I agree with you here, and since Stephen won't go into detail if these people were selling those credits, we will never know the truth behind it. What I want to know is how is farming chests an exploit? Did you have to be a lower level player to do this? Or just make it to Ilum with chests that contain the most credits? I am level 50, I can farm these chests all day long. What I want to know is if I farm these chests to amass wealth, will my account get suspended for doing so? If not, Stephen's post needs to be very clear of that. As right now, it sounds like BioWare will suspend your account if you want to farm chests, mobs, and other aspects of the game. Calling it exploiting without saying what was happening is very vague and misleading. I understand that if the exploit has not been fixed, that you want to keep it on the down low. Once it is fixed, you should share what the definition of an exploit it and what people can and cannot do.

There is a big difference between "gold farming" and selling. It has never been against a rule of an MMO to sit and gain as many credits as you can. You want to find all the chests and loot them? Go ahead. If you want to play the AH and buy low and sell high, go for it. Yet it is clearly obvious that in TOR, if you choose to play the game and farm chests and other NPCs, that you will get suspended. Unless some bug was in place that made the chests appear right away, there was no exploit. Those that went to Illum at a low level could have gone at level 50 and still got the same chests with the same loot tables. Exploits are a problem that BioWare needs to fix, but people should never get suspended the first time for doing them. It is the fault of the developer that these issues are not fixed. Exploits and hacking are very different, one is manipulating the game code, the other is finding a loophole within it.

There is nothing wrong about collecting money, farming chests, or playing the AH. It is perfectly fine in most MMOs to collect as much money as you want. Now if you are hacking accounts to sell/trade those items and are selling gold for real life transactions, that is different. If I collect 100 million credits by sitting at a chest spawn all day, am I breaking a rule? If I sell items from those chests or items from world bosses, am I breaking a rule? If I even trade that money to those in my guild, am I breaking a rule? BioWare cannot prove that I work for an RMT company, and as such, will suspend or ban players who choose to spend their free time sitting at spawn points for chests and collecting the items inside. As for Ilum, does anything change if I am a level 50 and farming those chests? If so, those accounts should have never been suspended in the first place. If not, BioWare needs to add a rule that is clear to everyone, you do not sit and farm chests in this game.

BioWare should then level restrict every single planet to the range it says. Why would a level 50 want to go back to any low level planet? They have no business there. The argument is weak at best and goes against what BioWare has advertised as flying around the galaxy at will.

Glad to know BioWare will suspend or ban people who choose to go to a planet at a lower level to get chests that may contain credits. Unless stated specifically in the ToS, collecting mass amounts of money is not against the rules. If you happen to trade that money for real life currency that is one thing, but collecting as much wealth as possible has never been against any MMO rule. I have no issue with BioWare banning accounts of those that hack other players accounts or end up selling gold for real-life currency. Now if BioWare is suspending players for going to a world above their level just to open chests or farm them, how is that against a rule? How about you fix your game before you start to ban players from it.

It is not harassment on a PvP server, and on PvE servers GMs hardly do anything about it. Seeing as you can rez at a medcenter, if someone chooses to rez via the probe and gets killed again, that is their fault.

WoW is the most successful MMO in history, it has more active subscribers than all western MMOs combined, it has set the standard for what an MMO should play like and follow. A good majority of people on these forums has played WoW at some point. This means it is an easy reference and something we can hold a candle too. Why do people compare BF3 to MW3? Why do people compare games at all? Why not just only talk about their game and nothing else? Should we never speak of any other game again? Of course not.

I had just over a million credits when I hit 50, and after the speeder training and level 50 abilities, that tanked to 650k. If you vendor most of the items you get, money is mad easy to make in this game, even with gathering skills. You should really never fall below 500k at any given point after 50. Raiding repairs cost a lot, so that is one set back, but you can kill mobs, do dailies, and vendor what you find to get that cash back.

The ticket gets passed on. I have not seen one in-game GM interaction yet. All tickets go to Ireland to their CS hub, and get "passed along" to the other teams that deal with that. GMs in this game have no power or really do not care. Unless you cannot log-in to your character, reporting people or issues will have 0 effect on the game and those people.

Heard from a guild mate that BioWare has started to ban players for going to Ilum with lower level characters and for win trading. This may just be speculation or word on the street, but seeing as the ToS say you can get banned for any reason, this would be a good one to ban people for. Not that I support drastic action and would rather see a better intensive, but it is one way to stop people from doing it.

Pro-tip, don't pick up crafting/gathering skills until you have the money to support it. If you do not buy anything off the AH, and sell most of what you get from quests/pick ups, you will have a lot of money. I was level 49 last night when I picked up my gathering and crafting professions. I have over 650k now at level 50 (was over a million but abilities cost a lot), and I am around 240 in armor tech, underworld trading, and scavenging. Trying to sell most of what you get from those missions is not even worth it (on my server at least). The price at which they sell tends to be lower or equal to the price of the mission. This just means get a lot of credits and grind to 400, or go out in the world and pick up the mats your self. Money is so easy to obtain in this game I do not even understand why people complain they don't have enough.

His problem will be your problem soon enough. Sure the majority is at level 30 or so, but it does not take long to level in this game. Aside from bugs in operations like bosses randomly resetting, floors not showing up right, groups not being able to enter flashpoints because the group leader/players are bugged, etc. From my guild mates who had been in testing for a few months, none of those issues happened. The game was fine in testing back in June/July, but BioWare seemed to break it and never fix it after that point.

People complain about the slicing nerf acting like money is hard to get in this game. I had over a million credits when I hit 50. That dropped down to about 650k after speeder and ability training. The point being, I have scavenging and underworld trading, yet I barley turn a profit on those gathering skills. Sure I could sell some of what I get on the AH, but a lot of that won't even sell at the price that the mission cost. My advice is to stop doing your crafting/gathering skills until you have the money to dump into it. I have my scavenging and armorstech around 240 or so, and I picked the skills up yesterday. I do not even bother going to lower level planets to find the mats, I just send my companions out to go get them for me. What you do with your money and game sub is up to you, but keeping in mind that in-game money is not hard to get and you may lose money when leveling professions.

I see 100+ people on our fleet on a normal basis. The cap may be different for each area/planet, but I doubt they would turn it off all together.

Elite and strong mobs tend to walk around a bit. Depends on the planet and area, but some mobs even pat around every once in a while. TOR has as much of static NPCs as most other MMOs. Though I do like that on some planets, the friendly NPCs at least take a walk every once in a while. I thought about why they stand around, and for a war on the edge it makes scene really. You do not want to leave your post, and if you are assigned to X-area, you better keep an eye out.

The system only goes up on planets that need it. Once the population cap in a given area reaches X-number, then they "turn on" the sharding. It may be possible that the cap was raised or that not a lot of people are on at the moment.

Tends to happen with bonus quests, as they cannot be dropped until they are complete. Your only real option here is just to go back and complete them. It should not take that much time if they are greyed out for you as you would out-level them easily.

Well when your server gets the nightmare mode only bug, any progression is better than no progression.

Sitting outside of major Republic quest hubs is all the reward I need. Making a circle of 50s around said camp and destroying anyone trying to come in or out is by far the best type of reward. Now compared to something like warzones, the "reward" for open-pvp is somewhat lacking if you do not fight on Ilum.

Good thing operations are 8 and 16 man, you can always go to Ilum at level 50 and form a 24-person operation to do some world-pvp.

With your networking degrees and knowledge, I am sure BioWare would love to have you on their team. It would be a great help for them to purchase equipment that can handle this load, and I am sure you have those servers picked out already.

Not much they can do, you can queue at the same time and from what I have heard, you get your group 7/10 times or so. You can only group four with players for PvP, but there is nothing stopping people that have multiple groups to hit the join button at the same time. I would like to see full rated warzones, but until then, you may want to group as well it really does help.

I tend to only watch my class story cut-scenes, but when I do, I am never disappointed.

MVP means little, as you only get 1 extra commendation. You get 40-80 per-match based on medals and how you did, so it is really not a huge deal or something that can be exploited for mass commendation gain. Considering you can get commendation capped easily in a day...

The PvP vendor is located on the Fleet in the combat district. They are separated by class if you look at the signs above and all gear pre-50 is sold by the "PvP vendor" and not any of the other named vendors. Weapons are sold next to the PvP daily bot, which is in the same area.