So you think its fine leaving both sides of the argument just escalating things like it is happening now ? Im not asking for a change right now - as you so eloquently pointed out that is unrealistic. The only change I think possible on such short notice would be reenabling the stacks completely which will piss off one side. A reaction that I would expect would be something like: "We see this change caused a lot of friction within the community. Please post suggestions for a compromise only in this thread (link to new thread) along with a brief reasoning. This is not the place to discuss or flame each other. if you dont post a suggestion, do not post at all at this point. In 7 days the suggestion thread will close. Then a community vote will take place and the most popular 5 options will be brought to the dev team to look into. We will come back to you after a couple of days with an answer on whether and how quickly the top 5 selections can be implemented." Being proactive with a statement like that, offering a clear path ahead beats letting issues like this fester.

WIth the amount of "discussion" about this topic, a reaction was warranted on working day 1. That whole statement is a noncommittial bit of nothing.

Thats not an explanation, thats a nonsense PR phrase translating into "we messed up but I am not allowed to admit that".

Just make stacks optional and let people play the content they want. It doesnt take away anything from anyone if another group gets a timed run with or without stacks. As long as titles and mounts are being sold there should also be a way for people to go get them without being in the 99th percentile. The argument "git gud" is worthless unless you extend it to its full length of "git gud or pay" - which is what it really is. The first price hikes for carries already happened within days of the patch. And still - no word from Bioware as to why they saw fit to introduce all this without any warning.

Despite being discussed in three different threads right now there has been zero response from bioware. Granted, they deployed the patch just before the weekend (in the hope that the anger would have ebbed down by the time they got back to work on monday ? ) but by now I wouldve expected to hear at least something. Theres been a lot of attacks, namecalling etc, but also hidden in between those posts there have been some suggestions for a middleground and I personally would really like to get the devs perspective on things as well as some reasoning for these changes at all. Also - if it is true that certain people were asked personally to test the no stacks Nightmare ops on the open PTS - why has that fact not been mentioned in the PTS Patch notes so everyone wouldve been informed about it ?

I think the only way they will even consider putting the stacks back on is if enough people leave and put in their "reason for leaving" note that they dont like the changes to the stacks. Let those handful of teams that cried about it being too easy enjoy their moment of awesomeness. After seing some of their behaviour I don't really feel the need to to give them more oportunities for their comments any more by asking for some reason.

You can also turn around the arguments - if it was too boring why are you still here ? WoWs Mythic raids seem to be what some people want so why not just go play that ? Want a challenge ? Just raid naked. No matter if people like or dislike the removal of stacks, we can all argue back and forth about which faction has more people (and since everyone is paying the same sub fee thats all that counts, right?). The devs decided to take the side of one group, alienating the other, before a discussion even took place. That stuff may work in AAA MMOs with milions of subs but in a game that is only still around because its Star Wars that move may have been the wrong one. Time will tell.

I didnt debate that in the slightest, dont know what youre trying to say here. But if the highest difficulty content isnt achievable for anyone safe for a handful of teams than it is not scaled in a way that is healthy for the game.

The crystal wont undo some of the comments hurled around here and on certain discords Im afraid.

Kudos to those select few that got their way. Overall Bioware - awesome communication externally, awesome internal communication as well - leaving your community manager in the dark on a change this big. Now that its official we'll see where that leaves us in a couple of months down the road. Until then, we enjoy progging rehashed content once more. The sad bit about this whole mess is the divide between "no lifer" and "pogger" NiM raiders as they so affectionately call each other.

Congratulations ! All those parses and killvids prove is that people who were bored with the content due to lack of difficulty can still do it. Nothings really changed apart from the fact that a couple of others, who are not on that level, can no longer. So again - congratulations on that ! You successfully keep the raffle that doesnt deserve it from calling themselves Nightmare Raider simply because they got the achievment. /sarcasm off. And to reiterate - I am not complaining about the difficulty itself, Im complaining about the approach some people take "If a couple of teams can do it its fine, who cares about the rest". And about the fact that this change that noone - apart from the same people who can now again make a killing selling titles, mounts and timed runs - asked for actually made it to live without any consideration for the community as a whole. And last of all, I am absolutely stumped by Biowares handling of this debacle. A simple "It was intended / it was not intended" statement will not take hours to post.

You did 4 timed runs in one night ? Impressive if true, but that is not the standard that should be used to tune content. Try to see things from other's point of view from time to time instead of calling them *******.

Imo, the stacks should be returned asap. If this was an intended change it was incredibly shortsighted. Sure, a low number of people may enjoy it for a while "finally a challenge again, yay" but in the long term this is hurting both the game and the community. Whats the total number of players that will be able to consistently clear timed runs, Gods and Dxun ? 200? 300? It simply does not make any sense economically to develop content for such a small portion group. If you want to see more veteran flashpointesque content in the future, sure go ahead and keep going in this direction. If the stacks stay gone as they are now I predict we will see the following happpen: "True" Nightmare raiders clear the content in a couple of weeks and are bored again. Dxun NiM comes out and the above repeats. A large portion of previous Nightmare raiders ignore the "advice" of "git gud" and simply stop or leave alltogether. All I had the chance to do since yesterday's ninja nerf was a bit of TfB and yes, dps, heals and hp have gone down significantly. From my point of view it was still manageable. I dont see my team brining in any external people to teach them and evaluate as new members in the future without the stacks though. The step up from Hm to the new NiM without stacks is just too big for a lot of people. Personally I think there should be a middleground. Give an opt out of Vet stacks to people who want a harder challenge but dont force it on everyone - even more so without actually asking the community beforehand, trying it on PTS or even acknowledging it in the Patch notes.

Thats exactly what it means. Also they will get 350m per week for medical bills and are free to eat chlorinated bantha meat as they please. Jokes aside though - no.

Ireland is a tax haven. Doubt servers get moved anytime soon But back to topic: Its not hard to find out where the lag is coming from: If you currently experience lag, click the windows start button, type "cmd" into the search bar and press enter. This will open a command prompt. Now simply type in "tracert 159.153.72.252" This will trace the signal to the Darth malgus servers and list all the hops (relays that transmit your data and establish a route from your PC to the servers). It will show something like: 5 14 ms 19 ms 19 ms m686-mp2.cvx1-b.lis.dial.ntli.net [62.254.42.174] 6 * * * Request timed out. 7 13 ms 14 ms 12 ms uk-lon01b-ri1-ae-25-0.aorta.net [84.116.136.102] 8 183 ms 98 ms * lag-12.ear2.London1.Level3.net [4.68.37.65] 9 26 ms 26 ms 28 ms ae-1-8.bar1.Dublin1.Level3.net [4.69.153.230] 10 24 ms 23 ms 23 ms 213.242.106.234 11 24 ms 24 ms 21 ms 159.153.72.252 Whatever hop you get a sudden massive ping increase at is your problem. If you get * * * for an early node that is not a sign of trouble. In the above case for me it shows 183ms 98 ms and a timeout on hop 8. So hop #8 is a source of "bad" pings for me. Now what do I do with that information ? If I call my ISP they wont be able/willing to fix it as SWTOR is not a critical application and fixing it is a waste of ressources on their end. If I call Bioware... they will be able to do nothing since its completely out of their control. The only option left at this point is to use a VPN or something to get an alternate route that avoids hop #8. Hope that helps at least some people realize that not everything is biowares fault