I too was targeted with the offer in my launcher, but have not yet received the 500CC grant. Furthermore, my monthly Cartel Coin grant slipped another 3 days this cycle--I should have received them on the 29th of March when I renewed my subscription and only just received them the 22nd of April (a delay of 24 days). The bug that caused the monthly grant to release every 33 days was supposed to have been fixed in Patch 4.3, so I'm guessing/hoping it's because the fix was applied after I renewed. If 28 April's Cartel Coin grant arrives on 25 May, I'll file a proper bug report, though it'd be nice if there wasn't any delay at all.

I'm addressing the past, comparing it to where we are now, and also addressing my current concerns with the game. I'm not doing this because I "enjoy it," as you say. It is because there are aspects of the game and its state that I don't enjoy that I am doing this. I want a better game, and I think everyone else does, too. Surely we can work toward a common goal. As for verbosity, I never had a problem with the first thread. If you wish to overlook it because it's too much effort for you to read it, that's your right, but I think most people can get the gist of the thread by reading the first two sections, which should be easy enough for anyone.

That may or may not be true (and as EA is the parent company with a history of certain behaviors, it probably is), but we can only try. I think part of the reason that it feels to so many that nothing ever gets done is because the community is scattered, fractured; each focusing on a different thing and unwilling to cooperate or compromise with other members of the community. Better that we work together and push for change and fail than for each of us to remain in our little bubbles, talking over and arguing and sniping with each other and the developers, and never making a real concerted effort. As I stated above, the onus for change isn't solely on the developers--we also have a role to play.

Yet again, this post reserved for future uses.

Reserved for future use.

When Will Then Be Now? Part One, above, took a look back at the state of SW:TOR as it was in the summer of 2012, and compared many of the thread’s suggestions and requested quality of life changes with the game in its current state. For those that took the time to read it, it’s clear to see just how much has changed and just how much has remained the same. In Part Two, I’d like to continue in the spirit of the old thread; to point out issues both minor and major, and provide creative solutions to them. While I’m sure there are many more issues I could list, they’re not always easy to keep track of or remember, and perhaps most importantly there are some problems for which I can’t quite figure out solutions. It is to that area that I would invite the rest of the community to engage themselves. The burden of change isn’t entirely on SW:TOR’s developers; as the consumers of their product, we have our own role to play. But it’s difficult to cut through the noise when things get toxic. One can understand why BioWare Austin relies on its metrics so much, when constructive criticism and good ideas are drowned out by a very loud and pernicious minority. While I feel voting with your wallet is a perfectly legitimate method of participation, it will only go so far in addressing your grievances and desire for change. Say you manage to cripple SW:TOR’s generated income enough that the developers get handed down from on high EA’s disapproval; they start to scramble. What will they scramble towards first? Most likely to their metrics. What will get changed? Probably not the thing you were after them to fix. Or perhaps EA pulls the plug on BioWare Austin’s funding altogether, and that game you kind of enjoyed but really wanted to love, “if only it would change,” just goes away instead. Once again, I would beseech participants to comport themselves with due civility. We all have our frustrations, but if we’re to see change we’ll have to work together at it. Screaming and sniping at the developers and at each other solves nothing. Try to remember that there’s a real human behind that username. Addendum With Patch 4.1 a mere few hours away, and details on the impending changes to crafting having been released, I considered editing out some of my suggestions because they are similar to what we’re getting today. However, I think I’ll leave them in for posterity and grey them out instead. Part Two: Another Thousand Papercuts Communication There are a plethora of disputes we all have with SW:TOR, but this is perhaps one of the biggest issues that has long plagued the game. Community relations and general outward communication seemed to get better after August of 2012, but declined to near silence in the lead up to KotFE’s release. And while communication seems once again to be on the uptick, there’s a long way yet to go. Developer / Community Team Outreach Too little was known about KotFE from its announcement until just days before release. The reason given for this lack of communication was the desire not to spoil the story, but much could have been conveyed that didn’t spoil anything, such as: mainstat consolidation, crafting changes, the removal of custom gear vendors, the conversion of Affection to Influence and other companion changes, et. al. Developers don’t blog nearly enough and should be much more proactive communicating their plans and ideas to the community, whether directly or through the Community Management team (preferably both). If the Community Managers’ hands are bound by whatever draconian rules are in place for communicating more often and in greater detail with players, then this needs to be rectified. Biweekly developer streams are a great idea, and I greatly approve of it, but what little information we get from them usually echos that which has already been released—either in blog posts, in interviews, from the dreaded D-word, or from simple deduction. People who are most likely to watch these streams already know of these changes and what has transpired in the story. Furthermore, a significant portion of time is devoted to recapping what you’ve done with the game and what’s happened in the story. Considering the time it takes from the development schedule to interact with players and fans on a livestream—and all time is valuable—they should be much bigger events, and the content discussed of greater depth and value. Use this time to excite players and fans instead of boring them; disseminating information they already have when they are so hungry for new things isn’t a tease, it’s filling dead air and padding out what little is actually being provided. If you want to have fun with it and stretch out your time on the stream, consider giveaways and a longer Q&A. Addendum: Developer streams are now just monthly. The time devoted to recapping what's already been released has been lessened, however. Metrics vs. Community Engagement Fun is not a quantifiable metric. At least, it isn’t quantifiable to the dumb wetware we call a brain. Perhaps machine intelligences will be able to quantify what makes a thing fun through the use of Big Data, but it’s hard for our tiny minds to conceive of such a revelation from that gargantuan amount of information. Metrics are important, and a great deal of information can be derived from them, but like all tools it is but one of many to rely upon. Use your other tools, i.e. the community. Ask players what they want, and not just in forum posts—actively ENGAGE us. I emphasized this a great deal in my original forums post and it must be reiterated. Greater engagement by BioWare means players care more about the game and engage more with BioWare. Have a cool idea that’s been simmering for a while? Release a video discussing it, take the opportunity to show what you’ve thus far created for it, and then ask us our opinion on the matter while there’s still time to pivot on the development side. Don’t just release a video after-the-fact, detailing or taking us behind the scenes of what’s just been delivered, give us a glimpse of what’s coming; surprise us; engage us. Waiting until the last minute to gauge the playerbase does not ensure a quick turnaround or proper statistical results. Instead, it only engenders discontent and anger on the part of players. It makes your jobs that much harder, and it causes release delays. Being forced to respond after the fact only amplifies these drawbacks (i.e. 4.0 companion changes, subsequent over-nerfing and un-nerfing). Draw a consensus from our responses, be it forum posts, surveys, polling, or some combination thereof, and weigh this data with the same importance you place on recorded game metrics. Collating all of this data, while a larger task, yields much more fruitful and, more importantly, more accurate results. The Subscription Rewards Survey This was a good idea, but poorly executed and greatly limited in scope. It should have been done shortly after KotFE and its subscription rewards were announced (since the survey in question was about the next round of rewards). Instead, it was sent out just before the announcement about the January to August 2016 Subscriber Rewards program. I find it hard to believe that most, if not all, of these rewards were not already decided upon and approved ahead of the announcement. If you’ve already made the decision as to what we’re being given, asking us what we want is ultimately without meaning. If simply a misunderstanding, it only further defines the need for better communication. Addendum: It is now apparent that the survey was most likely in regards to the potential subscriber rewards for Season 2 of KotFE. Nevertheless, such a minor lack of clarity in communication is partly responsible for the current unrest with regard to the HK-55-themed rewards. Also responsible are those members of the community who could not conceive of the fact that these things have already been made (or are in the process) and have been decided upon, and that it is simply too far into the release cycle to pivot on this matter. This example no less illustrates the need for better communication and engagement with the community. Going Forward There is an axiom that states that to be a good writer one must first be a good reader. This is absolutely true, no matter what you’re creating. You must continue to expose yourself to new and interesting things so that you remain inspired and your art remains relevant. Look to other successes to see how their approach to community interaction has helped their success and fostered a closer bond with their respective players. EVE Online and Final Fantasy XIV are the most notable examples, with Marvel Heroes 2015 receiving an honorable mention for their openness in the past. by Ben Brode of Blizzard’s Hearthstone team is a fantastic overview of the ebb and flow of community restlessness and discontent, and the consequences of both miscommunication and a lack of communication on the part of developers. The brilliant Andie Nordgren, Executive Producer of EVE Online at CCP, has given several lectures regarding user participation and player-focused design. I implore you to mine them, and the rest of CCP’s keynote speeches and developer blog videos, for useful and vital information to apply to SW:TOR and your interactions with the community. that seems rather pertinent to the conversation at hand. Performance, Performance, Performance! Story is important and one of the game’s best features, but if the game performs poorly (and it does), existing players will eventually grow frustrated or lose interest over this, and new player retention is less likely. When one with limited knowledge or experience must troubleshoot why SW:TOR struggles to provide consistent performance, but any random game purchased on Steam with far more complicated visuals does not, there’s a huge disconnect; and not everyone is patient enough or knowledgeable enough (or both) to deal with that, so it’s easier to just move onto something else. And let’s face it, if not for the fact that it’s a Star Wars game, a lot of these folks wouldn’t put up with it at all. Users disconnect with a program or device, or in this case a game, if feedback is not near instantaneous. If your miracle of technology, the smartphone, freezes everything to a halt for a second or more when you tap to bring up a menu list, is your experience not negatively affected? Does this not tarnish the brand in your eyes? There’s a reason why smartphones as a product didn’t really stick until the iPhone: in spite of the greater number of features and utility, Windows Mobile/CE was a terrible OS with horrendous performance. (On this matter, I defer to this excerpt from Jakob Nielsen’s book, Usability Engineering.) While changes have been slowly implemented over time, such as the changes to asset storage and allocation, current game performance (Patch 4.0.4 as of this morning) compared to that of Patch 1.3 is far, far worse. Furthermore, the performance cost for the visuals we get at maximum settings isn’t worth it, though the latter is a topic for another discussion. Hearing that there’s a team that is almost entirely dedicated to performance is heartening, however, and I can only hope that their work will soon start to bear fruit. Customer Service I realize that these brave and hard-working souls are few and overburdened by the volume of incoming requests, many of which could be avoided if some players would bother reading and paying attention to the information provided by the game. However, a one month response time for a well-written ticket during the holidays, and just after a new and extensive expansion—a crucial time in which it is to be expected, especially given prior experiences in the game’s four year tenure, that there will be a large volume of tickets and many unforeseen bugs—is simply unacceptable. Won’t someone please think of the overtaxed and ailing customer service droids? The Public Test Realm The PTS is woefully underutilized. Whilst one can sympathize about not wanting to spoil the upcoming storylines and chapter events, public playtesting remains a vital step in the QA process and must not be left to wilt on the vine. You have to decide which is more important: potential story leaks and spoilers, or game-breaking or otherwise frustrating bugs that turn away new and/or returning players. Addendum: The PTS is active again and has been testing some new features and PVP maps and modes, and the Eternal Championship is headed there soon as well. This is good. More of this, please. I still maintain, however, that all aspects of the game and its content, which includes elements of the story and its mechanics, should benefit from further public testing. The Cartel Market The Cartel Market should be improved to encourage and entice F2P and Preferred players—a group which data would seem to suggest is in the minority where transaction volume is concerned. Reducing the nickle-and-diming or cash-grab perception of the current market might make them more willing to spend money. Give a little, make it more enticing; perhaps not as much for F2P as for Preferred players. And speaking of, Preferred status wasn’t always so restrictive, and the barrier to entry was much higher (i.e. requiring to have been a former subscriber). Embargoed Packs The newest Cartel Market pack shipments have done away with the inclusion of reputation items and Cartel Certificates, and in light of the coming changes to Cartel Market pack functionality in Patch 4.1, the trend would seem to indicate a near-permanent embargo of the old Cartel packs, thus negating the usefulness of Reputation and Cartel Certificate vendors for players that have not had access to these packs in sufficient quantities to merit their use. Old packs, which are embargoed and have been reintroduced a scant few times in the last year, are at present the only source for reputation items from these associated organizations, and are still the primary method by which one obtains Cartel Certificates to purchase items from these unique reputation vendors. There is, of course, a single exception: the Contraband Slot Machine. Unfortunately, this decoration provides reputation for only one organization. Worse still, I have read that drop rates of Cartel Certificates from this device were significantly reduced (to a dismal 0.05%). The reasoning was understandable for the time, given the regular rotation and proliferation of embargoed packs and the unintended market consequences for Jawa Junk, but no longer. I suggest to first replace Jawa Junk payouts with something else; something useful and with some value, but only to individual characters or Legacies; something that isn’t likely to have a far-reaching impact on the in-game economy. Win/payout percentages should then be improved. Given the state of pack Reputation and Cartel Certificates, chances should be much more reasonable than they are; this device is practically worthless in its current incarnation. This should then be followed up with the introduction of slot machine variants for the remaining Cartel Market pack reputation vendors. An alternative suggestion, which might be a little crazy, is to take a page out of Star Trek Online’s book and use Lock Boxes. For those that haven’t played it, in Star Trek Online, Lock Boxes (their version of Cartel Market packs) randomly drop as a separate loot entity and are bound to the character credited with the kill. The player can then loot the crate separately from the mob corpse. These crates can then be opened with special Master Keys which are purchased from the in-game store with real money, or purchased from other players with credits. Players who choose not to open Lock Boxes can sell them to other players through the Exchange (GTN equivalent). The types of Lock Boxes vary from time to time, or depending upon the current promotions. During previous special events and promotions, just a certain cross-section or even all of these Lock Boxes would be available to drop, giving newer or returning players access to old items. Old embargoed Cartel Packs could be reimagined to function in a similar fashion, with a special master key available as a Cartel Market purchase at a reasonable price, with discounts for volume purchases. As previously stated, this is a crazy potential solution that I’m just throwing out there. I’m uncertain about how well such an idea would function in practice, let alone be received by players, so I invite the community to comment on it further. Itemization & Crafting Note: Please bear in mind that I’ve been writing down these notes off-and-on for the last few weeks, ahead of the announced crafting changes that will come with today’s patch (4.1). Some of these suggestions are mirrored in Patch 4.1’s changes to crafting, but will remain for posterity. Crafting is still in need of further refinement. Some of the recent changes leading up to and within Patch 4.0 were well overdue, but more could be done to improve it. The fast pace of leveling combined with the very awesome armor crate rewards from heroics negated the improved utility of crafting in 4.0. This could be due to poor oversight, a lack of communication between development teams, or both. Granted, only subscribers are given access to the aforementioned boxes awarded by heroics. Nevertheless, an heirloom-type system, mentioned in detail later in this post, would help with the tedium some players experience when gearing whilst leveling. Some of the crafting changes coming in 4.1 would better address some crafting utility, though more so at endgame rather than whilst leveling. The new crafting tier, complete with schematics and materials, is a logical progression. Nevertheless, some underlying issues will undoubtedly remain. I believe the introduction of the Appearance Designer has helped the armor crafting professions become a little more useful, but there are still too many pieces, to many schematics that go unused, and many styles have been removed altogether. While it’s good that some of the missing styles (as a result of the removal of many vendors/quest rewards and the changing of loot tables) are returning, many of us would also like to see the remainder come back. Augment Kits It is my personal experience that Augment Kits other than MK-8 (soon to be MK-9) go unused. With leveling as fast as it is, and gear in the leveling process transient, it is far too tedious and costly to produce or purchase augments and the appropriate kits prior to the MK-8 series. And now that a MK-9 series will be introduced with [today’s patch], the MK-8 schematic will soon fall into disuse with the rest. I suggest combining the lot into a single universal Augment Kit schematic that’s compatible with all tiers of augments, allowing the continued option for those that desire the detailed and frequent re-customization that some find repetitive. Artifice My main character has Artifice as a profession, and therefore this is the area I feel the most comfortable discussing in this post. It also remains one of the least profitable crew skills, even though recent changes have made minor improvements to its usefulness. Most of its long-term utility come from the crafting of decorative items, such as dyes and color crystals, and there’s room there to grow it. Addendum: Artifice will be receiving an update in today’s patch, but as previously stated I’ll be leaving my pre-announcement suggestions as-is, followed by further codicils. Dyes should be expanded and the underlying system tweaked. More craftable dyes with greater variety. Yes, even black dye. $15-20 for a single-use dye is shambolic. Perhaps remove paired dyes, or introduce schematics to craft for specific dye slots (Primary, Secondary, etc.) Give the dye slot in an armor piece multiple sub-slots, not only to give greater variety in color combinations, but to give separate Primary and Secondary dyes greater utility. To avoid controversy, allow the Primary slot to be used by dyes with Primary and Secondary components whilst retaining the functionality of said dyes. Introducing a Tertiary dye slot would allow for the coloring of certain armor pieces which are currently unable to be fully transformed by dyes as is desired by many players. Color crystals should be reworked and their functionality expanded. With the ubiquity of color crystals from the Cartel Market and their use as early as level 10, stats on crafted color crystals rated below Item Level 136 are now pointless, resulting in level 1-49 saber crystals going unused, and thus moved into obsolescence. Color crystals should simply be an affectation, like dyes, with stat bonuses derived from one of the other four slots (hilt/barrel/armoring, mod, enhancement, and augment). Should this change be made, removing the level restriction is only logical. Addendum: The developers seem to have reached a similar conclusion with the above and some of these changes to color crystals will be introduced in Patch 4.1. To add further utility with this change, allow color crystals to recolor the glowing parts on a given armor piece, functioning similarly to dyes. Understanding that prior assets may not function in this fashion and may be too costly to reconfigure, this feature could be implemented into future armor designs to conserve development resources. Mentions have long been made by developers of the potential to craft color changes for a speeder’s special effects, and there’s room to provide that for future mounts by implementing the preceding changes. Addendum: Indeed, crafted color crystals no longer have level requirements, and the schematics for obsolete crystals have been removed. However, there is still slight disparity in that the Cartel Market crystals still require level 10 or higher, but I am uncertain if this is as intended. Armor & Appearance I had some rather crazy ideas to revamp armor and armor appearances, but I felt them too complex to address in the short term. Perhaps it would be best to relegate the suggestions to a future post. Legacy Legacy has barely been touched since its introduction (though Legacy-wide Datacrons are greatly appreciated). New features and unlocks should be introduced, and there’s a huge gap after Legacy level 25 that should serve as an excellent place for them. Birthright and Inheritance These items were designed before the ubiquity of Custom, Adaptive, and Legacy armor shells, and are now essentially useless. Re-engineering these items to function similarly to World of Warcraft’s Heirlooms would return Birthright and Inheritance tokens to relevance whilst also reducing the annoyance of many players when faced with keeping new characters properly geared as they’re leveled. Some suggestions: Inheritance items could scale from levels 1 to 50. They should feature stats similar to or better than fully modded Custom armor shells. Birthright items could scale from levels 1 to 64, or a level or two behind current and future level caps. These items should also be endowed with slightly better stats than Inheritance gear. As with WoW’s Heirlooms, Birthright and Inheritance items could come with special boosts akin to armor set bonuses, which would be useful and more powerful than armor acquired through the usual means (i.e. crafting, rewards, or direct vendor purchases), but not as powerful as endgame set bonuses. Legacy Armor The prices of Renowned and Exalted armor sets from Legacy vendors could do with a reduction, or perhaps change the currency with which they’re purchased to Common Data Crystals—a currency by which most characters at level cap are overburdened. They’re just empty shells, after all. And perhaps remove their class restrictions. Legacy Wallet This was a suggestion I made before and it bears repeating. The previous exploit of Warzone Commendations before the introduction of the Legacy-bound requisitions illustrates the need for this feature. Such exploits, and indeed many black markets, are often utilized because of a need not being serviced by existing systems. Requisitions are only a stop-gap measure that doesn’t address the underlying problem. To allay concerns, the Legacy Wallet should come with certain restrictions for lower account tiers so as not to alienate subscribers. HK-51 While I love this droid, his acquisition can be a nightmare by the third or fourth go round. It’s a neat idea, in theory, but digging for parts gets tiresome. The Burba Seismic Excavator/Scanner doesn’t function as well as the Seeker Droid. Tweaking the system to use the latter device would keep the process of acquiring HK-51’s parts challenging while reducing frustrations. Treek is far easier to acquire by comparison, and is also much cheaper to unlock for other characters on a given Legacy. Perhaps HK-51’s Legacy unlock price could be adjusted. Even though it’s been nearly a year, I still feel a little slighted that the quest chain got reset in my absence when I was but a single piece away from activating HK-51, though perhaps more because of Customer Service’s response time and lack of assistance on the matter (I understand the quest had likely been reset many times in my absence, but the items were nonetheless there). Thankfully, a sympathetic player helped me do it all over again in a single night. Thanks, Malcia of The Harbinger. Speaking of HK-51, I also miss his unique Assassinate ability that got lost in the 4.0 companion revamp. It would be nice to have that back. Side Quests The Sith Inquisitor is on a quest for ancient power through the acquisition of relics and ancient knowledge. More emphasis on this would be nice. Although this is perhaps less a want of side quests and more a desire to see more of my class-specific story. WoW’s Archaeology feature was a great idea that felt half-finished on release, and has all but been abandonned since Cataclysm. The Star Wars universe is huge, and I think there are opportunities for side quests, to expand lore, and to actually use your Crew Skills for something other than making credits. For example, I loved the recruitment mission for Talos, and I went through with it even though I could have immediately demanded his return on my Inquisitor. Archaeology-related quests—not an event—would be a very welcome addition. Preview Window The character preview window has been bugged for quite some time. Drawing a weapon or previewing a crystal on characters that use a lightsaber doesn’t work. The current workaround is to first preview a lightsaber. It also used to show muzzle flash and blaster bolts when previewing ranged weapons, or previewing color crystals on characters with ranged weapons equipped. What happened to this? Please bring it back. Heroic Missions Since the revamp of Heroic missions, they now auto-complete when the primary objective has been completed. While this is very convenient, new players (or old forgetful ones who like to go back over old content every once in a while) will miss out on the cutscenes, and I find that somewhat unfortunate. The bigger problem with this, however, is not being able to complete bonus objectives and receive their rewards if you complete the primary mission objective first. [Heroic 2+] Possessed Hunter The objective, Valen Korik, has a respawn timer of 5 minutes. The site is camped almost constantly, sometimes by upwards of 20 players, and those that wait often refuse to group up. Switching map instances is of limited help. My suggestion would be to simply cordon off the area as a Group Phase. Those that wish to continue to solo the mission may do so, and those that wish to group can; both parties are thus able to complete the heroic quickly and efficiently. [Weekly] Defending Voss-ka Voss heroics were bugged after Patch 4.0, though the causes have varied. At first there were no Voss heroics; the reputation mission terminal in the cantina was removed, but its associated dropbox was conspicuously still there. In the patch that followed, the cantina dropbox was removed and Heroic missions for the planet returned, but without reputation gains or the associated Weekly; though if you had the Weekly before 4.0, it remained in your mission log, but the Voss missions didn’t count towards the objective. Reputation rewards for the Voss heroics have since been reintroduced, but completing the Voss heroics still doesn’t count towards the Weekly objective. Addendum: Fixed in 4.1a. Events The Chevin Grand Acquisitions Race For all its bugs, the Chevin event was a lot of fun, and next to the Gree event, one of the best in this or any other game. While it is appreciated that the vendors have returned, and now sell the old rewards in exchange for a combination of newer event currencies, some of us still have many Tokens of Enrichment and would like to spend them. As an event, it’s pretty special, and if I remember right even the lore of it suggests it’s a rare occurrence, so it could perhaps be limited to a yearly event if brought back. Star Wars Movie Hype Whilst most of the EU materials are now “Legends” (though are likely to be mined by Lucasfilm for new content), and SW:TOR’s own status between canonical and non-canon is currently ambiguous, the game felt largely disconnected from all the buzz and excitement surrounding the new films and series. To celebrate the ushering in of a potential golden age of storytelling in the Star Wars universe, across all media, with the premiere of The Force Awakens, SW:TOR’s promotion was…Double XP. No movie-inspired outfits, mounts or weapons (even though one of those weapons explicitly references “ancient Sith designs” and the Great Scourge of Malachor). Considering the success of TFA, now is the time to get serious about cross-promotion. Addendum: The Arbiter's Unstable Lighstaber and Dualsaber, whose blades mirror Kylo Ren's lightsaber, have been added with the Anarchist Packs. New Events During the live stream on the 14th of January, Producer Ben Irving said in response to a question about new events that those currently in the game still had “plenty of mileage” to them. In some respects I don’t think this is the case, but in others, such as the Gree event, I can understand. My concern with making events more frequent is that they’ll become less desirable to participate in to a much larger section of players. While it could also be that the comment was made with the idea that increases in event frequency would be a stop-gap measure until new events could be built (or an old one re-engineered), a wider variety of new content to keep people playing the game is a must. Sadly, ideas for this topic have been fleeting, but I’d like to hear what other users have to say, specifically those with greater knowledge of the Old Republic-era EU. Subscriptions Subscriber Rewards Unique aesthetic rewards are a nice incentive, but I worry they don’t go far enough. While Niko’s Blasters were an altogether new item with a unique appearance, Niko’s Duster was a recolor of an item that’s been in the game forever. And speaking of Niko’s Blasters, while they are original and do look cool, they don’t look nearly as awesome as the concept art used to actually sell the items (and let’s not mince words here, that is precisely what the promotion was for—to sell subscriptions). Limited-timed, paywalled story content seems to go too far in the wrong direction. Playing a slice of the backstory from HK-55’s perspective is a neat idea, but I wonder if putting the game’s universal selling point (i.e. story) behind a series of special conditions may be to the concept’s detriment. Furthermore, I think most people would agree that Darth Marr would have been a far more interesting subject, as much as we enjoyed HK-55. In any case, I’d like to see more discussion from other players on the core of this concept. Daily Login Rewards Several games now have it, including another Star Wars game from EA (Galaxy of Heroes), and some implement it quite well (Marvel Heroes 2015). It’s an interesting feature that would be sure to keep many players coming back. I’ll allow others to weigh the pros and cons of allowing access to login rewards to all three tiers, but would like to say there should be greater rewards unique to subscribers. Veteran Rewards Rewards for subscription length is, I suppose, more of a prestige thing, but Star Trek Online has a decent implementation of the feature, and their Lifetime Account unlocks all rewards (and it damn well better, considering the price). I'm sure many players can cite other games that have implemented a form of rewarding players for the length of their subscription, and it would appear to have an effect on retention. Lifetime Accounts There are a few games that have a Lifetime Account feature, but the only one I have had any experience with has been for Star Trek Online, and so I must defer to their design as a reference. From what I’ve been able to gather, Collector’s Edition codes are now expired and are thus useless, even if you do somehow manage to find one that’s been unused. The features and rewards of the Collector’s Edition of SW:TOR could return by way of this interesting vector. PLEX for SW:TOR Player tradable game tokens were a feature I thought at first would be a good one, and I’ve seen many people recently make the case for it, but I’m of mixed mind on the matter. On the one hand, it would open up new economies and allow new avenues for player entry into Subscription Land; on the other, the current model does make some sense, though the nickle-and-diming of individual game features at Preferred level is frustrating and exhausting for some. If something like this were to be implemented, I’m rather fond of WoW’s model, which allows users to purchase a market-regulated token with gold from all characters on the account. Furthermore, said token should ignore credit caps altogether and draw from escrow from all (or selected) characters on a given account. Endgame & PVP I think this horse has been beat to death; from recent announcements and the lack of new content in recent releases, there has been much to say by many players far better versed than me, so I shall leave it to them. The new PVP map on Odessen looks fun, though. The Future Where does BioWare see SW:TOR two to five years from now? In what direction should the game go, and for how long will it continue? These are questions to be considered, and I feel there is much soul searching left to be done by the development team (if they are not already doing so). However, given the length of this post, perhaps I shall save this topic for another day. Although a quick list of lofty, pie-in-the-sky things I’d like to cover in the future: More individual class stories. Old content needs a visual revamp (compared to KotFE it looks cartoonish). Refactoring or replacing the game engine, possibly funded through Kickstarter if necessary.

Preface This post originally appeared as two different Reddit threads (Part One; Part Two). I had hoped it would gain traction there because I rather like the ability to upvote and respond to individual replies or suggestions, but alas it did not. It is thus replicated here with only minor edits; many things, including the reference of time (4.0.4 with 4.1 imminent), remain preserved for future consideration. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. Some may remember a post I wrote on the forums in August of 2012. The original idea was to convey some thoughts for improving the game. As I started to list the things that frustrated me about SW:TOR, I was reminded of a similar situation with EVE Online. What was intended to be a few suggestions quickly caught fire. Unfortunately, I was unable to keep up with it. As it is often wont to do, Real Life intervened, and that meant not just having to step away from steering the thread like a would-be Muad'Dib, but pulling back from video games entirely. It's been almost a year since I've returned to SW:TOR, and while much has changed over the last 4 years, much has sadly remained the same. With the new year, a new expansion, and the varied moods of a fractured community, I thought it prudent to reflect on where we were, compare it with where we are, and just maybe with where we could be. Preface: I enjoy this game. I subscribe. This comes not from a place of malice. I believe that we must be critical—not only of the things causing our discontent, but also of the things we love. So I've spent the last two weeks scribbling down notes and checking as much as I can so as to be thorough. This is the result. Aware of posting limitations, I will split this up into two posts—Part One will, as the title suggests, look back at the old thread and compare it with the game's current incarnation (Patch 4.0.4 at the time of this writing). Part Two will address mostly new issues and attempt to offer solutions to them, or at least spark thoughtful discussion. I will also, eventually, look into the future of the game and its potential, suggesting loftier long-term goals in a cogent manner. Addendum: If you'd like to skip ahead to Part Two, where I discuss current issues and attempt to offer solutions for most of them, click here. Part One: A Retrospective To know where we're going, we must first remember where we've been. I've done my best to make proper attributions. Unattributed text, unless otherwise stated, was written by me. I can't promise perfection, so I encourage you to read the original thread. My Original List Inquisitor head mesh clips through hood mesh under certain circumstances. 4 years later, and my Sith Pureblood (body type 1) wearing the Saber Marshal’s Robe still suffers from this issue. In fact, many hooded robes suffer from it, including Cartel Market items. Furthermore, some other armor meshes do strange things in some cutscenes; for instance, Malak’s Shadow Armor set’s metal neck brace stretches as the character moves, as if one of the vertices just happens to be stuck in space. Inquisitor and Consular hoods don't stay up with any non-circlet style headgear. Less of an issue now thanks to the introduction of new headgear and the Outfit Designer making ubiquitous access to helmets like Force Sentinel Headgear. Helmets like Kallig’s Countenance remain affected, however. Many styles of armor, especially level 50+ pieces, are too elaborate or unrealistic for the purposes of combat. Many outfits of simpler design have been introduced, along with more weird and overly elaborate designs. People like what they like, and as long as there’s room for the development of both styles, I’m happy. As an Inquisitor (or Consular), I am tired of wearing robes and dresses! With the introduction of more designs through vendors, crafting, and the Cartel Market, there’s trousers-a-plenty. Limiting armor pieces and styles to certain classes or factions often seems pointless and can be limiting to the point of frustration. This has been solved, by and large, through adaptive armor from the Cartel Market and packs, and through the Outfit Designer, though I think there are still a handful of old designs that are class-specific and thus unable to be slotted into the Outfit Designer. Even though it’s been 300 years, I’m sure there have to be some Sith Trooper armor pieces from KOTOR floating around the galaxy. My wish came true, but what we got in the Restored Triumvirate armor set doesn’t look quite as good as it did in KOTOR. It seems bulkier. Some lightsaber handle models look awfully brittle or unwieldy, and not very practical. While a matter of personal taste, there have been introduced a much wider variety of lightsaber styles. However, most newer designs, including those from the Cartel Market, are much longer than the old ones and hang awkwardly when holstered, especially many of the doublesabers. Lightsaber beam meshes can disappear when viewed head-on (i.e. from the top down). A limitation of the beam’s mesh that still persists, though it no longer disappears completely due to added glow. The textures of planets in the ship approach cutscenes are blurry, no matter how high graphics settings are set. When I came back just after Shadow of Revan, I noticed that some of the earlier planets had been updated with improved cutscenes featuring new planet meshes, stars, and ship traffic. Not all of the planets have been updated to this quality. It would also seem that going back to one of the updated planets, like Nar Shaddaa, reverts to the old approach cutscene if you’ve started KotFE. A Legacy Wallet would be awesome and of immense help (shared currencies, Legacy bank). We now have Legacy Stronghold Storage, and that’s fantastic. However, shared currencies are still not a thing, and there are now even more currencies to keep track of, and many of them take up valuable inventory space. Sending my companion out to sell all my grey junk is fine and well, but clicking through every single item at a vendor is tedious at best. You can’t select multiple items to move, trade, or sell, but they did give us a Sell Junk button. It’s not easy to determine the level of a given item’s augment slot. This has thankfully been fixed through UI and tooltip changes. Game text is sometimes illegible. Text size and color can be adjusted, but no font customization. There is still a bug where text in a chat window will randomly change font smoothing, blurring text. The /r reply system for whispers is annoying, confusing, and sometimes broken. It chimes when your name is typed in chat, but still no separate tabs or windows for chatting privately with each individual, whispers aren’t color-coded to differentiate users, and /r still seems to randomly default to whichever person happens to whisper you last, even while you’re still typing. Mailing items and currency between characters in my legacy is cumbersome and annoying. Legacy Stronghold Storage fixes the item transfer issue, and 4.0 introduced auto-complete in the Send To line of a mail message for characters in your Legacy and members of your guild. Transferring credits and other currencies is still cumbersome, however. What do I do with all of my planetary commendations now that I’m level 50? Planetary Commendations were eventually merged into Basic Commendations, which are now Common Data Crystals, and that was very much for the better. And there are now options for converting Data Crystals into credits, though more wouldn’t hurt. NPCs (Sith, Jedi, Troopers, etc.) should drop items associated with their appearance or class/faction. Usable loot from the majority of NPCs is still random, and some of the few fantastic and rare or unique armors have sadly been removed from loot tables. Vibroblades should not sound like lightsabers (except when clashing with a lightsaber). Many vibroblades and training blades still have the same movement sounds. And we still don’t have any Echani weapons. Addendum: We do now thanks to the Anarchist's Pack. Why does the entire website, including the index page and forums, need to be unavailable during a patch deployment, server-side hotfix, or rolling server restart? This still occurs. So much for reading the forums or patch notes, or doing anything else on the site during downtime. Even when active in using the GTN terminal, I still go idle if that’s all I’m doing. Still an issue. Sometimes I can sit for an hour shifting my attention between browsing the GTN and glancing at Collections. A more advanced and gear-independent character styling system. I cited DC Universe Online’s outfit styling system when writing this suggestion, and while we didn’t get something quite as robust, the Outfit Designer is a step in the right direction. An NPC and player-driven contracts system; NPC and player bounties organized and issued through the Bounty Hunter’s Guild, and acquisition/delivery contracts issued through a black market system. Truly a lofty idea to suggest, and Bounty Contract Week takes us halfway there. I didn’t think they’d ever implement it, but kudos to BioWare Austin for doing so. Still, there’s room for improvement, and plenty of ways to expand this to include players, as per my original suggestion. Where’s the API? Like Spice, the data must flow. We never got an API, and outside of its potential for mobile apps for the GTN, mail, crew skills, etc., I guess it’s somewhat pointless. Visually, the game looks a bit long in the tooth. The periodic implementation of graphical improvements would be welcome. To this, MaximusRex responded: My response, which I think remains relevant (and I see no way to improve upon besides): They’ve added little things last 4 years, but it hasn’t improved as dramatically in that span of time as has EVE Online, or even World of Warcraft. KotFE made the jump toward more realistic-looking NPCs, but old content and player characters are made stale and cartoonish by comparison (though certain NPCs, like Malgus and Satele Shan, are now much higher quality). Furthermore, what few appearance improvements that have been made have been too costly in terms of performance; overall performance has greatly worsened since 1.3. The UI needs work; feels incomplete and unintuitive. While the UI could still use some polish and (especially) performance enhancements, the recent updates to UI customization were long overdue. Companions are always staring directly at you, regardless of their position and orientation, which looks terribly unnatural. They still stare directly at you, but at least they’re not weirdly contorting themselves to do so (unless you jump or are really high). WoW may be old and tired, but it does have a couple of interesting and relevant ideas, and being able to set macros and hotkeys would be one of them. No macros, but we finally have hotkeys. At least we don’t have selfies, Instagram filters, and Twitter integration being the main features of a point release instead of actual content. (Merlin’s beard…what were Blizzard thinking?) Thus Spoke the Community The above have been addressed, perhaps most recently Legacy-wide datacrons. The above issues persist. A great suggestion that has thankfully been implemented. Recent improvements have been made to help with that, but even with a solid-state drive it’s kind of ridiculous at times. Sadly, this still happens. In fact, it almost seems worse now in some cases. Probably due to network synchronization issues, intraserver lag, or perhaps a combination of both, but it still happens. My reply at the time: The Collections feature covers most of this, though there are a few outliers. Companions being reworked has helped a lot in keeping them relevant, and with the new content provided by KotFE, they certainly play a much more important role. My follow-up comment to Cindikle’s post seems rather prescient: It appears BioWare’s response to this was to introduce Tactical Flashpoints, with which I have a love/hate relationship where GF is concerned. And, of course, companions were eventually (recently) buffed. The recent reworking and buffing of companions has quite precisely accomplished the intent here, in addition to obviating the need for gearing. Also, bobmcbob! <> It’s still easy to get stuck in terrain and between random objects. The cooldown is still ridiculous, but sadly necessary. There’s a random invisible wall on Zakuul, but no invisible barriers in troubling /stuck spots. Prices were reduced, and now that credits are both easier to earn and retain (goodbye skill costs), this is no longer such an issue. Still present, but with all of the skimpy and revealing armor available through the Cartel Market, far less of an issue. Also, no one got my Eddie Izzard reference. In some ways it’s improved, but in others (i.e. romance status) it hasn’t. This was done within the last year, and it was disclosed in the recent developer stream that more changes are coming. More improvements are always welcome. Addendum: The additional crafting window changes referenced came in 4.1. Nothing like this was done, and outside of its use for roleplaying on RP servers, I don’t see it being used for much other than spam. Strangely, this still happens at random on the approach to Belsavis, Voss, or Illum. I think most of them are like this now, but still randomly desynchronize. We have Ready Check now. While these have been fixed, and now that female Inquisitors can finally give her gifts she Loves, courting gifts remain useless due to a bug. Apparently someone forgot to reflag courting gifts from Affection to Influence. Schematics icons are now dimmed out if you already know them, but also if you can’t yet learn them or they aren’t for your profession. The tooltip should be changed to function similarly to those for Cartel Market armor, which now show green text for completed set pieces. I don’t think this has ever been implemented for schematics, but that boss loot in Flashpoints and Operations now have per-character class-specific drops (er, most of the time) is a welcome change. Addendum: And now, in most cases, each party member gets their own loot—a product of changes in 4.1. They’ve removed talent trees, and added vendor and field respec, but still no toggle to switch between two pre-selected specs. Reorganizing your hotbars after changing specs is tedious. Shame, really; puts a lot of people off from changing specs or trying out new ones without rolling a new character. 4.0 thankfully changed this, along with recoloring story missions, and it was one of those simple changes that makes you wonder why it wasn’t implemented when first suggested. Long was there talk of it being worked on, but after 4 years nothing has come of it. Knights of the Fallen Empire has given us a plethora of companions, many of which are and are not Force users. Plenty of variety now to be had, though I fear the impending option paralysis, as Einstein once put it. Bounty hunters still can’t use rifles, operatives can’t use pistols in spite of having them magically appear in cutscenes, and only one class out of all 8 can use assault cannons. As for the viability of bounty hunters using assault cannons, as I said in the OP I would suggest reading what Boba Fett does in K.W. Jeter’s Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy... Kragshot wanted to allow for a larger combination of players and companions; now moot with companion buffs in 4.0. It was understandable to have kept it that way for so long when it could be exploited to rapidly assist low-level characters in leveling. KotFE’s deployment changed everything about the leveling process, I think for the better. Unchanged. In the time since writing the original thread, I have sampled other MMOs, and there are some that handle this sort of thing quite well; specifically Star Trek Online which uses accountname@Character Name, and this has the added benefit of freeing up names for others to use. Addendum: Quality of life changes slated for 4.3 include the ability to use spaces in a name and an increase in the maximum character limit in a name to 20. I haven’t seen any new usable chairs outside of the ones on our ships, but there is at least a /chair command, although that rarely looks good. Opposing factions can see emotes and read things said with /say. Chat bubbles have been discussed but never shipped; understandable due to engine limitations and performance issues. Though some small improvements have been made, the map window could use more work. I originally suggested an interactive 3D holographic map, adjusting the level of detail based on viewable distance and whether an area has been explored. Certainly sounds more Star Wars-y. Thankfully added with the launch of 4.0. I pointed out that the Chevin event (ongoing at the time) introduced the first adaptive mount, and suggested that this feature be applied retroactively. Patch 4.0 introduced a special hotbar that pops up when using Heroic Moment. We don’t have display mannequins, but they make sense for strongholds now that we have those. The Appearance Modification Station addresses this, though it uses Cartel Coins rather than credits. I had suggested my preference for DC Universe Online’s implementation (that everything from armor and weapons to hair has a style you can learn, and then change at will). I again deferred to DCUO’s color choice methods as an example. We didn’t get that, but dyes are in. The system needs some refinement, however, and I will outline suggestions in Part Two. This issue persists, though it had once been improved for a time. As I recall, it was a bug in Patch 1.3 that was later fixed. However, stuns are a thing again thanks to level sync, and that’s one of the scant few issues I have with the feature. While I haven’t noticed the ability to monitor heals over time, ability procs now light up on the hotbar. Jtobias wonderfully and expertly presented the lofty idea of custom companions. Dat post, doe. It’s wonderfully detailed. Still a rather lofty goal, but one I’d love to one day see in the game. I encourage everyone, especially the developers, to read that fantastic post. The fleet approach cutscene was completely redone and is much better for it. Armandeus made mention of other immersion-breaking cutscene glitches; some were fixed, others persist. BioWare responded with Galactic Starfighter, which has largely remained untouched since deployment. Of all the complex requested features to implement—to say nothing of the long list of things to improve and fix—it is my opinion that GSF was a misuse of development resources better allocated to other areas of the game; an opinion further reinforced by GSF’s stagnation and disuse. Addendum: This opinion was somewhat controversial to a Reddit user, but I stand by it. It is not meant as a personal attack on those who enjoy GSF (and I am among them, however infrequently), it is simply an opinion. This still happens due to limitations of the character meshes. Vaylin doesn’t have this issue because she was designed with unique armor. It still occurs from time to time, and it’s annoying, and adjusting mouse sensitivity and speed does nothing to fix it. We now have a few solo Flashpoints for story purposes, and you can still partner with a friend if you so desire, so long as they’ve also selected solo mode. They do now, even if you haven’t yet been to some of the speeder destinations. We’re still stuck with a limit of 25. I don’t notice a difference in speed, but I love how speeders are handled on Yavin and Makeb. While I do enjoy the scenery at times, sometimes I just want to get to where I need to be. Thankfully we can now reduce or remove the time on our Quick Travel ability, so I guess that makes up for it. Alderaan is a thorn in the side for a whole host of reasons, but the taxi situation hasn’t improved. I commented on the absurdly static feel of most of the planets and my desire for day/night cycles, detailing how it could be different on a planet-by-planet basis. Sadly, save a refactoring of the game engine code (or a new engine altogether), I don’t see this happening (anytime soon, at least) for two reasons: 1. The developers have said that day/night cycles would interfere with intended lighting in cutscenes (which does change to fit the camera angle in some cases, which makes this reason against so baffling, but whatever). 2. Weather impacts performance (which is why you can’t quite see the rain on Dromund Kaas anymore), and the engine struggles as it is. Not only did they add more platforming puzzles for finding datacrons, they added achievements for exploration. I still think the game controls and potential lag aren’t conducive to platforming, but it is what it is. While the Codex is not shared between characters in a Legacy, the achievements system, which is Legacy-based, does a lot of this. There have been a few small things, but we could do with a lot more. Legacy in general needs a review and an update, but that’s for a follow-up post. An interesting idea I don’t think has yet been explored. Something to consider when addressing the stagnation of the Legacy system. It almost never happens anymore, but when it does (like in the Warrior story on Korriban), it’s awkward. The expansions have given us this, perhaps none more so than KotFE. They’ve delivered more story and a lot of those little things. It’s been at times good and at others mediocre. There’s room for improvement, and I will delve into my thoughts on that subject in a follow-up post. I think they tried to address this desire with Conquests, but is rather limited in scope and only rewards larger guilds. My response was a suggestion to include planets dedicated to being open PVP warzones for the purpose of story that would shift the balance of power between opposing factions, similar to the star systems in EVE Online’s faction warfare mechanic. While a cool idea, especially for guilds, it’s never been addressed. Quest rewards have undergone a review, and while equipment rewards tend to remain meager for earlier quests, direct credit and experience rewards from quests (not mailed credits) scale with level thanks to Level Sync; Heroic rewards scale in brackets. With the release of Knights of the Fallen Empire, this seems to be addressed, or is at least in the process of being addressed. As we advance closer to the last chapter of the season, we’ll see if it actually plays out. Unfortunately, the story for KotFE have very few differences per class, if any. It remains a lofty goal due to cost, but it would be really cool to see someday, not to mention it would allow at least one more class to utilize assault cannons. And Rogue One could fuel desire for an Imperial Agent-like spy thriller on the Republic side. There have been small changes to assist with this, but far too few. Consult a usability expert, or at least give designers this article to utilize as a reference. While it is focused on Web usability, most of these guidelines can apply to UI development. An interesting idea with potential, and likely Forgettableone was just longing for the various features of Star Wars Galaxies. There haven’t been any new professions introduced, however. The feature remains both a cool idea and sadly absent. Sadly still an issue, the most notable example being the Dromund Kaas Heroic Possessed Hunter, for which many people simply refuse to group out of common courtesy. There are several options now available in the form of Cartel Market armor shells, and dyes add a variety of vibrant color combinations. Loot rolls have been improved, and some bosses in Flashpoints and Operations now drop loot specific to each character (and at least gives correct loot for a given class, though not always the advanced class of a given character). Some loot still drops the old fashioned way, and my suggestion at the time of adapting DCUO’s limitations on Need rolls remains a viable alternative, though I’d love to see others. Addendum: Since 4.1, all players within a group get their own loot in most cases. There had been talk of benefits and effects for staying neutral, and even a Legacy unlock reward on the PTS if I recall, but nothing’s ever come of it. This is still the default. However… It now does exactly this, which makes things much easier. Still, sorting by level by default would be better. An interesting idea, but one that hasn’t been implemented. I’m not sure if it’s something that should be changed, so I instead invite the community to weigh in. That said, you don't quite lose Influence (née Affection) anymore, but choices still have other repercussions in KotFE. While it could be more robust, there is now such a tab. I’m assuming Neloth meant for the GTN search, which does work, though with a shift + left-click instead of a popup menu from right-clicking an item. If I recall, things like this have been discussed, but that’s as far as it’s gone. I reference this in Part Two below. I wanted this as well, and our request was fulfilled. Took me forever to get it, but it’s mine. Now for Tulak Hord’s armor set… I think Strongholds have filled this need in a sense. We now have access to the Cathar and Togruta, but there are many more I’m sure we’d all like to see; the Star Wars universe is quite diverse, after all. This hasn’t changed, and I think it’s a limitation of the asset templates in addition to the game engine itself. As Pairaka said, there are armor pieces with fabric that flows semi-freely, but as is known there are moments when it just bugs out, and this is likely why it isn’t used more often. I would like to see this rectified, however, but it remains a pipe dream. We're at Now, Now... There are many more ideas in that old thread. It’s an interesting treasure trove of information, a little slice of time in static text. It’s amazing that players still dig it up to post in it. This is where we’ve been. Things have changed and other things are the same. Now that we’ve looked back, where do we go from here?

I just wanted to take a moment to hop in and, again, express my thanks. You guys are great. Please keep the discussion going. As has been suggested, I am compiling a list of all your submissions to put in the original post. There's 31+ pages of content, though, so please be patient while I work that out. In the mean time, keep chugging away, and don't be afraid to offer differing viewpoints or discuss some of the ideas already offered; you never know, you might have a unique take on the subject! The thread continues to make the rounds on the SWTOR blogs and fansites, and was even mentioned in a couple of the podcasts. I just finished listening to last night's Cantina Band podcast, in which they discussed the thread for at least a few minutes, so thanks to At0mXii, TheDurus, MaxArcarius, and Mr. Brushwood for commenting. <>

Thank you for providing a differing point of view. I can reasonably understand your position on these matters. Not everyone is meant to agree on everything all the time, and I believe that there is much to learn from other opinions. Now, in response to your criticisms, I would like to proffer a few points to consider (consideration is all I ask, feel free to disagree with them) regarding my suggestion (and that's all it is; I do open the concept to discussion and feedback) for gear style changes: Point the first: the majority in the community for this game, and indeed of many other MMOs, greatly desire the ability to customize their appearances as they see fit. It's rather dull and harder to discern anyone if everyone has the same body type, robe, and color of lightsaber. To that end, they are even willing to back up that desire with hard currency. Secondly, the developers have stated they wish to include greater character customization options, and have already made many changes to do so, with plans to continue said direction in content production as it relates to this matter. Finally, in any decently written story or developed universe (or, indeed, the real one), no character or person should be limited to a certain appearance befitting their mode of occupation or ability. To elucidate: Luke wasn't always dressed in white, or in the black robes, or had on his flight suit, but rather had an assortment of clothing styles afforded him by the setting he was in, what he was used to wearing, simply desired to wear, or the utility requirements of his given tasks. While it is true that all construction workers (are supposed to) wear hardhats, not all of them wear jeans and flannel. So, too, should it be that all Force users ought have a weapon befitting their class, but not always wear robes or armor. Operatives, on the other hand, are a trickier matter in that the very nature of their occupation (the spy business), and indeed their survivability, requires that they were many hats. They're chameleons and so must appear in whatever garb that makes sense for their given assignment. This isn't a vendetta or anything, I'm not out to ruin any specific person's game, so please don't take it personally. As a point of order, you do illustrate my point in the "papercut" idea that the chat system as it's been is something you've grown accustomed to. To clarify and assuage your concerns, however, I would assume that any changes to the ability to further alter chat colors would be entirely optional. As such, if someone dislikes or fears the change, should it come, it is my suggestion that changing it back ought to be a simple matter. Now, as I've been laid up with some kind of stomach bug the last couple of days, I haven't been able to keep up with the thread. I do apologize. I will, however, be going back over the last couple of pages to read the posts tomorrow. Furthermore, I did catch someone's suggestion about compiling all the suggestions and listing all the papercuts in the original post. I think that's a good idea and would, perhaps, help a lot of people keep up with the thread without having to read all 22(?) pages of it, so I will be working on that over the next few days. Thank you to everyone that's submitted their ideas and suggestions, even those with differing points of view. Please, keep them coming.

I don't think that the staff is offended, per se, but a certain level of uncivil discord invites more aggression, more incivility; and that then invites even more, which will simply cause a given thread to descend into such heated fervor that you've got players being purely hateful towards other players, and others who simply want to troll everyone else because they enjoy that kind of thing. Quite frankly, that solves no one's issues at all, and only works to further deter people from coming to the forums for anything, least of all in an effort to help the developers make the game a better one. Furthermore, I don't think all opinions are dismissed outright due to any controversy or drama surrounding the heated exchange regarding their post, but if someone were critiquing your work--or the work of the company by whom you are employed--which would you rather read first: a thread filled with discontent players whose efforts are spent almost entirely on negative attacks and infighting with very little constructive input, or a thread of discontent players that take the time to organize their thoughts, come together, and present and discuss real solutions to the problems everyone has? As I said in the OP, I don't think that the general lag behind other games, graphics-wise, is to SWTOR's detriment, because most of the focus is on story. It's certainly a better looking game than WoW, for example. However, I put it at the end of my Lofty Ideas list as sort of a suggestion for future development roadmaps, so as to prevent a certain visual staleness to take over the game. I cite EVE Online as my primary example, and the changes they've implemented over the years to the graphical capabilities of their game. All of those changes they've made haven't been purely to make things look pretty, although it certainly does. But it also increases the capabilities of their art department to realize grander and more complex visual styles to immerse the players within the world. And the underlying mechanics are also changed, performance improvements are introduced, reliance upon the CPU has reduced, production pipelines are streamlined, and overall production times as it relates to art or other content creation are reduced. Ultimately, those things are much more important for the game's longevity than its appearance, but the work can afford you having the cake and eating it too (in EVE's case). No, it's quite all right. The more people talk about it, the better. However, I would point out that I did mention it in the original post, under the nicely formatted sub-header of Legacy.

While I appreciate your enthusiasm, everything you've listed has already been listed before. If you have any insights into methods of implementation, or comments on the discussions already taking place, please feel free to do so. I greatly encourage it. However, I can't help feeling as though the intent of your post is somewhat uncivil (if it is not so, please forgive me). I understand your frustrations, which is why I created this thread in the first place, but civility is key in getting our grievances addressed, as is the unity of the player base. I will reiterate my appreciation for the tone of conversation in this thread remaining constructive and, above all, respectful. Furthermore, I've also noticed that you've recreated one of your threads almost verbatim, only using a title similar to this one. I personally don't care if the theme of this thread is copied elsewhere, but it does seem a disingenuous attempt at drumming up views based on a preexisting thread with a similar title. The thread you already have going has quite a bit of momentum, and I enjoy reading it; why jeopardize that progress by losing control of your anger?

I don't think I'm really good enough to be a developer, to be honest. I'm actually a technology consultant that's trying to play at being a writer someday. As for playing Devil's Advocate, I find that, in many (but not all) cases, the truth of a matter lies somewhere in the middle. I'm obsessed with being able to view all sides of a subject, to know it inside and out, so that I can formulate a more accurate hypothesis or method of (inter)action. This method of thought is rooted in the way I was raised and the way my mind developed as a child. It has allowed me to become naturally adept at absorbing information through reading (of which I do a great deal, on a wide range of subjects), as well as bestowing a certain affinity for using and understanding technological systems. I also find that it applies fittingly with my aspirations as a writer, in which I try to ground as much content in realism as I can, given the context of the story. Perhaps we may be dealing with hyperdrives and lightsabers, and other technologies that seem currently impossible or beyond our reach, but they have some basic rules, and the behavior of those elements--as well as other things like xenophobia, politics, sociology, psychology, et. al.--within the confines of said sandbox should adhere to those rules and interact in a realistic fashion.

From the OP First, I just want to thank everyone for making such great suggestions and even better posts. And thanks for being so civil, it's very refreshing to see. Secondly, it appears the thread has made it to the Oceanic Gamer blog yesterday, which was then linked to on SWTOR Life and a Greek fan site. I really wasn't expecting to get this much attention to the thread so quickly. It's rather heartening to know that I've struck a chord within the community. But be fully aware, our job as a community is far from finished. Finally, my morning roundup will (hopefully) be a bit shorter for a couple of reasons. For one thing, a few ideas and complaints have been repeated, but no new ideas put forth in most cases, so I won't address them again. But do know that I have read them and do appreciate the time and effort you've put into posting them. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, I want to keep the length of my posts a little shorter so people are prone to read them more. This has nothing to do with vanity or ego, but rather that I try to respond to things that I think might need emphasis, or that I might have an idea to expand upon that I'd like to hear people discuss and pick apart some. That said, there is a lot of great content from other users that I've quoted or referenced so far, and it would be a shame to gloss over some of that discussion. Wow, thank you so much for your response, Mr. Musco. It is very pleasing to know that you guys are so very interested in this project. Thanks for letting us know you're looking into it, and please relay to the others that they are welcome to join in the discussion. I would be very interested in reading a developer's take on the discussion, or anyone else from the Community team. Very nice suggestions, thank you. A lot of different people, from a lot of different backgrounds and lifestyles, play this game, and I do feel that they ought to have content that represents them, too. And as much as I've enjoyed corrupting Ashara Zavros (I do want to see more story there, too; I want her to embrace the darker things with a little more gusto), having other romance options would be very welcome, indeed. It does feel a bit like we've ended our stories, but with our being in the "Interlude" phase, I'm sure there's more to come. I'd like to see little vignettes of story in between the large acts that will be released with major content patches, too. Some planets dedicated to being PVP warzones for the purposes of story, that would shift the balance of power between the opposing factions, would be very interesting, indeed. Again, this is something that EVE Online has pioneered, both in their start with null-security non-empire space in the outer regions, and perhaps more recently with entire regions of empire space that are up for grabs, and which empire wins a given system is determined by the players that ally with said empires. There could be an interesting dynamic here, but I think it requires a great deal more consideration and brainstorming. In my original post, I go into the whole idea of making all armor styles faction- and class-agnostic, so I won't reiterate that an any more detail. However, your idea for logo branding would be very nice, indeed. And, of course, being able to choose to have a logo or not. In EVE, CCP regularly accepts submissions for corporation (i.e. guild) logo art for corp. tickers and whatnot, and are about to implement the ability to brand their ships with these logos. I think it could be very interesting to similarly award guilds unique logos for these armor style types. I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one very much bugged by that. I understand the metrics of scale for rewards at certain levels, but as you say, the dialog just doesn't match up. This is a neat idea and would add a lot more depth and connection to the companion storylines. Furthermore, I'd like to see more companions, and not just HK-51 (which I'm excited for), but one of the other ideas for a choose-your-own-companion type of thing (I believe I quoted the person and discussed it in my last post). Companions need more love, and not just in the story sense. These are kind of tricky, though I would kinda like having them, at least for the purposes of story. On the subject of Troopers and Smugglers on the Empire side, and Agents and Bounty Hunters on the Republic side, you're risking a repetition of class mechanics that are already present (although your suggestion is not an unbalanced one, save for the lack of Force users, which actually kinda makes sense when you think about it). As for droid races, this would be really cool, but it would require a revamping of a slew of dialog branches, as well as eliminating some romance options (although--why the hell not, really; robot love is love, too). The biggest issue, to ground this idea in some realism and the context of the Star Wars setting, is that I'm sure a lot of groups and governments would take umbrage with the idea of a sentient droid with any semblance of freedom, excepting rare circumstances (IG-88, for example). This isn't a small issue, no, but it's a damned important one, and I thank you for bringing it up. Color blindness is a lot more common than many people think, and I feel it's an issue that ought to be addressed very quickly. I've said it once and I'll say it again--I really believe that Bioware should hire some usability experts to tinker with the UI and user input/interaction; it would be to everyone's benefit. I agree, companions really need some love. While I personally feel that Inquisitors kinda got the short end of the stick in the romance department (although, the personality of my particular character really fits with the idea of corrupting and seducing the goodie-goodie), I would like to see Ashara try to get closer in more private areas, to act playfully, and certainly to send me more letters (I really enjoyed that!). I have heard that they are looking into the dominance and repetition of certain crew skill missions, but I agree, I'd like to see some changes implemented there. But...I like big butts...and I cannot lie... In all seriousness, though, I do think there need to be a number of tweaks in the art department, as well as a periodic implementation of graphical improvements--not just art/content-wise, but also in terms of graphical capabilities. You have a lot of other interesting suggestions, too. Thanks for submitting them. One thing that really drew my attention was the mention of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, although I'm probably thinking of the much older game than the one you're suggesting. I had such a blast playing with my friends on a LAN back in the day. I'd quote snowyv, but I want to save some space. Instead, I'd like to thank you for the post and the suggestions. You make a great number of very salient points and express them eloquently. I especially agree with the need for tweaking time/credit sinks, as well as a need for another player/commerce hub. I think Nar Shaddaa is intended, in some fashion, for the latter purpose, but it takes quite a long time to load the whole planet. And speaking of Nar Shaddaa, I know the game is T for Teen, but it really ought to be grittier, dirtier, and definitely trashy/sleazy. We're talking about an ecumenopolis that makes no attempt to hide the fact that it is paradise for the underworld. This is a really interesting idea. I would like to hear the thoughts of others on the subject. Seems like something with lots of potential. First: LOL! I seriously laughed at that. Secondly, I would also like to see this. I think a lot of us are infuriated by this, as well as the pure lack of sportsmanship, etiquette, and camaraderie within the player base present at these particular spots. I fully agree that all peoples of the game's community ought to be represented in the game, with content and styles of play befitting their personage. There definitely needs to be some tweaking here. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but too many people in PUGs just aren't very well mannered, or have no sense of etiquette or honor. That said, DCUO did implement a feature that limits the Need function on loot rolls to characters with classes for whom the item was intended. I think a similar addition to SWTOR would be greatly beneficial. It's something I thought was already present in the game when I first started playing, only to find out close to level 35 that it wasn't. I've heard rumblings that going Grey is something that's being tinkered with. In fact, I believe there was a Legacy unlock on the PTS for going Grey; I saw it in a screenshot somewhere, just wish I could remember where. Neloth mentions the GTN, crew skills, and crafting. I fully agree, and have mentioned before (but it bears mentioning again) that they definitely need some love. Nezumi brings up the lack of non-combat options for level 50 play, which I would like to see further elucidated and discussed, and also mentions some interesting Legacy additions. ThePedigree has offered the suggestions of new hair models that are longer, and also mentions Ashara Zavros' lack of...skin. While I probably wouldn't put her in the Slave Girl outfit, the grey bodysuit has got to go, especially if I want her to at least show some midriff. YES! I rather like that style, and I think it would fit my Sith Inquisitor character. DO WANT. This really bothers me, too, and really messed with my immersion when I started my Agent. That Troopers are the only ones able to use minigun-style blaster cannons is a crime, too. ArchangelLBC suggests a Legacy-wide friends list, and I think this is a fantastic idea. Granted, most of the friends I've made playing the game have mostly Empire characters, but there are a few that have Republic ones. Costello wants more alien species options for character creation, and I couldn't agree more. And we know many are present in the game already, and have been rigged for various combat styles, so implementing them shouldn't be too hard, save the spoken dialog that will likely need to be recorded or reworked from existing files (of which the latter is kinda repetitive...). I've seen Legacy ships mentioned a number of times and I think this is a really cool idea. Legacy is the crown jewel of this game and would greatly benefit from a lot more content in this vein. Clothing movement bothers me, too. It feels far too artificial and static. CCP, when working on the first phase of their ambulation project (i.e. Captain's Quarters and the Character Creator), wanted very much for clothing to be as realistic as possible, and to hang on and move with a character in a proper way. They actually hired a fashion designer not only to design some of the outfits for the characters, but also to provide valuable input on how clothing interacts with the human body in stillness and in movement. Cleet_Xia mentions a handful of the many errors in the maps and terrain of various planets, and I think it's something worth a little attention. AstralProjection lists a number of interesting ideas, a few of which I will expound upon. For starters, companion naming options are an interesting idea, but I worry that it would require too much work on the back end, as well as the recording of a lot of new dialog, in order to implement. Perhaps we would be better served by the aforementioned choose-your-own-companion. Ship customization options--both external and internal--is also a fantastic idea. Ship mods changing one's ship's appearance ever so slightly is a cool thought. I really want to know what everyone else has to say about the idea of modifying the internals of your ship. Could be an interesting entry for the use of Cartel Coins, certainly. The need for more dialog options after reaching maximum companion affection is also a good idea. As stated, companions need more lovin'. Capturing pets? A Pokemon-style minigame? Interesting thought. Not quite my cuppa, but I know many people would really dig that. Well, this post went on a bit longer than I had intended to, but there was a lot of ground to cover. Thanks, everyone, for submitting your papercuts, ideas, and solutions, and do keep them coming. As I said, I take the time to read them all and try to comment on all the ones I can without being too redundant, so know that you all have my full attention at the very least (and now Bioware's, too, it seems).

A little update on the Miraluka not being able to wear helmets or other head gear not being shown due to interference with their shrouds/visors--Amber Green, of the SWTOR Community Team, recently made a post discussing this: I'd like to further note that, from purely a realism and story perspective, that blind people often compensate by the reliance on hearing and physical touch, which would be impeded by a mask/helmet and armor, and so would increase the Miralukan dependence upon the force to 'see.'

From the OP Just a warning here: We've got a long post incoming here with a lot of responses to interesting ideas, as well as a few new ideas of my own. I know it's a lot of text, but I would appreciate it if you took the time to read it, especially before posting. I do try to take the time to respond to all the responses since my last posting. Some of you are posting the same things that have already been outlined, either in the original post or in subsequent replies, which is why I ask. Yes, I believe Gwena mentioned this in a prior post, too. The guns being out/saber glitches definitely break immersion in a cutscene. I think there could be some work done to help with that. However, there are a few things to consider: We're talking about a lot of data coming off (usually) very slow hard drives, and boy does it ever pull a lot of data (and almost constantly). A couple things that can be done to help mitigate the issue right now is to check the age of the drive and upgrade to a newer one, or buy a small, relatively inexpensive SSD (they're about $0.90US/GB right now on Newegg). Of course, not everyone is in a position--financial or knowledge-wise--to do so. Clearing off some space, increasing RAM, or moving the game to a second empty hard drive are other solutions. The HeroEngine was originally developed by Simutronics for creating MMOs with lots of story-driven content using a simple-but-powerful scripting language. While SWTOR does, indeed, have a lot of story-driven content, I think it also pushes the boundaries of what the underlying game engine was created to do (Elder Scrolls Online will benefit from a lot of Bioware Austin's work, it seems). It's still only a single-threaded game, though they (Simutronics/Idea Fabrik) have said they plan to update this. It's time consuming to do so, however, as multi-threading an application to take advantage of more than one core is a monumental task requiring a very different mindset in the programming sense. Bear in mind that I'm not apologizing for the loading issue, but rather broadening understanding of the reasons why it does what it does. And the SSD suggestion is just one method of an end-user workaround, but one I feel players shouldn't be forced into. This is something that's been in EVE Online since the beginning. I think it would especially be helpful on RP servers. I haven't played a Warrior yet, and my Agent is only level 14 right now, so I was not aware of this. Thanks for bringing it up. Yeah, I'm not sure what the deal is with that. It started popping up around 1.3. Wow, I hadn't noticed this before, but I'll be damned if that isn't annoying as all hell. I was wondering why the shuttle was always near death by the end of it, even with all the best in ship mods. Good looking out! Most elevators usually are synchronized in this manner, but there are many that aren't--like on Balmorra, for instance. I'm not sure what this is, but I'm assuming this is related to the Group Finder tool and checking the gear of other flashpoint/operation participants, yes? I had assumed it was because she was Jedi, albeit an arrogant and impatient one that's teetering on the swing down the spiral, and my being Dark Side. It was annoying for me, but made sense. I'm on a fairly clean computer with a fiber optic internet connection, and I'm not running any P2P software (other than Skype), so I almost never have a problem with disconnects. However, I have noticed an increase in server-side lag and synchronization issues since the introduction of 1.3 (the aforementioned grinding halt of the mail system). One possible cause could be the condensing of player population to a smaller number of servers which, for whatever reason (buggy code causing memory leaks, inadequate horsepower, intranet load balancing issues), is causing this to happen. This is an excellent idea, one I'm surprising isn't already featured. It shouldn't be too difficult to implement, either, as it's just an extra line of text in a schematic blueprint with a special flag to check against a character's list of learned schematics. I do know that they now lighten or darken on the inventory icon based on whether or not it is already known, but this is both bugged at times as well as easy to confuse with a schematic you're unable to learn due to prerequisites. Dynamic loot lists based on party composition is a brilliant idea. Thanks for suggesting it. This is definitely something a lot of people have been clamoring for, and I, myself, have been wanting of late. My main character is a Madness (DPS) Sorcerer, which is so much fun to play, and although I've got some talent points in Healing, there are times when my friends and I simply don't have access to a healer. I would like to fill that role, and I wouldn't mind paying, but not at a gradually increasing cost. The idea of making this free through a Legacy unlock is an excellent idea. I have no idea how this completely slipped my mind, but thank you so much for bringing this up. It is, indeed, quite annoying. I've noticed this recently, too. Damned annoying when you're trying to raise affection levels. This is something that's being worked on. That said, I know for a fact it can be done because many armor sets use the same model, and on the Republic side, the hoods are all up, while on the Empire side, most hoods are down (like the [Warlord's Chestguard], which uses the same model as many Jedi robes). Sorry to edit that a bit, but you're absolutely right. There ought to be more variety in companions and companion abilities, including in adding more Force using healing companions, as mentioned above. An excellent point, and something that's been bothering me a bit, too. Armstech crafters really seem to get the short end of the crafting stick, as it were. My Agent is an Armstech, and I have considered switching him to Armormech simply because of the lack of utility in the aforementioned crew skill. With the introduction of the custom weapons in 1.2, much of the usefulness of Armstech was crushed, and although the inclusion of augment and augment kit crafting helps mitigate this a little, the results of the change are still resonating. As the majority of players seem to be DPS specialized--I believe because there are a large number of PVP players who, as ACMessiah suggests, find the lack of dual spec a punishment for their desire to utilize both proffered game mechanics--having a few healing companions on hand during a flashpoint or heroic would help speed things along in the forming of groups. Playing Devil's advocate, I can understand why this is in play, given that it can be exploited to rapidly assist other players in gaining levels, but I agree that it's definitely a hindrance more than a helpful feature. This is definitely an excellent example of something that initially stings a little, but then we simply work around or overlook for the sake of it being so small. Many have gotten used to it, but I agree, it ought to be a little easier to discern. Usability is key! That's why so many non-technology minded folks over the years have found using a Mac easier than a PC with DOS or Windows--Jobs understood this and was very obsessed with it (hence why the default mouse for the Mac came with only a single button, and eventually no buttons in the Magic Mouse). If Bioware needs to hire some usability and UI experts, I suggest they do so. Again, you nailed another instance of "aw, that sucks...ah, well, I'll just play the game." It's so glaringly obvious from a usability perspective, but we grow used to it so quickly. You're really good at this, man. Absolutely a great idea. I've not yet played a Trooper, so I defer to those of you that do. Thanks for contributing this. I haven't noticed this, myself, although I'm not using the Default UI layout, but rather the Classic one. There has been some prior discussion in the thread of adapting things from the Bartender addon for WoW, as well as more in-depth UI customization features, and I think that would fix this issue nicely. I'm not certain, but I think they're working more on usable chairs, and I do believe I've actually heard chat bubbles mentioned in a recent talk with a developer. That opposing factions can't see custom emotes, as well as the inability to directly communicate with them or add a member to your friends list, seems a bit odd. I have a couple friends that have Republic characters, and it would be nice to see them come online so I can strike up a conversation. Indeed, I love exploration in a game. While I have not played Star Wars: Galaxies, I am told that it was quite vast and there was much to explore; that it felt big and alive. In EVE, they really capture the awesomeness of space; sometimes you don't notice it when you're just warping around, but when you're stuck to sub-light speeds and moving around an asteroid belt, it just feels as terrifyingly immense as it ought to. Absolutely. I think someone else above mentioned something about expanding the detail of maps, as well as their interactivity. Having a 3D holographic map to interact with and move around in would be of immense help. To add the need for further exploration, as well as to add contextual realism to its function, it could, for instance, allow for map detail only if the area has been explored, and increase detail for the immediately viewable area. This is another thing I seem to have overlooked that does, now, seem quite confusing. Good looking out! Absolutely fantastic ideas, guys. You make a lot of great points and supplement them with great ideas. Excellently formatted, too. Thanks for contributing. On the subject of mounts, with the Scavenger Hunt event going on right now, I believe they've introduced the concept of adaptive mounts that match your skill level. They should definitely apply this sort of thing retroactively. As for a display mannequin, I'm not usually one for that sort of thing, but it could be cool. This is something that I believe will soon be implemented along with the option to color match your companions' gear to their chest piece. It does seem like a no-brainer for character appearance, does it not? WoW handled it with a barber's chair, and that's okay, but I prefer DCUO's implementation--everything in the game has a style, even hair, that can be changed at will providing you have the style saved in your list. This has been mentioned a few times in the thread, and I agree. Again, though, I defer to the methods used in DCUO as a great example, which I outline in great detail in the original post at the beginning of the thread. To summarize, however, players in DC Universe Online pick any 3 colors they want as their base palette for armor styles, as well as colors for skin tone, eye color, hair color, and makeup. These colors can be changed at any time after character creation, too. I have noticed this, also, when attempting to play on an older laptop. Making the transitions simpler and removing the fancy effects for low-end machines would, indeed, be an excellent fix. You know, I thought stuns were happening a great deal more often than before 1.3. It's been bloody annoying, but I don't know if it's a bug, or something intended by developers. Definitely worth looking into! Audio cues are really useful. Paramount, even. I'm surprised by how much the UI is overly cluttered, sometimes. When you're in combat, you have a great deal of visual information to which you must pay attention, and the visual cues are often very detailed and small. The combination of more audio cues and much simpler, larger visual cues that don't detract from combat concentration would be most helpful here. As I mention above, I really think Bioware ought to hire some usability experts to help improve UI and interactive experiences. Both of these are solid ideas. I'd like to see them both implemented, although I think the latter would be the easiest (and quickest) to get going. What an amazingly lucid, well thought out idea. I absolutely want to see this! And the method of implementation you describe feels quite a bit Mass Effect, or Fallout 3's VATS. Very awesome stuff, man. More of those things that really bothered me in the beginning, but I just started overlooking. Especially when I started hitting the spacebar to skip through some of those particular cutscenes. On the subject of the fleet, though, I do also notice a lot of flickering of textures from z-fighting polygons, too. In fact, z-fighting happens a lot in this game, especially in terrain, and just feels a bit like sloppy modeling/map building. Absolutely, and it shouldn't be too terribly hard to implement. I know that addons like Altoholic use the user data cached locally by the WoW client to pull that information. I'm not certain of the details of SWTOR's caching system, or how much data is cached locally, but if there's any of this data floating around, it shouldn't be hard to implement. Implementing this seems a bit complex, given the mechanics of the space combat system that's currently available. The developers have hinted at "awesome things" coming for space combat that they're "excited about." Unfortunately, unless they've been working on an entirely new game mechanic to implement such a combat style, it's probably a ways off. That said, if you love the idea of PVP space combat and want to play now, I suggest trying EVE Online. It's hard to beat the adrenaline rush you get when you barely survive a gate camp, as loss in the game in terms of currency and property (and even skills, if you don't keep your clone up to date) is a very real thing. I'd thought of that initially, too, but forgot about it. I'd like to see this. Again, I defer to my previous statement to Kendiara, as well as a more detailed overview in my original post, regarding DCUO's implementation of these things. This is something that happens a lot in the game. I can understand why; after the fiftieth NPC you've placed and set up in an area during a 9 hour shift, you'd get tired of futzing around with appearances, too. But it could definitely use some time. Thanks for pointing these out. The balding of NPCs is especially annoying and just makes me go :wtc:. I get that the Miralukans (whom I love from a story perspective (I'm a big Zatoichi fan)) need the protective/ornamental eye coverings to blend in and interact with sighted folk, but that they're unable to wear full helmets is downright puzzling. I noticed this when I first started playing the game, as well. Eventually, I found the sensitivity controls for mouse movement in the game settings, but as you say, it still occurs from time to time. I haven't been in many Warzones as I don't PVP in SWTOR that much (sadly, a particularly vocal group of people who PVP are unfriendly, unhelpful, ill-mannered a-holes), so this has escaped my attention. Thanks for contributing this. As you said, there are a few suggestions you list that I, myself, have listed in the OP, but there are a few that haven't been iterated as yet. Good ideas all around. Again, one of those things that sometimes I find annoying, but just deal with (mostly because there sometimes seems to be too many credit sinks in the game and I'm always friggin' broke, lol). You present some very interesting solutions to this dilemma, I must say. I particularly like your idea for an "Aura of Calmness" or "Field of Fear" that's tied to character and Legacy levels. It would be really sweet to roll on by a group of low level mobs and watch them run away in terror. Same here. And it also ties in with some of the concepts I outlined in the OP (remove class/faction restrictions, DCUO armor styling system, etc.). Simple armor styles and being able to pick them up off mobs was present in KOTOR, including the simple black wraps/robes. I mean, for cryin' out loud, Luke effing Skywalker wore black robes, and he was a Jedi! The developers have stated that this is something they're working on; and I believe it's slated for the next big content patch, but don't quote me on that. Indeed, it would be most beneficial, and it's something I outlined in my original post. Absolutely a great idea. As I said not too far above in this post, there are an awful lot of credit sinks in this game, and that may be a good idea to keep in check the people with all their character slots filled with maxed out characters. But for those of us who don't have that much time to play, or play at a pace slower than others as we savor our stories, it's a big annoyance. I haven't played Witcher 2, so I'm not sure how it works in that game, but something very similar sounding exists in DC Universe Online, and I quite like their implementation. Fantastic suggestion! Kind of insignificant on its face, but would be a welcome quality of life fix, for sure. Yes, yes, YES! A million times, yes. It doesn't need to be an outrageous number, but definitely more than 25. Mentioned a few times before, and I go into it in this post already, but I completely agree it needs to be tweaked some more. Thanks for the added input. In most cases, I can definitely agree with you here. Although, there are some cases in which, for the purpose of the given context (story-wise) that it's unfeasible. For example, there's Taris--on the Empire side... I have seen this (speeder acceleration) in game already on Hoth, and it would be nice to see it elsewhere. In fact, not all speeders need be so low to the ground; I'd like to see some fly over the tops of buildings and whatnot. After all, the closest distance between two points--barring the creation of an Einstein-Rosen bridge--is a straight line. I would like to see a slight speed increase, too, however. Completely and totally agreed, my friend. There is a certain lack of ambience in the game. Most worlds feel terribly, rigidly static. Weather would be a nice feature, as would day/night cycles, but I think they ought not to be tied to any particular real-world timers or conditions. To clarify: The galaxy, and indeed the universe, is vast, and not all planets are going through their summer or day phase at exactly the same time. Some planets should be experiencing night; others, day; some, winter; others, fall; and so on. In the case of Taris, given the time differential in the storyline, day/night cycles could be opposite for either faction, and depending on how long it is between the two storylines, the seasonal cycles could be different as well. I both agree and disagree, at least a little, with the idea of more platforming rewards. The datacron hunt has been one of the most infuriating aspects about the game, as the game controls just don't lend themselves very well to platform-based play. I mean, I love platform games, but Jak and Daxter this ain't! That said, through much head-desk-ing, I have somehow got it down the majority of the time, but it is no less annoying. As for the sharing of Datacron stat bonuses across Legacy characters, it's an interesting idea, and would certainly help mitigate the frustration some of us feel when hunting them down. You also opened up a thought I just now had to the possibility of merging Codex entries across Legacy characters. This would add incentive for players to create characters for both factions, and also to try out all the classes. This is why forums are awesome, especially when people are civil.

Before I address the roundup of postings since my last reading of the thread, I wanted to address something. I started writing it in the middle of said roundup post, but it got me on a train of thought that I could not deter from, and I think it very relevant to the overall discussion. I'd also like to note that I've actually been meaning to write the original post for the last couple of months, but have just been too busy to do so. Thanks. Absolutely, I want to see this game continue. SWTOR has immense potential, and every time I hear a developer talk about the game, a 5- to 10-year plan is almost always mentioned in passing. I want it to realize that potential. And I know it's possible, because EVE has been around for almost a decade now; they have a net gain of subscribers every year, and they aren't slowing down. What it comes down to, though, is that EA needs to have faith in the concept and let Bioware do their job independently of their ominous cloud. If you, like me, read the minutes from the recent earnings call, it was almost as if they regarded SWTOR as a cancer. The push for Free to Play will ultimately be a good thing, but let's call a spade a spade, here--this is entirely a profit-driven motive (i.e. greed) on the part of Electronic Arts, a company beholden to its shareholders (whose only interest, ironically enough, is to make money, regardless of the methods chosen to do so). True, too, Bioware also has a lot of work to do, and it needs to stay energized and focused on realizing their vision while (reasonably) catering to and (definitely) answering the needs of their players. I keep drawing parallels and comparisons to CCP, the makers of EVE Online, for a reason: CCP developers are active in the community, be it in very regular blog posts, YouTube videos, or on the forums (yes, the developers themselves even make posts on the forums and respond to criticisms). Furthermore, we as players cannot sit in mild discontent, or in quiet apathy, and must instead hold Bioware to a higher standard. CCP, for its mistakes and faults, is ahead of the game with the power of its community, and liken them to shareholders in the game's promise (solidified through the CSM). I like that idea. And you know what? It's true. We are shareholders, and we do have a voice--both in the written word and through our dollars. It need not descend into declarations or accusations of fanboyism, or ichor-laced postings of pure hate and vitriol. And now I shall get off my soapbox and return to writing my roundup post.

I completely agree with this point of contention. It's quite the annoyance. Furthermore, I really like your idea of a Quick Travel to your ship. The text for Quick Travel says "A shuttle has been dispatched," so why can't one of your companions swing by and pick you up? Good idea. You've got a lot of interesting ideas, Amuntet. Thank you for posting them. But if you could keep them condensed into one post for your ideas, I would be greatly appreciative. If, a few hours later, you feel the need to add more, feel free to make another post, but please keep it tidy. Like I said in the OP, bullets, indentations, and other formatting is good. I find this quite annoying, too. But do understand, as games have grown more complex--especially in the artistic sense--there is a significant amount of data that's being read from source and written into memory. SWTOR is close to 20GB of compressed data (one of the reasons it's so CPU intensive, I gather), so reading that takes a while. However, I do think that there could, perhaps, be some optimizations made in this area. That said, if you can afford it, get yourself a little SSD (they're down to around just under a US$1 per gigabyte on Newegg right now) and install/move SWTOR onto it. You'll be quite happy about with the results. There's definitely room for optimization here, I'm guessing. All UI elements ought to be loaded into RAM, not loaded on-use from the hard drive (which is where the bottleneck and pause is coming from). I think there could be some other CPU-related performance improvements, as well. Also an annoyance. Although these could have more to do with network synchronization issues than anything relating to data reads from source into RAM. I believe I may have heard something about this being worked on for a future release, but I'm not entirely certain of that. Regardless, this can be a bit frustrating when I just want to know what a damned weapon looks like. My current workaround has been to look up the high resolution weapon renders on the Web, there are a few out there. I know it's hard seeing them all together like this, but that's the point. It has to sting a lot, all at once, instead of little by little, to get the community organized and eager enough, to get the attention of community managers and developers, and to get these changes actually implemented. It worked for the EVE Online community, and I think it can work here, too. You make excellent points, sir. Thank you for illustrating the view from the other side of the coin. Absolutely, there ought to be more UI configuration options. As a former WoW player (I quit shortly before WotLK and, after my account got hacked and frozen 2 years after the fact, I never went back), I have used Bartender and I think it's a great addon. Some of its features would be very welcome, indeed. Very interesting ideas. That's the whole point of Legacy, isn't it? Partly to allow your other character 'descendants' to inherit your property. Besides which, I'm sure a lot of parents, aunts, uncles, etc., make us look after their pets on occasion. Seems only natural that other Legacy characters ought to have access to them, too, since you can only play one character at a time. You make a lot of interesting suggestions regarding end game stuff, which I'm not overly familiar with as yet, but I appreciate them all the same, and I'm sure they're going to start mattering to me a lot more in the near future. I also find this troubling. I know we're meant to play with other players for high-level content, but there are times when it's difficult to fill out a group and it's necessary to have companions fill that role. Unfortunately, our companions just can't keep up. DCUO implemented an interesting idea a while back in their instances and raids--if a player of a certain type (i.e tank or healer) isn't in the group, a small buff/bonus is temporarily applied to defer the loss in said ability. For example, if your group lacks a healer, each party member would receive a small, hidden heal-over-time buff. With some tweaks to the idea, and in concert with a buff to companions, I think this would help considerably. I have two companions at maximum affection on my Inquisitor, and no, there isn't anything like this. But it's a very interesting idea. I think a general buff to companions at high levels, as mentioned above, might help mitigate the need for a uniquely exclusive set of gear. This is a tricky one to be sure. It is easy to exploit, but after having been trapped on tons of rocks in the mountainous regions of Alderaan... Maybe they can simply tweak the terrain a bit, though it could be quite time consuming to do so. Tough nut to crack. You're telling me. I'm sure it's fine for people that have 6 level 50 characters running dailies, operations, and hard mode flashpoints all day, but there are those of us who have other things to do with our time. A style system, like the one in DCUO (I mention it in the OP), would really help knock this one out. Kind of a lofty goal, though, but I know it can be done--I've seen test footage of other games using the Hero Engine swapping armor appearances and changing color palettes. I completely and wholeheartedly agree. Besides, there just might be some executive transvestites out there who want to dress in the Elegant set. Fantastic dress with fantastic shoes and impeccable makeup. What a mindjob would that be for some Republic soldiers to see a group of Marauders dressed to the nines hot-dropping into their camp. "Oh, will you look at that? Crack the ale, boys--Oh, ****! They've got lightsabers! I was surprised. Were you surprised?" Yes, that was an Eddie Izzard reference. This would be nice to remedy, as well, as I play the game primarily for the story right now. I have a feeling that we may see lots of companion love in the future, though. Perhaps after the winter expansion. That would be very nice, indeed, especially for crafters. They just added this not too long ago in EVE Online. Although, I would go a step further and suggest that it be searchable regardless of location. On that note, I think the crafting UI could use some serious attention. Aforementioned load times are bothersome, and there's no contextual search within it, just a series of drop down boxes to narrow your list.

I find this also incredibly annoying, and it's obviously a bit bugged. Hopefully it can be addressed. Absolutely. To each their own. I don't want to remove the armor sets that are already present as I'm sure there are people that like them. As I said, it's a matter of personal taste. But I do think there should be more armor sets in line with the grander Star Wars theme of form following function and practicality. That said, would I say no to an armor style lit up in the vein of Tron: Legacy's costumes? I can't say I would, lol. I think it'd look cool, but that's just a personal taste thing. I've noticed this, too, and have forgotten it as I don't use Xalek on my Inquisitor. Good catch! This is annoying to me, too. However, my usual workaround is to wait for an area to get populated enough to switch phases. My guess is that, with the influx of F2P folks, more areas are likely to have more phases. Of course, it's also possible that the developers could lower the player cap for areas that are particularly busy in order to mitigate respawn issues. Lowering respawn timers could help, but I have to wonder if there might be other solutions we have yet to consider. They've actually stated recently that they've been working on this and it should be included with the next update. Probably a major update, rather than a collection of bugfixes.

This is a fantastic suggestion. As a guy, I almost never play a female character unless it's the only option, or it makes sense for the roleplay, as I feel it would be disingenuous of me to do so. So my experience with the game as it relates to female characters is limited at best. I truly appreciate your taking the time to illustrate this. It's stuff like this that made me suggest the change to class/faction locking on armor styles. If NPCs can get away with it, why can't we? In the case of EVE Online, pod pilots (players) are viewed by their crew and by the planetary inhabitants of the four empires to be nothing short of Gods (because of their ability to live forever through clones). Players ought to have, at least in the end game, more power and freedom than the majority of NPCs in a given game. This absolutely irks me, too, lol. And Jandoon, above, mentions that companions are always staring directly at you, regardless of their position and orientation, which looks terribly unnatural. I've seen some contortionists in my day, but with the way Mako has twisted herself around, I'm certain she's broken something by now. Absolutely. The UI feels very incomplete and unintuitive, and still needs a lot of work. Right-click context menus are something else that's in EVE that I'm also used to using in modern operating systems, so it often just makes sense. I will say, though, that the UI for SWTOR isn't anywhere near as bad as it is for DCUO. DC Universe Online may have a lot of interesting ideas, but the game is not without its own very deep flaws. I haven't done much in the way of end game content yet, and I've only tackled a few world bosses so far, so thanks for this insight. You also mention the Tionese crystals/commendations, and I've seen them mentioned elsewhere as kind of a nusiance. There should be more vending options for them. And when they're of no use to one character, having them in a Legacy Wallet would make them useful to another. Of course, when you have all your characters maxed out, having an avenue of redemption/compensation for them would also make sense, as credits are needed by everyone all the time. I, too, would like to see this. WoW may be old and tired, but it does have a couple of interesting and relevant ideas, and being able to set macros and hotkeys would be one of them.

What does it mean, “A Thousand Papercuts?” In late 2010, there was a thread created on the EVE Online forums with the same title. The players organized to civilly and thoughtfully outline their issues with the game, sticking almost exclusively to small, quality of life issues, or very simplistic suggestions to improve their gameplay experience. Game developers at CCP, the makers of EVE, quickly took notice of the thread and kept their eye on it for a while, eventually organizing a small team within the company to get together in their spare time to look into “the small things.” Their efforts were rolled into the summer 2011 expansion, Incarna. After EVE’s Noble Exchange debacle in the summer of 2011, in which there was a sudden focus on exorbitantly overpriced vanity items that sent the community in an uproar, CCP was forced to call an emergency meeting of the CSM (a player-elected group of representatives that meet with developers in Iceland biannually to discuss and address the concerns of player constituents) and plot a new direction for development. After many meetings, public apologies, and internal restructuring, CCP pivoted towards seriously addressing the concerns of players. The Thousand Papercuts Project quickly turned from an erstwhile hope into a very prominent development plan, and the small team working in their spare time became an officially recognized group with the resources necessary to bring that plan to fruition. The Crucible expansion, released in the winter of 2011, was the realization of all their efforts, and focused mainly on the Thousand Papercuts idea, as well a large contingent of bug fixes, balancing, and other quality of life stuff. Crucible was welcomed by the community with open arms, and CCP made it a point to emphasize that the spirit of the expansion, the Thousand Papercuts idea, would remain a significant part of every subsequent release that followed. Indeed, CCP kept good on their word, and in the expansion that followed (and the one currently in development for winter 2012), a significant portion of the content released has included a focus on “the little things.” As an aside, it should be noted that CCP is very close with their community of players and fans, and there is much that Bioware can learn from their example--both from their successes and from their failures (like the NeX incident). I’d also like to point out that I have been playing EVE Online since early 2005, and I enjoy it and SWTOR very much. Overview With this thread I aim to gather the papercuts--the little things that don’t necessarily break gameplay, but add up to lessen our experience with the game as a whole--and list them in detail, along with some possible solutions to increase the quality of life for all players. The focus will primarily be on small things (annoyances, quirks, and the like), but I’d also like to include a couple of larger feature requests just to round things out. The goal is to get the community organized and put all of the feasible, well thought-out ideas into a single thread. To keep things as focused as possible, the intervention of moderators and community leaders may become necessary to keep things tidy. I’d ask anyone who wants to contribute to the thread to limit their suggestions to the small, quality of life stuff (examples will be outlined below), and to also limit discussion in the thread to coming up with and working out creative solutions that others may not have considered. Don’t judge or criticize anyone’s post, instead try to be constructive and offer solutions or feedback. Repeating complaints or ideas outright also isn’t helpful, but do feel free to offer a unique solution that has not yet been presented on a certain issue. Brainstorm! Please, don’t post unless you want to contribute to the discussion; remain on topic and, above all, be civil. Contributing Try to focus on small things, i.e. things that seem too insignificant to file bug reports, or things that most people don’t openly view as an inconvenience; the things that you get used to after a while and find workarounds for, or simply put up with, but they still bother you to some degree; the little things that--by themselves--don’t account for much, but all of them in concert cause frustration or decrease the quality of your gameplay experience. Some examples: Mailing currency between characters on my account, despite the fact that they’re connected through the Legacy system, is cumbersome and annoying. What do I do with all of my planetary commendations now that I’m level 50? I have no real use for them besides buying armor mods and selling them on the GTN. When on my speeder, or running with my saber drawn, I can see the back of my Inquisitor’s head clipping through the mesh for the hood of my chest piece. The sounds used by vibroswords are nearly identical to that used by lightsabers. This makes no sense given prior context (KOTOR). Font options in the UI would be nice. I can barely read the chat window unless I’m in a dark area. Hoth is hard enough on one’s eyes, but reading chat text while playing there is a nightmare. The /r reply system for whispers is annoying and sometimes broken. In some instances, it will display one character’s name, but will reply to another if you have had more than one recent private conversation. It’s also hard to differentiate at a glance whom it is that’s whispering you because all the names are the same color. Try to keep your posts clean and well organized. The use of bullets and indentations will help immensely to that end. The easier they are to read and comprehend, the more likely it will get a community manager’s attention, and just maybe they’ll forward the thread to a developer. The Little Things Here are some of my own “papercuts.” Feel free to expound upon and contribute to them if you have ideas or solutions other than the ones I’ve presented. Appearance / Art Inquisitor head mesh clips through hood mesh under certain circumstances. When on my speeder or running with my saber drawn, I can see the back of my Sith Pureblood Inquisitor’s head clipping through the mesh for the hood of my chest piece. I do not have this issue on my Miralukan Jedi Knight. I don’t really know of a solution, other than perhaps someone in the art department looking at the issue and changing how hoods hang on player meshes. I know that the hood up/down feature is being looked into and worked on (it’s on the backburner, I think (?)), so perhaps this issue is also being addressed therein. Also, I personally know of someone who has already submitted this issue in a bug report. Inquisitor and Consular hoods don’t stay up with any non-circlet style headgear. The hood of the chest armor on my Inquisitor disappears when wearing helmets like [Kallig’s Countenance], as well as in the preview window. However, I have noticed that some helmets do actually work with hoods, like the [santhe Corps Light Exoskeletal Headgear] or the [Force Sentinel Headgear] (which looks really cool), but they only seem available to wearers of medium armor. A solution seems pretty simple, but if there’s anyone with direct knowledge of how the underlying mechanics work (like a developer), please feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken. My guess is that it’s simply a flag that’s set in whatever database entry that exists for the medium armor pieces in question. Many styles of armor, especially level 50+ pieces, are too elaborate or unrealistic for the purposes of combat. Some seem difficult to move around in while wearing. Again, this is another matter of personal taste and an issue with art direction. While not as gaudy or garish as the much derided clown suits in the World of Warcraft, it’s something that annoys me, and perhaps creates a semi-conscious link to the WoW aesthetic that leads many players to place SWTOR in the same (tired) concept box. Star Wars has a particular look associated with it--one that is simple, if not practical, and without too much flash or gimcrackery. Simplicity is a good thing! I like the simple-yet-elegant design of the [saber Marshal’s Robe], for example. As an Inquisitor (or Consular), I am tired of wearing robes and dresses! This is just a personal preference, honestly, but I would love to see more variety in the options availed light armor wearers. More access to pants and matching tops would be wonderful. Let’s face it, the Formal and Ulgo Noble social/adaptive armor sets are gaudy, and are essentially two of a small handful of style options. Limiting armor pieces and styles to certain classes or factions often seems pointless and can be limiting to the point of frustration. It’s just frustrating to find that, even though the armor class requirements are met, I can’t dress a particular character in a style befitting the character or my personal desire for its appearance. Worse still is that--especially in the case of custom (orange) armor pieces--it limits my options for gearing my companions. Finding a really cool-looking medium armor piece that would help keep Mako up to date with my Bounty Hunter is pointless if it’s restricted to Imperial Agents or Marauders. True also is the frustration with which I’m met when--in the case of perhaps wanting to roleplay a fallen Jedi, or a neutral Sith, or maybe a former Republic Trooper-turned-Bounty Hunter--I’m limited to whatever so-called ‘neutral’ armor looks like depending on which faction I’m playing, or that I can’t have a Dark Side Consular wearing a [Dark Acolyte’s Robe]. Removing class and faction requirements could be an excellent start, although with the latter I would think it necessary to allow the appearance of certain armor styles of various factions to appear the same for an opposing faction (i.e. a class-agnostic [Guardian’s Exalted Body Armor] looks the same for Empire characters as it already does for Republic characters). Perhaps I picked it up off a Jedi I just ran through; why let his armor go to waste now that I’ve killed him when I could use it as a disguise, or simply wear it as a trophy or a display of my dominance? Or maybe it just looks bleeding cool and I want to wear it, consarnit! Even though it’s been 300 years, I’m sure there have to be some Sith Trooper armor pieces from KOTOR floating around the galaxy. Sith Trooper armor (image link) is not to be confused with the Imperial Trooper armor set. I’d love to see this in the game, especially the chrome set--I wore it for quite a long time in KOTOR. It just looks so boss! Perhaps it could be included as adaptive/social gear, or an armor style (see “Lofty Ideas” below). Considering its age and (perceived) rarity, maybe one might purchase it from the upcoming cash store when the game goes free-to-play in winter 2012. For a reasonable fee, of course (please, Bioware, learn from EVE Online’s NeX folly). Some lightsaber handle models look awfully brittle or unwieldy, and not very practical. This is simply a matter of personal taste and an art style issue. The one thing I really love about the Star Wars universe is that, even at its most fantastical, things operate with a certain sense of practicality and realism within the context of the setting. Lightsaber beam meshes can disappear when viewed head-on (i.e. from the top down). I realize this is a limitation of the lightsaber mesh itself, and the part for the beam is constructed of intersecting polygons with a (seemingly) animated (probably through script) texture that features an alpha channel. I seem to recall the shader used in KOTOR for the lightsabers not behaving in this fashion (correct me if I’m wrong), and would like to see an improvement in their appearance if possible, including the light that is cast from the saber (which sometimes appears on walls in a weird fashion, looking like a cone spotlight from a flashlight with a dark center for some reason). The textures of planets in the ship approach cutscenes are blurry, no matter how high graphics settings are set. Obviously, it’s a texture resolution problem. The texture size is fine for the smaller planetary view, like when viewing the data before making a jump to the location. But when viewed up close during the approach of your ship, it looks atrocious; as though it belongs in a game from the early oughts, rather than 2012. Nar Shaddaa is perhaps the most glaring example of this. Legacy A Legacy Wallet would be awesome and of immense help. My brief time with the Diablo 3 beta introduced me to the concepts of shared currency between all characters on my account, and also a centralized place to store items all my characters could access. Say what you will about the shallowness of a game like Diablo (which is sometimes fun to just veg out and play, don’t get me wrong), but these are brilliant ideas that I’m surprised haven’t made it into MMOs yet. Shared currency between the characters seems pretty straightforward, so I shan’t expound upon that too much. A legacy bank tab would operate much in the same way as the current mechanics for ship cargo holds and guild banks, especially the latter due to how the item binding system works currently. Obviously, it would only be able to hold unbound and Legacy-bound items. The most practical method of acquisition would be to connect it with a legacy unlock; Legacy 1 and a reasonable amount of credits for the first tab for example. This is the only Legacy idea that I have off the top of my head. I’m really interested in hearing more ideas from other players because I feel that the Legacy concept has a lot of untapped potential. UI Sending my companion out to sell all my grey junk is fine and well, but clicking through every single item at a vendor is tedious at best. I’m sure you’ve all been there: You’ve just finished about an hour of grinding or running heroics with a friend, but have forgotten to send Khem Val off to sell your junk, and you’ve just come to a vendor. Only being able to click one thing at a time is, indeed, monotonous and annoying. There could be a couple different solutions to this dilemma. One way would be to allow the selection of multiple items before selling, but existing hot keys might have to be changed (CTRL+Click previews an item and Shift+Click links an item in chat). Another option is a Sell All Junk type button in the item or vendor windows. It’s not easy to determine the level of a given item’s augment slot. The item modification window does not show what level an augment slot is unless the slot is empty. Since augment slots are backwards compatible with augments from lower levels, guessing what level the slot is can be difficult without removing the augment. Aside from the annoyance at the cost involved in doing this, it is just poor design. Game text is sometimes illegible. I can barely read the chat window unless I’m in a dark area. Hoth is hard enough on one’s eyes, but reading chat text while playing there is a nightmare. Text colors can be changed, and the ability to change text colors is limited solely to chat text, but legibility in changing environments is difficult at best without sacrificing valuable screen real estate. Furthermore, whatever smoothing/scaling algorithm is being used can sometimes make all text on the screen quite blurry, though that could depend on certain display resolutions and aspect ratios (I operate at 1280x1024). Expanding font color options elsewhere would be helpful, as would having more options for varying the size and typeface used for various independent UI elements. Tweaks to the smoothing/scaling algorithm to improve legibility could also be beneficial. The /r reply system for whispers is annoying, confusing, and sometimes broken. In some instances, the text entry bar will display one character’s name--presumably the last person to whom you’ve replied--but will reply to another if you have had more than one recent private conversation. Character chat tabs could be a solution, though I have long enjoyed EVE Online’s implementation of chat windows. Coming from windowed IRC (and later IM) clients where each person had a dedicated window, it just feels intuitive to me. And on that thread, chat logging would be nice--for private conversations, certainly, and also to assist in code of conduct/end-user violations cases for any player or GM that’s monitoring general chat. It’s hard to differentiate at a glance whom it is that’s whispering you because all the names are the same color. Let’s be honest, all the text in that chat window is smashed together pretty tightly, and it’s pretty hard to distinguish any one person without giving it your full attention. And even then, the text can sort of...run together after a while. Changing text colors for various chat messages only changes the color for the message type and does little to address legibility and the discernment between other players. A possible solution would be to alternate the shade of a particular color every other line. Highlighting messages that you send out to differentiate them from the chaff, as well as those messages which mention your name, would also be good. The adjustment of line spacing, indentation, character name spacing--it’s all important for increasing legibility. Economy Mailing items and currency between characters in my legacy is cumbersome and annoying. Shortly after 1.3 was released, the mail system buckled under heavy load, and there have been occasional glitches even before that. I can imagine that a very significant portion of mail traffic involves the transfer of items and currency between other characters within a player’s legacy. The aforementioned Legacy Wallet solution should remedy everything quite nicely. What do I do with all of my planetary commendations now that I’m level 50? As our class storyline takes us through all the available planets, we acquire many planetary commendations along the way. And sometimes, even after we’ve hit 50, we like to go back and help some of our lower-leveled friends with heroics and other difficult content, for which we are rewarded with yet more commendations. By the time we’re in the end game, however, these forms of currency are essentially useless to us, unless we sell them on the GTN or use them to equip our other characters. Allowing all the collected commendations to coalesce into the Legacy Wallet mentioned above would bring new purpose to commendations. And do consider the future: planetary commendations become useless while we’re focused on acquiring Black Hole or Rakata gear. As new content emerges and the level cap is raised, the commendations used to purchase end game armor will eventually fall to the wayside, too, but would be useful for other legacy characters. Another potential use for outmoded commendations would be the option to redeem them for hard currency. This would be especially useful for those who have all their character slots filled with high level characters. Loot NPCs (Sith, Jedi, Troopers, etc.) should drop items associated with their appearance or class/faction. In KOTOR, you were able to take the black clothes or robes off fallen Sith acolytes and wear them on your character or party members (you could use the aforementioned Sith Trooper armor, too). They also could drop lightsabers containing red and purple crystals that you could use or remove and place in the lightsaber you were using. I’d like to be able to wear what that Jedi was wearing, or use that Marauder’s interesting looking lightsaber handle. Maybe, as a roleplayer, I like collecting trophies from my victories (and putting them in a rectangular wooden box...lol). In any case, it makes more sense for you to get from a particular NPC an item or items that are likely to be carried by that NPC. Just as an example, the ships of a particular NPC pirate faction in EVE Online drop the modules, ammo, tags, etc. that’s associated with those groups as well as the ship’s class. Addressing this would involve one of my aforementioned solutions (removing class/faction limitations on gear), as well as changing up loot tables and the distribution of loot amongst mob types. Ambience Vibroblades should not sound like lightsabers. The sounds used by vibroswords are nearly identical to those used by lightsabers, despite the fact that, in KOTOR, vibroblades and Echani weaponry clearly use metal sounds, except when clashing with a lightsaber. It’s a distinctive characteristic that doesn’t make sense for the weapon and kind of breaks immersion. Vibroblade-type weapons should sound like a piece of metal cutting through the air, and should clang like metal when hitting armor or another metal weapon; they should not sound like lightsabers. Miscellany Why does the entire website, including the index page and forums, need to be unavailable during a patch deployment, server-side hotfix, or rolling server restart? Indeed, this seems...a bit unusual, if not archaic. There’s not much sense for the basic face of the game--the main index page--to be unavailable at any time (save those rare 0.0005% moments). And for those players that are curious or chatty during downtime, there’s nothing for them to do as it relates to the official website; no patch notes to read, no forum in which to participate to pass the time. Not everyone knows that there’s an official SWTOR Twitter account, and even that can be extremely vague at times. Worse still, the Tweets from the official twitter account will, during downtime, often link to things on the site that readers can’t get to because every page on swtor.com is unavailable. Even when active in using the GTN terminal, I still go idle if that’s all I’m doing. Changes were made to reset the idle timer for chat and engaging in crew skills, so that clicking around and searching the GTN still doesn’t count against your idle timer is a bit baffling. Lofty Ideas A more advanced and gear-independent character styling system. As a casual player of DC Universe Online, I’m greatly impressed by their implementation of, and the depth of configuration for, character appearances. It’s amazingly straightforward and offers a degree of customization I haven’t seen since EVE Online’s character creator (while there aren’t yet many clothing options for EVE's character creator, its facial and body customization options are absolutely peerless). Armor, weapon, and skin styles are acquired through equipping gear pieces for the various character sheet slots. They are also bestowed by special one-use items whose sole purpose is unlocking a particular style for a given slot. The appearance style for that particular slot (chest, head, face, main hand, etc.) is then saved to a list. This list of styles is available as an appearance tab on the character sheet, and a given style can be selected for each slot independently of the gear actually used by the character. Coloring of the character and the armor is handled interestingly, as well. When creating a character, players select the primary palette to be used by the character’s armor, consisting of 3 colors, as well as the colors and appearance of the character’s skin, hair, and eyes. Players can later change these colors after character creation. The combination of the 3 colors, and their order as used by the armor, are configurable for each armor slot, and can be altered in such a fashion that the armor can use all three colors or just one. The implementation of such inspired features would go a long way to affording players the freedom to render their characters’ appearances precisely the way they want, and to do so without the headache and difficulty involved with hunting for new gear with precisely the kind of style they want, in the color that they want, every time they progress a few levels. Crafters need not be left out of the opportunity for the monetization of gear styles. Synthweavers and Armormechs could have a single set of orange custom armor for each of the armor classes that has a very basic or unitarian style, and schematics would allow the learning of styles for crafting. To facilitate the transition and to keep crafters from feeling snubbed for all the work and money spent previously in the acquisition of schematics, converting all the armor schematics they’ve already learned into said style-only schematics would be a good idea. This would also help to mitigate the frustration many players feel when the dreaded armor/gear hunt (that keeps their stats up to date as levels progress) clashes with their desire to have their characters appear as they envision. Like DCUO’s own cash store, a handful of unique or whimsical armor styles could be purchased with Cartel Coins. It would add another incentive for free-to-play and subscription players alike to spend the currency they acquire through subscription rewards or direct purchases. An NPC and player-driven contracts system; NPC and player bounties organized and issued through the Bounty Hunter’s Guild, and acquisition/delivery contracts issued through a black market system. The lauded Bounty Hunter’s Guild from Star Wars fiction has the potential to add interesting gameplay options and storylines to the game. Weekly and/or monthly NPC bounties could be issued by Guild NPCs to players, and players could be able to issue bounties on other PVP-flagged players. This would add a very interesting dimension to PVP gameplay, as well as open the door to the galaxy-wide PVP some players (not myself, mind you) are clamoring for. It seems unfair for this concept to be limited only to the Bounty Hunter class, but it does make sense within the context of the universe and, indeed, the storylines surrounding the Bounty Hunter’s Guild (read K.W. Jeter’s Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy, seriously). Smugglers need not be left out completely, however; the acquisition, transportation, and delivery of rare and volatile goods would give them a similar gameplay experience. Regardless of either side, Bounty Hunter or Smuggler, players of other classes could join in for a piece of the action, partake in the risk, and split the rewards. This could add another layer, and a very interesting aspect, of cooperative play. Where’s the API? Like spice, the data must flow. A game API that’s accessible to independent developers of mobile and web apps, as well as PC applications, is achingly absent. I’m not much of an expert on API development, but in the case of EVE Online (and World of Warcraft way back in the day), it’s something I’m used to using to glean important information to utilize in making various aspects of gameplay less imperative or time consuming. As an example, I’d like to cite the incompleteness of Torhead in comparison to the other ZAM Network sites and tools, like Wowhead. Determining drop rates and loot tables, or culling useful statistics from other game mechanics, is extremely difficult without access to more data. A site like Torhead or As Mr. Robot should be much more useful and contain much more information than is currently available. Visually, the game looks a bit long in the tooth. The periodic implementation of graphical improvements would be welcome. SWTOR has been in development a very long time (since 2005, according to an article I read, but haven’t been able to verify), and even with the updates and improvements to the Hero Engine, its age is beginning to show. Again, this is partly due to the length of the development cycle, but I understand that the limitations of the Hero Engine itself are also a factor. Another reason would be that the bulk of game development has been focused on story elements and gameplay mechanics (and from what I understand, updating the underlying mechanics of the Hero Engine). Bear in mind that the focus on story and gameplay elements over keeping the graphics up to date is not to SWTOR’s detriment--I’d go so far as to say that it’s paramount over how the game looks. But now that the game is here and content development pipelines have been streamlined, it’s a good idea to address game visuals in the near future so as to keep the game fresh and to take advantage of the graphics hardware many of us have. I’ve mentioned it a few times so far, but I must give credit where it is due: EVE Online is a distinctive representation of a game that refuses to stagnate or remain dated in the visual sense. Since its release in 2003, EVE has always looked visually striking through each iteration, and periodically improves upon that beauty--from the massive Trinity expansion to , and into the . And somehow, in spite of the push to create new visuals that rival the old and take advantage of the newest and best in graphics hardware, it remains a game that is accessible to wide range of hardware. Does SWTOR need to be as visually jaw-dropping as EVE? No. But sincerely, Bioware, don’t sit idle. Updates Well, it's been a while since I've first posted the start of this thread, and I must say that I'm overwhelmed (in a good way) at the response it's gotten from the community. It's been referenced on blogs and fansites, and just last night there was a significant amount of attention paid to it in the latest episode of The Cantina Band podcast (thanks guys <>). As I've said before in other posts, you guys have been great. Keep the ideas and the discussion going. I had hoped to get a response from a community manager at some point, but didn't think it would be quite this soon, if at all. This is a pretty significant accomplishment, and you should all take at least a little comfort by the fact that Bioware is seemingly very interested in what we've done here, and what we'll hopefully continue to do. I don't think we should we pop the Champagne and throw a party now, no, but it is significant all the same. Keep in mind, there are three development teams working on this game at the present time (one on converting the game to Free to Play, one pushing out the regular content like the upcoming Warzone, and one working on the coming story/expansion). They have a lot on their plates and we may not see some of these changes right away, but it should be enough to know that they're listening, they're taking our issues seriously, and that they'll get to them when they can. So, although we've received a response from Eric Musco of the community team, and information is making its way to the various development teams, our work is far from over. And while we must remain vigilant, we should continue to observe decorum and afford them the respect they deserve--even when they're being quiet, and even if the changes don't come right away. Now, with that out of the way, I'd like to set about placing here some of the suggestions that have been made by others. I think we're at 31 pages right now, and it's a lot to ask for someone to read through all of that. Below, I will organize and try to summarize as much as I can, as well as offer my own commentary where applicable. Your Papercuts Many people have voiced support for some of my suggestions, so I will not repeat them here unless there has been any relevant discussion that adds anything to them, or offers an opposing viewpoint. This is a placeholder for now, as compiling the list of your suggestions is going to take quite a while.