The whole crafting complaint seems really blown out of proportion by involved guild members who clearly just wanted a quick and easy way to get to whatever target they were aiming for. Whatever they've done, CQ is still not hard to do. You want your personal target done? no problem it takes like half an hour still. If your guild wanted to upgrade to medium yield from small yield planets, better find more players or other things in the game to be interested in, because you can't use crafting as a cheap stepladder anymore. If you want big yields from crafting, go back to grinding mats into war supplies, something that took at least a bit of effort compared to harvesting and spam-crafting assembly components. You wanted easy point streams just from doing crafting on your own because anything that's not solo content is aggravating to you? That sounds more like your boiling dislike of the game tipping over from a fraction of an ounce of pressure. They can make improvements to the MMO half of this game, but as long as they aren't you were going to leave sooner or later, don't blame the crafting. Guilds are teams, conquest is a team effort, the most valuable parts of conquest are still group content, so find some of that you like rather than trying to grind with your own antisocial self for a group-centered feature.

Dread Masters are the Kings and Queens of this game's quotes. Play their story arc on Belsavis if you haven't already

PvP is still fun to me from time to time, but The Old Republic gameplay model really made it look like a mess. We always hear the occasional complaint of ability bloat in classes, and while I don't think consolidation is needed for PvE, it would make fights in PvP less chaotic and button-mashing, therefore less of a crapshoot whether your WZ pop would result in you or the other team getting skunked. Even in a premade, I just do not have any enjoyment doing ranked WZs, the rewards are never going to be worth it unless something changes. My gaming disabilities may be showing since I often can't keep track of everything going on in PvP fights, but that's the reason I don't play it often.

Honestly I'm sick of extreme gatekeeping like this, they think that because it's sooo easy to get to 306 now that there must be something wrong with you as a player if you aren't there. My raid team had to kick a healer for this general attitude: That content they went through is so easy to them, so if someone screws up and wipes on it they must be brain-damaged. So you can guess how every post-wipe regroup felt.

He's probably just mad that the latter action means that as a queuer, he can't get into that in-progress group so he can get an easy notch for weekly progress without doing most of the work. Once he's in a phase, f*** the other players right?

The point is that the way to get this BiS set is ridiculous, if they'd come out with more than a trickle of content like Dxun which held the damn pieces it might be tolerable, it just isn't now. And if your class had a decent set tied behind this ridiculous wall you would be angry too; we're fixated on PT because it has one of the few bonus sets that's actually useful compared to the others. There's countless threads about the flaws of almost every other classes' "big prize set" for doing Dxun that makes them not worth the effort, like at all.

I never understood people selling items at the highest price point when there's a decent volume of other listings of the same item for much cheaper. The storage theory is weird, but it's a good explanation. If they were really intending to sell them I would think they're hoping for a noob who has no idea how to use the sorting or page buttons on the window.

You made a pointed example of how changes and feedback heeded or unheeded "killed" a feature of the game, and I was simply trying to express why I think that that is an exaggeration. They do what they want to do that'll make money and as much as people cry about not listening to the player base, most of them will get over something like that. The crafting changes are small fish compared to actual gamebreaking stuff, which is what the PTS should be for. We could have left it at that 2 replies ago but I don't understand the need people have to charge other members with "irrelevance" or "necroing".

I noticed something similar to this on Alderaan doing the Sith Inquisitor story a week ago. When you have to retrieve the relic from the vault, the console for the shield is almost unclickable, and when you finally roll over it and are able to click it the shield only dims, as if there were double the "shield object" in the game. The fix is the same, relog. Bugs galore and the fixers apparently have no idea what they're doing to the game with each patch.

Crafting in it's current breadth should never have been a conquesting guild's purpose, and I don't understand why they'd boost conquest by letting anyone kill any old thing or make any old thing for points. They could have just as easily tailored more significant low-level activities to conquest and gave decent points for them, but not enough that max-levels would waste their time somewhere like Heroics on Hutta. Making everything you could possibly craft contribute to points was just a stupid idea. If War Supply crafting wasn't dead around the onset of Eternal Throne and the stupid intermediate assembly components/grafts, it definitely was when changes meant you could just bot farm mats and bot craft any old thing, basically gaining a passive income stream of CQ points without doing a damn thing in the game. Conquesting should require participating in things that involve actual effort and teamwork, it shouldn't be contingent on how many players your guild has who can find the easiest method of grinding points solo and do that non-stop to the Force-knows-what end.

Way to make me think about what to spend my money on. Considering that I was not really a fan of the fantasy genre apart from Star Wars at a young age, and the only other current MMO game I play is Grand Theft Auto, if this game had the skin of a different universe around it I likely wouldn't play it.

I normally don't log onto the game right after a patch update, I look at the forums to see what about the update people are discussing the most. It helps lower my expectations and be less outraged when I log on because I ask "this is what all the Hubba-rubb was about?" It helped me here too; I do believe it was a stupid move that was also a transparent one to get players to buy into their biggest credit sink to drive off inflation (and yeah that bright idea's going to fail, they plugged a hole in one complaint department only to bash a huge hole in another), but it's not gamebreaking like the buff stack bugs were (I haven't noticed one of the affected areas there, either). Overall this update was a nothing-burger to me, a nuisance to the HUD but not one I couldn't adjust my interface use around. Sadly I'm probably the type of person that encourages the devs to stay idle on fixing terrible decisions.

I don't understand the point of a PTS either if the most negative feedback related to a change isn't redressed in time for the live release. It feels like they have their live release date and can't change it, so if desired fixes can't be made in time, they decide to abandon making any changes for that patch and fix them in future patches in order of importance, and there's always some that pile up on the back burner because in the middle of the cycle the creative crew comes in and says "work on this we need new content!" I'm pretty tired of it tbh, the team needs a lot more time devoted to just fixing things; if the bigwigs aren't happy about delays they should eat it.

The expansion as content wasn't too bad, the one major thing that I agreed with the haters about was that the storyline was cut-and-pasted to *every* single class. I understand, it would likely have been too much work for the studio to make 8 different storylines of equal size for the expansion, but what we got fell pretty short. It feels tenuous for some classes to go through everything the alliance commander does, such as communing with Satele/Marr/Valkorion and battling with insane atomic-bombs of Force-powered enemies, and some classes like the Smuggler feel totally out of place. For Fallen Empire we needed an expansion that told the story of the Eternal Empire conflict and the Alliance from multiple perspectives. The trooper facing them from the Republic military, the Smuggler/Bounty Hunter from the underworld, Darth Nox researching force-imbued tech that led them to Zakuul, etc. What we experience with all the different chapters and companion encounters gave me several ideas of how the timeline could be remade. All of them could find their way to the Alliance in some form or another, but the prodigal main character of an anticipated KotOR 3, the Knight, should have had Alliance Commander reserved for him. I'm glad that Onslaught is making an effort to divide storylines up for the classes again, but there's still so much storytelling potential that was abandoned for the sake of churning out a basic expansion efficiently. TOR became a melting pot of Star Wars factions and the companion issue is a symptom of that.

It's sad to see TOR this way, but I think you're right. The high value of the Star Wars trademark is both a blessing and a curse. It generates enough money that movies and games can be popped out with giant globs of equestrian excrement on top and profit will still be made. I really hope someone else comes out with a better MMO now that EA doesn't have a standing monopoly on Star Wars games. I still enjoy TOR, but I think it's time for the title to be managed by someone else that sees it as more than a minimal-effort cash cow there to fund other projects.

So, this came to my thoughts during discussions of GTN credit inflation in another thread. And right now my curiosity is brimming about how it would affect the game... What if the GTN was a bind-on-purchase deal? No changes would be made to what items are bound or not, but if it goes through the GTN, the buyer would only receive it as a "bound-to-legacy" item, preventing "flipping" an item and reselling it several times. I imagine if the feature had changes made to it, that limit could be expanded to 2 or 3 passes through the GTN. At first I thought it would be a good way to prevent players amassing too many credits by treating the GTN like a stock market, but now I'm imagining it would reduce the circulation of all the items in the market, and drive up their prices if the players knew they would never be resold again. I'm honestly not sure what might happen, so any thoughts?

I think the best way to fix this is to simply make more valuable items available either by paying NPC vendors with large® amounts of credits or playing the hardest content. Screw new augment mats just give us a random silver rarity CM item now and then. If some of these high priced GTN items were easier to get outside of the GTN, their credit value would quickly go down. Plenty of those vendors already sell semi-valuable assets, but they're often paired with a requirement of some "special" currency in addition to a moderate amount of credits. It's clear what the limiting factor is in those cases, and an economy in need of deflating would do well to make both a limiting factor. The amplifiers were a half-baked credit sink that irritated the credit-poor players but barely made a dent in the billion-credit players accounts. Other than that plus account upgrades/character perks which people would have bought if they wanted long ago, there is no good credit sink, not a long-term one anyway. I think crafting mats and products need to have restrictions on trading in the GTN too. The new gold augments are obvious problem areas, but in general too many people are selling their basic mats there to gradually get richer. Farming them for yourself is sufficient; we don't need them inflating credit accounts when personal crafting bot programs and day trading is all many players do for continuous stretches of time.

I'd rather they solve in-game inflation rather than adjust a cap, such as returning crafting down to earth with no assembly components or ridiculous god-tier augments. When your algorithms didn't plan for multi-billion credit transactions it's clear where the problem lies.

The courting bonuses broke when the influence system was changed, I think it's the system, some obscure bug that BW will never figure out where the code went wrong. No gift that changes its influence power based on player choices changes it anymore, except for Jaesa since those choices are made *before* she's your companion. Regardless, no one wants to give a companion gift to their companion when it doesn't give the greatest possible amount of points, especially since Fallen Empire when you're guaranteed to find a comp. who likes the gift more. Most comps can't be romanced so won't respond to courting significantly, and the ones that would if you'd just romance them don't anymore (except for Doc which is why any courting I pick up is going straight to my Jedi Knight from now on, those 2 are bi asf )

For real, the first complaint I saw after they told us that the weather would be delaying the update was some oblivious guy with broken English who quoted it and asked them "why isn't the update including fixes we've been ask about for since last expansion? please replay?" It was as if they didn't even read the dev notice they were quoting. Normally I'd agree with wanting more back-end fixes but I just want people like this to shut up right now, be grateful the servers are still running through this weather (which is affecting a LOT more than Austin, Texas)

I don't like the overflow of companions either. It was supposed to give you the feeling of choice in how you set up your crew for adventures but it's just gone way too far. The "other companions" section of your window is going to be miles long if you decided to do every mission related to them, and on that note, the Star Fortress alliance members should never have been made summonable companions. And as for the main characters, specifically the ones created with Fallen Empire, they don't seem like they're going to get a satisfying end to their story arc unless you decided to kill them. Koth, Arcann, Senya, they all just fade into the background because the devs never had ideas about their existence outside of the expansion, becoming as shallow of characters as Finn in the sequels, immediately after the chaptered expansion arc. Imagine if you picked up way more than 9 companions during your time playing Kotor.... Tatooine? Take along the Jawa at the gate, and the treasure hunter who helped you kill the dragon. Manaan? Take along the Republic ambassador or a couple survivors in the mining facility underwater. Korriban? Take along Yuthura Ban and a rival Sith student. That's how overboard it feels TOR is taking party selection. I'd like us to get back to quality over quantity with a set team that your character had meaningful relationships with, and that had meaningful relationships with each other. We don't need a new 1 or 2 companions with every new bit of content that gets released. Characters that come and go, sure, but don't make them all selectable sidekicks as if they're all just waiting on the ship for your call. I'm sure Lana and Theron have plenty of other things to do.

Trash pulls are bad when they're not inserted in moderation; that's because they're space and time fillers ONLY, to make it feel like you're accomplishing something killing the 100th mob of "Inrokini!!!" chiss with one hand on your keyboard and another on your RL sandwich, and it often just means that the devs are too devoid of ideas to make more of the flashpoint challenging enough to deserve a loot box. If the loot for killing them was worth something significant, speed grinders would just hop in and out of phases quick-killing as much trash as they could (which is exactly why they had to get rid of certain Ops trash or the XP that came with killing it, KP and Bestia come to mind) When you think about how many separate combat mobs are in flashpoints and operations that are not bosses, only about 10% of enemies in all the content are worth fighting, that proportion is even LESS for KDY because only one fight gets you ANY reward worth working for. Quantity and not quality is the name of the game for the people who make these phases lately and some of us are getting sick of it.

I hate groups like that, they have their own little exclusive guild chat or discord and don't say a word to pugs who might need guidance until they screw up, then get abused for being noobs. Like I get that some people might not want randoms clogging up their servers, but just send out a simple invitation if they want to chat and then kick them once you're done with the Op.

If this were another game it might work, but it isn't. I am eager for a Star Wars MMO that explores classes outside of Pub Vs. Imp, and with EA's exclusivity rights having expired, I see it as a possibility. If Nightsisters became an MMO class, I could definitely see a melee-sorcerer class like this. But with TOR, a melee class like that would essentially constitute a DPS-Healer hybrid. Ever since skill trees were phased out (where you could pick passives/abilities from any of your advanced classes' disciplines), BW has been decidedly clear on hybrid roles: they're too much work to balance/rebalance so they don't end up as a "jack of all trades, master of none" fringe class, and they disrupt the basic trinity of Tank-DPS-Healer.

This conflict purely stems from dps not knowing or caring about kill order when there's more than one enemy. Consider the following mob: 1 Elite ranked NPC, 2 or 3 Strong ranked ones, and a few normal ones interspersed; each one of them is grouped close enough to be hit with a general AOE or by stepping one pace closer to hit them, except for 1 or 2 Normal ranged enemies. The Tank's main job is to fight the ones that are like him, which have the most endurance (the Elite and Strong ones), while the dps focus on the weaker ones that would go down to their superior power quickly; they have weapons that can hurt just as much, but they have so little health compared to what a dps can dish out that it doesn't matter. A good dps generally works from the outside of the fray to the middle, but so many see what the tank is heading for and think "Oh, that's what I should be hitting too!" when it's not. Their job is to target those ranged snipers that will hit the healer without some other interference. Mobs are almost never bunched up as nicely as I described, and it's ridiculous to expect the tank to run all over the place making sure he has aggro on all of them before they overwhelm the healer. Kill the ones that can be killed quickly and join in the tank's battle royale with the leader Only. When. It's. Needed. It also doesn't help matters when a veteran teaches noobs harmful stuff in the name of a quicker record on clearing like "ignore adds burn boss" simply because damage is so badly tuned for certain fights and the boss will die before the adds become a problem for survival.