Seek help, professional help.

Yup.... another six months of shifting mods to old shells. The new looks are a mix of extremely conservative 'painted on' colours and... just... urgh... I suggested to guild mates a few months ago that we'd be mauling old content for things like Rakata warrior pieces... I guess this is one way to ensure we keep doing them - assuming the old vendors aren't removed.

Arguably the most common cause of failed password attempts is the caps lock key - create an indicator of some kind to alert people if their caps lock key is active. ... yes, I just failed to enter my password four or five times before realising that my caps lock key had secretly activated itself; Yes, there's an indicator on my keyboard but my keyboard's already choc full of lights (all the same colour) that it's just one of many. (Keyboard makers design fault there and mine for not being more observant, and it's a mistake I very rarely make). Having said that, the point still stands, a great many password failures are due to sneaky caps lock keys.

I know it's been said before, I've said it before - please stop shaking my screen! I don't shake your screen while you're trying to concentrate (which admittedly would be an impressive feat, particularly given that I live on the opposite side of the world), please quit messing with mine.

SWTOR would have fantastic features available to it, though admittedly the sticking point is nearly always graphic optimisations. Having said that, there are plenty of great looking games that work extremely well on Macs. Given that they'd need to employ a whole unit of Mac developers though, I doubt it'd ever happen - BW struggles with the enormity of TOR as it is. Other companies, large and small (and enormous) manage it but I honestly don't believe BW have the skills or motivation to even consider it.... it would be awesome to be wrong about this. Again, that said - it seems like an incredible waste not to create tie-in mini-games for Android and iOS devices. As noted above, I'm sure they'd say they're busting a gut to make TOR but it would be incredibly worthwhile to hire a team (or two) of Android / iOS developers for this purpose.

You need to begin by properly defining the problem that you want to solve. The entire premise of your proposal rests on the reasoning that "re-listing undervalued products is bad". If you're going to tackle the issue, you need to really consider what exactly is 'bad' about the buying and selling of "undervalued" goods. A wise man once noted that a great many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view - figuring out the actual value of an item within a given system and society is a fantastically complex exercise and ultimately depends on the needs / wants of the (prospective) purchaser. There are many reasons why people undercut or list at undervalue prices. There are many things other people pay huge sums for but which I think are utterly worthless or at least, no more valuable than comparable items... colour crystals come to mind as an easy example. You can't 'fix' the human side but you can help people make better decisions - and critically, through good tools and a good UI make working with the GTN a good experience for everybody. Try to hold back your unending bile for a few minutes and consider the various Auction mods for WoW - allowing that the GTN is not the same as the WoW Auction House - many of the principles are the same for the purposes of this discussion: curse-gaming link on which they list 258 mods that deal with the economy. Take a moment to consider that - 258 mods, some of them jam packed full of seriously advanced features while others focus on very particular tasks. That's a lot of work to make trading work better and more available to a greater range of the community. i.e. It's an important issue and well worth addressing (making the GTN UI easier to navigate and browse is tied to this as well... the GTN desperately needs to be more usable). The vast majority of those mods focus on making the listing process quicker and easier, within the context of listing at "current" prices, often with a choice for just how aggressively one wants to sell (or buy) items. Facilitating people with the tools and information they need puts them in control, makes every individual responsible because they know right from the start, where they stand and what to expect of their actions.

Just to add to this while I can, think about Roles in terms of what characters can do in an encounter. The structure is defined by the things NPC's and player characters can do (i.e. the abilities on your bars). MMO's are all about the Boss Fight, and In a boss fight, the boss needs to be a serious threat but you can't have everybody tank equally well, so clearly there needs to be a designated tank. Likewise healing is an important component, it adds a resource management aspect and a level of gameplay on top of "kill the boss" but people can only do so much, so you need dedicated healers. DPS is important because you need to ensure the conditions to complete the encounter are in the players hands & not just a rate of attrition. We won't really see more interesting roles (imho) until encounter design embraces more interesting challenges - i.e. more than just "kill the boss". We need to be working tactically to achieve goals during encounters; Ideally I'd like that to mean that Operations (and Flashpoints) become more about varying degrees of success in missions than "killing the boss"... that's a whole discussion all on its own though. Once upon a time a certain BW personality made a big deal about the need for encounters to be heroic and that meant against the odds, out-numbered, etc. I'm pretty sure that as professional game designers, they've been thinking about all of this for a long time. I think they'd agree that it all ties in together and that it's the kind of play we should be aiming for.

There's a rather significant difference between removing the trinity and removing all structure. The trinity is an old idea, it's worked quite well for a long time but it has very serious limitations, particularly when it houses the entire scope of your game. The scope of the functionality of the trinity is just as important as whether or not you use it. Currently for example we can have a single character who can acquire suitable gear and spec appropriately to alternately fill one of two roles (depending on Advanced Class) - my Assassin might on short notice rummage around in his inventory for a dps set, pop open the talent window and respec over the course of say a minute. By contrast, a Marauder or Sniper may only ever dps no matter how much gear they have or how well they allocate their talent points. The discussion necessarily goes far further into game design that I think anybody wants to delve into on a little forum thread that'll be swept away in days if not minutes, but I'll throw a few little ideas in - hopefully in balance to "BLARGH CHANGE BAD FLAT WORLD GOOD" There are a number of good reasons to support the trinity: It provides identity - people easily associate themselves either as a healer, tank or dps and following on from that assume a certain level of responsibility. It's easy to explain to people - it makes me sad but the truth is that people loathe thinking; the standard roles are iconic and don't need much explaining even to people who have never played an RPG. It provides clear goals - gearing a character of a given role means always working on the same group of stats while safely ignoring others (which other roles use). It's comparatively easy to design encounters for, you can be sure that a group will include an appropriate balance. Current boss encounter design as it stands pushes current technology (and creative constraints) to its limits. The Trinity however doesn't tend toward heroic encounters - oh sure, you can plug in bigger and bigger 'bosses' but you're still limited to carefully scripted 'dances' - there might be several ways of resolving a given encounter but each is extremely similar and ultimately only ever amount to variations on the theme of 'kill the big dude'. There are very rarely any opportunities for somebody to step out of their comfort zone and do something tangibly creative or that that makes a real difference. I'd personally like to see stances used as a means of more creative use of the roles / trinity concepts, there's a great deal of potential outside the little old trinity box.

It's a brave soul who volunteers to be thrown to the lions.

Creating so many encounters that we can bypass by simply walking past (let-alone stealthing or cc'ing) is a really strange design. I can see how it challenges less proficient players, it certainly creates a dynamic that requires some skill and fairly reasonably penalises clumsiness but it's also rather unfulfilling. Without knowing exactly why BW has chosen this route though it's difficult to propose a viable alternative, anything we suggest might just walk straight into the problem they're trying to avoid. With that in mind... Given that we can skip so much though, I'd like to see encounters loosened up - allow them to move around the area (instance or open world) more naturally (organically), place static NPC's in places where it makes sense for them to be static (eg people manning consoles and offices). To the best of my knowledge, regular packs & mobs aren't set to move around because of the extra requirements and potential problems of pathing (and overly-carefully balanced challenge) but it really does make for sterile environments. Where boss fights are concerned, we really need to explore the purpose of the encounter to figure out whether or not it should be mandatory to advance. Where they're optional, I'd suggest is a golden opportunity to work into "choices have consequences" scenarios. On the surface this obviously means more work but there's an awful lot of 'empty' or filler dialogue in TOR whose value as a choice is incredibly minimal (the kind of stuff that even the most dedicated people eventually end up desperately wanting to spacebar past); just randomise and automate those 'low value' conversations or better yet, don't force players to cut-scenes unless there's real value in it. There are other (non-invasive) ways of adding character and dialogue (including voiceover) that doesn't break the flow of the game. Breaking the flow of a game is what people most object to about cut scenes (of all kinds). Whether you appreciate the fact or not, these dialogues are encounters as well and need to be treated in the same way that you fashion other encounters (i.e. with the same stages that a story must progress through). Encounters should add to the narrative, boss encounters are either tipping points, reveals, 2nd act twists or finale. Likewise, challenges need to have context (ultimately, every encounter is a challenge of one kind or another). Purely optional bosses are generally purposed for being extra challenging (with appropriate item rewards). I'd like to see extra challenging encounters used as an optional way of completing a Flashpoint in fewer steps. Sometimes purely optional, technical fights are absolutely fine to plug in for the sake of being an optional, technical encounter. A significant portion of MMO's & RPG's is a fascination with technical details - boss fights in Operations (and Raids) are all about the technical side of things; which incidentally is why we need technical feedback during Operations. (Having said that, it would be nice if Flashpoints, world story arcs and quests had a clearer relation to Operations). ... of course, there's a lot of 'should' in all that which is offset by the real world where I appreciate that stuff just needs to ship, asap; if not sooner.

The OP isn't necessarily entirely wrong, but as pointed out none of us can possibly know how well tuned the game actually is - unless you're one of BW's developers, even then they're segmented into different teams and are unlikely to have the whole picture. It's highly likely that they themselves are far more critical of issues in the game than we might ever be, they work with the guts of it endlessly - frankly I think we should spare a thought for their hardships rather than our own for a change. BW busted a gut to bring SWTOR to market, they've taken on huge risks and more than a few really serious challenges - and here we are grilling them for not being more awesome (fanboi much? no, I appreciate that there's more going on that we'll ever know about and that programming games is f*n hard work). Too many of us are like the OP though... knowing just enough to be dangerous (I recognise in retrospect that I'm guilty of this as well), and when provoked (by problems or disappointment) wield that knowledge like a weapon to wound whoever it is we blame. Like most companies (large and small) there are areas of their product that really aren't up to scratch, there are certainly areas of the business and it's internal practices that even to a distant viewer quite apparently need serious improvement. To take just one instance of an issue without any context of how it actually works and stand on a soap box waving it around while declaring that it's all a massive disaster reflects on us far more than them.

OP, these words you keep using.... I do not think they mean what you think they mean. firstworldproblems.jpg

It seems the curmudgeons are out in force lately... I had characters of nearly every class for years in a certain other MMO, as I do in SWTOR and I strongly support the OP; not because of any relation between particular MMO's but for the lessons I learned from the experience, something a great many people seem dead against because (arrogant, ignorant) Opinion. The great privilege of Tanking isn't that you're nigh-indestructible, you most certainly are not. The privilege of Tanking (and healing) is the Role, the respect, the responsibility, the tactics. If all that mattered was having something for the boss to beat on, there are certainly many options that don't require one player to sacrifice their time & goals for the sake of everybody else. The only reason why tanks (or frankly even healers for that matter) shouldn't have a greater impact on DPS is the fear of balancing Hybrids. On the other hand, attacking stuff is what most people enjoy most - not everybody of course, I say 'most' because I mean most, but not everybody. I point this out because I've seen this debate several times and no matter where it takes place, the arguments for and against are always the same. There is no scenario where anybody's having fun if your character can't accomplish things in a reasonable time or can't participate as fully as other players. There's no reason or value in hamstringing tanks just because they fill a particular role in groups. Most importantly, all classes need a similar range of capability and viability with core features (ie combat) to sustain participation. Relegating healers and tanks to only being 'fun' in the narrow context of their group role gives RPG's and MMO's exactly the problem they all face - too few tanks and frequently, too few healers. I'm not suggesting there shouldn't be a balance - else we'd all simply run tanks and healers, I'm not suggesting that the only option is straight-up DPS increases either. The balance is out of whack though and the issue does need serious review.

As many people have said, when Companions were first discussed my hope was that they'd be relatively independent and that the missions we'd be sending them on would be based on their themes - snipers doing snipery things, smugglers smuggling, marauders marauding... juggernauts... juggling More interaction really would be nice, there is such a massive pool of dialogue it's seriously disappointing that on those rare occasions when I do deliberately click on them, their only response is a curt 'don't speak to me'. It'd be nice if companions could interact characters and NPC's - occasionally emoting greetings & such. I know most things take masses of man-hours but surely something like this could be accomplished with less effort than lifting the Lusitania.

I don't know if it's possible to more completely miss the point of companions or their part in the game.

Mr Street (of WoW) recently discussed how their PvP will go through some changes to address an 'artificial' gear-gap and also help with mid season catch-up. SWTOR seems destined to follow in their footsteps, with similar issues. Keeping PvE and PvP separate seems like it's "the only way" they can both work but this also creates pretty significant divides. I know it's been discussed before (and likely will be many times again), I'd still like to take the opportunity to encourage the SWTOR devs to rethink this whole paradigm. PvP and PvE are both aspects of the same game, treating them as two games in one is a major pita for all involved, particularly where players need to maintain multiple sets of gear (for each spec), often on multiple characters, all the while working on mods for each piece... Where PvP players can't indulge in PvE (and vice versa) the game misses out to a significant degree on participation. To which I expect the answer "that's what story modes and recruit gear are for"... that would be disappointing because it really is missing the point.

It's almost odd that it hasn't been stickied. In other news, my papercut (other than screen shakes grrr) are the need v greed buttons being set too close together, particularly for those of us who have large displays and have customised the UI, those tiny need and greed (and the various close boxes) are very easy to miss or miss-click. Please consider placing the need and greed buttons with at least a button-sized distance between them. As a complete aside, tabbed windows would be nice to have (particularly for people who like crafting) - by which I mean windows that reduce to tabs at the screen edge (though tabs for different aspects within windows would make their space more productive too).

The idea certainly has merits however you'd quickly end up with everybody using only BiS mods - which we do for the most part eventually, but the pace of gearing would be significantly faster. I'm sure there's also a strong feeling amongst Devs that people gain more satisfaction from earning a 'piece' of gear. I think at this stage, we've all become so accustomed to evaluating a piece by its mods that this is largely irrelevant now - in fact, many people see a drop or a 'piece' as composed of two components, the shell and its mods - as such, it seems completely reasonable and viable to treat them as separate rewards. Mods (of various kinds) could be a more generic reward from a variety of encounters while shells might be reserved as a special reward for particularly difficult encounters. I suspect the Devs have wanted to go in this direction for some time but feel that the biggest hurdle is that it adds a lot of complexity to loot tables - not merely as there are more items but that they need to ensure that the mix of all the extra items and their many combinations are suitably balanced - again though of course, we're quite close to that situation as it is because players evaluate rewards by their component mods anyway and will often take an item for a single good mod. On that count in fact, it may help reduce drama as mods which are good for more than one character / class / role are separated from the controversy of the other mods & the shell being light/medium/heavy armour. I think overall, the direction is almost inevitable.

Actually I find Smash also sometimes fails to trigger if there are no enemies around, though its cooldown is still triggered.

Gather up all the things that inspire you about a given class (or whatever) and stick them in a box - not necessarily a physical box but in whatever context is suitable, group up that stuff and put it in a place that's easy to get to and which is safe. When you're working on one one project and find unrelated, inspiring things along the way, don't just leap right into another project - stick them in that 'box'. Get into the habit of going through the box, say on the 30th of every month and put things in an order that you want to get to them in the coming month (even if it's just to review a certain thing in say, a fortnight). Learn to trust that you can put stuff that interests you in a certain place and that you don't need to keep it all in your head all the time (or at all). While you're working on a given project and find yourself distracted, pop the box open and go through the stuff that inspired you to start your current project. Lots of people have varying degrees of OCD style conditions (frankly I think nearly everybody lies somewhere along the OCD spectrum), we really only notice people at extremes. Consider keeping a journal (yes, seriously, yes even for a game). You'll probably find when looking back through it that it leaps from subject to subject - take it as constructive criticism and find a way to create a more structured journal (i.e. learn to recognise where you're attention skips away and how to get back on track, without necessarily throwing away your existing progress).

Hi Kimmey, thanks for your interest - talk to us in-game. We have quite a few alts so in-game mail might be the way to go if you don't see Enjinn or Reya online. I should amend this thread by saying that the guild has grown quite dramatically in recent months, I wouldn't describe us as 'actively recruiting' anymore - as with all guilds though, we're always interested in talking to good players.

Wait, what? you... but... I just wrote all that stuff... surely you read at least an occasional sentence from somebody in one of these discussions.

In response to Penril's comment that Addons - well managed - through an approval process is very much what I would hope for. Before continuing, I'll try to head off pointless arguments by saying my hopes are completely in vain, BW won't do anything like what I'm going to suggest and as already mentioned, its a safe bet that SWTOR won't be getting add ons any time soon, if ever. TL;DR: Addons can be an extremely valuable part of the game if they're integrated and managed thoughtfully and with high standards. So, in the vein that Penril had mentioned, a 'Walled Garden' approach could be a great way of managing an addon situation. I'd suggest that Addons should be hosted within the game, that they reside on BW servers and are downloaded to the players PC and loaded into memory when the game loads; that the Launcher be the point at which players choose which (if any) addons they'd like to have running in their game. Clearly the caveat there is the issue of millions of people downloading 5, 10, or maybe even more MB each time they start the game - many mods we're currently familiar with are bloated by the inclusion of various kinds of art. It's entirely possible to optimise that greatly through enabling the API to access some in-game graphic features like windows, buttons and gradients - i.e. existing assets. BW could even come to some kind of agreement with developers that submitted addons might be at BW's discretion, built into the game (i.e. they'll be made to run in native code rather than LUA). BW might start the process by creating an initially limited public API and contact particular developers of the Curse community to work with them on porting a few popular / test-case addons. Following, community developers submit mods to BW, perhaps including a GIT link (so that as mods are updated, a review need only check alterations since the last submission), for evaluation where they're checked on a few key criteria (BW could be quite strict about this) - at a minimum ensuring there's nothing malicious or intrusive to privacy, that the mods don't attempt to access locally stored data or don't access locally stored data outside set bounds, etc... One of the restrictions to submission for example might be that mods will only be accepted if they show significant improvement compared to an existing add-on (if any), that conditions like performance and quality coding practices and collaborative work might be given preference - with a view to encouraging a community that works on addons that improve key areas of game functionality rather than flooding BW with a million little addons that each duplicate or overlap functionality to various degrees. The point of it all being that a well managed environment can almost entirely mitigate problems and support development and growth of a healthy and significantly productive community of external developers; That some fairly (conceptually) simple safeguards are more than possible and that well managed rules for participation and submission are very important and can greatly shape the entire endeavour. Just because I can, I'm going to leap on a few other comments with my personal opinion (in no particular order). Macroing - The key reason people want to macro abilities is because they're essentially redundant, they're the kinds of things that are so obviously paired with another activity that the player really never makes any kind of critical decision about them - they're 'no brainers'. The best example of this is Dark Ward, and speaking as an Assassin tank I can tell you that I for one use it every single time it comes off cool down. There's no intelligence behind the decision, ever - it's paramount to keep its uptime as high as possible and there's never any reason not to use it. It's identical to the original Shield ability from vanilla WoW (i.e. an issue that was very publicly addressed nearly 8 years ago) and has seen iteration and ongoing discussion during that time... sorry, /end rant The point there being that a perceived 'need' for macros tends to be directed at problems of design. Segue to the next item, "Addons make the game too easy" is as relevant as complaining that cars make travelling too easy. To be fair, those complaints really need context and qualification but good luck getting any kind of coherent sentence from those people, let alone a cogent argument (and just to be clear, that phrase doesn't mean getting angry - it means clearly stating a case in the context of a debate). The most common source of this complaint comes from various 'boss mods' which alert players to boss mechanics. BW devs have already very well aware of this and have talked about it before, they're very much on board with ensuring that game mechanics are clear, that encounters properly communicate to players when special conditions arise and do so in unambiguous ways. As with macros, boss mods became popular and necessary due to failure of design - players were punished on tough encounters for reasons they couldn't understand, because the encounters (in that other game) failed to communicate how they worked. Combat Log Parsing (mods like Recount) - there's a theme in all of this - players need in-game feedback about what's happening in-game, about how our choices matter and what effect and to what degree, our actions matter. In terms of combat, animations help us visualise spacial aspects and healthbars provide a convenient general gauge but ultimately players need more full-featured and detailed feedback or we're simply left guessing. How often have you heard a raid leader ask "so... what killed you?" with a response like "uhh... I ahh... ran out of hit points, I think... I dunno..." Every single (ok, maybe bar one..) Operations boss has an enrage timer - i.e. it's critical for each member to perform at their optimum, for each character in a DPS role to output their share of damage. Without some kind of accurate, numerical feedback we can only guess about how people are performing and whether or not individuals and the group are on target or even in the right ballpark. Lack of a combat log is tough enough but lack of suitable instruments means we're flying blind. MOX and Torparse.com help but there are decided limitations to their accuracy and effectiveness, they certainly help and are generally considered, yes, mandatory - because they provide critical feedback which the game itself fails to provide, as mentioned most notably when a key criteria to success is (amongst other things) outputting a certain minimum DPS per character. It's absolutely the kind of thing which should be built into the game (one way or another). The omission of clear and concise feedback about dps where dps is a key condition of success is a rather obvious failure of design. Having said that, it takes quite a lot of work to create tools like Recount or even *gasp* Auctioneer, and not just work but specialist knowledge - quite possibly areas which BW staff don't specialise nearly as much as other people, who while not playing games may themselves specialise in those areas. Asking BW to create all the extra functionality we'd like and / or expect is fine and totally reasonable, but there are a great many competent people outside the company who are willing and able to improve its functionality and who can do so independently of the business and its internal structure. BW have a huge list of features they'd love to implement and ways they'd love to improve the game but there are only so many of them and so many hours and there are practical limits to how much adding more man-hours (or people) to a given project will provide tangible benefits. Your very sensible requests might sit on a post-it note for a very long time. It makes perfect sense to create a structure that lest them hand off some of the more self-contained projects.

Really? You've never tried to find something in your inventory and thought "geez, if only I could search by name or kind or maybe even control the ordering of contents..." or "I wish I could better organise the crafting window or highlight related materials in my inventory to those I commonly need to purchase or farm" or have wanted class-coloured or colourblind friendly UI elements or more informative raid frames or a better scrolling-combat-text or perhaps even something to help watch your targets de-buffs or your own procs / time sensitive buffs or maybe even something like Prat to provide a better chat experience.... No... you're right... the terror of accountability and overzealous judgement via the social misuse of things like GearScore, BossMods and Recount are totally worth barring all other possible extensions to functionality. I'm sure I can barely mention those things without some people flying into a blind, ignorance-fuelled, righteous rage. Having said that, it's unlikely in the extreme that BioWare are in a position to create a public API even if they might want to (which as noted earlier, they have gone on record as saying they don't want to).

Another significant downside with gear-grinds and gear-dependance is lugging around a full set plus situationals & consumables for each role each of your characters participates in, in each game - PvP and PvE - and I say it that way because as discussed elsewhere, vertical progression (and Expertise) creates a huge divide, effectively making PvP and PvE separate games. These are all issues I'm confident BW are well aware of though and they, along with other game developers have probably discussed them to death and back... but we still don't have a good solution so it's worth continuing on.