Oh well, no raiding tonight (EU) I suppose. Thanks for being clear that it'll take a while, at least we know we can cancel and do other stuff.

First of all, let me commend you on that. Acknowledging Galactic Command as supplementary rather than primary made it a welcome addition to me. Problem is PvP is by far the most reliable and easiers way to get tier 4 gear now. Lucky rolls on CXP rng are second, and ops are completely useless for it. Casual pvpers with lots of spare time have several alts in full 248 by now, so there is nothing exclusive about it. The problem isn't even that getting 248 in PvE is too hard, especially with crafted 246 being close. It's the frustration that weeks of hard work clearing a new NiM boss yield absolutely zero rewards, even HM rewards are miles better, giving pieces for the correct class that can be upgraded by pvp. Don't even bother with a "chance at Tier 4 gear", that will just make it more frustrating. If you don't want to hand out tier 4 (to keep it exclusive to the new ops and about 50 million casual pvp players), just drop it entirely from NiM ops. Unassembled components would work, but it better be a significant amount. Something like 50 components per boss wouldn't really feel like a rewards, but at least it's borderline useful.

It may be a "money sink", but it's a horribly designed one, which is why it should be changed. Good money sinks are repeatable, offer a feeling of value, and are entirely optional. This one is not repeatable except for alts, which makes it more of annoyance. It doesn't have a feeling of value, it has a feeling of ransom, much like the f2p restrictions. And it's barely optional, the ability to navigate the game smoothly is a core essential. Taking that away from people leads to loss of interest and loss of subscribers. They realised this when they practically removed the cooldowns on priority transport and fleetpass, and again when they lowered the levels you access speeders at. These things make the game better and should not be gated behind a money sink. The agonizingly slow speed of mounts in this game was sufferable because it was made clear engine restrictions did not allow for a higher speed. Now that that's been resolved apparently, it feels horribly bad to have those improvements withheld behind a massive paywall. "Money sink" is a lousy excuse, they may just as well just remove 100k credits from your character every time you log in. That'll work as a money sink and will also encourage people to play less.

Please make the new mount speed unlocks legacy wide. Like with the Advanced Mounting perk two years ago, an asking price of 1.8 million per character is a bit absurd for larger legacies, and it's yet another discouragement to actually play the game on alts.

Or the pain of spending 90 million unlocking it on all their characters...

Very disappointing these are character perks and not legacy. For years we've been told the engine couldn't handle higher speeds (well maybe it was true after all, considering it's not working), and now we have to spend 50+ million to get up to speed again? This should really have been a legacy-wide purchase to unlock 4 and 5 on the trainer.

Well the topic is about the weird people, so hopefully it's not the standard for anyone. But the Progenitor seems to have an above-average quality population to me too, on imp side where I play. It's the main reason why I like the server a lot, even if it's population is a bit lower than Harbinger, I practically never run into the kind of horrible people I keep reading about in threads like these. And since I'm on the Progenitor too, and in a good caring guild as well, I haven't got anything interesting to share either. The worst I get are the occasional pug dps in sm ops who can't out-dps the tank, but that's more entertaining than anything else.

Agreed, the purple circles work ok on the big map, but on the minimap they're horrible. There should be at the very least be a toggle to get rid of them.

Excellent news as far as I'm concerned. Love that we're getting a new operation (and hopefully more of them after as well), and it's nice that we'll be ably to see some of it soon instead of waiting until september for the whole thing. Also very happy that there'll be a NiM mode. New mechanics for Master Uprisings is also great news. The last batch of Uprisings already have some pretty decent fights, and I'm happy to hear that effort will be put into making them more interesting instead of just upping numbers. While I like the core concept of getting progression for everything in the game, CXP still needs a lot of tuning, but I actually get the feeling Bioware are aware of the troubles in the system, so I'm pretty confident the next few major patches will get it more or less balanced. Double CXP is a nice stopgap in the meantime. It's been a harsh two years for people like me who mostly play for the group experience, but 2017 is shaping up to be a pretty good year. Let's keep this up and make 2018 even better!

Most of this makes me happy. The only thing I still dislike is the fact that ops bosses (except the last boss) aren't guaranteed to drop a token. I can live with the tokens being random, even though I'd prefer a fixed loot table, but every boss killed causes a lock out, and every boss killed should drop some token.

Thanks for the update Eric, it's pretty frustrating to not get the achievements after doing all that, and it's a big relief to know the issue is taken seriously, and we won't have to wait for a month for a fix.

I actually like the concept of the stash, it was always very annoying to have to wait two days before you could sent pack items to the right characters, and to have to juggle inventory space. It's also great news for the DvL packs, the only sad thing is that the timing punishes people who embraced the new event, and already opened their first 25 boxes. It would be a lovely gesture for Bioware to simply send people another set of boxes if they've already completed one or more DvL achievements. There's practically no cost to doing so, and it would mean the early achievers get a little extra reward (in the form of their already-bound rewards) instead of a penalty for being early.

I find your faith in corporate dilligence endearing. In reality, there are two possible reasons why a country is excluded from participation The country's laws make this competition illegal there The legal team didn't check the country, so they don't know if it will be legal Your assumption is that number 1 happend for all missing countries. Which would mean this promotion is illegal in nearly 180 countries, making it about level with cocaine trading. This seems unlikely. The more likely scenario is that reason number 2 excluded most countries. This is reasonable up to a point, there is a limit to how many local laws you can vet, and it makes sense to stop vetting countries below a certain percentage of the player base, before cost getting prohibitive. But dropping 20+ EU countries off the list looks ill-prepared at best.

Thanks for responding so quickly Eric. I still feel that the country list is unnecessarily constrained compared to similar actions by other companies, and it would've been nice if more effort had been put into widening eligibility. But I'm glad to hear that our disappointment hasn't fallen on deaf ears, and steps are being taken to improve.

Thanks, that's actually an interesting read. However, it still looks like a lot of "we couldn't be bothered", from a quick browse I could only see real problems for Italy, with rules apparently requiring the contest servers to be in Italy (likely breaking EU regs, but that's beside the point). For France, the only issue is that they would have to translate the T&C to French, which apparently they couldn't be bothered to do. For the Netherlands, there's zero restriction, and the prizes this low are even tax-free, so "we didn't know it exists" seems the most likely cause for excluding. And I maintain that if a country has many similar competitions, and yet somehow a large multinational company like EA can't figure out how to do this legally, that's just plain lazy and a big middlefinger to the people of those countries. Strangely enough they have no trouble at all finding out how to collect subscription fees from those same countries...

Well, that sells a lot better than "our company is too incompetent/lazy to offer this competition to half of our customers, so FU", so yes that's what the official line will be. The fact that thousands of other companies run similar prize events without any problems doesn't matter, it must be "the laws", as it can't be "the company's incompetence". Not in the press release at least.

Might be true for a few countries, but for most of that list that is simply not true. There are simply no major differences like that between the EU states that would make this thing perfectly fine in Germany and the UK, but impossible in the Netherlands, France, Italy and Spain. It looks much more like a case of a few countries they could be bothered to look into/had some boilerplate legalese lying around for, and screw the rest. I really think Bioware should've taken a few extra minutes to find a way to have a contest that doesn't excluse a large portion of their players. Now they've turned this into another nice middle finger for a sizable group of their players.

That must be it, all those countries have laws forbidding games. Even though they're in the exact same EU with the same regulations as the UK and Germany. It can't possibly because Bioware couldn't be arsed to hire their $10 lawyers for another hour and clear their bloated T&C there too.

Please consider extending this list of countries to include at least the EU states. It's beyond weird that South Korea, Thailand and Chile are eligible to participate while they have no SWTOR server within 10.000km, and at the same time France, Spain, Italy, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Romania, Portugal, Czech, Greece, Ireland, Sweden, Finland and probably a few others are missing.

I was looking forward to playing this next week, but I appreciate that you want to do this well rather than quick. And many thumbs up for putting this on the PTS, I expect that will significantly reduce the chance of breaking bugs.

This is pretty horrible, first we get no new operations for over a year despite solemn promises that that would never happen again. Now the loot from NiM gets removed as well, making it even less rewarding to run. Some of the old ops are great designs but we've done them for years. I've enjoyed this game for years, but you're making it harder and harder to stay. The only thing keeping me in at the moment is the community and the friends I have in the game, but with this kind of demolishing of all endgame more and more of them are leaving.

Your level 65 Roughly Average Item Rating ~216 (optimized) Discipline Lightning Companion Choza Rabbat Companion role Healer Companion Influence level 10 Which Mission or Star Fortress are you playing Heroic Mode Star Fortress Your personal experience while playing this content Not especially easy, but doable without dying. I didn't use any of the alliance crates or heroic moment abilities to see what it was like. That went fine for most of the fortress, when using cc's and stuns to control incoming damage. The only fight that was very hard was the last terminal before you face the Exarch alone. The combination of large numbers of adds spawning and the moving ground circle not allowing you to stand still means I barely killed the adds before they killed me. When using a higher-level companion this would've been easier, but I think this fight will be very hard to clear without using the alliance buffs for a static class like a sniper. Full combat log of the run: http://parsely.io/parser/view/91868

Bioware's action is a bad precedent. I'm not a big cartel spender myself, just a few hypercrates, but the idea that Bioware will effectively remove items gained from the packs at a whim, and clearly without any analysis of the changes , makes me very reluctant to ever buy things from the CM again. They cost real money and may clearly disappear at any moment.

Queued for a random 55 HM on my Jugg tank (38k health, but nicely optimized 168 gear with 180 bits). Got a group in progress for Czerka Meltdown. Zoned in and ran in together with a very well geared assassin, somewhat confused where the rest of the group is, as they're not on the map. Turns out the other two are on Oricon. And have around 20k health. They finish their combat and zone in, and a quick inspection shows they're in 124 and a bit of 140 gear, with pretty much no achievements. Looks like two new players who queued without knowing what they got into. And quite a bit below recommended gear average. I mention this might get interesting with their gear level, but let's have a go. We head for the desert monster, and give it a go. It's not all that bad, but health keeps dropping (also because I missed a generator on one rampage), and we wipe around 30%. The healer (with the lowest gear) asks what the recommended gear level is, apologises for not noticing, and asks if we want him to leave. Assassin says he's got plenty time to try more, and I'm in no hurry either. We give out some pointers on positioning (avoid overlapping rampage hits) and op healing, and try again. This time I try to tank by the book, hitting every generator, using area taunts to shield people, using defences to minimize healer drain etc, and we actually make it. The new guys are delighted, and real happy with the loot that drops. I tell them this was pretty much the hardest boss in all 55 flashpoints, and it will get easier from here. Next two bosses we give out explanations, new guys do everything by the book, and we easily one-shot the rest of the flashpoint. All in all it was loads of fun, really having to focus on the hard bit, and having two new players who try hard and learn quickly. It's a real pleasure having new players eager to learn, it's making me think I should PUG a bit more.

Long time reader, but I haven't posted here before. Last weekend, however, I probably was the weird person for a few people. I was leveling my engineering sniper with the 12x boost, did some pvp and when he hit level 47 went straight to Makeb and did my mission to level 55 with the bolster on. Then I thought it'd be nice to do Forged Alliances on him, so I pick up the mission and queue for assault on Tython. It pops almost immediately. I check the group and I notice there's one weirdo in there with 15k health, which is pushing it even for tactical flashpoints. Then I realise it's me, and I'm still wearing the blue level 42 gear I leveled in, but with the pvp and Makeb bolsters I completely forgot about it. Others are a well-geared 38k tank, and ok geared 26k heal and dps. I don't mention my gear, and neither do they, and we proceed to do a clean run through the flashpoint. After the first pulls I learn to not go all out on the aoe right from the start, but some cooldowns and LoS keeps me alive. I barely scrape 1000 dps, probably just keeping up with the tank, but it didn't cause any real trouble. In the end, we cleared it without a single death. After the flashpoint I grabbed the full set of 180 mods I had already laying around on my alts, and pretty much doubled my cunning and endurance. But it must've been weird for the others to have a 15k dps show up and then not kill himself on every pull. And it was just as unusual to have a group that didn't have a single complaint about my gear.