is all but expected.

It is a known issue now, to be addressed next week. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=775334

Read post #5.

Honestly, I would rather live with the existing queue times (which isn't bad at all on Shadowlands IMO) as opposed to teaming up with the other side in some cross faction delusion. The idea of cross faction warzones is especially absurd and if implemented, friendly fire should also come along with it. Edit: This has nothing to do with roleplaying as I am about as far as you can get from a roleplayer. I simply believe that certain fundamental boundries (or parameters) should not be crossed as it would set a dangerous precedence, even if it is just within a game environment. Once the core Imp versus Pub line is blurred, what's next? Certain players will undoubtedly start citing it as some form of justification to blur the lines between classes (weapon choices or roles) as well. After that comes the rationalization for faction changes. With the precedence set, it will become much harder to dismiss them. Let's not open that can of worms and go down that misguided road.

Yeah, I'm not sure why it was set up that way either. I wish BW would just tag all the decorations with small, medium narrow, medium and large hooks to let the players have full control over deciding where they should go.