The data to do this may already be available since the GTN currently shows us the median price of recent sales. Something else that would be helpful when listing items is to show the count of that item that have sold in the last day and/or week. That would help us to judge the demand for the item we're listing, which in turn could be used to adjust the asking price.

In response to Eric Musco's post outlining what is and is not possible, it's perhaps worth mentioning a "meme" that became very popular on the forums of another MMO I played, many years ago before SWTOR had even released. It was the "Standard Code Rant" and it said: "Never tell the devs how easy something is. You don't have the source code and assets, so you really don't have any idea." This is oh so true. Things that look like they ought to be easy can sometimes be really difficult, and sometime the things that actually are easy to implement look very difficult. This is speaking with first hand experience, because I worked on that game as a dev for a couple of years.

That could be. The mission owner was a Sorc, while the second player was an Agent

Steps to reproduce: 1. Use the <Shift>-E screen to grant yourself Chapter 2 on Veteran difficulty. 2. Invite a second player to your group 3. Enter the mission. 4. Use "Group" -> "Summon Group for Party Quest" to bring the second player in 5. Progress through the mission, making sure the second player (not party lead) leads the way. Expected: The two enemies from your past spawn to be fought. Observed: The two enemies do not spawn, preventing progress through the mission. As an editorial note, this bug is typical of problems that plague SWTOR when trying to do story content in a group. This game is an MMO, so you you should expect and develop for multiple players working on content together.

Never mind that. During the quest to get Blizz, you meet four of his companions. I want R'bik D'nec. What's better than a psychotic Jawa with a flamethrower?

That's a non-question. With the move to AWS, if that's done completely, then there is no requirement for physical servers owned by BioWare or Broadsword. So nothing to take over in the first place. In a dream world, BioWare wouldn't have just moved to AWS, they'd have put everything in Docker Images. That would let them spin the game up on anyone's servers. AWS, Azure, Google cloud, you name it. Although having worked with Docker in the past, I'll be the first to admit "Easy to say, vastly more difficult to actually achieve."

Although that's less of an issue today than it was even five years ago. Covid changed things dramatically. For instance, the last job I had before retiring was with Respawn, another EA studio, working on Apex Legends. Respawn are based in Southern California, I lived at that time in the SF Bay area. I never actually visited Respawn's offices at any time. * Interviews were handled remotely via Zoom. * On getting the job, a complete system, fully functional arrived on my doorstep via FedEx. I just plugged it all in, started it up, logged into the Respawn VPN and was ready to go. * Standups, and all other meetings were conducted via Zoom. Source management was an absolute breeze due to the use of Git. * When the time came to retire, I held the exit interviews remotely, packaged up the system, printed the FedEx shipping labels and sent the whole lot back. My point being that there is nothing now that prohibits a company based in Virginia from hiring devs who live in Austin. Smart companies recognize this truth, and indeed they get some hidden benefits. Due to not burning 2.5 to 3 hours a day as I did commuting to and from my previous job, I could put in an hour or two more per day on Apex, and still have more free time to enjoy (e.g.) watching a movie with my wife.

Agree 100% this is a very contentious issue. I fully understand that you need the credit sink, that's absolutely necessary for the long term health of the game's economy, and we all know the economy is in a really bad state now. However, against that I want to balance the experience my wife had starting a brand new character on Satele Shan server, given that we have only played on Star Forge since we started about two years ago. TL;DR Quick Travel was completely inaccessible to her for pretty much all of the leveling experience, it was priced completely out of her reach. Why is this a bad thing? Consider the experience of a new player. What the current pricing structure does is to train brand new players to think that Quick Travel is something for the very wealthy only, and so they just get into the habit of not using it. Thus they become trained not to use Quick Travel, and you've just lost that credit sink for them. They'll tend to go everywhere either on a personal speeder or a taxi, because those are affordable. So I'm going to suggest that you change Quick Travel costs as follows. For level 80 and above characters (thinking ahead to 8.0 and beyond) maintain the current prices. However a level 1 character only sees a cost range of 10-100 credits. Then just scale the prices from 10-100 to 100-5000 as the character levels up. I wouldn't go linear on this, that'll bump the price a bit too quickly for low levels: by the time they hit level 10, 12.5% of the way to cap, we'd be looking at 21-712 cost range, and a typical level 10 first time player will only have a budget in the low thousands of credits. Spending 25% of your entire wealth for one quick travel trip really isn't an option. As a first pass, I'd go with a quadratic curve for the price increase, that would drop the level 10 pricing to around 11-176 credits, still very manageable on a brand new player budget. Bottom line. Something needs to change for the benefit of first time players, the current prices will leave a very bad taste in their mouths.

I had the same issue today. If you're looking in Bioware you could make our lives much easier if you'd have the launcher tell us what's wrong rather than just silently failing to launch the game. It's crystal clear that the Launcher is aware of the lack of correct DirectX 9 support since it's not even attempting to start the game. When this error condition happens, just pop up a messagebox saying "DirectX 9 is not properly installed. Please download from Microsoft's web site and install it." It's a one line fix for the love of the Force. MessageBox(nullptr, "DirectX 9 is not properly installed.\nPlease download from Microsoft's web site and install it.", "SWTOR", MB_OK); You'd save us all so much trouble if you'd do this.

These costs aren't intended to make a dent in your 2.5 billion credits. They never were. Stop thinking about your own personal credit balance, and try looking at the larger picture of the entire game economy. If you were to add up the entire balance of credits on every player on (e.g.) Star Forge you'd arrive at a value somewhere in the trillions, if not quadrillions of credits. That overall figure is the visible sign of the inflation, and is the reason that GTN and private trade prices are out completely of control. The long term desire is to reduce that number, and for the sake of this argument, I'm going to pull something out of thin air, and work with one quadrillion credits on Star Forge. That's ten thousand accounts with 100 billion each - seems reasonable to me. Let's divide 1 quadrillion by 5,000 and we get two hundred billion. This means that it would take something like a hundred billion maximum cost quick travel trips to make a serious dent in the overall balance. Now do you see why this change isn't intended to fix the huge amount of currency in the game. But it does serve a purpose. On a daily basis, people kill mobs, do quests, get credit rewards etc etc etc. All of this adds up to a daily increase in that 1 quadrillion figure. This is the credit flow into the game. Before trying to reduce that 1 quadrillion figure, the devs first need to dramatically slow the rate at which it's growing. And this is where the increased GTN taxes, taxes on private trades, increased repair costs, QT costs, reduced value of good sold, etc . etc. etc. etc. all come into play. By increasing expenses across the board, and at the same time decreasing income, that is expected to slow down the influx of credits. I'd guess it'll take a few more iterations before we finally get there, this is not something that should be rushed. Only then, once the income/expense numbers are balanced, will it make sense to actually attack the big quadrillion monster. That'll take time as well. There are a lot of hidden problems. e.g. what I would describe as "sequestered" credits, i.e. the credits on accounts that are not active at the current time, but that still exist. Those can only be removed from the game if the accounts that have them start subbing again. And extracting credits from the economy without breaking the game isn't as easy as it sounds. The devs have stated over and over, this is a long term plan. We are not going to get a magical overnight fix, I can see this extending well towards the end of 2023, and into 2024. But the basic plan is sound, even if there are a few flaws in the current implementation.

It's also training new players not to use QT at all, which in the long term reduces the effectiveness of the increased cost.

I had a very ugly situation last night where a character got stuck, it was what I call the "stuck in a crevice" issue. I couldn't activate any powers, since the error message reported that I was "floating". /stuck did absolutely nothing to move me. I did eventually escape from it by using the activity finder solo tab to transport to heroic missions on another planet, but the whole experience got me to thinking about the current implementation. Rather than try to fix the current system since it appears to be broken beyond redemption, I suggest a relatively easy rewrite from scratch. Looking at the game with 30 years experience as a game developer, it seems pretty obvious to me that you're using a classic "path node mesh" for AI pathing. Not at all surprising when you think about it, it's a system that's easy to implement, fast to use if well written, and common as garden dirt in games of all sorts. I suggest that when a player uses "/stuck", the FP and OP behaviour of suicide remain unchanged, but in other places, unilaterally move the player to the nearest node in the graph, in x,y,z space. I consider it essential to consider the z dimension as well, otherwise it may become possible to exploit this to climb or fall past cliffs intended to block passage. e.g. the cliffs surrounding the Glacial Fissure area on Hoth that's full of the volcanos.

There are a lot of hidden benefits to doing this. I played the now defunct City of Heroes MMO for a number of years, and their trade house had both this feature, and what were called buy orders. Joe Stramaglia has hinted that buy orders might be in the pipeline at some point, and after my experience playing CoH, they really do serve a very useful purpose. Back to buying partial stacks. Once this is implemented, consider taking steps to encourage players to list large quantities as stacks rather than one item at a time. The back end benefit for doing so is that it reduces the number of stacks in the GTN database, with all the associated benefits: less database storage needed, potentially faster searches, etc. To encourage players to sell by stacks, a very simple way would be to start increasing the GTN tax above the 8% level the moment you have more than one copy of an item on the market. This would mean introducing the ability to add items to a stack already on sale after the fact. Of course, this would not apply to items that can't be stacked, for example augments come to mind as a non-stackable item, so they should not be penalized in this way. There are also a few edge cases that would need to be considered, specifically maximum stack sizes. Probably the easiest solution to that particular issue would be to exempt stacks from the additional tax if the stack size is at the maximum possible. Having seen stacks of 9,999 crafting materials on the market from time to time, this is a very real issue to consider. Finally one last request that is a permanent minor pain point with the GTN. Please provide an option to allow me to specify item price rather than stack price when selling something. Just consider I'm trying to sell a stack of 137 items, and I want to list them at 19,500 credits each. Can you work out in your head what the stack price should be for them? No, I can't either.

You're completely missing the point. We're not debating whether there should be travel costs or not. Nobody here is saying we need to remove travel costs. The message we're trying to get through to the devs is that for new players, the travel costs are prohibitively expensive, which runs the risk of losing new player subscriptions. Sure, keep the 100-5000 range for level 80 characters using quick travel. By the time you're level 80, you'll have a decent bankroll, and can easily afford that. But scale those costs down by level, so that at level 5 on the starting planet they are more like 10-50. Then as you level up, the cost to use quick travel increases linearly till you hit the current price range when you reach level 80. This will have little to no impact on the overall effect of the "quick travel tax" as a means to balance income and expenditures, because the majority of players in the game are at or near the level cap. This is a constant truth across any mature MMO. But it will make a massive difference to the enjoyment of new players.

This game has the ability to automatically format a number, usually a credit amount, with comma grouping, e.g. when specifying sale price on the GTN. This is a very useful QoL feature, because it makes the entry of the amount far less error prone. However, both the legacy storage and guild bank credit transfers do not use this feature. Would it be possible to add commas to these four entry fields?