Fun is probably the worst thing that can happen to a video game. One day, people are enjoying themselves. Next thing you know they're paying you without you having to browbeat them into it and they feel like they're getting their money's worth. Before you know it, they're loyal customers who actively appreciate what you do. And at that point, it's too late to do anything but sabotage everything you built and tell them to go away. Dangerous path to go down, fun should be avoided at all costs.

Yeah, it's very unprofessional, to put it one way. Which probably means the grunt devs did want to be professional and did want to have pride in their work, but were forced to cut corners and be sloppy because of management. It would fit with the overall picture of an "expansion" delayed 2 months and in a buggy state on PTS.

Yes need for that if people are dissatisfied. Why would people "keep calm and play" a game they don't want to play?

I don't think it's tough at all. Give the people who have the schematic in their inventory or have it learned a refund of the tokens cost. It's not as though having a few more gree tokens is going to wreck some kind of projected-time-wasting-to-keep-people-logged-in for-new-content. Personally, I would rather [insert shockingly awful thing here] than grind that many gree tokens, let alone come to find my grind was for nothing. It's not like the tokens come easily, at all. You can't even grind them unless the event is active for the one week at a time or whatever they cycle this FOMO crap in for. I think that aspect of it is a no-brainer, they probably just don't want to code the solution.

Not blaming you here, you're prob just passing along what you could get some dev lead to tell you, but the part about "encouraged negative gameplay" is incredibly vague as a reason to the point of being little better than no reason given at all. In what way exactly were they being abused? Did the team factor in enjoyment received from using them? Was it even taken under consideration to nerf them in regards to this alleged "encouraging negative gameplay" rather than delete them completely? Oh and this part is equally vague in its own way and doesn't make much sense. From the reports I've seen, stuff actually takes longer to kill on PTS (last people saw of it) than on live, so unless you've changed the balancing since you took PTS down and gone completely in the other direction, this seems backwards as a reason.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can get credit for random, as long as you queue random, even if someone else filters out FPs of their choice, so it wouldn't necessarily be obvious unless in a case like this where you keep seeing the same thing.

That would be nice (them being held accountable). At this point, it's like the main content left in this game is morbid curiosity in watching the train wreck happen to its conclusion. Every other time they post now, they find a way to surprise me with new lows. If I was able to be detached from this game and not care about my own time and money put into it, or that of others, it would be almost funny watching it all go down. Instead, it's just sad and frustrating.

Same here. The one silver lining of that quest is the black sun quick travel point is very close to it, so it's relatively painless to check back on it inbetween other coruscant heroics.

This isn't a credit sink. It's balance changes carried out in a sloppy way.

I seriously doubt most have billions. Many do, that's apparent, but most? You don't accumulate that kind of credits just from passively playing the game, you have to focus on it in one way or another and you are forgetting the kind of people who don't have much free time to play. Also worth noting that with how inflated GTN sales are now, you can very quickly go from having a few billion to near nothing if you spend it on a few of the most rare items.

I'm not, dunno why you're insisting on a false version of reality.

Wait, so if I understand this right, you are just straight up deleting tacticals that players earned?

I guess I haven't done them enough then because I can't recall ever seeing someone vote kicked for not doing a particular skip or failing to make a jump. The kicks or leaving I most see are when someone repeatedly insists on doing their own thing to the detriment of the group, without even explaining their actions, or two people start bickering about how to do things. There is nothing wrong with being able to stealth past trash. Most groups can't and will never do it. The fact that it's appealing at all is a testament to: 1) how boring trash is and 2) how unrewarding it is in the imposed progression treadmill. If trash dropped the same kind of loot bosses do, you can bet there'd be less trash skipping. It's a design problem and trying to force people out of doing what saves them time in a time-wasting system never helps, they just grow ever more resentful and petty about avoiding the time-wasting BS however they can. One of the reasons so many people are in a rush to begin with is because of these time-wasting systems that put all the rewards at the bosses and at the end. Not to mention a lot of trash just takes too long to kill and is obnoxiously spread out in creative ways so it's harder to kill efficiently unless you get everyone on the same page with proper LOS pulls. This is 10 year old content, people can't be expected to enjoy trash mob pull #6 in a FP they've played hundreds or thousands of times over the years. But if that pull gave them meaningful progress at least, then they'd have a reason to do it like they have a reason to do the rest of the 10 year old content.

Lol no they don't. I can only assume you haven't played much beside SWTOR if you really think this.

So ruining fun and creativity is important to head off a future that is based on wild conjecture assuming the absolute worst of the playerbase. It's mindset like this how fun video games end up becoming a restrictive bore. Here is the reality of what would tend to happen if this wildly speculated approach came to pass as a "standard"*: "Everyone have stealth combat style?" "I do." "Yeah." "No I don't." "Ok, guess we're killing trash then." Level 80s who can mow through trash together proceed to pull. *And it more than likely never would come to pass. Most people are not going to want to go through the hassle of setting up their 2nd combat style as a stealth class they may not want to play at all (wasting the one chance they get at giving combat variety to a character they like), just so they can skip a little trash when they play FPs.

You might be on to something there.

Ah yes, now instead of HS, it will be people leaving FP immediately because it's a random they don't want to waste the time on. Fun stuff! When players are forced into a boring grind replaying 10 year old content, they will tend to choose the path of least resistance. The answer to that is never more grind and more attempts to force them into stuff they don't want to do... just the opposite. Less grind and more focus on rewarding them for doing what they enjoy doing and suddenly you have people doing content that actually want to be there and aren't ready to snap at every minor time-wasting delay along the way. I don't think what I'm saying here is anything particularly startling or revelatory about game design, but this BW studio is absolutely obsessed with FOMO and browbeating, so I am really just saying it to you, I know they won't listen.

It's a weird feeling. Like the mood surrounding it is abysmal and BW is offering no reason to believe the criticisms are wrong, which makes me think they know they've got no grounds to defend it on and are worried themselves, which makes me all the more concerned it's going to be terrible... I mean, I am not as much concerned about what my personal reaction to the changes will be, as I am concerned about the playerbase's reaction at large and for how many people this or that thing may be a breaking point for them. Especially the people who haven't been following the scattered trickle of info, some of whom may be shocked at what they see. UI changes in particular are the type of thing that can kick up a firestorm of ire all on their own.

Being understaffed only goes so far as an excuse though. It justifies there being little in the way of content updates, it doesn't justify the poor design decisions and mismanaged resources, which is what most of the complaints about the coming 7.0 changes revolve around. Like literally 5 people could be more productive than whatever amount they have left working on this game, if those 5 people were focused on choosing carefully with the resources they have to improve what's already there. This team is already understaffed and then throws away resources on rewrites of gameplay systems with a poorly thought out vision, if you can even call it one. At this point, I'm not sure what's coming even qualifies as a coherent vision for the game's future. I can't believe I'm saying this, but as indescribably destructive as SWG's NGE was to the original game, at least there was something coherent to its design direction. With this, the best people can do is hypothesize it has something to do with making the game more playable on other platforms and get radio silence or vague PR info as to the why. It's just sad.

To be clear, the steadfast master robes aren't on sale, they are just featured. Because there's no daily flash sale, they popped into the slot in the UI the flash sale would normally inhabit (I guess cause it's a left-aligned UI sort). But yeah, presumably the flash sales have the same problem as other things with the scheduling, as Thander said.

Fair warning, from what I've read, the armor sets in them are being added to collections and for reasons unknown you can't vendor them anymore (we can only assume it's because collections items are set to not be vendorable). The result is that you'll get a lot of repeat pieces you already have like before and won't be able to vendor them to quickly get rid of them. You'll have to manually delete unwanted duplicate pieces instead. So I recommend using bank tabs to collect what you can now, sorted into full sets, so you have less reason to deal with the pain of how the crates will be when 7.0 hits. AFAIK, the pieces will get unlocked just from putting them in your inventory, so it should be relatively painless to do the actual unlock part if you have full sets on hand (whether it'll be for character and then you have to pay CC or something for full unlock, I'm not clear on, I hope they aren't turning in-game earned armor into another layer of CC cost, even if minimal). This is based on what was reportedly on PTS.

Lolz. Yeah, actually, all of the ISPs are run by people who hate SWTOR at every level of management bcuz they got owned in huttball in beta and needed to git gud , so they try to sabotage its amazing hero! engine to make it look bad. Poor SWTOR. :( If only it was adored and worshiped as it deserves it would be the best game ever. Idk what kind of bit I'm doing here, but I had to keep the joke going.

The standard I've heard is to try contacting support about it if this happens. I think there's a ledger in your account info on the website for CC gained and lost, so you could probably review that to verify how many months you've missed and then bring that information to support.

Ugh, I'd forgotten about this change coming. Talk about ruining the main appeal of stealth classes.

And they probably could help, or at least, SWTOR team could learn something from getting a look at LOTRO's implementation. I don't buy the "it's two different systems" responses you're getting from some people. It's technically true, but one can still learn lessons from somebody else's implementation and design, and that somebody else can share insights into the process they went through to make it happen. Roadblocks they hit, challenges they faced, etc. This is one of the reasons to fight for open source in software. People can learn a lot sometimes just from seeing how somebody else did it.