Well.. one could argue that it's only a bad decision being made if it doesn't work. Not like they would tell us, of course.. but.. take the social bar turned advertisement bar that many people, myself included, were (are) not at all happy with. I am still frustrated that I have to close that thing 20-50 times a week, and that I still have to drag it to the place I had the social bar now and then, but it's not something worth canceling my subscription over. I imagine it's not for most people that were/are unhappy with it. Now what if it actually resulted in a measurable increase in CM browsing, or even in CM sales? To the powers that be that may sound like the perfect reason to decide on implementing more loud and in-your-face UI elements. If this now results in a higher percentage of players clicking the shiny credit sink buttons, while all the complaining players keep spending what they'd otherwise be spending, then they may very well consider this an utterly fantastic decision. We may also be seeing more of this kind of thing before long.

You probably wouldn't. But it's also not relevant. If you can click it away, then everyone can click it away. They don't want everyone to click it away, they want everyone to be reminded of the shiny credit sink.

Star Wars was, more or less, why I caved and gave this game a try when my brother asked me to come play it with him and his girlfriend. They're long gone, I'm still here.. but honestly this game has never felt like Star Wars to me, and so these kinds of questions (and most of the responses) sound weird to me. Maybe it's because I'd never been into anything besides the movies--that is, before kotor, but while I loved that game, it also didn't feel like Star Wars to me. Lightsabers.. Force.. but.. they were nothing like the movies that I grew up with, the entire approach is so radically different, it's like comparing the wild west with the zombie apocalypse because they both happen to take place on the same planet. Space Barbie and classes/specs that allow me to feel awesome while fighting stuff are why I'm still here.

I recall they made a bunch of changes to a stronghold based on PTS feedback. Sadly it appears to be a major exception that I can remember. Part of the problem, as we perceive it (part.. because it doesn't account for the actual bugs that make it to live), is that when they do something unpopular for a reason, us not liking the end result doesn't take away their reason, doesn't make them inclined to change it. In the case of the amp panel, people are now asking for it to be able to collapse, but while there have been additional tweaks, as far as the UI goes that would bring it back to where it was before. If I were to guess at reasons for the change.. then the most obvious one would be that they felt not enough people were making use of their shiny credit sink, and having that panel always open makes sure that nobody can miss it. Whatever reasons we have for disliking it would not change this. Their priorities are not the same as our priorities.

I can just see them respond to this by making it possible to collapse it.. but having to do it again on every login--or perhaps even every time the character sheet is opened. This isn't exactly an accident anymore. They want things to be in our face and are not being subtle about it.

Datacron decos have absolutely still dropped for me on 75s, but only extremely rarely anymore. My impression was that it was companion gifts that screwed it up. Blue-quality planetary drop was almost always a datacron deco, now it's usually a gift. @OP, the only thing I really don't agree with is that the deco interface is "not bad", it's absolutely horrid. I ended up focusing mostly on a guild stronghold, at least once I could get one deco for myself and then keep buying it for the guild for a set price. I remember utter frustration at one point for being unable to afford a single trash bin, while I wanted quite a few of them. Expensive centerpieces I could understand, and it's not actually quite as bad as it used to be, in my opinion, but not being well-off in the real world shouldn't mean only having cardboard boxes available to sit on in the game, so to speak.

If we wouldn't be having this argument if "people were getting their nuts kicked in on Taris at level 75", that doesn't prove that these matters are tied together, it proves that people are complaining about the wrong thing.

Yeah. I dunno. I've got a sort of hate-love-hate-hate-hate-love-hate thing going. Sometimes he amuses me. Like with this link.

Yeah, I wouldn't be getting my hopes up. It's admittedly unusual that swtor even gets mentioned, but they always find a new shiny to pour the brunt of their resources into, and this won't be any different. If something does change for the better, we'll notice when it happens.

It seems to me like difficulty is being conflated with speed. Faster leveling is not responsible for the game having become as easy as it is now. Taking longer to level a character is not what adds challenge to the process, only time. I don't much care about the challenge aspect. I play the stories for the stories, but have seen plenty of threads come by about the game being too easy or too hard. It's something I don't feel strongly about either way. The time factor, though. I would absolutely not ever want to go back to how long it used to take. I thought it was tedious on my first character, and then having to do every single tiny side-quest on every single character after that was not something I ever considered fun. I can now enjoy the class stories and pick up the extra bits that I like along the way. The faster leveling is one of the best things that could have happened to the game.

Both this Desler and the hat dropped on Oricon are Legacy-bound, for what it's worth. In general it's something to consider, I suppose.

Nope, using one and then the other on a single target encounter will only result in the debuff being refreshed.

The point would be that they didn't set out to change the rakghoul relics, they made a global change to how clicky relics work. Not that this makes it any better, but you asked for the logic behind the change, so it's relevant to know what the change actually was. Rakghoul relics becoming useless was an oversight, not a decision.

Underwhelming to the point of being insulting, and horrible character sheet changes on top of it. Can we just skip this update maybe?

Well.. people are buying and people are selling. I make most of my credits from selling, so that's the most direct response to your question. People do buy. It's hard to be more helpful because you provide no details. Some items are definitely much harder to sell than others. Some Low-Demand/Low-Supply items may be slow to sell but can still make you a lot when they do sell. You might be listing for too high, or there might not be a lot of demand for the specific items you're trying to sell, or you might have unrealistic expectations from how fast items move. I can't tell if any of those are the case based on what you've shared, but they're a few possibilities that came to mind.

I'm just going to quote myself from another thread.

It happens in several places in many flashpoints, presumably a pathing issue. Enemies will not follow beyond those points either. If you walk far enough, your companion will pop back at you. If you want them with you right away, you can dismiss and summon again. Not being able to summon a new droid is a separate issue. I've seen it, but I do not know what causes it.

As for the Star Fortress.. I ran them together with someone a lot, some years ago, not much recently, but even back then there was a (very rare) possibility of the layout getting sufficiently mucked up that it didn't seem to make sense, seemed broken. I had figured this to be the result of the way Star Fortress layouts are randomized, a sort of messed up result rare enough to have slipped through. I don't know if what you saw is that, but that's what it made me think of. I don't play enough Uprisings to comment on those. The guild roster thing is something I've seen in large guilds for years, but only very rarely in small guilds. I think maybe for some time it may have been fixed and it came back, or I may have been lucky for a while, but it's not new, at any rate, just not usually a thing for small guilds. I have seen it in my ~100-character guild, a handful of times, but regularly in the large guilds I'm in for conquest. My suspicion is that you experienced a bit of a fluke situation where you ran into various (semi-)rare bugs in a short amount of time, making it seem like something happened recently. I can't be sure, of course.

They'll show up in your inventory and you'll be able to use them the next week. Edit: Up to the cap of the next week, of course. In the past I've farmed all the reputation tokens needed to max out Gree reputation inside one Gree event, and I spent weeks using up the tokens afterwards. Some time ago they changed things up a bit, making the tokens consume automatically when you receive them, and initially this also happened at reputation cap, but they adjusted it since to only auto-consume if you'd normally be able to consume the token at that time. If you're at a weekly cap or totally maxed out, the tokens stay in your inventory. My most recent personal experience with this comes from completing Onderon reputation a few weeks ago. At some point I hit the weekly cap, and I was able to use the tokens I got after that the next week.

Err.. no.. that's not normal at all? I mean, what are you talking about? Strength of trash or relative strength of trash? There is not a single other Story mode where the trash is the same as in Veteran mode, not one. Many even have lower 'classes', like Elites instead of Champions or Strongs instead of elites. In Spirit they're not similar, not 'also kinda strong', they are exactly the same as in Veteran, and that is not normal, and explains the discrepancy between this FP and others quite well. Edit: Random example. Very first Strong enemy on Umbara Story has 10k hp. That same one on Umbara Vet has 85k hp. Edit2: I was getting so frustrated with trying to figure out how to respond to a factually incorrect post without resorting to unsupported claims myself and without going by every Story and Veteran FP to gather evidence, which I did not at all feel like doing, that I maybe came on a little too strongly there, removing that.

So.. I've made comments about this FP based on how playing it in Story and Master modes felt, but I wanted to actually have some hard numbers to judge the situation by. I've yet to check in Master, it's not popped for me since I decided to do this, but I think comparing Story with Veteran is already pretty telling. (I have not played the story-solo mode, or whatever it's called when you do it as part of the ongoing story, but I'm operating under the assumption that the enemies in there are the same as in the version on the solo tab. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) Most bosses in the flashpoint have 575k HP on Story and 3.1m on Veteran. The final boss has 1m on Story and 4.8m on Veteran.. so.. roughly five times more HP for Veteran bosses (I forgot to check HP for bonus boss on Vet). I wanted that as a reference, though I did not feel that boss health was a problem at all. My feeling was that it was the trash that was the problem, because of how much longer it took me to churn through trash on Story than with groups on other modes, combined with the fact that the bosses people seem to struggle with most are the ones surrounded by trash. Now.. I was making this nice list of HP values for trash enemies I encountered in Story mode, and then I went into Veteran with a friend so I could take my time checking them there.. except.. it didn't take me long to figure out that they were all exactly the same. Story trash has exactly the same health as Veteran trash, while the bosses have roughly a fifth of the health. It seems to me like they forgot to scale them down.

I think 'smart' is not exactly the right word. Enemies are just as likely to run into your AoE as they are to move out of it. They just move when an AoE is detected, which may very well be along pre-determined paths. If the latter is the case, it wouldn't be something that could be applied to companions. Not saying that this can't use some attention, but it's not really a fair comparison like that.

Hmm. I recently found a usb drive that I appear to have lost in 2010, which contains a bunch of stories and ideas for stories that I'd been working on at the time. It felt like finding treasure. I'm currently trying to determine how much of it I can salvage, so I can see myself doing a lot of writing this year. Short stories primarily. Then there's a potential project that I'm not at all certain about yet, but which may be sufficiently interesting to share. My keyboard is deteriorating. The 'z' and 'x' keys aren't very responsive, and the 's' is beginning to go too, but after having checked out literally hundreds of keyboards online, I find that none meet my requirements. All of them feel like a step back from the keyboard I have now (unresponsive keys aside), and they don't make my current one anymore. So I've started looking into the possibility of building my own. I've never done something like this before, but there do appear to be plenty examples online of people having done/tried it, so I'm checking out those examples, and perhaps some time this year.. or next year.. I will be playing swtor on a unique keyboard. Because.. you know.. playing swtor is going to be my primary 2021 theme.

The difficulty curve is definitely not helpful in any way. I've played this game a long time and have learned a lot over the years--this game being my first meaningful MMO experience--but the first steps I took prepared me for the later steps. Not so with on-rails space missions. It goes right from stupidly easy to stupidly hard, with the provided incentive for learning to do the hardest missions being incredibly thin. Sadly it seems highly unlikely to me that this part of the game is going to get any kind of attention anymore, so what we've got is what we've got to deal with.

I am not familiar with the character in question, but 'ditz' made me think smuggler too. Aside from that.. Imperials spend a whole lot more time fighting each other than fighting the Republic, with light side being a 'for the good of the empire' approach. I wouldn't really see a light Agent as a villain, though there's not really a lot of ditz either..