I'm slowing down, though. It used to be I'd have saddled up my white charger and ridden him down, verbally. Thus doth age betray us all.

Even when the level cap was 65 they didn't drop for me. As I recall, if they ever dropped it was super rare. I suppose someone must have some, but not many.

Awesome. (I gotta wonder if this is one reason we don't have "appearance designer for weapons." I kinda hope that turned out to be technically possible with this rebuild)

Man, I was *just* getting used to "Force Pull into Phantom Stride" for opening, too. Hope they fix this. ETA: File a bug report in game as well; I will the next time I'm on a character it matters for.

What do you want to do with it? I literally put a million credit sin my legacy bank today, maybe a day or two worth of "work" from a couple characters., that prior to 4.x would have been maybe a hundred K.

Empire attacks a jedi fortress, republic defends. We know that from teh blurb. So at least ostensibly factionalized.

Weapon Appearance Chooser is on the table, if not on the roadmap.

FPs stopped dropping their gear with 4.x Allegedly the models are still available, but it's a pretty threadbare claim for some of the models. Some are in alliance crates, some are still craftable, so are world drops. They might not be moddable shells, though, because of outfit designer.

So don't do a minimum run? Kill everything that moves in an instance, etc. If you have to go nail NPCs outside the heroic zones, that's usually even quicker than doing so in them.

How often do you need to do more than the planetary heroics to get rampage goals, though? Every time I've bothered to do them, I've beaten the rampage goals before I've run out of "things to do" on planet. I mean, I haven't been efficient about running the heroics, but I haven't needed to go very far out of my way, either.

The DvL mechanic in current SWTOR should have been a separate meter, if one was needed, or simply a switch. It's not important enough to have hijacked one of the prime differentiators of SWTOR - that Choices Matter. I've white knighted before, but this is a hill I will die on in my anger at the devs for doing something.

The stupidest thin to come out of the studio recently from a story perspective was driving people to Light V or Dark V by putting alignment changes on basically every action. It doesn't separate RP from mechanics, because it SWAMPS RP with mechanics.

The worst that's going to happen there is that Belgium tells EA to quit it instead of EA choosing to, and gamers with Belgian IPs and billing addresses can't get loot drops any more.

"There will be consequences" from your choice at Iokath and after Nathema. That's all we've been told.

It still has to make the changes on the back end - a horrible mess of interlocking dependencies. If this was a clean-sheet design, no problem. Approaching a decade of overlapping design decisions and layers of cruft that was never designed in from the beginning, and is provably fragile? Not worth the effort.

Back end tools on a test server for the use of playtesting are not going to be suitable for exposing to the customer base; at least some of whom will be looking to use them maliciously. I'd be a lot less negative on the whole idea if we didn't already know the flags database is complex and prone to bugs; or if any kind of customer-facing tool for this was built in from the beginning (as it apparently was for ME2).

They pay me approximately $10 a year or so (I forget the exact amount since I did the math) because I use a 2FA token on my account. I'm in technical customer service, and I'm not cheap to pay (well, I wasn't when I was answering calls and I became more expensive when I was the guy that fixes the tickets the front-line reps put in; I'm even more expensive when my job is "don't make the customer make the call in the first place" as a systems engineer). Reducing the number of people who call in to those front-line techs before they call in is my #1 job today. (Not that it matters, but I worked on an MMO a long time ago. It failed to launch, and I was doing "zone development" not engine programming, so it's not very relevant to the SWTOR experience.) Coding a hobby game in Unity when you are the only one working on it and nobody else ever has is indeed a trivial exercise. It's also not what the topic at hand is. It can be done. It's also nastily harder than it looks (especially if you're comparing it to a Unity hobby project), and will benefit a fraction of the player base at the potential cost of breaking everyone's experience. Better for them to direct their resources to new projects. (I've been very wrong about studio priorities before, though. Look through my posting history and I swore up and down they'd never put in difficulty sliders for story content - then they did for Chapters. I could weasel out and say "but they didn't for Vanilla Content, this was developed alongside the major changes in 4.x" but they still did it when I didn't think they would. So I too am mortal.)

A) Customer service costs them a LOT of money for each call And b) they couldn't do a darn thing about my character with two copies of the ship droid. Game flag databases, in particular this one, are NOT simple; and we've had more than ample evidence that this one in particular has some nasty unpredictable behavior in it. Could it be done? I didn't say no. I said it can't be economically done. To be obnoxious - this^^

In game, at least one devaronian has no issues dating outside his species (ahem).

There's a pre-4.x article on how to maximize credit income by doing dailies. It includes the old Ilum dailies (RIP) and the staged Makeb Weekly (unrecognizable) but is a worthwhile read for the other daily zones, and the theory is still applicable. I can't find it right now, though. Daily missions on Iokath drop CXP consumables. They're small (even smaller than the ones from solo FPs), but they drop reliably. Bonus missions are where the credits are in heroics. So keep your goals in mind. Also, never pass up an opportunity to do in an Elite. There's an Imp heroic zone on Alderaan that's crawling with them, for example, and Alderaan is low enough level that you can still go through them pretty quickly on a level cap character. KotFE Chapter 2 is still pretty decent for time to CXP ratio, though it's been nerfed heavily from its glory days.

Any playable race has to: speak Basic, have facial expressions, and be lore-capable of romancing humans or near-humans. For the sake of cutscenes they also have to be able to fit in chairs, beds, and any other place you can put a PC in a cutscene or in-engine. I don't think the Nautolans fail any of these, so they're at least possible.

I run SWTOR acceptably on a Surface Pro 4 (though the graphics settings are pretty low). Not that I'm recommending one (it's not a cheap machine), but it has a terrible GPU and still works.

I'm not sure I follow; but I compressed my argument a tad as well. I did a bit more research into the ME tools available, and it looks like the biggest difference is that for the jump from ME1 to ME2, the "character import" was originally done by a "checkbox" system rather than by directly importing saves, so the capability was built in from the beginning. This was not the case for SWTOR. Designed from the beginning makes things way easier than bolt on afterwards. But my particular point the support options is that "messing with character database flags" is an inherently risky business. In a single-player "buy once and done" game, you can simply say "this is not supported behavior, if it breaks, you're on your own." In SWTOR, which is an MMO with a subscription, they can't get away with telling someone "oh, your character is boned start over." FInal note, as to the fragility of the character flags database in SWTOR. I was shipping stuff around last night because I just started up a new character, and almost every item (including stuff crafted by my characters or others, and CM items) got that silly "are you sure you want to mail this, it might prevent trading between eligible characters" pop-up you get now. This is an indication that the devs don't really trust the flags database any more; even for something so trivial as "is this an item that came from group activity and the bind timer hasn't expired." There's other minor bugs you can trip over from time to time that indicate the flags database is not in as good a shape as it ought to be. The one that stares me in the face on every character I've started KotFE with is the "unavailable companions" section that lists Treek; even though there's another perfectly good copy up in my Other Companions section. Usually there's a couple others, but Treek is always there. They chose not to do an interface for the Token 60s when they were developed, going back and doing so now would be fraught with danger.

Also, the Citadel website doesn't have to work. If something gets broken by it, they can tell you "shrug, start over." Doesn't work that way in SWTOR.

Short-form? Because the story flag database is a hot mess because of decisions made going back to when development started in 2010 or so. Because the story flag database for SWTOR is immensely more complex that Dragon Age or Mass Effect, because it supports the eight storylines, etc. This is a heck of a lot more complicated than the Citadel website.