To be honest I have never had any issue getting BiS gear in WoW, neither in PvE (I was an hard core raider) nor PvP. SWTOR has always been grindier when I played it (up to 2014) and with 5.0 it looks like it's only going to get much worse.

Since Mr. White Knight of course chooses to ignore constructive suggestions, I'll repeat it here. It does not take Einstein to devise a decent drop system, SWTOR actually was closer to this in the past than after they wasted so much time implementing slot machine RNG.

That's a good point. If I go buy milk, I expect to get a bottle of milk, not a car tire "because one day it could turn useful anyway".

I take it, my point was too simple and logic to deserve a reply?

I wonder... why just don't drop tokens in "everything the game has to offer" and those tokens are redeemable for whatever one wants? So, everybody can play what he wants and get what he wants. It's a win-win solution imo. Make it so that 1 token drops from 1 "gold star" NPC, 20 from doing an heroic, 50 for a FP and up to more given for completing an OP. So, the "casual" can slowly get what he wants, the raider can get what he wants and same the PvPer. The result it's 3 happy guys. Sounds simple enough, isn't it?

Only works some times. I have also tried quitting from the server selection screen, which as of today is the safest workaround available. I still managed to get some black screen off there as well, but much less.

WH...

As former player of other failed EA/BW MMOs... No. They won't. They'll get down to one server like they did for the other games and then shut it down when population drops enough on that one.

Sadly it's not so simple. Companies big like this are probably going to use a 3rd party HA whole system, integrated with their own facilities. Usually what happens it that either the "integration" has issues / version mismatch of one of 1000 sub-components / slight incompatibility they did not find out before they upgraded everything to support the latest expansion. Some times (only happened me a couple of times in 33+ years of developing software) the HA or the database itself got a rare bug and it's going to corrupt data in hideous, creative ways that get discovered only once several thousands rows got ruined and it gets hellish to restore integrity constraints etc. We have also this "little" issue, where you can't just take down the server for a week and recover data and restore data relations (by hand or not) because players expect to play within 1 hour or 2 from shutdown.

It's because it's people who like me, play MMOs since 15+ years, and KNOW what happens when somebody complaints he has to do XYZ or else. Every single MMO company takes it as a "must nerf XYZ now" to bring it down to "else". It's ALWAYS been like this, I don't recall a MMO company buffing worse grinding to the better way.

All what you SHALL get with this kind of post, is to see PVP rewards to get nerfed by 75%. Because whereas you see "PvP CXP is OK, all the rest sucks", EA SHALL read: "PvP CXP is too good, MUST nerf it down to the rest". EA makes money selling CXP. Try imagine what they do, it's just simple math.

In PvP, set bonuses can easily dictate who wins a close match / fight.

Because people can play a "MMO" wishing to find "just a MMO" and features, others focus on Star Wars saga and want to experience Star Wars stories. In theory SWTOR should try making both happy, but implementing videos and sequences takes far less time than adding a major, full MMO true feature.

Ok I am going to try that. Because at first I thought exiting from character selection would work better than directly from in game, but in the end I found out it still does the same effect.

You'll have this issue with Nvidia cards of the 1000 family, in example GTX 1060, 1070, 1080. This is due to a combination of SWTOR memory leakages (the more you play the easier you get this issue) and SWTOR somehow getting one of its threads in a deadlock with the nVidia driver (even the latest ones). I didn't experience this with older nVidia cards, just with the newest ones. You can try waiting it out for a couple of minutes or ALT tabbing and forcing the stuck client shutdown from Program Manager. In my case, if I do this, the next Windows 10 reboot gets very slow, like when Windows 10 suffers an hard crash and needs to recreate all its caches. I truly hoped the hotfixes (and related servers downtime) they applied these days would fix those high impact issues. But BW was too busy nerfing CXP and putting in game P2W CXP to notice the real issues.

Yesterday I had several people telling me I was wrong when I said it was EA (and their damn cash grab policies) fault. They said: "no, it's BW who screwed up, it was their decision". Now that magically we get those P2W boosters, are you still so sure it's only BW's wrongdoing? Please, don't make me laugh.

I used to be an hard core raider in several MMOS. We "stuck around" doing ops because it's a team effort where you do it again and again fine tuning the team and its results. Even with everybody fully geared up, there were still "achievements" to be had, by figuring out alternate, non documented paths to kill bosses better / quicker. Or new ways to complete the ops in shorter time. Or purposedly do a very hard op with alts in bad gear just to see how a perfectly tuned team can deal against those odds.

I have played MUDs and other ancient RPGs, the drop chances were pretty decent, loot tables were not huge. Most of all, boss "X" would have a chance to drop "leg gear Y" so you knew you could focus on that. It gave a "direction" to the efforts. There were an handful of ultra-epic pieces that would drop only after performing some incredible effort. I had a MUD where a quest leading to such stuff would take up to 3 real life years (pieces of quest would be enabled once a month each). But that was the ultimate-end-game-of-a-lifetime, the 2-3 guys on a server with *1* piece of that gear walked among us like gods. In SWTOR no gear is worth this status. Purples, oranges, whatever, it's all very standard stuff. Everybody actually needs the best gear as baseline, if they want to even get into a competitive ranked team.

Problem is, a MMORPG by definition caters to dozens thousands of players, each with his preferences and playstyle. RPGs in particular, may or may not be made around a compelling story. I have played for years to the "original" RPGs, the text based ones, and they didn't come with a storyline. BUT, they came with progress. Progress is THE FOUNDATION of RPGs, along with impersonating something else. Since the 90's, you'd farm a certain boss knowing he'd drop your needed stuff. Did not always drop it, but when it dropped, it was what you needed. SWTOR broke this foundation by denying "controlled" progress. Now you can get garbage for months, no amount of effort is going to grant you proper progress. You could be unlucky and NEVER get a certain item to drop until the next expansion. Those like me, who could bet 100 times on a coin and always get the opposite face, are not going to bother with this dumb RNG system.

I regret having wasted 3 months of sub over this. Last time I had played SWTOR, you could pretty much be totally sure you'd get entertrained by an expansion for a couple of months, purchasing a 3 months sub actually made sense. As of now all we get is some pretty good storyline, but it's not a 3 months matter (I wish it would!). All the rest is absolute garbage. I simply don't have neither the time nor the patience to play rat-on-a-wheel and be ransom of a broken RNG loot system. Most of all, what's the point re-grinding ancient content n+1 times again? So, distilling the whole expansion: new storyline, new UI at level 70 (but it won't add a single day worth of gaming), all the rest is recycled stuff. A 1 month sub is more than enough, then off to play other games while waiting for a next expansion worth being played.

You could sum up this whole paragraph with two letters: EA. Expecially the last 3 lines.

One day someone should compile a listing of the most stupid decisions taken by the SWTOR devs. I am sure it'd be 100 pages long and this last "decision" is well positioned near the top.

Isn't it funny, this was a reply to another thread and it got posted here

In a certain way, SWTOR has died. It started with some massively huge content, had very large "shoulders" and infrastructure. It could have been a WoW competitor featuring multi-million subscribers. Had this happened, today we'd see the umpteenth massively rich new expansion, we'd have cross server PVP and tourneys and much more. Instead, they botched it near the beginning and since BW had to implement F2P SWTOR is still a nice MMO (for a casual player or one who loves SW lore / experience) but not the AAA king on the throne.

SWTOR encountered 3 "events", each of which could potentially be fatal to a MMO. 1) Has been taken by EA. This alone is guarantee of a despicable future. 2) "Free to play new business model" happened, and it happened exactly right after this truly expensive AAA budget MMO had been released with a suscription model. BW had really to waste endless amounts of manpower to retrofit SWTOR so that it could survive in the "free to play" MMO era. Of course, this impacted both the game fun (paywalls are never nice, expecially when you have them even as full sub) and contents amount / quality. 3) "Casual / solo player era" happened, where the highly social MMOs of old were slowly taken over by solo / casual friendly ones. I and millions other players are "guilty" of that, as we were in our university age in early 2000 and could dedicate 8+ hours a day to gaming. But today? We got families, jobs, bad jobs and no jobs to deal with. Needless to say, MMOs had to gradually drop their social requirements and group requirements. I had TREMENDOUS fun at 40 men raiding, but nowadays even finding 8 people to play at the same time most of the time, became a dire task. So, SWTOR managed to miss 3 massively important boats, it's actually only thanks to BW / EA big shoulders if SWTOR has not gone down. However the struggle is all here. These "solo player" expansions, featuring little group content, are a testament to modern day gamers. All those who CAN play a lot and in large groups, are going to find themselves quite left in the cold in these days.