I wonder how many people are assumed to have quit when they have actually dc'd. I do ops about 5 days a week, and I frequently see people dc from the game. It happens so often that I have come to expect it. I see no reason to believe that dc's happen more often in pve than in pvp, and that's why I think this is an issue. Imagine if you got penalized for dc'ing in pve. It would make progging ops almost impossible. Likewize, for those who group queue for pvp, or just want to finish their dailies/weeklies, adding lockdown penalties to the task seems wrong to me. So, unless the devs can figure out how to stop penalizing people for things that happen that are beyond the player's control, they should stop penalizing them all together. At least that's what I think.

So, I guess that you are leaving it up to us to do some experimenting to find out the answer to this question. I would obviously prefer that you just tell, us, but if that's the way you want it then I guess I will oblige you.

While I agree with you in spirit, some days things seem to be going fine right up until the point that they go wrong, and then just when you think things are stable again, boom, and the internet drops again. I don't know about you, but I don't control the internet, and can't always predict when it will go out. Of course, on stormy days I know that it is more likely where I live, but does that mean that I shouldn't play on those days? Long lockout penalties are off putting to me and tend to make me grumpy when I am affected by them. If making me grumpy is the reason for the lockouts, then I guess congratulations are due to the dev that came up with the idea. If on the other hand, if making me want to pvp more often was the goal, then the change was a complete failure, and whoever approved this change should realize their mistake, and reduce or eliminate the lockout timer penalties.

Unfortunately, it seems that only positive feedback is listened to, and negative criticism is considered toxic and gets ignored.

So, if my internet connection is wonky, and I dc I get a 20 min lockout. If it happens again I get a 1 hour lockout, and if it happens a third time, I am locked out for 6 hours. Do you really want to do this? Did you even think this trough before coming up with this? I also wonder, why are you keeping details secret, and what other intended changes have you made that you don't want people to know about?

Do they even have any target dps numbers, or do they just say that they do to try to justify changes? If they do have them, they they should publish them. If not, then they should stop saying that they do. Until then, I don't believe them when they say that they do.

I don't seed Rakata gear listed. Is it getting the same level increase as other gear?

As a thinking person, it seemed obvious to me that you were only responding to the situation and not yelling at Jackie. What you say is true, and unfortunately patch day delays beyond the initial estimate are more the rule than the exception, and yes, even though I always expect delays, I am still not happy when they happen.

Posts like this only feed their dark side. Now I have a picture in my mind of someone at the studio yelling "quick, get the popcorn" as they anticipate people's response to your post.

This is also the logic used when the game launched in 2011, but since then gap closers have been added, and all melee abilities have been made instant or given the ability to channel while moving. Because of that, melee time of target has improved, and with that improvement time on target issues have been reduced or eliminated (boss dependent). In addition, when this logic was first introduced dot spread was not a thing, so in fights with multi target dps it made sense to have some burst dps in an ops group to help with add management. As things currently stand, dot classes out dps burst specs in both single target and multi target fights by design. This makes burst classes irrelevant and undesirable, and that is why I disagree with the continued use of these outdated developer guidelines.

Tell us, what are your dps targets by spec. You say that some specs are over performing, but never tell us what your performance standards are (assuming that you actually have any). I would also like you to let us know if performance levels are based on bis 340 gear or unaugmented 320 gear or something in between. Also, are you basing it on performance in pvp or in operations or on dummy parses? To be honest, I wish you would stop nerfing people, and increase the health pools on bosses instead. I mean, some bosses are so easy that only take 1 or 2 minutes to kill.

People are getting 340 gear by spamming watchdog, not by beating hard NiM bosses. Just saying.

So far so good. I got the new launcher earlier today. The whole process took about 2 minutes. I still use windows 10, and am using a 5 year old pc with an i7 processor, a nvidia graphics card and an ssd drive. I don't know if this information is useful, but I decided to share it just in case it helps.

Who needs to worry about credits when there are so many other forms of currency in this game. How many people can't afford to buy a gear upgrade, or to repair their gear due to a lack of credits? It's more likely that they that you will run short of tech fragments, conquest commendations, daily resource matrix, op-1 catalysts, fp-1 stabilizers or wz-1 accelerants that you need long before you will run short of credits. Why not get rid of all of the extra currencies, and start having people use credits to buy things instead Also, inflation a lot of the inflation in the game is caused by item scarcity. When the supply of an item is low, and the demand is high, people who have the credits will drive up the price. Maybe the fix for inflation is to make items less scarce. Right now, materials needed to craft gold augments are listed for sale on the GTN for about 300 million credits. Imagine what would happen to the price if you only needed 1 of each of these instead of 5 each to make a cm-1337 so that you could craft an augment. Prices would almost certainly go down on the mats needed and on the augments. They could also make them available on a vendor and sell the mats for credits at a price that they felt was fair. That would help to put a cap on the amount people would be willing to pay for them and would take credits out of the game when people chose to buy them from a vendor instead of another player. So maybe the best ways to fight inflation is to get rid of some or all of the specialized currencies in the game, and to make items that people want available at a rate that keeps up with demand and reduces the risk that item scarcity will lead to inflation.

I suspect they don't know what's wrong, and that's why they are not talking about it. I do hope though that they plan to generously compensate everyone that is having problems and is unable to play because of this change.

In regard to the 10th anniversary celebration goes, mediocre at best is an over statement. It was practically nonexistent.

You're right, steam numbers are incomplete, but they do provide information that can be used to support people's feelings that the game is less active than it used to be. If the devs ever choose to post actual numbers, then I will be happy to disregard the steam charts. Until then there is no other way to that I know of to find information to either verify or refute the "this game is dying" argument.

So, which is it? In one post you say gear doesn't matter and that it's all about skill, and in the other you say that you don't think everyone should have the same gear. If gear doesn't matter, then why not let everyone have it? Personally, I think gear does matter. I think that the person who is just starting out and doesn't understand gearing will perform better as they gain access to better gear, and as players like you and me are able to help them to understand the system. I want those that underperform to be able to do better, just as I want to do better myself, and that means that not only do I want the better gear for myself, I want it for everyone. In the old days, we when we lost a raid member, we would run a new member through a couple of ops and give them all of the gear drops so that they could perform up to their full potential. We would also craft them their augments and explain how the gearing system worked. That made the game more fun. Personally, I get gear to do the content that I like to do. I don't do content to get the gear that I want. That's why I don't join a team now to get the better gear. I want to be an asset to a team, not a sandbag. Yes, I would like to do the content, but lacking the gear I won't.

I looked at the parses that you linked, and it looks like you picked ones were people are doing much less dps than is typical in raids that I join. Someone dps percentile was 0, and one was 6, another was 9, and one at 14, with you in the 97th percentile. So yes, you pulled your weight, and carried the group, but come on, this can't be normal. I do see people regularly performing in a range between the 50th and 75th percentile, and often see people performing in the 95th to 99th percentile in ops that I join on my server. Today, I did an SnV sm, and had a pyro pt and a sniper in 339 gear, and I was playing on an arsenal merc with 331 gear. Yeah I know, a merc lol, but thats what I wanted to play, and even though I underperform other specs on a merc, it was story mode. The pyro pt outperformed me by 20% on Thrasher and 15% on Styrak (both of us played in the 99th percentile for our respective specs), but the sniper lagged behind me in dps by 3.5% and 40% on the same fights. This is typical and what I expect when I play. I don't care that I don't need the better gear for story mode content. I want it, and know that it would benefit me, and would encourage me to join a team that does more interesting content if I had it. Now tell me again why reality needs to set in, and why better gear would do nothing for me.

No. I pugged into a 16 man hm op tonight, and got beat out on dps by the people with 337 and 339 level gear, and me in 331. I out parsed everyone who had gear that was comparable to me and those with lower gear ratings. I also put up numbers that were comparable to the top parses as displayed on the Parsely web site for the spec I was playing. Still, I saw what is possible with better gear, and I know that I don't have it, so I do not want to be on a team when I know that the gear that I have is holding me back from playing up to my full potential. Instead, I will continue to pug into ops, and live with the scraps that I get from the game instead of becoming a valued member of a team. That's the way the devs want it, and I guess that I am just not willing to jump through their hoops to satisfy them or the elitist players who judge me to be either unfit or inferior to them, and not deserving of the gear because I haven't "earned" it.

I understand, and I still disagree. The minimum requirement that I used in my example is from a real world case that I have seen. I know that it is not actually needed to clear content. But it is a requirement to get on a raid team in the real world on the discord server that made the announcement. I have cleared all NiM content short of Apex and NiM gods, so while I am not the uber best player in the game, I do understand what it takes to clear the content, and I still disagree with those that think that they are somehow better than other people, that they are the only ones that deserve the gear. As far as finding an actual team goes. I have been multiple teams over the years, and unfortunately people that I enjoy playing with have moved on to other games. Now I am behind on gearing and don't want to weigh a team down, so I have opted to not try to join one. That could change if I had a pathway towards getting better gear, but outdated old school game design is preventing me from doing that at the moment.

How about instead of using 10k as an example you use a real world example. Here's my example. Yesterday it was announced in one of the discord servers that I am subscribed to that the parse minimum for NiM ops was increasing from 26k to 28k. In that case, someone able to do 7% more damage would allow for an 1.820 point increase to a person who parses 26k in 330 gear, bringing their total to 27,820. That is only 180 points short of the required lower limit. Now you can argue that the limit is arbitrary, and yada yada, as so forth. Or you can argue that people shouldn't do NiM ops if they can't do 28k in 330 gear. There are obviously a lot of "to bad for you" arguments that can be made to justify the position that only better players deserve better gear. But in my opinion, the guy who does 26k deserves the gear just as much as the next guy, and keeping it from those people is not good for the game if it keeps the player base that has access to the harder content from people who want to participate in it, but can only do so if they have access to the gear.

I'm reading the forums less now. The new format is difficult for my old eyes to read. The lack of contrast caused by white writing on a grey background strains my eyes.

How do you know what other people need? You seem to assume that because you might not need it that no-one does. Allowing an attainable pathway to the best gear for everyone that wants it benefits the game because more people are encouraged to venture into harder content when they have it.

Is there a way to customize the background color? It is to bright for me and is causing me to strain my eyes when trying to read the text. More contrast between the background and text colors would help.