Eew! I didn't see that! It didn't occur to me there would be achievements for GS that weren't actually directly tied to GS. I happily bought my way out of it and thought I was done

I might get some of the ship droid customizations, but the others are only worth 1 token if that. I was so looking forward to changing Nikko's look, but the skins they added aren't different enough to bother with. My 100% companion customization collection is now ruined

Mine too. I refuse to spend my time doing activities that don't interest me, so I've gone from completing 3-4 conquests per day I play to 1, maybe 2. The whole philosophy behind their conquest nerfs is baffling. Why double the points required, slash points earned, convert infinite repeatable to daily, outright remove others, and yet at the same time greatly reduce the rewards? I would think they would opt for one or the other. Shouldn't we get better rewards for more work instead of worse?

Asheron's Call had random loot drops that would be improved through crafting. It was very exciting since the gear could get destroyed in the process. When I played ESO, crafted gear was tied for best, but I gather that's not the case any more. My fuzzy memory of City of Heroes is that the best inventions were crafted. This thread has some interesting discussion on the topic.

I believe you are talking about moddable armor. (Adaptive armor functions as light, medium or heavy depending on your character's class.) Moddalbe armor only goes to 306. After that you are stuck with static gear until an unspecified time in the future. You can, however, take that armor and put in in the outfitdesigner. That lets you keep the look, but use better armor for stats.

I remember being shocked when I first started playing SWtOR and learned some mats were locked behind raids. I hadn't seen that in the other MMOs I crafted in. In Asheron's Call 2, some mats were only in pvp zones. That really spiced things up! This survey over on Reddit was interesting. https://www.reddit.com/poll/tagel1?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=swtor&utm_content=t3_tagel1

This is why I haven't picked a second combat style or made any loadouts yet. I don't want to spend half an hour getting one just right and then losing it due to a misclick.

That's a matter of opinion In my circle of friends weapons in the outfit designer is far more important than an operation they will never do.

Dear Keith, Lets discuss this some more. I'm all for changes that will make the game play more smoothly on more systems , but clearly the vast majority of the changes made to the UI had nothing to do with performance. Performance is worse than before. Since the vast majority of the changes made are purely aesthetic, and widely hated by your player-base, are you going to put your money where your mouth is? What are you going to do to improve the player experience that has been eroded? What are you doing to improve flow? 'Cause I got to say, there is no flow at all right now. Even when you fix the myriad of little bugs introduced with the UI change, using the new UI is jarring. Every. Single. Time. The palate change should be a little step in the right direction, time will tell. Are you also going to adjust the line spacing since the wider spacing is also causing players physical discomfort? Ditto the font? Any reason you can't decouple the inventory screen from the character sheet? It is super annoying having my inventory open when I don't need it to be. (None of the little bugs made it onto your earlier list. Dare I hope they are being addressed in 7.0.1?) Any thought as to letting us change our avatar's stance and angle on the character sheet? That's what drives me bat **** crazy! The bouncing combat stance gives me anxiety, as does the weird top-down angle. Maybe it's an OCD thing? All I know is I want so badly to fix the angle and click off combat stance. I'd rather not see my avatar at all, than have to watch her constantly bouncing back and forth. You can't claim that change had anything to do with improving performance, improving the experience, or better flow. A significant portion of your player-base is afraid of the future UI changes you are planning on making. Can you assure us that the changes won't double-down on what we hate about the ones we already got?

Not only did they not add in a new way to get embers or jawa junk, they also removed jawa junk as a conquest reward.

Reading and comprehending are also two different things. It has been clear that there have been issues surrounding comprehension. Keith is not the first to quote a player and completely miss the point of the post he was quoting.

It is not uncommon in MMOs for the best gear to be crafted gear that can be sold from one player to another. This game sufferers tremendously from underdeveloped crafting. I'm sure many of us would be overjoyed if we could craft our way to BiS gear if Bioware didn't insist on gating crafting materials behind group content too.

It is very condescending to assume everyone who doesn't like certain changes just doesn't like change. SWtOR has a very diverse playerbase who enjoy very different aspects of the game. Most of the changes were very uneven, affecting different types of content, playstyles and classes differently. That is great that the changes didn't negatively impact the aspects of the game that you enjoy, but give your fellow players enough respect to believe them when they say that some of the changes did, indeed, negatively impact the aspects of the game that they enjoyed.

I fail to see how getting absolutely nothing is a an upgrade. Renown was a supplement to gearing. It was never, ever intended to be the only method of gearing. Renown crates gave us gear to convert into jawa junk and embers. As a crafter, that was valuable to me. Now I get nothing. Command crates gave a random piece of gear for your spec. There were 4 tiers of gear. Sometimes you'd get mods or schematics for other gear, including augments. Most of that could be deconstructed to learn the schematics. On top of that there were random mounts, pets and shells, also depending on which of the 4 tiers you were in. Almost forgot, you could also get reputation items and even a box with random cartel market item. Over all, lots of goodies to be had. People complained that the gear was random, which many of us told Bioware well before launch that the random nature of gearing was a mistake. Command crates as the main gearing method was a disaster, but as regular dopamine hits, they were fantastic! Nonsense. Bioware re-uses assets constantly and in multiple locations. 7.0 had next to no new art assets for gear. I think there is only 1 new skin in a couple of recolors. That's it. Even 6.0 introduced more new assets than that! They could jam pack new crates with decos, shells, speeders and pets, oh toss in crafting mats, jawa junk, reputation tokens, retired schematics, dyes. If the fluff is BoE instead of BoP, the people who don't want it can sell it or give it away. (Command Crate fluff was a mixture of both.)

I thought that was obvious. In 6.0 casual and solo players could eventually get top end gear by playing the content they enjoy, obviously raiders could too. In 7.0 casual and solo players can not ever get top end gear by playing the content they enjoy, but raiders still can. Taking something enjoyable away from people who are used to getting that enjoyable thing is a common form of punishment. As a reminder, this is the quote I was replying to, "The people who do only solo and daily content who feel they should have access to gear they don't need have created this mess of a system."

Let me get this straight. You think the people who enjoyed 6.x gearing are responsible for 7.0 gearing? Are you suggesting 7.0 gearing was designed as a punishment for solo and casual players enjoying access to good gear for playing the content they enjoy, and that the raiders who resented not having exclusive gear for their preferred content had nothing to do with it?

Historically MMOs were designed around lots of people being in a persistent space, doing what ever. All those people hanging around fleet doing nothing but chit-chatting and light shopping on the GTN? That's about as classic MMO as you can get. Solo play, group play, pvp, roleplay, crafting, those are all parts of a well rounded MMO.

In my experience, grinding content is usually designed for solo play and socialization is predominantly done at hubs. YMMV depending on which MMOs you've played over the years. Heroics are grinding content that were balanced for solo play in 2015. We were told all solo content was balanced around 318 gear, so anyone who has done part of the new story shouldn't be under-geared. 326+ gear is over-geared if they genuinely balanced content the way they claim they did. And then there are all of the characters who are playing content at or around level who can't over-gear like that, and who don't have access too dcd or cc.

I know it's too late on a Friday for any Bioware employee to read my post, but here it is anyway. Keith, Thank you for information on incoming bug fixes. There have been so many it's hard to know what is a bug and what is a design flaw. Please assure us that the 7.0.1 fixes are just the tip of the iceberg and far more fixes are coming. I'm sure we all have a list of bugs that are our personal most irritating bugs that won't make the cut. (Mine is the lack of click and drag in the item preview and the truncated zoom.) And we all know that 1/3 of the bugs that get "fixed" won't actually be fixed, and some new ones will be introduced. You are studiously ignoring the way most of the design changes reduced player enjoyment. They were quality of life downgrades. Are you planning on rectifying that, or are you sticking to your "like it or lump it" stance? Please remember that sometimes the cure really is worse than the disease. What IS your "vision". You keep mentioning it as if we should be excited about it, but you haven't given any details as to why. (A roadmap would really be helpful at this point!) To be frank, you mentioning future UI "upgrades" terrifies me. None of the changes in 7.0 give me any confidence that you realizing your vision is something players should look forward to. Considering the way you gutted rewards and made every last thing more grindy and tedious, it sure feels like your "vision" of the future of SWtOR does not include solo and casual players.

I think they do read them. I think they put them on a giant list and a few times a year they pick one or two easy ones to fix so they have something to pad out patch notes. How else can we explain old typos being fixed getting included in the 7.0 patch notes? (For example: Fixed a typo in the message that appears if a player attempts meditating without the requirements for the Voss datacron.) They certainly don't send that list to customer service so the CS reps. are aware of existing bugs...

Yes sir, they were. I started playing AC a couple of months after launch, and I started CoH on launch day.

Once I decided to give up on conquest and ignore lvl 80 armor I started having fun doing the old stories again. Even though I'm having fun again, I'm not having nearly as much fun as I did prior to 7.0.

Hear! Hear! The past few years the story has felt rote. If the writers don't love what they are writing, how can they expect the players to love it?

You need to brush up your MMO history. Soloing was well established as a playstyle since 1999. Asheron's Call was one of the big 3 and had very little that required grouping, and none of it was critical to leveling or gearing. City of Heroes was a great second generation MMO that was also very fun and easy to solo in, which also pre-dates WoW by a bit.

Years ago Colonial Williamsburg hired an outside firm to examine communication within the museum. They were having a significant problem with the research their curators were generating not filtering down to their interpreters. When I see how badly designed and implemented 7.0 is, I think Bioware needs to do something similar. They aren't functioning properly and they clearly need outside professional help figuring out why.