Yeah, you're right, definitely a pattern there that goes beyond a single lead (or at least, visible lead, there may be people who stay out of the spotlight who are in charge and have been there the whole time). I've been trying not to be doom and gloom about the expansion, but it's hard not to see it in a bad way. As you say, there's not much of a playerbase left to leave and I've seen people complain about the upcoming changes who are supposedly been here for the whole 10 years and are thinking about leaving if it goes through as is. That's a really bad sign, cause those are some of the most unshakable people this game has. Right now, the only way I see things not going south is if they scrap most of the gameplay system changes they were going to do and focus on the cool stuff like combat styles and weapon outfit thingy. Then they can rework things gradually throughout the year in areas they wanted to, while being responsive to feedback. I'm not sure they've ever done that, but that's the path away from disaster that I see. Anyway, I swear this game is like a bad relationship. I leave it and then I forget and come back and it's as unhealthy as ever lol. I should not be worrying over the future of a video game, it's supposed to be for fun. I wish I could just play it when the mood strikes me and know it will be managed decently and sustainably going into the future. Going from expansion to expansion with this game is whiplash time after time.

It's extremely tedious if you do mix and match at all, having to claim an entire copy of an unlocked armor set from collections just to get one or two pieces. I spend a ridiculous amount of time deleting copies of pieces I don't need just to put together one custom set. Ideally, just revamp it and make a wardrobe system so we don't have to claim the copy into inventory at all, unless we really want it as a shell. (e.g. let us stamp directly from an interface that contains all of the pieces we have unlocked, categorized by Head, Chest, etc.)

Well the game takes a significant hit to the playerbase pretty much every (or every other) expansion and there are warnings from the players, which are often and frequently summarily ignored. The sky may not be falling, but some inclement weather certainly happens on a regular basis around these parts and takes large chunks of the playerbase with it, many of whom don't return.

The more experienced players can correct me if I'm misjudging this: My impression is that they are focusing on the wrong end (utilities) as the problem, instead of focusing on core gameplay loop and the problem of class rotations that are almost boringly simplistic sometimes, using a fraction of the class abilities, but are opaque to grasp because of the amount of situational abilities that include damage in them. Take Mad Dash as an example, in PvP, it's easy to imagine the usefulness of it both moving you forward and doing damage (e.g. to interrupt someone interacting with an objective). It's difficult for me to imagine similar use in PvE; in the PvE context, the damage part of it just comes across as confusing and sends the message that it is an ability *for damage* when it's more of a utility. So it might make sense to remove the damage component of it specifically in PvE, to make it clear it's not part of a damage rotation. Another example is Sorc/Sage and Sin/Shadow knockback. Once again, in PvP, the damage component makes sense. In PvE, it at least could have shared utility and damage as a form of knocking an enemy away (if you are playing solo) and hurting them a little bit more, but still, if you play veteran FPs with any frequency, you will with some regularity come across players who use it to damage enemies and end up knocking them *out of* the group's AoE. This is also one of the 1st abilities the class gets, so it's one the player will get accustomed to using, even though its use is so iffy in PvE leveling. I do a lot of solo heroics with companion on dmg, so I have some familiarity with reaching for utility and other such situational choices. So I'm not comfortable with what sounds like is coming, but I do think the setup of things can be confusing and overwhelming. I don't think the answer is to take a jackhammer to the class abilities list and when you get them, which is what they seem to be doing. I think more careful consideration of each ability is needed and they should directly consult with some of the vet players who have a mastery of their class (certainly not me, talking about others), to better understand what they are missing in how abilities get used in different contexts.

100%, well said. It is incredibly frustrating the way they take advantage and squander what they have, and it's straight up painful to imagine what we could have if it was well managed, knowing we may never get that for any SW MMO.

And by that what they really mean is they are laser focused on increasing the value for the shareholders. These days, shareholders are the customers and the players are semi-sentient wallets to be pilfered from with whatever technique is necessary; given lip service when necessary, if that gets more money, but otherwise not really recognized as people.

Good points. I haven't followed the raiding scene in this game, so idk if it's ever worked this way here, but I remember in rift, it was made such that when a new set of raids came out, the previous one would become easier because of overgearing. This allowed mid-to-lower skill guilds to keep up with raids, without being stuck on the same bosses forever, or feeling left out of new content.

As allured as I am sometimes by such thoughts, to play devil's advocate: It's probably just the same attitude that comes from their "F2P" model. They like to browbeat people into doing things they don't want to do, rather than incentivize them and make them happy. No content? Make gear extra hard to get so people are forced to play for longer to gear up. New players might get what they want too fast? Force them to grind for more credits for longer. It's all about pushing you into a corner where you have no choice but to do what they say or leave. A model that only works because this is star wars. I would like to be a fly on the wall for them trying to use that mindset on an IP that people aren't so obsessively into. As it is, the idea they are trying to kill it does seem attractive as an explanation because even despite the obsession, the game has been poorly received expansion after expansion with ever-shrinking playerbase and all anecdotal evidence would indicate that the base game is what keeps the die-hards coming back and the newbies coming to check it out. They are sitting on a goldmine of a base game despite its issues in development (not engine, that's garbage, but the content itself) and they squander it away time after time.

Yes ridiculous. You want to hinge on "partly," "partly" can mean 1% responsibility, which is not even worth bringing up. Had KOTFE not been a rushed action adventure game stuffed into an MMORPG with a poor engine, had they not taken away people's companions for no good reason, had they not trivialized the entirety of the republic and empire with deus ex machina "new faction is so stronk" stuff, they could have made a really cool expansion about a 3rd faction and explored it in depth with your companions alongside you, while having you approach it from the lens of your faction and their interests. Win-win. What they did do was unnecessarily ambitious with the resources and time they had, done with a poor understanding of the base game they were working with, and trivialized much of the character development people had done up to that point. So naturally, people wanted a return to "imp vs pub." It's the only lens this game has had where your character has a distinct role to play and has meaningful development. With KOTFE, your character is more or less a "powerful stand-in" and your particular need to be at the center of things is very contrived because they were smushing together so many different variations of faction, alignment, and class.

Ridiculous blaming the players for that. It was clearly cut down because of time and resources, the whole KOTFE/KOTET arc screams rushed due to somebody's "grand artistic vision" getting out of hand. A problem that BW studios seem to commonly have, though they certainly aren't the only one.

Multiple times, yes, and for similar reasons. Disappointing, rushed development and greed are the primary sources of my failing interest (overpriced games, everything is a "live service," nothing is finished anymore, everything is full of "we'll do it later" excuses). At times I've thought about quitting the hobby entirely. Part of what keeps me interested is the development side of it. Modding existing games, or creating games of my own. I can make stuff that's simple and works, and has no obnoxious strings attached. It helps remind me that this hobby doesn't have to be a sea of expensive garbage. One of the things that has helped here and there is expanding the range of games I've tried. I've had a tendency, historically, to get trapped in a small range/type of games and not go much beyond it. And it can make the state of video games as a hobby seem far smaller and garbage-ridden than it is. For example, I got a Tomb Raider game recently for cheap. Haven't gotten too far into it, but it's an interesting diversion sometimes that is off the beaten path of what I normally go for. It can also help to go back in time a bit. Both for sales that allow you to purchase the whole package of a now-finished game (DLC and all) for cheap and for finding stuff that is just better designed. I got Civ 5 a couple years ago on a sale, the whole package, was my first Civ game, and I was really impressed with it. It's got a lot of depth and potential for mastering of little bits of strategy.

I just wish you had more control over it, overall. In a single-player game (like... most of bioware's games) you have a way to potentially "undo" choices you might regret, in the form of saves. You can save before important decisions and then reload if you have second thoughts. Here, there is no such mechanism, so if you make a decision you regret, you're just stuck with it. In reality, I don't think saves as a safeguard are much of a safeguard and were probably never thought of being one. But they wind up being a safeguard that mitigates flaws in the design of a game with important dialogue choices. And without that safeguard, intended or no, the flaws are felt more. I think ideally, they would give us some kind of access to the story flags (I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to mention this idea), so that we can do things like fix broken flags (if a bug occurs) or change decisions we made that we might regret. I know choices are supposed to matter and all, but single-player bioware games with saves have always had the ability to go back to some extent, even if not strictly designed for intentionally. So it's not like it's a totally new concept. And if we did have some kind of access, that same access could be built to give us better insight into what our relationships are. So that we know whether a particular flirt option, for example, matters or not. We know what character(s) our character has made connections with in what way.

Interesting read. Sounds like a terrible idea for a business. I mean, for Microsoft, it sounds great. They cut out the middleman and get more profits. From the standpoint of a business, I don't see how it'd be helpful to put all your eggs in one basket and trust Microsoft support to maintain your PCs, rather than having a "big IT department." Seems like a one-sided deal to me. The only way I can see it making sense for a business is if it saves money on the hardware / maintenance of it and you keep your IT department. As for the author's speculation here: Sounds like a terrible deal and I disagree completely. I can't imagine any scenario where it would make sense for a personal PC's OS to be rented. If you're already building your own PCs, it isn't that expensive on top of the managed cost to throw in the cost of a single OS license. And if you're building your own PCs, you know you can build them to last, for as long as humanly (machinely?) possible. Furthermore, people keep all kinds of long-term data on their computers that they want to hang onto and what happens when your subscription lapses? Do you just lose access until you pay up, like some kind of corporate-sanctioned ransomware? The whole idea is absurd for personal use. That factor only mildly makes sense from a business standpoint because if the business can't afford to renew the subscription, they probably have bigger problems anyway and they can probably go through a planned/organized process of transferring data they really care about, as needed. Overall, anything that sells the idea of people not owning the software they pay for is ground I'm vehemently against. And yes, that includes games like these - I just make an exception for them because they've already been built in a way that makes them dependent on expensive server infrastructure that bioware pays for. If they were built in a way that would allow them to run in a single-player mode without a server, or with a personal server, I would be saying there's no excuse for them not being able to be run in perpetuity offline / in private, once you've paid. As it is, with the lack of a limit in money someone can spend on a game like this, I think it's borderline criminal that there is no guarantee of access past bioware's arbitrary choice of expiration date at the moment of their whims. Partly because most of the "restrictions" in software are arbitrary in the first place. Greedy moves in software are increasingly attempting to make certain restrictions seem like they are a matter of the offering company paying for them and thus there is no argument for the customer having continued access after the offering company arbitrarily decides to end the service. But this is folly on levels that don't just have to do with money. It has to do with the life of software as well and thereby the life of technical code and creative works. Work that can very easily be lost to the ages, to arbitrary lines drawn about copyright and access, purely because some people want more stacks of paper (or, more precisely, more numbers in a virtual system built on lines of code that lists the amount of money they have). Even though in many cases, preserving said works may be a simple matter of some gigabytes worth of hard drive space on a single computer in the world! The people who work on such works should be appalled at the idea of what they work on being arbitrarily ended (and thus destroyed) at a company's whims. It's one thing for that to happen in mid-development. It's a whole other thing for it to happen to shipped works that have made a mark in history and pop culture. It's a dark path to go down.

Anyone who has played the game thoroughly should be familiar with the CC spam, much of it unavoidable (e.g. there is nothing to recommend and no tools to counter it with). Not sure how you get the idea that it's dubious to bring up.

RNG (Random Number Generator) is a staple of RPGs that goes back to tabletop games with dice rolling and has to do with simulating the randomness of real life. Things don't always go how you want them to in real life, quite how you planned, and simulating randomness creates a certain unpredictability that can mimic the need in real life for adapting to evolving circumstances. RPGs are known for using RNG in combat, along with various stats like attack power, such that each swing of your sword will hit for some random amount within a given range and it might have a chance at things like a critical hit, to hit for significantly more. In modern gaming, RNG has become a term synonymous with game designers purposefully making it statistically improbable to get what you want in a timely fashion, so that you'll stick around for longer, pay more, and look good on things like login and subscription numbers (e.g. all about that real life money). One of the primary criticisms of using RNG to artificially gate how long it takes for people to get what they want (while giving them the impression that they theoretically could get lucky and get what they want much faster) is that there's always a curve and some people are going to consistently be significantly more unlucky than others, leaving them to struggle and suffer to get anything that they want at all, much less get it in a timely fashion. This is where some people fight for "RNG protection" (e.g. if you roll the die enough times, you collect a number of doodads that can be traded in for your desired whizbang, rather than purely relying on the die rolling you a whizbang). However, I would argue that "RNG protection" is often an act of putting lipstick on a pig. If the gear system is already so painful that the statistical outliers are going to suffer horribly simply because they got unlucky, maybe the system needs to be reworked to not use RNG in the first place. After all, RNG in gear systems is not something where the "simulating real life" argument necessarily applies. Gear is usually obtained after combat has ended, when you have time to kill. For the most part in systems like that, there is nothing to adapt to within the context of the game. You just got crappier gear than someone else might have gotten and have to deal with it. It's not as though there's a specific strategy you can employ in response other than rolling the die again and again and again.

CC spamming mobs are easily my biggest issue with combat in this game. Especially in heroics that were made easy enough for 1 player, where the mobs were clearly designed to use CC in a way that would make things difficult for a group of players (possibly a whole tank, healer, and DPS, if not 2 DPS). But with 1 player you're just eating everything that a tank would normally eat, throwing off your rotation and increasing encounter time pointlessly. The only way I found it tolerable in heroics was to memorize how each group tended to use CC and then send in my companion first on the most annoying mobs. I don't understand why they've never done anything about it. It doesn't make solo combat more difficult most of the time... just more annoying. Outside of heroics, "for house inrokini!" is probably the worst soloable area in the entire game, as far as CC spam goes. Edit: Also, to expound more on why it's so annoying. I like to get into something of a state of flow. It's near impossible to get into a state of flow if I literally lose control of my character on a regular basis, while I wait for a hard stun to wear off or for a knockback animation to play. I completely understand that being a thing in PvP and expect it, but in solo PvE? It's garbage. If you want challenge, just have mobs put down some bad you shouldn't stand in. I don't understand where any designers get the idea that shutting down control of your character in the middle of a fight at random times, in an unavoidable way, as caused by a computer program, is somehow fun or interesting or challenging. It just makes me want to play something else.

At this point, if they were to really reinvest in SWTOR in a heavy duty sense, I think what would make the most sense would be to make a SWTOR 2 of sorts. Make it more of an action MMO, or even an action adventure game with some online play to match the modern sensibilities (and since SWTOR as a basis doesn't have that much "MMO" in it anyway). Go all out on realistic graphics, character creation, and early development tools for more easily creating new story content in a way that doesn't require the same kind of upfront budget that SWTOR does. Then have a main story thread that does use some voice acting (excepting for the player character), again, to save on budgetary and time issues (e.g. don't repeat past mistakes). Put the emphasis on the RPG experience (player choices, branching storylines) over strictly cinematic storytelling in every scenario; they can win over some of the realistic graphics people with the graphics for the game as a whole and things like character creation, while winning over some of the more tabletop types with an emphasis on RPG in the gameplay itself. In other words, learn lessons from past mistakes and make something that is more sustainable and less expensive to develop for on a foundation level, while still appealing to the Star Wars and storytelling RPG interests. The only problem is, I don't know who EA could get to develop a game like that. Bioware austin has proven time and time again that they can barely handle online play, much less a "live service" model. Maybe with a better foundation of a game (e.g. without the myriad of longstanding issues in its construction), they'd be able to do better, but I don't have much faith in them at this point and EA probably doesn't either for a project like that. I think in an ideal world, they'd find a way to have a bioware studio and some other studio with experience in online play and solid tech in general, work together, with bioware utilizing their experience in storytelling and the other studio utilizing their experience in tech. Any game that is going to last needs a solid foundation to work from on a tech level and I don't think any bioware studios have ever been great at that stuff.

I don't know what their given reason was at the time (if they gave one at all) but generally speaking about video game design in MMORPGs, level sync enables you to take content that becomes dull and empty when people level significantly past it and turn it into something that is close to their current level of power. This in turn allows you to tie level-relevant rewards to the content that are persistently relevant, no matter how high level people get, without creating a scenario where people go to the level 20 zone and farm mobs there for level-relevant rewards and one-shot them all day, while being incapable of taking damage. In other words, it becomes a question of, "Do people get nothing useful from repeating this content when they are overleveled? Or do we level them down to make the difficulty of it more in line with their current level and give them useful rewards from repeating it?" Problems can arise though, when level sync becomes something that is so imbalanced in its design, that it makes you significantly weaker than you probably should be to handle the given content. The result being that instead of feeling like you're getting a level-appropriate difficulty for repeating rewards, you can feel like you're getting an out-of-place higher difficulty for repeating rewards. Which can kill the enjoyment and/or accessibility of doing the old, repeat content and defeat the point of level sync.

So if you've ran 1000+ raids with these people, why aren't you just talking directly to them, instead of generalizing the playerbase publicly? Are you hoping they'll accidentally read this and change their ways or something? One would think if you've ran 1000+ raids with them, you're close enough you can have a conversation. Regardless, beginner or no, raided with 1000+ times or no, calling people spoiled is insulting and makes no sense. And I suspect you'd agree that it's insulting on some level, considering you're posting about it on the forums, rather than talking to them directly. Maybe some of them just aren't as skilled as you are and never will be. I've dealt with those kind of people in my own experience raiding in another game. And maybe you're wrong... maybe it isn't just adjusting and it's different now, too.

In my view, alt-friendly w/ regards to BiS gearing in a game like this where you can have up to something like 50-60 characters on a single server with the add slots used... would be like, you do it once and you now never have to do it again (and it's also convenient, like doing X process once means you can now get copies for alts, rather than dealing with nonsense where you pass stuff around). And you can progress through X process on any of your max level alts, all of them contributing to the same progress pool. So kinda like how tokens were for base level (not BiS) in 4.0 (I think it was 4.0?) Where you could get tokens just from things like leveling PvP and then by the time you were max level, you were ready to grab a set of gear. Not that I have any attachment to that particular implementation, but the idea that it can be more of a passive process for alts, if it's going to be a process at all. But I also don't have any love for gear treadmills in general. I tend to think of them as tolerably interesting in games where they are put together alongside enough content to justify the escalation of gear stats. When you have a situation like SWTOR, where so little is new and the little that is new is blown through so quickly (ex: story) the gear mostly seems superfluous. Like, in my view, in a well-designed MMORPG system, gear treadmills are more of a spice on the dish as a whole. They help bring out the flavor. But if you have very little fresh content (the dish) there is very little flavor for the spice to bring out in the first place. So you just get the spice and not much else, and it tastes bizarre. The idea that gear treadmills are necessary to keep people interested in lieu of fresh content seems massively short-sighted to me. The only thing I've ever gotten from gear treadmills is burnout, personally. I'm not saying I've never completed them, but that by the time I'm done, I tend to be sick of the whole affair. And gear treadmills tend to push you to do content in ways you wouldn't otherwise do, which helps foster burnout. There's also just the psychological problem, that when you reach the top, you're probably still stuck in the momentum of grinding, but there's nothing left to grind, so it creates this feeling of, "Now what?" And instead of continuing on in a different way, you go find something else to do that will give you that same feeling of accomplishment. It's the same psychological problem with achievement and collections systems, generally speaking. But honestly, the whole "reward incentive" thing in games is something I have problems with in general. The way I see it, if you remove the artificial rewards and a game isn't fun, adding artificial rewards doesn't make it fun. You're just tricking some people into temporarily playing it who wouldn't otherwise do so. People who will resent it or find it extremely dull when the rewards run out.

Maybe so.

Any time someone uses the word "spoiled" in the context of the rules for a game that someone is paying for, I pretty much stop listening. This isn't school, nor is it work, nor is it "the hard knocks of life." It's a game that people pay for. They aren't spoiled if they don't like something being harder than it was before. It's a game that people pay for. Talking about being spoiled in relation to it makes about as much sense as chastising someone for wanting to sleep on a comfortable mattress. It's recreation. It's a game that people pay for. Defend the defensible and I'll agree with you, or at least respect your position. Insult people needlessly and say they are spoiled because their desires for a recreational game are different than yours? I will never respect that.

Yeah, it's bizarrely inconsistent from what I tested, as far as things being different. The only thing seemed consistent in my limited testing was that bosses in heroics seemed consistently harder than before. Probably has something to do with how the leveling down essentially stat caps you.

Indeed. I think I always took that line as a marketing tool from when I first heard it, but there was a part of me with a glimmer of hope that they'd try to live up to it. All I can do at this point is laugh. If I was more conspiracy-minded, I'd buy into the idea that they're purposefully tanking the game at this point. Maybe bioware austin is burned out on SWTOR and wants to work on something else. Or I'd buy into the idea that SWTOR has become a testing ground for EA to try awful stuff and see what they can get away with. I don't want to believe it's just incompetence. Because then I'd pity them and feel bad about ragging on them for it (even though I paid to be here), and that's more painful than imagining they're doing it on purpose for one reason or another. I mean, I don't want to believe that some of them have been at this game for 8 years (not including original development of the game) and they still suck so bad at it, they're unintentionally making mistakes like this. Plus, it just doesn't make sense to think that. I know bad management can do a lot of damage, but... christsakes. To me, it appears thorough how off things are with this expansion. Like detailed bad decisions with careful thought put into how bad they are. That's part of why it's hard for me to believe it's just incompetence. At least, in this case. Like to our credit, as outsiders, we can catch things that people close to the project can't, but nonetheless, they should have a way better handle on it than we do. And it seems to me that it makes far more sense that they do have a better handle on it and have shady intentions, than that people like us have a better grasp of their game than they do.

This is what I get from google translate: So if I understand correctly, OP is asking for the quest tracker to in some way inform you about your quest progress on the planet as a whole and where you can pick up quests you haven't done. Seems like a neat idea to me. Would be nice to be able to find/track stuff you've missed if you're wanting to do everything.