What is it then when Player A gifts Player B 4 billion credits and Player B gifts Player A a cartel market item shortly thereafter. It's this loophole that is the issue with "gifting". It would be abused by far more players than would legitimately use it for gifting. The binding of CM items to legacy after the first trade/sale following their purchase from the CM is the only real solution (though you still get the "no tax" trade the first time) to prevent flipping of items which drives up prices. Gifting should be allowed but not for everyone all the time. Perhaps a 30 minutes to 1 hour unlock that you purchase with credits (or longer if purchased with CCs) where you can trade things tax free . Still exploitable but it does put a damper on "free" trades. Despite the complaints, the taxes have been very successful in bringing down prices. Perhaps they can be lifted at some point once prices have stabilized at a more reasonable level.

Still prohibited from traveling to stronghold in this entire area. Also add to the list the Jedi Temple (Main Floor) area on Coruscant

Silly question perhaps, but do you have an open character slot on Star Forge. If there is no open slot, the transfer will fail.

Based on them not having developed any games of their own in 10 years and supporting only EA MMOs, it seems likely they are not truly independent. Basically all of their income is coming from EA. I've worked under situations like this where you leave on Friday working for one company and come in on Monday working for another. Nothing really changes except for the signature on your paycheck. This is what I think Broadsword is, not a wholly owned subsidiary, but pretty close.

It's the same publisher, EA. The Dev team is the same dev team just under a different name, Broadsword.

Or it could be purely financial. Keeping all three "servers" in the same server farm is cheaper than spreading them out to different locations (as opposed to moving them all to a different location). The benefit you get from spreading them out only arises if the game population rises significantly and one datacenter can't manage the full "workload" and the population using the server becomes more dispersed.

Were you logged in when you made the transaction? You usually have to log out then back in for it to show up.

Yes, but if I play a "weak" character vs a "strong" character (ie more challenging), the rewards are the same. If you create separate versions of the content then you can include things that do make it harder and the increased rewards are justified. You can't do that in a milieu where different rewards are being applied based on your selection of level sync. The KotFE and KotET veteran modes are more than just lowering your stats through level sync. How much harder is it really for a level 80 character with 40 levels of reduction than a level 30 character with 10 levels of reduction doing missions on Coruscant (or any of the first 3 planets or so). Should that level 80 character get better rewards just because he is taking a bigger level reduction than his lower level counterpart even though the content may still be easier of him because of his level based abilities. What about someone with all of the legacy datacrons collected vs someone with none. On low level planets the datacrons do make a difference. Should the person with fewer datacrons collected get better rewards?

Again, the problem is this is a very subjective determination. It needs to be completely objective if you are going to add increased rewards. Running the same level character through certain heroics using stealth is much easier than running a glass cannon DPS. How do you differentiate between them when they may have the same overall stats and levels (the equation becomes complicated very quickly).

The problem is that level sync is no longer a hard cap and better gear and more levels will always make the content easier. How do you define what is "hard" enough to qualify for increased rewards. Reducing a level 80 character 8 levels while they are wearing 336 gear might still be easier content than reducing a level 40 character 2 levels while wearing 226 gear in the same content. Since 7.0 your gear matters. You would have to base it on the actual stats themselves (which aren't gong to be consistent based on the level sync "level") plus an adjustment for the abilities the character has (levels) in order to make it equal and that is probably beyond the ability of any player to determine (or even Bioware/Broadsword to determine as even the class you are using can impact the difficulty - stealthers for example) what actually constitutes "hard" enough for the xp/reward bonus.

Seems like everything is fine as it is now then. The few people who do it get reported. The problem is clearly being exaggerated.

You have to make a choice then, get rid of the griefers and collapse the queues (assuming they are actually as prevalent as people in this thread want you to believe). Or keep them and at least get to fly the missions for the minimum 6000 CQ points per pop.

SWTOR wasn't sold to Broadsword at all. Broadsword was hired by EA to "run" the game servers and keep the software updated (and provide whatever continuing support, content updates, are needed). The most likely scenario is that EA has a set fee they are paying Broadsword to provide contracted services (managing the servers, fixing bugs, updating the content) and possibly a profit sharing clause so that if Broadsword does a particularly good job running things, they can profit. The important thing to keep in mind is that EA is the only source of funding (subscriptions, CM, etc are still going to be handled through EA - the publisher, developers are almost never directly involved in the money collection). Whatever profit Broadsword makes from the game has to come from the funds provided to it by EA.

One thing to remember is that EA is still the publisher so everything has to be approved by them (and probably Disney as well) for anything to be said. The game will have to survive on whatever EA decides to give Broadsword to run the game. Think of Broadsword as a sub-contractor with no other clients (they only run EA "MMOs")

Bringing this one back up as it is still happening. All the same places as noted previously. It's mostly slicing nodes but other nearby nodes are also sometimes impacted (Archaeology, Biochem, and Scavenging). If the issue with fixing the slicing nodes is one of credit boxes, change the slicing nodes to drop slicing mats instead (or even randomly Slicing, Treasure Hunting, Diplomacy, and Underworld Trading mats).

While the season is active, you also get 2 Notes when you reach 25K conquest points for the day (so up to 14 for 7 days). The group GS objectives also generally yield better than the solo objectives on completion. I haven't noticed a difference with or without Amity but having Amity as your active comp is supposed to increase the drop rate. Unlike the underworld rep items, there doesn't seem to be an particular place that is better than any other.

As late as it is in the season, you may have another problem. There is a limit to the number of reputation points you can gain per week (I think it's 5000). If you aren't already close, all those Notes of Reflection won't do you any good. You will still be able to progress the reputation after the season but it will not count toward the achievement.

An interesting idea, but the question would be, how many people wouldn't play the game mode then? Right now I see more interest in PVP/GSF when guild groups can queue together (Currently I only do either activity as part of a guild group and I wonder how many others do the same). Maybe a solution for the solo queuing is to lower the number of people needed to initiate a "match". for PVP maybe 6 vs 6 and GSF 8 vs 8. It seems sort of odd to argue against grouping in group content.

This is sort of what it is like now. As you advance through the story (move toward the outer edge of the wheel), the mobs get tougher (at least for people not running around in BIS gear and max level on low level planets). In theory, the combat AI of the NPCs could be tiered based on the level of the PC(s) to include extra abilities and better utilization of stuns and knockbacks - instead of just using them immediately. You might even be able to adjust those tiers based on the character they are attacking (use combat routine A against a low level opponent and combat routine B when attacking a higher level opponent) that way mixed groups of levels could fight the same mobs together and all be "challenged". It requires more effort from the Dev team but would, in the end, be a much more satisfying "harder" content and would not make the game difficult (or tedious) for the players that haven't been around for ages and collected all the boosts in the world. Alternatively, you could adjust level sync's stat reduction based on character level vs planet level or gear level vs planet level. Putting in the effort to improve mobs is a lot better than just turning them into "bullet sponges" and making them immune to player abilities. The problem arises in how much effort to expend on making the game "harder" vs providing new content. It seems like most people would choose new content over reworking the vanilla game (7.0 was a major rework of the game with little new content and was rightly panned for it). Broadsword is not going to have more resources to devote to the game, EA is still paying them to maintain the game and the Devs are from Bioware (and fewer of them than are "currently" available).

The "fly X ship" objective is probably the most widely abused objective in all of conquest. It should be replaced with something else. The infinite CQ points for just flying matches (doesn't matter if you win or lose or even get any medals) is problematic as well but if you take care of the "fly X ship" problem it may decrease in severity due to the reduced "stacking" of objectives making it less beneficial to speed through the match..

As I remember it, If you were subbed at the time of the mergers, you got an extra 12 free slots (it might have been before the merger as well, I don't recall exactly where it came in). If you were preferred or f2p, I think you either got fewer or none at all. I also believe, only the subbed players got the benefit of exceeding the unlocked character slot limit (and while they didn't have any characters inactivated, they could not create any new characters until their character count dropped below the unlocked limit). f2p and preferred I believe had characters locked (inactivated) if they went over. I've been continuously subbed since launch so I'm not sure exactly how the f2p and preferred merger went but it was definitely more restrictive.

That doesn't in any way invalidate the fact that two servers are always better than one. You've been around enough to see how all of the group related play has become more toxic and unpleasant. It would be nice to go to fleet or DK and not have to turn off chat due to all the garbage being spewed (maybe an automated AI reporting system could help there). I also can't remember the last time I did a Master of Veteran flashpoint where anyone said a word in chat (and I run several a week on SF). On SS I run them with a guild and there is pleasant conversation going on all the time. The whole social aspect of the game certainly seems to have moved into guilds. There was a time when someone could ask a question in chat and it would get answered respectively instead of rudely like it is now. Reduced cost transfers are offering them the choice, so that argument falls flat as well. And everyone is currently in the same boat as far as transfers go. It costs the same to move from SS to SF as it does from SF to SS, so no one is prevented from moving even now if it is that important to them (not to mention you could always start a new legacy). It takes a lot of gall (which I assume is what you meant by 'gore") to say that what other players want is unimportant, which is more or less what you have said in all your posts. I am for allowing those "random grouping" players to transfer at reduced cost which solves their problem without impacting others.

No, in my mind, I am giving them the opportunity to move to SF if that is what they want. You, want to force everyone onto SF regardless of what they want. Once all those players supposedly trapped on SS have transferred to SF, and you still can't get pops outside prime time what are you gong to do, there won't be some massive hidden reserve of group players on SS to merge into SF, just a bunch a people who don't want to be on SF (which is why they stayed on SS) making them much more likely to just quit the game. And the vast majority of players taking advantage of the low cost transfers won't even be group players moving, they'll be players moving stuff to SF to make a bigger profit on selling stuff or consolidating their stuff in one place. Bioware has made it clear they are open to allowing transfers (they announced back-end maintenance on the Character Transfer system) but are hesitant to do so because they are worried it will spin the economy out of control again on SF if lots of players are allowed to move high value items from SS to SF. Merging SS and SF will do nothing to expand active random grouping hours on SF and there won't be anyone left on SS that wants to do that content through ransom queues, so merging is pointless. There aren't enough players in the entire game (if you take the negative impacts of lag into account, anyway) to keep any server active much outside "prime" time. This won't be a problem after reduced cost transfers, all those group players for whom it is important will be where they get the best pops in the game (SF in your opinion). Free cost transfers for a month or two (perhaps through December since there is usually an uptick in players on all servers) completely eliminates the "can't get group content" argument from the equation.

With reduced cost transfers it will never get there because the poor group players who can't get their 100 warzones a day can still transfer to the "good server" (in fact there is absolutely nothing preventing from doing so now - and most of them have already moved). As long as a server is active during local prime time it should be left alone - it harms no one at all despite the fictitious examples that keep getting posted about GTN prices and "social" play (almost none of the group play is social anymore it's all speed run) and I don't consider fleet/DK trolling to be a positive social aspect of a high population server. The thing that will happen though, is that when the SF pops start to drop, which they will soon enough, the group players on SF will eye those "few" group players still on SS and want to force them to provide a boost to their group pops on SF and demand a merge. No matter what you do for some of them it's never enough.

A dead server is one where no one is logging in and playing. The PVP servers prior to the last merge were dead (if you were lucky you saw 5 players on fleet, and might be alone on most planets). SS is nowhere near that. There are still a lot of players playing on that server which makes it not dead. It may be non-viable for a certain type of play-style (someone looking for 100s of warzones a day) but that most certainly doesn't mean it is dead. Those players playing there now have every right to expect to be able to stay if they choose. Those players who want to move from SF to SS should also be allowed to do the same and not be at a disadvantage "financially" compared to those wanting to move in the opposite direction. The only reason to oppose movement in the other direction is a fear that casual group players currently queuing on SF would move to SS because it is more suitable for their preferred playstyle and that group play just isn't that important to them (thus impacting queue times on SF).