Then set the scaling up so it's automatic in some conditions, and optional everywhere else. You turn your PvP flag on, you automatically get scaling along with it. You come within some defined range of a WB area, you get scaling turned on, with the same sort of ten-second warning you get now when you move into an opposite-faction zone that will set your PvP flag. Then make it optional everywhere else, and make turning off your scaling flag inconvenient -- you have to stay out of all combat for, say, five or ten minutes, similar to the restrictions on turning off your PvP flag. That way, if you want to help your friends with their lowbie characters, you can set the flag and play your high-level character with them without cutting off their XP, world bosses will return to being opponents that take a group to take down, and it will be harder for people to get their jollies ganking lowbies. It's not going to solve the problem of a high-level character running around an area denuding it of mobs and gathering nodes -- that's one of the problems of having a game that's mostly open-world content -- but it does give the benefits of scaling to the people who want/need it while allowing the people who don't want to be bothered with it mostly avoid it.

I can see where making it mandatory under certain conditions would be a good thing. If your PvP flag is set, you level-sync to the planet you're on; this makes it harder for the people whose measure of their personal self-worth is driven by how fast their level-60 character can gank your level-10 character to get their jollies. Even scaled, the higher-level character's gear is going to create an imbalance, but it's not going to be the current "I crush you, you fan me" exchange it is now. For the rest of the non-flashpoint content, make the flag voluntary, but make it impossible to toggle off quickly -- having to log out or not be in a combat situation and outside of any mission instance for ten minutes or so will keep people from flipping it on and off to abuse the content. If you want to do Master/Padawan RP with your high-level characters and the low-level characters in your guild, you can turn the flag on and go run their missions with them, and the characters who don't want to bother with the mobs on a planet and are just going back to get the datacrons they bypassed can do that, too. It sounds to me more like "You're not having fun the right way, so we're going to force you to have fun the right way, whether you want to or not". If the level-sync is optional, then if you want to help lowbies, you can turn it on and play that way. If it's mandatory, then when your Jedi Master or Dark Council member has to worry about the mobs they might run into on their starting planet that they struggled with as a Padawan or acolyte, how have you increased in power? Yes, you've got all of these abilities you didn't have as a lowbie that give you lots of different visuals for your attacks, but you're doing the same amounts of damage you did back then. At the San Diego Cantina Event, they said that the flashpoint scaling would reduce the stats on your gear by a factor determined by your level and the level that you're getting scaled to, so I would expect that it would work the same way for the planetary scaling. However, I hope -- probably futilely -- that the scaling is done on a component-by-component basis. Say you're level 50, and you're going back to a planet where your gear is scaled to 25% of what it would normally be. And you have another character who's actually at that level, so none of their gear is scaled. Both of them have level-10 Hawkeye crystals in their weapons and offhands, giving them +82 Power... except that the level-50 character, if the scaling is based just on your total stat values, is only getting +20 Power from their pair of level-10 crystals. If you have old upgrades -- low-level Augments that you slotted early in your character's career and didn't upgrade because it wasn't cost-effective in the middle levels -- they'll be scaled more than they should by their level. Or if you've got level-35 implants or earpiece because you never bothered to upgrade them, they'll get more heavily reduced than they would by their level relative to your synced level would require. But, I'm afraid that Bioware will take the cheap, fast, and easy solution; it takes much less computation and coding to just look at the character's final stats and apply a single divisor based on the player's level and the synced level than it would be to go through each component and scale them based on the component's level and the synced level, and then sum them up to get the character's scaled stats.

When your level-capped Inquisitor goes back to Korriban, a Darth sitting on the Dark Council, one of the most powerful Sith Lords in the Galaxy, and can't afford to stand in the middle of a pile of trash mobs that an acolyte could defeat because you've been level-synced down to the point where they can actually hit and hurt you significantly, something is screwed up.

This one's easy to address. You turn on the PvP flag, it automatically level-syncs you to the planet while your PvP flag is on. When your PvP flag is off, the state of your level-sync flag is up to you. Put it under the same sort of conditions that the PvP flag is -- you can turn it on any time you want, but in order to turn it off, you have to refrain from any combat activity for a period of time, or possibly be logged out for a period of time. But make it optional, rather than deciding that being forced down to a level appropriate to each planet is the "One True Way™" to have fun, and requiring everyone to have fun that way.

From what I can see, mandatory level scaling is Bioware saying "Running outleveled content isn't having fun the way we want you to have fun, so we're going to change the game to force you to have fun our way." You had to group up to do flashpoints, but you could wait and outlevel them, then go back and run them solo if you wanted to experience the content without having to collect a group. But there were flashpoints that you had to do to progress in the story line, so in order to prevent people from getting hung up trying to find a group, they created the solo mode, where you got a godbot and were bolstered so that it didn't matter how badly geared you were, you could just blow through the content without a real challenge. Now they intend to scale you down to an appropriate level for the content, so that if you want to do a flashpoint, you'll need a group again... except that there's going to be a solo mode where you get a godbot that will, just as if you ran the flashpoint at your actual level, trivialize the content. Except that you'll get XP and drops that you can use. Whee. Your character is a Darth on the Dark Council, one of the most powerful Sith Lords in the galaxy... but when you go back to Korriban, you'd find yourself having to work to defeat the same mobs you fought when you were an acolyte. Sure, you've got the high-level abilities you gained as you leveled, but they're all scaled, too, so you're not doing any more damage with them; you've just got a bunch of different visuals to do the same level of damage with. You never get a feeling of becoming more powerful, because you're not allowed to advance in power past a certain point on each planet to keep that planet's content a 'challenge'. You'll never be able to go back to Balmorra and take out your frustrations on the Colicoids that gave you so much trouble when you were there the first time by raining lightning down on them and watching them die like flies, flailing uselessly at your protections holding them at bay. Level scaling is a good idea; it allows players to take their high-level characters and play with their friends' low-level characters if that's what they want to do. Forcing it down everyone's throats all the time because playing that way is the One True Way™ to have fun isn't. If you're never going to be able to feel that you've gotten enormously more powerful/capable than you were when you started, there's no real reason to leave your starting planet; you might as well just skate around street-sweeping, because you'll never feel more powerful against the mobs on any given planet than you will be when you hit the level-scaling point for that planet.

A bit necroposty, but I just got one as a drop from a tonitran (the raptor-like reptiloids) on Rishi, so they appear to be just down in the low-probability end of the blue item drop table.

To address that, there would need to be some sort of 'bound' status for 'active' decorations so that they would only work for a character in the same legacy as the owner of the stronghold, or require actually possessing a key to that stronghold; either would allow the owner of the stronghold and people they pick to access the datacrons, it would prevent a publicly-accessible stronghold from becoming the 'go-to' location to grab all the stat bonuses. While this does create the opportunity to make additional 'live' decorations (exits to specific planets, for example) that didn't become causeways of abuse, backloading the code to support it would be a major undertaking.

Given that there are an almost endless number of ways to mix and match items from different armor sets to build outfits, and having to destroy the unwanted pieces of sets after you've pulled copies of five different sets to assemble an outfit whose appearance you liked, would it be possible to get a 'place a copy of this item into your inventory on the individual item panes in the lower part of the 'Inspect Item' window for the set, so you could just grab the individual pieces you wanted, rather than having to grab a full set to get one piece you wanted?

Bastion and Begeren Colony connect right off, but Harbinger is still Tango Uniform.

The 186 basic comm gear for Troopers has an offhand generator in the Yavin Boltblaster gear set for DPS Commandos. However, the 186 basic comm gear for Bounty Hunters also has an offhand generator in the Yavin Boltblaster gear set for DPS Mercenaries, even though Mercenaries have dual pistols, and can't use a generator. In order to get an offhand pistol, it's necessary to pick the offhand pistol from the Yavin Med-Tech set, which is inefficiently statted for DPS. In order to get a properly-slotted offhand pistol, it's necessary to buy the Med-Tech's pistol, then buy another piece to rip its mod and enhancement out to put in the offhand pistol, or buy the correct mod and enhancement off the GTN. If we are supposed to be able to get a full set of gear with Basic comms from the level 60 vendor, regardless of class, then the vendors should sell all the pieces that a character needs to make a full set -- the vendor for Bounty Hunters should sell an offhand pistol under the Yavin Boltblaster set, for example. If this means that the vendors, between sides, share an inventory and would offer an offhand pistol Pubside under the Yavin Boltblaster set, then all it takes up is space in the item listing. It eliminates the imbalance and favoritism of offering Commandos a well-slotted offhand while offering Mercenaries only an offhand they can't use or an inefficently-slotted offhand that takes additional credits or comms to fix. And if the same imbalance exists at higher tiers of gear, they should be corrected, too, as well as any similar inconvenience for Agents and Smugglers.

And that's why you cheat. Add a 'base name' string field and an integer field to the database of schematics, and give each item a value based on its position in the tree of upgraded schematics. You have the green schematic for a pair of boots; it gets the index 0 (actually '000', but zero works). The blue Fervor schematic gets an index of 10, Expert gets the index of 20, Veracity gets the index of 30. REing an Expert schematic will give you a purple Hawkeye (24), Vehemence (25), or Expert (26) schematic. The default sort would then be on the base name -- so all the schematics derived from this green schematic would be grouped together -- and then by the sequence integer within the base name, so you'd have Boots, then Fervor Boots, then Fervor Boots, then Supremacy Boots, then Endowment Boots, then Expert Boots, Hawkeye Boots, Vehemence Boots, Expert Boots, etc.

After choking three times -- twice trying to interrupt the annihilation attack, and once to being unable to get out of its way fast enough, I pulled out Lord Scourge, who was still in his starting gear, and sent him in first, switching out of tank stance myself. He went down, but not before we were able to beat the droid down enough that I could finish him. He probably would have stayed up if I'd taken the time to gear him out first.

When you try to climb onto your mount (speeder, lizard, tauntaun, etc.) while your character is still doing the animation for getting out of a taxi, you get a message like "Can't do this while moving." Now that the perk to activate your mount while moving exists, this sounds wrong, because you can activate your mount while moving everywhere except that one case. Rather than change the way getting out of a taxi works, which would be a coding change, I would like to suggest that the error message be changed to "Can't do this while dismounting", which leaves the existing prohibition in place in the mechanics and makes it clearer that getting out of a taxi is different from running around as far as jumping on your speeder.

Seriously? "The Conict Rises on Rishi"? Is there a proofreader in the house?

You can just as well ask which people were bragging about having vaults and vaults full of Jawa Junk from the slot machines.

And, for both sides, I'm reminded of Heinlein's statement "There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit."

Actually, the 50% point -- the expenditure that would give you a 50% chance of having won a walker somewhere in that string -- is 51,985,500 credits. At 69,314 plays, the odds of you having failed to get a mount is 50%. Although even at 100,000 plays, you still have more than a 1 in 3 chance of not getting a mount (36.788%), and at 200,000 plays you still have about a 13.5% chance to have not won a mount yet.

From what I've seen, the vast majority of it appears to be that every NPC that sends you email with a commendation reward (i.e., Duke Organa) for completing their missions sends you a planetary commendation. Which should be easy enough to fix; that should be a search-and-replace on the attachment item ID value.

There is also a bug with the 'Planter: Rishi Palm Tree (Medium)' decoration; you can buy them from the decoration vendor, but when you use the decoration item, what unlocks is the 'Planter: Yavin Jungle Fern' decoration.

I found an entertaining bug with Tatooine and Strongholds that I'm surprised made it off the PTS without someone complaining about, considering how easy it is to find. When you exit from a Stronghold to the planet that stronghold is on, you arrive at the stronghold board for that planet, where you can purchase a Stronghold, travel to one of your Strongholds, or review and travel to one of the public Strongholds. Except Tatooine. On Tatooine, the stronghold boards -- both Republic and Imperial -- is placed just inside the entrance to the Anchorhead and Mos Ila spaceports, respectively. All spaceports have a property set that makes you unable to travel to a stronghold from the spaceport. This makes the Tatooine stronghold boards completely useless for reviewing and traveling to public strongholds, as well as for purchasing, then traveling to, a stronghold of your own. The stronghold boards should either be moved _outside_ the spaceport, or have the property prohibiting stronghold travel removed from the entrance of the starport.

That one's good, but for sheer incongruity, I have yet to find something that beats the scene at the end of the Sith Inquisitor class line on Tatooine, when I picked the 'Surprise!' conversation choice with my female dark Sith Sorceror when she meets with Casey Rix in her hangar, and in the most cloyingly chirpy tone I've heard in the game, she says "I brought Andronikus back!" (caught in , not mine)

What you get is the appropriate station for your selected crafting skill -- the same one that's by the trainer for that skill on the fleet; if you set your character up with only mission/gathering skills, they won't get a crafting station in their ship. That said, creating a set of decorations for the crafting stations and automatically giving each character with a crafting skill one of the appropriate decoration, with more craftable from, say, one grade 2 or 3 Industrial Prefab.

I don't think that it was ever brought up in any of the preview videos or the intro missions that the strongholds would have more hooks than you could place decorations into, so that even when you got a fully-unlocked stronghold to 100% there would be empty hooks. Having a notification to this effect mentioning that this was done to create additional originality and variation from one stronghold to another would have been useful.

Most of the directions I've seen have you out by one of the moisture vaporators, but you can also get it from the balcony, although it's a lot more finicky with the extra range. While standing on the balcony a little right of center, look out a little right of the larger vaporator (see this image, which shows the aim point); you'll need to wiggle your macrobinoculars around a bit to get a 'hit'. Once you do, you can zoom in on the droid.

The datacron decorations are blue-quality items, so you could theoretically get them from any mob that drops a blue item. That said, it appears that the Champion-grade mobs inside instanced flashpoints, and particularly any Champion-grade mob that you 'unlock' by completing a bonus requirement (i.e. the double power-reroute in Esseles) has a higher chance to drop them than a Champion-grade mob that you can find outside of an instance, even a heroic area -- if you can get into the area with the Champion without having to have the heroic mission, the mob appears to run off the open-world drop tables, not the instanced bonus-champion drop tables. Also, it looks as if you can't get a decoration drop from any mob that drops a mission-requirement item (a gold drop); if they drop a gold item, that's all they drop.