Veteran and Master mode chapters are all designed around the assumption that the player is in a DPS spec, knows the max DPS rotation (even if they may not execute it perfectly), has a stun, has an interrupt, knows how to LOS around terrain, reads buff/debuff tooltips on themselves and the NPCs, and is generally competent with respect to being able to do the harder MM flashpoints or Vet or NiM operations. A lot of the Vet chapters you can get through without all of that, but some are challenging if you're not really on point. Almost all of the encounter mechanics are either DPS races, interrupts, line of sight/AOE/positioning challenges, or knowledge of when to use a defensive cooldown. In other words, things tank specs either don't help with much, or actively hurt. The preference for specs is DPS > Tank > Healer. Having stealth is a bonus, but chapters tend to be heavy on skytroopers that ignore stealth. DPS that is geared and skilled will have the easiest time of it, esp. with stealth. Tanks may have problems on DPS checks, sometimes severe problems, but there is a bit more forgiveness in terms of survivability in places where there's not a DPS check. Maybe 1 out of five chapters or so has a significant DPS check. Healer with stealth is an exercise in misery. Healer without stealth is an exercise in misery with a generous portion of bonus misery. It's doable, but having done it, I wouldn't recommend it. If you're not confident in your PvE skills, I'd say it's reasonable to run the content in a tank spec until you get to an encounter where you just can't kill things fast enough, swap to DPS spec for that fight, and then swap back to tank. It's more relaxed that way on survival, if slower and more tedious. Having a level 50 companion, ideally Z0-0M healing, and 336 blue gear with at least blue augments will help quite a bit too (or better gear if you have it). Reading guides on some of the harder encounters can also smooth things out quite a bit if you're not into figuring out encounter mechanics on your own. If you're really struggling also pick up some stims, adrenals, and medpacs.

It is absolutely 100% the lighting, which is terrible. Bioware knows that it is terrible. They were told, in detail, by many people, that it was terrible during the PTS. They were told this within a few days of the new character creator going live on the PTS. There was plenty of time to fix it, and given that it's mostly just color and intensity that need adjusting it's probably fairly simple as a fix. Specifically: There is an overly strong neutral white light source located above and just slightly in front of the character. This makes the hair, forehead, and cheekbones washed out due to excessive specular glare. This is on both factions. There is background lighting from below, on both sides or possibly a ring, that is a moderately strong blue for Republic characters, and a ridiculously strong red for Imperial characters. This will moderately to strongly shift the highlight colors on the neck and lower half of the face, and distort the clothes especially if they are light colored. In a photography or portraiture class, if you were going for fairly normal "representative" portraits that allow customer to accurately pick color choices for products they're purchasing, no competent instructor would give the current character creator lighting setup a passing grade. It's that bad. For art photography, it would probably be a passing grade, but not above a B-. The neutral light from above washes things out too much and isn't very interesting in overall effect. If you're going to go with strong deliberate color shift and high dynamic range, you need to lean into the stylism consistently enough to get a worthwhile aesthetic effect out of it, and the character creator doesn't manage that. Note that they're trying to hype up the interest of a new player with the faction themed lighting, but in a really ham fisted way. The intent is good, it's just the execution that's rubbish. You could have the intended effect by having thematic lighting for the Faction, Story, and Combat Style selection screens, then go to good neutral standard portraiture lighting for doing all the selector sliders, and then going back to strong thematic lighting for a final confirmation screen. So you get the badass Republic/Imperial theme bits, but you also get functional lighting for making accurate color choices during character editing. I promise you that the art team doesn't use this sort of lighting setup when they're working on character art, and would probably throw a fit if someone asked them to. However, this is Bioware. Having done something that is obviously incompetent, they will stubbornly stick with it for years before admitting that it was a bad idea in the first place and doing at least a partial fix. The best workaround is to make a character, get in game and go find an appearance modification station on Fleet Stations. Modify the character in that interface and note the slider number options that work for you. The lighting in there isn't perfect, a bit washed out and a bit cool, but it's a lot better than in the character creator. Note your choices, then go back to the character creator and use those slider values to get an appearance that looks reasonably consistent with what you intended.

Yes, this a fundamental part of the problem. The game design assumptions for WZs and Arenas involve the belief that players will trend toward what works, and what works is organized groups of highly motivated people who know what they're doing. When you then follow that base design assumption with 10 years of development focused on story based Space-Barbie content, and end up with a queue full of people that you could be forgiven for thinking are a bunch of drunk chickens pecking at keyboards in the hope that there might be some Dorito crumbs stuck between the keys, the result is not pretty. I was leaning into Devil's advocate territory a bit, but I think there are enough fundamental design issues with the mismatch between what the 1.0 developers designed into WZ structure and the current playerbases' preferences that there's not really a good cure for the existing PvP content, unless you consider saying: "Hey, this is team oriented PvP content for skilled players, if you don't know what you're doing or can't stand teamwork, then it's probably not for you," to be a cure. As hardcore team PvP, the design of WZs, Arenas, and even the World PvP areas actually work pretty well. The problem is they totally suck for casual PvP. If you look at the history of PvP comments, I'd say the majority opinion is that they suck as casual PvP with pre-mades, and also suck as casual PvP without premades. After all, there is a certain amount of truth to the observation that, "If my team is winning it's because of my leet skilz, but all losses are due to filthy pre-mades," at least by the time things are being litigated in comments sections. Even if Bioware completely removes the ability to group at all, for any content, people will still surely only lose in WZs and Arenas because of pre-mades. It's one of those immutable things. My suggestion for purpose built casual friendly hybrid PvP was a serious one. Most game design basics aren't patented, so if Bioware wants to steal from Tower defense, MOBAs, heck even demolition derby style racing games, or whatever other genre they think has fun and interesting casual friendly player vs player gameplay they've got a pretty free hand to imitate and adapt for use in SWTOR. The pillars of stuff people generally want at a casual level are: Have stuff to do that feels like it's having an effect Get some nice loot Be able to have plausible deniability that personal lack of skill had anything to do with our team getting thrashed. The current forms of PvP fail hard on all of those except loot, and even that's a bit meh. Casual friendly PvP would fit really well with SWTOR at this point. Of course, 7.0 has largely been about moving away from casual friendliness, which is an interesting strategy given an almost entirely casual playerbase, but Bioware will be Bioware. I guess my TLDR summary is that premades are really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hardcore team PvP content design being a poor fit for an overwhelmingly solo casual playerbase. Existing PvP in SWTOR is great if you've got a genuine team, but it sucks if you've got a random group of knuckleheads. What SWTOR could really use is some new PvP content designed to be fun and work well for random groups of knuckleheads. I used to generally group for PvP in SWTOR, and the design is solid, IF you have a group that works together. Those days are long past for me though so if they had well designed content for random knucklheads and a random knucklhead PvP queue to go with it, that's where I'd be spending most or all of my PvP queue time. The player experience goal should be, "Well my team really sucked, but I still had fun. Finished the weekly but I think I'll queue for another 2 or 3 before I quit for the night." PvP content designed to provide that would give you an experience that simply trying to nerf team formation in a team format won't. Edit: Note that for it to work you'd need not just mechanics that work with disorganized chaos as a playstyle, but equal or greater attention to the design around social dynamics.

From a game design standpoint there isn't a problem. Warzones and Arenas for solo players do not exist. Period. End of story. The fundamental design of WZs and Arenas is for team play. The pre-mades aren't invading the solo-noobs' garden of paradise and cheat-stomping them into the dust; the clueless and lazy are being allowed into a team format PvP content without being forced to show the competence or teamwork that are prerequisites for success. Solo-WZ tears are just as illogical as Solo Vet-ops tears. If you want to succeed in group activity reward tracks that are oriented towards high skilled cooperative play, you need to show up with skill, and that includes skill at operating as part of a team. Solo PvP by design DOES exist in SWTOR. You walk up to another player, mouse over their portrait, right click, and challenge them to a duel. Unlike solo PvE, there is no reward of any sort for solo PvP, other than perhaps personal enjoyment. I suppose you could ague that world PvP in a PvP instance or on Tatooine is potentially Solo PvP, and potentially has rewards, but it's also potentially 40 vs 40 or 40 vs 1, so I'm not sure that really counts. If you want content designed for solo PvP with a rewards track, you need to ask Bioware to create that content, because currently it does not exist in SWTOR. If they stuck to consistency in design principles, which would be admittedly very odd for the SWTOR team, then you'd expect Solo PvP to be a role neutral 4 v 4 groupfinder format that rewarded green gear up to 336 with the same itemization budget per piece as Veteran FP gear. Arenas would then be a role balance required groupfinder mixed group or solo queue with rewards equivalent to MM FPs, and WZs would be the equivalent of Vet ops, meaning 336 blue gear with improved stat budgets and no groupfinder option for queuing, basically evicting solo players from high end group PvP reward tracks. WZs at present allow people to get gear at itemization levels that they don't "deserve" based on the teamwork and skill requirements of the content, at least if you're taking PvE rewards as a baseline. SWTOR has failed generally to do a good job at ground PvP content. So creating content that's meant to be solo-PvP oriented with an accompanying reward track might actually be really good for PvP in SWTOR. The problems are, the rewards are going to be inferior to what PvP currently gives, and there's going to be a wait because Bioware will have to make an attempt at figuring out how to do solo friendly PvP content that's role, gear, and skill neutral. Not entirely sure what the point of skill neutral PvP is supposed to be, but this thread is full of people asking for it, so it's worth a try? I mean, if they can make it FUN, then it should work. That would probably mean much better incentives for cooperation and politeness in the game design for solo PvP content. Honestly, if they could figure out good solo PvP content, they could probably take lessons from that to improve the existing group PvP content. Edit: One place to start might be a hybrid PvE / PvP style of content. For example build a wall or tower or some other indirect competition where players can build score on their own, but benefit from teamwork (blatantly obvious noob-friendly teamwork), with interludes of either indirect PvP (attack their turret, heal or tank for your turrets), or direct PvP, cycling through these phases several times per game. So there's competition, but some avenue for success for those people totally incompetent at direct PvP. There's a spectrum here that can range from mostly competitive PvE to almost pure PvP. Well designed, you could have a progression from less PvP to more as skill grows, with a bit of RNG in what pops just to keep things from getting stale. Sort of a PvP - Lite family of content, for those that want competition stiffer and less predictable than NPC scripts, but aren't really interested in advanced team based PvP content. Not gonna hold my breath for any of that though.

Kind of annoying for some classes to not have a stun and stun break baseline. Spent a lot of time hunting through tooltip texts looking for those on some of my less played classes. Feel like Knight/Warrior tanks are a bit sparse on things to do. Sometimes I end up just standing there waiting for things to come off of CD because there's not really anything useful to do, though this may be partly a matter of me not really seriously tanking on them and overlooking something I should be using to fill that gap. I primarily tank as Shadow, so Knight and Trooper tanking styles both feel a bit slow to me coming from juggling to keep all of the Shadow buffs active. After 7.0 though, those two classes feel even slower to me. The spread of abilities over the number of levels is a bit of an issue for leveling. It's uncomfortably sparse now, and though all leveling content has been very heavily nerfed in terms of difficulty, there are in various spots now where encounters were designed on the assumption that players had key abilities like stun breaks, stuns, interrupts, where those abilities may now be unlocked after you get to the level for those encounters. It's not a show stopper, but it is bad design. Meaningful choices were good, somewhat thinning crowd controls in PvP was good, but in terms of gaining abilities as part of the leveling/reward experience they didn't really solve the problem of having a mismatch between the number of character levels and the number of abilities granted over the course of leveling to max level. If they add another 5 levels with the next expansion, it's going to become even more problematic. The original spacing of abilities over levels was quite a bit better in 1.0 than it is now. I'd like them to return to that. Of course, with a 60% increase in levels to the level cap, that gets you to genuine ability bloat. I think the obvious solution would basically to have a core set of abilities spread over levels 1-50, and then over levels 51- level cap what you do is have upgrades to those abilities making them more powerful, or unlock options where either you choose between a more powerful version of the base ability or a different or modified ability of equivalent power. This way you get: A fixed number of abilities per class to map to quickbars so that bloat is no longer an issue Good spacing between ability grants as you level a character Continued sense of power progression as you level past the original level cap A way to implement meaningful choices between abilities and tailor builds for specific playstyles or content An ability grant progression system that doesn't have to be completely refactored with every expansion because the design can handle growth in the level cap It's not a super secret approach to ability grants, and given that I'm pretty sure that Bioware is 100% wedded to the idea of increasing the level cap with every expansion I have no idea why they went with the current implementation, which is already slightly problematic in it's abilities/level spacing ratio and will only (very foreseeably) grow worse with future expansions.

Log in performance has serious problems for me. Of maybe 9 attempts on April 6 only one was successful. Starting from StarForge as default server, I consistently got timeouts and a contact customer service message. After many attempts gave up, and decided to wait. 4 hours later successfully logged in, and got partway through a FP with no problems, when IRL interrupted. Group formation and transport to FP seemed to be normal on clicking accept. 1.5 hours after that, I'm now stuck in a perpetual loading screen with mouse droid noises. So not only is Shae Visla not working, but SWTOR is effectively unplayable for me now. After I finish griping here I may try digging into Steam Config files and see if editing the default server with Notepad++ can save me the trouble of a clean reinstall. 0/10 for log in experience. Latency from NH USA has gone from 20-40 ms for NA servers and 100 to 150 ms for EU servers to a pretty stable 345 ms. So 2 to 10 times more latency. Probably not an issue in PvE, but getting concerning for PvP particularly GSF where being over 150 ms starts to create a significant effect in my experience. Haven't actually gotten to test, see log in issues. Two thumbs down. If the live servers become like this I'm abandoning SWTOR permanently. Not gonna pay for a game that has a 10% success rate for log in attempts. Edit: potentially useful info If this happens to you on a Steam Client, and you get stuck listening to perpetual mouse droid noises on a hung loading screen because Shae Visla won't let you in: Set your File Explorer View options to See All to be sure you can get at your AppData Go to: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\SWTOR\swtor\settings\DisplayName_AccountDev.ini and open it up with an editor like Notepad++ to replace the Shae Visla Shard data with LastPlayedShard = Star Forge LastPlayedShardAddress = he3000n01.swtor.com:8995:castlehilltest If Star Forge is up, it should get you logged in to a working server where you'll have access to the select server menu.

Can log in and play on both NA servers with no problem. Server status shows all servers up, however if trying to log onto a non-NA server after delay "Contact customer service." message pops up. Bonus feature, can't log in to EA support to tell customer service, because it's not sending required authentication codes. Rah, rah, EA support, GO TEAM! /sarcasm Current Shae Visla feedback: significantly less functionality than I expected. Edit: 4 hours later, problem seems to be resolved.

People keep complaining about premades ruining solo PvP, but I'm confused. . . . When did they enable premades queuing into duels?

About as badly as it does with groups. I've been queued plenty of times at slow hours where there's only one match worth of people in the queue and it's not uncommon for one team to end up with zero good players and the other to end up with 3-5 skilled solo queued pilots. Aggravates the heck out of me, because the matchmaker is failing by it's own metrics. If it looked at the people that end up in the match the "balance score" would be bad according to the matchmaker. The problem is that it seems to pick one "group" at a time, and considers a solo player to be a group of one, and once it has made a choice, it goes on picking and never double checks the final team composition. I think it's a combination of using less complicated code and of prioritizing minimum queue times above all else. Basically, they do a sorting step at each pick from a fluctuating queue, but once they have a match worth of players, it never goes back and checks, "given this finalized pool of players pulled from the queue, is this sorting of player into teams the most balanced sorting according to the metrics being used." The answer is almost always no, what varies is how badly. Sort speed good, sort quality poor. Team compositions definitely not double checked for correctness before start of match. I'd like a better sorting method implemented, but maybe not until the code they're releasing gets on average more like previous expansions and less like 7.x in term of how buggy it is. The way things have been going, a 7.3 matchmaker revamp would probably either fail to pick players from the queue at all and hang in some sort of infinite loop, or sort everyone onto one team and then auto-terminate the match due to the mismatch in number of players on the two teams. Though . . . if they managed to break the the auto-terminate too, then everyone would always win their 12 vs. 0 matches, and people might finally stop complaining about premades and how long Win x/x matches dailies and weeklies take to complete. So maybe they should go for it, and achieve the unattainable goal of making everyone in a MMO PvP mode happy with their win rates? April first is coming soon . . .

Well if you look at activities that are designed as team activities, the ones where failure to use teamwork is a near 100% failure rate MM FPs, Vet Ops, NiM Ops, there's little complaint about grouping and teamwork being needed. The ones where success is possible without groups or teamwork are WZs and Arenas, and people sure do complain about the benefits of teamwork in them. One difference though, is that the incentives for the PvE have a stronger link between reward and being a team. Their groupfinders imply at least, that teamwork is needed. No tank? No Healer? Back into the queue you go if they didn't accept the pop from groupfinder. It subtly says to the player, "you must be part of a team and work as a team to do this activity." PvP incentive structures don't really have the game sending you that message in that way. Sure, damage, kills, heals, etc. but that's all stuff you can do solo, and is sometimes easier to cheese solo. If the game directly says, "Yo, dude, I have a bribe for you if you make a team for this team activity," you might see some traction with a playerbase that's notorious for chasing rewards to the point that they complain about being "forced" to do optional activities for optional loot, that's inherently worthless digital ones and zeros. Worth a try anyway. There's a lack of positive reinforcement from the game design for cooperative play in SWTOR's PvP activities.

I suspect it's effectively acting as independent matchmakers. So if you're in a pool for say WZs, the warzone matchmaker will see you in the WZ queue and make matches based on that "blind" to what other queues you might be in. If it puts you in a match it will remove you from all other queues as part of the match start process, but that's the limit of the queues "talking" to each other. So, no, there's not priority other than each queue trying to make a match from it's pool as quickly as possible.

You could go the other way on groups. 3/3 Fly a GSF match while in a group. Then folks like us might post things like, "Experienced GSF pilot LFG for GSF group weekly," a bit more often. On average, given how I fly alts, I'd be trying to group for 15 more matches per week than I currently do if that were the incentive. Just a thought.

I had an idea responding in another thread about Seasons rewards, and was lamenting that there's no way to show off Cartel Coin cosmetic purchases for Galactic Starfighter ships to other players. You can sink a lot of CCs into blaster bolt colors, paint patterns, paint colors, and engine exhaust colors, but no one else will ever see them. That's a bit of an issue for monetization, because showing off the shineys is a big driver of cosmetic game item purchases. There are Correlian Stardrive mounts, that are basically the Galactic Starfighter battlescout model. Why not hook up a Frankenstein UI code of some sort that hooks up a new mount with that mesh to the cosmetic selections that can be bought in the GSF Hangar interface? This would give a player a chance to potentially spend up to about 6500 Cartel Coins worth of customization option unlocks on a ship. The unlocks are per character btw. If you wanted to be particularly brilliant (and particularly money-grubbing), this could be set up as a generalized mount customization system. Dyes, color crystals, and weapon tunings could all probably be used as inputs as well. In terms of justifying the effort this would involve on the back end, the idea is to get one base mesh where the art development is done, and allow players to potentially spend CC to get the mesh, and then to spend more CC on already existing appearance modifications. So possibly an income stream that requires little effort after the back end has been built. It would also be an opportunity to vastly improve the monetization of GSF cosmetic unlocks, which I daresay most players don't even realize exist. However, if they start seeing fully customized Stardrive based mounts tooling around on Fleet some of them would probably get interested pretty quickly. If I wanted to actually have GSF Cartel Coin cosmetic purchases that appealed to the general playerbase, I think that's how I'd do it. The GSF cosmetics are per character, so looking at costs, you'd be talking about 600 CC for a blaster, paint, engine combo for one mount for one of each, around maybe 1800 to 2400 for a decent selection of the "good" options, and over 6500 if you want to be a completionist. For the GSF based portion, there are 3 Imperial scouts and 3 Republic scouts in terms of meshes that could be used, and are suitable for mount sized vehicles. I suppose other ship classes would work, but the scale wouldn't look right, though if you put "mini-" in front of the name maybe that would be a work around. For non-GSF mounts probably mechanical themed things would be the best fit, but I suppose with some creativity some organics might also work. Of course, Seasons rewards unlock mostly through game play, so if you did this you'd probably want to put such a mount in the Subscriber only reward track, somewhere in the Seasons 80-100 range. Them for the remaining GSF scout meshes probably first put them in Cartel packs at a low rate, and then eventually transition to purchasable mounts in the Cartel Market. My ulterior motive here of course, is to be able to tool around on Fleet flaunting a Stardrive mount mesh with the Republic SR-03 paint job and modded engine colors. I do think there might be a profit opportunity for Bioware here though, especially if it's build as part of a more general mount customization toolset.

I sympathize with your sentiment, but a lot of your examples are poor or flat out wrong. Algorithms are not inherently flawed. They're just sets of instructions, that if the hardware is capable of executing, will execute as instructed. The non-contribute algorithm works very well. It has a timer with three set points, a reset mechanism, two user interface message outputs, and a forced user log-out as the final step in what's probably an if-then-else structure. Do people make mistakes implementing the algorithms they meant to implement and implement something else? Sure. SWTOR is full of that, though the auto-kick doesn't seem to be one of them. Do people make bad software design choices and use algorithms that work flawlessly to perform a task that is not to be the task that needs to be performed? Yes, frequently. but that's a problem with the overall software design having chosen the wrong algorithm, not with the algorithm itself. If you want to screw in a screw and someone hands you a hammer, it doesn't mean that hammers are inherently flawed or even that they can't drive in a screw. It just means it would have been better if your helper had handed you a screwdriver instead. Metaphorically speaking, screws that have been hammered in are pretty common in software, but blaming the hammers is misguided. Play style isn't really an issue so much as being below a certain skill threshold. If you're actively playing, and above a certain threshold, the timer is a non-issue. We know this because the entire high skill community of GSF players seems to have completely missed that there was a change to the system from how it used to be. It's a very diverse set of playstyles. Individual players can even play rather differently depending on mood. I've got a "pacifist" GSF alt, where the goal is the highest win rate possible while having the lowest kills per game. I think it's currently at something like 65% win rate with an average of less than one kill per match. Never managed to see the non-contribute message with that alt even though I focus purely on support when flying it. Can pure support help a team? Absolutely. Does pure support place you at high risk of non-contribute? No, not if you're supporting effectively. What skilled and experienced people often forget though, and this doesn't just apply to GSF, is what it is like and how difficult things can be as a beginner. So enthusiasm for kicking is a bit unfair. It also slows the rate at which people gain experience and graduate from being beginners to being more skilled if they get kicked a lot. Training, planning, and prior decisions are things I'd love to see more of in GSF matches. Actually, in most matches they're things I'd like to see any of. Not really relevant to vote kick features though. Kills and damage are pretty good signals of skilled participation. If you want to have some kind of automatic effect to detect skilled participation they're good choices. I'd add accuracy as another good indicator. For more generic usefulness, add objectives if in Domination, and low numbers of deaths in TDMs. The issue with them is that they all confirm positive activity. So if there's no signal from those channels it doesn't tell you what's going with that player in any detail. Are they trying their best but just clueless? If the player has a low number of matches, there's a good chance of this. Are they skilled but AFK because the popcorn they forgot in the microwave just burst into flame? Maybe. Are they trying to cheese through conquest fly scout/strike/gunship/bomber 5/5 goals by queuing into matches and then alt-tabbing to stream a movie? Could be. But the signals of positive activity don't tell you anything about whether a lack of positive activity is unacceptable or not. If that's the case though, then why are they using positive activity signals for the kick timer, and is that bad design? They're probably using them because there aren't any good negative activity signals. That and it probably only required a line or two of fairly simple code modifying the old warning system to implement. As for the question of bad design, eh, it's messy. It does punish genuine inactivity. It does incentivize activity. However, it also punishes inexperience (in a mode where the tutorials are hard to find and not very good), and can incentivize perverse/negative activity. So it works, but with some undesirable side effects. Without access to Bioware's match data it's hard to assess where the benefit/cost balance lies between intended effect and undesirable side effect. Your examples of people "not contributing" are indeed pretty good examples of not contributing: The ship running away isn't relieving much pressure from their team. Given the amount of time it's taking to kill them, the pursuers aren't all that dangerous. They're also not that strategically competent because they haven't given up the chase to go slaughter the target's less able teammates. That length of chase isn't really justifiable unless the target is known to be so good that they will single-handedly demolish the other team if they aren't kept busy. That sort of player isn't going to have any trouble with the kick timer. They're also not going to waste time going out to the middle of nowhere. What they'll do instead is lead the pursuers to an area where there's cover that protects the ship being chased from enemy ships' line of fire, but provides clear lines of fire to friendly ships. This allows the rest of the team to kill the pursuing scouts along with all the other enemies they're killing, will likely keep the ship being chased alive, and leave the chased ship in a position to do something useful when the pursuers are shot off their tail. So yeah, chased ship person in your scenario, isn't really being very useful to their team. They probably shouldn't be kicked though. They may not be helping their team, but they are practicing and developing their defensive flying skills, and doing a reasonable job of it. They're not really helping their current team in their current match, but there should be a benefit to future teams in future matches. There's a learning progression at work. Learning tactical defensive flying to help yourself stay alive is a less advanced skill than strategic defensive flying that both keeps you alive and helps your team at the same time. Someone learning at the tactical level usually isn't ready to work on the strategic level yet, so it's reasonable to cut them some slack even if they aren't contributing. The missile boat example seems wildly improbable. I guess you mean Pike or Quell, as those are the only ships that at least vaguely fit the missile boat description. If you're so new you don't realize that you have a second missile on a Pike or Quell, and are getting close enough to lock and launch EMP missiles (and therefore well within Heavy Laser, Concussion missile, Torpedo, and Railgun range), the chances of surviving long enough to hit the kick timer are very slim. If you're actually landing any of them, it'll reset the timer and you'll be fine. If you're just beeping at people with lock tones and not landing missiles, then honestly it's not doing much. Strikes were like that before 5.5. I also tried this strategy when I was testing the auto kick system. I had to not do damage to avoid resetting the timer so I could document exactly what was going on with it, but, I still wanted to help my team so I dropped a healing beacon and started locking but not launching missiles to try to "spook" enemy ships. Between the small sliver of players that are skilled and won't break until after the missile is launched, and the great masses that just ignore the tones and then wonder what "one shot" their 10% of remaining hull, it appears that beeping at people is just as ineffective now as it was before 5.5. So no, the example player isn't really contributing to their team meaningfully, and being kicked and replaced would probably help their team if the backfill is more skilled. Everyone has to start learning somewhere though, so again, though the example player isn't really contributing, they probably shouldn't be kicked for it. The bomber is also not really a good example. The job of a bomber is area denial, but it's not just random area. It has to be meaningful area. In Dom this is easy. Find a friendly, neutral, or contested satellite, and you're good to go. Even a hostile one if there's a reasonable chance of either taking it or pulling enough opponents to it so another sat can be captured. When fighting around a node with deployables, doing enough damage to avoid the kick timer isn't an issue. TDM is a different matter though. No space in a TDM is inherently strategically relevant, not even the DO superspawn points. So as a bomber, you have to deploy mines, drones, and beacons where they are relevant to what is going on in the match. Simply dropping them somewhere and going off to hide, hoping your team will use them isn't really contributing. If your mines and drones aren't damaging anything they're not really doing much good. "But gunships can hide. . .," no. If your nest of mines is never getting triggered by any ships, then any ships in your nest aren't being pressured in a way that a nest of mines defends against, and your mines are not doing any good. Go place new mines and/or drones in a more useful place. If you only use mines, drones, and beacons, you're actually wasting most of your component slots and base ship attributes. If you dump deployables and then go hide your: engines, hull, shields, capacitors, magazine, primary weapon, and maybe secondary weapon depending on build, are all being useless. The majority of your ship components, are being useless. Bombers can fight somewhat effectively with just deployables if done correctly, they can fight entirely without deployables somewhat effectively, but they can fight most effectively by using both the ship and the deployables. If they neither effectively, then they're basically useless. As Exocor points out though, in TDM useless can be quite a bit better than worse than useless. I'd say the inactive TDM bomber is the one case I can think of where the auto-kick will reliably detect a ship that definitely should be doing something different. It doesn't do much to help the player understand what they should be doing different though. In any particular match, vote kicking is more likely to help your team than hurt it. It doesn't improve your odds greatly, but if a player has reached the warning, and is staying there long enough for multiple people to see it and vote, or for the auto-kick to engage, then even a pretty low skill backfill should be an improvement in the vast majority of cases. Where kicking hurts isn't in the individual game. It's in the long term development and health of the GSF playerbase. It punishes lack of activity reliably but can't distinguish between inactivity caused by not knowing what to do and inactivity from trying to get rewards while AFK. It tends to completely miss deliberate malicious play and it doesn't reward good play. That's what puts me mildly against the auto-kick feature. There are players, who despite not contributing to their current match, should stay in it (and probably in a bunch more), so that they can learn to contribute. For the players it should really influence, ones with some skill but who are just in GSF as a low effort avenue to non-GSF rewards, auto-kick isn't super effective. Alt-tabbing on a sat in Doms and self-destructs in TDMs are viable workarounds for those players. The actively malicious, of course, just aren't deterred by much of anything. For the most useful demographic, players in it for the loot with some skill but little motivation, reward structure changes would probably be a more effective solution. Positive action is fairly easy to detect, and the code to detect it already exists. If lots of positive action maximizes the loot/effort ratio, those players will get pretty good at GSF pretty fast. If that replaces auto-kick, then hopefully you have a stronger positive effect on how the average game goes, while at the same time allowing new players to fumble around ineffectively for however long it takes them to learn to be effective. Given that the players who picked up GSF as a subscriber early-access perk had years to learn how to play GSF without having to worry about auto-kick, it seems excessively harsh to make new players suffer through it, especially since it seems like most current GSF players are relatively speaking, new, at least to GSF.

There's not really a way to show off the GSF cosmetics to other players. However, if you think your spearpoint might look better when you're playing with magenta engine plumes (it totally does), then it might be nice. Changing your blaster bolt colors can also be nice for aesthetic reasons. It would be sweet if they had a variant of the Corellian Stardrive mount where it would take the paint-job, engine color, and blaster color from your hangar's battlescout selections. Sort of a dye/color crystal/tuning system for a mount, but based off of your GSF cosmetic unlocks. Then you could show off your GSF cosmetic purchases. I'd go for that. Not sure you could do it for anything other than scouts though, the other ship classes are too big to really work as mounts. Probably too complicated, too much work, no one knows how to do it, but if I wanted to actually have GSF Cartel Coin purchases that appealed to the general playerbase, I think that's how I'd do it. The GSF cosmetics are per character, so looking at costs, you'd be talking about 600 CC for a blaster, paint, engine combo for one mount for one of each, around maybe 1800 to 2400 for a decent selection of the "good" options, and over 4300 if you want to be a completionist. So after almost ten years of utter failure at monetizing GSF, if they could pull off a GSF-cosmetics linked mount it might work? Depends, I guess. Would need a sample of people who don't care about GSF at all to see if they would be willing to drop CC on a customizable GSF themed mount. Or mounts. All of the base Rep and Imp scouts would work as models, but the Czerka one might not. Edit: Oops, silly me, I remembered paint patterns, but forgot paint colors, so add 120 to base, 240 to mid range and for the whales 2280, for a grand total of up to 6500 CCs per mount. With up to potentially 6 mount variants, and being a per character unlock. I think I would run out of CCs pretty quickly.

Eh, seasons are ok. Nice supplement to CCs, some of the items are appealing. Don't really care about seasons companions. I already have tonnes, and there's not quite enough story/personality to make them really interesting. There aren't any Galactic Starfighter rewards. There are ships like the K-52 that used to be on the Cartel Market but no longer are, and cosmetic engine and blaster colors that basically no one knows exists. Bringing one or two of the above as teaser rewards might get some players thinkg about the fact that you can buy CC cosmetics for GSF ships. The GSF interface unfortunately, doesn't really do a good job of letting you know these things exist. It's nice having a broad swath of everything, with different areas of emphasis each week. So there's always an activity you like hopefully, and on some weeks there's an excuse to binge on what you like. Yes. It's pretty easy as a subscriber, as F2P you need to pay some attention to when the season starts in order to not fall behind, but there a fair margin of wiggle room there. Seasons is opt-in, so I don't see how it can prevent anything. I do alter choices a bit in terms of what activities I do on which alts to avoid duplicating effort on Seasons and Conquest, but other than that not that much impact on choice of activities. Nope.

There hasn't ever been as far as I know. The problem is that there's not a good, simple, reliable algorithm that can sort between new players hitting boost, barrel roll, or power dive at the wrong moment multiple times and someone deliberately self destructing. Even a time from spawn, or distance from spawn limited option is problematic in games where a team is getting spawn camped. I guess the closest devs ever got to a mention was an April Fools related post about releasing an "Asteroid" ship, in homage to the number of players that have died to terrain collisions in GSF. I doubt there's any win trading going on. The reward structure isn't really set up for that to be profitable. More likely is Conquest fly 5/5 matches in [Ship Class]. So you have a scout, a strike, a gunship and a bomber on your bar, self destruct in at least three so you tick all four boxes for that match, and then if it's a TDM continue to SD so you can get to the next match as quick as possible to do it again. At least those are per legacy goals, so after five matches of SDs there's no longer an incentive to keep doing it. Unless [Ship Class] Eternal is up, though I'm not sure it's really worth it for 6 k Conquest, especially since you get almost double that by scoring a win. Otherwise it's generally someone throwing a tantrum because they have no clue what they're doing and keep losing GSF matches. Though if they're really bad enough to be enough of a handicap to cause pretty much any team they're on to lose a TDM due to their incompetence, I'm not sure enraged deliberate SDs would actually make that much of a difference. I think the only reasonable shot in terms of lobbying the devs SD detection would be a modification to the respawn timer, assuming that they have someone who can modify it without breaking it. After a set threshold of "freebie" deaths per time period, additional deaths in close sequence would stack some extra time on the player in question's respawn timer. Basically rate limit it in the most extreme cases. Possibly with a conditional that only counts deaths with no enemy damage taken. Given that there are people so bad at GSF that they'll legitimately die 10-20 times per match when trying to survive, you'd have to set the bar pretty generously. There's also the issue that if a working SD system were in place, the easy workaround is to fly slowly, in a straight line, not using defensive cooldowns, in front of a highly competent pilot. In terms of damage to one's own team, there's not much difference in effectiveness between that and just ramming a capital ship at spawn. Making Conquest, Seasons, and gear currency reward structure more medals earned based and less mere presence based would probably be more effective though. It's hard to earn medals and be completely useless to your team at the same time, and if earning medals is a faster easier path to the loot than serial SDs are, then the bulk of your SDers will start farming medals instead. Of course, BW would have to fix the scoreboard so it shows medals again, and redo the reward structure, so fairly unlikely, at least before 8.0, 9.0 or some other full number version where they're completely redoing the reward structure anyway.

Rather disappointing. Was testing in preview with a Black and Blue dyed outfit, and a Blue-Cyan-Indigo Cartel Market crystal, and it looked pretty sick. Unfortunately, with the apparently unchangeable green-blue default blade it just looks sickly. Can lightsabers have nausea? Cause it sort of look like this one does. Particularly annoying that it works in preview, but not in the game world. Edit: As of march 27 2023, color crystal appears to be working correctly now.

So this is a thread complaining about UIs with more than 24 class abilities that cites three examples showing 24 or fewer class abilites, and one showing 25 class abilities, as terribly "bloated." Yet somehow, Jedi Shadows, which can have at least 29 abilities, are a good example of excellent "streamlined" classes? I'm struggling a bit with the internal inconsistencies of the OP's argument.

It turns out that auto-kick really is a thing the other thread discussing this with my test results. I was very surprised. I definitely didn't get the memo on this one whenever the change happened.

The 15 seconds between the second warning and the kick is kind of harsh IMO. It surprised the heck out of me when it came up, so I probably wasted a second or two, but then in a poorly positioned dronecarrier I managed to land a proton on someone and kill something with HLCs while the Proton was in flight. So no worries for me, trivially easy to avoid a kick if I want to. If I were a new player though, by the time the message had registered (assuming I had enough attention to spare to read and process the meaning), and I started figuring out what I needed to do, and how to do it, I think I'd probably end up kicked before even really being able to start responding. Moving it out to maybe 20 or 30 seconds before the kick would probably be better, possibly with a follow up. There's a balance somewhere between getting the message through and not having the movie style bomb countdown red wire/black wire sort of stress freaking out a new player who's already kinda stressed. As far as auto-kick goes, it's really as much about the reward structure as anything else. If participation is the route to most efficient loot acquisition, whether tech fragments, WZ currency, gear boxes, conquest points, etc., then that's what people will do. So create a medals based reward track since they already have the code to track that for GSF achievements, and in most cases you should reward "good-ish" play. Sure you can cheese some medals to an extent, but even the cheesing isn't really harmful and often at least mildly contributes to the team. Probably a "too much work" prospect from Bioware's perspective, but personally I'd take that over the auto-kick.

Auto Kick tested and existence confirmed. The old warning system is still there and works as previously. After about 1.5 min, or 10% of maximum match length of no damage, a warning for non-contributing flashes mid screen. If you continue in non-contribute status for about the same length of time again, a warning flashes mid screen that if you do not do damage to an enemy, or interact with an objective within 15 seconds you will be removed from the match. Bioware did indeed implement an auto-kick in GSF, and as far as I can tell, didn't bother to publish it in the patch notes whenever they pushed it live, though I have to admit that I more skimmed the notes than read with a fine tooth comb, so it is possible that I missed it. So there are two systems at work here. The old timer that prevents other players from even trying to kick you until the first non-contribute warning timer has expired and given you a warning. The new timer that continues the timer for another period and automatically boots you from the match if it expires, even if no-one on your team cares to initiate a vote kick. So basically 10% of match without "contributing" = warning message, and enables other players to start a vote kick. "Contributing" resets the timer. At 20% of max match time without "contributing" game automatically kicks you from match and gives a PvP + GSF queue ban, according to the new stacking penalty scheme. Sure, going 20% of a match with no damage is pretty poor performance, but on the whole I think I'd recommend reverting the feature, and not just because of fond memories of when we used to do 12 v 1 chases. When you don't understand that boost start has a cost beyond boost sustain, don't know energy management, have a bad ship build, don't understand how range, tracking, evasion, and accuracy interact, then hitting one target in a 3 minute span can be genuinely challenging. @Nee, The wording on the second warning is poor in my opinion, in that though it is clearly an auto-kick, it doesn't explicitly say it's an auto-kick. It's very similar to the old inactivity warning wording, which I think is what lead to the chorus of more experienced pilots thinking that nothing had changed and that you might just be mis-interpreting things. Note: It only took me 12 matches to finally resist the urge to kill things for long enough to actually get a non-contribute, I think it helped that it was an Iokath TDM, which is not exactly my favorite map. Being in a bomber also helped.

So in summary: You have no knowledge of statements from Bioware that they implemented an auto-kick. You received no notification from the in game UI that is was an automatic rather than player initiated kick. You posted a screenshot that leads to a 404 error not found. A simple, "No, I have no evidence," would have sufficed. I read and posted in that thread, and not having seen any real evidence for or against, but seeing you and others talk about auto-kick with great confidence made me wonder if you did have evidence that simply hadn't been presented. Salty tone aside, though, your response is actually quite helpful. If I had to bet, I'd lay money on you just misinterpreting what the UI is presenting, and actually being still non-contributing even though you thought you weren't. That's not an insult by the way. I can't count the number of times I've thought one thing happened during a match only to go back and look at a recording and find that watching without the stress and excitement of playing at the same time reveals a very different story. There's a small chance of course that a network latency spike created a situation where there was a desync between what your client thought was going on and what was going on in the server, but you should have seen fairly obvious signs of lag if that were the case. I wasn't trying to imply that anyone was specifically trying to target or harass you. I was trying to say that some people playing GSF seem to have an enrage timer regarding everyone who ever has non-contribute for even a fraction of a second, and will try to kick all kickable players as soon as they become kickable. Seems silly to me, as we were all beginners once, and in any case in a TDM the team is better off if a new player hides in a terrrain object somewhere and dies maybe once, than if they rack up 16 deaths trying to avoid what's basically the "Hello world" code example hooked up to a timer. My overall advice, unless someone comes up with actual evidence of an auto-kick, is to be friendly and sociable in the chat while waiting for the match to start, and then just ignore the warning if you think that ignoring it allows you to play better than paying attention to it. I'll try testing it at some point just to be sure though.

@yandcabral, @Achnaattwo. @Nee-Elder, do any of you have any solid evidence that an auto-kick feature exists? Pre 5.5, and I believe at least for some time after 5.5, I know 100% for certain that no such feature existed in GSF. We had some theme night games at times where it was basically 12 v 1, and the job of the 1 was to run away and survive as long as possible. So based on experience, I can tell you that in the past is was possible to be non-contributing for pretty much the whole match without getting kicked, because other players had to initiate the kick. I've looked through the patch notes for 6.0 through present in the General, Warzone/PvP, and Galactic Starfighter sections, and haven't found any notes about changing how this worked. Do you know of any official Bioware notification otherwise, or have any ingame messages that it was specifically automatic and not just a grumpy player on your team checking the teams frequently to initiate a kick as soon as they saw someone with inactive status? Having an AFK/inactive detection system upgrade from the old: do damage OR be in capture range of a friendly satellite, is a slightly separate issue. At a certain skill level, staying away from the non-contribute flag becomes trivially easy, but in the beginning like most of GSF's skills it can be frustratingly difficult, especially since there are higher priority things to worry about such as not getting blown up. Healing is a bit problematic because you have to code to distinguish between self-healing and healing others (self healing can't count because it's too easy to exploit), getting damaged is also a bit problematic because being AFK while gently bumping into an asteroid would be a way to cheat the detector. Contested sats would be a good improvement, but . . . there's a problem. Changes in detection require actual writing of code to change how GSF functions, not just edits of numerical values in existing code. That means programmer time needs to be allotted to it, and GSF's allotment of programmer time is zero, unless it's to fix unintended severe bugs.

Il est un discord pour les Fanas de GSF. Qui dans le monde acheter un K-52? Un Fana de GSF naturellement. Donc si on veux trouver un K-52, on doit trouver les Fanas de GSF pour poser le question, <<Avez-vous un K-52 que vous pouvez vender a moi?>> Malhueresment, il n' y a pas beaucoup de gens qui veux acheter un K-52, resultant que les developpeurs ne voudrais faire le travailler pour metter dans le cartel market. C'est sans profit pour eux. Je croix que en case de Barro, un jouer que retourner aux SWTOR appres quelque ans avec autres joues a trouver un dans son cargo. Pour la prix, tous les chose de cartel market qui sont tres rare sont aussi tres chere. K-52 est, tres, tres, rare. Bon chance en votre cherche.