The rating requirement for Master Mode flashpoints canNOT be 242, that is far too high. It should be 236, or 230+augments. 242 isn't even necessary for the hardest FPs such as Lost Island and Rishi, and any wipes for players in 236 gear or above are caused by lack of skill which vote-to-kick can deal with. Additionally, it'd be really nice if the classes that have overtuned DCDs got their DCDs nerfed. Bioware literally gave Merc players free Ranked rewards for this season, and that is not fair to other players at all. Likewise, some classes such as Lightning Sorcs would really like not being one-shot by everything that moves. The rest looks good though.

Either do Option 3 and make bolster equal to 242, or bring back Expertise gear. The PvP gear grind is absurdrigjt now, and if you're concerned about making it "too easy" and hurting the raisin community, the only solutions are to either leave the grind as is and make bolster huge, or separate the PvP grind entirely.

"Sorry we only balance by target dummies" -Bioware 2017

As another followup to this question, is there any plan to take the storyline away from the "EVERYONE RULES THE GALAXY!" mess we have right now? There is no logical way to introduce a plausible threat into the game without writing out the entire Eternal Alliance/Empire and its Eternal Fleet, because every problem can be solved by just throwing hyperintelligent ships at it. Just look at how many "why can't I crush both the Republic and the Empire??" threads that Iokath spawned; a good story can't be written when every conflict can be won by the player pressing their "I win" button.

While I do agree PvPers are far more toxic to other PvPers than they should be, please don't even start on "PvPers are never pleased". Literally if they just balanced the classes more often than once every 6 months, got rid of FoTMs within a month instead of taking YEARS and just gave us Ranked and/or OWPvP rewards that aren't Cartel Reskins, most PvPers would be happy. An additional warzone and/or OWPvP map every 1.5 years would be cherry on top of the cake. On the other hand, we've had 2 full years of story, and story players are complaining that they have to wait four months for the next story update. So let's not pretend PvPers are "hard to please", when this game's story players are the loudest, hardest to please crowd; we can literally coast on by with 0 new content as long as existing content is actually balanced. (Can't make any comments about PvErs being impatient here though, especially the raiders. Raiders have waited 2.5 years for a new Op, and got a single boss instead, so they have every right to complain. And then there's the poor GSF community )

That johnny/billy bullsh*t is their most transparent baiting attempt, and it's pretty funny when you consider that it does the exact same thing they keep insisting the pro-merge crowd are doing: assuming that the other side's complaints are somehow less important. Say you want merges, they say that those are harmful to guild assets. Say you want merges with guild assets solved, they say you can't assume they'll be solved. Say you want free legacy transfers off of depopulated servers and their response is a very open "but what about meeeeeee" response, questioning why players should get free transfers off of dead servers and this imaginary johnny who hates the "cesspool" shouldn't. And then they have the audacity to claim that YOU'RE the one who's uncompromising.

Okay this is the 7th or 70th time I have seen this post, who or what in the name of the Force are Grenkk and Sellexith????

That's good to hear, with this we at least have concrete examples of you guys listening to our feedback over your own metrics. Even though KotFE and KotET are considered to be your most successful expansions, you are making sure to introduce varied content based on our feedback, instead of continuing to focus on pure story/solo content. Thank you! Is it possible we can get a clarification on what TUX said though? I personally have played through all major expansion releases since 2.0 (except for joining the KotET party pretty late), and I can assure you that the number of active players I have seen for any of the expansions was RotHC > KotFE > SoR > GSF > GSH > KotET. And in terms of longevity, GSF, KotFE and KotET were both at the bottom of the ranking (the former two I noticed a surge in activity at release followed by a massive drop in a month, for KotET I joined too late to judge a drop-off at any point). Why do many players have experiences that vastly differ from Bioware's metrics for expansion success? Is this being measured it by subscriber numbers, active player count, number of expansion purchases or CC revenue? I doubt it's subscriber count because KotFE release hit a 3-year peak in subscribers, while the earnings call following KotET mentioned a significant drop in sub count. And I sure hope you're not measuring it by the number of expansion purchases upon release, because that'd kinda be "cheating" for KotFE/ET, since those are purchased by simply subscribing, and even players who don't play either of two would be forced to get them if they were subscribed during release. Some clarification on the metric would be nice, because the players' experiences don't match up with what's being told to us. Finally, I had an additional question. Is there a metric for how many players replay KotFE/ET? Due to them being a one-size-fits-all story, a lot of players made very vocal complaints about how it has no replay value and they will never subject more than 2 characters to that expansion, and so on, and I am curious to see if this matches up with what Bioware sees in the actual gameplay metrics. I have a stinking feeling they have a metric like "number of copies of expansion that got purchased in the first six months of release" or something like that, hence why KotFE/ET are the two most successful (because nearly every active player "purchased" them). Hopefully Charles will clarify if that's the case.

He fit very well into EA's coffers, that's probably it.

Well, on Voss, Vitiate's Voice was trapped by Sel Makor, who's as much of an Eldritch Abomination as he is, so he probably had to concentrate most of his power in that Voice, not on his Dromund Kaas Voice, or on Valkorion. And thanks to that, he was weakened enough for the Jedi Knight to strike down, which could very easily explain away him not being able to puppeteer an army to stop the JK, and the JK and T7 were both immune to his puppeteering anyways. As for Valkorion on Zakuul, it's been stated that he would go kinda "comatose" ish for months at a time, implying he had a finite amount of attention to divide amongst his Voices, with Valkorion being no exception.

I am fine with both sides coming across as the bad guy the whole time. That's kinda been a theme in SWTOR from the very beginning, with corruption and people like Chancellor Saresh in the Republic. I just need a good reason to actually side with one of them. In vanilla we all had good reasons for the storylines to go the way they did. Most Jedi and Sith characters owed their lifestyle to one or the other faction and among the others they either had good reasons to stay with their factions, or had choices to defect/abandon them even if they're marked as "Republic" or "Imperial" for all intents and purposes. The way it was done here, there's no reason for ANY Outlander to side with EITHER of them. If I am an Eternal Peacekeeper, I wouldn't want to join hands with one of the warmongering factions. If I am Eternal Emperor, I would want to annihilate both fleets right then and there as a warning to anyone who treads on my planet. If they had just used the disabling of the Eternal Fleet as a bargaining chip, the entire choice would look so much more sensible. Have both Republic and Imperial Fleets moving in for the kill on the disabled Eternal Fleet, and both sides offer to stop the other from getting to the Eternal Fleet. Simple as that, and now we're forced to make a choice that we may not necessarily want to.

There have been two different time periods where SWTOR has been a primarily solo/story focused MMO. The full year after launch was the first, and KotET/FE was the second. Both these times saw sub declines. The first period declined from 1 million to around 500k, and the second caused a one-month long spike (to their "highest in three years" aka 500k) followed by a sharp decline because solo players insisted that a 2 year long series of purely story content wasn't enough. So anyone insisting story players are the "whales" has no data to back that up. Simply stereotyping your own group's wants and needs doesn't change the fact that the game's revenue has declined every time the group got focus. Hopefully they do the right thing and follow what made RotHC great; regular group content that uses storylines for flavour, as opposed to focusing on the solo player and making content with 0 replay value.

There is an easy fix to this: 1. If a player has less than 5 medals, give them 0 rewards 2. Ignore rule 1 if the player has the backfill medal. Problem solved.

In a 10 minute fight a difference of 500 DPS is a difference of 300,000 damage done. That's very easily the difference between a dead boss and a wiped team. This becomes way more apparent in fights where the player can't pull off their perfect rotation every time, or in fights with a lot of outgoing damage where the Merc is using their heal2full off-GCD abilities while the Sorc has to waste time bubbles and casting self heals. It also becomes much worse when looking at burst phases, where the Sorc can have their entire rotation get outbursted by nearly every other burst class in the game.

Thank you for this. Between Galactic Command and this example, you've given us a pretty good idea of what the devs consider to be too much sunk cost. While I still think that the players' feedback about GC was early enough to have abandoned or heavily modified GC, I can see why the KotFE couldn't be modified that much. Is it possible we can get a description on the thought process that went into the "story only, literally nothing else" direction the game took these past couple of years, and when and why did you decide to change?

Even if we assume that war zones take more time to develop than any story or PvE content, it still has magnitudes more longevity. We have what, 7 war zones and 4 arenas, and "give us a new war zone" is one of the LAST complaints you'll hear a PvPer make. Meanwhile for PvE we have a dozen operations, dozens of flashpoints and uprisings, and tons of solo content. And it's never enough. There are so many complaints from solo/story players that they have to put up with a 2.5 month story drought after two full years of story. So in terms of cost vs benefit, PvP is easier to develop for.

5.3 very specifically does not address Lightning, and is attempting to nerf down Merc DPS to lightning levels. Do you live in a fantasy world or what?

While we do understand that there's nothing directly to be said, such as "yes we're doing mergers" or "no, we're not doing mergers" I do think a few posts are needed just so you can guide the discussion in the right direction. For example, there are a LOT of posts saying cross server is better than mergers, followed by people saying "but they said that cross server is impossible", followed by "that was two years ago, not now" and "we need to force them anyways". Simply specifying whether cross server is even a remote possibility will stop the pages and pages of discussion we have of people saying "my speculation is better than yours!!" Likewise, there are hundreds of posts that go under the assumption "if the devs manage to merge without loss of assets, theni want merges because x y z" which only get countered by people constantly talking about the assets and ignoring the other concerns. If you could at least give a general statement on whether the merging has been improved since the last round of merges, that'll help curtail pointless speculation from both sides. Also a lot of players feel "we can't answer this question yet" isn't a valid answer anymore, given that all but the most populated servers have no hardcore communities, and population has been on a steady decline for too long, and a good chunk of the servers have 5-10 people playing online at any given time. Their concerns do need to be addressed, and saying you have no plans to deal with population problems in the near future does NOT inspire any confidence.

Oh of course, players do have to help make communication a two way street. I'll be the first to admit that PvPers can be so incredibly toxic that the devs almost never post in the PvP forums directly (even though they respond to PvPers in the GD forum). But when players complain for 8 months that a class has horribly effective DCDs, we need a little bit more than "we plan to address this in the future! Trust us and be okay with our very misguided and ineffective balance changes!" to be happy. And when we say we're not happy, we get no answers. Notice how even as they specify how our feedback is listened to and how balance works, at no point has Eric/Keith come out, quoted a player who said "your Arsenal changes don't work and here's why" and replied with "our Arsenal changes DO work and here's why" or "you're right, we messed up, and here's how we'll fix it". There are as many reasonable, levelheaded complaints that the players are making, as there are toxic posts that ruin dialogue. The devs need to reply to the former kind, before they turn into the latter too.

Again, you're arguing interpretations. From my point of view, I see more groups clearing world bosses than I ever did before, and I've played between 2-8 months in all major patch cycles except for 1.0 (which probably had the highest activity for world bosses anyways). Your metric of "how many people have the NiP" debuff is laughably inaccurate. Even if you actually are right about Harb having fewer NiP debuffs than it used to, that doesn't say anything at all. There are dozens of world bosses, and people get different bonuses for galactic conquest for doing the assigned one. So for all we know, you checked the NiP debuff when NiP wasn't on the conquest objectives list. You MIGHT in fact be correct, and world bosses aren't killed as much as they used to be. But my experience disagrees with yours, and if there's a metric that measures that, then "debuff on exactly ONE boss out of dozen, in a system where at most 2 of those dozens are given a bonus" is not the correct metric.

One of the major rules of game developing is that you never take content away from players without good reason. Sometimes even if you have a good reason, don't take it away. They made world bosses as group content for levelling players to enjoy. They found that the biggest killers of world bosses weren't grouped up levelling players, they were souped up end game raiders soloing or 2-4 manning it. They created a system where the end game raiders need a full group to take down the world bosses, allowing both endgame players and levelling players to have a fair shot at the boss. Word boss groups are fairly easy to assemble. Takes all of ten minutes on fleet and/or half an hour on planet. Plus conquest cycles through all world bosses so you're very likely to find groups hunting two different world bosses per week.

"Incremental" needs to be partnered with "frequent". They hold off ENTIRELY on class balancing for a full PvP season, and their FIRST balance patch is entirely based on target dummy numbers instead of real PvP or PvE data. Even if they somehow stick to their hollow promise of "frequent, incremental" changes this time, (which they promised several times in the past and never stuck to) then the next balance patch is still going to happen at the end of season 8. So basically PvPers have to put up with overpowered mercs for a full season, PvErs have to put up with underpowered non-Merc ranged-burst for a full year AND see merc get nerfed too. No one is lashing out at them for being transparent. The lash out is happening because they're "transparent" and then when we beg them for a full week on an explanation of why they use target dummy numbers and ignore metrics such as TTK and CC times get silence. Why do you think this transparency and the Merc changes spawned the "How is our feedback treated?" thread? Because players feel like we're not being heard. Bioware did part 1 of communication: talking. They need to get around to the listening part too.

As true as that is, when the PvPers say "Mercs are really hard to kill right now" and Bioware responds with "okay we'll make it harder for them to kill bosses", it leaves a bit of a bitter taste. Likewise when PvErs say that they don't use Sorc DPS for being borderline viable, and instead of bumping Sorc DPS up, they see Merc DPS being nerfed. So it's not quite cut and dry as problems being hard to fix, so much as many players feeing Bioware is fixing entirely different problems.

I don't think they were saying you possess skills that you said you don't. They were saying that tech support in ISPs probably don't possess the skill you think they do. 'Twas a joke.

They've already said (and shown, with their Arsenal changes) that they intend to make little to no changes to DCDs and utilities until August, because they think it's more important to parse just right against a combat dummy. So yeah. No hope for at least the current Ranked season, it's gonna be Mercs+Sniper+Sorcheals, but you can always hope that the Flavour-of-the-Year roulette lands on one of your mains next season!