Too late, BW. I knew this was coming, because BW always "fixes" good deals for players. Already have all 12 tunings unlocked through pulls on 49 toons. Light/Dark tunings are event rewards, so I'm less bothered I can't do the same with them. I don't really care about the colors, since I've locked in the ones I like and I don't use legacy weapons for mirror classes. I would if weapon designer was in game, but I'll ***** about that when it happens. Oh, well.

There's nothing more demoralizing than being a noob pilot on the receiving end of a 0-50 death match or a 0-1000 capture match, except maybe being the only veteran on a team of noobs with the same end-score because your name is recognized, so you always get singled out first with every wave. I just grind for the CXP at this point, since I've maxed out the ships I want, so win or lose I don't really care. However, a new guy with his first ship who ports in to that kind of buzzsaw isn't going to stick around for long. When the matches reach that point, pops drop off to nothing for hours, or until enough vets queue for a same faction match. Additionally, most pilots have one faction hangar tricked out to the max, with the other either ignored or half$&$ed, so servers end up being dominated by one side 95% of the matches. Make the unlocks faction wide, so any Imp/Pub toon can fly the same tricked out ships as their comrades, and people can make progress on the hangar of ships regardless of what toon they're playing, and reduces the grind to just two tracks: Imp/Pub. GSF has the same critical flaw CXP does: it requires focus on ONE character to the exclusion of all others while playing it, unless you want progress to take forever as you constantly start from scratch every time you swap to an alt.

So it doesn't cost CC, anymore? I honestly haven't looked since I've already ground out a couple of each class and don't need to use the conversion.

This guy knows what's up. Give strike fighters a purpose. Make more maps. Introduce another match type (I like capital ship defense or play keep away with nuke before it's delivered inside a station and detonated). Also, remove CC cost to convert req points. The grind to gear new ships is beyond ridiculous, especially with the tiny GSF population.

I've played merc arsenal since game start. First toon. I have five merc alts, three arsenal. They've always been my favorite class for combat style, gear and skill set animations, but they've been on a roller coaster the whole time from crap to OK to meh to Ok to awesome and now back to crap. It's still the most fun, kinetic class to play for me, since Jango is as close as we get to Boba. I have two of every other AC/discipline (so faction mirrors). I play them all to some extent but have always come back to merc arsenal. Hit them with the hammer all you want, I'm still going to play them, it just won't be as enjoyable and I imagine I won't bother with endgame pvp/ops/mm fps with them anymore once they inevitably become farming targets again/liabilities, because you guys simply refuse to separate PVP stats from PVE. You could lock in PVE to a curve against level and difficulty of content and call it a day, while you then fiddle with PVP until that completely different, more dynamic environment is as close to balanced as you can make it. Or you could do what you always have and rob Peter to pay Paul. BW never just tweaks stats. They'll hit them with a nerf from orbit and forget about them for another 6-10 months. If they want actual, successful, two-way communication, they need to have a dev who actually plays the class every day and does MM content come in and justify what they're doing and how they get their data sets, because I've seen Eric play and he's just not up to articulating the hows and whys or answering questions on the topic. Not a knock on Eric, but when all he has is the talking points others have given him, he can't really go off-script. For instance, does Eric know why the team is using the same DPS range they've had since day one, despite all of the many changes they've made to how combat plays out currently? Escapes? Gap closers? DCDs? Greater mobility from reduction in channels? Does he know why the team is nerfing DPS and survivability at the same time, when tweaking survivability alone would actually change DPS numbers, especially in PVP, and dmg output isn't really the issue there? Sigh. Whatever. I'll let others argue the issues here. Getting tired of every thread being a downer with zero to look forward to. It's pretty sad that I'm left with just looking forward to a few cool CM armor sets or sweet mount with each update and not the actual story content or gameplay.

With Czerka I'm thinking more along the lines of expanding that story to get better use out of the assets. Like maybe going back to Kashyyyk where Czerka is trying to recover some assets after abandoning their operations there. I see how CZ-198 itself is done though. There are way too many plot lines and organizations that wee just abandoned in favor of completely new crap with Zakuul.

Or how about they could have added a chapter 6 or 7, or whatever it got up to before KOTFE changed the labeling, with plots for all 8 characters. Just one new chapter in the style of vanilla set on one Rishi-sized planet would have been better than all of KOTFE/KOTET. Obviously not the same size as the vanilla chapters, but enough to advance personal stories after the events on Ilum, Oricon, Makeb, CZ-198, etc. Alternate something like that with the one size fits all faction plot expansions like ROTHC or even Dread Masters/CZ-198 that give flashpoints or an op. Zakuul burned through so much time and resources for what amounts to zero replayable content. It's a shame. I'd have paid big bucks for 16 hours (2 for each class) of tight, well-written, new class story set on any number of planets that haven't been properly expanded. Manaan. Darvanis. CZ. All these asset sets sitting around unused.

I'd love that. I think it would be cool to have Jadus step in and coup the weakened Empire and then Malgus rocks out of the shadows to run an insurgency and we get to choose which side we want to back: Malgus's inclusive New Empire or Jadus's Empire of Fear. Meanwhile, the Republic has to deal with the loss of Chancellor Saresh and either the death of or descent into powermad insanity of Supreme Commander Malcom, and how the leadership is going to reconsolidate to deal with a resurgent Empire. Maybe General Garza might want to launch a coup of her own when no strong political leader steps forward.

Please don't spread Harb pop elsewhere. It's taken years to collect them all on one server. And new servers does nothing to solve the name problem. If there's a toon no one has used in 3 years on Harb and one active on JC that's only a year old, and one on Jung Ma that's just created, guess what happens when they're moved to the brand new server? JC and Jung Ma guys get screwed. BW doesn't just transfer active toons when they force a server merge. They move every single toon that hasn't been deleted. Name conflicts will just travel to the new server.

This game can't handle all of the North American players in just two servers. I guarantee if you do this, you will have another mass exodus as you break guilds, lose assets, people lose character names, and the game runs like garbage across the board. Remember how it was really hard to raise the character limit to 52 per server? Now crush everyone on to two servers and that isn't going to over tax the system? And if it isn't going to overtax doing that, was it a blatant lie about character limits? POTF & Jung Ma have like 20 people between the two of them. They've had free or low priced transfers for over a year. Let's not screw up the vast majority of players to accommodate a handful. Servers like JC have perfectly fine populations as is. There are constantly running ops PUGs, pvp and gsf. I hate the idea of merging again, however, if it is inevitable ...sigh... There are what? Eight US servers? First step. Purge all old character names not logged in for over 1 year across all servers. Then run an internal comparison check to see how many players would be affected through server merge by conflicting character names to see how many are going to need compensation of some kind for getting gypped by losing names. Then, AT MOST, I would designate the top 4 population servers and open the doors with free transfers to those servers for 4 months. Get the small and tiny pops to self-transfer as much as possible, leaving only holdouts and people with guild assets that will need BW help to transfer over case by case. Four US servers in the range between JC and Harb would be more than good enough.

Well, you've certainly convinced me. I'm sure Keith will be thrilled with all of the convincing you're doing here. FYI, calling someone names and not bothering to actually address their arguments tends to solidify them in their position, not the opposite. You're actually undermining your own position. I'll leave you to it, though. Enjoy your thread.

So, what you've done here is present an argument from authority fallacy. You've just dismissed the opinions of anyone who doesn't fit your particular criteria for valid criticism out of hand and declared that the only true response should either be one of adoration, as a player, or adoration as a fellow developer. And you knew that what you were saying was inappropriate as a dev speaking to his customer base, so you changed the color of those lines to 'player', to give yourself some deniability when called on it. However, due to your current position, when posting on these forums, your posts are always from the position of a developer. You don't get to crap on critical players' heads in 'player' color and then switch back to 'dev' color on a whim. There are tens of thousands of posts stretched out over the past two years outlining in exacting detail what people did or did not like about the storyline and implementation of KOTFE/KOTET, many begging for dev response or even acknowledgement. Those threads were hidden, shuffled around, or outright deleted and never addressed by the devs. If some people, now, after all that time, see the lead writer try to explain away the failures of that story and cover over the massive plot holes and inconsistencies by posting some notes he had that he thought were too "boring" to bother putting in the game for players to experience, and don't react with fawning adoration, it should hardly be viewed as "strange" and then ignored. By BW's own admission, 1/3 of the Valkorian storyline was stripped away due to the poor reception of KOTFE, leading to a condensed conclusion of events in KOTET. These expansions were not resounding successes. I would think this might lead to some self-reflection that maybe -maybe- everything the writing team chose to run with wasn't gold, instead of making excuses for the shortcomings and trying to explain away glaring character and plot inconsistencies with what boils down to "writing is hard and I got bored". The actual writer's bible notes are interesting on their own, but do nothing to actually fix the dissonance between pre-KOTFE SWTOR and post-KOTFE SWTOR, especially if you're not going to go back and insert or alter content to sync the two eras of the game, because as outlined, those notes are not completely accurate to the vanilla game or it's original direction. They just aren't. It would have been nice to see a post where a dev acknowledged that there actually were some issues with the product that could and should have been better handled, and that they would try and avoid falling into those same traps going forward. Instead, it's all backslapping and self-congratulations. I'm reminded of the streams, actually. Moves like this burn through goodwill, Keith. From me, anyway, since maybe I'm the only one who is on the whole displeased with KOTFE/KOTET and mostly just sticks around to play Star Wars Barbie and run endless alts through the vanilla game. Vitiate should never have been Valkorion. Making them the same will never really make sense, because it was something decided on years after vanilla was locked in stone. There is zero build up to it in any of the storylines, because of this. Even SoR/Ziost didn't really point to what became the Zakuul storyline, and comes across as more of a hybrid of the last assets developed by the original team married to what would become KOTFE/KOTET going forward. I think it was the decision to make the Emperor a living god and the conflating of Vitiate/Valkorion that eventually lead to all of the problems in the expansions: how companions were used (or forgotten), retcons to beloved vanilla plots and NPCs, having to give petty, human-level motivations to a living god, crushing all class stories into one, disregarding key parts of how any of them had ended, Valkorion and Family taking on too much importance to the story to the detriment of player agency. Had Valkorion been a foreign threat outisde of Vitiate's plotting to eat all life, Zakuul could have been dealt with on it's own terms, without having to force vanilla plots to contort and fit with some mega plot by Vitiate that's constantly changing and makes no sense from scene to scene because he's suddenly become two completely different characters with opposite aims. If you think of KOTOR I & II as World War I, and vanilla SWTOR up through ROTHC as World War II, SoR/RotE into KOTFE/KOTET could have been the Cold War against the Soviets. Each period was just as world-changing, important, and exciting. Stalin and Co. were just has dangerous and scary as Hitler and the Nazis, only the dynamics and alliances were different. Stalin didn't need to secretly be Hitler all along, and if you were reading history as a story, it would be hugely disappointing (and nonsensical) if that turned out to be the twist. I'll post a disclaimer that I don't speak for anyone else, just to make sure people who are thrilled to pieces don't think I'm speaking for them in any way, shape or form.

So far, every NPC that isn't a companion candidate who would could either die or survive based on player choice, vanishes from the story after that choice is made. Unfortunate, since lots of cool NPCs are lost this way, but it's easier to develop ongoing stories if Schrodinger NPCs stay in the box.

The motivation was 100% BW didn't want to write more than a single storyline, anymore. By forming the Alliance and declaring a singular Outlander, they effectively ended the faction storylines for two years, after having already ended the 8 class storylines from the moment they launched the game. It seems as though, maybe, the direction going forward is to do yet another semi-reboot and go back to faction warfare after Iokath, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. Eight class or even four (Republic Force, Republic Non-Force, Imperial Force, Imperial Non-Force) storylines will never happen. It would take effort and capital investment that EA is simply not willing to give.

You only have to do the class stories. You can ignore the planetary arcs and side missions.

Just wait till next year and you will be able to buy it for certs...just like with the rancor mount. Or get luckier.

I bought 300 Smug Coins and 100 Kingpin Coins (because I can, and it saves massively in time spent). Every time I "Feel Lucky" playing the Smuggler Slots, I went and dropped Kingpin coins until the buff vanished, indicating I was getting a reward. Rinse , repeat. After a little over three hours of absolute boredom, I got Mr. Piggy, the new speeder and 40 certs, which bought the other new speeder and all the new decos added this year. Already had everything else from previous years. About 8 million credits spent, which is way less than what I'd have paid for just Mr. Pig alone on the GTN, so not a bad investment. I liked the few little one-off missions and added background activity. It made the area feel more alive. I agree though that they should incorporate the massive internal space with the main casino floor. It's a waste not to. I also really wish they could make this event less me clicking a few things in a cramped space for hours hoping for something to happen. Even just pazaak would improve the event immensely. Slots without odds regulated like realworld casinos are so, so, so, BORING and disheartening unless you win something relatively quick.

There's a hole in your purse.

I've always liked the idea of a minigame that uses the pets in a dejarik PVP arena with a gotta collect 'em all series of unlocks from victories/matches completed. Star Wars Pokemon/Dejarik would be super fun to play while you wait for queue pops or as guild events or even conquest events. You could also have a solo track where players go to competitions across all planets with regional championships and galactic events against a cast of npc gamblers. Expand on the idea of the Eternal Championship arena. I mean the game should really have pazaak and sabacc, too that you can play in all the cantinas scattered around the galaxy with varying house rules and/or local npc players to challenge. Stuff like that is just fun and makes the game feel more alive.

I appreciate the expansive coverage of game concepts, but it's just a completely different game that doesn't sound all that interesting to me, let alone balanced. I would suggest picking a single aspect of the proposal and focus on how that might be used to change the game for the better. There's way too much going on here that will absolutely never happen, even in a sequel or reboot of SWTOR.

How about an Aussie-voiced Green Jedi Knight from Corellia? Human, body type 3, long Qui-gon type hair, veteran of the liberation from Imperial occupation. He worked with CorSec and other surviving Green Jedi to undermine the Zakuulan occupation and helped Force-user refugees escape and now wants to join the Alliance, if the player chooses to re-ally with the Republic post KOTET. Alternate dialogue for whether the player was vanilla Imp or Pub about the conquest/liberation of Corellia and the part they played. If you ally with the Empire post KOTET, an Irish-voiced Human Sith Apprentice whose master was killed by Arcann during the Zakuulan invasion of Korriban wants to join up. Cyborg, body type 3, shoulder-length prequel Obi-wan type hair, mechanical left arm he lost in the escape from a squad of Zakuulan Knights. He linked up with the remains of Sith Intelligence under Empress Acina and ran recovery ops in Zakuulan territory to steal back holocrons and other Force-related artifacts looted by the Eternal Empire using underworld contacts.

It can take a few minutes. Refresh the page and click the transfer history button to see if it has completed.

When grophets make the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs. Seriously, though - a focus on bugfixes is a major plus going forward. Thanks.

Will companion outfit customizations appear in cutscenes or will they revert to their default look in the same way their unique weapons aren't shown and revert to the default?

Lovecraft could turn the Terror from Beyond, that Thing buried on Belsavis and a resurgent Dread Masters into a galactic nightmare scenario. Of course, we'd need a new sanity mechanic and the endgame would be everyone going insane or suiciding or being consumed by an extraplanar abomination. I'd love that. Whoever they got, it would be really nice if they took the time to update new instances of the vanilla worlds to reflect all that's happened with the wars and invasions and changes in power. When you travel to Tatooine, for instance, you chose pre-post Zakuul occupation and have an actual new feel for the setting with new side missions and planetary story arcs.