As the title says. Unfortunately it seems this was not a consideration when the decoration was being designed, making it essentially unusable and purely cosmetic, which I find disappointing.

I was originally planning to go through each proposed change one by one, but I realised since I do not play every class being affected, that I would be unqualified to comment on some aspects of the changes. Nonetheless, I did want to put forth my general feelings in the areas I feel confident speaking about and summarise which things I agree with and which things feel like the wrong direction. Judging from the comments, and from my own perspective: - Concealment/scrapper DPS is slightly underperforming and should overall be increased, the consensus appears to be that this should not involve any nerfs, even in the context of the proposed buffs. I would add that the longer duration for evasion/dodge should probably in my opinion be specifically tied to concealment/scrapper. Lethality/ruffian already has strong survivability in the form of an instant cast healing ability and superior damage reduction. - I don't play operative/scoundrel healer, but looking through the comments it seems that most people agree that the AOE healing ability needed some kind of nerf. I can't really comment further on that other than to agree with the majority. - A substantial Marksmanship/sharpshooter DPS buff is definitely a good thing, but I would add that snipers/gunslingers in general are also substantially lacking in defensive cooldowns. Most of their defensive abilities in previous updates were in the form of utilities, and they are now in the unique position of having to choose between essentially all of their DCDs, in addition to the fact that other DCDs have been outright removed entirely, something the other classes, in my opinion, are less affected by. Some kind of slight increase to passive damage reduction would be a good change in my opinion. - Mercenary/commando healer changes look fine. I believe the other two healing classes were slightly outperforming it, so a slight buff is in order. - I am aware that mercenary/commando DPS was recently buffed for both disciplines, but I think a slight further buff (particularly for arsenal/gunnery) is in order. There is a very convincing argument on Vulkk's website for improving the arsenal/gunnery discipline through slight buffs to the ability tree (https://vulkk.com/2022/06/01/swtor-7-1-arsenal-mercenary-and-gunnery-commando-changes-announcement-and-analysis/). - Advanced prototype/tactics is my main discipline, so I feel most qualified to speak on the proposed changes to this. I think a very slight nerf to this discipline was inevitable and would be fairly justified, if a strong new tactical were to be introduced, since the discipline was performing fairly well in PvP even with no tactical. Not by miles, by marginally. That said, I do think these proposed changes will go way too far. The power burst nerf is probably about right, since in combination with two energy bursts, it was a very powerful damage burst in a small time window. I think reducing magnetic blast/tactical surge's damage (the most frequently used ability) should be done extremely cautiously, especially when considering all the other additional nerfs. 14% is too much, and will impact on the DPS potential of the discipline significantly. I don't think the bleed/DoT damage should be affected at all. (It is possible to accumulate so-called 'fluff' DPS from refreshing the retractable blade DoT with shatter slug, but this accounts for a very negligible portion of the DPS, and, since AP/tactics is considered a single-target burst DPS discipline, this should not factor into their balancing, in my opinion). I also firmly dislike the proposed new tactical. AP/tactics has a root breaker, with increased movement speed with the right utility, on quite a short cooldown, and a leap. I think a 10 second 50% slow is therefore unnecessary and will serve only to annoy people. Additionally, I think having the tactical ability be determined by multiple abilities is a bad idea, since it introduces inconsistency to the buff offered by the tactical and may potentially interfere with and/or complicate the rotation to try and optimise the effect of the tactical by waiting to hit the right ability and, in the case of the free rocket punch, modify the rotation. Personally, I think something more like this would be a better idea: 'Thermal Detonator remains dormant on the target for 12 seconds, and can be detonated by Magnetic Blast, Energy Burst or Rail Shot. When detonated, your Shoulder Cannon missiles each deal 3% more damage for the next 10 seconds.' This maintains DPS consistency, provides a good burst (I foresee this as: energy burst with power burst > use buffed thermal det > power yield > energy burst > buffed thermal det explodes), doesn't interfere with the rotation, and should nicely compliment existing implant bonuses that add extra shoulder missiles, assuming it also affects them. - I generally like the madness/balance DPS changes, but I think a 50% slow (assuming it lasts the whole duration of death field) is too much. Since I'm assuming this change is primarily made for PvP survivability, I think it would be good for allowing for easier kiting in PvP, but too strong if used to inhibit the kiting potential of other ranged classes. This kind of utility should not be tied to an ability with such a short cooldown, in my opinion, or should have a limit (e.g. can only activate once every 30s). I can't really say much about the other changes, since I don't play the classes enough to know them inside and out, or what buffs/nerfs/changes would be most suitable.

I'd like to second the previously mentioned idea of having class ship strongholds. It would take less effort than making a brand new stronghold from scratch, so is a more achievable short-term goal, whilst offering quite substantial possibilities for personalisation and creativity (depending on how much sense the hook layouts make). It would be even better if you could still use the ship (for travelling between planets, and story cutscenes, etc) whilst it is decorated, but that might be asking too much. Personally I'm a big fan of the smaller strongholds. I don't particularly like the huge strongholds that have loads of massive centrepiece/starship hooks everywhere. They tend to offer less creative freedom (due to the hook placements/limitations and the decoration limits) in my opinion and end up causing framerate drops for me when actually fully decorated. This might be quite a niche idea (primarily for RP purposes) and therefore something few people have any interest in, but I would love to see an Imperial assault shuttle interior as a stronghold. Like in the cutscene from the alliance story where you are on the shuttle with Acina. Just a small sized shuttle interior stronghold, with a dense arrangement of small/medium narrow/medium hooks. An equivalent could be made for one of the republic shuttle designs. It could have a cockpit, a passenger area behind that, and perhaps an engine room at the back. Since that shuttle interior model already exists from that story cutscene, again, in theory it should be less work than making something from scratch. Cheers.

Not a bad suggestion but, as already mentioned, it is a short-term fix. See my related thread for potential ideas for long-term fixes. https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=1007922

Sorry, I meant 306 gear

True enough, and there are loads of examples of things like that which have been implemented that do nothing but exacerbate an already dire situation. The tax evasion guild perk, for example, is nonsensical to me. While we continue to use credits instead of some new currency we need essentially the exact opposite of that. For example the high cost of removing gold modifications from the old 258 gear, while in my view annoying, was a good idea because it was an effective credit sink. Similarly, amplifier tuning. Again though, these are temporary solutions that only slow the rate of inflation.

Possibly, but then if it's happening already, and probably going to get worse, then what do we have to lose? Sale of items might temporarily remain mostly in trade, for increasingly higher amounts of the old currency, but this will eventually reach the current hard limits imposed by the game (4.2bil). Eventually, over the natural course of players playing the game and being rewarded with the new, more value-stable currency, people would begin to favour it over the progressively further devalued old credits, and this could be further incentivised with small nudges toward the new system, such as introducing a trade tax for the old credits (like the GTN tax, but in trade), or even more drastic measures like putting a limit on the amount of old credits tradeable in one trade, like exists with the GTN. Of course, the easiest way to solve the problem of people using old credits in trade in favour of the new currency would be to have both the GTN -and- trade use only the new currency, but people might be more upset by that. I have seen many people suggest that the GTN price cap should be increased above 1bil, which -would- definitely go some way toward helping battle the rate of inflation, by increasing the amount of credits removed from the economy via GTN tax, but I don't see this as a viable long-term solution. As long as the root causes are not addressed, hyperinflation has no reason to not continue to get worse, and eventually even the new GTN price cap would be reached. So, then the cap would have to be raised again. It is at best a temporary solution. The root cause is at this point, in my view, unfortunately unsolvable. There are just too many credits in the economy and too many credits being constantly generated from nothing. You would have to expend far more time and effort going and addressing all the ways credits are being generated in vast quantities, and establishing credit sinks sufficient enough to result in a net loss of credits, than you would have to expend simply transitioning to a new currency system. So, the options as I see it are: - Start with a new currency. Keep old credits, but separate them completely from the GTN and possibly (quite likely) trade too. Or; - Painstakingly try and find and solve every potentially exploitable means of generating credits that exists in the game, of which there are surely many. Or; - Keep shifting the goal-posts with what would become increasingly frequent price cap increases to keep up with the increasing rate of inflation where gold sellers would, in my view, very likely maintain a monopoly over the economy and thus continue to drive inflation. Or; - Do nothing, and thus enable gold sellers to thrive even more successfully than they would if a GTN price cap increase were implemented. Admittedly none are great options, but I think the first would be in every legitimate player's best interest.

Eventually, it is possible, likely even -inevitable- that this new currency would accumulate in quantity and lead to inflation, yes. However, inflation is not necessarily a problem. Up until the credit exploits in 5.0, the economy had inflated, but it was manageable. Hyperinflation, i.e. runaway inflation, is a problem, and I believe this new currency would remove the sources of hyperinflation that currently plague the economy as it exists in-game today. Annoying people is the main concern I foresee too, yes. But I do think that the majority of people, upon contemplation, will see that this solution is far better for the economy and far fairer to players in the long term, while having the additional benefit of effectively eliminating the source of income for the organised crime that has (by Bioware's own admission) become entangled with SWTOR's economy in recent years. To be clear, I am not suggesting that anyone lose their existing credits, or that their existing credits cannot be spent on other areas of the game. This new currency would be required ONLY for GTN sales. On that point, you are also largely correct that nothing is -needed- from the GTN (with the possible exception of materials that are otherwise prohibitively time-expensive/difficult to obtain, e.g. gold augmentation materials), and that objectively most if not all content -can- be completed with minimal credits. However, I do think that that argument is slightly side-stepping the issue I am highlighting. By that same logic, we needn't do anything about the hyperinflation -at all-, but I don't think that is the opinion that the majority of players have. Everyone wants their character to look cool with cartel market items, and hyperinflation means the only easy way to accomplish that is by spending real currency. You could argue that since these are cosmetics, that is fair, and that is a valid argument. But that was not always the case. Cartel market items -were- easier to buy through the GTN in the past. So we have to decide if we want to penalise new players, by making them pay for the same cosmetics we older players could essentially have got for free in the past.

In order to curb hyperinflation, especially in light of the most recent development, something must be done. I propose a new GTN-specific currency, to be implemented as follows: How? - Servers go offline - All GTN items are taken down from the GTN while servers are offline and sent to player mail. - A patch is applied, containing the changes to the GTN system. - Servers come back online. - After the patch, items can only be listed for sale in exchange for '[new credits]'. - A tax, like the current one on credits, can be kept. What are '[new credits]'? - Obtained via completing any complex task in-game (i.e. NOT from crew skills, NOT from farming NPC mob drops, NOT in exchange for easily obtainable/farmable resources/material nodes. All of these aforementioned activities CAN be completed by bots, and should NOT enable the accumulation of the new currency). - Some examples of tasks that SHOULD reward the new currency: completing FP/GSF/PvP/Ops daily/weekly missions. Perhaps weekly heroic missions, or class story missions. Essentially, like the current gearing currencies. - The '[new credits]' should NOT be obtainable or exchangeable from any vendor, to 100% guarantee that a currency exploit resulting from a bug pushed to the live servers is IMPOSSIBLE - These credits should ONLY be useable on the GTN to buy directly from the GTN, and should NOT be mailable OR tradeable between players. Make them legacy-bound, if need be, to ensure this. - The '[new credits]' COULD be stored in a legacy bank. What happens when an item is bought on the GTN? - The sale price of '[new credits]' is deducted from the buying players' amount of '[new credits]' - Any GTN tax is applied - The asking price of '[new credits]' is transferred to the selling player's in-game mail, minus the GTN tax. Voila, you now have a thriving new economy based on in-game content completion alone, unperturbed by exploitable bugs or credit farming bots. Everyone gets to keep their billions of existing credits, which are still perfectly useable for the casino event, repairing gear, buying legacy perk unlocks, buying stronghold rooms, etc, etc. Everything except the place that is the primary, sole reason for exploitation (criminal or otherwise) of the in-game economics: cartel market items on the GTN. What are the potential downsides? - People might be quite upset that their billions of credits can no longer be used to purchase GTN listings. The alternative, however, is for them to have even those billions eventually reduced to near-worthlessness by further inflation. - Some people might join activities that reward the new currency and simply be AFK. There are work-arounds for this, but it may be a problem initially. - Probably others. Feel free to make constructive criticisms in replies to this post. This conversation needs to be had. Cheers. Edit: added another potential downside.

Hi there First of all, I very much appreciate the work being done behind the scenes to attempt to keep the in-game economy running. As someone who has played the game since 2012 it has been such a shame to see the inflation of credits slowly but progressively become snowballed by gold sellers over the years, something which I believe has particularly hit long-standing players who have watched the value of their legitimately earned credits evaporate. Anything that is being done to address this is more than welcome. With that said, I also must state that the problem does not only appear to be persisting, but it is getting worse month by month. I haven't posted until now because there are no easily implemented solutions to the problem; it is essentially a cat and mouse game that no doubt requires constantly keeping pace with the sellers. However, there are some things that can be done that aren't, from what I can tell, even if only as temporary fixes. Of course, I am completely unaware of how much of what I'm about to suggest is already being done, or similar approaches, but here are my thoughts. I believe that rather than attempting to silence/ban the sellers, the focus should be on attempting to limit the means of generating the credits they are selling (assuming they are being generated though legitimate, albeit exploited means). In other words, treat the cause, not the symptom. This means analysing where the credits are coming from. I would assume this would be any low-complexity, easily automated task, which could be performed in large, repeatable quantities by bots. A couple of examples of possible situations where this is could easily be mitigated: - Farming grey trash items from NPC mobs. At higher levels, these grey materials can be sold directly to vendors for anywhere between a few hundred and a thousand credits each. A stack of 99 of these therefore is approximately 100k credits. A bot could be left farming stacks of these 24/7, and turning them over to a vendor for credits, which very quickly generates a high volume of credits from nothing. A fix for this could simply be to significantly reduce the vendor sale value of these grey items. Another fix could be to replace these grey items entirely, for something less useful to farming bots and more useful to actual players. For example, jawa junk that can be traded for materials. This example I have personally witnessed bots farming first-hand, so I know at least some of the credits comes from this. - Credit lockboxes from crew skills is another potential source of credits generated from nothing which could be easily automated to be completed en masse by bots. This is more difficult to remedy, because players may view changes to these crew skills as unfair. Again, however, it might be possible to actually implement changes that are advantageous to players, while also preventing the possibility of exploitation. Credit lockboxes again could be swapped for jawa junk pieces, or another similarly useful item that does not simply flood the economy with more credits. Another approach worth considering (and again, I know I have no idea what could be in the works in this regard), is transitioning to a completely new currency. When hyperinflation befell the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s, the old Papiermark was replaced by a completely new currency, the Rentenmark, which held its value because it had its value backed by actual goods. Of course, real world practices like this are not directly applicable to game economies, but a similar fix could be implemented. For example, Galactic Trade Network sales could be altered to accept either a credit value or cartel coin value. This would effectively introduce the backing of real-world currency into maintaining the value of goods in-game. Alternatively, GTN listed items could require hypothetical 'GTN sale tokens' to buy instead of credits. This would enable credits to retain their current value and importance in performing certain tasks (repairing gear, unlocking legacy perks, buying stronghold unlocks, etc) but would damage the primary reason players are buying from gold sellers (to buy the currently hyperinflated CM items listed on the GTN for credits). These 'GTN sale tokens' could be implemented to only be easily earned by legitimate players though completing in-game activities that they would have already done in the course of playing the game, in a similar manner to how gear currencies are currently earned. Removing the link between credits and the GTN this way would arguably remove the very reason there is a gold seller problem. A third and final means of tackling this problem may be to have an exponentially scaling GTN tax percentage. Currently the GTN tax is a linear 8%, so is the same regardless of whether the item is sold for 100,000 or 900 million credits. This could be changed to scale exponentially the closer the sale listing gets to 1 billion (the current GTN sale price limit). As a very rough and by no means deeply considered example, an item sold for 100 million could have a 10% GTN tax (so the player gets 90 million for the sale). An item sold for 200 million could have a 20% GTN tax (so the player gets 160 million). An item sold for 300 million could have a 30% GTN tax (so the player gets 210 million), etc. This would not only immediately begin to cleanse a significant portion of the currently circulating credits from the economy, but it would also incentivise lower price listings. I have purposefully listed this as the third of my suggestions because I believe this should be a last resort, and would also be the least effective of the three suggestions I have put forth. By this same line of thought, I would also advise removing the 'tax evasion' guild perks, which do nothing to curb the current hyperinflation problem, and in fact actively contribute to its perpetuation. As you can probably tell, I am not an economist, merely someone who cares quite deeply about the health of the in-game economy and would like to help restore it if possible. There are undoubtedly flaws with the above suggestions that I have not considered, so anyone patient enough to take the time to read though them, please feel free to criticise them if you have recognised any problems. Thanks again, this is just my humble two cent, but hopefully some of what I've typed is at least food for thought.

Judging from the lack of replies to this post, I'd say you're right, it must just be me! I suppose it just seems strange to me that the other PvP gear currencies also have a 999 limit, despite far fewer of them being required for each gear piece (e.g. the 'daily resource matrix'). Kind of makes the cap seem a bit arbitrary. Guess I will just have to find something else to do to fill the time each week between the resets.

I had hoped that the change to allow loses to progress the PvP daily and weekly missions would expedite the rate of gear progression possible through PvP, but the 999 weekly cap on the WZ-1 accelerant gear currency makes it feel as though one limitation has simply been traded for another. The time investment is lessened, sure, but now there is simply nothing else that can be done to buy/upgrade PvP gear once the weekly cap has been reached, which can be done on literally 3 characters. Gearing under the new changes seems to feel, for me at least, to be more or less the same pace as before, which is disappointing as it feels a bit slow to me. Am I alone in this? I understand the obvious solution is to just swap one complete set of gear between alts, since they are all legacy bound gear pieces now, but I would still rather have a full set for each character, if for no other reason than convenience (I appreciate the loadout system for this very reason). Also, since we can't min/max with mods now, you kinda need to accumulate several gear sets to achieve optimal stat distributions (e.g. some classes need less alacrity for the 1.4s GCD, some do not need accuracy, etc), even if you intend to swap gear sets between alts. Does anyone else think the weekly cap should be raised a little? Perhaps even just to somewhere around 1500?

Thanks again for the replies I originally said that the issue had been happening since around 6th October, but I went back through discord messages I'd sent about the issue and it looks like 4th October is the day upon which I first encountered it. Sorry I can't be more accurate than that. I do know for certain that I had literally played the day before it started and it had been fine then (well, as fine as usual, anyway), and that it was unplayable the next day from the get go. So the performance issue came about overnight. I am starting to lean toward it being hardware related as well, but I'd have thought the window unfocusing fix would at least on the surface of it seem to imply a software problem or a conflict of some kind, though that might stem from some hardware problem. I don't know if it's relevant, but on the topic of hardware faults, I did also have some blue screens come up about 3 weeks or so before this problem started, and they only seemed to come up after swtor had been running. From what I recall, the accompanying error messages implied it was either faulty RAM or HDD. However, I haven't had any blue screens since then, and swtor had been running at a playable level of performance for a while afterwards (as I say, about 3 weeks). I've had this PC for around 6 years and it's never been completely quite right (it frequently wakes itself from sleep mode by itself and a couple of times the display has refused to function, resulting in me having to physically resit the RAM to fix it, weirdly), so I think my system is probably just starting to give up. I am heavily considering just replacing it. Good thought, but unfortunately I don't have a gsync monitor. I will give the swtor ea.answers.com site a try, and give the machine a good clean as well.

Hi, thanks for your reply I checked to see if windows had updated around the time I started having this problem, there aren't any updates listed in the windows update history. I don't recall seeing any anti-virus/security update when the problem began either, but I can't say for certain. My windows version is Windows 10 Version 21H1 and the OS build is 19043.1237. I've tried a full reinstallation of swtor through steam and the problem has persisted, exactly the same as before. Low frame rates when the CPU core #4 hits 100%, and the same bizarre 'fix' from hitting the windows key to deselect the window also is still working the same way it did before. I'm going to try the dust solution next, but I would imagine that would only be a potential cause for the problem if it was inducing thermal throttling, right? Or would dust affect the CPU without causing an increase in temperatures?

Oh, also worth pointing out that when I have noticed the performance fix itself when another window is 'on top' of swtor while it's running, I wondered whether that was simply due to the fact that less is being rendered because less of the game window is visible. So I actually tested if just simply pressing the windows button to open up the start menu (i.e. not clicking into another window) would also fix the performance. It does, which is just even more perplexing.