Just a reminder of the original system where gear was even more gated that 7.0 Gear progression at level 50: https://imgur.com/a/s55GjDT

I have not seen anyone mention how great the gearing is. I have seen the debate back and forth of whether to return to gating the top tier or not. If you played 10 years ago you would have recalled all the green crap dropping during leveling and then having the next tier gated by flashpoints, and the next tier gated by operations. Plus grinding even more so your companion wasn't crap. You could get some artifact items from heroics, but they were actually heroic then and you actually needed a group to do them. There is no comparison between then and now. They even had to reduce the effectiveness of companions because people were using them instead of human healers. It is just balls out turn the brain off easy now. My issue is the hypocrisy of calling a portion of the players "entitled" when they themselves want to jump to the very best gear by just logging in. I tried some of the new gear and you could mix and match to increase stats. It is not optimized of course, but I did not notice any degraded performance from what we have now. We sure will not feel overpowered for a fe wmore patches though.

Go ahead and count. 2nd highest gear tier for doing anything, which includes almost nothing. None of the gear will be great at patch. Until they rebalance everything it is going to be messy. It is always messy. Max new gear ratings (7.0 gear upgrade caps): 326: This can be obtained by doing anything in game (Conquests). 322: Story Mode Legacy Operations 326: Veteran Mode Legacy Operations 330: Master Mode Legacy Operations Perhaps the perception of solo content challenge is a new player thing. You haven't needed gear for story related content for a long time up until master mode chapters were added. You can literally start a fight and go make lunch while your companion finishes the fight. Hardly a challenge worthy of epic gear. You should have been around 10 years ago to know what it meant to work for your gear. As the patches are added more options will come to all players. They added this as part of the Q&A. Q. Can I acquire mats to max gear and mods without having to do grouped content? A . Over time, as more patches are released in the expansion, you will be able to upgrade your gear more and more, including unlocking the moddable gear vendor. I am not saying I am delighted about most of 7.0. I question why they basically went back to what they had when the game was launched and moved away from. Being around from the beginning I have seen both methods and handing max gear out like candy to anyone for everything is not very meaningful - but to some it is. To me top gear should come from progressively more challenging content or crafting, but that is just my opinion. I think there could have been a middle ground such as increasing the difficulty on some of the mm flashpoints and mm chapters with chance for higher gear. Or making it super grindy so a solo player could still get there, but had to spend more time versus challenge to earn it. Bioware is gambling by making this change. We will see if they end up burning themselves like some of their other choices over the years.

Every time I inspect someone on fleet who says "PVE is easy" they usually only have EV and KP hm done. I get a good laugh and it is hard to take them seriously. It is not harder, it is different. Some can do it and some can't...or haven't worked their way to that level yet. Trying to pit one activity against another does not help your argument or your cause. You haven't "proved" anything. You just said it. Saying something does not make it fact. Please link your ops achievements. Are you speaking from experience? Or just speaking? Nightmare (or master mode) operations are very challenging activities requiring not only getting yourself up to a certain awareness and skill level, but also 7 or 15 other people in order to complete one. Your entire premise is that the two are the same which clearly is not true. If everyone entering pvp maxes out at lvl 200 gear than that is the best gear in the game for that activity. That is essentially what they are doing. PVP and PVE are different activities. Your argument suggests that just because you do one activity it should give you gear that would be considered maximum for all activities. Also, staying with your argument, ranked pvp players will max out their gear (to the maximum pvp gear cap) and then because nim raids are so much easier, ranked pvp players will quickly acquire the new maximum nim raid gear level. Why are you not complaining about how easy ranked pvp players have it in 7.0? *sigh* Most ops players cannot complete nim content. Why would they love a system where they will not get top level gear any faster than anyone else who will also not complete nim content? Did you conduct a survey to be able to know what ops players are thinking on the matter? Now you say "PVP is far harder that nim ops". Again, post your ops achievements to back up such a statement. We covered the gear ranking in the prior paragraph. Per the dev post "PvP will have a stat floor and ceiling, so players with higher levels of gear will have their gear reduced to the stat ceiling (326). GSF will be awarded akin to the PvP upgrade loop". You can get 326 lvl gear doing ANYTHING in the game, so doing anything in the game will get you the top level gear for pvp. Saying something is debunked does not debunk it. I have not seen anybody saying you need max level gear to beat nim ops. The argument I have seen is that the harder content should award the higher level of gear. Staying with your logic - pvp and other activities do not need maximum level gear so why should they get it? They do not need it to beat the content.... Help us understand where your logic is going here. Clearly this paints a stereotype of players who do nim raiding. Different players will like different content and surprise! Most players like more than just one type of content. Trying to pigeon hole one aspect of the player base does not do anything to support your case. I don't remember anyone saying this ever. I remember things like "I am so sick of grinding", "I am so sick of spammerstation", "If I have to do hammerstation one more time I am going to jump off "insert your favorite tallest structure"". So now your argument morphs from "nim raiding is easy" to "everyone gets gear too quickly and we should cut back on gear rewards to everyone". You are aiming to be Mr popular aren't you? Everyone will be able to still do the content they want and be rewarded for it. Max new gear ratings (7.0 gear upgrade caps): 326: This can be obtained by doing anything in game (Conquests). 322: Story Mode Legacy Operations 326: Veteran Mode Legacy Operations 330: Master Mode Legacy Operations You will be able to stand around fleet complaining how easy nim raiding is while earning the second highest gear in the game. That seems pretty rewarding to me. Enlighten us. How is getting the second highest gear in the game by doing almost nothing not rewarding? Where to start here.... So now, in addition to being underwhelmed by how easy nim raiding is, you know the history of mmorpg's and what most "raiders" in those games think. Perhaps I underestimated you. Seriously though, how many nim raiders do you actually know? I have recently done some flashpoints and DvL bosses with some. I've talked decos and decorating with one. Trying to stereotype and demonize part of the player base as the basis of your argument is lazy and has the opposite effect. Though your narrative has weaved wildly paragraph to paragraph, your main point seems to be that anyone should get top gear regardless of what type of content you decide to do. Why didn't you just say that instead of all the wild assertions and demonizing people who can complete nim operations? It is clear this behavior is entitlement - yours. Where in life (except PVP and congress) can you fail your way to the best stuff? Doing nothing and expecting everything IS entitlement. While I have mixed feelings personally about a lot of 7.0, they are moving it back to where more challenging stuff will reward you better stuff. If you don't do nim raids then you won't have that top tier of gear. Not everyone has 300 rating augments....life went on and continues to go on. Life will go on in 7.0. I'm sure all this is a moot point since based on how easy nim operations are to you then you will be one of the few with the top tier gear.

There is a serious problem on star forge involving several players that are intentionally despawning all the DvL bosses. I saw someone mention that this was happening, but did not believe it. Afterall, what rationale person would waste time to travel to all 4 planets and boss locations just to prevent others from being able to finish the bosses? Well, I saw it for myself last night. They were not even discrete about it. I got screenshots of two different players with different legacy names were involved. I am doing videos of the next ones before I submit it all to bioware for action. If you have evidence please forward it to bioware, or me to include with mine. Unbelievable to know that there are some humans out that who consider this entertainment. SWTOR TOS Harassment Policy Our goal is to build a strong community that offers a comfortable atmosphere for all of our players. This means seeing that players have the ability to combat antisocial behavior Harassment consists of misuse and/or abuse of game mechanics and verbal harassment with the intention of distressing and offending other players. Game mechanics allow players to interact with the world and each other. For example, the ability to block a doorway is a game mechanic. Use of game mechanics like these is by no means considered harassment in and of itself. The key to determining whether the mechanic is being misused or abused is to determine "intent." Reported incidents are not considered harassment until it is determined by the SWTOR CS that it was done to intentionally to cause distress or to offend other players. Harassment is also any behavior that is incessant, inescapable, derogatory and directed specifically at you or your group. Before reporting, a genuine attempt to alleviate the situation should be made by leaving the area or the offending player, or asking them politely to stop. If a sincere attempt has been made to solve the problem and the offending player persists in the behavior, it should be reported. A judgment of valid harassment can result in penalties placed on the harassing party up to and including immediate account closure, based on the severity of harassment and the player's past account history. Player versus Player (“PvP”) activities, where available, are not exempt from this policy.

This. Plus who do you think buys the stuff you post on the gtn? I purchase a shocking amount of embers, matrixes, and other mats from people - 10,000 embers a week just to illustrate the scale. I sure as heck won't bother with any of that if I know any benefit will be wiped clean.

Actually, augments use very little of those. And most people buy the blue version which use none of them. Mods, enhancements, barrels, hilts, and armorings) use 5 each Implants, relics, and earpieces use 10 each Tacticals use 20 each Augments use 5 each Armor pieces (head, chest, etc) most use 10 each. Tacticals, augments, and stims/med packs will be the only thing viable so that is way less uses for embers that there are now. Hence the demand will go down. For the things I craft (and I almost never bother with augments due to how much competition there is) I use 10,000 legendary embers per week. So unless I switch to making augments I will not be buying 10,000 embers each week.

I don't envy the person who had to sort through all those screenshots and whittle them down to 3. I would have thought they would have announced it prior to launch of 7.0 so they had one less thing to deal with.

That's the billion credit question isn't it? Most jawa junk comes from disintegrating gear currently - which is going away. That would make one believe that the supply of mats and jawa junk would dry up. Bioware has not said anything more. But, when you think there might be an opportunity, Bioware finds a way to gimp it, so it is a gamble and we will not know for sure until after the 14th. It's worth noting that while the supply of both will dry up, the ways to use them will also dry up. As 306 gear will now become low level stuff, crafters will only need those mats for a limited number of items so one would anticipate that the demand for them will also go down.

What I know: A developer post indicated that you would be able to buy solid resources with jawa junk (one of the three types). Post Since crafting is not changing then you will be able to get embers from slicing (rare) and from wealthy missions.

Inflated prices due to lack of competition are not going to be fixed with your proposed solutions. People will just inflate them more to cover the increased fee. Adjusting crafting so more people can do it is the solution for that problem. If my costs go down and I already was getting a more than adequate margin of return then I saw no need to gouge on the listing price. Again, the stuff I buy has not been affected by the inflation.

Any word on when the results of this contest will be announced?

And a point of clarification on this inflation. As a lil ole crafter in the game I have acquired more credits than some. While this does not make me part of some evil cabal trying to destroy the universe, it does mean I see lots of item pricing and trends. Yes, there are more credits pouring into the game per my prior post, but it really only impacts the cartel market stuff. The price escalation has really been very visible since they removed the referral program, which makes sense as that would have reduced the supply of items being sold in the game. - Grade 11 mats (premium to artifact) have stayed about the same in the last 2 years. - Solid Resource Matrix are cheaper now than they were 2 years ago. - Processed Isotope Stabilizers are cheaper now than they were 2 years ago. - Legendary Embers fluctuate, but they are on average cheaper than they were 2 years ago. - For the crafted stuff I sell, those are also around the same price as they were 2 years ago. - Mounts (rancors, gundarks, banthas, tauntauns, spider tanks, jet packs, and raptors - the ones I watch for) fluctuate based on how many are on the market, but on average are no more expensive than 2 years ago. - Decorations ( the ones that are usable for me that I watch on the gtn have not changed much in average listing price. - toys and emotes. The ones I've searched over the last 2 years have been pretty stable. In fact, I just bought 10 feign death yesterday that were cheaper than I ever saw 2 years ago. So, from what I monitor, inflation is not impacting everything. In fact, prices have been quite stable over the last 2 years or gone down slightly for some.

My response was to the trend I saw reading the posts and not to one in particular. I should have quoted one of the replies that had "make the rich suffer" and not yours.

It is auto rolled to someone in the group.

So because you didn't take part in an aspect of the game that makes it ok to take someone else's stuff and exclude yourself from the inflation fix? You focused on outfits. New players will have less than you so should we cut your outfit inventory in half so its fair? Everyone benefited from the increase of easy credits into the game, just some more than others. If a drastic action is taken it should be across the board and not be limited to part of the population. Conquest related payouts have been adding tons of credits to the game and it became very noticeable when cartel item supply was restricted by the ending of the referral program. Weekly conquest payout per toon in 2018 was about 70k credits (only credits). Since the last update, hitting conquest each week gets each toon 312,770 credits (only credits). And that is just the conquest credits and not the credits from the activities done to hit conquest. That is a 346% increase. Top tier gear drops like snow flakes from everything. Those sell for 6 - 21k each to a vendor. The facts are that they just made it too easy to make credits and did not offset that with enough things to remove credits. People can easily make a million credits in a day now from activities - per toon. Not exploits and not something nefarious. Now because of the lack of balance for so long, the fixes will not be to anyone's liking. It's great new players can acquire wealth a lot faster than any prior time in the games history, but you cannot expect that not to come with negative consequences. The cause has been around for a while and the fix will take time. Dry up the intake of credits from conquest and add more credit sinks. More epic sinks like Yarvok's Gratitude or: 1. Ability to buy stuff in lei of having cartel certificates - steep markup of course. 2. More deco packs with steep cost. Just more decos in general actually. 3. Bring back the item that we can share with ftp friends so they can do ops again. 4. New perk so people can summon without a guild or specific guild rank. 5. More bank tabs. 6. Old items like those cantina mounts from way back when. For some of us a big aspect of the game is wheeling and dealing and trying to make credits - It is Star Wars after all. We got those credits the same way anyone else could have if it would have been their goal. We should not lose what we earned to fix a problem we did not cause - or definitely not bare the brunt of the fix.

New players don't have the gear you have so let's strip you of half your gear. Most the people I know with a lot of credits sit on it so it is not circulating - so not part of the problem. You should read up on the theory you reference. People with a lot of credits spent time or $ to get it. In many cases that IS the game for them. Penalizing them is not equitable and not an effective solution anyways. Drying up all the easy credits from activities and implementing better credit sinks are.

Wondering if this is code. Is the game ending as it began? 2012 gearing https://imgur.com/gMGD35h After reading of the current planned 7.0 changes I got the sickening feeling that all the changes are not to better the game or appeal to what players have been asking for, but as a test bed to try out new dev concepts for future non-swtor projects.

Higher GTN tax and repair bills will just hurt those with the fewest credits to begin with. They tried high repair bills back around 2015. It was reversed. There are two ways to reduce prices. Increase the supply or reduce the demand. Bioware reduced the supply with removal of all the free cartel coins from the referral program. Trying to punish rich players won't solve the problem. In fact, rich players help take credits out of the game - well stashed away, but at least not circulating. That is hindered by the credit caps currently. Increasing the caps for character or legacy will let these players store more credits so they are not floating around in the game. Amounts in excess of 100 billion credits make players resort to adding alts or buying rare items to store more credits. Past 500 billion credits it is such a pain it is almost not worth the effort... almost. You don't want them to spend, you want to support them storing more credits out of circulation. There needs to be more specialty credit sinks. A must have mount, palace, or object that is so desirable that people will drop a billion or more credits to have. And then billions more to unlock rooms or features. Something that even the "doing pretty good" players have to save up for. Or a leaderboard for highest amount of credits for individual or guild. Something that offers a competition to save instead of spend will reduce the credits circulating. Trying to drive up costs, taxes, penalties is not going to affect the wealthy. It is just going to hurt everyone else. Increasing the GTN tax from 3% to 8% did nothing. Prices are multiples higher than when it was only 3%. Don't shoot off your leg to save your foot. Add pricey barbie doll credit sinks of epic proportion. Ultra pricey and limited edition decorations or vanity items. Not sellable on gtn - sold by vendor so it really takes credits out of the game. On the demand side, credits rain from the sky now. Popping conquest and getting embers, matrix's, or OEMs get people 40 million credits or more a week. That is a shocking change to what players can earn versus prior years. That's fine if people like easy credits, but you cannot throw all that gasoline of easy credits into the fire wood of the market and not expect it to go up in flames.

Yes, the stronghold. The actual planet disappointed in the fact that it is known for the twin suns, but the stronghold did a much better job actually having 2 prominent suns. This is the cave in the ancient ruins part of the map. It is part of one of the datacron quests. This photo shows the other side of the cave which might make it more familiar to you. I liked the lighting, water quality, and feel, but I had no idea what that tentacle thing was so opted not to use it for the competition. https://imgur.com/a/2HXEtSE

It was interesting reading what people were thinking about some of their selections. I knew the competition would be tough going into this. I aimed to maximize the complexity of my selections so mine might get the edge when judges were looking at lots of the same type of scenery. Should I go with scenery? Should I go with humanoid structures? Should I find an easily recognizable structure so people knew where it was? Or should I try to strike a balance of all those elements? For each I tried getting down lower, high, more to the right or left. I wished I could remove a tree or building a few times. The most difficult part for me, and it seems so for others, was settling on just one photo. Some I would have submitted if we could send more than one. Hutta 1 2 Tython 1 2 3 4 Makeb 1 2 3 4 5 Tatooine 1 2 3 4 5 6 Ossus 1 2 3 4 Korriban 1 2 3 Zakuul 1 2 3 4 Ord Mantell 1 2 3

This was taken inside solida hesk's estate. As I captured some of the cool and well known vistas it struck me that others were getting the same ones, so when I saw the colors and lighting inside that compound I opted to submit that one. Everyone has posted lot's of cool snapshots and most of us seemed to have similar screenshots. To try to get something unique I ended up in some crazy locations. As I got into more exotic locations the perspective could be better, but things were so far away that it made a poor photo. Some of the stranger locations. https://imgur.com/a/13kfHNA https://imgur.com/a/XR2pD0e https://imgur.com/a/VBZdRB7 https://imgur.com/a/iSHSdFn

This absorbed many hours of my days/nights. In the end, the hardest part was deciding on which one I would submit for the competition. Posting only the ones I submitted below. Hutta https://imgur.com/a/vmntAWT Korriban https://imgur.com/a/FLjuQ9A Ord Mantell https://imgur.com/a/DuPpxMs Tython https://imgur.com/a/GmTJpdu Tatooine https://imgur.com/a/3EJQoft Makeb https://imgur.com/a/gXb7LGf Yavin 4 https://imgur.com/a/oJ0RIxC Zakuul https://imgur.com/a/oo7WBl5 Ossus https://imgur.com/a/o1JLgkj Mek-Sha https://imgur.com/a/PymN0jF I must add, that most of the bodies of water look amazing on the ultra graphics setting. Even if you do not play with that setting on, everyone should venture out and explore in ultra setting from time to time. https://imgur.com/a/Zi6aF3U

Recruitment is open again. All levels. Examples of some of the events we do is linked below. https://imgur.com/a/psX50k7 https://imgur.com/a/Aq2P0eN Message Tawanne or Khyranus in game.

Looking to buy Pub guild (level 64 min and unlocked). Message me with asking price.