Some of those same people who did that to the players in Anthem, came back to swtor when EA pulled the plug. That’s when the game direction started to change again. Before they came back, Kieth seemed to be righting the sinking ship. Since they’ve come back to the game in different roles, BioWares made questionable decisions that have driven even more players away from the game and taken as much fun out of it as possible. You know nothing will happen to the people who influenced the games direction in 7.0. They’ll probably get a promotion into another project cause failing up is how you seem to progress the fastest at BioWare/EA.

No crafting upgrades

That’s something that Keith needs to really answer in person, Jackie is only the spokesperson. That’s if Keith or the devs want players to ever test again. They will need to build up some trust with the player base again that they severely eroded by ignoring the majority of PTS feedback. We need communication from the top and maybe some humility that they got it so wrong by ignoring the player PTS feedback.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion. But what do you like about it that makes it better? We’ve actually lost some functionality and it’s become more convoluted than the old one. So I can’t understand how you can say it’s way better when it does less than the old one, hurts your eyes and is convoluted.

Only if they implement a proper fix for it, including a font change. If all they do is apply a bandaid fix, it won’t help some of us. While I’m grateful for Jackie’s post and news that they are looking at it, I’m sure I’m not along in having low expectations it will be fixed properly or quickly. My trust lvls are at an all time low when BioWare say they are going to do something. They will need to prove it to me from now on with actions and not words till I can trust them again.

Only if they implement a proper fix for it, including a font change. If all they do is apply a bandaid fix, it won’t help some of us. While I’m grateful for Jackie’s post and news that they are looking at it, I’m sure I’m not along in having low expectations it will be fixed properly or quickly. My trust lvls are at an all time low when BioWare say they are going to do something. They will need to prove it to me from now on with actions and not words till I can trust them again.

You can have all the money in the world and still not allocate it properly or get a good result. You only have to look at Star Citizen as an example of wasting money and resources. If that game ever gets released it will be the most expensively developed game in the history of games. It’s already the most expensive non released game in history. Players specifically said to them at the beginning of the 7.0 PTS process that BioWare were biting off more than they could chew. Their over ambitious goals didn’t equal the budget, resources and I dare say, the talent required to pull it off in the time frame they allocated themselves to achieve it. This was always going to be a failure when the players could plainly see BioWare’s limitations better than BioWare could. BioWare didn’t even understand and still don’t understand their own limitations with this game. Players pointed out 8 months ago what the issues would around this release and most of those predictions came true. What blows my mind about all of this, is if players who have no access to internal data, budgets or the RL internal workings of BioWare, could see the problems using anecdotal evidence, how could the project leads and producers not see the same problems that have mostly come to pass with this release (I can’t bring my self to call it an expansion). Is it mismanagement or do they have so much spreadsheet data and game theory they play around with and massage to fit their own narratives, that they get lost in it? That’s why they should engage with the player base more and actually listen to them and bounce ideas off them before moving forward with concrete plans. Instead of trying to go it alone all the time and getting it wrong. We’ve all seen how badly BioWare fails when it refuses proper engagement with the player base and we’ve seen them succeed when they do (Rishi SH example). With this 7.0 failure, they have lost the trust of much of the player base, especially those who tested on the PTS for them. BioWare will need to try and build up trust with proper developer and producer communication and community involvement if BioWare wants help to dig themselves out of this hole. It needs to be a more two way street with them to build trust and then take us along for the ride with them. Nearly all of the problems with 7.0 could have been avoided if they’d engaged the players properly. None of this needed to happen. 7.0 could have been the celebration that swtor, the devs and the players deserved.

You don’t even need to go as far as putting them on passive. Just keep some companions at low affection levels and swap to those companions if content becomes to easy. BioWare could even add a slide for any max level companions that would allow you to adjust what level affection your companions operate at. Bioware could also set it up as another credit sink in youre legacy. Then when your companions reach level 50 affection, you can have access to the feature by paying credits for it. They could have it so settings at first are for level 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50. If it players still found they needed more control, they could make the settings every 5 affection levels after level 10. That’s a win win solution for everyone.

I can understand why BioWare might want to tone down companions being OP in many situations. But I’m not sure capping presence is the correct approach. I still believe the affection levels of you companions is the best way to determine how powerful they are. That allows players themselves to choose how powerful they want their companions to be. Which determine how easy or hard some content can be. If you find the game too easy or hard with your companions affection levels, you can always add more gifts. If they become to powerful you can always use a less powerful companion to make the game harder again. BioWare might have data that shows too many people have capped all their comps to level 50 because companion gifts have been given away as rewards or dropped faster than they should have for many years. The fix for that is to raise companion levels again and restrict gift rewards to reach those levels. It would also be a great credit sink. Capping presence or any secondary stats was a major mistake in this expansion. The only stats they should ever cap or planet sync are power endurance and mastery.

It also depends on when players subscriptions are due for renewal.

Options are always better than disregarding part of the population in favour of accommodating another part.

Thank you for making a yellow post for the community and acknowledging the UI problems. Im really hoping these fixes to the UI will be more than just the contrast adjustment because the font change that’s being used through most of the game now is another sticking point for people with poor eye sight and is causing its own eye strain problems that lead to headaches. I’d personally really appreciate it if you could emphasis that with the dev team working on the UI fixes and keep us updated, even if it’s going to take months to fix or not going to be addressed at all. This way we aren’t left guessing or in limbo that it will be addressed. Then we can take our own responsibility with our eye health and wether we can continue playing. I’d already taken personal steps last year to specifically keep playing this game because of my deteriorating eyes and before the changes in 7.0. I upgraded my monitors to a 27” led no flicker 1080p and got a new highend graphic card. And I could still see everything perfectly on February 10th. The eye strain I’d had previously disappeared completely and my headaches I sometimes got went as well. Then you made these changes in 7.0 and I can’t even read my characters combat class on the front screen or much of the rest of the text in the game without squinting and moving my face right up to the monitors. It now feels like I wasted my money and time trying to do this for this game. I don’t play many other games and the ones I do play, didn’t need me to upgrade my monitors or graphics cards to keep playing them.

It’s not always totally black and white. There are multiple factors that influence the way people post or don’t find threads that correlates to the topic they want to post on. How much effort people will put in will also depend on what devices they are posting from. Phones can be a pain to search on or find stuff on this website. Tablets less off a problem and PCs are the easiest to search and find things. The site was never originally designed for phones of tablet use and most people seem to use those to post social media these days. But I do agree with much of what you are saying, especially when you can already see 3 or 4 similar threads on the front page and someone starts a 5th.

Wasn’t all of this discussed in multiple threads for months before 7.0 was supposed to launch in December. And BioWares response was to nerf conquest credits. It would seem that is all they are going to do. They seem to have zero understanding of economic theory at BioWare and aren’t listening to the multitude of ideas that players have suggested. They don’t even need to think of ideas themselves, there have been plenty of great ones posted by players. At this point, I would say they aren’t going to do anything else to combat the GTN or inflation problems. And there is so much else that needs fixing in the game with 7.0, that I can’t ever see them getting around to doing anything to fix it even if they knew how they wanted to do it. It’s apparent they are running on fumes these days. It would seem BioWare or EA have rediverted even more resources away from swtor, probably to Dragon Age 4. Just like they did the same swtor people moved to Anthem. It’s now on full maintenance mode.

I’d agree that it’s gone too long now to roll it back to pre7.0 totally. What I would like is they roll back all the UI, ability / utility pruning, gearing system and conquest changes to pre7.0 and work on story instead. I know none of that will happen. Only voicing my preference.

This is entirely true.

I had a PM from Jackie waiting for me when I logged in. She mentioned they are indeed “aware of the UI issues and concerns around trypophobia”. She didn’t really elaborate why they haven’t publicly posted any response yet. But did say “the team is working on updates. She is in the process herself of gathering all details before addressing them publicly” (I assume that means what ever changes the BioWare devs are doing, how long it will take and if there is any possible compensation for people who can’t currently play because of it). This bracketed part are my thoughts, not a quote from Jackie, so please don’t confuse that as something she said or promised.

It would be a quick bandaid, but not a proper fix. If they can’t do something more permanent faster, it would be a start to let some extra people play with less discomfort. As long as they didn’t think that was all that was needed to make the UI more palatable for people having physical discomfort from it.

While I agree with what you’re saying, it’s not always possible to find other threads on the same topic. The forum search feature isn’t the best and is also dependent on how other people spell stuff or word the title or descriptions. I personally try not to duplicate bug reports, even when I made this one in the bug section, I knew someone else had made one on this topic, but I couldn’t find it after looking. Of course when you see 3 or 4 threads in general that are all the same and then someone else makes another thread, it begs the question why didn’t they just use one of the others.

I honestly believe JackieKo is being prevented by her bosses from posting a response. Either that or she’s off sick because it’s been a week since we’ve seen any posts from her. All posts are stamped community team since last week. I hope she’s ok.

What ever the reason, having the community coordinator or community manager say something would hopefully calm things down. It seems totally illogical to just ignore it from a PR situation and let it keep spreading through the forums, social media and gaming media reviewers.

But swtor 2 made by a different company than EA/BioWare and on a proper engine that can handle 20 years worth of upgrade to performance. Only problem is MMOs usually take longer to make than co-op RPGs. If they started making swtor 2 tomorrow, I’d probably be 60 by the time they released it.

I’d pay for 1.0-3.8 classic version. 3.7-3.8 is when pvp gearing was at its best. The only thing I really liked after that period was from 4.6? when they let you convert pvp comms to tokens to swap to other Alts. Id be happy if they just relaunch let the classic version so all currencies are legacy bound and not character bound.

You won’t get any disagreement from me or probably anyone else. EA would have shut this down long ago like they did with Anthem if this wasn’t Star Wars.

It wasnt even a logical business move to have two servers for the US based in the same data centre. Double the cost and splitting the population. It’s not like the new server hardware was ever going to be overloaded with such a small population.