Poorly. There's not a shortage of queue time with groups absent from the queue. In terms of lopsided disasters of matches the presence of one better than average player is all it takes. If the matchmaker would consistently split high matches played/well geared characters fairly evenly between teams, that would make some improvement, but unfortunately it's quite happy to lump globs of players that ought to be on opposite teams together even when they're not grouped. It's a routine occurrence.

First of all, "in a working matchmaker" requires a working matchmaker. Which we don't have as far as team balance goes. Secondly, from the player experience and overall population standpoint, a half pro and half scrub team is not likely to be a good match. People like to win. If you give a player a "fairness knob" to turn, and ask them to adjust it so that the game is "fair" expect them to keep turning it until they're winning 80% to 90% of the time. Because they're not really after fairness, they're after dopamine release in their brain. The player-emotionally correct ratio of wins to losses is: just enough losses so that you can fool yourself into believing that your personal skill is the primary determinant of victory. So a kiddie pool isn't as good as PvE, because real players will feel that losing half the time is excessive, whereas a scripted object doesn't care at all if it gets obliterated 90 times in a row. Still, it's better than the general queue, because aside from losing an "excessive" amount with a 50% win rate, a new player can also generally tell if the victory had nothing to do with their contribution, or happened in spite of their presence. That's discouraging. In a kiddie pool environment, the new player's play is just as bad, but since everyone else's is also just as bad, if they make any useful contribution at all it's likely to be a meaningful contribution. In principle I believe GSF has, or at least at one point had, a limited kiddie pool system, in that for some condition like "matches played less than x", it was supposed to preferentially form matches with just players meeting that "new player" criteria. Not sure if it still exists, not sure if there's the population for it to still work, as Bioware strongly subscribed to the, "any match, no matter how horrendously bad, is better than no match," philosophy and even back then if there was too much of a pause between matches it would dump the kiddie pool players into the shark tank, but there was a clear qualitative difference in the noob only matches. Also it was a total disaster with even a single competent player mistakenly being put in the pool (I got to experience this a few times when creating new legacies on EU servers back many years ago). Which shows the chief problem with kiddie pools, by the time a player knows enough to be safely out of the kiddie pool, a player is way too advanced to be allowed in the kiddie pool. There's no good place to draw the line on skill, just less bad places to draw it. Says the person accusing others of coming up with a GSF licensing scheme when they are in fact the first person to bring up a license scheme in the thread. 🙄 A GSF license is actually a pretty good idea though, now that you bring it up. Lots of racing games work that way. The problem is that it absolutely wouldn't work going off of player stats in PvP matches. Or at least not without a GSF player population hundreds or thousands of times bigger than it currently is. There aren't enough people in any particular skill strata to make the skill spread in any given match be narrow enough. It would have to be based on PvE GSF content, that's unfortunately extremely unlikely to happen. How is having an "unlicenced" player pool and a "licensed" player pool fundamentally different from having solo and group queues? Either way you're classifying players and grouping like classification with like classification. Based on experience I can tell you that if encountering a skilled premade, player skill on the opposing team is much much more predictive of competitiveness of match than group status of the teams. If there's a team with 4 solo aces playing against a team with 4 grouped aces, the group status is basically meaningless. For your desired outcomes, skill based segregation is far more effective than social habits based segregation, and a license scheme would be a skill based segregation. Your license idea, which you appear to hate, is actually one of the best solutions proposed so far in this thread. Still problematic, but it has some fundamental merits. I'm more optimistic than Sriia is on the possibility of improved matchmaking. As in technically feasible, not likelyhood that Devs will ever do anything about it. Personally I think that there's a fair bit of space to improve matchmaking. There are tracked GSF match stats that correlate very strongly to skill, for example accuracy (yeah, you have to pull out gunships as a separate group, but that's not that hard as per ship stats are tracked), average damage, average kills, average assists, win rate. Things that correlate better than matches played or ship gearing status. So the player sorting probably has scope to be improved. More important though, is you could add a team balancing step after teams are pulled out of the queue to make a match. A look at: with this sub-pool of already selected groups of players (solo being a group of 1), is there a better way to balance the teams than the way that the current (terrible) matchmaker did as it pulled them out of the queue? That'd fix a lot of the matches where there are a bunch of solo queued aces stacked against and all low skill team, because the answer would be: yes if you put half of the players with GSF records correlating with high skill on each team, instead of all on one team, the balance should be better. The queue we have has enough population to support better matches, what we need is an algorithm that has at least a cursory team balance error checking function. Bioware has generally expressed a "fast pops are the only thing that matters" attitude, but given computational speed, adding a balancing step after the teams have been plucked from the queue wouldn't make a meaningful change from current rates of match formation. Granted late joins would be an issue, and the UI might have to be changed a bit to account for that, ie it would have to be more like a FP groupfinder where you need confirmations from the minimum number of people before you can load into the pre-match screen, but it's really just swapping one wait time graphic for a different wait time graphic. The issue is that implementing something like this requires at least mediocre programming talent, understanding of which player stats in GSF correlate strongly with skill, and a feeling by supervisors that trying to significantly improve the GSF play experience for a lot of players is a worthwhile endeavor. A match maker that's making a decent attempt at team balance even if it doesn't always work is a lot more palatable than one that is clearly not even trying to balance (or is so bad at it as to be indistinguishable from not trying). Yeah, this is pretty much the same "how matchmaking could be improved for GSF" argument I always bring out in these threads, but based on how many arguments it took on "fixing disto-missile balance is important for fixing strike ship class balance," I'm hoping that maybe I might be getting close to the halfway point on improving GSF matchmaking.

It's more that a functional matchmaker is a prerequisite. Disable group queuing. Fine. What happens. Aces solo queue, matchmaker sucks, weak players get obliterated on teams that never had a chance regardless. To a certain extent there's really nothing in team balance that helps new players unless there are enough new players to support a "kiddie pool" queue. Even with balanced teams, weak players still get obliterated in a flash, and in TDMs if the teams are closely matched there's a fairly strong incentive for skilled players to use targeting weak players as a way to rack up a winning kill count rapidly. What a person who doesn't realize that firing a cannon with a range of 4 km at a target 9 km away is useless really needs, is to be playing someone in that gunship 9 km away who is trying to close to 4 km so that they can dogfight with their short range cannons. Then once they both figure out the reasons why their gameplay is so horrendously ineffective, and it starts to show in their match stats, they need to be booted from the kiddie pool. Not sure if we have the population base to support that, though the number of zeros I see on scoreboards says, "maybe?" Kicking noobs out of the general queue is probably a better bet than kicking out groups.

Absent a matchmaker that's better at balancing teams than pure random chance, I'm not sure it would really help much. I don't think you appreciate how frequently the matchmaker will put all of the skilled players on one team even if they're solo queued. If I'm doing the weekly on 3 alts on an evening, I generally expect that to happen at least once and more often than not several times. I frequently keep a silly/stupid ship build on my bar because stomping the crap out of helpless randos gets stale pretty quickly, as there's no challenge to it. At the end of the day the people who stomp the crap out of new players are the people who stomp the crap out of new players. Grouped or solo, the crap still gets stomped. The issue is that GSF is a game mode that is hyper-sensitive to player skill. If you lack basic defensive skills, you will be utterly demolished any time you encounter someone with basic or better offensive skills. If you lack basic offensive skills, you'll pretty much never kill anything except by accident. If you lack strategic skills, your team will never really respond effectively to what's happening in the match, and will likely lose. None of those skills are taught well in the tutorial (which I'm convinced most people don't even know exists), so unless a player makes the effort to find resources to learn those skills, they are doomed to get stomped, again and again and again, until they go learn them. Most people don't bother, and therefore are doomed to be perma-stompees. Learning how to exit that state is not that hard. Someone who knows what they're doing can teach all the basics in probably 3 hours or less. Figure maybe twice as long plus a lot of practice if you just read/watch videos instead of having a real live teacher on voice chat. The lack of a structured PvE introductory experience for GSF is a gaping hole in the game design for GSF, and absent a reasonably safe PvE learning environment players just have to learn the hard way. This has always been arguably the greatest weakness in the design of GSF. If it's any consolation, as SWTOR's population has dwindled over the years the population of GSF aces has dwindled even more. You're less likely to be farmed into oblivion today than you would have been 6 months after GSF was released. Ship balance is a lot better too, so farming new players takes more work and time these days. Oh, for another value to add to your list, given that most players can't be bothered to look up anything about GSF outside of the game, a premade of skilled players is probably the only chance most players have of seeing what skilled play looks like, and possibly learning by trying to imitate it.

I'm not sure she really is Sith in other than name, job, and tradition. At least not if you look at the Sith code. Or at least not if you play primarily Rep/Lightside, or Imperial Traitor. What makes Lana distinct from the other Sith is that she's not the typical, "slave to your own passions," type. Indeed sometimes you wonder if she has passions. Sure she has the aggravation and rage that you'd expect someone to have if they take their responsibilities seriously, and are forced to work in a governmental system as dysfunctional as that of the Sith Empire, but really, do we think that there's anyone in the Sith government that doesn't want to force choke just about everyone else in the Sith government? Not out of personal animosity so much as how much excess friction there is in getting anything useful done due to structural issues. If you look at Lana's unethical recommendations it's almost always in the vein of an easier and more reliable way to serve what she sees as a greater good. Sure, there's a slim chance that Main Character and Lana can run around personally killing disposable hench-people fast enough to stop Captain Doom, his Doomtroopers, and the Cannon 'o Doom, but if you'd just put a few detonators in the right place on this dam spillway, you could bust the dam and cause a flood that's guaranteed to wipe out the whole Doom parade. Sure, a few thousand civilians will probably drown, and maybe 20,000 will be displaced for a year or more, but if the Doom parade reaches its target at least 100,000 are going to die in the initial barrage, a water system that provides safe water for 100s of thousands more will go up in smoke, and the loss of the transportation and logistics is going to cause all sorts of other problems. And you SERIOUSLY want to risk all that against the chance of two suicidal lunatics not getting killed when they take on the entire Doom Brigade by themselves? Then when you say yes, instead of discreetly knocking you out and blowing the dam she wades right into the death-defying fray with you. All you get is a bit of grumbling and an ironic "told you so," when bandages are applied in the aftermath as far as pushback from Lana. It's a lack of interest in evil for evil's sake. She's generally just after a quicker, safer, more reliable means of doing something that's generally beneficial. She's a very ends justify the means sort of gal, but doesn't have any real attachment to the means being evil as long as the ends are arrived at. At the end of the day she just lacks the deliberate malice that you'd expect from a Sith. Not that I'd see her readily going LS. I think for that to happen, you'd need to convince her that a Lightsided embrace of the force is actually generally more effective in the long run than using the Darkside. She'd probably still be more pragmatic and ok with ruthlessness than most Jedi would be comfortable with. I could see her sort of abandoning both sides though, as being too tied up in dogmatic embrace of essentially theological positions, and going for sort of a, "Ok, you convinced me that the Light side is better in the long run, but I'm not signing up for all the crap that goes with being a Jedi," position. After all, the Doom Parade was destroyed, the collateral damage was minimal, and a look at the data shows similar outcomes for the last dozen completely insane and totally suicidal escapades we've been in, so maybe there's something to this Light side approach after all? Just ask her if she's arguing with success, and then give her a bit of time and space to have a small and understated personal crisis of confidence and shaken worldview. Then remind her again after another half dozen. She might come around, eventually. She might need a hug though when she gets to the, "But it shouldn't work. The odds are so insanely against it. It just shouldn't," stage. Don't worry excessively though. She's too even-keeled to spend much time sulking that the Universe isn't behaving the way that it "ought" to. She'll get over it. Mostly. My excuse for the extensive thread derail participation is that no, I could not off hand recall the names of any new and significant characters from 7.x, and therefore had nothing of interest to say about them.

Sounds like fairly normal matchmaking for the GSF matchmaker to me. It has never been much good at balancing teams for competitiveness. As in, under ideal conditions, it does a bad job pretty consistently. Conditions are almost never ideal, so normally you have to consider well balanced matches more an accident that happened in spite of the matchmaker rather than a deliberate product of the matchmaker. To be fair to Bioware, good matchmaking in a small population playing a game extremely sensitive to player skill is a very difficult programming task. On the other hand, they also can't fix one field on the scoreboard display, because apparently that's too complicated for them, so I'm not sure they really look much better through the lens of fair-mindedness than they do through the lens of unreasonable expectations.

What, like fix the scoreboard?

Late 2017 I think was when 5.5 was released. Leaving aside both the Denon and Iokath maps because they were a long time ago, Ships in terms of ship class/build. Balance. GSF works on a slightly sub-optimal Rock-Paper-Scissors balance scheme between ship types, and if you suddenly decide to turn it into Rock-Paper-Scissors-Iguana then you're likely to introduce very broken imbalance between ship classes. Add that it seems quite likely they retain few to no people who are still really familiar with the GSF code (and who knows how well if at all it's documented), and major changes to gameplay and ship balance system are a can of worms that they may legitimately be better off not messing with. There's still a laundry list of things they probably could improve re. balance, but they did get to most of the critically important major flaws in 5.5. So while not as well balanced as actual Rock-Paper-Scissors, chess, or go, GSF does manage to be freakishly well balanced for an MMORPG mini-game. Ships in terms of cosmetic skins. Probably a combination of: Needing someone who knows how to make the alternate mesh, textures, and LoDs hook into and work with the GSF UI, needing someone who can modify the GSF Hanagar UI to accommodate more ship skin selection slots, and abysmally poor sales of the existing alternate ship models. Seriously, if the market for the service is, "Barro and some guy from France whose name I can't remember at the moment," then it's probably not worth any time or effort on the developers' part. Yes, maybe if it were a model other than the K-52 aka "Jakarro's garbage scow" more would sell, but based on success so far BW just isn't good at coming up with adequately appealing ship models to drive alternate model sales for GSF. Maps and battle modes. Return on investment. These are fairly labor, skilled labor, intensive projects. Aside from the basic engine limitations that probably limit you to something like either a 100 x 100 x 100 or 200 x 200 x200 km cube as a playing space (GSF fake scale, map size limits same as for ground game, they just add in a few extra zeros to the display fields and rescale objects, ie your 10 meter long ship is probably really 1 m or 0.1m long as far as the game engine is concerned), you need people who do good enough map work that you don't have weird one-way LoS bugs with terrain, missing or holey collision boxes allowing invincible drones/mines, and you need a game design person who understands the ship types and flow of GSF play well enough to actually design a mode/map structure that results in engaging entertaining play. Having met those requirements you then need to figure out how working on GSF is a better use of that talent in terms of revenue than working on anything else in SWTOR. I'm not sure what the internal Bioware logic (if there is any), on this is, but in terms of listening to well reasoned player feedback on GSF game mechanics Bioware has been excellent, at least if the changes are within the scope of what they think they can do, but when it comes to player feedback on, "things you could do to get me to spend CC (ie real world money) on GSF and increase the revenue from GSF," Bioware has been absolutely 100% deaf to feedback. No idea why. Republic and Sith Empire starfighter commands are registered non-profit organizations in lore maybe? We'll probably never know. Ship class balance is in a fairly good place. Bombers are a little bit weak, the T2 gunship is a bit weak, but every other ship has one or more competitive builds and even the slightly lagging bombers and T2 are perfectly usable if not going against entire teams of expert opposition. There is no perpetual gear treadmill. Once a character has a ship fully upgraded that ship is fully upgraded. Can you competitively play GSF at the highest levels with a ship that you last bought a new component upgrade for during the 3.0 expansion? Yes. Try PvP or NiM Ops with gear that's 4 expacs out of date and let me know how that goes for you. Gearing is very easy relative to other game play options. If you're subscribed, and know how the gearing system works, gearing for GSF is quite a bit faster on average than most other STWOR modes of play. As a bonus, if you understand the game mechanics well, or if you just read the gearing guides of someone who does, you don't need to be anywhere near fully upgraded in GSF to unlock most of the performance granted through gearing. You can even gear alts with fleet commendations with requisition grants purchased from the vendor on fleet. So technically you can gear your GSF ships by flying the on rails space missions if you really want to. The largest know bug is the tier 4 & 5 upgrade deselect bug, which as bugs in SWTOR go is fairly minor. I'm pretty sure that someone at some point figured out what the conditions leading to that bug are, but I don't remember the details. Something to do with logging out of the game, or quitting without logging out, or something like that I think. So technically if you can find the post where whoever it was figured it out it should be a mostly avoidable bug. At least that's the largest longstanding bug. When they broke the scoreboard for WZs in 7.x related "upgrades" they also managed to break the GSF scoreboard display, since they share a code base. Apparently there's an issue in that whoever knows enough to break but not enough to fix the WZ scoreboard is pretty sure that they won't figure out how fix things any time soon because GSF's proposed addition to the optional objectives for the next PvP Season was cancelled based on player feedback of, "You know you need to fix the medals display on the scoreboard before you add medals based Seasons objectives, right?" Interestingly, the actual code tracking medals still works and you still make progress toward achievements for medals, and mouseover will tell you how many total medals you got, but the tooltip for medal name and objective is broken as is the display in the scoreboard column. The data is still being generated, it's just not displaying properly anymore. Unfortunately this may become a long standing bug, but that's really more a "Shambolic disaster of 7.0" and lack of technically qualified personnel issue than a GSF thing per se. At present there's nothing really dependent on medals, and you can look them all up in the GSF legacy achievements tab, so it's not exactly a critical bug. Riiiiight. I'm sure that an MMORPG that was basically billed as, "WoW, but with lightsabers," didn't run into any problems at all because it was marketed as a direct competitor to an endgame instanced PvE oriented MMORPG, but they released it without having actually bothered to, you know, have a significant amount of endgame content of any sort, and followed that up with a glacially slow endgame content release schedule. Oh and given Bioware's extensive track record with MMO PvP based titles failure on that front is surely what caused people to ditch so quickly once they discovered that the endgame was, "watch particle effect slideshows at 3 FPS on Illum." /sarcasm. Sure, if BW had managed to pull off really engaging world PvP it might have slowed the slide a bit, but given the studio history and the game's early marketing I very much doubt wonky world PvP was the culprit as much as not having bothered to have endgame content, or even a coherent plan for endgame content, in a heavily endgame focused genre. If SWTOR had launched with 6.0's level of endgame content, or even with 3.0's level of endgame content, it probably would have done a lot better on player retention for the first year or two at least. Rate has always been an issue for SWTOR though. Sure no developer can keep up with player content consumption rates (pending figuring out how to use generative AI to do most of the heavy lifting), but the SWTOR team can't even come close to keeping up with other in-genre competitors, and that's what probably really ultimately did them in relative to other MMOs. I think the polling for satellite proximity is 1/s or sub 1/s. You have to be actually in proximity though and many people underestimate how close they need to be, there needs to not be any opposing ship in range, and with latency between server and client and perhaps some elements of just SWTOR being SWTOR the UI on the client on your machine can lag up to a couple of seconds in terms of displaying capture progress. You can see this sometimes as jerky rather than smooth fill progress of green bars on the fins. As far as the server goes though, as soon as it gets the message that your ship is within range the count starts, whether your client is displaying it in a timely matter or not. What achievement granting bugs? Most of my regularly played legacies are at 100% for GSF so I don't normally see GSF related achievement progress anymore, but I think I may have some on German and French servers that I could hop on and test for bug reports if there are specific GSF achievements you think aren't granting properly.

Well, Bioware is probably, maybe, possibly? thinking of this in "game designer mode." So from their perspective "premades suck, premades are unfair, premades make me cry, etc." may basically register as a an error not found situation. The issue, is that WZs and Arenas are designed as organized group content. Same as HM/NiM ops, and arguably MM FPs. So for them, if premades that are playing smartly routinely utterly demolish random disorganized mobs of solo players, it is absolutely not a bug. It's a feature. The format is supposed to reward organized play. So great, all the crying on the forums just goes to show that the system is working as intended right? Right! Oh, but wait a minute, what about customer satisfaction and customer retention? There do seem to maybe be problems with those? So what's the problem(s) then? (from a game design point of view) Well, players motivated by PvP loot rewards don't seem to be sufficiently motivated by them to actually bother organizing into groups to improve their chances of success at doing group content. If this is the view taken, then solo queuing starts to look like the problem. You need to induce people to stop solo queuing and start grouping to queue. Carrots in terms of loot? Sticks in terms of penalties for solo queuing? UI and UX revamps that address player objections to grouping for content and/or encourage social interactions that build community and willingness to group? Hm, maybe all of the above, just need to look at the example of the last time BW successfully used game design implementation to get players to play the game the way BW thought that players ought to play it. . . . er, yeah, we'll get back to you on that. What if there's another problem though? What if there are players that want PvP, want multiple opponents, but don't want any organization involved? So what, like a PvP equivalent of Veteran FPs? Yes, that! Exactly that. Seems a bit weird, want to do stuff with a group of people but not be in a group, but ignore that for a moment so we don't have a nervous breakdown about whether that's a paradox, and think about whether we could even do that. Yeah, we could probably. Make a separate reward track with either maybe 5-10 less irating or worse stat distribution, have less appealing PvP season rewards associated with it, or decrease the progression earned per activity compared to team PvP. Also look at the encounter designs, so probably smaller terrains on average than WZs, Alderaan is probably about max size you'd want. Drop Huttball entirely because that's so intrinsically team based that it's not worth trying to repurpose. Oh, and in terms of objectives, we'll need to redo them a bit to be less team oriented. So maybe: kill x number of opposing players in area y, kill x number of opposing players in time t, heal z number of friendly players from 30% or lower to 70% or higher. Possibly have some sort of shifting AOE buff or debuff mechanic to move players around the map a bit. PvE bits, tricky because we want PvP but to spice it up and not just have pure deathmatch so: PvE that anyone can do, that doesn't depend on complicated team cooperation, that's rewarding, but doesn't turn it from a PvP to PvE match? Maybe a short time limited DPS race to destroy at turret, door, other environmental object/NPC. So can't spend too much time on it, encourages learning at least a DPS rotation, doesn't require actual teamwork to progress (though might be challenging without it), and players can spoil other side's effort by killing their DPSers so there's a PvP lane still available even if PvE objective is up. Ok, there we go Veteran mode PvP, probably doable. Yeesh, sounds like a lot of work though. In my personal opinion, BW devs sometimes get a bit over-invested in game design aspirations they have. There's this beautiful shiny ideal, that they don't quite have the time or budget or team to implement, that players fail to appreciate appropriately and just rampage through for the loot, and as it start to crumble and collapse, sometimes in flames, there's still a commitment to the shiny ideal and the hope that maybe with a few rolls of tape maybe it can be held together and work, "😍as intended🤩." That can delay practical steps to address observed problems until all hopes of "as intended" are utterly crushed, and hope is a resilient little bugger. My view is colored by having started on a small PvP-RP server, where group PvP was pretty common, in WZs, in world PvP zones, and sometimes just spontaneously out in the world doing missions. Group PvP works pretty well, if that's what the community expects and wants in sufficiently large proportions of the population. I think BW is still trying to go for that with WZs and Arenas. I don't think the existing populations have the level of social/cultural support needed to make that work though, and based on past performance I'm extremely skeptical about Bioware's ability to regenerate enough of a team PvP community to support that. I think that there's a strong case that the bulk of the PvP population today is in a place where Veteran mode PvP is basically what they're after. Solo queue, yes, but not just solo queue. Also a format that supports opt-out of team play better than the WZ and Arena formats do. I don't know, call them Skirmishes instead of Warzones? Quicker, easier, less investment, lower reward rate. Done well I suspect something like that might pretty much kill off both the WZ and Arena queues, or at least make pops really slow. I also suspect that BW is still at least a year or two away from giving up on some shiny platonic ideal of perfect team PvP, and then, assuming they do a good job of design for Veteran mode PvP, probably at least another year to make the maps and code the format and scoring. Purpose built solo-queue PvP content is where I think BW should go if they really want to serve their existing customer base for PvP. They probably won't, but they should.

Given how frequently I see people in chat asking for help on Class Story bosses because they can't manage them, this is fairly easy to verify as a false statement. I wouldn't mind a KTOFE style story-veteran-master option for instanced world and class missions, though I don't think BW would be likely to do a good job of it. Typically for "scaling" they just do a multiplier on the NPC damage and a multiplier on the NPC health pool. Which, honestly, mostly just makes autoattacking through stuff take longer. To teach gameplay, what you want is something more like specific attacks that are cooldown limited that impose a big but recoverable hit, (say 25%, 33%, or 50% of expected player health), that can be avoided by LoS or cooldowns, or interrupts, etc. Also some burst DPS windows "Mr. Bad Dude is feeling queasy, hit him now," type stuff. Some "don't stand in the stupid," as well. In short, PvE mechanics. The problem is that this takes time and attention to each encounter rather than a tiny code fragment with a multiplier that applies to all NPCs in a zone, so it won't happen. The underlying problem isn't so much that they allowed inflation of player and companion stats, as that when level scaling came in they actually did the work to go through a lot of encounters and pull the PvE mechanics out, turning almost everything into the most basic form of tank and spank. With out the variety of fight mechanics cranking numbers up doesn't so much bring back challenge as it does increase tedium. So really, I'd like the KOTFE style difficulty option menu, but for the implementation, I'd like the difficulty to be in line with what Oricon daily bosses were when they released, where it's more a matter of getting mechanics right than it is a matter of hacking through an endless conveyor of skytroopers or wading through the massive health pool of a monolith. Sure make the hits a bit harder on vet and master difficulty, but mostly run it as story: 0-1 fight mechanics, vet: 2-3 fight mechanics, master: 3+ mechanics and tighter timing on hitting the mechanics. The whole ability pruning scheme they came up with for 7.0 hasn't helped with this. The way ability grants are spread out now, it's starting to constrain what they can put back in as mechanics at at lower levels, because some classes may not have the abilities that are meant to solve certain PvE mechanics at the appropriate level anymore. This could be solved of course, but you have to ask yourself if Bioware is likely to solve it or just make it worse.

This is so vague, and so different depending on income, that it's basically meaningless in term of trying to help you get a good set of options. That said here's a "nicer than you need for SWTOR" example I put together on PC part picker. Honestly for SWTOR you could build something that worked for $500 or you could spend over $5000. This example aims around $1650 in the US, probably more if VAT is in play. Do things like drop from 13600k to 12600K, 16 GB RAM instead of 32, SATA HHD instead of NVME, etc. and you can easily cut a fair chunk off of this without that much difference in performance, at least for SWTOR. CPU Intel Core i5-13600K 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor Intel Core i5-13600K 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor $309.99 CPU Cooler Noctua NH-U12S redux 70.75 CFM CPU Cooler Noctua NH-U12S redux 70.75 CFM CPU Cooler $54.95 Motherboard MSI PRO B760-P WIFI DDR4 ATX LGA1700 Motherboard MSI PRO B760-P WIFI DDR4 ATX LGA1700 Motherboard $159.99 Memory G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory $65.99 Storage Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive $59.99 Video Card MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus 2X 12G GeForce RTX 3060 12GB 12 GB Video Card MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus 2X 12G GeForce RTX 3060 12GB 12 GB Video Card $349.99 Case Corsair 4000D Airflow ATX Mid Tower Case $94.99 Power Supply Corsair RM750 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply $109.99 Operating System Microsoft Windows 11 Home OEM - DVD 64-bit Microsoft Windows 11 Home OEM - DVD 64-bit $117.98 Monitor Asus TUF Gaming VG27AQ 27.0" 2560 x 1440 165 Hz Monitor Asus TUF Gaming VG27AQ 27.0" 2560 x 1440 165 Hz Monitor $300.00 Total around $1650 These are the sort of specs you'd be looking for from a system integrator, figure $100 to $200 for assembly on top of parts cost. Generally a gaming oriented builder won't do quite as nice a job of tailoring to requirements as a self built machine, but it should be fairly close. There's an element of, "What was on sale in bulk 4-9 months ago" in their builds, just due to logistics and need to make a profit, but the spec sheet should be broadly similar at a price point. Oh, and try to find reviews of the builder that are from third party sites. If they do a poor job of speccing computers or have problems with builds getting destroyed in shipping you'd want to know about it.

Questions, during peak times, on the most populous server, what is the typical wait time for a WZ or Arena match to start? Based on this time to form, and average match length, how many PvP instances are concurrently running? Given how many instances are running, and allowing that there may be 1 to 3 instances worth of players in the queue, what's the total size of player pool you'd be drawing from in this best case scenario? I could see this working if the fraction of people who regularly PvP in SWTOR were greater, if the fraction that took PvP seriously were much greater, and if SWTOR's player base were 10 or more times greater than it currently is. I'm not PvPing enough to really have a good pulse on the level of activity these days, but on the rare occasions I do if I dual queue GSF usually pops faster than WZs, and I can tell you for sure that GSF doesn't have the population to support a system such as you describe in a way that works. At least for the Ranked/ELO portion. For the 4 player cap, it would help a bit, but GSF has that in its matchmaker, and the matchmaker will routinely make matches where by talking to the people who are grouped it's possible to confirm that the algorithm is making 4 + 4 vs 8 solo matches, and doing it repeatedly, even while it's known that there are enough people to make mixed teams. Even if your groups deliberately coordinate when they're queuing to try to get mixed teams for better balance, the matchmaker will still routinely screw it up. Until the matchmaker is fixed enough to actually be any good, at all, at balancing teams, automatic matchmaking will be problematic. If you want balanced teams you basically need to do custom matches where people are picking the teams. Which might be a decent option if it worked reliably for all maps and had any loot or mission/season/PvPtrack rewards associated with it. Note: for balanced teams, you need to do player based selection whether it's group v group, mixed group and solo, or pure solo in the player pool. Matchmaker is just flat out bad at balancing.

Oh, I think we all forgot to mention: For TDM matches people have published maps of the Damage Overcharge "super spawn" locations. These are power up nodes that always spawn a DO powerup, as opposed to other nodes that spawn a random power up type. If you memorize the DO spawn points you can see if there is a power up at those spots by looking at the mini-map. If you see one, go over and scoop it up, or in chat mention it if there are team members that are much closer to it and it's in danger of getting scooped up by the enemy team. Top end players have the DO spawns memorized for all maps and actively scan for new DO spawns for the entire duration of the match. It can be worth a 30% or more increase in output if you get several DOs over a match. Kuat and Lost shipyards https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FQAI25EL.jpg&tbnid=rWF1ZkUR-jZmIM&vet=12ahUKEwjiip_mkYT_AhUHM1kFHRfPDnoQMygBegUIARCzAQ..i&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fswtorista.com%2Farticles%2Fswtor-galactic-starfighter-guide%2F&docid=dVNJ3hJEVUZ6jM&w=900&h=1200&q=SWTOR GSF DO map&client=firefox-b-1-d&ved=2ahUKEwjiip_mkYT_AhUHM1kFHRfPDnoQMygBegUIARCzAQ And Iokath https://imgur.com/a/zchJPHC

A bunch more stuff: It depends on the ship. There are achievements for 65% and 75% accuracy, so the Devs certainly thought this was reasonable. It is. At least it is if you're only using railguns from a gunship. For myself, if my accuracy with railguns is below 75% I'm not really happy with my shooting. I'm almost always not happy with my shooting with railguns. Truly top level gunship aces can routinely get low to mid 80s for accuracy. A really excellent battlescout can hit the 50s to high 60s with Burst Laser Cannon and Cluster Missiles on a pretty regular basis. Step into a normal strike fighter or scout with RFLs and high accuracy might look more like 40-55%. Flying style plays a role. People who start out in gunships and BLC battlescouts tend to be conservative with when they try to shoot. Each shot takes a huge chunk of the energy pool, so there's a strong incentive to only shoot if there's a good chance of hitting. So that means things like making sure the range is ideal, making sure the target is centered in the firing arc, making sure the target isn't moving across your screen so fast that it's hard to keep the reticle aligned, making sure that the target doesn't have distortion field or targeting telemetry buffs or engine powerups active, and using the Wingman crew skill (+20 accuracy) before shooting. Contrast that with a strike or scout running a RFL build, where you have the energy efficiency and rate of fire so that it makes sense to just mash the trigger and hose down the target because you're never going to run out of energy and so landing a lucky low probability shot is pure profit. Both approaches can work, if paired with the right ship build, so you can see similar kills/assists/damage between different pilots with one posting 70% accuracy and another posting maybe 33%. That said, more accuracy is always better than less, and regardless of build and style if accuracy is below 35% and you're not deliberately being silly in flying style then your gunnery skills probably need work. You can also cheese accuracy numbers if you want to. Ion railgunning satellite turrets, mines and drones; spending most of a Domination match popping enemy turrets; only doing damage with missiles or torpedoes; or only doing damage with mines and drones can all get you 90-100% accuracy numbers, and sometimes pretty decent damage, but it's what I'd call fluff damage and most of the time isn't nearly as useful to your team as normal play with much lower scoreboard numbers would be. The individual match conditions play a huge role. Posting really high numbers is usually partly a symptom of a very lopsided game, or at least a game where a high skill player is not being put under much pressure by other skilled players. There are a small handful of players that are basically unstoppable, but for the vast majority of people considered aces in GSF, having one or two people focus on putting constant pressure on them can reduce offensive output by 50-75%. The people doing the pressuring need to have some defensive flying skills, because otherwise they're just free kills not pressure, and they need to have the offensive skills to kill a non-defending target in 5-10 seconds. They don't need to actually kill the high skill pilot, but they need to keep the ace busy with surviving instead of rampaging through weaker pilots. Traditionally non-competitive games are called farm games, and ships flown by people with no defensive or offensive skills may be called food ships (you just gobble them right up). Any build of any ship flown by a highly skilled pilot can post the sorts of numbers you're talking about, or even higher, in a match where it's ace vs food. Think 12 baby pigs that fell off of a ship vs a 5.5 meter long great white shark. Is the shark hacking if its score is 12-0 after just a few minutes? Defenseless targets don't do well against apex predators. The scores you see in games where most or all of the players are highly skilled are usually much more modest. On a Super Serious event, if enough skilled players show up, it's not that unusual for the highest score to be something like 9 kills and mid 40k s damage. Skilled offensive play is countered pretty solidly by skilled defensive play, and if everyone is a skilled defender sky high offensive scores are really difficult to achieve. Games with a lot of skilled players on both sides are exceptionally rare these days though, so if there's a good player in a match they can usually post high numbers because there are plenty of easy targets and no one to stop them. There's also a tactical consideration if there's just one or two good players on each side. Since skilled vs. skilled play is difficult and not as productive per time unit, a sensible strategy is often for the high skilled players on each side to be aware of each other as threats, but mostly to focus on trying to utterly crush the opposing food ships faster than your side's food ships get utterly crushed. Which leads to high scores on both sides, and whichever team wins the "crushing noobs" race usually wins the match. The balance really depends on how lacking in skill there rest of your team is. If they're competent but not great, then pressuring the other team's high skill players can really let the rest of the team be active, successful, and win the match. If the rest of the team is completely hopeless, then being the fastest most ruthless noob-crusher is usually the only chance of victory, and generally leads to high scores. Sometimes really close games can also produce high scores. In domination if it's a 1 sat vs 2 sat game, and you're defending a sat that's just barely holding against really intense pressure from the other team, sometimes you can rack up enormous numbers because there's just a constant stream of opponents to shoot. It's a much more fun way to post high scores than a farm game, but sadly these sorts of game aren't all that common right now. By the way, if you're getting at least 30% accuracy (50% if railguns), and 6-10 kills in most games, then you're probably a fairly solid competent GSF player, and generally speaking an asset to your team. The tail end of the distribution in terms of skill can warp your perception of what normal is. I hover right at the very bottom of the ace skill range, and I don't really like gunship play or consider myself good at them, but last night I had a TDM where I posted 15 kills 15 assists, 0 deaths, 77.6 k damage, and 73% accuracy, and ended the match feeling like I had flown really poorly and should have done a lot better. Mind you, these are pretty good numbers by my standards, but it still felt bad. Of course I'm using some of the best aces ever to have played GSF as comparison, people where 30+ kills per match was normal. Probably not reasonable as a standard of comparison, but as long as you use that sort of thing more as a goal to strive for than something that you get mad about not achieving it should be ok I think. A tip for making progress: aside from looking at guides and other community made educational material on how to be skilled at GSF, work on one skill at a time. So for example, with railgun, fly a bunch of matches where the only thing you worry about is making sure the target is very close to perfectly centered before you shoot. Focus on what you're improving, don't worry about the rest. That should help you get rapid progress on a specific skill, and once it starts feeling a lot easier to do that specific skill, add in the next thing you want to work on. I find that generally works better than trying to work on everything at the same time. A gem for covering fundamental GSF skills, not 100% up to date, but while specific stats on components have changed the fundamental skills have not. https://www.youtube.com/@GSFSchool

Transmogrification comes from Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, and WoW picked up that term to use as a name for their cosmetic gear overwrite system. By the time SWTOR came up with Outfitter as a system "Transmog" had passed into general use as a name for a game character gear appearance modification system. Cardboard box, permanent marker, and tinkertoys not included.

Assuming they successfully transition to AWS as a server provider, then new "current client" instances should be very easy for them. Classic might not be. They should have the old code stored somewhere one hopes, but depending on the back end of what happened for the shift to 64 bit, getting a 64 bit classic version might be easy, or it might mean just about re-doing the 64 bit transition again from scratch. The chances of a classic version of SWTOR depends on perceived user demand and where on that easy - hard spectrum having a 64 bit classic version would be. That and the question of version maintenance. They struggle to keep up with maintaining the current client, not sure they'll want another concurrent fork to maintain alongside it.

It is not a change. Outfits have never been free. It's always been a credit fee per armor slot to set up an outfit, and a credit fee per slot to change an outfit. This has not changed. The Outfitter had fees with it from the very beginning. Changing the gear you're wearing is free. Having the gear you're currently wearing display instead of an outfit is also free. So if you have enough bag space to store the gear sets you can have probably 4 to 6 different looks linked to specific Loadouts. So it's a bit more convenient than it used to be when you had to manually change gear. The downside of course, it that it may constrain what stats are on your gear depending on what look you're going for and of course a lot of your storage space gets taken up by gear. On the other hand, cargo space is based on a time where people would often have a PvP heal set, a PvP dps set, a PvE heal set, a PvE dps set, etc. so carrying 4 to 6 sets of gear isn't really that much of a handicap if you have all slots unlocked in your bags. The option to display the gear you're wearing is not really highlighted in the UI, so you may have to look closely to find it in the new UI if you wish to opt out of using the Outfitter.

Depends on the target audience I guess. Once upon a time, back in 2.x and 3.x I very mildly liked WZs and if guild members really needed a healer I'd consider doing Arenas back when they first showed up. Now, in general, I just find that PvP kinda sucks. Lots of maps, but you tend to get the same one all night. No one has heard of teamwork or objectives. Premades and people who haven't updated their quickbars since they dinged level 15 don't help, but they were around back in the day too and didn't bother me that much. Now, generally I avoid PvP almost completely outside of GSF. It's just not much fun most of the time. I did a few WZs last Galactic Seasons because I was behind, and there were 12 point PvP objectives that helped catch up, but mostly the lesson learned was, "Yep, PvP sucks these days, don't get behind next season, or decide that seasons isn't worth 100% completion." To bait me into WZs, if there were a reward track that was 75% GSF and 25% PvP, I'd consider tolerating the WZs if I was interested in the rewards. To get me in Arenas. maybe if it were 90% GSF 10% Arena, but maybe not. Well, that's to bait me into ground PvP using GSF. What would really get me back into ground PvP would be if PvP didn't suck so badly any more. I'm not sure Bioware can do that though. What would draw me in would be WZs where people are playing objectives, trying to win, being relatively civil to each other, and where the matchmaker has at least a reasonable (say 25%) chance of making a match close enough to be interesting. Bioware tends to be hamfisted with incentives though, so I'm not sure the current pool of players can be herded from where they are today, to something like I just described by poking and bribing from Bioware. I won't hold my breath.

This was already the case with the 5.5 patch for GSF, which is why what was able to be changed was fairly tightly constrained. In theory, the scoreboard should be fixable by people who alter the WZ scoreboard, since the GSF scoreboard is based on the WZ scoreboard, which is why it gets broken by changes to WZ scoreboard code. On the other hand, I vaguely recall seeing something about parts of the WZ scoreboard not functioning correctly and having stayed broken for a while, so maybe they don't have people who could figure out how to fix it in a timely fashion. It involves getting game mechanic code to talk to UI code, so it's a bit of a cross discipline item which may make it harder to address in terms of people and expertise needed. A bit baffling that they actually successfully pulled off a 64 bit client, but can't get UI elements to work.

Airfield barometer reading. Important to know so that after you go shoot down enough enemies to become an ace you don't crash on approach due to an altimeter offset error. Adjust your cockpit altimeter to read 0 at the QFE value, and you should touch down approximately when your instruments tell you you've run out of altitude. As opposed to when you still think you have another 500 meters of vertical space before you smack into something. We're talking aviation related stuff here right?

It should only remove people from the queues if facing the murderously brutal learning curve of playing GSF is more appealing than participating in a WZ or Arena. From a game design perspective, GSF is vastly superior for things like balance and gearing, but as much as I like it, it's a weird little mini-game in a fairly standard WoW-ish MMORPG. If a niche mini-game is pulling PvPer's out of ground PvP queues for PvP reward tracks, I think the big question is: "Why is PvP such an objectionable experience that people will shift to a wildly different PvP activity to avoid it?" GSF pretty much permanently siphoned me out of WZ queues, but that's mostly because I like GSF a lot more than WZs. If it siphons indifferent or enthusiastic PvPers off in a big way then I'd say the real issue is ground PvP being in desperate need of a fairly deep overhaul, because honestly if both GSF and ground PvP lead to the same reward destination, we should expect the ground PvP lane to be more filled as a matter of player preference, given the overall nature of SWTOR and its playerbase. My understanding was that the GSF activity was going to be a single, subscriber only, objective on top of the already existing WZ and Arena objective, but with no change in the cap. So if you prefer GSF to those activities you could substitute one PvP objective with the GSF objective, per week. So for people that like PvP there should effectively be no change, and for people that like GSF there's the question of whether having 1 of however many objectives done makes it worth actually doing PvP to fill out the rest and get rewards (PvP rewards tend to be ugly IMO, so probably not for me). If this turns out to not be the case, and people flock to the GSF option, then ground PvP is in a really, really dire state. Edit: Oh and for what it's worth, I'd rather have a standalone GSF rewards track, which would obviously be inherently superior to the PvP track just by being a GSF track, but eh, if they want to give me rewards I'm not interested in from the PvP track I guess I'm ok with it.

Increasing caps on character and GTN transactions would be nice. Since it will be a while before in game credit inflation moves much, removing the barriers to making large GTN-taxable transactions would be a nice quality of life change, and a good inflation fighting move. Why make it hard for people to erase big chunks of credits from the in game economy? Makes no sense if fighting inflation is a goal. Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently? For the Sell interface, it'd be nice to have the ability to do defaults for some settings. For example, I just about always list for 3 days, and it would be a minor but nice convenience if it could remember that for a character so I don't have to change it for every item type sold every time I use the interface. Smarter auto-pricing features. The price field auto-fills, with a number that's usually not what you want to sell for. It remembers for subsequent items of the same type, which is nice, but some auto-price settings would be nice. For example: Minimum currently listed per item price, Maximum currently listed per item price, Last sold per item price, Mean or Median per item price. Those would be handy tools to have. Someone else mentioned the weird filter dependency hierarchy, where certain field have to be filled in order to search other fields. That is a bit annoying, though I'm guessing it's also deeply baked into the code and not an easy fix, but a more open filter structure would be nice.

So the per game amount of medals you can get is approximately 20 or so. For most skilled players getting in the high teens is an above average game, and 8-12 is fairly normal. Getting six medals or less is not a very good game. Call it say 3 games on average to win a weekly, (ie, losing at least one game during the course of the weekly), that's 30 medals or so for an "average" weekly. So say you do the weekly three out of the four times available per week, and that would be 90 medals. Seems reasonable as a starting point. I'd say 75 to 150 medals is manageable for a fairly casual approach to it. Maybe up to 200 if you want to make it a fairly stiff challenge for newer players. Making it a stiff challenge for GSF nutcases would be unreasonable for most players, because you'd be talking over 400 medals in a week. Very important to-do item before you implement this though. FIX THE SCOREBOARD MEDALS DISPLAY AT THE END OF THE MATCH. If new players don't have an easy way to find out how to achieve the medals in question, they will get very frustrated very fast.

None of that is wrong. But then, none of that is inflation either. I'm not saying that you shouldn't object to issues with the CM, I'm just saying that it's best to clearly communicate CM issues that are separate from credit inflation issues separately, instead of lumping them in with inflation. Technically, exploits aside, all in game credits are earned by gameplay, because that's the only way to create them if you don't have the credentials to log in as an admin and edit values on the servers. Inflation happens when gameplay is giving many players more of those credits than they know what to do with, thus creating vast oceans of surplus to slosh around in the player to player economy. It's pretty ridiculous even outside of CM items. Gather a material via a crew skill mission. Divide the number of mats received by the going GTN price. Does it make any sense for the market price of a material to be 100 times the unit cost of having initiated the mission to get it? That's a purely in-game to in-game transaction. I had some discussion of the economics affecting incentives for CM and crafting with respect to Bioware's business model, but apparently when discussing their business strategies even the word "the" is an "objectionable term" for what ever they're using for automated content monitoring on the forums.

People keep saying this despite it being factually incorrect. Repeat after me, however many times it takes to sink in: CM TRANSACTIONS DO NOT CREATE CREDITS IN GAME. They just offer an incentive for players to transfer existing credits to other players. "Tax" those transfers, and you actually have a useful inflation fighting tool. If you want to fight inflation in SWTOR: don't complete quests that reward credits or things you can vendor for credits, don't gather resources for crafting that can be vendored for credits, don't loot NPCs for credits or items that can be sold for credits. Quest rewards, credits looted from dead NPCs, and in game vendors that pay credits to players when players sell their "junk" are the sources of credits in SWTOR. If a player can generate a few million credits, as in new credits that did not exist before in game, in a few hours of gameplay, then if the game doesn't also destroy an equivalent amount, via repair costs, GTN tax, vendors selling things for credits, etc. then the difference accumulates in the in game economy. In general credit rewards have been given an upward bump with every expansion, and costs have stayed static or gone down. Resulting in inflation, then in hyperinflation. Of course, lack of policing things like bot farming and credit exploits doesn't help either, but as long as regular gameplay produces a lot more credits than it destroys, the underlying issue isn't resolved.