Just remember, starting tomorrow, using quick travel to get unstuck will cost you credits so you can pay for terrain design flaws.

This is patently false. Of the 10 that don't almost all of them are old pre-Hutt Cartel ones that have fairly extensive story telling in them

BT and Esseles aside. 10 of the 28 GF flashpoints don't have a solo mode and can't be done in anything less than Veteran mode so there is no option to "take all the time you want".

Shouldn't this apply to the speed-runners as well?

OK, then why should they make changes to make it more difficult for low level players to play flashpoints as has been suggested by several people in this thread. There should be no limitations on what players can do in the flashpoint. If someone wants to watch the cutscenes, they should not have to "form their own groups" or "run the solo mode". If GF is for everyone, it is for everyone regardless of their playstyle.

The list of flashpoints without Solo modes is very long: Hammer Station, Athiss, Mandalorian Raiders, Cademimu, Collicoid War Games, Red Reaper, Kaon Under Seige, Lost Island, Kuat Drive Yards, Czerka Labs, Czerka Core Meltdown.

Story mode is not Solo mode. Those are two different things. Most of the "low-level" flashpoints don't even have a solo mode.

Well then you can put your limits on Vet and above flashpoints and I wouldn't care. Story mode flashpoints should be accessible without restriction (level, space-barring requirements, mob skipping, etc) to anyone high enough level to be on the planet/station where they can pick it up (or whatever the original level limitation was). If you want to play a Story Flashpoint through Group Finder and don't want "low levels" or "story watchers" or "non-skippers" along, it is your responsibility to put the group together, not theirs.

The lowest level character I recall seeing running one of the "vet" flashpoints through GF was level 50 or 60 which I wouldn't consider low level.

This wasn't about vet flashpoints as there are virtually no low level players running Vet flashpoints which is what the OP was complaining about

New players got the most benefit out of it since "experienced" players have played the game enough to have a cadre of friends to play with and know how to form groups. New players don't have the connections in game yet to form their own groups, for many the early flashpoints provided that. It is unreasonable to expect those least able to form groups to do so, so that the more experienced players can speed run the content more easily. Edit: It was added back in 2.0 when high level characters could still solo all of the low level flashpoints (and the game population was high enough that finding a group to do a flashpoint was as simple as standing by the entrance to it) so there was no reason, other than social, to group up a bunch of high level characters to run them (there were other flashpoints for high level characters to run in groups if they wanted the challenge). Now, the reason people run them with high level characters through Group Finder is for the increased rewards (primarily anyway).

I'm not sure I totally believe that. Lots of Cartel Coins should have lowered prices by lowering demand (with more CCs, people can buy items directly from the Cartel Market instead of the GTN which would normally drive down prices). It most certainly would have had an impact on Bioware Cartel Market sales as fewer people would have had to buy Cartel Coins with real money to buy things off the Cartel Market (and there were certainly people trying to maximize the CC gains through GS). I think this is a bit of obfuscation by the Devs (or maybe just an attempt at after the fact justification for the change).

It should be expected that anyone using Group Finder to run FPs instead of putting together a group outside of it should expect to have to wait for people to watch the cutscenes. Group Finder was put into the game for new players to experience the flashpoints more easily (and learn how to play their classes in them) not make it easier for people to speed run content for rewards. If spacebarring is required, there should be no extra rewards.

two problems with that approach 1) not all early flashpoints have a solo mode (Athiss for example) 2) You can't learn how to play tanks or healers by doing the solo flashpoints. They are all set up for DPS.

Heroic Transports and your legacy QT ability function differently. The heroic transports take you directly to the entrance of the heroic while the personal QTs only take you to an unlocked QT point (typically at speeder pads). The personal QTs existed long before the heroic transports and are thus very likely to use a different mechanism (and separate code structure). It should have been possible to add a cost to heroic transports without adding them to the personal QTs. A 1% increase in the GTN tax would have done more for reducing credits in the game than any personal QT tax will ever do (and should have been extremely easy to code) The QT costs are an unnecessary annoyance (especially with the annoying pop-up asking if you want to spend the credits). If you want to drain credits, why not just reduce the rewards for completing the heroic missions by a 1000 credits (adjusted down for lower level characters who receive lower rewards for them). That would be unnoticeable by players and would have accomplished exactly the same thing (and wouldn't have been interpreted as nickle and diming them to death or reducing the effectiveness of a very popular QoL). It really does seem the intent is to get people to quick travel less as a means or slowing down the rate they complete content irrespective of the rewards it grants. I didn't see a functional Heroic transport cost on the PTS so it's likely one won't be included in this when it goes live (or the costs are going to be so egregious, the forums would have burned down under the criticism).

While I don't agree that it has no impact on re-playing story or leveling characters, what is the point of it then. It clearly won't have any impact on the number of credits in the game (since the players replaying the story or leveling characters don't generate anywhere near enough credits to have an impact - at most 2-5 million per play-through). If it isn't going to even slow down credit generation, why implement it instead of something related to the GTN. At least with a change to the GTN you would actually be removing credits from the game (since listing something on the GTN doesn't actually generate any new credits by itself and a sale removes 8% of the transaction cost). This just seems poorly thought out overall. Costs for heroic transports make sense because farming daily areas and some heroic areas can generate lots of credits. I think a simpler way to reign in credit influx is to revert back to mobs dropping planet level rewards instead of character level rewards. You can keep the mission rewards the same if you like (though they should simply put a cap on those too so that level 80s running the Coruscant heroics aren't rewarded better than someone running the heroics on Voss) I'd also like to see some differentiation in costs for heroic transports based on whether it is a jump from fleet/stronghold to the start point compared to on planet jumps (which should be less). If you are going to keep the QT costs, they should be based on area jumps not pure distance so that jumping from one speeder pad to another doesn't cost 10 times as much using the taxi.

I've got full sets of Esseles and Black Talon gear for multiple "classes" (along with those from several other early flashpoints). It would be nice if they would put those in collections so they could be used on other characters. Some of the pieces are actually quite nice.

Any Cartel Market item that had actual stats associated with it (from built in mods) can no longer be claimed from collections although it should still show it as collected. Some items have been completely removed from the game.

I think it could work with some modifications if the goal is to pull credits out of the game. 1) 3.5% is too high, maybe 1% or 0.5% 2) trading off GTN has to be stopped or it's a pointless exercise. 3) There should be a minimum sale price below which it doesn't apply so it's more like a luxury tax on very high priced items than a regressive tax.

Couldn't they just offer something like they do with Group Finder where you can select the "playstyle" you want. Offer check boxes for "everything", "just solos", and "just premades". Maybe even offer slightly better rewards for the less popular "playstyles" to help fill out their queues.

OEMs and RPMs have dropped due to increased supply. People are completing their gearing treadmill which leaves them lots of free tech fraagments to buy the OEMs and RPMs (simple supply and demand). The same is true of most crafting mats. no demand = steady or lower prices. It has nothing to do with credits flowing into the economy. What does have an impact on the higher priced items is the ability of a small number of players to buy out the entire supply (flipping items on the GTN or other trades for a higher price each exchange), that is a credits already in the economy problem. As far as credit sellers go, they are merely preparing for an expected increase in demand when the new "credit sinks" take effect and players turn to them to "bypass" them. I personally have not seen hypercrate prices drop at all, though I don't follow them closely enough to notice small changes and those changes are very recent, if they are occurring at all (it could be a supply and demand thing as well with Sales runs now being paid for in multilpe hypercrates - could be market saturation).

They have already taken this approach over the last several years (though they weren't silent about it) and it has had no significant effect on inflation. You no longer get credit rewards for completing conquest objectives (which was a big source of credit influx), rewards from heroics have been reduced at least twice (in addition to the elimination of credit rewards from them as conquest objectives), the selling price for mats and gear at the vendors has been massively reduced (selling gear from heroic boxes was eliminated entirely), etc. Still prices rise and in many cases they have risen even faster with the reduction in credit influx. Keeping doing the same thing over and over and hoping "this time will be the fix" is the definition of insanity. A new idea is needed. The allowing of off GTN trades between players (which totally avoids the best credit sink in the game) needs to be fixed in some manner. A single off GTN trade taxed at its value would pull thousands of times more credits from the economy than all the quick travel taxes will do in a year to say nothing of the credit sink taxing Sales Run transactions for hypercrates would draw out).

I think you are seriously underestimating how easy it is to store "credits" in non-credit forms that can basically be instantly converted to credits without using the GTN. With the credit limits on characters, it is unlikely credit sellers are storing their "wealth" in exclusively credit form.

Unfortunately, a mechanic put into the game to encourage people to do group content (and learn how to play it) by making it easier to group up with other random players seeking to do the same, has been completely taken over by speed-runners and other "toxic" elements (mostly players that got kicked out of guilds for bad behavior or couldn't get into guilds because of their reputation). They are looking solely for the rewards (particularly the bonus for having all flashpoints checked in group finder which includes the low level ones) and not the "social" aspects of playing in a group. There are some good players that use group finder and actually do help you out and will interact with you. Unfortunately that seems to be becoming more the exception that the rule.

It already is. You can already buy end game gear with cash (via Cartel Market items) through Sales Runs offered by a number of guilds.