After I posted I went and checked on line. Sorry, I didn't realize they broke down presence to base and total. On live, the base presence is the only one that shows as scaling, but it doesn't feel like the total number is making any difference in performance. (Base presence is only a fraction of the total on an old legacy, so scaling that shouldn't have much impact.) If anyone knows how to test the efficacy of presence I can test it between servers. It feels like the lvl 6 companion I have on a fresh server is not much, if any, worse than a lvl 50 companion on my fully legacy unlocked main server even though we are talking about a huge difference in presence, but I don't have numbers to verify that. If there is a good way to test, then I will also test the fix on the PTS to see if it really is doing what it is supposed to do. I don't think that is right either. On live, my lvl 75 character had base 900, bonus 3,058 presence in my Nar Shadaa stronghold. When I went planet side, my base dropped to 100 and something (sorry, didn't write it down), but my bonus remained at 3,058. So, at least according to the stats given on the character sheet, only base presence is scaling. Maybe the character sheet is inaccurate, or maybe presence isn't working as intended?

"An additional note on companions and their effectiveness: the Presence base stat does scale in Level Synced content to reflect the amount of base Presence a player would expect to have in that level range." Does the mean they are or are not scaling presence from legacy unlocks? Next to no one is running lowby alts with presence augments, so what are they actually scaling?

I was told that my character did get the reward. But apparently they were invisible.

Mantellian Protector & battler for trooper had icons, but they were all for the wrong parts (ilvl just ilevel 18, ilevel 30 was correct.)

That was 6.x gearing. Many of us would absolutely love if they'd go back to that! But, alas, playing for fun is not a part of Bioware's current vision.

I'm not a math person, so let me get this straight: Level sync wasn't perfect and was too hard/time consuming for your skeletal crew to keep updating, so you spent a lot of time re-working the code so it would be wonderfully even and easy to update in future expansions. But you messed up the maths and made everything significantly worse and now you are having to spend lots of extra time fixing it to hopefully make it less messed up. And it's only taken you half a year to realize that you messed up the maths and threw everything way out of whack even though players have been telling you over, and over and over again that you got it all wrong? According to Bioware's stated gear philosophy, the point of your 330 gear is to give you an edge in the raids that you earned it in. You earn the gear for the content you are playing. Raid gear having better stats than conquest gear in solo/story content would be giving part of the player-base an unfair advantage. Raid gear should have synched stats that is identical to conquest gear in the content that rewards conquest gear.

We still don't know how profitable SWtOR has been. That 1 billion is total revenue in 8 years. We don't know how much of that is actual profit. Estimates for how much it cost to make SWtOR in the first place start at about 250 million. How much did it cost to develop and maintain per year? We don't know. In comparison, WoW & FFXIV make 1-2 billion per year. BDO has made at least 2 billion so far.

There will undoubtedly be more "story beats" as the year progresses. They might not be much, and they might not advance the story in any meaningful way, but they will happen. I am hoping 7.1 will include some story along with the daily area. I haven't heard one way or the other, so I am choosing to remain hopeful.

I would be perfectly satisfied if we could customize all of the standard body ones: Nikko, Paxton, Arcann*, Hemdil, Rokuss, Veerona, Nuray, Fen Zeil. Oh look, only one is female. While they are at it, maybe they could fix the skins for Vector, Scourge and the Gamorian Bodyguard so they can wear outfits that have some bare skin. It's only been a known issue for 9 years. Oh, look, all males. When Ashara had a skin issue it was fixed right away so she could wear a bikini. *It is debated if Arcann is a standard body type 2. I think he is. I believe the "extra bulk" is just his unique armor.

This casual player would have more fun if the classes were balanced. As I play my way through my roster of alts, I have to say, the underperforming classes are less fun to play. Hitting like a wet noodle isn't fun for me.

Where are you getting the idea that solo/story players don't sub and buy cartel market items from? That's a huge assumption based on absolutely no data. All anyone outside of select Bioware employees can do is base guesses on anecdotal evidence. That guy on his 50th alt which might not pass Taris is probably subbing to keep access to all 50 alts, has a huge collection of cartel items unlocked so he can use everything on his alt army and has pimped out strongholds. Subscribers and whales come from all player types. KotFE had way more problems than just being too story focused. The story itself was problematic and drove a lot of the story players away too. This game needs fresh, strong stories AND decent group content to survive, let alone thrive, and that isn't something we've had since SoR. ALL player types have been getting dry crumbs of content for years now. Players fighting over those crumbs doesn't help anyone. A lot of what you are seeing is directly a result of being told that solo/story players don't matter and all MMOs belong to raiders and raiders only. Yes it's an over-reaction, but people are tired of being told that they and their money aren't good enough to warrant equal consideration.

What solo content are you doing that got you 273,000 tech fragments in one month? (And how many hours a day are you doing that content?) Clearly the rest of us are missing something.

Those are rookie numbers! I've been waiting 9 years for Vector's & Scourge's missing skin textures to be fixed.

This is your opinion, not a fact. At the beginning the developers for SWtOR came out and flat out said the fully voiced stories were not that expensive to make. Raids are very difficult content to develop. All content is ymmv depending on what interests you. What is one and done for you is infinitely repeatable for me, where as what is infinitely repeatable for you is one and done for me, if that. 4.0 failed for multiple reasons, not just it's reliance on a mediocre at best story. 4.0 was badly implemented all the way round and alienated people from all play styles. This is an interesting discussion on the place of raiding in MMOs. This one is topical about trying to force raiding by gating gear.

Either my searchfu isn't working, or there isn't a thread over on the bug forums for this (one in general and one in suggestions of all places!) I'm going to go start one to see if we can get an acknowledgement. Please add your experiences to it! https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=10021224#post10021224

People are still getting duplicate pieces from Kai Zykken's Unidentified Set Bonus Crate even though the items are in their inventory. We were assured this wouldn't happen since finishing sets is near impossible without RNG protection! Please add this to the known issue list! https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=1000459&highlight=kai&page=6 https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=1004225&highlight=kai https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=1001374&highlight=kai

They will probably fix it when they fix Vector's & Scourge's missing skin textures...

Good start! When is the next bug fix patch planned? Most of the ones that irritate me didn't make it this round. (Looking at you item preview window that won't let me move my character or zoom in all the way and materials inventory that won't let me pull out a portion!)

Well... one advantage of all of the 7.0 changes and bugs is that I no longer have any desire or motivation to do anything in the game other than play the stories. I have made progress with my Vette clone for that ship. Here is a very awkward screenshot of the big power kiss! My sub ends in 25 days. I'll still be lurking around and posting on Reddit after that, but my account is pimped out and there is nothing I need a sub for beyond access to all of my alts. I'll re-sub when Bioware gives me a reason to*, or if I need to change up who my active characters are. *Reasons would include: significant reversing of course, massive bug fixes, high quality story addition that includes non-Lana romance, and not bringing Vaylin back from the dead.

I quit the game for 7 months because I was so mad at customer service. I had chosen a few, specific, light side choices on a dark side warrior because I wanted Koth and Arcann to be alive in his play-through. Ossus reset the flags and killed them both. So now he has a happy, romanced, yet dead Koth who never stole the Gravestone, and a living Senya, but a dead Arcann. After very clearly (and politely!) explaining that I made the choices to keep them alive and a bug killed them, customer service insisted there were no bugs that affected companions and I had to live with my choices. I followed up (still politely!) with screenshots showing I had made the choices to keep them alive, and I was told if I contacted them again on the issue I'd get banned from contacting support. Had they just admitted it was a weird and unfortunate bug, but there was nothing they could do to fix it, I would have been disappointed, but not mad. I figure there is no point in contacting customer support for anything unless it's an issue with them getting your money. They are worse than useless and have been for years now.

I don't delete characters, I buy more character slots I would love to be able to re-watch cutscenes!

I'm not going to engage in the larger conversation, but I was here for 5.0 & 6.0 and can clarify things a little for you. (Someone (not you) doesn't seem to understand that the player base isn't one unified voice. That sometimes one group of people likes something and one group of different people don't like it...) 5.0 Command Crate gearing was a flawed concept from the beginning. It was entirely random. A small number of us told them random was a really bad idea when they announced their plans, but they didn't listen. 5.1 they added currency and vendors to temper the RNG. As Bioware made changes based on player complaints, players stopped complaining. 6.0 Renown gearing also had flaws. It was, once again, too random. Sure, this time they had a vendor, but it was pricy and didn't have mods for min-maxing. People eventually got their gear and quit complaining, or continued to complain to the bitter end.

So to temper expectations on the 7.1 launch date, here is my interpretation of this statement. "In the coming weeks." What does this mean? My interpretation is in 2-4 weeks. I googled it and found it might mean next week. So for this exercise let's say "weapons in outfitter" will be placed on the PTS in 1-5 weeks, so average it to 3 weeks. How long will "weapons in outfitter" be on the PTS before live? Historically that has been all over the place, from a few weeks to months. I'm going to hope that what is being tested is close to ready. The raid was on the PTS for 3 weeks, so let's guess 3 weeks of "testing". Will there be a test server iteration for the daily area next, or is 7.1 going to launch when "weapons in outfitter" is done with testing? Let's say another moderate 3 weeks if there is another round of testing. So, modestly 6-9 weeks before 7.1, which would be early to mid May. Now my big, big question is, is there a "story beat" coming with 7.1 or is it just the delayed content from 7.0 and additional bug fixes? I'm getting impatient for more details about the rest of the 10 year anniversary celebration we've been hearing about.

That's interesting speculation, with absolutely no data to back that up. Role Players have an even more social-dependency play style and are likely just as big of spenders in the Cartel Market if not bigger, yet they are studiously ignored by Bioware. Fleet is where purchases are flexed. Pimped out strongholds for RP are incredibly expensive. Having all of the bits and pieces for outfits and emotes for RP? Incredibly expensive.

I like the idea of combat styles and loadouts. I haven't had the urge to use them yet though. I like the idea of shared tagging, but again, but I haven't had any need for it yet. I don't see anymore people in the open world than I did before, just more instances. I like that world bosses are a big part the new gear spam. I haven't taken advantage of it yet, but I enjoy fighting world bosses, so it's nice knowing I can find world boss groups whenever I want.