Messing about with gear again, instead of making interesting content? Really? Is there no-one left who can write a decent story, come up with missions, create a new PVP or GSF map? Design a new planet to explore? Put in new things to do? Or are we just left with accountants who think devaluing the currency and adding another is going to keep star wars fans and gamers interested? Some of us have been grinding for gear ever since we started. - For me, Enough is enough. I'm not going to go through that all over again. I'm done with this BS.

Lots of losses is indeed possible, especially in solo queue. - It's highly unlikely that even a elite player could turn a match around all by themselves. Okay so the solution is to team-up, but not everyone has a regular circle of friends that are always free when you are. people have other lives outside SWTOR PVP.

I remember when it was kill or be killed, it used to be scary and enormous fun. Most times its a slog-fest of poor players, quitters and idiots. And everone uses the same builds and same counters over and over. Every time you start on a merc they refect, every time a sorc, they bubble, every time vs an operative you get a spike in your chest, every GS and sniper a flashbang in the face. Every time you try to slow someone they're resistant or pop a CD to overcome it. Every time you get CC'd three people jump on you and kill you before the CC wears off. Every time you put a target marker on the enemy that needs shutting down, no-one focusses them. Every time your node gets capped, you scroll back in chat to see no inc calls. Some people still give out useful info in chat, such as incs, clears, help coming etc, they focus the right people and generally try to co-ordinate the rabble, then they get abuse and no MVPs and wonder why they bother. There was always a buzz around announcing a new pvp mode, only to find it was the same cold scenarios warmed up again, ( yavin, queshball, vandinball) I used to love this game and wanted to PVP 24/7. Nowadays I only play SWTOR when there's nothing better to do.

IMHO DPS never needed to guard another player in the first place. Blurring the lines between disciplines was always gonna cause massive headaches. IDK if this goes far enough, since I stopped playing tanks and skanks some time ago, so I'm a bit rusty on all the guard mechanics. - I can't believe it took so long for anyone in the studio to wake up and smell the coffee, since players have been posting about it for literally years. Maybe they'll tone down all the self-heals from non-heal classes and phase walk from ranged DPS and all the other unnecessary guff that's crept in recently. REALLY SIMPLE PREMISE: Tanks soak up damage and generate threat, can dps a moderate amount. Heals heal, can dps a small amount. DPS do dps. Some classes have stealth at the expense of some heal capability or some dps capability or threat-holding capability. Any crossover makes an already- hard balancing act nigh-on impossible.

Hey! don't knock it! That's about 19 seconds a day of fresh new content.* - Probably not even as long as it takes to boot the computer and load the game and then log off. *providing you don't use rocket-boots to spin through the inside areas, spacebar through the cutscenes, use stealth to bypass encounters and put your comp on DPS to tear down the mobs at double rate. And play through one faction and take it as read the other is pretty much the same all over again. ohh! I'm sounding a bit like SteveTheCynic - bless him!

It's not about the lightsabre being shorter than the range of the guns. Its more about clever play, rotating your DCDs, using CC and Line-of-sighting, then using your offensives to bust-down the ranged player. To be fair though, unless the ranged player comes to the node he's scoring nothing for is team. - And the ranged on your team are doing the same to their solo melee node guards. Lesson is, never guard a node without some form of backup or backup plan, and never get caught alone and vulnerable. GL

Simple math(s) Players can easily make 100K in about 10 minutes if they choose to do some intensive stuff like heroics or daily areas. Even if there are only 1000 players, they can do this every single day, it soon adds up. - And this game is almost 9 years old. - Which is around a third of a TRILLION credits. Ofc in the old days there were thousands of players on every sever - of which there were scores. The credit sinks are few and far between, and every now and again the rewards for activities go up - and you get huge -if not hyper-inflation. Billions of credits were also made by exploiters, when you could buy items at low cost and re-vendor it for a higher price. - Even though some were squashed, probably a lot got away with it. There are also bots, which are basically mining credits from mob re-spawns, closed instances, endless flashpoints or simply running circuits around lockboxes. - Indeed some players get their thrills making as much money as possible. In the real world people have to eat and burn fuel and pay taxes and settle their monthly bills. - That keeps money scarce, circulating, and keeps inflation low. - There's precious little of that in the game. Its a factor in a lot of well-established games. inflation is in constant positive feedback, and is rarely, if ever tackled.

I like the way that people can see the match going south, so they just mess around being idiots until the match ends to avoid the 15m lockout. At least before the changes, there were quitters who could be backfilled with someone with a reason to help the team, since they could get 1 match point even for a loss. Now a back-fill has zero incentive to aid any team, in fact it is in their interest to end it quickest by not defending nodes, calling incs and suchlike. so ruining the experience for the other 7 players, who benefit the least from those selfish players. PVP is a mess for many reasons. Why double down and make it even worse?

100 dollar deposit in order to play the game, refundable when you close your account. If you are banned or caught botting, spamming chat, or any other serious infringement, the $100 is forfeit. Easy solution. Hand wringing and trying to squish f2p credit spammers is an endless game of whack-a-rat.

you also get a few social for completing bonus missions in heroics, if you are grouped up. and IIRC if you are in a raid group for killing World bosses. - Though my memory on this is somewhat hazy. - I certainly gained a lot of social when 2x WB kills on Ossus ( for the weekly) was a thing.

I think the deserter lockout means some people on the losing side will just sit the match out, by not trying hard, basically throwing the game. And TBH it doesn't seem to deter many people. I played a couple of matches the other night and looked at the allies table at the end. We cycled through 12 players on one and over 12 on the other. - Not the highest turnover ( I've seen 20+ on some matches on occasions) But then that was a few years ago, when player base was probably higher. TBh I'm sorely tempted when I see a game going south and just AFK to make a cup of tea. Only respect for the 15 other people who are online to be entertained stops me. I've advocated a sliding scale of rewards for PVP over the years. It'd cure a lot of the ills in the [pvp] game. - But I know that the studio has neither the time nor the talent to make it so.

Valor, social points, standing in varying factions, light and dark.... are all measures for varying activities in the game. Just accept it and move on. If you need to gain certain benefits or status, you have to work for it in the prescribed way. I don't see why you should gain rep with the bounty brokers for flying in GSF, nor should you gain valour for PVE flashpoints. Nor should you get achievements for things you didn't do. It's not like social and valor count for a huge amount. - A title, few minor unlocks. - And TBH valor 25+ and Social 10 are not that hard to achieve. Both are farmable in a few sessions play at most.

TBH the story got lamer and lamer and the re-jigging of stuff that didn't need fiddling with got dumber and dumber. I re-subscribed for 6 months a few weeks ago, and have hardly been online since. I'm starting to regret that money spent. The onslaught story was so piss-poor I only did it once on each faction. - Since it basically was the same whether you were empire or republic, it didn't seem to have much merit in any way. We were completely rail-roaded whatever choices we made. as for telling the rest of the story with a mail in the post, that smacks of desperation and budget cuts. - instead of animating it and getting a VA for an afternoon, they pen something in 10-minutes and run it by the spellchecker. Shame, coz this game was great a long time ago. - The most fun I've had is when my guild-mates decided to give it a run-through again for nostalgia. - We had a blast - but mostly for poking holes in the story, levelling up at a stupid insane rates and messing about in voice chat. It's the community that made this game great. BioWare decided to drive huge numbers of them away as a business decision. - Now it's subsidized from whales on the CM who have to have the latest shiny thing. - The community spirit is all but dead, and the pretence at meaningful story went with it.... probably around Makeb for all those that have been here a long time.

Weekly content updates.

I'm in 3 different small guilds and 2 big ones. - So that's a +1 +1 and +1 TBH BioWare has ignored small guilds from the start. - Small guilds matter! Not dividing the conquest score by the number of ( active) guild members was a stupid move. The number of times I log on an hour or two after conquest reset and see several ( big) guilds have already posted well in excess of 1M ( or 5M) Conquest points..... And I think.... "Why bother this week?"

I like OPG. - but it never really worked as a team map. When it first appeared, I tried my hardest to get people to co-ordinate, to have a plan, to aid nodes that we were taking or losing or needed reinforcements. - And was pretty much ignored, no matter how polite or urgent or encouraging or slightly sarcastic I was. In the end I decided this map was a solo effort for 16 people ,and not worth getting worked up about. It has its merits, but the long and twisty-turney passages means too many people running between nodes and not enough strategic play. I guess it was designed to break up big groups of people, but it over-egged that pudding and left us with a bit of a mess, and no ( blue milk) custard.

Part of the problem is that they didn't make the game sustainable on the Subscription model. - In hindsight that was their biggest error. So they introduced F2P and the hybrid model between that and full sub, but to pay for it they needed a revenue stream and quickly if the game was to survive. However, they doubled down on some poor decisions and took the game and story in a direction that a proportion of the playerbase didn't like. I accept that there is always going to be a turnover of players in a game. That's a given. However at the same time, mobile games were using in-game purchases to make money and its a logical step to follow suit, from a purely business point of view. But there's an obvious disconnect between making a game that everyone wants to be part of and letting the money roll in, or making a game for a small population and having to squeeze them every which way to keep it running. - I personally would prefer the former. I think that sometime soon there'll be a reckoning with gambling/lootbox/surprise mechanics. - the US may be a step behind but the EU seem to be hot on this kind of thing. And companies can't hide behind simply renaming gambling as something else for much longer. Gambling is still gambling whether its for real money or game currency or currency bought with real money. Most people can show some self restraint, but unfortunately like a lot of addictions, some people cant, because it's a form of mental illness. Grooming people to gamble and taking advantage of them for profit is certainly questionable, if not immoral. I sometimes wonder what SWTOR would have been like if they'd kept up the consistent excellent storytelling and content, and promoted it strongly when the last few SW movies came out, and invested in the game and fixed a lot of the issues - bugs, glitches, patches after an update and general QA.

I managed several novels worth - 100+ chapters at around 6-8K words per chapter, as well as having family life, and a full time job and playing SWTOR. - Just a matter of slicing your time up into manageable chunks is all it takes. maybe if we'd all spent less time opening boxes over and over and over in the hope of better gear, shiny things and more boxes to open....

I'm sure weasel-like practices will eventually get stamped on hard. Selling stuff for IRL money so you can get in-game currency to gamble with - albeit in packs or skins or boxes, or lucky dip .... is still gambling. Much like buying chips in a casino - it's still one currency used to buy another. And by changing cash to chips it makes the amount that you're sinking into your habit more opaque. OFC there's pushback from these companies that are making $$$ out of getting people hooked, but that's only to be expected. They are greedy capitalist companies who have greedy shareholders after all.

almost all arenas. I occasionally stay for a change of pace, but mostly it's a case of being 4v1 focussed, stunned killed and then the toxicity starts and people telling me how awful I am. And yeah, I'm probably only a few percentage points over the average, but I don't need people telling me to log off quit the game, delete it and top myself. - which strangely never happens in 8v8s. Occasionally I stay and if its close it restores my faith in arenas but that never lasts long. I also don't like any match that is about the 4th same map in a row. Whether I quit is about 50/50 if its a join losing match and it's near bedtime, then I might log out there and then and save myself the heartache. It pains me to quit, so it happens rarely. - And I'd never leave a match that's already a couple of minutes in. - quitting before the door opens is only a courtesy - letting someone else take my spot, not just back-filling.

Not bothered either way. Some Mado stuff is okay, some I'm not interested in that much. Tho' my snarky side says, 'Write 15 chapters based on purely martial skills to tick off force users' like we were forced to follow the ways and machinations of force users in kotfe and kotet, even though we were BH or smugglers, troopers and mercs.' But we all know that a 10-15 minute chapter every 6-8 months is all the studio is capable of ATM. So whatever awesome or otherwise we wish for , it'll never happen. The closest you'll ever get is a 10-second non-voiced cutscene with Shae Vizla.

Hihi. I was just looking at some old patch notes, and see that since 4.0 we're only a few months away from it being 5 actual years since some of the companions were lost. I was wondering if we'd ever have the remainder return. - Or a statement saying that there are no plans/ that they are still in the pipeline/ to give it up already.... Since characters were suspended in carbonite for ~5 years, it's a bit rich to make us literally wait that long IRL. IMHO. TBH I'm not that bothered, and I know that there is a terminal on Odessen. - But some former players were asking during a video chat the other day, It got me wondering.... Anyone got any thoughts or is it a lost cause? Is anyone holding out just kidding themselves?

So many times we take 2 and someone has to get greedy and take a third. - Often making it harder to keep on top of things, and sometimes losing us the match. so many people ragequit so much when early 2-capped and so frequently when 3-capped it becomes a joke. I've seen 20 people cycle through a losing team before now, - even 12-15 is not uncommon. TBH a lopsided game is over kinda quick anyways - why prolong the agony of a team who clearly can't grasp 'take 2 and hold' - even though it is a mite boring at times. The fault is in the map design. It was probably fine with a huge playerbase and lends itself to intelligent matchmaking - but nowadays I bet there's fewer than 50-100 people PvPing at peak times. With a few groups together and some classes being better for PVP the variety diminishes hugely. Instead of reducing heals and damage, why not reduce the channel time to switch a node back. So many times you get to within a few tenths and someone stops you- Or a stealth comes out of nowhere to interrupt. Good AI would make games more even, maybe, but we all know BW have mostly ignored PVP for 7-odd years, so why would they bother now?

DoT classes only shine when the enemy are bunched up a lot. Attacking and defending Doors in Voidstar for instance is a high pressure area - if you're on the fight intensive door. But also numbers aren't everything. You could be doing 10K dps on one node, only to lose the other two. You could be doing minimal dps while guarding a node or running with the huttball denying the other team a scoring opportunity. Probably the best advice is to stick with one character and discipline and learn it inside-out - learn every corner of the maps for good positional play, read the chat like a hawk, and don't get drawn into unnecessary fights. Playing other classes for a while also helps highlight their strengths and weaknesses. OFC playing in a team of regular friends/associates will probably win more games on average than any DPs score solo. Lastly, don't get hung up about it. You can do low DPS in a close-fought game with lots of twists and turns and it be immense fun, but on the other hand, pad huge numbers in a boring match, where no-one plants a bomb, or you get 3-apped or lose a huttball 6-0 Enjoyment beats topping the leaderboard any day, IMHO .

Start 6 or 7 years ago. Don't do too much travelling around and PVE Don't spend credits on cosmetic stuff. Sell anything you don't need or want. Sell any excess. Keep an eye on the Prices on the GTN. Have a character or two in a big Conquest guild. The weekly conquest top-10 rewards are sellable for credits. Keep doing quests or PVP for credits. Craft if you can find a profitable couple of things. Farm your own mats as far as possible. When you take quests, make sure it counts for a daily or weekly and do the bonuses for PVE Run only quick dailies/weeklies such as Czerka or black hole, or Ziost. Cherry pick any dailies or Heroics you can do really fast. - Such as Hutta or Corellia. Team up with people to farm heroics. Don't spend credits on anything you can live without - such as stronghold expansions, Decos, outfits, new weapons/ mounts/ unlocks. Put /send all excess credits on a character you rarely log on to . That way it's not tempting you to spend spend spend all the time you see a shiny thing. When you et over a certain amount, stop caring.