I always thought an assassin droid class would be cool and it'd be available to each faction.

I have to vehemently disagree here as the gear treadmill has gotten much much worse IMO. I was a progression raider (healer) from a year after launch until I stopped playing a couple of weeks prior to 6.0 launching and came back to SWTOR a few weeks ago and this gearing system is atrocious and completely grindy and RNG based which prevents gear planning for guild raid groups. The new gearing system did a few things right like making everything legacy based but I'd kill for a return to 4.0's system or even the post 5.2 system compared to this nightmare of a system where I have literally no control to gear my main let alone alts for raiding without known slot unassembled gear tokens dropping from raid bosses. Also the removal of set bonuses from my old legacy gear and the old set bonuses on the character bound shells being hard capped at level 74 was completely unnecessary. Unlike pre-6.0 I have no idea when I'll be able to hit 306 to be properly geared let alone min\maxed (I'm currently at 278 gear level starting from 250/252) whereas pre-6.0 we could run a few HM ops to gear a new raid member in rather short order as it was all 100% predictable. A secondary effect of these changes is that it's almost impossible to find group finder raids to include EV\KP that normally dropped in a couple of minutes since there's no gear tokens dropping to incentivize wider community participation. The current system could be vastly improved by removing the RNG aspect..which we all pushed back on during the first year of SWTOR and also when 5.0 dropped resulting in 5.2's player friendly changes.

This is perhaps the most logical post I've ever read here on the forums! The code is not working for either of my accounts.

I'm glad that we're getting back to Star Wars but the darn gearing system may make me skip it anyway. What were the devs thinking?

No there shouldn't be gear for PVP period, it should be solely skill based in PVP.

Exactly not to mention the new changes designed to exacerbate the gear grind by not allowing mods and enhancements to change gear pieces (such as a crit enhancement from a glove not allowed to go where an alacrity enhancement of a different armored slot goes) which makes min\maxing more difficult. They didn't need to change a darn thing with the current gearing system.

This was my reaction when I found this out. I am not happy about this after surviving the disaster that was 5.0's original gearing system. This is a huge step backwards.

And SF and SS cater to very different people (Raiders and PVPers on SS vs RPs\ERPs on SF) so I wouldn't expect any magic bullet coming from a merger.

I have the physical collector's edition, but that's about it.

Servers and their locations are a business decision, not something that can\will be affected by a forum petition. I guarantee the cost of west coast servers and the associated taxes and salaries far outweigh the amount of revenue brought in by subs tat would use that server or they'd still have the west coast server.

It's pure RNG, last even I won 5 speeders and 4 pigs, the event before that only a few golden certs. Welcome to the world of gambling.

Or it's just more expensive to do business in California where the old server farm is. EA is a for profit company and will look to cut costs where it makes sense and it seems the majority of players are North America and EU so East Coast servers that cost less were chosen.

Amen I'll sign this one, great suggestion!

No the devs do not encourage it, players can be douches and that's pretty much the end of it. Just because devs aren't crusading against something doesn't mean that they encourage it.

Me too, now I hope they find a way for cross faction raids so my Pub toons get some love.