What sadly doesn't help me believing that the QA team does much is the fact that we have a "Known issue - Patch 6.XX" at every release. This is normal, and is prepared in advance usually to list the numbers of bugs identified by QA just before release. Every MMO or live service does this tbh. What's bothering me however is that while said thread exists, BW's post gets filled at more than 80% by bugs notified by players. So most of what BW places in this thread is mostly discovered by players. Too much in my opinion to justify that the QA team is working properly. Even bugs notified on the PTS and not fixed for the release are not notified here until somebody complains about it too much on the live release. It may very well be stuff that has gone forgotten. That I know can happen. But you usually forget once or twice. Not systematically.

As an interesting story, we had a patch one day that got released... Well, not for everybody. Some peoples had the patch to download, and others did not. Players who didn't had to download anything were playing fine and could log back in with no issues. I and many others however, who had to download said patch, would find our game just... Well just broken. Bugs, glitches, visual issues... Nothing was working properly. You couldn't do anything. After this day, after a little investigation from Bioware, we received a message from Keith Kanneg, producer of Swtor at the time (I don't know if he's still there, we may have lost contact since a few years. ) to apologize for the weird issue, and telling us that from that point on, there would be a QA team assigned to patch releases, to make sure it worked. So there are two issues now with said statement. First one is that well... Swtor didn't had any QA check before releases, meaning that most bugs weren't checked or even known from the devs when a patch was pushed live. Same as every issues around. Second issue is that now we're supposed to have a QA team dedicated to... Well. Avoid this kind of scenarios. I'm not saying that a QA team will identify everything, sure. But I still expect that major bugs (passives not applying) or even the small WIP icon on amplifiers window would have been found out by said QA check, as those were immediatly spotted on by players. So what happened ? Do they just launch the patch on their test server, log in to see if the game doesn't crash and call it a day ? I hope that's not the case. But at the same time I do hope so, as this seems like some good job opportunity for many peoples who lost jobs due to covid. Doesn't require much qualifications.

An interesting tale that I didn't knew about tbh. One different thing however was that in both ways, the hotfix arrived soon enough. Here, even bugs tracked on the PTS aren't fixed on time for the release, and some of them won't be fixed until a month or so, no matter how gamebreaking they are (ahah, passives increasing stacks ? Nah, won't be fixed). Heck, even the WIP icon on amplifier window was ported straight to live. To be honest I'm quite envious of Bioware's dev team. It must be pretty wonderfull to know that no matter how much you mess up a live release, you will never risk your job, no matter how many bugs you introduce and features you don't implement correctly. Even while working on the same line of work as them, I would lose my job after two terrible patch releases like these ones if I don't fix them in a week.

You could remove the effect of taunt reducing damage dealt by enemy players and make it a tank exclusive effect to be honest, just like guard not reducing damage dealt is a tank exclusive passive ability... Or I think it's supposed to work like that. As a side note, reworking Defense so it doesn't affect Parry/resist/dodge chances anymore but instead increases passively DR and damage dealt would be the way to go in order to balance both PvE and PvP. This would however require a rework of some defensive cooldowns, like Invincible for jugg tank maybe in order to make it more of a party mitigation tool, or Deflection so it still have an impact on Parry chances. With a change like that, Defense could become worth it in PvP because it increases damage dealt (by a smaller amount than power) and still buffs your resistance. So you're tanky and still do enough damage to be noticed. Increasing party utility for tanks, and removing defensive group utility to dps (like taunt's damage reduction) is also another way to increase tank impact on a game. But it does require a whole rebalance of most defensive cooldowns. Imo, dps should be squishy by definition, and tanks should be the one able to prevent them from dying. This alone makes tanking an important threat in PvP, and rewards skill rather than just dumb power gearing.

I never thought to one day say this, but Blizzard did manage to implement easier PTS download. By making it copy the base game's files onto the PTS folder then applying a special "PTS Update", where you only download what's changed. This is an enormous time gain, especially when looking at how wanky most mmos launcher are. I wish BW would do something similar. It wouldn't be the first time they try to emulate something first done by Blizzard too. And basically, +1 to your whole post, as I didn't want to copy/paste it entirely.

Or you could just like... Rework the whole tank thing, since most of their kit are pretty redundant in PvE as well. I mean... Who would want to use a full Defense build instead of Power, in both PvE and PvP ? Nobody. Same goes for defensive cooldowns. Why have them if every dps can just use a single cooldown to avoid dying on their own ? Tank cooldowns should be more focused around short-term hard mitigation and party mitigation instead of just always being reducing their own damage taken. This way you have an impact in PvP without needing to gear with offensive stats. I'll try and come up with a tank rework soon tbh, to fix both skanks and tanks in general without hurting PvE. That should be interesting.

Dev input has disappeared since they stopped most marketing and side activities like dev streams were put to an hold. Let's not talk about interviews as well, as Swtor is gone from the radars from most mmo news sadly. And the last time we had official dev input on the forums on how they make the game, we quickly saw that their input was more a flawed vision than anything else, and their answer was trying too hard to be correctly marketed that it basically took us for idiots by saying nonsense. As for what you seek my friend, I'm afraid this game isn't anymore targeted for you, just like I saw two years ago it wasn't anymore for me as well (even tho I did consider myself an hardcore player back in the days). If you want I can give you some other names of MMOs that would suit your taste better, both in terms of content and playerbase. Just say the word And woh, you guys managed to anger Dasty. How's that possible.

I mean, I'm only here since like... Yesterday, but it doesn't seem that bad when compared to other discord servers. It sure lacks activity when I compare it to other mmo discord with the same goal, but I think it's just how it goes. Still can't be as toxic as a RP discord if you ask me. And I've seen a ton of these.

I think they are perfectly aware of it. Any other IP gone through the same mistakes and mess up as this one would have closed a long time ago if it wasn't for Star Wars. And they are fully aware of the absurd amount of money it generates too, otherwise you wouldn't see two 40€ new weapons on the cartel market *each time a new patch drops*. It means that peoples are buying this stuff. A lot. So they're more than aware of how to get little investment for big profits regarding swtor.

Overall I understand why they want to do it. But even adding the option to close it after opening the character sheet wouldn't have changed much imo, apart from reducing screen clutter. As a side example (more a funny anecdote than anything tbh, but worth mentionning), cluttered and hard to navigate interface was one of the really bad point of FF14 before it's 2.0 rework, as even opening the slightest window would make spawn a ton of unfriendly tabs hard to read/understand. Another important thing to take into consideration is the new player experience as well, especially since amplifiers aren't introduced until you drop... Well high level purple gear. There is no point/incentive to have this huge window open on the screen of a new player only to tell him "you will worry about it later". Again, swtor lacks a lot of tutorials and "soft" knowledge progression. Introducing amplifiers at low level has absolutely zero interest, since the feature is usually reserved for endgame content. Just like the galaxy map is disabled when you don't have your personnal ship unlocked, I don't see the point of having the amplifier window show up until you need it. Especially since unlike most other games, you don't have a way to upscale or downscale individual tabs of the UI. Overall... Maybe a whole UI revamp could do the game some good. But seeing how long it took them to do this work, I'm not sure it is even possible for BW at the moment. Edit : For the amplifier UI, funny thing after having checked, it doesn't show up if you don't have anything with an amplifier equipped. So I will take that back, at least. It also doesn't prevent you from moving your character panel to the right of your screen. As soon as you equip something with a single amplifier however...

Just like we had a ton of UI implemented at the time of command rank to be reminded it existed. I know. I was just pointing the flaw in the design. I usually am more of a "propose idea" kind of guy, but most of the time with BW recently I just end up talking about why it doesn't work. I wish they'd teach us about Swtor and bad decision-making in game-design school tbh.

You can laugh all you want my friend, as my sub ran out while I was typing a snarky response. So guess who had to sub again for another month ?

Well... I mean. Why would I roll amplifiers again if I already have all of those I want at gold quality. Having the panel in front of my face won't change anything... Except making me hate them even more.

Ahah, lightsaber goes vrrrt I'm mainly here for Star Wars, RP purposes, and sometimes I still enjoy stomping players in PvP, when it procs. Apart from that I've got everything I need PvE-wise, story-wise and content wise in another MMO. So I'm just hanging here for the memes and the fact that I like talking to everybody here. Forums is 50% of why I pay this sub tbh. If I wanted to joke about it, the true endgame would be to be quoted by a developper.

Hello there, So with the recent drop of patch 6.2.1, there is an increasing number of threads about a lot of changes brought by the patch. Apart from the multiple bug report threads, there is some recurrent topics that are brought up by the community, the one I'm gonna talk about now being the new Amplifier UI. Here's whatever threads I could find about the subject since the update dropped : Yeah... The new amplifier panel needs to go Just my two cents on the current Situation (Interface, Bugs, Exploits) The new character preview window... isn't good at all Proposal - Revert Character Sheet Changes + Make Amplifiers Collapsable This is just only about the first page of the General Section, maybe there's more but I didn't check. However, the important part now is that we had a PTS session that allowed us to test the new UI changes to amplifiers. So, players had the time to test early these changes, and give feedback around those on the thread created by Daniel Steed. I took the time to scroll through said thread, through the specific 21 answers posted by players in fact. Out of all these answers, eight of them were talking about the fact that the new character sheet UI needs some work/isn't good. This is more than a third of the total feedback gathered, even more when you notice that five of the posts in this thread were almost off topic. Now comes the question that I'd like to ask the Bioware Dev Team : What is the purpose of the PTS ? Because it seems that even with proper feedback given by the players, no changes were made between the PTS release and the live version of the game, so I'm naturally wondering if maybe, we as players, have misunderstood something when it comes to PTS usage. And this is why I believe that these questions may need some official answers : Is the PTS actually for gathering feedback about new features ? Or is it maybe just to see if new content can be debugged early before release ? Is there any plans to use whatever feedback is collected through PTS ? Are the changes brought by our feedback going to be implemented "in a later update" or not at all ? These questions are important because it seems that the Bioware team is doing its best to deliver content with a limited amount of developpers and designers working on the game. If the PTS is not used to gather feedback in order to make changes before an important patch, then maybe we don't need a PTS at all in the end ? On one side it will not change from our current cycle (patch drops, peoples talk about bugs/bad features, bugs/bad features get fixed later), and on the other side it actually gives Bioware more development ressources to put into the live game instead of having to maintain a PTS that has no real purpose. I hope that this thread will catch the eyes of somebody at Bioware who can help us understand how decisions and feedback are taken regarding to PTS, as the current situation seems to be more harmfull than beneficial for players at the moment. As usual, take care everybody and see ya all somewhere in the galaxy, Elia

We talked about it a bit more than a month ago in here : https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=989217 Would still like to see it happen, but please no cartel market about it. Those are base features in other games/mmos, I don't see why I should pay 20$+ for an idle animation per character on this one.

Bumping this up since it has quite a big impact on class performance, be it in solo, PvE or PvP. At least having a BW official say something about it would be nice, including a date for the quick fix, as you certainly cannot expect players to wait for a month with this kind of bug affecting reclear capability.

To be honest, a significant piece of data would be to see how many wins a skilled player gets when in a premade, and how many wins the same player gets when he stops grouping. This way you have a direct vision of how grouping impacts your chances of winning if you're a really good player. Ideally, it shouldn't increase it that much, because matchmaking with ELO is here to prevent that.

I like this post, because you probably didn't go around the PvP forums recently. Conquest changes around crafting took two weeks of whining to be implemented. Matchmaking and PvP daily rewards are still not even acknowledged by the devs. I think that nobody on this game has priority on one thing over the other. The only thing where Bioware is more than active is cartel market-related bugs. I doubt that you can say that players are interested in one topic above the other. The forums don't help much, as it is hard to see how many players read your post (again, upvote feature, anyone ?). However, what you're saying does imply that there is work to do around a lot of subjects in this game, and not "just one" more important than another. On that I'm sure we agree.

That would be one way to get rid of some massive excess credits however. Imagine, for just a month you could be able to duplicate CM decorations against like a 1M credit sum. Think of how many millions would just disappear suddenly.

I'll take a few interesting bits of this article if you'll allow me, because while I do agree that "participation trophy" isn't the best idea well... This part here is one interesting because from what I understand, you do get something worthwhile no matter if you win or lose, so players are indeed jumping the bandwagon and killing themselve fast to earn this. However, another interesting thing is that this mode provides "good rewards" almost exclusively if you win, the case above being the only one where you don't need to win. And this is where we fall short with Swtor and probably "BioChris" point of view, as currently, unranked PvP offers strictly nothing for winning. Sure you get to complete a weekly quest, which gives you in 20 wins what three master mode hammer station would have given you anyway... This is even worse when you see that the rewards you get from this quest is used mainly to... Get gear. The one you're supposed to have already if you won 20 games, because gear in swtor (at least set bonuses and tacticals) make that much of a difference in PvP. I like this one, because it shows again that we used to have a superior model in the past, liked by way more players in the form of PvP Commendation, that you'd earn quicker and in bigger amount if you were good. Interesting note about our old system but these commendations were used to buy gear, and more importantly, other rewards as well, which made even good players already geared interested in still earning those, either for the monetary value they provided (sold on GTN) or because they wanted "something more" to their stronghold or in their outfit. Surprising to see that their old system worked better and that their current one, just like swtor's current, is struggling to meet the expectations of both veteran and newcomers. To be honest, I would be all in if they kept rewards to be win-only, only if said rewards were actually worth it. Then maybe would I have an interest in winning and not just having fun camping that poor commando on a node. But I think that "BioChris" would surely have already seen the issues and interesting comparisons highlighted by this article, and not just the one paragraph that says "players will just kill themselves if you give them any reward for losing". Right ? TL;DR - Good post indeed, but it also shows that you either need to provide players with worthwhile rewards available only for winning, and that surprisingly the commendations/token systems used in the past worked way better, as nobody used to kill themselves just to end a game quickly at the time.

To be honest, he's not wrong in wanting more "good looking" decorations to be obtainable via in-game means and not coming from the cartel market. Peoples have already suggested to make more decorations available through crafting, and I believe that this is something entirely possible. If you want to go through some extremes, imagine that some games like FF14 do have decorations available on their cash shop, but they also have more than 200 decorations available through crafting... For just one of the 8 craft discipline. So there is definitely room for improvement in swtor imo. Sure this does cost development ressources, but it's not like making peoples play your game instead of making peoples buy stuff on your cash shop makes a difference in final revenues. Right now it would, for sure. But you do not make a MMO just for the "instant" revenues. But aye, that's EA we're talking about, true that.

I think that this is precisely why they do not post on the forums. Again, we can go back to the big yellow post we received somewhere in 5.0 where Bioware stated what their goals were with class balance (mainly, the difference of damage between ranged/melee and burst/dot). It took less than 1 day for peoples to say "well even with this mentality, the current balance DOES NOT reflect what you are saying". Or even "So you are just ignoring the issues regarding cooldowns when balancing ?" which... Well it was pretty much it. No matter what "vision" they have about the game, the issue is that the state of this game is pretty far from any idea or objectives Bioware has. I mean... Defense is still a useless stat, some class still have no set bonuses worthwhile, the credit inflation is not solved by any amplifier tax they're trying to implement, they're still going about the fact that gear = content, most of the Onslaught story cutscenes are still having issues with the french translation not displaying at times... Or even older ones, like how having a GCD on Phantom Stride and Holotraverse did not solve the issue of getting yeeted into the skybox... I'm not against them posting about whatever idea they have, or whatever purpose they give to new features/content. On the contrary, I welcome this if they're able to take player feedback in consideration before it's too late. But the issue is that most of the time, whatever they say is pretty far from reality. And imo that's exactly why they are not talking much on the official forums. Because that would be leaving traces of the many attempts they had in changing the game to, as usual, fail to meet even their own objectives.

Oh, I'm fully aware that there are far more toxic means of communications around this game, but I'm especially comparing these forums to other MMOs forums right now. It doesn't take long to scroll through the PvP forums to notice peoples arguing over nonsense and debating about who knows best about something they don't understand. Or the recent talks about Conquest and how it stirred up Dev Tracker quite a bit with all the mentions of posts removal. Even just whenever you have a new dev post regarding balance changes, with all the players being angry "but you guys don't know what you're doing" without developping much or contributing to a discussion in any interesting manner. That's for me what I'd call an environment more toxic than healthy. Rest assured however that I fully know how the rest of the game is, and am certainly not comparing the forums to these parts. I am just saying that while peoples here don't often behave as adults, it isn't a reality that is doomed to stay permanent. If other games can manage it, why not this one is just all that I'm saying.

inb4 "Biochris" isn't the real person and it's just Dasty in a human suit. Anyway I see that this really motivated peoples to speak, somebody definitely knows how to spark interest in peoples mind. Somebody mentionned these forums as being toxic, while I agree with the sentiment, I also believe that they became like that because of the lack of dev communication. Let's rewind back to when Keith was first introducing himself and his roadmaps, oh boy, peoples were so happy, and we had far less angry chads running around. Peoples are here arguing on why "your idea is dumb and has nothing to do in this game because I see it like that" or simply "you don't know anything about this game, I know better than anyone". But that sort of talk would disappear real fast if you had here somebody talking just like Chris does on said discords. Somebody to recall others "hey man, so this game is not intended only for solo/casual audience", or whatever vision they have for the game. Again, peoples will not get mad because of the devs decisions. Peoples will get mad because nothing is said about the current state of the game. I do recall that one time they tried to explain about class balance however, and the issue was more that... Well their explication didn't reflect the reality of what was happening (even now, when you back to that post, it makes little to no sense seeing the current balance). Peoples got mad about it because it felt like a marketed-post placed here to make whiners stop complaining. Not a real post to establish communication. And it's more than certainly why BW is afraid to talk here again.