As the GM of a small guild,I couldn't agree more. The crafting and repeatable conquest objectives were the ONLY thing that allowed us to participate in conquest. Even though we have fewer than 30 people, and only a very small handful ever did weekly conquest things, we could still get on the top ten very regularly. It was enjoyable and highly rewarding to know that skill and determination could put our name out there with the supposed 'big dogs'. Heck, we even conquered a planet one time, a small guild on a decently populated server COULD do it. The folks complaining about it before... all I can say is 'they must have just been lazy'.... so you can't 1v1 a mega guild with 10x your player base, so what? Make smart choices where to invade, save up, prepare before hand, and push hard, you could make it, we were proof of that. Anyone who says otherwords is telling a lie, and looking for a conquest handout. These recent changes have hit us hard. Conquest used to be a moral booster for us, and now most people are starting to have that conversation of "what do we do now that ToR is officially circling the drain". Yes, some changes needed to be made, but these were not those changes. No system is perfect , but I'd rather have a broken system that let us have some 'feel good' over a system that has us feel like the developers hate us.

Our guild ship dissapeared on us once a year or two back. It was still listed, but we were unable to teleport to it. The real kicker was the fact that we had JUST finished farming he last few bits to unlock the last of the rooms, so it couldn't have happened at a worse time. Moral really died in the guild over it, especially since we put in ticket after ticket and got no response. Weeks passed, still nothing. We even called up CS and they said it was a known bug and should come back in a few weeks when they did a maintenance reset of the servers. So we waited, and waited, and reset day came... still no guild ship. At this point it has been nearly a month with no ship, which might not sound like a big deal to some, but we're a small guild, and it took a lot of work by a very few, very dedicated people... and to have it snatched away as it was about to be finished? People were ready to leave the game as it appeared customer service was going to do nothing (this isn't a CS hate post, this is going somewhere, stick with me). I eventually called CS again, very distraught at this point, and was met with only more frustration. I was informed this was a technical issue, and CS had absolutely no contact with the technical department, nor could they do anything about our problem. I asked the lady 'what am I supposed to do, my tickets are getting no response and it's been over a month"... she told me to post my complaint on the forums and hope a community manager saw them and jumped in... so I gave them one last chance to fix things. I'm not sure how closely Eric works with the CS team, or if he really does just watch the forums like a hawk, but he saw the thread and responded by the end of the day. Within a day or two we had our guild ship back, and Eric was offering all sorts of stuff to us as compensation that we never asked for. We turned it down, we were just happy to have our guild ship back, and to experience somone working for this company that is truely an upstanding guy. Eric, I know you get a lot of flack from the community, you have a really crummy job, having to be the person that takes the mud flinging from a lot of upset members of the community. I have to admit, I'm one of those people upset about the current state of things, but I'll never forget how hard working of a person Eric is, and how under-appreciated he is. So, thank you Eric, whatever the future brings, you have a heck of a lot of good karma saved up, and I hope life cashes that in for you and yours.

He said that the 'ultimate pack' is the next CM pack, not that it was a special pack coming in addition to the next pack, it IS the next pack... indicating that what we thought was a pack of new things, is actually going to be a pack with no grantee of new things at all. I'm crossing my fingers in hopes that you're right and I've misunderstood him, but I have the feeling that just isn't the case.

So the new packs are basically one bit of scrap and three chance cubes... there's not even a grantee for one of the pack items? Is this correct? Because if it is... this is the biggest joke yet. Are the developers actively trying to kill the game? Could you introduce us to one person on the dev team that actually thinks these recent changes are good ideas, that this is what the members of the community want? What is one reason to even keep playing this game?

There's absolutely no logic to that statement. There are no positive effects for smaller guilds. Not a single one of these changes has brought us closer to bigger guilds, nor provided a single member with a sense of accomplishment for trying to participate. Weekly guild goals? Not nearly as satisfying as capping a planet or being in the top ten. The nerf effects all guilds equally, big or small. Ergo there is no positive for small guilds, as they receive the same negatives as larger guilds. Nothing changed that gave a buff that only effected smaller guilds, nor were there any changes that only negatively effected larger guilds. Changes were made across the board, not cherry picked. Using your own argument (50 vs 200 or 250 vs 1000) it's still a 75% split, you're just dealing in larger or smaller numbers, the distance between the two, relative to the ease of gaining points, and their availability, remains exactly the same. At best, nothing has changed, you just have more unhappy people now who don't like how points have to be gained.

That statement is very far from the truth. In limiting the ability for large guilds to gain points, they also limited small guilds' abilities to gain points. These are across the board nerfs. Our guild has roughly 30 accounts active and around, of that number only a quarter actively do any sort of content that would put any conquest numbers on the board. However, we were almost always on the top 10, and even claimed a planet once. That was before the mergers and changes. We're proof that a small, and casual guild can compete if given the opportunity to do so. This patch has effectively neutered our ability, and drive be competitive.

So here is some feedback from a smaller sized guild, the type of guild that's really just a group of friends who casually play the game, the type of group you guys 'supposedly' want to target/help out with these changes/balances. Absolutely nothing you changed was positive for us, it didn't help smooth things over, it didn't help us feel like we could actually compete. You nerfed crafting, which was the primary way we ever even got on the conquest boards in the first place. You've made the whole crafting system so horrid that several folks are now planning on leaving if we don't see some sort of emergency revert in crafting, they see these changes as a neon sign of a sinking ship. This of course drags others with them on the way out the door, effectively killing our group off when it comes to our involvement in SWTOR. Combined with the fact that we're still competing with the larger guilds (since tier can be chosen on a whim), we'll never have a chance to amount to anything in conquest , or have our members feel like they contributed in a meaningful way. So, congratulations, I guess, your changes had the exact opposite effect as you planned. We were able to put our name on the boards with crafting before the changes, and even managed to take one of the planets once during one of the mass invasion weeks... but now, with these changes, and the fact you crammed our server with a bunch of massive guilds (the server merger being another horrid choice you guys made) who can just take the lower tiers if they want... this whole conquest system has become pointless. Actually, it's more than pointless, we've been left feeling like you guys actively spat in our face...pointless would feel better. Usually I don't care much about conquest in the first place, it keeps a few of my guild members occupied during the daytime, but you've gone and lit that small shred of happiness on fire, and tossed it in the gutter. Shame on whoever on your development team thought these were good ideas. Though, I'm not sure if this is an issue of bad design choice, or zero forethought, neither of these possibilities bode well for the future. Can we get that question answered? Is the current abysmal situation of conquest (where small guilds are even more punished than before) due to bad ideas or a lack of looking at the bigger picture? I understand that most of the company's employees have recently been shifted around to work on other projects, such as the upcoming Ironman sci-fi MMO, but only having a skeleton crew working on SWTOR isn't really an excuse for taking a system that 'kinda' worked and replacing it with ideas you guys found scribbled down in bits of paper left lying around on the floor after everyone moved out of the office. I'm not one for the doom and gloom of 'ToR is dying' like a lot of people portray, but it's nearly impossible to stay positive about the state of the game when you just admitted that you're now treating the live servers as beta-test servers. Rolling something out with the plan of letting it settle and 'seeing how it plays out' is something you do on a ptr, not live for the life of an entire patch. So not only have you guys made bad design decisions, you're also implementing them in a more amateurish manner than most Indy game developers. We aren't test subjects, we're paying customers.

Same here, 75% on the dot. Just sits there doing nothing.

Fully agree, I just came to the forum to complain about the exact same thing. My entire guild has been groaning about this, we've turned it into a game where we all start shouting and cheering sarcastically every time it pops up. It's like watching football with your friends but you hate both teams! I get the idea behind it, just make it something we can hide or resize. I was sceptical about this expansion and the proposed changes (especially after the last expansion didn't deliver), but after a few days, everything has really won me over..... Except this big...annoying...blue monstrosity that keeps popping up. I tried to report the UI for spam, but apparently you can't do that. Please remove or hide this annoying 'feature'

*update* We've been contacted by community management, so it appears we've got some traction going on the issue. Thank you to those who are (hopefully) now investigating the issue and resolving a solution. And thanks to those who have shown support (and restraint) in helping us get this issue noticed.

I know there are various threads on this issue, but after a conversation with a CS rep over the phone, I was told to just start a new thread, and 'hopefully if all your guildies respond to the thread, they will notice". This has happened to my guild a while ago, Ingenium Securities on the Ebonhawk server. About two weeks ago now. We were first told to have someone who was on the guild ship log in. But there is no one on the guild ship. Then we were told a few other irrelevant work around a that didn't matter, because we have no one on the guild ship. Like many others, our guild ship has dissapeared. We put in a ticket they tell us to submit a bug report. We submit a bug report and they give us no response. We have called in multiple times to customer service, they give us the run-around that 'we cannot touch anything game side, only accounts and logins'. When asked to be transferred to someone who CAN help us, we are given to a 'manager' who tells us the exact same thing. Except this time we are told that there is no way to transfer us to anyone over at technical who might fix the issue. So here's my last attempt that someone on the technical side of things returns our guild ship to us, or we're refunded the cost of our lost ship, or something, I don't even know at this point. I'm just attempting to get things fixed.

That's also a fair assumption, division of labor within the workforce over there, and there's only so much internal information the Devs and community managers are able to let out. This is probably one of those things. I can also sort of understand the argument that they are busy elsewhere, making sure the game is actually playable. As we went three or four days in a row of questionable stability, they have had their hands full. I get that However, it doesn't change the fact that a large portion of their customer base is currently unhappy about a thing, and the only peep we have heard so far has been a blue post saying 'if you go to your bank to get your money back, we will perms-ban your account'. The fact that the the responses that seem to be getting recieved over this whole fiasco have been so... contrite?... Leads me to think something is up, only compounding that assumption with the general silence on the topic at hand.

I opened a ticket to ask if the new packs were bugged, since I received far more old content items than I did items from the current pack. After purchasing three hypercrates (90 packs), I received many copies of the same weapon, one mount, and one set of gold armor (far better than most others it would seem). Still, I found it outstandingly offensive that 75% of the items I recieved were items from OTHER packs. I did not buy other packs... I bought the current back... because I wanted items from the current pack. If I wanted armors or color crystals or decos from previous packs... I would have purchased those gold and silver deco/armor/crystal/etc packs when they were on the CC market. I opened a ticket to ask for a refund, since I assumed my packs were bugged. In all honesty, I'm not one of those people that sit in front of their computer all day long looking over every single developer note, so I didn't even know about the chance cubes being a thing. I thought "Hey, a new pack, lets get some new items! Yay Star Wars!". Those jubilant cries of joy soon turned to stunned silence. Silence further enforced with the CS member closed my in game ticket without addressing my issue. Yes, I understand you like my money more than me, and will not return it. I get that. But.... Is it intended that you are to get more items that come from outside of the packs, than items affiliated with the packs themselves? We buy the packs because they contain new things, not because they contain old things. There are old item packs for that. No dev on the forums seems to be willing to address this issue. That tells me they either don't care (which I don't think is the case), or something did screw up... and they are worried about admitting it. Since there have been so many screw ups with the patches as of late, I'm inclined to believe it is the latter and not the former. Still, I think the community would REALLY APPRECIATE, if a Dev would speak on this subject. There have been several threads crying out about this, and many customers feel swindled. You would think some form of damage control would be done before they start hemorrhaging clients. I myself will never spend another dime on CC after the curt and dismissive response I received from CS regarding my issue. Which is sad because I genuinely enjoyed the process of opening packs. The little bit of gambling has always been fun in my eyes. I have the disposable income to spend $100-$200 each new set of packs, and while sometimes I end up snapping my fingers and going 'oh drat, bad rng', I've never thought it was an actual problem until now. It really saddens me to see such a potentially fun aspect of the game go down the crapper due to seedy business practices. That being said, I would still like to give ToR the chance to continue earning my subscription by answering my simple bold question above. No I will not put in a ticket to get it answered, I did that and got ignored. No I will not CALL CS and speak to them, as I have no proof that a person over the phone will be nice to me when the person across text was dismissive. I would like the question answered here, publicly. I think we, as customers, deserve that much at the very least.

The problem seems to be, you are not currently guaranteed to get a new item from the pack. Over fifty percent of the packs I opened, had only Jawa junk, a companion Cody, and two data cubes. I spent money to get items from the new packs, if I wanted to get items from previous packs, I would wait for those packs to be on the CC market and buy them, (or through the grand deco packs). Furthermore, by looking over most replies, it appears you receive 1-2 gold items per 30 crates you open (on average). That is a far decreased drop rate in rare items compared to previous packs. As someone who used to buy 3-5 hypercrates each release, I would usually end up with just about everything unlocked. Now, I have only one mount and one gold armor set unlocked, after three packs opened. And that's it... Not even close to half.... I'd say that's a noticeable change. I'd also say they won't be receiving another dime from me, nor will they be receiving money from several others as well. Buying power is really all we have in this case. No dev has come forth and said "we discovered the drop rate in things is messed up, we are going to do X". So it must mean things are working as intended, and all we can do is simply stop giving them our money. Simple as that. Voice your opinion, but don't expect much in return. Until they see CC sales dry up, they will do as they wish.

Attempted to put in a ticket to see if the packs were just bugged or what, as I couldn't believe my results after opening three hypercrates. The bug report feature broke and won't even allow me to put in a ticket now. Guess I'll be calling customer service direct tomorrow to demand a refund.