Yeah.. I'm all for having empathy, but right now I have no clue what we're being asked to empathize with.

I would be inclined to agree with a want/pass system. I think there's a lot to be said for Need/Greed/Pass in theory, but all that theory goes out of the window the moment not everyone is in the loop. I'm the only one in my guild who frequently pugs flashpoints, and generally I wait and see how others in my group behave before I decide on what to do, which in practice means that in pugs I Need for things I want and in guild runs I Greed for things I want. In the rare cases where my guild uses group finder to add a 4th, my guildies are surprised every time when they notice that the random is Needing. While my guild never booted everyone over that, I can imagine guilds that usually don't play with randoms are annoyed with someone Needing on everything. It all seems a bit arbitrary anyway. I have my own views on how people should roll, but just because I think so doesn't mean that anyone will, so then sticking to that just hinders myself.

You do not need to be on the mission for Coruscant and Dromund Kaas. The mission item is wrapped inside another item which you can pass to your other character. I'd argue that it's also not "totally random", as there appear to be a few general places in every location that it spawns, though not always at exactly the same space. A while ago I made this for someone else, based on the locations I'd recorded finding it myself. This is by no means complete, but may still be helpful. Edit: I have two more screens since making that last one, with one new spot.

There's plenty of examples of things that are/were/have been broken for years, but I didn't think this was one of them. That fight resetting used to be very common, but it had been fixed, at least mostly. I've not seen this fight reset in a long time. It's possible it broke again (if there's one thing I see here more than in other places, it's old bugs coming back) or maybe necromancer ran into a fluke incident, but it's been a long time since it reset almost every attempt.

Neither of the NA servers has had that few people on at any time of the day or night.

Well.. it may be a matter of practical experience, but it's not a 1:1 thing to translate one person's experience to the next. For instance.. using maximum ability queue time helps me compensate for latency some, especially on specs with lots of casts. I can sometimes see, within the time frame of my one-second queue, the game catching up with my input, and as long as I keep pressing what I know I should be pressing, instead of what the lag is trying to make me think I should be pressing, there's much less difference in performance compared to playing on a server with lower latency. But I've seen someone (that may have been TrixxieTriss) state that lowering ability queue time was essential to coping with high latency. Does that mean one of us is wrong? Or does that mean our different amounts of latency affect us differently? Or our play styles? On theorycrafter discord I've seen a recurring discussion about how much alacrity to use to compensate for latency, and there doesn't seem to be any one specific outcome to that either (except to experiment). So unfortunately I don't believe there is an absolute sort of answer to OP's question. Too many factors involved, and "latency" can refer to an infinitely large range of numbers.

The notion of swtor being a 'kotor3' or a 'kotor sequel' seems bizarre and distasteful to me. I'd long given up any real sense of hope, but part of me is still waiting for kotor3.

Some of us never left IRC.

I do like Brie Larson, but "A Jedi More Powerful Than Vader" and (as mentioned in the article) "her character established as being more powerful than Darth Vader and Rey combined" sound like fan fiction pitches, but are most likely nothing more and nothing less than click bait. How powerful any character in Star Wars is, is pretty meaningless anyway. The source article says "Vader has been touted as the strongest Jedi of all, before [..] Luke Skywalker [..] took over", but any major hero and any major villain in almost any comic and game (and possibly cartoon? I've not watched those much) displays considerably more power than any of the heroes and villains in at least the first six movies (even when they're the same character) simply by nature of the media in question. Power has been limited by technology a lot more than by writing. It's a storm in a teacup.

Seems to me like people giving a bunch of unneeded and unwanted advice, trying to press on even when it becomes clear that it's not needed or wanted, and then got hurt that their help was not appreciated. OP was not asking for help finding a good guild, but was confused about what happened. UlaVii and Dmnqwk provided the correct answer.

It's not different. The jumpy bit has always been there, regardless of faction.

Well if the station is placed next to a wall and has its animated 'front' facing away from the wall without entering any rotation value, you will absolutely be spawned behind it, inside/behind the wall. So I am a little skeptical of this, though I haven't seen for myself what happens when it's on a tile where the decoration faces 'inward' by default.

I managed to kill myself twice with this before I realized what was going on. It popped me through a wall with no floor on the other side. Bypassed the issue by rotating them to face walls, but it'd be nice if they functioned properly.

Well, I don't play the other games you mention, and.. I think "how much is one million credits worth" is kind of impossible to answer other than "one million credits" or "whatever you can buy for it", but.... at lvl75 earning a million credits via pure gameplay (meaning, not selling stuff on gtn) is a matter of hours at worst. It greatly depends on the kind of content you play (and the level of your character). but a million is quickly made nowadays.

"Okay, I'm back, so this game that you all have been enjoying while I was gone should change to match my needs, if it doesn't I will leave again and if you disagree then you're wrong." These changes won't happen. So.. bye, I guess.

I feel compelled to respond here, because for various reasons flashpoints became sort of 'my thing', the activity I easily sink most time in on a weekly basis. I also find the question difficult to answer, because.. well, for example, Hammer Station (the then-SM version) is where I learned the first steps of tanking, and that I liked tanking, and how paying attention allowed me to make life easier on my groups than other tanks made it on me. Now I go "ugh, Hammer Station again" because if I don't filter it out, it (MM, now) will easily pop 20-30 times a week for me. Also.. while I've been known to moan about certain FPs for sure, the fact that I play as many FPs as I do sort of reveals that I can secretly appreciate all of them. But don't tell anyone. In Master Mode (what I play the most) my current favorites are: Nathema - I like it more the further the FP progresses, non contest for 1st spot right now. Love the boss fights, except first maybe. Battle of Rishi - My favorite for a long time. Common theme here is perhaps 'mechanics that aren't complex but can't just be ignored'. Lost Island - Even when most groups can complete it fairly smoothly now, it has so many parts where an experienced player can make things go just that bit easier. (I guess that's a big thing with me, I will do guild runs, but 90% of what I play are pugs, and I get a kick out of how often I've contributed to an easy/smooth run, only to have 1-2 of the players say we just did what they've never succeeded at before) With a special mention to Manaan and Czerka Core Meltdown, which I mostly love to tank, because a tank can make first two bosses on those two so much easier on a group. I'm not a huge fan of Veteran Mode. I understand the reason why they became a thing, but I enjoy tanking and healing, and I largely feel irrelevant as tank or healer in Vets, unless it's a broken fight or the group is particularly clueless. I don't play them much outside of leveling, but I very much enjoy doing Battle of Rishi VM solo. Has good pacing. In Story Mode I don't think anything really sticks out for me. I'll play them when leveling or sometimes to churn achievements when they count, because I don't do Veteran very often. I can think of two (Umbara, Spirit) that stick out negatively to me, for different reasons, but I've had a good time on all of them, including those two.

It's still available from the vendor on Odessen that was mentioned in this very thread. Travel to Odessen, go east, take the elevator next to the Star Fortress instance, pick 'Alliance Staging Room', talk to 'Recovered Good Vendor'.

You are wrong and didn't seem to read the posts (mine and OP) very well at all. We both very clearly mentioned that this was not about the laser phases. That's the easy part. Edit: I've played this game for 8 years, and flashpoints I almost exclusively play Master Mode, but by the looks of it I still play Veteran Mode more than you. I will play Veteran while leveling or when helping guildies, I have very close to 100% FP achievements (Battle of Rishi bonus boss 25x taking me some more time to complete than other bosses..) and will not normally bother with Veteran Mode with capped characters, and playing 50 MM FPs in a week is not an exception for me, I know a thing or two about what I'm talking here. If you're on a character that only just meets the level requirement for Veteran Maelstrom, and you get targeted by his DoT a few seconds after the fight starts, you're probably already dead. If you do not know this, then either you don't play Veteran Modes or you're the kind that only plays them with lvl75s. That fight is an absolute mess. Not the laser phase, only the other parts.

Rivix seems like a potentially interesting addition to the cast, but I have some trouble seeing him as more than 'potentially anything' just yet. I suppose it's not just him, though. There's a lot of potential but not a lot of screen time out there. I guess we can always hope.

I've never been a fan of timed 'exclusive' rewards. There's people frustrated that they won't be able to get some manner of shiny anymore, and I want everyone to be able to get (be it a gift or a reward) the things they want if at all possible, but then when BW makes a lot of noise about bringing some fancy reward back and I already have it, that just makes it feel like the fact that I've been here all this time makes me... not matter enough to also get something. That's basically my opinion on the matter of exclusive/timed rewards as it was discussed on these forums not very long ago. The reason I bring it up now is because this system seems to overlap a lot with some of the suggested solutions. It's not what I would have gone with, but as long as they keep adding new stuff to it, and don't just rely on old rewards, then what they're doing is combining a solution for some of the frustrations regarding exclusive rewards with a system designed to keep people occupied with old content. I was already occupied with old content anyway, so.. I am cautiously optimistic about this system. I will have to see it in progress before I can be sure whether I like it, but getting shinies for playing the game while my friends that started playing later can finally get things they've wanted for years, it sounds like a nice idea to me.

I don't play Veteran Modes often enough to be able to offer more than gut feeling on this one, but there are instances where damage levels, especially on DoTs, do not make sense, for instance the HK-47 fight on False Emperor has a DoT that does about 20k damage on Master Mode and about 200k damage on Veteran. There are some more (boss) encounters (for which I don't have numbers, sadly) that feel like they've not been tuned properly. I'm thinking Taral V bonus boss, but also Cademimu with Champion class droids in Veteran that are only Elite class on Master, or even Hammer Station where Elite droids have stealth detection in Veteran but not in Master. I'd say Daksh is not the worst offender, but definitely one that doesn't seem tuned properly on Veteran. You can avoid a lot of the damage by breaking LoS once you see a sort of target reticule appear on you (outside of the laser/LoS-mechanic windows), but that's not always possible for melee, and even if you see it coming, if you're not already behind something or on top of a heal clicky, and don't have a useful defensive cooldown yet, it's too late. Definitely not tuned well for its level requirements.

As far as I can tell it wasn't initially bugged. I have the achievement, but a few friends who hadn't been there at the start can't get any progress, and one friend who did go there from the start but didn't actively try to get the achievements at the time is missing one step that he is now unable to complete. I assume it got broken somewhere along the way, and people that have it just got it before that point.

It was a pretty poor excuse for an event, and I hope it never comes back in that form. Would be nice if they brought back the rewards in some other manner.

Well.. I'm glad that the noise we made had an effect, but I'll hold the celebration till I see that it stays collapsed and doesn't open every time the character sheet opens, or even on relogs, or even every weekly reset on every character. I'd like to be more optimistic, but they haven't exactly earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to these sort of things.

Does spam report even do anything anymore? I've not gotten confirmation popups on spam report since the patch, and assumed it was broken, and that that's why the spam bots were becoming an issue again.