I actually understand the OP's perspective, as it is one that I held before KotFE. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that the time and resources to make two separate games that SWTOR has somewhat merged simply don't exist. If, by some chance or fit of madness the head honchos at EA/BioWare had decided to make two separate games based on the "legacy of Revan" era, I suspect that neither game would have seen the light of day, or both would have died very quickly with no support. Only by making a single game could EA/BioWare actually make any money (i.e. continue to support a game with updates and expansions), and better that than gambling on two games and getting nothing at all. Many of the game's limitations (and I suspect that the developers/EA/BioWare feel the same way though they may not be able to comment on this directly) stem from the game's engine. Many threads have already discussed this at length, so I won't expand here, but I think the developers' seemingly limited ability to cater to *all* fractions of the player base stems from limitations imposed not by any person or group of people but rather by what they can and can't do in the game's own programming. Personally I think they're doing a fantastic job - I was disappointed at the MMO format of SWTOR (I am a KOTOR I and II player/modder) and for this reason I didn't start playing until late 2012/early 2013, and when the rumors started swirling around 4.0 I was used to the MMO format (and had spent the vast majority of my playtime in endgame) and was again apprehensive. But having played through the expansion, my confidence in the developers' programming abilities, responsiveness, and storytelling ability is higher than it has ever been. I am still a little apprehensive about the substantially greater time/effort I will have to spend on each of my characters getting them up to speed (pre-4.0 I had 13 level 60 characters, and was spending a little time leveling my 4 sub-50 characters; since early access I have gotten only 7 characters to 65, cleared chapters 1-9 on only 2, and have mostly cleared the new content to include the Star Fortress story arc in heroic mode on only my main character).

Here's what I think is going on with the rather small but vocal minority that demand sweeping companion changes that will affect all players. They clearly aren't challenging themselves content-wise. Sure, on planetary content, thanks to the improvements in companions' combat capabilities as a result of the alliance system, the companions are very powerful. But try soloing the hard mode FPs, the heroic mode Star Fortress FPs, without the alliance buffs (I cleared one heroic-mode Star Fortress without buffs, and it was so difficult, i.e. I died more than twice, that once I earned the achievement I chose to use the alliance buffs in every other heroic-mode Star Fortress), and so on. If you come back saying companions should still be nerfed then you clearly have no idea what you're talking about and don't know how to challenge yourself. Companions still can't manage threat, so that's something of which good players will always have to be cognizant - the times that my affection rank 15+ companion died in the heroic Star Fortress FPs (I only solo FPs and most non-operations PvE content, and haven't done an FP in a group in over a year, and I plan to keep it that way) it occurred because I wasn't watching my companion's health and (lack of) threat management. About half the time I also ended up dying/going to jail, and the other half I was able to hang on and finish the fight myself. But companions do die, and a lot of the time that can also get you killed; those who believe that isn't the case simply aren't doing challenging content and are just running content that is meant to be easily overcome for the sake of story flow.

I have it, and yeah, it would be cool if it had a flourish. I also got lucky and landed a Zakuulan walker during one of the heroic mode Star Fortress FPs and noticed that didn't have a flourish either. I think both the Gravestone scout and the Zakuulan walker would be cooler with flourishes, but honestly they're both very nice without them too.

When I spoke to the Ithorian Jedi (Choza Rabbat) on Alderaan for the star fortresses quest on my main (male shadow), I was able to ask a question regarding Nadia, but Choza said he hadn't heard anything, and especially with the Jedi Order going into hiding, contact has been even more difficult (i.e. he has been unsuccessful so far). I dunno if other potential Alliance recruits can be asked similar questions by other characters.

Others have hinted at this, but I think it needs to be said outright. You chose a very bad time to install and play the game for the first time ever. 4.0 (which is also known as the "Knights of the Fallen Empire" expansion/update) is the single largest expansion/update to the game since launch. It added a full 10 gigs to the size of my game's directory on my hard drive (from roughly 30 GB to 40). Even so, patching (plus one repair - something to do with the loading screen wallpaper, according to the logs) took me roughly 2 hours on a school (i.e. very good and uninterrupted) connection on Tuesday. I won't presume to know what your motivations for playing the game *at this precise moment* are, but given the game's renowned (albeit mostly minor) game engine flaws, bugs, etc. as well as the workarounds that have arisen over the years, I feel that it would have been wiser for you to have looked into any idiosyncrasies and workarounds that other players have had to adjust for before actually trying to play. For example, BitRaider (the streaming client in which you can play some of the beginning content while the game itself continues to download later content) has caused a large proportion of players many headaches, to the point that many players have decided to manually adjust their game files to remove BitRaider. For others, however, it has caused no problems (some of my own guildies were using BitRaider for months/years and we had no idea because it didn't cause them problems and they never mentioned it).

Off-topic or not, my claim was nothing like "Pee Wee Herman is really Duane Johnson." My claim was that the devs provided definitive answers about why they changed. It's not an extraordinary claim (like saying "Pee Wee and Duane Johnson are the same" is), and it turned out that there was evidence to support it; others had made the same statement based on what they had read in the devlogs. Your counter-claim was that I was merely parroting what others had said (partly true) when there was no evidence to be found (proven false), and in so doing the burden was actually on you to prove the devs had said nothing about why they made the skill tree changes. You were wrong. I did leave out an important point, though (and people can see the difference when comparing my original post and your quote), which you kind of touched on. The original claim was based on information (admittedly not first-hand, originally) that had been read/seen/witnessed. You made a counter-claim that the original claim was incorrect. Since some basis existed/believed to have existed, the onus was on you to demonstrate otherwise (obviated by the overwhelming evidence that you could have looked up yourself - not difficult to do). There is nothing ludicrous about it; and your attitude doesn't help matters much either. I would highly recommend that you keep silent until you actually have something substantive to say. That is all.

Ever hear of doing your own research? If someone makes a claim based on what they have witnessed/read/seen, the onus (in terms of logic) is on the one who makes the counter-claim to demonstrate that the original claim is false/erroneous/etc. Therefore, I made the claim; it's on you to prove me otherwise (what you're doing is similar to putting your fingers in your ears and yelling "I didn't hear it myself; it's not true"). It's how logical inquiry and debate are conducted. That said, I know this is the Internet and therefore the terms "logical inquiry" and "debate" apparently have no meaning for the vast majority of people online, here you go (skip to the section near the bottom called "Why the Change"; I cite it at length below): http://www.swtor.com/info/news/blog/20141006 - not particularly hard to find. Verbatim from the section entitled "Why the Change": "With Disciplines, we can focus on creating strong and fun play styles from level 10 on, without having to worry about how people are spending 50 skill points and whether some people are making bad decisions or if others are finding crazy untested combinations that vastly exceed what we want to happen. Attach to that the idea of expanding the amount of and type of utility each player has access to and you get a system that creates better and more balanced characters with a stronger identity while allowing players actual choice. We also continued to run into a significant problem expanding the Skill Trees for level cap increases: development time. Each of the Skill Trees were balanced based on an assumption of points and how players must spend their points to get what they need to perform in combat. When we add more points (as well as more skills themselves) to the trees during a level cap increase, all of that balance is thrown off kilter and must be reset for every Advanced Class. This results in a massive amount of time spent every level cap increase simply redoing and rebalancing the Skill Trees over and over, preventing us from spending time actually doing cool new things." It's fair to say that's pretty definitive. In case I have to break it down for everyone Barney-style, the green-bolded text is another way of saying "we are penalizing players who found skill tree combinations we did not intend and find to be OP" and the yellow-bolded text says "we had to spend too much time balancing skills for every expansion." If one were to infer anything from this, it would be that the developers want to spend less time having to balance skills (for instance since there are other balance-related things, such as Force Lightning damage initiation v. Forcequake damage initiation, that still need to be addressed) and more time on improving their product and playing with other things in the game. Perhaps they plan to put out more expansions at a more rapid rate, or they feel that rather than taking time to have to balance stuff they feel that their time is better spent working out bugs that seem to pop up almost every other patch. The developers are probably not at liberty to say, but what it sums up to is that player choices were initially found to be too broad and infringing upon development time and so the most economical (not saying it's the most reasonable) choice was to somewhat limit player choices. With disciplines they were able to implement something that players quickly got used to, yet saved them time and effort to focus on other things.

I'll throw in my (very lengthy) two cents here, without talking about any datamined stuff, because there's plenty of stuff in the information that has been released that is concerning. Be warned: this is a long post. My apologies in advance. Part 1. Story. SWtOR initially explored a broader perspective than KotOR, in which the player could see that era of the Expanded Universe through the eyes of multiple notable figures of that period. There were 8 primary classes/storylines; the fact that small details between the storylines didn't exactly match (missing Dark Council members at the conclusion of some stories, the election of Supreme Chancellor Saresh and the circumstances thereof, etc.) helped some players to assemble something of a chronology of the various storylines. Even if this aspect (the 8 storylines) was not what attracted players to the game in the first place, it was a major reason why they stayed. Ultimately SWtOR itself told a single story arc: the aftermath of the Treaty of Coruscant; events that led to the resumption of hostilities; the first phases of the new war; the breakdown of the Imperial war effort, loss of Imperial gains, and the retreat of the Empire; the aftermath of Republic resurgence; Toborro's failed bid to make the Hutt Cartel a galactic political and military power; the end of the Revan saga begun before the events of KotOR I with the defeat of the Revanites and release of Vitiate. But before the events on Ilum, Makeb, and beyond, it was the way in which the story was told and the perspectives from which it was told that kept players coming back to the game. With Ilum, the 8 perspectives were merged into 2, and though players in both factions fought many of the same bosses, other lesser bosses and the story objectives at least through Makeb were still distinct enough to clearly show that the faction-specific perspectives were different (for instance, the Republic's goals in the Makeb story are quite different from the Empire's, though they both ultimately have to deal with Toborro in some way). This merging of perspectives disappointed many, but was still acceptable to most players, who by the time RotHC was released had gotten used to the MMO format and were otherwise pleased about most of the ways in which SWtOR was different from the KotOR games. The number of perspectives (as well as storytelling quality and attention to story- and universe-related details) is the primary, if not only, strength that SWtOR still wields over other MMOs. With KotFE, while details are relatively scant, the fact remains that this expansion will tell a single story through a single perspective (the Outlander's). In my opinion, any reduction in the number of perspectives (cf. RotHC and SoR) weakens the major advantage SWtOR retains over other MMOs (story and multiple perspectives thereof), and KotFE's model rejects this attribute entirely. While this may be in line with the original KotOR games, this violates the spirit of SWtOR and a major reason why, in spite of it not being a single-player KotOR III, players (myself included) continue to play SWtOR. As implemented (or at least proposed to be implemented), to me "cinematic storytelling" means "we are going to tell the story of the game/expansion using cinematics, rather than in-game dialogue such as flavor dialogue with quest givers and companion conversations." Effectively I am being told that the story and its direction will be dictated to me by the cinematics, that the fate of the POV character (the Outlander) is predetermined and is a binary outcome, and that I will be experiencing the story I am given rather than imagining my own within the SWtOR environment. I am not a RP player, but I can see how this could be thoroughly discouraging to that group of players. A move to a single story arc for all classes and factions is a major departure from the spirit of SWtOR and is categorically a mistake. Instead of a 16-chapter arc, it would have been far wiser to instead make the expansion a new 2-chapter arc for each of the primary classes. I don't know what, if any, market research was done (if so, it sampled a non-representative population), but in my opinion KotFE's format is most certainly *not* what any player base wants from a MMO, not years after release. Part 2: PvP/GSF. One of the ways in which SWtOR is different from and superior to the KotOR games is PvP/GSF. Neither depends upon storytelling (they only need the context to remain relevant), yet they allow players to interact across factions (albeit mostly with regards to killing each other) as well as become very familiar with the gameplay of secondary classes (by "secondary classes" I mean in the context of "Jedi Consular is a primary class, and the Sage and the Shadow are the secondary classes") as well as roles (by roles I refer to the MMO trichotomy of tank, healer, and damage-dealer/DPS). Balance between the secondary classes and roles is of course very important, and for the most part, through the life of the game the developers have done an admirable job in terms of balance when it comes to warzones (WZs). In my opinion, GSF (Galactic Starfighter) is the single most complete and well-produced product the developers have released. It does not suffer from the game engine-related problems that WZs do, and the maps, while limited in number, are high-quality and sufficiently varied such that no two GSF matches are ever the same. I also believe that GSF is a "purer" form of PvP than WZs in that the upgrades/"gear" play less of a role in GSF than they do in WZs, and GSF in my opinion depends more on skill and taking advantage of class strengths/weaknesses than WZs do. Even so, in GSF, new characters in less-upgraded (or even stock) ships can score hits and kills on seasoned aces with mastered ships, whether they are lucky or know what they are doing, and as a result there is no such thing as being truly overpowered in GSF. WZs are similar in that no two matches are ever the same, and the maps are incredibly innovative, but the on-ground WZs suffer substantially from the game engine's flaws and therefore aren't as "clean" a form of PvP (especially given that fact that PvP gear is different from PvE gear, whereas in GSF everyone has the same equipment and access to the same upgrades with enough requisition). PvP in the form of WZs and GSF is probably the one aspect in which SWtOR is far and away a step up from the KotOR games. It is almost an obligatory feature of the MMO format, and I suspect that a substantial proportion of the player base (and of the potential player base) enjoy PvP so much over the rest of the game that they will log on only to queue for WZs/GSF. Yet PvP has been largely neglected in that neither WZs nor GSF have seen a new map in almost a year, and new patches are regularly disrupting the previously seamless balance that was so painstakingly achieved before (cf. the Sorcerer v. the Sage in WZs, and the fact that the most recent patch de-selected certain equipment on non-base GSF ships, i.e. bombers and T2/3 scouts, strike fighters, and gunships, such that they have to be re-selected at every login for each character with a hangar). Team selection/distribution mechanics, especially in GSF, have been wonky (I have been in at least 25 GSF matches, on both factions, in which a GSF match was prematurely ended because the queue put 8 players on one team and 4 players of the same faction on the other team, whereas taking 2 players from the 8-man team and putting them on the 6-man team would have balanced the fight numerically and prevented premature match termination). But these things have not been fixed, and several have not even been acknowledged. Based on the the KotFE story, both the Republic and the Empire have largely been defeated and though not completely annihilated/rendered nonexistent, have lost large swaths of territory to the Eternal Empire. This should mean that the Republic and Empire, despite having a common enemy, will not interact nearly as much as before. This renders PvP interactions obsolete, context-wise, and things like Huttball or the Relics of the Gree event anachronistic if they are to continue into KotFE in their current form. If, according to the story, there is only one Outlander, and the other notable personalities of the era are either dead or missing, then the context for PvP/GSF is obviated, and the one thing required for PvP/GSF to remain relevant to the SWtOR/KotOR universe regardless of storyline is gone, and a major part of the MMO experience (and therefore a reason why players would subscribe in the first place) will either disappear or suffer greatly as a result. Without adjustments to WZs/GSF (for instance, the presence of NPC players in WZs and/or GSF matches of a relevant faction), this is unquestionably another major mistake in SWtOR's development.

Actually, it was - someone else earlier in the thread remarked on it as well - the disciplines are easier to manage and they tend to penalize "hybrid" builds (such as someone in the Shii-Cho sentinel/marauder tree working up the Ataru tree to gain dual saber mastery). At least the first part of that explanation was definitely given by the developers at some point close to the release of 3.0.

I get that maybe with reduced storytelling/storymaking resources BioWare wanted to do something of an overhaul. But the game's problems, and there are many, do not stem from the original storytelling. In my opinion, the single aspect of this game that is better than any other MMO out there is the story (at least through Makeb). I first started playing The Old Republic because I had played KotOR I and II, greatly enjoyed the story and the atmosphere, and continued to play originally because of the immense variety and superb quality of storytelling in the game. I now play for mostly end-game reasons, galactic starfighter/PvP, for e-peen (being able to put your money where your mouth is, I find, is quite nice), and to a certain extent to be able to power through the early planets that I had found initially so difficult when I rolled my first character (a Jedi Shadow tank). In all honesty, everything else about the game is mechanically comparable or inferior to what other MMOs are doing. But here's the rub: that is absolutely fine. Sure, we'll complain about this, that, and the other small mechanical thing, mechanical bugs, the Hero engine, etc. But when push comes to shove, we played this game for the 8 main class stories. We stuck through Ilum, Makeb, CZ-198, and Oricon for the story (i.e. the aftermath of Corellia), and honestly I think the quality of those stories, while not as diverse, was still very high. We endured the rise of the Revanites/Shadow of Revan, whose story as applicable to player characters is quite a bit more flat than is characteristic for BioWare. With Knights of the Fallen Empire, this trend is not looking positive. Mechanically, the game engine will divide characters into factions, but the story in Knights of the Fallen Empire is going to be the same regardless of faction, even more so than Shadow of Revan. At least in Shadow of Revan the dialogue was different through interaction with different NPCs, but now *every* character that you run through the Knights of the Fallen Empire story will have the exact same interaction with the exact same NPCs. It is evident that the storytelling, regardless of who sugarcoats it how, is substantially inferior not only to expectations, but the standards the game set for itself at launch. It is as if the entire game is filtering 8 primary classes of character into 2 (i.e. faction-specific), and now into 1, character story. What this essentially amounts to is a prolonged single character creation process. Recall character selection in KotOR, i.e. whether or not your POV character (well, spoilers, it's amnesiac Revan) is a soldier, scoundrel, etc.? Well, The Old Republic's progression has essentially drawn that process out into a years-long story. Instead of 16 or so chapters, would it be so difficult to instead turn Knights of the Fallen Empire into a 2-chapter epic (just like starter planet through Alderaan is Chapter 1, and from there through Hoth is Chapter 2, etc.) for each of the 8 major classes? That would still come out to 16 total chapters, and I believe that would please far more players, potential players, and observers than the currently proposed format. But, surprisingly, this weakening of story is not my biggest complaint. My most serious gripe about the upcoming expansion has everything to do with proposed/inferred mechanical changes to gameplay, including the potential loss of companions. Not only will this affect crafting (which, for a large proportion of the player base, including myself, is a very efficient way of earning credits that they can use to buy the stuff they want/need, i.e. participate more fully in the gameplay), this will affect daily missions, heroic missions, flashpoints (for instance if you group with 3 players and one of them brings out his/her super companion)...the list goes on. There are other major mechanical changes which I will not directly name here, but there is absolutely no reasonable justification for making any of these changes. None. What's more, none of these changes improve or correct the original gripes about mechanics/gameplay. If they wanted the game to be such a substantially different experience or resolve some of the perennial mechanical complaints players have had about the game, they should have instead made an entirely new game using a different game engine. It is highly irresponsible to release a game (prematurely, according to some), then years after release (when paying subscribers have largely gotten used to its unique idiosyncrasies and happily play the game regardless), rather than work out all or the vast majority of bugs (to include in-game misspellings and inconsistent spellings, cf. the Makeb staged weekly for the Republic faction - it's spelled "incoming," not "incomming") mechanically alter it so much so as to be irreconcilable with the original gameplay. This is my concern, and if they are implemented without some sort of opt-out (while I didn't use it, I was pleased that there is an opt-out for the 12x XP, which suggests that the devs aren't tyrants and won't force major changes down our throats), I will be required to do two things: 1) search for an open-source server version of this game (or make one myself) as many have done with SWG, and 2) cease subscribing and playing the game, since the developers/EA will have clearly displayed their lack of regard for my subscription and input.

This thread is old, but not closed or dead, so I'll answer what I can based on my own experiences. I don't have the answers to all of the questions, and some of the items have been answered by the devs or by patches after you posted, but here goes. 1. lag spikes have been common in the game since launch, unfortunately. No one has been able to pinpoint any specific cause for any instance of lag spiking as far as I know. Yavin IV and Rishi lag, I believe, mostly because their environments are so graphically large (think Coruscant and Nar Shaddaa, and imagine if all of the in-between areas you taxi through were in fact part of your interactive environment instead of just background - lots of moving parts, many of which have little or nothing to do with player-environment interaction, all of which add to processing times and the perception of lag - a stark example of this is actually in galactic starfighter; compare your FPS in a Lost Shipyards map, and compare it to a Kuat Mesas or Denon Exosphere map) 2. the solo Revan fight - the part at 65% and 32% HP is a mechanic, i.e. it's part of the fight. Hopefully by this time someone's explained to you how to get past those two phases (hint: it's very similar to the HM mechanic in the end fight of Cademimu when your groupmates get chained down). 3. for GF FP comms rewards changes you may want to check the patch notes post-2.5. Ditto for isotope 5, SM ops bolster (I could be wrong about this, but last time I checked, the ops bolster only applied to SM operations groups), the GF ops timer, and the meat trees on Rishi. 4. the complex access card, from what I've been told and can observe, is pointless. What's more, the devs don't seem to have noticed, or because it's so harmless (you can train it and craft it, but it apparently sells to NPCs for 1 credit and you get your rare crafting mats back, according to numerous posts on these forums) they're focusing their efforts on more important things. 5. as for sky ridge and raider's cove gear not coming with color crystals, you may want to see what the patch notes say about that. Same goes for the lack of crew skill achieves at 500, the Yavin IV coalition staging area, and the mod colors. 6. do you have data for damage dealt by silver and gold mobs on Rishi (i.e. combat logs)? Without data, such a claim is hard to substantiate. As for reverse engineering, the success rate/chance is <i>per RE event</i>. So for every relic you RE, each time you RE you have a 1 in 5 chance of success. This does not translate to "RE 5 or 10 times and get 1 or 2 successes." Look at it this way: every time you RE something, you have an 80% chance of failure. So, for 5 items, your overall chance of failure is 0.8*0.8*0.8*0.8*0.8 = 0.32768 or a nearly 32.8% chance of not learning a schematic, even after 5 RE events (your chance of learning a schematic after 5 events is 1-0.32768, or roughly 67.2%). This is because for each RE event the chance resets itself. You will notice that your rate of schematic learning success is much higher in a skill like biochem because when you RE in biochem you RE multiple items (medpacs, stims) in the same event. To really make the claim that REing yields a lower chance of success than displayed, you'd need a lot of data to show that your rate of success/failure is statistically significantly different from these percentages.

woot shadowlands is back up! Thanks for getting that up so quickly CS!

One of my toons' crew skills is a 450 Armstech; when I tried reverse engineering augments today that I'd crafted a few days earlier, I'd get the following message: "No reverse engineering information for item [name of item here]."

For those paying close attention to details and nuance, it quickly becomes clear that the Knight is mostly just a meathead, whereas the Consular is the brains and the power. Just look at the titles and ranks; for one thing, titles are a dime a dozen for the Consular, while the Knight doesn't earn nearly as many over the course of the story. Even the title of Master is handed to the Consular at the start of Chapter 2 as an afterthought; according to the story, if the Knight goes DS, the Knight does not get the title of Master at the end of Chapter 3. Further, it is the Consular, not the Knight, that gets offered a seat on the Jedi Council, DS or LS. The Consular, after Chapter 1, also is given quite a bit of leeway and freedom to move without having to answer to the Council on Tython after every major event. By the end of Chapter 3, the Consular becomes effectively the single most powerful Jedi in the galaxy, not only as a member of the Jedi Council (having defeated yet another Master in Syo Bakarn/the First Son), but with an army composed of some of the galaxy's fiercest warriors, and a familiarity with some of the galaxy's highest-ranking individuals (not just Supreme Chancellor Saresh). The Jedi Order dares not touch the Consular because the army answers to the Consular, not the Order, and the galaxy's high-ranking personnel know the Consular, not the Order. The Consular's title Barsen'thor means "Warden of the Order," indicating that it is the Consular's duty and within the Consular's abilities to guard and guide the Order. The Knight? A champion of the Order, sure, but not a Jedi warlord, and still at the Order's beck and call. The Knight certainly doesn't hobnob with some of the galaxy's highest-ranking politicians, and certainly isn't rewarded with the title of Barsen'thor or a seat on the Jedi Council. The Knight has no army like the Consular's, and there is some question as to whether or not the "Emperor" that the Knight defeated was the definitive form of Vitiate. The Consular's story is somewhat slow-going in Chapter 1, but in terms of galactic standing, there is no question who is first.

Incorrect. You probably haven't gotten there yet, but As for the whole "Consular v. Inquisitor" debate, I wonder why we're even having the debate. They are even, they were designed to be even, and there's really no good way to settle the debate (except maybe through PvP, and even then, the moves are just factional analogs of each other). If such classes existed in real life, the outcome of such a confrontation wouldn't be decided by what class they were (and what we think they stand for) but by the individuals involved, and because they're so evenly matched, probably a whole lot of luck.