I was cautiously excited for a PvP rework / revamp when it first got announced. Surely after such a disappointing launch with 7.0, lessons would have been learned right? Nope. This PvP update has been a complete and utter failure in my opinion. Not only has it ostrocised and flat out removed the ranked community, but it has also beaten down the casual PvP community with an oppressively poorly tuned medals system. Further, nothing has been done about the abysmal state of class balancing within PvP or the horrific desyncing issues - which is made even more noticeable by just how stupidly punishing the medal system is. If you want to play a combat style with poor defensives, you don't get to experience the game due to massively overtuned burst damage in PvP. (playing as corruption sorcerer feels like I might as well just not play PvP, 8 seconds of invulnerability while I can't do anything once per 2-3minutes does nothing for me when it takes a few GCDs to die in more extreme circumstances) If you want to play a DoT class, you might never get the big crit damage medal - one of 2 that I've seen for damage players. Most medals from before 7.2 have been removed, yet we still need 8 to get full rewards. This makes no sense whatsoever. Lets look at a match I just played as a Corruption Sorcerer on Quesh Huttball. I healed non stop from start to finish, assisted in a few kills, interacted with the ball holder on both teams, I even picked up the huttball. I got 2 medals: Did I get a medal for picking up the ball? No. Did I get a medal for attacking or defending the ball carrier? No. Did I get a medal when my largest heal was a 55k crit? No. Did I get anything for hitting 5 million healing? No. And it goes on and on. Whereas previously you could easily get your 8 points - one for attacking, one for defending, one for a normal crit, two for doing enough damage or heals or protection, one or two more for kills etc... Now you get one for a much harder to achieve crit for many combat styles, one for damage, one for enough attacking points, one for enough defender....and yeah that's 4. We simply are not being rewarded for the time spent in warzones anymore. This game is a time commitment, and the devs are not respecting our time. This is made even more apparent by the fact that the devs for some reason beyond mortal comprehension think that the Decorated Combatant GS weekly should still require 45 medals to be earned, and think that 8 medals is how many we should need to get full rewards. If we are now getting between 2-5 medals on average compared to the 8-13 we used to be getting, reason would suggest that we should only need 4 medals for full rewards, and at maximum 25 medals for the weekly. These weeklies are supposed to take an hour each. It is near impossible for the average player to consistently get anywhere near 8 medals. That game I mentioned earlier? There was only one player who hit the 8 medal mark. ONE. Out of SIXTEEN. TLDR Combat style balancing is still awful in PvP. The medal system is inconsiderate towards 94% of the playerbase. Steps needed to fix this: Balance PvP separately to PvE or put more work into compressing the amount of burst damage in the game. Normalise damage between combat styles and normalise defensives. (It has taken an entire year for Fury to be brought down, yet marksmanship is still at rock bottom.) For medals; We need more medals back into the game, bring back kill medals for a start Reduce the stupidly high requirements on big heals, big damage and objective interaction (clicking an objective in one map grants points, but not in another??) If the above aren't done, fully halve the medal requirements necessary to achieve full rewards and complete the Galactic Season weekly. If not, I really don't give a damn about the fancy new PvP season track, it's simply not worth wasting my time on when the thing that actually needed a proper rework, the PvP matches themselves, have been left in such a poor and unfinished state. This wasn't a PvP rework or revamp, it merely attempted to direct attention away from poor balancing towards shiny new toys and systems. It can be fixed, but only if the devs listen.

Any chance we could get another dev post by Chris or someone else on the balance team about any changes that have been made based on feedback? It would also be great to get a post going back over how the team actually balances combat styles because no one I've talked to thinks that combat styles like virulence or lightning needed nerfing, while everyone talks about marksmanship as if it's a joke and it still hasn't received any meaningful changes. (Polarizing still only buffs innervate heals for a measly 3% during polarity shift and it haunts my dreams)

Beyond the initial culture shock, so far so good. Though it lacks some of the uniqueness attributed to older game ui design, it definitely seems smoother and less clunky while retaining a similar feel. A couple issues from a UX perspective are with navigation context. The top navigation bar (Game - News - Store - Forums - Support) which could do with offering better indication that you are hovering over a non active item. I.E hovering over Game should partially fill in the little circle underneath it and dim the text colour as well as the current cursor change. Same goes for the headers for each subforum. Hovering over the sub-sub-forum bits causes them to glow blue, whereas hovering the actual headers (New Player Help, General Discussion, Combat Styles etc) only shows a cursor change. Having additional context as to what is currently being hovered is more important specifically for these two (amongst others like hovering player names) because they are some of the key ways to navigate to larger blocks of content and will help the site achieve it's goal of modernisation. Just a couple small things that I haven't seen mentioned yet and I don't know if there are changes planned for these already in Phase 2!

I don't know if having the winning story become canon should be a thing, but having more community contests (screenshot, story etc) would be pretty neat. The devs have their own views and ideas about how things should pan out. Leaving some things intentionally vague allows everyone to have their own headcanon - especially for romance-centric fanfic. It would be cool if the devs took inspiration from new concepts introduced through fanfic (where they make sense), though that shouldn't be the focus imo. Personally I'd love to see some stories about player's own characters, whether it be following an in-game event or something that happens between the in-game stories.