And why do you think that is? Level synch makes the slot machine fiasco look like small potatoes. So BW would rather censor the discussion than hear what players think? That makes no sense. It should TELL BW something important. I really do hope they are listening. I have always just rolled my eyes at the weekly "This game is dying" threads wondering if these guys had any sense at all. But it's kinda like the Boy Crying Wolf. When the wolf finally appeared the villagers paid no attention, and all the sheep died. This one has me worried. I can't see how it would EVER "infuse life back into the game." The game is not broken. They do not need to fix it. And they don;t appear to be listening. They need to give us new content and leave the mechanics of the game alone. Sadly, they can't keep their hands off the game, and THIS time I fear it might have grave consequences. And I REALLY hope I am wrong.

You have no idea what the majority of players want. People claiming "The majority wants" X are blowing smoke out their tailpipe. All the evidence any one of us has is trying to read the tea leaves on this forum and others. So when someone says, "The majority wants level synch and you don't know what you are talking about." that is COMPLETE nonsense.

Is that required? I explore Tacoma in my Silverado more than I would like to. And there's a damn toll on the bridge!

Negative. This may very well be the deal killer. We'll have to wait and see.

I'm really sorry, but you are delusional. Those tow points of yours, though they may have been used by someone, are completely irrelevant to the argument. I am by no means agreeing with you. That's just funny.

The snobbery and elitism is great with this one. A. Correct. I prefer to do green level missions rather than orange level missions. That's because orange is difficult for me and I'm not as good a player as YOU are. Pat yourself on the back and ask around if anyone else gives a flying X how good you are. Yup; it's only you. We don't know exactly how level synch will synch yet, but if it prevents my doing green missions, it;s a deal killer. B. What does "being social" have to do with level synch? I assume by "social" you mean grouping because there's nowhere else to BE very social (unless you consider PvP social) Your point seems irrelevant. C. Dailies? What are dailies? Yet another irrelevant point. So you've gone to the trouble to make a completely elitist snide post and 2 of your 3 issues are completely irrelevant. I can see some truth to your first point, but that begs the question. Must I be "as good as you" to play the game? Is the game to be designed for elitist snobs only? I'm sure there are a lot of them around, but not enough to sustain the game. Perhaps you are the one who needs to take a moment and decide what your problem is because so far you making no sense whatsoever. And this brings up the weirdness of this decision. Most of the things BW is doing simplify the game, making it easier for non-experts to play. Examples include Mastery and other stats, companion nerfing (no more working at stats plus all companions do everything), and the gutting of crafting. They are clearly dumbing down the game either for themselves, making it easier to maintain, or to attract more casual players, maybe both. Yet level synch appears to do the opposite. Of course we don't know exactly how it works yet, but it looks more and more like BW is going Bipolar on us.

What would you rather do, kiss rabbits? This is "Star WARS," remember? It isn't about sustainable development using green technologies or farming organic produce for the vegan marketplace. If you don't like this sort of thing there are some "exploration" games out there. Take a look at the upcoming "Tacoma," for example (the space station, not the city or the truck.) There are games out there where you never pick up a weapon, but this is not one of them. Complaining about it seems rather pointless.

At first I thought level synch wasn't such a bad thing, but wished they would use a toggle. But the more I read about it, the more shocked I have become. It;s not just that you won't enjoy level 60 stats if you wind up on Alderaan to, say, solo a heroic. This has the potential of affecting you even if you're a couple of levels up from where BW thinks you ought to be. For example, I have 12 60's and they are all on Rishi, just finishing up. I didn't exactly plan it that way, but that's how I wound up. That means all missions are green level, not orange. Now it looks like BW will say 60 is too high for Rishi and will nerf it to 55 or 56. But this is what has allowed me to play the game, to kill Torch 12 different ways. If BW does nerf stats to that extent, then I see why that's a big mistake because, for me, at least, it will kill the game. Orange level missions, for me, are a frustrating experience. And that's really too bad. We'll have to see, of course, exactly what they mean, but if it is as I describe above, then I can see why people are predicting dire times. Please tell me I'm wrong; I hope you can do that.

A STUDY OF MISSION SKILLS AS RELATED TO COMPANION GIFTS Executive Summary Treasure Hunting is the least valuable Mission Skill when accumulating Companion Gifts, though not by as much as I had thought. Nevertheless, given the extra time it takes to utilize Treasure Hunting for Companion Gift missions and the fact that it has a lower Return on Investment (ROI), it should be the last one you use compared to the other three skills. I quite realize a couple of other studies have suggested Treasure Hunting is measurably better than the other three skills, but I suggest that these studies are flawed. A complete explanation and all the raw data is provided below. Statement of the Issues The idea has been expressed that Treasure Hunting provides a measurably better return on Companion Gifts due to the fact that returning Gift Fragments, as opposed to whole gifts, allow the player to choose more valuable gifts from the Curator on Fleet. My contention is that not only is this is not true, but that Treasure Hunting has the worst Return on Investment of any of the skills that return Companion Gifts. This study is to test that theory. All four Mission Skills return Companion Gifts. They are Treasure Hunting, Investigation, Diplomacy, and Underworld Trading. Two of these have unique characteristics. Treasure Hunting sometimes returns Gift Fragments rather than whole Gifts. These fragments must be combined and turned into the Gift Curator on Fleet to obtain a complete gift. Diplomacy has missions that are either Light or Dark which return a certain number of equivalent Light/Dark points in addition to the gifts. Investigation and Diplomacy always return whole gifts. Gift Fragments themselves come in three varieties. "Premium" Gift Fragments (Green) require 12 fragments to assemble into a single gift. "Prototype" Gift Fragments (Blue) take 6 fragments to assemble into a single gift. "Artifact" Gift Fragments (Purple) take 8 fragments to assemble into a single gift. As you might imagine, you cannot choose a purple Unique Rakata Grenade using Premium green gift fragments. Already an astute observer can see some issues. It's going to take more than one Treasure Hunting mission to obtain sufficient fragments to assemble into a single gift. How many? We don't know, and that's one of the things measured. More missions equals a greater cost to run them. The claim is that this greater cost is offset by the fact that you get to choose which gifts to get with your assembled fragments. I don't believe that is the case, and this is another factor to be measured. Third is a time factor. You must travel to Fleet and make these fragment transactions, plus you must research just what gifts are more valuable at a given point in time. This is a measure of efficiency. If you used this time sending out missions instead of exchanging fragments, wouldn't you be ahead? This shall also be measured. Experiment Design 100 missions were run in each of all four categories. This was done in 20 sets of five missions each for each mission skill. Though provisions were originally made to deal with mission failures, the fact is that in 400 total missions, no failures resulted. There was a 100% success rate for all the missions. With each mission taking approximately half an hour, the 400 missions represent 200 hours of mission time. With 20 missions running concurrently (4 characters with 5 companions each) it took about ten Real Life hours to run the missions over two days. In this case running 100 missions approaches statistical validity. 1,000 missions would be better, 10,000 missions would be ideal, but this is a compromise. There is no need to haul out equations to show this. There are tables available on the Internet which allow you to do this. After all, with a population of 300 million you only need a sample size of 384 to have a 5% margin of error or a "95% confidence level." The question involved here is whether these 100 mission are representative of what people generally experience when they do companion gift missions. We don't want the results here to be an aberration or an accident. The claim here is that there is a 95% chance that it reflects reality. If that's not good enough for you, then go do 1,000 missions and report back your results. They won't be any different. No, your mileage will NOT vary. Missions were sent out at the 49-50 "Rich" level, the highest level that companion gift missions can be found. No "Wealthy" grade missions were be used. At this level no Premium "green" level fragments are returned. All toons used are Level 60. All companions used have an affection level of 10,000. No attempt was made to match potential "crits" in the missions. Indeed, only one, Kaliyo, has a relevant crit anyway. Neither Treek nor HK were used. "Efficiency" was not tabulated as it is nothing but a mission time variable. 20 different companions were used equally on 20 missions each. As you know, all missions don't show up at once when you attempt to activate them. Sometimes one does; sometimes five do. It varies. If five missions did NOT show up (which is normal) the procedure was to log out and back in until five per session was achieved. This procedure will ALWAYS work if you are patient. The number of total missions available per skill ranges from 5 to 8. Every attempt was made to spread the missions among those that show up so that a single mission is not overly used, but given the distribution it was impossible to assure a precisely even balance except in the instance of Treasure Hunting where all five available missions were run 20 times. Note that this issue does affect time and insofar as time is valuable, it will take you a lot longer doing the login logout shuffle with Treasure Hunting than with the others. That's because there are only five Companion Gift missions available and all of them need to show up for each mission set. But the login shuffle frequently returns only lockbox or gemstone missions. This will be a moot point in 4.0, but it still exists today. Note that it is very important to run equivalent missions here. It is INVALID to simply sell 100 gifts from each mission skill and divide to get an ROI. You need to sell as many gifts as you can from 100 missions and ONLY 100 missions. See the difference? This will become apparent when we do the summary information. Given the results of the other studies, I suspect this is the area where they go askew. The math is about right to suggest this is the issue. Crits All missions will return one gift each or several gift fragments. They NEVER return two whole gifts. Some missions (except for Diplomacy) will return "Critical" results once in awhile. This is tabulated in the summary information. This will happen whether or not a companion has an overt + Crit in a given skill, though theoretically it will happen most often when such a skill is present (We see no evidence of this.) Affection levels grant "crit skills," but they are hidden. Only one of the 20 companions used in the 400 overall missions has a specific relevant Crit; Kaliyo has a +2 in Underworld Trading. But as you can see from the results, it does not appear to matter. Investigation returned 19 crits and Underworld half that, therefore the presence of Kaliyo is not reflected in the statistics. It's too small to measure. But crits ARE a "result" just as much as gifts are, so what do we do with them? All the "crits" are in schematics for items that each relevant toon already has, i.e.: The schematics are of value only insofar as they can be sold. The fact is these items do not sell well on the GTN. It's not worth the trouble, therefore all crits in this experiment were sold to a vendor in a Stronghold and the credits added to the total for that toon. No one toon gets an advantage here. This represents a very small part of the totals. General Summary of Results The Total Cost of 100 missions ranged from 214,200 credits for Diplomacy to 216,300 for Investigation. The difference is explained by some missions in each category costing 2,225 credits while most cost 2,125 credits, a minor issue, but used in the specific results. Remember we're trying to figure out what 100 missions of effort will get you. That's the only fair (and valid) way to do this. As we know, Treasure Hunting is "different" in that it returns artifact fragments for some missions. The percentage of "Fragment Missions" is large at 41%, therefore 100 missions returned 59 gifts where the other three mission skills returned 100 gifts. However, those 41 Fragment Missions returned 119 fragments which were converted into 11 Artifact Level Gifts (Purple) and 4 Prototype Level Gifts (Blue) to raise the total number of gifts available to 74. We can begin to get a sense of what is afoot by comparing the number of Blue and Purple level gifts put up by each mission skill. At Levels 49-50 there are no green or white level gifts, so they are out of the equation for this study. Here are the generalized figures: Treasure Hunting: Blue Quality Gifts = 50; Purple Quality Gifts = 24 Underworld Trading: Blue Quality Gifts = 85; Purple Quality Gifts = 15 Investigation: Blue Quality Gifts = 79; Purple Quality Gifts = 21 Diplomacy: Blue Quality Gifts = 80; Purple Quality Gifts = 20 Now all gifts are not created equally. A Rakata Grenade just might be worth more than every other purple quality gift on the market. And those Galactic Encyclopedias sell better than Britannica and are CERTAINLY more valuable than Zeltron Perfume Sets, so it MAY be that being able to convert purple fragments into 11 of these will carry the day. So let's take a peek and see how it's shaping up. How many of these high-value blue and purple gifts do our contestants already possess after the 400 missions have been completed? Treasure Hunting already has: 0 Rakata Grenades and 4 Galactic Encyclopedias Underworld Trading already has: 3 Rakata Grenades and 10 Galactic Encyclopedias Investigation already has: 0 Rakata Grenades and 6 Galactic Encyclopedias Diplomacy already has: 2 Rakata Grenades and 8 Galactic Encyclopedias So it looks like Treasure Hunting is pretty smart to convert to those Rakata Grenades, but won't gain much of an advantage over the encyclopedias. Looks like Underworld Trading might be in trouble here, but then there are the vagaries of the GTN, so let's see what happens next! Notes on Sales Strategy Once all missions were complete we looked up all prices and determined the sales price for each item with a view to both maximizing credits and selling all products within a single 24-hour session. That is, neither are we sitting on extremely high prices nor do we price extremely low. We work off the lowest prices as long as they are reasonable, but we do not always try to undercut the lowest price. Once in awhile we come across a "White Knight" sale. This is when someone undercuts an item by a wide margin. For example, we found one item for sale for 2500 credits when the next highest of that same item was 16,000 credits. Was this a mistake or on purpose? Doesn't matter. The proper response is to grab it at this low price and resell it. We did this several times with low ball items, but we did NOT resell and add to this experiment. We treated those items as separate issues. Several times we asked for (and received) higher prices than those listed. On the "Account of the Discovery of Korriban," for example, the lowest price was 30,000 credits. We listed for 35,000. On the other hand, when there are several pages of items selling very close to one another, you can dip a bit lower to secure the sale. For example, with the "Signet Ring of Ancient Tion" there were several pages running from 17,000 to 18,500. We listed 12 at 16,500 and they all sold. The "Unique Rakata Grenade" is valuable. The lowest prices were 50,000 credits. We listed them all at 52,000. Only the Vials of Gree Nanite Paste were higher. We sold them at 66,000, slightly higher than the lowest price. Setting prices is subjective, of course, and could potentially skew results. However, we sold ALL products from ALL missions at the same exact price, so if by chance we did make a mistake, all four mission skills were affected. After all, though this is an experiment, these are our credits and we want to the very best we can to return as many credits as we can. Cost of Sales: Determining Profit Basically this: Sales Price minus GTN Commission minus Mission Cost plus Vendor "Crit" sales equals Profit. You'll be able to see the precise figures for every item further below in the details sections. Here is a summary. Since columns don't work here we are forced to do a text-based version. RESULTS Treasure Hunting Gross Return on Sales: 1,533,440 + Sales of "Crits" to vendors: 5,940 + Cost of Missions: 214,500 - GTN Commissions: 91,650 - Profit: 1,227,290 = Base of 100 Underworld Trading Gross Return on Sales: 1,560,020 + Sales of "Crits" to vendors: 4,320 + Cost of Missions: 214,700 - GTN Commissions: 93,342 - Profit: 1,251,878 = 102% of Treasure Hunting Investigation Gross Return on Sales: 1,759,600 + Sales of "Crits" to vendors: 10,740 + Cost of Missions: 216,300 - GTN Commissions: 105,576 - Profit: 1,448,464 = 118% of Treasure Hunting Diplomacy Gross Return on Sales: 1,841,600 + Sales of "Crits" to vendors: 0 + Cost of Missions: 214,200 - GTN Commissions: 110,496 - Profit: 1,516,904 = 124% of Treasure Hunting Discussion That's all you really need to know. All the rest is detail, lots and lots of detail! Now, of course we know what you're going to do next. First will be disbelief. You "know" this can't be right! The only explanation is that I must have some huge flaw in this experiment. So you will try to find it, and the first Big Thing you will discover is that where all missions save Treasure Hunting had 100 gifts to see on the GTN, Treasure Hunting had only 74, therefore this "is not fair." Wrong. It's not only necessary, it is completely fair and allows us to compare apples and apples. What do you get from 100 missions? The answer is above. If you wanted Treasure Hunting to have 100 gifts to sell and so be on a par with the other three skills, given the percentage of fragments (59:41 is the exact ratio) you would have to run about 130 some odd missions to accumulate sufficient fragments and additional gifts to get to 100--about a third more. Does that number, one-third or maybe 1.3, ring any bells with you? Maybe that's where you should look for flaws. Now, the fact is the results are not as lopsided as I expected them to be either. Although both Investigation and Diplomacy yielded clearly superior results, Underworld Trading was only marginally better and I suspect within the margin for error. In other words, were we to perform this exact experiment again, it could very well be that Underworld Trading would be last on the list. The rest of them wouldn't be, though. There's a five percent chance these results are due to chance. Unlikely. In any case, was I correct in my initial claims? Yes, but barely. Not that a 24% difference is not noticeable, but the overall figures were much closer than I expected. But there is validity in the idea that choosing gifts you get for fragments ALMOST makes up the difference between Treasure Hunting and Underworld Trading. Details: TREASURE HUNTING UNDERWORLD TRADING INVESTIGATION DIPLOMACY Selling Prices: This is from a spreadsheet and may "consolidate" when transferred to a forum post and become jumbled. The order is: Name of Gift, Low Price Found, Selling Price.

Please forgive this test post

Communication? Just look at the crapfest on these forums. "Nerf this!" "No, don't nerf this!" "Balance this." "Just leave it alone." "X should be mandatory!" "No, X should have a toggle." "PvP gets no love!" "PvP is a minor issue no one cares." "Mastery is good!" "Mastery is bad." "Equal companions is good!" "Equal companions is bad." "Keep 12XP!" "Ditch 12XP." "You changed this. Now I hate it!" "You changed this. Thanks." "This is bugged." "No, it's working as intended." "It's Bioware's fault! Fix it NOW." "No, it's YOUR fault. Fix it yourself." Bioware: "We're gonna do this." Players: "Worst! Decision! Ever!" For EVERY SINGLE ISSUE in this game there are people for it, and there are people against it. And if you listen to these people, if they don't get their way, they say the game is going to die. And EVERY SINGLE TIME a dev posts not only will they be repeatedly flamed, someone has a "concern" or needs a "clarification." "I don't understand. Does THIS mean that piece of dust in the corner will be purple or green and if it's purple do I have a chance to change it the way I want it and why don't you have a yellow option? People really want yellow. I asked my friend and he wants yellow, too, so I know EVERYONE wants yellow." And, of course, the metrics show a completely different picture of who does what when. So basically what we have here for "communication" is a big pile of player-created poop. There's quite enough "communication" already. What the devs need to do is look at their metrics and decide the course the game will take and make the changes they feel are necessary to grow the game. What we players say on these forums has almost nothing to do with that because we really have no idea what we are talking about.

If you want nudity, you need a Korean game. Teen rated games in North America, especially, will never have true nudity because the players' Mommies would freak out.

In which case 12x XP is not mandatory, right? You say 12XP is mandatory then turn right around and remind us about the White Acute Module, which makes 12XP NOT mandatory. And what does Level Sync have to do with it again?

/NOT signed.

Why not? Choosing which companion to use is a part of the complexity of the game. You have to learn what companions are good at. Making all companions "the same" is yet another dumbing down of the game. Keep going like this and you'll have SWTOR as easy as Dora the Explorer.

So that eliminates speculation. Players who bought, for example, Gold Scalene Armor would sit on it for a few months and wait for the price to go up as it got more rare, then sell it for credits. And something like the Sensuous Dress Set, which has never to my knowledge reappeared on the Market, now goes for 10 million credits or more. It looks like that practice will be eliminated. Now that's either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what end of the equation you are looking at. But that "feature" of the market has been there since the beginning and removing it is going to affect the nature of the market considerably.

I am not answering Khevar's message on this thread. The best thing to do in these circumstances is just stop. Otherwise it's never-ending. We need to deal with the issue. Now, I have a request to anyone who wishes to respond. I have asked Khevar for this information as well, but would be surprised if he answered. edit to add: Okay. Got it. My bad. It's very simple. If you had prototype (purple) and artifact (blue) gift fragments from Treasure Hunting in sufficient quantity, what gifts would you choose to buy from the curator? Which are the most valuable? Khevar maintains that being able to do this makes up for the fact that Treasure Hunting yields gift fragments rather than whole gifts. Whole gifts are random, and you get a lot of low-level gifts during random missions, so being able to choose which gifts you get is an advantage. This makes Treasure Hunting as or more valuable than other mission skills, all of which return companion gifts. That is Khevar's hypothesis and the crux of this whole issue. I believe he is wrong. I believe Treasure Hunting, largely (but not solely) because of gift fragments, is demonstrably the worst mission skill for companion gifts, but we haven't tested this out, so let us do that. If I am the one who is wrong I am willing to come back on this forum and state so publicly. I don't expect that, but these sorts of conclusions ought to be driven by data rather than emotion and supposition. So here's an opportunity for you to shine and show what an expert you are in this business. If you had to choose, today, what's the best gift? I eagerly await your well-considered responses. Edit: OK. He has done a test in which he claims TH is better. I must say that was awfully fast. I'm scrambling to get 100 missions completed. It'll take me a couple more days. Let's see if it can be duplicated!

I am putting together a little experiment that ought to put these issues to rest. I will start an additional thread on it. It will take me a few days to complete it.

Of course. You are bolstered when you do that so that you have a fighting chance even though technically you may be at a lower level than other players in the same space. It's not random at all. Working as intended.

So you decide to resort to ad hominem insults. Why? We were doing just fine without them. I see no reason why you have to expose your nasty streak here. It says a lot about your character and does nothing for your reputation. Plus you still fail to see why gift fragments are not cost effective. As I have stated twice now in depth, all fragments are not created equal. There are three increments. You get to choose which gift you buy from the curator WITHIN THE INCREMENT of the gift fragments you have. YOUR CHOICES ARE LIMITED. The low level gift fragments do not yield high level gifts. If you have green level gift fragments you can't choose a Rakata Grenade. It's also a complete gamble on which level of fragment is returned on a mission. You may be hoping to score enough fragments to finally get your coveted Rakata Grenade, but then you get some more green fragments. Whoopee! It's going to take you several missions to get there and you WILL wind up with left over fragments. So what you wind up doing is multiple missions, all costing as much as a regular mission, where you MIGHT get a few fragments which, when put together with at least one more mission for the same cost (and probably more, literally), MIGHT yield you sufficient fragments to get a high-worth gift. But that's only if you've done your homework on the GTN to discover exactly what gifts are high value. The Work-per-Gift and Cost-per-Gift here is tremendously high. It takes way more than 100 missions to net 100 gifts. Unlike Underworld Trading, as one example, where in 100 missions you are going to score near 100 gifts and X number of Rakata Grenades anyway just through RNG. (The failure rate on these missions is unusually low, in my experience.) No fragments. No figuring out just what gift to get. No visiting the Curator on fleet. No left over fragments ever. Plus you're going to make a million credits selling those 100 gifts, pretty much guaranteed. Between the four skills that have it I have done literally thousands of missions. It only took me one series (of 100 missions) to see that I was wasting my time with Treasure Hunting. They take way longer and return less value than the other three. It may seem bizarre to you, but it seems bizarre to me that you would want to go to all this trouble for no measurable gain and that much more work. I'm all for players playing the way they want to play. By all means keep churning away if that floats your boat, but it seems like a fool's errand to me.

Once again, just like several other concurrent threads, we have people who do not want there to be options for other players. People keep insisting they want to control how other players play. If you are grouping with other players, you have a case. Obviously, you don't want a level 65 in Ops on Dromund Kaas with others who are at Level 13. That makes no sense. But if you're not in some sort of group where that would affect you directly, it is really none of your business. It has nothing to do with "fairness" or "balance" because nothing you do affects me and nothing I do affects you. My "cheevos" (shudder!) are between me and my CPU. WE are not in competition with one another. Options = more diversity More diversity = greater appeal Greater appeal = more players I will NEVER dictate to you how to play the game you want to play, so STOP dictating to me how I should play the game. That seems like a win-win to me.

I don't foresee using it myself. I don't see the point. I've got 12 sixties, one for each class and half of them with the opposite advanced class, and I've enjoyed learning the abilities of each. Right now I'm plenty tired of the Hutta to Makeb grind, but I'm thinking that won't always be the case. To start at 60 there would have to be something very compelling about the Xpac to justify taking a 13th and inexperienced toon through it. It's kind of like doing Torch again. I've beaten her 12 times 12 different ways now. I think that's enough. I don't begrudge others starting at 60. That's fine with me. Different strokes and all. So many players take offense because someone else plays differently than they do. That's never made sense to me.

I thought we had explained the issue here. First, your gift fragments have a normal mission cost, so compared to missions that return an actual full gift, they are not as cost-effective. It will take you at least two missions to get one gift and sometimes more. Each mission has a full mission cost, so compare that to missions that always return a complete gift. You're paying at least twice as much and for some gifts that exceeds the price you can get for them on the GTN. Secondly, there are three different kinds of gift fragments that take 6, 8, or 12 fragments to make a full gift purchased from the curator on fleet. But the fragments from missions are never in increments of 6, 8, or 12. That means you must run multiple missions to accumulate the amount you need to turn in for a full gift. And when you finally do gain sufficient fragments to turn in, there are inevitably fragments left over, which are worthless. Now I suppose you could say, "Well, go get even more fragments to match up with your remainders." but that just perpetuates the issue. You never know if a given mission is going to return fragments, nor do you know what level of fragment is going to be returned. You are in a lose-lose situation. That's why IF your goal is to get companion gifts, you ought to get them with one of the other three skills that do that because they NEVER return fragments.

Log out and back in. I love it when that happens, then I can send all my guys out at once and I don't have to do what I just suggested.

People such as yourself have a very narrow definition of what "MMO" means. You seem to feel that just because a game has many players that grouping is required. Where does it say in the word "Massive Multi-player Online" RPG that one MUST group? All it says is that the game accommodates a great many players. And that accommodation means the game can appeal to a wide variety of players and styles. So if you want to PvP, you can PvP, but you don't have to. It's not required. If you want to chase datacrons, you can, but you don't have to. If you want to be exclusively a PvE player, you can do that. If grouping in Ops and FPs is important to you, by all means do so. You do have to finish the class stories to advance, which are essentially solo ventures, but you really aren't required to engage in any other fashion. An inclusive definition of what "MMO" means acknowledges this reality. One where "MMO" means "Group Play Required" does not. It's all about diversity. The real mystery here is why some people feel the exclusive definition applies and everyone else is wrong. Just looking at the many opportunities in game should teach you the exclusive definition is the one that is wrong. It's supported by the facts of the game. So the question becomes, why do you care what other people are doing? Why don't you just do your thing and leave other people alone? Now, if your answer is that it affects you because PUGs take a long time to pop, that tells you something, doesn't it? It tells you that players who are otherwise available are not interested in grouping with you. So the question morphs yet again into, Why don't players in game avail themselves of the many opportunities to group? Could it be YOUR attitude? We've had plenty of testimony here on why people won't group. Basically the reason is because they don't like you. They don't like being vote kicked because they won't press the spacebar. They don't like being criticized because a piece of their gear is deemed "wrong" by the resident expert. In short, they find the whole experience of grouping distasteful. And when they express this, as they have in this thread and others, your answers prove the point. "You can't expect us experienced people to let you see the scenes of the game when we've seen them a zillion times before." And, "If you can't be up to speed go play with some newbies." Those kinds of answers and that kind of attitude is EXACTLY what people who refuse to group are talking about. People are not enamored with your character. They do not wish to hang out with you. They do not wish to endure your elitist attitude. If they knew you in person you would never be invited to dinner. They do not agree with YOUR definition of what an "MMO" is and the fact is, you cannot enforce your definition no matter how much you insist that your mistaken version is true. It demonstrably is not. This game and its changes are not guided by what you think--fortunately. That you are not getting your way is not evidence that the "game is dying." It is evidence that the game is seeking a wide variety of potential players, of which your segment is but a small part. You're not that big of a fish in this pond. You do not get to dictate how things work.