oh damn. i completely forgot about the first encounter of our characters with Valk... since, well... he didn't die that much. indeed there is one option where we can indeed claim murder. whether a court would count it as such is another matter. i mean your character can say they acted with malice but even so the judge could still consider it brought about by reasonable provocation. other then that the final fight (which is juridically very problematic since it wasn't physical) and the confrontation with Valyin the main problem i see here is that in both cases the killing was simply lawful (self defense). so whether there was malice involved or not just doesn't matter i think. furthermore there is also the problem that at some point the actions of the eternal empire imply a state of war (except for chapter 1). as such the imperial family all become enemy combatants and therefore killing them is anyway fully legal for as long as they don't capitulate thus impossibly a murder.

someone on twitter claimed his dark side character murdered a certain family. that made me wonder. it is possible to claim murder in all 4 cases - from a legal perspective? In 2/4 cases i can't see how you can do worse then just self defense kills no matter what. in 1/4 i am not sure if there is even an option to be made directly responsible for the death. the last one i haven't seen yet so i can't judge. so not much material for murder - and lets take British laws here as e.g. german concept of murder is insanely hard to fulfill. so yeah, looks like just a bold claim that cannot be backed up by facts. then again its twitter but admittedly, it's kind of hard to achieve murder against people that are trying much harder to murder you instead. it must be kind of funny for dark siders... against such opponents one owns evilness is always overshadowed and put to shame in comparison. i mean its hard to look evil at all.

just wondering if Command Crate rewards would be 'significantly' improved if the visual gear (i.e. the orange 8 rating stuff without any mods installed) we get from them could be added to existing CM collection items with some system of unlocking them if not the same as for cartel market gear (BoE entire set to unlock).

yes, LOL is a very good example where free players have access to nearly 100% of the content (depending how you count the visual stuff) and the game makes huge amounts of money. DOTA2, WoT and alike show that LOL is no weird exception but rather that restricting access to multiplayer through paywalls is counterproductive to your income. muliplayer thrives the most on the many-player aspect of it - literally. thus access restrictions are the ones that hit it the hardest. with lower player numbers the same content becomes much less fun - due to prolonged waiting in queues, inability to find a group at all at certain times, finding replacements when group members leave, frustration about frequent failures because when players have less chance to retry content they are less experienced with it, high chance of unbalanced teams due to mixing of noobs and pros in PvP, ... it all works like a chain reaction: the decreased fun in multiplayer due to low player numbers causes further player loss which in return reinforces the aspects mentioned above.

EA/BWA is now trying hard to force people into subscriptions but i doubt that it is effective. instead they should just give it up and focus on the F2P people that like certain aspects of a game. see, those that play solo and stay for themselves don't really help the game or the subscribers and i doubt most of them will ever sub. so focusing on them doesn't yield much. but those that like group content enough to play it should be fully enabled to do so because of the effects this has for subscribers. the core business model of games like WoT, LoL, DOTA2, ... is build around multiplayer without restricting F2Ps from anything relevant for the gameplay - and instead merely increasing grind. the same should be done for STWTOR for all group content. as for story and single player content i think that this shouldn't be locked away by a paywall - as it is now for all except the original class plots. as i have mentioned before i would just require the players to grind for it in order to unlock every next chapter - whereas it is instantly available to subscribers when they finish the prior story. for what i have learned from other games is the F2P players are astonishingly tolerant to grind. in the end one has to accept that the majority of F2P won't ever pay so trying to force them to do so cannot work. it doesn't mean that those players cannot be useful for the game and the community. but as it is now these players are kept nearly completely separated from subscribers which is plain stupid.

the credit cap is a stupid thing to try to force people to subscribe but instead i think it causes just a lot of players that ended their subscription just to leave completely. in the case that a normal f2p system would be implemented with regular reduced credit income rates (also to prevent botting) the cap would need to go obviously.

there are a lot of F2P games and other freely accessible forums out there and they manage. but true one requires quite a little more forum moderation as spam will happen. however, filtering those game accounts that never even reached level 10 should massively reduce that. a karma system could also come very handy in this context. but then again, the value and weight of feedback is somewhat reduced once subscribers become a minority. i am at least sure that BW/EA management will much easier disregard it. so maybe still limit access to some areas of the forums.

since my characters aren't on one of the high population servers queues can take some time off the peak hours. usually a weird phenomenon in a F2P game, but then again SWTOR isn't really one. and that's just plain stupid. the current business models just makes not much sense - considering that alternatives could profit everyone involved! so first of all BW needs to change their view of what F2P players are: no, they are not freeloaders and thus not enemies of devs. instead they can be made into service provides for people that actually pay: remove waiting time in queues and enable multiplayer content become more viable for a wider audience. there are a lot of games that already had immense success with that business model like WoT, LoL and many others. basically it means that F2P players shouldn't have any restrictions whatsoever to access multiplayer content - instead merely suffer reduced loot/drop/xp/credit rates for all activities in comparison to subscribers. therefore they would require to grind and thus play more - which makes queue times faster. what they don't need immediate access to is story content. that includes original class story lines (except the first few planets) and later KOTFE/ET but excludes planet plot lines. now that we have level sync this is perfectly fine since there isn't a problem to do them at a later point. therefore these players would need to progress their character mostly through multiplayer content. if BW also changed that their raids and harder multiplayer content such that random groups would become more viable for it (with less failing at the final boss because specific roles are required and randoms are too often all DPS) the vast majority of subscribers could enjoy a bigger variety of the content there is. i rarely had the chance to even play OPs because of that bad design. another restriction for F2P however should be that they shouldn't be able to specifically pick out individual group content. instead they should either be able to queue for e.g. all FPs or none. that restriction has the reason that subscribers can pick what they like and still have short queue times because those players that queue for all would be grouped with them. a perfect example where F2P players become service providers. as for nice visuals, there are some rewards in the game that have a chance of dropping nice looking gear (supply crates from heroics, command crates, ...). but obviously good looks aren't essential for the service F2P are supposed to provide. therefore these should be an explicit subscriber benefit and probably be also integrated into the collections system to underline this aspect even more. next point is that F2P does also come with problems like spam and alike. initially F2P should be severely restricted assuming they might be bots at first. but through normal playing and gaining levels these restrictions should be loosened. another good idea might be a karma system. F2P players that get enough positive ratings from (different) subscribers should be promoted to a better status (to prevent exploits the rating might ignore cases where 20 people rate one person down or up in a short amount of time). considering that if other players value such a player (for providing help, being friendly and competent or whatever) then this indicates they are important to keep as they might be a reason why some subscribers stay subscribed! besides that it would motive F2P to be on their best behavior while it would make fighting bots/trolls/griefers slightly easier. finally, F2P players should be able to earn access to (some) story content through grinding and if they aren't misbehaving. being rated very positively might however speed that up a little. so some might ask what would the point be to stay subscribed if one is free to take part in all multiplayer content and get best gear? well, story is a big selling point in a BW game for one. and obviously having to grind many times as much as a subscriber is a big motivation, too. (after all look how much forum outrage there was about too much girding). besides some big F2P titles have proven that subscriptions work very well in exactly such a model. however to be fair there is also a downside: if considerably more players start play the game the servers might become more leggy and unstable requiring a hardware update on BWs side.

just wondering how realistic that would be to reuse the areas from chapters and make them into FPs / OPs by removing most story cutscenes to replacing them with background narrator like in uprisings. then the major work left to do is be to make new scripts for all combat - preferably in a similar way as in uprisings (since regular FP mobs are dead boring) or even better: with randomized scripts and mob spawning behavior like in Left4Dead to make replaying less repetitive. mobs and bosses visuals could be reused as well however they would need additional mechanics added - not necessarily new ones though. ... so basically combat focused multiplayer chapters ...

neither does it fit the pretend narrative of the doomsayers. sorry, but from all data i can find available with sufficient history plus additional sources the situation is inconclusive. there are no sharp changes either way. there is just enough to say that there seems to be a slight population increase over the holidays (which is normal for all games) yet not as decisive as it was last year (patch 4.0). at best one can say that 5.0 didn't attract many more players then naturally would come in this time of year. apart from general stats however there might be a swap of population occurring with veterans leaving while new/solo player coming in netting in an overall stable population. this would at least explain some of the seemingly opposing claims several people posted here as their observation. but in any case this is pure speculation either way as there is no hard data available.

from what i can gather twitch statistics show rather a minor upwards shift for SWTOR but can't find long enough history data to make it a definitive statement

this is exactly my line of thinking. take away the gearing aspect and there is just hardly any fun left. people always complain about lack of new content but what content could BW possibly make that is fun to repeat after first play through (if taken by its own value without any rewards)? all the FPs and OPS play all the same to me... sure there is a little bit of specific mechanics here and there but it isn't enough to make it really feel different enough from the rest. well, at very least the new uprisings actually added something that feels remotely new since some fights require indeed a different more active approach then anything form the old content. i have a faint hope that old FPs and OPs could be updated to feature in parts something similar. in the further future i also hope BW starts to introduce RNG into uprising event scrips with player interaction changing how each run progresses. that would make them refreshing to replay. and if that works rework old content in the same manner and then extend it even to the open world...

most action-RPGs would count for that criteria. Diablo series and Path of Exile being among those i can name instantly. if not for the 8 players i would list the LoL and its family but yeah... further away from the genre there are some shooter games though i admit that i don't know many with a 8+ coop mode because i haven't looked for such. anyway although just for 4 players i'd list Left4Dead regardless as it is just a great example of a PvE multiplayer experience. i think Team Fortress2 has a coop mode for more players. not sure about Warframe coop player limit. Armored Warfare has a PvE mode AFAIK. there were actually also MMORPG/Shooter attempts like GlobalAgenda, Defiance or Firefall but those failed for various reasons (well, mostly for trying to be too much WoW). however, there are a few other games in development to fill the gap. there's of a lot of these survival/craft/builder games appeared since minecraft and arma3 dayz mod. i can't name the titles but if its something you like you find plenty of interesting options there. hmm, i guess you'd have to be more specific about the gameplay/genre you are looking for to be more concrete. there are soo many games out there that it's likely you find something for you. but yeah, as for star wars games with 8+ PvE mode there isn't that many options to SWTOR, true

sure, but i wonder, of all the MMOs out there why in heavens name would you pick a MMORPG to play with others? in the last few years a great many new games and concepts have appeared with focus on all possible aspects of multiplayer and all so much better made then this outdated stuff. what kind of multiplayer gameplay are you looking for that other games just don't do better?

there is no lack of content. we have more then enough. however, that content lacks a lot of replay value and that needs to be addressed. and no, whatever changes to the gearing system won't fix it! level sync is a small beginning but at least is allows to play most of the old content. but a lot more needs to be done. and it isn't entirely BWs fault as the entire MMORPG genre isn't any better. and as for story chapers: well, at least this is something that makes it worth playing SWTOR at all. i wouldn't dared to consider subbing if not for that.