If you want character diversity you will now be able to put beard stubble on female characters. Problem solved. TBF though, the economy was ****ed with or without amps in the game. The fundamentals for a stable economy simply can't exist with the priority of the Cartel Market for visual progression over crafting and endgame

I've long wanted this game to dump the existing group finder system and implement a proper LFG system to give ALL players the ability in game to find each other and play the content we want, with who we want, and how we want. Do you want to spam hammer station, post a grind run? Do you want to group up for flashpoints and not have to see "spacebar pls" in the chat for the whole run? Post for a flower sniffing run! Do you want to group up to run the world quests with someone, or kill a bunch of World Bosses, or hunt for HK parts? Post it and anyone in the server can join up. Do you want to complete the dailies and weeklies that give extrinsic rewards? You can do that too? But no, instead we are getting an even more claustrophobic grouping system in 7.0 that is solely designed to keep us on the hamster wheel.

What is the plan to address Primary Combat Style selection for ALL characters, as well as Secondary Combat Styles being available for preferred players? The pullback of these features as well as retconning the expansion announcement are pretty bad look, and fixing this would go a long way to convincing me that SWTOR is worth playing in 7.0. I am not going to create new characters to get the flavor I want, and should not have to. Telling me that if I want to have a Bounty Hunter Vanguard/Sniper that I will have to roll a new alt and leave existing characters behind is not a good player experience, and kind of invalidates the time and effort put into them. As a player I want to feel like all of the time I have put into the game has value, especially the time I put into my characters. Telling me 'reroll' is not the correct answer.

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." - Shigeru Miyamoto Thank you Keith for stepping in here and making the right decision to delay launch. The lead up to 7.0 has been very difficult for me. As a longtime almost exclusive player and wannabe completionist, to see so many changes to the core principles of the game get streamlined, and then to have what little player agency coming to the game pulled back at the eleventh hour with Primary Combat Style getting dropped, was incredibly disheartening. I reached a quit moment last week with Chris' update on Combat Styles, coming to the conclusion that I may no longer be the target player for the development team. I'm hopeful that your announcement today means that I am wrong, and that there is some consideration for long time players like myself who aren't raid loggers or chronic altoholics. I hope there is some consideration that the game loop of daily job board and extrinsic rewards doesn't build lasting value. I hope there is consideration that even in a Theme Park MMO there is room for player agency and emergent gameplay that can be part of the game loop instead of outside of it. 10th Anniversary expansions are built on Hope. I hope.

This is my quit moment for SWTOR. I wish you all the best, but this was the final straw for me. 7.0 is taking the game play loop too far in the opposite direction from my preference, and now telling me that my heavily invested characters will not have the same level of customization as a fresh toon? That's a nope for me. I truly thank the devs and my fellow Ebon Hawk / Star Forge players for the thousands of hours of enjoyment.

These kinds of grouping problems could be easily solved if the devs would give us a proper group finder system instead of the content corral group finder trash we have had to use for years. Let players group up for the content they want to, with whom they want, run it how they want to, and when they want to. Instead we get crammed onto the same railcar and have shiny baubles waved in our faces to distract us from the fact that we aren't able make our own decisions on what is fun and rewarding play.

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for voting with my wallet, kid.

That's why they aren't responding.

I don't think they will ever invest in the dev resources needed to rewrite the engine under 64 bit. Short of Windows removing support for 32 bit applications they are going to keep the status quo and deliver the best experience they can within the engine limitations. So we'll never have large scale PVP. 16 man operations are deprecated. More instanced content to keep active world resources to a minimum.

If we are unable to choose a new Primary Combat Style for our existing characters this will be a quit moment for myself and many others. We're not talking about a change to gearing and levelling meta, which changes every expansion. We are talking about the opportunity to change our characters class. This is what has been advertised to us. I'm not talking about PTS. 99% of the playerbase isn't going to know about PTS. I'm reading the marketing material for their launch, which has been linked in this thread already. It tells me that I will be able to pick a new Combat Style when I log into each character. Not a second Combat Style, which is for subs only. This is for all players. If they don't have the choice for a new Primary Combat Style, which is one of the only reasons I am considering staying on for this expansion, I will probably quit.

This is literally the only reason I was going to keep playing in 7.0. If we can't pick new primary combat styles on our existing characters I may be done.

Galactic Seasons was created (alongside Login Rewards) to provide mobile game style extrinsic reward systems that manufacture player engagement. Why do they exist? Maybe the devs don't think players want to play the game, and in the absence of new content or a modern endgame loop they believe they need to add these blatant systems to keep players engaged.

Has there been any dev clarification as to whether existing characters will be able to pick a new pirmary Combat Style at 7.0 launch?

That's a really good question, and I'd like to know as well, since I haven't found levelling or gearing to be at all interesting or relevant since 3.x 6.0 if they had actually released a horizontal gearing system instead of the 'one set is actually good for your spec and the rest are ****' system would have been awesome, but that train has sailed.

So the gearing system is specifically designed to make sales runs possible. Good to know that is the priority for 7.0 gearing design.

So in your opinion the changes won't solve this problem

I at first liked that they were going to do a class rebalance. Fixing and changing abilities, removing redundant or underused abilities, bringing back uniqueness to not only each class but also to each spec. That isn't what we are getting in 7.0. The work on ability trees is half hearted. They only looked to cut TTK and punish players with difficult choices. They missed a huge opportunity to rework the classes and create a new tree system with interesting and dynamic choices. And yes, that might mean that some abilities would be left on the cutting room floor, but at least we would have classes that were still fun, and varied. Instead we are largely going to end up with classes that are mechanically identical but cosmetically different. This makes it easy to manage from a dev perspective, easy to copy rotations for parsing, and easy to play alts for casuals. For anyone else looking for nuanced gameplay, find another game.

They aren't stupid, They know what they are doing and they know the risks associated with them. The lead game designer has immense knowledge of game systems, other MMOs, what works and what doesn't. These changes are not being made without knowing the intended results and consequences. For players who are unhappy (like me) we just need to understand that our investment of time and money are not important, making a game that makes as much money as possible into the future is. It's just business after all.

And that player base will require less dev work and will spend way more on CM than we do right now, just like the mobile games they are trying to emulate.

I'm not at all surprised by this. The BW team has a long history of dismissing player concern, never admitting they are wrong, and sticking with their decisions even if it hurts the game. The current game design director is clear on the vision to transform SWTOR into a mobile lobby game, seeing that as the future. CM shop cosmetics, quarterly story updates, daily/weekly mission table. The only outlier to the 7.0 changes is the exclusive gearing path for NiM raiders, which shows that there is still at least one group of players that the devs listen to. If you only care about story, space barbie, rp, or are a nim raider, you probably will be fine with 7.0. If you like mobile lobby games, you might like SWTOR even more than you do now. If you like player agency, open world / sandbox elements, etc, SWTOR is not going to have anything to offer you going forward.

Faction PvP doesn't work. Yes we need systems for FvF conflict/competition, but not PvP. Now GvG PvP, that I think could be worth looking into.

They know exactly what they are doing. Isolating gear paths is entirely to gate progression, in the same way that he only way you can get non-RNG gear is to play in their new daily/weekly mission board, which autoresets if you don't complete the content in the timeframe they dictate. Daily Login Rewards Galactic Seasons Daily/Weekly Mission Table 7.0 SWTOR is a mobile lobby game, not an MMO.

They don't care about achievements. If they did they never would have created Feats of Strength in the first place. They never would have reset the DvL event achievements back in the day.

The changes to daily/weekly quest design is going to create the same unhealthy relationship that conquest has today. I would say it is in fact making it worse since the mission goals are not only for currency and experience, but also for gear. Why do you think that you should control how many characters a players wants to run through any game loop cycle? Especially for solo and story players who tend to have more alts? This is removing player agency and is bad game design This is laughable and antithetical. You are literally bringing in a new daily/weekly mission board system that is going to actively promote the behavior that you are now trying to stem for Conquest. Players are going to be encouraged to log into multiple characters to complete mission board only as the most efficient gearing path, at the exclusion of any other ingame activity. In the same way they find the most efficient path to Tech Frags and Conquest Points today. Instead of taking a nuanced approach to creating fun game systems with intrinsic rewards, you seek to control the overambundance of extrinsic rewards you crowd into a content starved game.

They already got the feedback they wanted from the players that matter to them.