The last two GS have been an example of what "story" is without companions. Totally lackluster and uninspiring. There is nothing to connect the player to the GS story (it's just another grind now just like Conquest - starting the GS "story" with "grind these three old and very long flashpoints" really made the whole thing uninteresting). Add a new companion, just don't make it required (even if it is only purchasable with GS tokens during the season) with a some add in interactions with the PC. Then the anti-companion crowd can skip it and those that like to have a variety of companions to choose from, can have them as well. Having companions increases the probability someone will play through the GS story multiple times rather than spending CCs to buy an unlock.

Battle of Rishi today, same problem

They have been extremely rare drops for a while now. I've only gotten them from mission mobs (planetary random mobs too) but very very rarely, never out of any lockboxes (at least for as long as I can remember).

Lower level of mission "Into the Fire" on Makeb also still has a floating turret

Since about 7.0 I have been running into situations where the companion disappears and becomes an invalid character even though they are still showing up as "present" and at full health in the HUD. This happens most frequently for me with Traitor among the Chiss and Taral V flashpoints (almost every time I run those). In order to get the companion back, you need to summon a different companion and then resummon the companion you had.

The only real issue I have is the same I have had with all the "expansions/updates" lately. Way to little story play time (and what there is, is just running down a corridor in a straight line with mob after mob of the same enemies to drag it out - reminds me of all the complaints about skytrooper corridors in KoTFE/KoTET). The number of people critiquing the story, having finished it less than a day after it launched, is by far the biggest problem with updates. An expansion/update should take more than 1 short sitting to complete. Everything from 7.0 to now is practically shorter than one mid sized KotFE/KoTET chapter and those were pretty much 1 sitting completions as well.

The Heroic +2's come in two grades. The ones associated with the bonus series were designed initially for higher level characters so they tend to hit harder and require better gear/abilities to complete solo. Bonus series content used to be something you had to come back to a planet to do (typically after you finished the next planet in the sequence) and the heroics associated with the bonus series were tuned to that higher level as well.

The biggest problem is lack of new content to challenge players (people keep pointing to FF XIV but that game has had tons more new content added at the top end compared to SWTOR). There has been so little content in the game over the last several years that it is impossible to make the base game challenging at all for the massively overpowered characters that you have at max level to keep the end game players happy. In reality, there probably should not have been any significant gear increases since KoTFE/KoTET, then there might be some challenge left in the later game (and new content wouldn't need to be ridiculously over-tuned to suit that power level). Quite simply, a lot of the content is "too easy" because players have abilities now that the the original content was never designed to handle. Walking around on the starter planets at level 80 with all your end game abilities available is most certainly going to trivialize the content. And lets be honest too, how many people are actually at a level appropriate for the planet they are on with all the leveling boosts (again something end game players wanted so they didn't have to deal with version 1.0 difficulty leveling their third or fourth character to end game level). Level Sync does nothing to make the content harder, it just makes it take longer. The only way to make the game more like "launch" would be to take away abilities that are not suitable for the planet the character is on and that would trigger massive "forum outrage". Just look at how bent out of shape people get when there is even a hint of them not getting max level gear from wiping out level 1 NPCs on the starter planets with their level 80 characters It's less a problem that the game has been "dumbed down" and more an issue that the power level for end game characters has exceeded the content available for them to feel challenged.

We started cutting up the story progression content into tiny pieces long ago. Why not start doing the same for GS, stretch it out as long as possible (two, three, or maybe more seasons). I guess we'll have to wait until the next GS starts to continue the story.

I don't agree totally with you on this. There is some aspect that is true but GS1 and GS2 had enough story and interaction with NPCs to make it something you might want to do on more than one character (not so much for the last season and the current one). Removing companions certainly downgraded any connection the character had to the "story" making the whole GS thing just another type of conquest mechanic (repeat old content until you are sick of it). The last two seasons have been totally lacking in a coherent story (the previous season story ended abruptly and this one even more so) and the current season is just a repeat old content with a couple of cutscenes. Nothing really tying the story to any of the participants.

This is the one least likely to occur. Throughout the entire game's life people have asked over and over for faster leveling. The original version of the game was an absolute slog where you had to complete every mission on a planet (and usually have to farm mobs for a while to) to be able to move on to the next planet. People have asked for faster leveling over and over for a variety of reasons. They want their characters to become powerful faster, they've already done the content a dozen times and don't want to slog through it again (but there is no new content to move on to), they want to get to endgame (or PVP or GSF) and don't want to have to level each character through all the content again, they want to get to max level so they can start collecting the "good" gear, etc. A nice idea, but would be met with lots of resistance from just about everyone in the game.

It's hard to be disappointed when you expect very little. Story content has been dragged out so far that you have to play a new character through the "old content" just to understand what you did the last time you played. Overall, the amount of content added has been embarrassingly sparse and even the GS add-on, that had at least been interesting when it was launched with seasons 1 & 2, has degraded to the point, there is almost no reason to participate in it. What needs to be done is for Broadsword to have each update focus on one of the gameplay modes and do a good job of providing engaging, relatively error free content (once per year everybody gets something substantial). They should define in advance, which aspect the incremental updates will address and then stick to it (so people know when their favored mode will be addressed). There is no real need to modify base game mechanics with a population as low as it has sunk.

I have noticed occasionally with some AOEs that have a "charging" period, that you take damage if you started inside the AOE and then moved out before it is executed (interrupt seems to work if the AOE is interruptible). It seems to be more a glitch than anything since it does not occur consistently in my experience. The "increased damage" AOEs added to some FP to make them more difficult seem to be more prone to this effect.

While a nice idea, It's not exactly simple to implement. You would need to incorporate some sort of code that differentiates between a new player crashing due to inexperience and someone deliberately crashing. It would probably have to involve some sort of "crashes/minute" mechanic which would be easily circumvented by switching between crashing and not paying attention to the game. It wouldn't be fair to the team with inexperienced player(s) crashing to be penalized for that in addition to the loss of "uptime" it already causes. Eliminating crash/destructions altogether, though not truly realistic, would be a simpler solution.

Maybe they're saving the ending for the next Galactic Season. No real ending is pretty consistent with the very low quality of this season's story (When you start the story with "run these three old and very tedious flashpoints" you knew it wasn't going to be good. GS story has been on a trend downward since GS3.

One thing to keep in mind with all this complaining about how many CQ points people are getting is that it is the only way outside of group content to gear up your characters. It literally takes tens of thousands of Tech Frags and Conquest Comms to gear up a single character. And even when you get one character there and can use Decurion crates to bypass the base gear (which currently takes completing the weekly for a planet's heroics for one piece), you still need thousands of tech fragments and CQ comms to upgrade your relics. If you play PVP you are getting both CQ comms and WZ-1s at the same time, both of which can be used to upgrade your gear (and WZ-1s drop at a prodigious rate in PVP). If you are doing flashpoints, the same is true with FP-1s, and with Operations OP-1s. Should group content have more options for gaining CQ points? The simple answer is yes, but pushing for ways to make gaining CQ points for those that don't enjoy that game mode more time consuming isn't the answer.

And this is what it comes down to in the end. All of the pro-nerf stuff (from all sides) focuses on what a few players do and undercuts what most of the players do. The Rep nerf has far greater impact on the casual players in that they now have to do additional content just to get 1 or 2 characters to their goal (people who get 10, 20, or 30 to the goal already have a system to get there). With the Rep objective in place you could quickly complete 1 or 2 characters and then go on to playing the part of the game you enjoyed. I like to get a couple characters to the conquest goal each week. With the nerf, I now have to put in more time doing the part of the game I don't enjoy (grinding content). I like playing the heroics and some of the dailies but don't want to feel I have to just to gear an alt. There are too many people worried about what someone else is getting out of Conquest.

Maybe this is the core problem and why they don't get what they want. The fly 5 ship objective change also has nothing to do with your "hypothesis" of having more smaller objectives. If you don't put forward ideas for these new "objectives" you have no place complaining about not getting them.

Sounds like something to ask for then. Why don't you start a thread about it and see how popular that is within the GSF community? I'd do it myself but I'm pretty clearly on record as not liking the game mode and my starting a thread like that would likely just initiate a flame war.

You have misquoted me here. What you quoted is actually Stradlin's comment

Perhaps they looked back at their data over the last several years where they have continually reduced the number of CQ points obtainable from "solo" activities and determined that all their "encouragement" of players to do group content as a means to increase subs or maintain subs or at the very least increase participation in "group" activities was completely ineffective and now they are going to try something different. That said, Operations do need more ways to gain CQ points as they are seriously underrepresented in CQ (ask for them to buff your content not nerf other people's)

1) Better story broken up into fewer minuscule fragments. Story should be 20-40 hours every year not 15 minutes here and 15 minute there. 2) Take GS back to where it was in Seasons 2 & 3 3) Get rid of Flashpoints as story 4) Make Planetary Missions replayable once you hit level 50 5) Do a better job filling in what happened during the 5 years you were in carbonite in KotFE (post KotFE areas of the vanilla planets)

What trivializes Conquest even more is advancing multiple objectives (5,6, or even 7) with a single mission. If they left the points the same for GSF but made it so you could only advance 2 objectives at once, I'd bet there would be outcry from the GSF community on how the devs nerfed Conquest for them even though the number of points available was the same..

So why is it exactly people are against someone else completing CQ on multiple toons? Does it really affect you negatively? If you have tons of creds and are fully geared you don't even need to do Conquest. People completing CQ on multiple toons seem to want either the creds (or the mats, if they are crafters) or the gear.

I think inability to create new content for whatever reason plays into it as well. Based on the assets in the game, it's clear GS6 was intended to have a reputation track but for some reason, they were unable to implement it (or it was a last second change). Why even have a currency drop if it is only really vendor trash, sort of goes against the idea they were trying to reduce the influx of credits to cool the economy. The choice of the flashpoints in the first GS misssion as well is telling. Those are some of the longest flashpoints to run (thus "stretching out" the content).