Actually, you've been here for about 3.5 months after launch. https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=&oq=when+did+swtor+launch&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGHP_enUS456US457&q=when+did+swtor+launch&gs_l=hp...0i22i30.0.0.0.3192...........0.n6yayHhdjN8 Also, I guess you aren't familiar with the Dev Tracker. Let me show you: http://www.swtor.com/community/devtracker.php?page=220 Tell me again about how they were communicating a lot... I'd really like to see it. Because one might think that over the course of 4+ years there might be more dev posts than a single thread. There are multiple threads with over 220 pages of posts in it AND the dev thread is filled with fluff like 'We know the servers are down, we're working on it'.

Companions were one of the major selling points and focal points of the initial game and its marketing. For four years Companions were doing fine, and were appropriately powered. Yes, they dumbed them down with the introduction of the Yavin Armours etc making it stupidly easy to have a very powerful companion, but you still at least had to do a tiny little thing to get them there. Telling people not to use an essential part of the game in order to make it challenging is silly. Its a tired argument and I would suggest maybe you should 'learn to play' so they can return companions to their previous state where only a minor bit of effort was required to gear them and where companions had uniqueness. The game is stupidly easy now. There is very little sense of accomplishment from facing a tough encounter an or having to try it a few times with different tactics until you find the one that works. Now its, 'Target Enemy' 'Click Companion Attack Button' '/dance' 'collect Lootbox'

Sunk Cost Fallacy and I was being stupid. I knew it at the time too. I knew how ephemeral my purchases were but I convinced myself I was 'supporting the devs' and helping how I could to continue to ensure the game would stick around. I saw it as a measure of my good will demonstrated by financially supporting them. So.. yeah.. now its F them.

Got you beat there too. I was noting that, just the base game/sub charges cost over the course of 4+ years. EG.. Singple Player Games are not worth that much money to me. When they turned it into a singleplayer game, they stopped getting my money. There are much better single player games on the market. You can do the math, but I was basically equal to 25 subs a month for nearly the entirety of the lifespan of the Cartel Market. Some months with bad pack luck I was even more.

But its a GRINDDDDD *whine* Why does it take me so long to get to 65? Why does it matter at all, you level sync everything, just make me 65 to start! Its super frustrating that I actually have to doanything at all over the course of less than a full weekend, in order to get to level cap AND see al the story. Just give me everything I want as soon as I log in! Why does your game have to be so HARD?!?!?!

Think about it though... Subscribers make up a group that includes people who like the game enough to continue paying for it, and players who pay for it but do not like the game. Former Subscribers is made up of far more of the latter set.. People who are no longer happy with the game, often so much so they refuse to pay for it every again. If EA/BioWare allowed this set of former players to continue to voice their opinions you would see a vastly more negative forums than present.

So, since this breaks your immersion so badly, let me ask you.. How do you reconcile that when you do your alliance dailys/weeklys and you go back and perform heroic quests on prior planets you are inhabiting (and if grouping, grouping with) people from the past. EG.. Players who are level appropriate to a world or whoa re seeing it the first time, are in YOUR past, if you are there for Alliance reasons? How are you managing to wrap your head around that the actions performed in your quest for your alliance Heroic 2's fit the planetary storyline from YOUR PAST, not your present? Etc? You use Immersion breaking like its some magic argument, but all the Alliance Quests are immersion breaking in and of themselves. You travelinto the past to get influence for people in your present/future? really? So what,ou hate Koth, but he has a high influence on your alts because one of your characters got high influence with him.. How does this break anything that isn't already broken when the whole method to get influence is to time travel?

I hate the idea. But that's because I wanted an MMO. As a single player RPG that's fine, but I'm not going to pay $15 a month for a SPRPG. Frankly, the content provided would not be worth the Over $750 dollars I spent _obtaining_ and then subscribing to the game in six month chunks over the life of my sub (closed beta on). I can spend $60 and get a single player RPG with a LOT of content and replayability + a developer team that is very much engaged in and happy to hear from their players and their opinions. (Projekt Red/Witcher come to mind?) who also provide tools and encouragement to their player community to expand on their game/universe even more.

Consider, if you will, the chicken/egg origins of your argument. What might have been the nature of the forums if the developers were engaged with their community from the beginning? BioWare/EA made this bed. Many of the early QoL improvements were offered up as suggestions in the suggestions box forums in really nice ways, and then completely ignored, and it wasn't until people got mad and started screaming and yelling that changes were made, even for simple QoL improvements to the game. If they had remained active and engaged and involved in the community for their game, if they had not been taking a metrics only approach, if they had done the things many of the most successful dev teams do and been a part of their community, maybe the forums wouldn't have gotten as 'bad' as they are?

It happens though, my forum Avatar Number is a bit inaccurate with regards to timing my commitment to the game. I was so excited etc I failed to register as early as I should have because I didn't read the emails close enough. I also tended to avoid (and actually do tend to avoid) most areas of games online forums because the negativity can affect my enjoyment of the game. Most often it was when I came to find a class I loved was proven to be handicapped or whatever. But yeah, I am a fan of this game from before my account creation date of 09.30.09. I had been a continuous subscriber from the very beginning, bought both the digital deluxe and the collectors edition/datacron cube boxed version of the game. I've supported it throughout, though I suspect the last months of my paying subscription were more out of being thoroughly engaged in the sunk cost fallacy... that and perhaps some Stockholm Syndrome. I have nearly 100% completion for every cartel market category in my collections. The first two I do not because, if people recall, things initially didn't get added to your collection.. so I threw some things away for space considerations that I later couldn't add back into my collections. For the most recent pack I don't have 100% because I started blowing my in game currency reserves (about 300,000,000 credits) instead of buying CC's. Suffice to say though for the duration of my account and from about the second 'pack' or so, my monthly contribution to EA's coffers was equivalent to about 25 monthly subs. I'm bothered that their 'Metrics' that they have used to justify so many changes in the game likely included me as an example of what they thought people wanted. I am a casual, often solo, player. My playing time was sometimes limited and so I tended to do things by myself and slowly. Thing is, I liked the challenges as well, and by doing things on my own, I was often greatly challenged. I didn't do a lot of the progression content because I didn't have the hours necessary to sit in a group and I am more introverted and not a fan of voice communication etc. I can generally hold my own, and am happy to just 'listen' to team speak etc, but did not like that many guilds etc make it a requirement to use. But because I did pretty much every quest on every character and went through the stories multiple times did not mean I was looking to have that experience made super easy, or faster, etc. The Slot Machine though, I can peg really as the beginning of the end because while I had had examples of the EA/BioWare tactic in dealing with their player-base and issues, this was one of the worst and most egregious and it was really telling how _petulant_ they got when they made a mistake and they got caught. It was a mistake, we all make mistakes, and while there were many people being crazy, there were an equal or greater number of people offering all sorts of observations and information and really just wanting to help make things better. Instead thogh, we got the patented wall of silence from BioWare, which along with the marketing and behavior with KotFE which demonstrated, to me, I truly was nothing to them as a person, I was merely a purse which they wanted to dip their fingers in early and often, that pushed it completely over the edge for me. Now, I understand how capitalism works, and I understand how they are in the business to make money, but I have found that you can do this and remain successful while also being engaged with and excited for the products you produce and engaged with and excited for the customers you have. I've been in the MMO playspace both as a participant and as a developer of sorts since 1989 when I discovered MUD and found I had as much or more enjoyment from being a 'Wizard' and using my abilities to make the game fun for other players. I've been part of the invited beta/alpha team on many a project. I experienced Everquest before the public did. I was part of WoW's beta, Dark Ages of Camelots closed beta, City of Heroes, Champions Online, Star Wars Galaxies, (I hated it BTW, it was needlessly grindy/arcane.. moisture farmer simulator, did not feel heroic or 'Star Warsy' at all in beta), LotRO (was a strong and vocal Captain in the early beta stages), etc etc etc. I continue to post because I paid for that privilege. I paid for it from the start in six month installments to demonstrate my love and commitment for the game. I have,perhaps, still a small kernel of hope but I realistically understand that they have moved well beyond making this an MMO and instead are trying to push the envelope on stealing from gamers $15.00 a month for a 1 hour or so of content created monthly and theyhave turned this from being an MMO into a subscription based SP RPG and I'm not going to pay for that. There are too many fine fine single player RPG's available that cost me only once and for which I will get equal enjoyment AND those developers also rcreated tools and encourage their players to enhance the longevity of their games through mods and add-ons fromt eh community. I believe strongly and support most QoL improvements. I disagree sharply with things disguised as QoL but which dumb the game down and cheapen the experience entirely, basically making the game play itself and require no intellectual effort on my own part, and thus no 'reward' for figuring out what I was doing wrong and fixing it and then being able to complete something I could not before and may have even sworn it was impossible. There's so many things I just can not get on board and like about the new SWTOR/KotFE direction of the game. And for me, this CSM debacle was part of the start of it, where the really doubled down on how they were going to manage things. I should have quietly followed the example of so many others. I shouldn't have convinced myself that it was still fun to play even though it was increasingly difficult to get a WZ pop or group finder pop on my server because it declined and declined to the point at which I stopped logging in we were looking at MAYBE 30 people on a fleet during prime playing times. Sure, I could have transferred to another server, but for me that was just staving off what was happening anyway and the things that bothered me would still be present whether my server was populous or not. EA/BioWare was still going to use the 'Wall of Silence®™' when things go difficult and the players were upset with them. They were still going to use 'Soon™' and they were still going to call subscription incentives 'subscriber rewards' to try to get me to pay for a MMO when what I was getting was very small chunks of episodic content and repeated broken promises while the additionally made the game fit for toddlers because most all of the content doesn't require your interaction, you just initiate combat and then let the game do the work. I said above in a different post, they really had every opportunity to turn a mistake into a win, a win on many levels. They could have introduced something fun for their players, something that offered up alternative avenues to acquiring things for players, and could have been a Win for engaging with and _respecting_ their community. They chose not to, and I regret financially rewarding them for the time I did after that point.

I'm not coming back to the game but I would say that it should be Legacy for both. I understand some find it 'immersion breaking' but its a tedious grind that is not necessary and is an artificial method to provide 'content' by making players do old content repeatedly. Its very painful for anyone who has alts and the game, up until the latest expansion encouraged you to have lots of alts, at least 8, to see al the various story lines. RE: What if I killed a comp? And? So, you killed the comp, it wont be available for _that_ character. It might still have a very high influence, but you can't benefit from it because its dead for that character. No big deal. You don't have to use comps that don't fit your character. Heck, companions now are absolutely plentiful, you've got lots and lots of generic companions that do exactly the same thing as one another. So this shouldn't be a problem. Just because you have one available at high influence due to legacy doesn't mean you have to summon them.

It doesn't matter for me as I'm not going to re-up my recurring sub just for the slot machine, but I disagree with the approach of a limited number of pulls. Just ensure that the returned value over time is less then what you could get through other means, but tuned to a point that is 'fair' and 'fun'. My suggestion was to add in various popular armor sets and other items from the prior packs as well as this provides a method for BioWare to create an in game currency sink that also provides chances to get 'old'/retired pack items. If additionally everything won from the slot machine was 'bind to legacy on pickup' then you couldn't sell these things. They could use the same model then for each of the old packs, as they had originally intended, and people have a fun, social way to diminish in game currency (money sink) and balance the economy while also obtaining old equipoment from rarely sold packs to balance out their collections. You can still sell the packs, I am sure some people would prefer that as well, just you provide more options. I don't have a horse in this race anymore though.. they've lost me as a paying customer.

Many people who are posting these posts have prior attempted constructive criticism. Constructive criticism is rarely replied to as well UNLESS they created a thread and ask you to post init, then they don't really reply, they just say thank you for the input and then go do their own thing, which very frequently does not match the majority of the suggestions (See the recent 'subscriber rewards'). People eventually get frustrated and angry and so post the 'I quit' pots. Because money does talk.

I have a suggestion thread that had the rates/chances and suggestions for repair. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=793234

Yes, there are soooo many Star Wars MMO's, it boggles the mind.

They wont do this. EA likes to silence anyone who might complain. Subscribers are less likely to complain compared to former subscribers, so only subscribers get to talk on the official forums.

Your only recourse is to do the following. Login to your account management pages. Go to your credit card information, delete it and thus cancel your recurring sub. Enjoy many of the other games on the market where the developers show an interest in their players enjoyment and work to fix problems themselves or, at the very least, provide a set of tools that allow their players to modify and update the game and make available 'mods' that fix things that some players don't like. EA holds a monopoly over many games/properties either because they purchased exclusive rights to distribute/represent a property (sports games, star wars) or because they acquired the game/studio and brought it under their cape. Continuing to harbor 'loyalty' for a game/property and providing EA money for it because EA is the 'only game in town' only further encourages their behaviours in these areas. They are not in this business to make games people like, they are in this business to make money, and time and again they have demonstrated that as long as they are making money with a minimum of effort, they will make the minimum of effort, especially as any effort often requires an expense and thus less money made I(in the short term). They are ruled by Wall Street/Accountants/'investors', Quarterly Demands, etc, have very little long term vision, and are patently player unfriendly. Most EA studios behave in exactly the same way as this is the corporate directive. Don't address issues with your players. Do not respond to them and the ones who are giving you money will eventually shut up and continue giving you money. They figured that out, so you need to change the game. Stop giving them money.

There have been multiple new threads on the subject of the CSM. One of them, in the Sugestions Forum, brought up by a brand new player who never even experienced the CSM in its previous incarnation. Their commentary and their experience with the machine only validates exactly what your player base told you in this thread and other contemporaneous threads/suggestion threads. You have done a very poor job of it and you have significantly damaged your reputation with players to the point of removing their CC information and their recurring subs and ceasing all their Cartel Market purchases. You obviously disappoint new players, who don't go to the same drastic measures, but still express confusion over why the machine in its 1.1 state is so 'crappy'. A simple review of the names/personalities in this thread and how many of them are no longer active subscribers to your game should give you an inclination as to how poorly you manage your systems and how even more poorly you manage your responses to your systems. You had every opportunity to turn this into a 'win' and re-enforce your customers favourable impressions of your products and you, again, blew it. Your continued focus on the metrics generated only by your 'active' playerbase where you've created an echo chamber effect where you re-inforce your decisions because you consider the actions of only your current playerbase and do not factor in the 'lost' customers is responsible for the decline of your subscriber base. This is not/was not an isolated event. This has been the pattern from the beginning. You really need to stop thinking of players as monetary units to exploit. EA/BioWare's present course and EA's course across the spectrum of their products demonstrates why a monopoly is 'bad'. Yes, you still have players, because you have a significant market presence, exclusive deals, and locked down properties so if people want to experience something they HAVE to go through you. But the public perception of EA is overwhelmingly negative. But you get your $ so you do not care. Imagine though, what $ you might get from your players if you were making them happy instead of begrudgingly participating because you're the only game in town?

Alos, I would continue to add my thoughts in this thread: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=790586 Bring it back up and make it sit near the top of the forums again for weeks. BioWare/EA has received far too many 'free passes' from its player base.. though really considering the number of people active then that no longer play (they may still post, like myself, on occasion until their 6 month sub runs out) they should have the metrics to show just how drastically their income dropped when they offended so many players in one fell swoop. I have not spent money on Cartel Coins in a long time. Prior I was an admitted whale with significant monthly purchases of coins. Even players who are still playing the game, or have returned, do not spend money in the cartel market anymore due to things like this. Its frustrating to see how out of touch BioWare seems to be. They trust too much in 'metrics' and they appear to be not factoring in that customers they lost are a metric as well, and why they lost them, so instead they keep plunging further and further into depths that seem to very much please an increasingly smaller number of players, but their metrics show nearly 100% participation in the product they supply. They don't care though, as long as they make more money than they spend, they'll continue and have all sorts of internal meetings where they double down on the current strategies to attract players while overseeing dwindling numbers. There are soo many fairly obvious 'fulcrum' events that can be witnessed by reviewing a history of the Forums and BioWares behavior. Any one of them is related to the loss of subs/customers, and BioWare does not seem to have ever taken these examples to heart as their behavior and reaction to these events remains the same.

Actually, the time frame between the announcement and the nerfing was less than a week. I would have to go back and check, but I think it was not even three days and may have been only 1 or two days. It was that huge a disruption in the game in its previous version that they made the switch VERY quickly after they were informed by the players of its 'generosity'.

For the price that is paid versus the price of production, the costs on Cartel Market crates etc is terribly high. Its nearly pure profit. While the posted is new to these purchases, etc, it still shows that BioWare's a bit out of touch as this players experience is not atypical of the experience many other players have who never post in the forums and just quietly quit after having numerous bad experiences like this one. There is a reason why the game's subscriber base has plummeted and appears basically to be slowly dwindling despite the requirement to be a subscriber to play the new content and despite the relatively large market awareness of 'Star Wars' at present due to a very successful 're-boot' of the franchise. BioWare would likely HUGELY benefit by making the Cartel Market items ala cart, significantly less expensive (so they can be purchased on a whim), and when added to your collection, have it automatically unlocked for all of your characters on your account. The items would still be nearly pure profit for BioWare but they would make less, per purchase, and this is understood. The theory is that they would make up for, in volume, what they lost in price per purchase. The barrier to entry/purchase is presently too high. Many of their items, when converted to 'dollars' cost more than many games or expansions on the open market and this is often coupled with the monthly subscription fee as well. I would likely win a wager where my money was on that a significantly large number of people who are presentlynot making cartel purchases would make them if they could purchase things ala cart and at a reduced/reasonable cost. Make these true 'micro' transactions. A cosmetic speeder should not cost the equivalent of $20.00 US and then be charged another significant sum to unlock it for your other characters. It may seem like a silly little complaint, but things like this demonstrate, even if only subconsciously, to players/consumers what the company thinks of them and their business. The customer is, in the EA/BioWare model.. something to exploit for as long as possible for as much as possible. Customers come to understand that and they cease being customers.

If you're curious: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=790586 My suggestion thread on it: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=793234

I guess they decided that you don't make the rules.

The Slot Machine is likely a sore subject for a large number of people. Many of them don't seem to post much anymore either. If you are curious you can search on CSM or 'cartel slot machine' and likely find a few topics both is the suggestions and in general. I do not know your history/background in the game.. but the short version of the story is this: Slot Machine was released and it was _very_ generous. So much so there was no longer any reason to ever send a companion on a gathering mission. People noted this to BioWare. Some other people freaked because they thought it was perfectly ok at that inflated rate. BioWare/Eric said that it was not an exploit but that it would be reviewed. Slot Machine was nerfed into utter oblivion into the format you see presently. Many people on both sides of the argument were made unhappy by the changes resulting in a 200 page thread, etc. BioWare has never addressed it since.

Aside from the fact you have no idea what you are talking about either, as you do not know their costs, and you are considering that development costs are equivalent to monthly set infrastructure costs, etc... Its possible that doubling their income and increasing their costs still results in a greater profit and more potential upside for increased profits as they do not turn a section of their player-base into active dissenters who, even while no longer playing make sure that anyone who mentions the game gets an earful of vitriol because they were so upset with BioWare's choices. Considering the size of their staff, as best we know it presently, they are milking a cash cow (albeit one with declining cash flow.. due in large part to their decisions) and contributing very little in terms of development costs, likely, I would wager, they are on the very very low end of the scale made up of all MMO developers for their costs at this point, outside the cost of the license.