That's weird. It sounds like there's a permissions issue somewhere -- this happens sometimes when a game doesn't have proper Read/Write authorization to a file. Maybe Bioware flagged the files with the wrong permissions? I rebooted but was able to log in with no issues. My launcher is set to run as admin. I use Bitraider. How is yours set up? Really curious to know if this is the issue...

Try deleting your Bitraider file (Program Files x86 > Electronic Arts > Bioware > Star Wars The Old Republic). The game should verify, then download the patch. Just did this and got in. Now, there's a new minimized window in the middle of the left side I can't get rid of. But I'm in

I'd give a platonic hug to some of my favorite companions during their Alliance alerts. My warrior would have totally hugged her lil sister Vette. My trooper needed to hug Elara. My consular and jk needed to hug their padawans. Same with my smugglers when they finally reunited with Akaavi.

Friends of Old is absolutely way out of whack-- I've done most of the vanilla Imp heroics after 6.0, and this one is probably the roughest. I'd even argue the open world part of the Sithspawn quest is too hard for a new player. Those gundarks hit like mack trucks and a newly minted juggy crumples like tissue paper. New players don't have defensive cooldowns or interrupts, or any skills at all really. Bioware seems to have forgotten that not everyone plays at max level all the time. Starter planet content shouldn't be balanced for high-level players. It needs to be tuned to what a level 17 player can survive.

Confirmed. I thought it was a glitch a couple of weeks ago, but I had a second repeat last night. Please fix this! Sub-level 75 players get no XP whatsoever from this flashpoint aside from bonuses.

I can confirm this on the Republic side. Been running a level 55-60 sentinel through Battle of Rishi, Blood Hunt, Korriban Incursion, Assault on Tython, and Legacy of the Rakata. I haven't gotten any gear drops at all since the last patch. On the Imp side, I ran my level 72-75 juggy through Boarding Party, and Korriban Incursion. I've received standard Ossus gear on her-- but lots of tanking gear for a DPS toon.

Pub side contenders-- maybe: Nar Shaddaa: The Morgukai. Lots of golds and high-value silvers at the top of level sync. Most of them are pretty well clustered and distributed. But they're in a confined space and the golds have a really long, annoying stun. Works best with a stealth melee toon. Lab Animals: All at-level silvers, but there are lots of them and in decently spaced clusters. They're great AOE fodder, if you've got a decent companion. Shadow Extraction: Again, all silvers, but there are tons of them. Gobs and gobs. They're also pretty nicely clustered. Hoth: Humanitarian Aid: A good mix of at-level golds and silvers. Nothing too particularly annoying to kill either, even though it takes a while. Frostclaw: If you want lots and lots of mobs plus some variety, there's a mix of everything from champs to golds, silvers, and lots of trash. The trash is really annoying, though, with mini-knockbacks that come five or six at a time. Corellia: Starfighters of Corellia: Nicely spaced and a good selection of silvers and golds. TBH, I'd go Humanitarian Aid

You really love theorycrafting, don't you? That's awesome! Me, I see all the choices, spreadsheets, storage tabs in legacy, and my brain short-circuits. Then I start going catatonic Right now, I have three tabs in legacy. One is mostly Onderon stuff if I ever feel like taking the rest of my 70s to 75. Except I'm using the DvL set and I'm going to be sharing one set of 306s at max, so I should probably just vendor it all. One is companion gifts. The third is random all-toon access, including more jawa junk than I know what to do with And I already feel overwhelmed with that. I hit 306 last night-- finally! *does happy dance* I'm skipping sets and fine-tuning because it's too expensive and there's way too much to wrap my brain around. So, aside from getting the rest of the weapons to 306 for my 75s, I'm going to finish crafting 228 kits and augments for those pieces and call it a grind. *does happier dance* No more Conquest! No more endless flashpoints! No more boring dailies or heroics unless I'm broke! It's ALL DONE

I'm going to have to start doing this Seems like a huge time and logistics saver. Right now, I dump off my next-lowest piece into my cargo hold so that whatever 75 toon I'm trying to grind for frags or Conquest on can help herself. Kind of annoying.

Are you using Takenna on the Imp side? The vendor behind the big desk. The lotto vendor is pretty much going to always give you an upgrade unless you get one of those moddable pieces. Then, you might get a downgrade if the RNG on the mods doesn't favor you. Rip out the good mod, or disintegrate the piece. Otherwise, if you get a fixed-stat adaptive piece, it'll be a significant upgrade over what you're currently wearing. Stay away from the Unidentified Equipment piece at 250 frags-- but slot-specific unidentified stuff is usually a pretty sure bet. I'd estimate your chances of getting a useable upgraded piece at over 95%. Ex. When I was at iLevel 303, the RNG vendor was giving me 306 upgrades from my 302s. You're far away from using class vendors, Kai Zykken, or any set bonus stuff. Don't even worry about that until you're at 305 or 306. Most of your gear at this point is stuff you're going to be wearing for a day or two at maximum as you progress through the ranks. Right now, I'm at 305, with three or four 304 pieces remaining, and most of that is thanks to the RNG vendor. The solo path takes longer, so you have to be willing to jettison the kinds of wisdom that work for people who grind group stuff heavily. The first thing to get rid of is the need for certainty. That's just going to hold you back in the new gearing system.

Ugh. Seriously? Figures, though. It feels like a very Bioware kind of a move. What sucks is that all of these little buffs that make the game less tedious and more playable happen at level 75, when you really don't need them. I feel even more sorry for new players now.

You know what I miss? The supercharged speeder quests from Ziost. Those are still a lot of fun I'm not sure why Bioware stopped making them in favor of walkers and mouse droids.

Do you think that urging people to dump more money into SWTOR is going to encourage Bioware to post more frequent content updates? Either way, whether unsubbing or opening our wallets, players have little to no impact over the decisions of our EA and Bioware overlords.

This week was really solo-unfriendly compared to last week. Almost every objective was either a) expensive in credits and mats or b) geared toward high-end group content. I managed to do it on a few toons anyway, but I feel like my soul's a shriveled husk The best bet always seems to be dailies-- CZ-198, the Black Hole, and Yavin all pay out pretty well in CXP despite not being objectives. I think I got half again as many CXP points on Yavin alone as I did trying to do the False Emperor flashpoint.

The big one-- you're not getting anywhere solo without spending tech fragments. So get ready to hear your favorite lotto vendor shouting at you at least once a day. My main is iLevel 303 now with some 306 pieces, and it's because I'm using my legacy and rewards across multiple 75's to fuel her. 1. Story Flashpoints. And don't do multiple flashpoints in a row. This one's kind of weird. Pre-patch, I'd been grinding the first two bosses of Vet. Red Reaper because I'd get a decent drop or two. Post-patch, the drops dried up. I was solid gold, iLevel 302, but I was starting to see purple 290s without a single hint of gold. So, just to check, last night I dumped Red Reaper from my quest log and ran Story Korriban Incursion, then Story Legacy of the Rakata. Korriban got me two 306 relic drops off the last boss, raising my iLevel to 303. Legacy of the Rakata got me one 302 piece (I'm working on 304) and one mod at 300. The rest, really low-rated purples. I think Bioware sneaked in some kind of anti-grind algorithm into rewards to keep us moving through content. So if you love flashpoints, you're going to have to mix it up. But based on getting gold rewards from story mode, I'm thinking trying to grind vet stuff isn't worth the stress anymore. 2. KOTFE/ET chapters You get a "story crate" from each one when you complete it, except ch. 9. My JK got a 300-rated piece (think she's at 301 overall) from one last night. So it's possible to get decent level gear from them. 3. Conquest + Renown crates Both give you tech fragments to gear your main. If you see one of your 75's close to the next crate, grind it out if you're close to 325-350 frags. That's a new piece for your main. Plus, if you're running old dailies, you're going to ding at least a couple of crates and a few hundred more frags in the process. 4. Onderon dailies/weekly This one got mentioned already. Pub side is less grindy than Imp side now that they fixed the crashed ship daily. 5. Treasure Hunting Oops, mentioned above me. Sorry!

If I had the wattage, I'd hunt down the ESO livestream where the devs went out of their way saying that solo and casual players don't care at all about gear or how powerful they are. That they're just running around killing dragons and didn't care about stats. Hence, their last major patch with Elsweyr Part 2 included massive nerfs across the board for all players in all parts of the game because the 1% of high end raiders were clearing the hardest DLC dungeons and raids too quickly. This game and ESO are still pretty solo-friendly, but it's a lot less friendly after the 6.0 nerfs. WoW, from what I've been reading, has upped the difficulty on low-level content as well. Was just also watching bits of the GW2 livestream today-- and they're upgrading difficulty on the new maps to account for new masteries. There's an industry-wide trend toward making baseline content more difficult at the expense of casual, story type players.

Guess you haven't been spending much time in Zenimax Land lately. Or in this game

Of all of the random annoying changes, this one is actively infuriating. If nothing else, you should be able to mouse over and read the second countdown in the pop up window to the side. Been taking my guardian through KOTFE, and waiting for the clock to tick down without any concrete feedback makes the delay feel like it's a thousand times longer. Knowing something is five seconds vs. some indeterminate clock hand rotating makes me feel just a little bit more in control. Guess I'm weird like that

Which is why during hours when I'd expect East Coasties to have a few dailies over coffee, I've had both CZ-198 and the Black Hole totally to myself. More than once. Aside from the starter planets and the fleet, Satele Shan feels just like the Bastion during APAC and early morning East Coast hours.

Yeah, after leveling a couple of Pub toons, I hopped on a male juggy I'd abandoned. DK heroics are way, way overtuned. I never die in heroics, but the trash in front of Lord Tytonus took out me and level 35 Vette in a couple of seconds. Getting there took a billion years because the trash has insane amounts of health. Another heroic that used to be no issue was the Sithspawn one. I think there's some kind of new scaling on effects that reflects how much damage a mob is doing to you. The last stone you gather has two gundarks in front of it. I used to be able to avoid being tossed across the map by putting my back literally to the rock wall. This time, the gundarks threw me almost on top of it Plus, I was constantly getting close calls with the gold sleens that never used to do any real damage. No heroics on the Pub side even come close to DK now. I haven't touched that one painful one on Tatooine, but I've done most of the others. My old nemesis, The Morgukai, is a snap by comparision. I keep wondering why I can't force myself to log back on to that juggy. I can only imagine the horrors I'm in for on Balmorra

I ask myself that most days Answer is inconclusive-- or I need to use the facilities.

Well, the core thought means very little to me in general. One can say, "Pubs are good and the Imps are bad," based on this central idea. But when that idea isn't actually shown through the story, it ceases to have meaning. Ossus tried to show the Pubs are good and more or less did that. It definitely did show the Imps were bad. Aside from that, everything else followed in the vein of that well known Rush song, "Tell, Don't Show." #sorrynotsorry I don't think that narrative quality was there at all in what skimpy bits of story we were dealt in Onslaught. And that's the problem. It was all very paint-by-numbers generic. Lots of Iokath and story copy-paste of dialog as a token nod to the class stories. That cheapened class story content to me during Iokath, and it was even worse here. Watching Onderon's rich culture, developed so well in KOTOR 2, get little to no elaboration or development felt insulting. All in all, you can feel Bioware's budget cuts despite some genuinely beautiful and creative world design. I'm honestly not that hard to please when it comes to story. Make something interesting or entertaining. Give it a little philosophical or cultural depth. Make it adhere to your own world logic. Don't insult your own well-envisioned characters with stupid actions or lame plots. It doesn't have to be Shakespeare or, hell, even KOTOR 1. It just has to have reasonable gameplay (Ossus didn't and the Meridian flashpoint was the most tedious to date), a story that has decent pacing and flow (KOTET overall was pretty okay that way), and respects the story atmosphere you've already established in previous installments. And, most of all, don't disrespect my toon's story arc on a very basic level. I don't think SWTOR is ever going to meet those standards again. I'm actually okay with that. I just want my personal farewell to be smooth and to give me some good lasting memories.

You know, as someone living in a real-life Empire right now and seeing everything that was built up over centuries of popular struggle get dismantled by a reality TV show wrecking ball, that type of story really holds no appeal to me at all. I'm repulsed enough by reality Anyway, I fundamentally disagree with you that the Empire is evil and the Republic is good. From a stated values standpoint, that might be true. But as you delve into the class stories, you see that there are all kinds of evils and goods and just normal, everyday people trying to survive in both societies. They have their overclasses, middle classes, underclasses just like Zakuul did. They're all, at their core, civilizations struggling to survive and thrive. Planetary story arcs, main storylines, and lots of sidequests built up this view with all kinds of subtleties and variations through all of the strata of Empire and Republic societies. You as a player could choose what to focus on in your worldview of the SWTOR universe. That's not the case now. I loathe dichotomous thinking. Nothing is ever pure black or pure white. And both sets of leaders from KOTET onward behave exactly the same way. Heck, they were the same leader on Iokath Not to mention, the whole resource plot point has been lost to warmongering bullhockey. These stories are sort of a view of the top echelons of both societies, and, TBH, they both are uninteresting and kind of suck as a result. The fun part of the class stories has always been experiencing the cross-section of these civilizations, not just the boring leadership. The difference now is that the Empire is the supreme wrecking-ball of progress while the Pubs are trying to preserve what they've built. But both are doing it by slobbering like war dogs over scraps. Not my cup of tea at all, sadly.

Yep, they nerfed healing companions pretty significantly. A lot of the starter worlds hold some of the hardest content in the game now The worst fight I had in all of leveling my last Shadow to 75 was on Tython. Balancing's a little wonky. Dromund Kaas does get significantly easier, tho', aside from the heroics. The other thing they've done is cut your health almost in half, and probably the same to your Mastery. So you hit like a wet noodle. AND your max planetary level for the cap is now the planetary max. So where you used to be downleveled to 12 on Korriban, you're squished to level 10. This makes mobs hit you a lot harder. BUT, hang on until level 75. You don't have far to go. Once you've hit that level, you're going to start seeing new armor dropping regularly that will give you a stat boost over and above planetary level caps. You'll see the iRating booster kick in once you've hit iLevel 271 (I believe). That won't take long. Your ez story mode will kick in, it just takes a little longer to catch up with you.

I haven't touched on story because, TBH, I haven't found much of it since KOTET to be enjoyable or engaging. I'm subbing for the moment and enjoying the vanilla stories up through Ziost on a few toons until I'm sick of them, then I think I'm going to say a quiet permanent goodbye to the game. I don't like where the story's headed. At all. The new additions were either a) dull as dishwater-- Pub or b) entertaining but soul-destroying--Empire. If I could head-canon any of my toons into either side after all of their experiences, I might have a different opinion. I can't, though. The story definitely hit me in the feels, but not in the right way. I feel actively repulsed from Empire side on both Ossus and in Onslaught and bored as a Pub. The thought of running them even space-barred makes me shudder like I'm being forced to touch slime mold. Bllllluuuuuughhhh.