I opened a ticket for the Datacron Master title and perks... I got a reply in about a week telling me to wait until a future patch to fix it. It's not even mentioned in the known issues, livestream or dev posts, so that future patch isn't even coming... And you're worried about two weeks and one day? Eternity > 15 days

tl;dr - I can haz ur gear? Seriously though, I warned you clear back in November...you didn't listen because you had what you wanted in hand at the time. Funny what a difference 90 days makes.

Admits to falsifying information in an attempt to feed his preferred narrative. Credibility check on aisle 7!

On behalf of everyone on the intrawebz.... If your own family, friends and people in real life don't want to deal with you, what makes you think a bunch of strangers on the internet, who care EVEN LESS want to? No...just no. You are now condemned on the internet too. But thanks for playing.

That's a blind assumption, you're pointing at financials and providing no specific insights, observations or correlations between the numbers and the results. You're BS'ing the financials argument so hard you may as well be selling back mortgages circa 2008. That's because you're not open-minded and aren't interested in hearing anything except crap that agrees with your misguided conclusions. It's okay, just own up to it. Raiding is required and an expectation for MMO's. The question is what resource dedication is enough to make that representation of the player base happy. Here's the problem with your completely illogical statements thus far; for a game suffering declining subscriptions and revenue, pissing off 15%+ of your LOYAL player base by telling them to go pound sand (in the interest of your argument that story is better), is a guaranteed way to make sure this game dies a quick death. Like it or not, hardcore LOYAL raiders bring in reliable revenue. F2P skunks don't, and as soon as there's another MMO the skunks will jump ship, leaving a hollowed out game with plenty of "story" that you so desperately want, but nothing for raiders, so they'll be forced to leave too. Unlike you, raiders want to stay for the long haul. Big evil suddenly appears, well-mannered and intelligent teenagers get special powers, evil comes to fight teenagers, teenagers beat evil, evil plots to take over the world next episode (where the EXACT same thing will happen). SWTOR needs *this* kind of formula, right? Think about what you're saying. "Whatever I want is more important that anything you want." See, this is why what you post has no credibility. You're now in negative credibility. Ahhh, the coup de grace..... After your little tirade tearing on a whole slice of the player base, you call for peace and holding hands, declaring only those you approve of as those which "actually matter" and are "cost effective". This is hypocrisy of the highest quality, just MUAH. This is republican presidential quality commentary right here.

Just because most parents in the United States have an IQ of butternut squash and believe in creationism over evolution, doesn't make them right. What we see in current MMO's is the equivalent of common core gameplay.... or as I call it, the No Sheep Left Behind program. Raids are being dumbed down, the time investments shortened, gear requirements reduced, technical mechanics removed.... JMCA's idea of "inclusion" is a world where the shortbus stops at the entrance to Temple of Sacrifice and lets everyone in, no gear check required. And of course, everyone gets a participation trophy, even those who are completely useless in an op/HM/FP/group/etc. What bothers me most is that they don't just get participation trophies now, they're beginning to demand them (see JMCA's original post). Game makers are beginning to child proof our games.... ironically for the likes of this: The issue isn't a decline in interest, it's a decline of resource investment. It's cheaper to feed the sheep recycled solo-content (level sync anyone) than to create new challenging and complex storylines and expansive areas with fresh graphics. Kids these days have shorter attention spans, they have iPhones by age 4 and iPads by 6. The technology is more intelligent than most of the new "gamers" coming online, and the games are reflecting this trend in a very bad way. So while JMCA is entirely wrong about almost all the logic he's posted, the only true statement he's made is raid play is on a decline. There's plenty of gamers still willing to invest, but the quick and easy buck is again, cheap quick solo content that already exists. That's also why so much of our gear is reskinned crap, and why Alliance dialogs are choice clicks instead of voiced over content. So make a choice, you can go Common Core MMO with JMCA over here or you can join the real gamers before the world went Ritalin-assisted A.D.D. and push back on the developers to actually build real content instead of feeding us lines every single announcement/twitter/livestream/bag of wind dev post. The problem isn't *just* the developers, it's just as much a problem of the sheep drinking their koolaid. Back in the day, we used these types for target practice...now they're considered a revenue stream. I liked it better when they had to be in bed by 7.

OP's second post in their own thread, dismissing any logical counterarguments and holes in his own logic that might be posted proactively. So even if he's flat wrong (which he is), by the very statement above he's sticking his fingers in his ears and ignoring relevant information that would disprove his claims. Yeah, this poster really wants to have a legitimate conversation about the state of the game. Smells like another Casual-Story poser. Someone give him the BW Austin Career links... Ignoring loyal players, disregarding logical arguments and whining on the forums with useless posts; he'll make a fine community manager.

Silly rabbit.... you honestly think after the last year and a half that they will be able to produce content every 4 weeks? They can't even launch existing events like Gree or Rakghoul on time...and those require no new code.

"GRAH GRAH GRAH!!!! And if Apple releases the iPhone 8 in 6 months I'll definitely unsub and take a long break."

So EA's refusal to take it's insane profits and to fully fund a game in dire need of additional resources (or the will to use them) is its own defense? So they have the motive, means and opportunity, do nothing, and you're making an excuse that those dollars are earmarked for something else? Do you realize how unintelligent that would be? To let a F2P game surpass your most well-known and visible title and to stand by doing nothing? Rethink this argument then come back with something better.

"We have a REALLY exciting livestream for you crazy kids this year. If you subscribe from now until August 2020, we'll give Lana Beniko a unique sparkling lightsaber crystal, and a jetpack with the initials LB on it. Oh and chapter 11 will be out some time in 2018."

BW raised money via subscription over a year before Cartel Market existed. Diablo3 has none of those funds and STILL does it better. Then BW has CM on top of subscription money and STILL can't manage to pull even half the quality of Blizzard. So your argument is weak. If a true F2P company can manage such feats with a fraction of the team and resources BW has available to it, and WITHOUT making its customers pay for the privilege, there's no excuse. If BW has a skeleton crew and is STILL collecting our money, whereas Blizzard isn't, then BW is failing to hire and perform the work functions needed to maintain the game. Again, the fault of BW, not the players. If you're done making weak excuses for BW, you can begin thinking through some of the comments you make, and seeing the flaws everyone else finds in them.

So patch 2.4 for Blizzard's Diablo 3 released last night. And with it came the option to purchase more storage tabs; the third storage expansion for a single-purchase non-subscription game since its launch with more unique items and graphics for gear than SWTOR has by far. And with this "incredibly complex and challenging" release, it begs the question, when will SWTOR see its next storage expansion increase? The GTN on any given server now have 100+ pages of augments, and materials for augs as well as mk-8 kits (components specifically) are priced in the gutter as those are one-time purchase items which never require replacement and hardly ever require repair. As a result there are pages of mats, prices WELL below their averages for the last 3 years (I'm sure a contributing factor is more token-60 noob crafters entering the economy with no effort and heading straight for high end schematics). The smart choice is to diversify as a crafter, which requires boatloads of materials, which requires.........................................wait for it...................................................S-T-O-R-A-G-E. There's the question in a nutshell, why can a game without ongoing subscriber funding, a smaller support team, who is notorious for long release windows with little to no information (Blizzard is the poster-child for this) STILL able to manage superior, beneficial releases with a higher QoL increase than SWTOR that has greater resources? Let's count: 1. Diablo has thousands if not tens of thousands of unique items, few of which are reskins; SWTOR reskins virtually everything. And when there is a unique release, it goes straight to Cartel Market for cash shop payments (instead of to crafters or RNG drops), and further are some of the ugliest POS sets known to humankind. 2. Diablo has increased storage and stack sizes three or four times since launch, SWTOR...does cross-server character transfers count as storage? 3. Diablo managed to go through an entire life of full support auction house; SWTOR just continues to release trash on CM regularly; and even got overconfident enough to drop box contents to 25% of their original volume because "reasons". 4. Diablo has balanced PvP nearly a dozen times since release. SWTOR *crickets*. 5. Diablo just released an entire new region, expanded two existing areas to create two new full zones, balanced all classes, redesigned high end gear, created multiple legendary sets, continues to expand jewel selection, added new gold sinks with player benefits (one of which was a 500k gold storage tab increase) and that's just in their last 6 months and ON TOP of their expansions to date (CONTENTZ). SWTOR.....level sync'd people who didn't want it? 6. Diablo has an endgame that permits ongoing growth in the form of experience increases, stat buffs, exponential levels and in doing so paired with their RNG, provides enough unique content to buy themselves time until their next batch of high end gear sets and seasonal legendaries are ready. SWTOR.......has alliance crates for 20 levels and then? 7. Blizzard tests their releases before they enter production, Bioware screwed up companions, then patched them to screw them more, and we're waiting for the next patch to finish screwing them entirely. 8. Diablo adds new abilities and options at least twice a year permitting new builds and options for its players. SWTOR makes any abilities, stats, options irrelevant in level sync as you don't have the stats to make the most of them, AND doesn't bother retooling existing classes outside of nerfs, let alone creating brand new ones. 9. When Diablo hit a hard wall with increasing stats and further customizing characters, they provided player-customization to add desirable affixes (Zultan Kul) sharply increasing what a player could do for damage outside of straight leveling, AND in doing so created a new economy for finding rare items and reverse-engineering them for their inherent powers. SWTOR........Hell, I don't even know. 10. Diablo allows that no matter how powerful your companions gets (even to the point of true-never-dying immortality) it will always be useful, without surpassing the potential damage the player themselves can deal out. In SWTOR, either your comp is OP, or it's useless. If it's not OP, it can't heal itself quickly enough to be useful, and if it isn't OP, then it doesn't even draw some aggro before it hits the floor. There is no middle ground, and since equipment can't be customized, it has no other utility aside from selling your trash grays. So why can a little-supported single player game with hardly a fraction of the resources that SWTOR has as one of the world's most popular IP's do these things so much better than BW? Contemplate.

That's not the problem, the problem is they're absolutely right... There's no penalty for being a jack*ss on the internet. If there were, it would curb a number of issues. For accountability to exist, there must be consequences. What keeps people from walking into a bank, grabbing a handful of cash from the vault and going home with it? The potential hurt feelings of the bankers? No, getting shot, jailed or both is why. Now if that could just apply to the intrawebz.

That's an assumption. There's no reason to remove rewards on a non-LS server and the two were never tied together by any logic to begin with. The argument that LS is necessary to keep rewards "fair" for non-LS people versus those who would be sync'd is irrelevant if we're playing on different servers. We can both get the same rewards whether sync'd or not and it hurts NOTHING. Same goes for lock boxes and everything else. We're not saying the game is harder, we're saying it's more annoying, LS is unnecessary and being able to play on a server without it is better. Quite frankly, anti-LS'ers have spent a long time now explaining why we don't like it, and those in favor of it aren't listening. So no, we're not going to rehash our reasons for the umpteenth time; if you really want to know, read through the 100+ pages already posted on the subject. BW just needs to give us a non-LS server and we can move forward.

That's irrelevant. The fact that OP suggested a perfectly workable solution that completely gets us away from the pro-LS sheep and that they STILL are against it, tells you something about people who are pro-LS. They aren't looking for solutions, they're looking to create problems. Remember, they "aren't as good as L65's" if all the L65's jump ship and move to the non-LS servers OP suggests. Pro-LS'ers only want it so they can feel as valuable as the top dogs. If all the top dogs leave, they're just average and that idea doesn't appeal to them. Further proof the problem never was LS or anti-LS players, it's the Group 2 LS'ers. See sig for details.

There are quite a few people on this forum, and thread in particular who disagree with you on that point. I'm glad you've decided communication from BW is fine, but, you're wrong. The people who code that game can't fix the issues, and the Community Manager who speaks for and represents the community can do nothing about it to raise attention, push for resolution or escalate if issues are not getting attention? Your logic seems detached from reality, the purpose of a "job" and any kind of personal pride someone should take in theirs. I suppose there's some chance you're correct, but that would mean no one who actually works on the game, or represents the organization that runs it has any accountability for said game, or to the people who play it... Sounds like you're making excuses for them. Weekly or bi-weekly communication with detailed tentative patch notes, current projects, a priority list of known issues, their status and ETA's of resolution would be a good start. You know...all the things you do with a major project or program in the corporate world if you're paying the least bit attention. "We are aware of the issue" is far less effective than "Oh yes, GTN Search Not Working - Item #2624, defect 3A73E, date identified 1/1/2015, Status: Attempting to Confirm in Test Environment, Severity: Low, ETA for Update or Resolution - 1/15/2015"... THAT is communication. Proper, professional, detailed and concise. It tells everyone exactly where it's at and what BW is doing, and how long it's been worked on. Most importantly, IT PROVIDES VISIBILITY. There's no assumption in what they're doing, where it's at on the priority list, the last time it was checked, etc. But if you want to continue down the twisted rabbit hole you were going; no, I just want detailed information such as the example I show above for all known game issues and projects in play. He's not responsible for the game he represents, or the lack of information concerning the laundry list of issues the community wants addressed, despite that being his formally assigned job role? Your logic is severely broken. What heat has he taken? He ignores most every topic, doesn't change undesirable behaviors (the lack of communication I've detailed at length,) and he's forced to login to these forums (which he gets paid to do) and...let everyone know there will be a live stream in a week with a developer, and that stickies were removed for new year housekeeping... You may be wrong on your last point. It's possible it's the easiest job on the planet. If it isn't, it might at least be in the same league. In any event, no one is taking guesses at whether the job is easy for him. We're just pointing out HE'S NOT DOING IT.

No, I wouldn't. As I've proven time and again, I'm more than willing to stand on my principles of doing the RIGHT thing versus doing the politically convenient thing. By all means, continue to make assumptions, but no, if I had his job, I'd do it and far better. Because the worst they can do is fire me. Better that than going to sleep at night knowing I did my job by far worse than I'm capable of. I'm fully aware of his constraints, and I'm uninterested. You don't get to pick difficult versus easy consumer issues to address. You address them all or you have to deal with the fallout of having your business decisions, common sense and ROI logic questioned at every step. You make a similar point to the above post, you assume because it's "his job" he's a go with the flow type who has to bow down to his EA overlords. I assure you, he can grow a pair and tell them to stuff it. It will either bring about change, or get him axed. But let's be honest, he's not far from the axe at this point anyways. Unhappy consumers breed terminations.

Here's a hanky; your heart is bleeding on my blouse. The difference is I put my delusions on a resume, and when companies call and check references they clear verification. Shall we check your time traveling ninja and see how that works out? Low grade (and I mean REALLY low) sarcasm as an attempt to out someone for putting up false credentials is fine and well... until the credentials check out. Then your remarks just look uninformed and poorly thought out. This is why I have degrees and certifications. They allow me to drown out white noise such as your comments...

That is an assumption, and has the same problematic factor of being supposition which can't be proved or disproved with evidence the player base has available to it. You may very well be wrong and the forums are in fact an accurate representation of the player base as a whole. You can't disprove the possibility any more than he can prove it... Everything else is bandwagoning. You can't assume because the internet as a whole trends towards human depravity that one game's forums have the same tendency. Even within single city blocks there are different demographics.

Those are outliers, not the norm. Most of them think they are Steve Jobs reincarnated; nearly all of them are wrong. Of the one to two left, collateral damage. At any rate; we're not talking about a highly specialized and technical skill set. Not unless Musco is configuring nuclear reactors in his off hours. He's a community manager. A high school newspaper reporter can do half his job; ironically at least the one half we know he's failing at.

LS sucks, period. ....exclamation, exclamation.

Here's an interesting thought to ponder... You're correct on this point, but when has it EVER produced results as efficiently and quickly as driving true sense of urgency with bluntness and criticality alone? I've been in business a long time; soothing people's egos gets things done, ramming issues through their boss, forcing them to do their job and calling them out when they fail to do what they should has almost always provided superior results much faster. I had a manager once who said "then the next time you need them, they won't do anything for you". My reply was, "and in the future, they'll still have a manager they answer to that I can get what I want from". No single cog in the wheel is important. Some people delude themselves when they go to work into feeling they in themselves are of extreme personal value. They pride themselves on it. That's ego and attempt at self-substantiation. The truth is businesses have many cogs in the machine, Eric is one. If Eric is broken, or isn't working right, somewhere there's another cog... So concerning the "more flies with honey than vinegar" argument, I'm uninterested. There are other ways aside from brown-nosing and ego-stroking to get things done.

Try Fortune 500 enterprise. I like how you pulled grocery store out of thin air though.

I've done his job for a major corporation. I'm quite familiar with it's demands and his *role* (proper word use here), so a morally-defunct scolding from someone who has not performed said position serves little purpose; worse yet, it's uninteresting. I address my correspondence as I see fit, which is why it is MY correspondence as opposed to your correspondence. Next, I don't expect him to defend responding to a (non-issue) thread. I DO expect him to correct the offending behavior. Further, posting that stickies were removed due to forum cleaning isn't "doing what he can" absent authority; actually, he could have posted a definitive date on when he'd say something useful about the concerns I've raised and that would have been several orders of magnitude more useful (still annoying, but useful as at least that's a firm commitment). His current course is actually doing nothing at all (hence the "soon" observations being made by the community). The first rule of any role is if you don't have the authority to do the job, then that's NOT YOUR JOB. So if the Community Manager isn't permitted to manage the community, then he isn't the community manager and is wasting our time in a charade pretending otherwise (it's the same principle as "managers" who refuse to make any decisions that may have consequences). If such is the case, can we have the name of the actual Community Manager to address our concerns to? If he *is* the Community Manager, with appropriate and adequate authority to sufficiently address the community's concerns, then we have a much, much larger issue with a lack of consistent, reliable, detailed, engaging and effective communication from the person tasked with doing so. That's a "below expectations" performance review right there... As to your last point about him being a human being; I'm sure he is, but from 9-5 M-F he's also a cog in the machine that is supposed to be getting things done. He can be a human being before 9 and after 5, hell, if he fixes these problems I'll even send him a basket of cookies with my personal thanks. But as face of a business, I speak to him as the business. Businesses don't require class in being communicated to; they don't structure their decisions or actions based on being asked to do something nicely. If they did, there would never be angry calls to customer service. Simple logic.