This. You give them materials, they give you a completed item with no waiting. Then they craft the materials. If they get a critical success they get two items. They just made profit by doing absolutely nothing with zero risk.

A miscommunication you say? For the sake of argument let's say a casual player has a single level 50 toon... they don't belong to a raiding guild... and have enough time to play the game for roughly two hours a day. I'd say that definition of "casual" is more than generous. It's a foregone conclusion that a casual player is required to have Grade 7 to succeed at these missions. Grade 7 will cost you exactly 300k credits, 1500 Fleet Comms and 300 Daily Comms to get all the non-schematic parts. Our player earns roughly 200k credits per day doing space missions and Section X. He also earns a maximum of 100 fleet comms per day over an hour and 10 minutes of space missions (assuming he completes all of the bonuses and does not fail at any point). Due to the 16 daily comms from Section X and the two-hour or so time limit, Black Hole, Belsavis, and Illum are no longer worth doing. That means at minimum it will take him 17 straight days of grinding in order to earn all the non-schematic components. Even if we assume his toon is a Cybertech capable of learning the two schematics... they both require another 700 comms, each, to buy, which means another 14 days of grinding... and to craft them requires enriched durasteel, molecular stabilizers, and other materials he does not have access to as a non-raider. So the most expedient method would be to use his leftover earnings from the previous seventeen days to buy them from the GTN, where he might get lucky and spend just over a million for both of them. OR He can shell out the real money to purchase the upgrade bundle from the Cartel market and have everything he needs in before he even starts playing on the first day. Let's also remember that his all of his play time is completely consumed by grinding for space ship parts... and every day he gets bored and decides to do something else only increases the time it will take to finish. Miscommunication is a pretty massive understatement here. It would probably be much easier to just say you done ****ed up. Hard. The problems as they stand are currently as follows: 1. The player who shells out the money can begin completing the new Heroic Space missions right away. Which gives them another source of Black Hole comms. Which means they get gear for PvE faster than someone who doesn't. This is "Pay to Win" in every sense of the phrase. You are deluding yourself if you can't see this. 2. Assuming you have an expert knowledge of the space space combat system and know all it's ins and outs and can effectively memorize the best order and locations to use spaceship abilities... the new missions are still extremely difficult without the new upgrades. To everyone else they are a complete curb-stomp in favor of the computer, requiring a solid month of dedicated work before you can even attempt them. 3. To even suggest that doing the proposed grind is supposed to be in any way comparable to the Cartel Market is insulting in the extreme. The market instantly eliminates four weeks of work with a click of the button. Even if it eliminated only one week of work it would still be a no-brainer if you wanted to do the new missions. This whole situation is a blatant cash grab on your part. A shameless attempt to coerce people who already subscribe to this game to buy Cartel Coins. Sitting there saying, "Oops", and trying to pretend it was an internal misunderstanding only makes things worse.

This. If the enemy moves 4m away from you then you can't hit them anymore and the ability ends. EDIT: also, interrupted is the generic error-handling message it throws up any time the ability does not finish channeling completely for any reason. it's a 3 second channel and a 1.5 second global cooldown. If you fire another ability before it's finished it will be "interrupted". Same thing if you get stunned, knocked back, etc.

Okay. That's a fair question. Before I even get started I would like to say that I am a strong opponent of the trinity system. This post is basically an explanation of how I got there. I like lists. So let's do that: Pros: 1. It encourages a and rewards variety of archetypal play styles. The image of the heroic knight with a sword and shield, a stalwart defender of his allies who selflessly throws himself in the path of the forces of evil and sacrificing himself so his allies can live, is a pretty staple image of all fantasy stories in all mediums. In most of game systems it is mechanically inferior to sacrifice offensive ability to maintain this image. The trinity system allows not only allows this image to persist but also encourages and rewards it. 2. It presents unique challenges to suit different people. The basic principle of this game is to defeat your enemies before they can defeat you. This mindset, combined with the treadmills of tiered content, and the push to meet endgame as fast as possible, encourages players to find the quickest and most efficient way of killing creatures, which tends to train them all towards the mindset of a "DPS" role. Some players thrive on this, meticulously calculating how and when to use what power and in what order to achieve this goal, and a DPS who is good at his job is a damn fine sight. For other, this gets boring. Quickly. The trinity system provides a "break" from this and offers its own unique challenges that might suit other people better. A "tank" controls the setting and flow of the fight. You have to decide where the boss stands to best keep his attention on your and off your allies, and has decide what enemies are best focused on him, and what enemies his allies can handle without his help. A healer has to keep everyone alive. You have to constantly divide your attention between your allies who need it the most and make split second decisions over which abilities will keep which party members standing long enough for the fight to be over. A good tank helps, sure, but a good enough healer should, in theory, be able to manage even when things are flying around all over the place. Cons: 1. The trinity system pigeon-holes players into party roles. The dark side of Pro #1. The trinity system encourages one particular style of play at the expense of another. This is never a good thing in any system. In order to make fights "hard", designers build end game content around large scale encounters requiring dozens of players to succeed. The trinity system limits these fights in scope extensively. The bosses inevitably focus exclusively on one person while the rest of the party slowly whittles him down. Occasionally you throw in a mechanic that is supposed to make everyone panic. Imagine a scenario where the 4 person party crash lands inside an enemy hanger and is immediately swarmed by hostile creatures. The group buckles down and singles out the enemies in small groups that they can handle individually and they triumph. After taking a moment to catch their breath they move forward and encounter a locked door, two members of the group split off and try to find a way to open the door. When the second group succeeds, the first group moves forward to finish the objective, and the second group is suddenly ambushed by the a Big Bad Evil Guy and have to either fight him off and escape, or defeat him so that they can meet back up with their allies and rescue the hostages. This would be awesome. And it would be a dynamic activity that would engage all four members of the group in different things that would require them to use their unique abilities to solve, and it would be easily done in any table-top RPG. In the trinity system you would never see an encounter like this because all 4 party members have to stay together. We have this problem because all four roles are required at all times in order to succeed. You would never think of running a raid with several differently specced Sentinels/Marauders, who carefully trade off enemy attention, and fire their abilities off in sequence to keep the enemy mob debuffed long enough to succeed. It's not even that it would be extremely difficult, but doable. It's flat-out impossible. 2. It break suspension of disbelief in half I'm sure this will generate debate among proponents of the trinity system as a non-issue. But I would argue that for a game that bills itself as story being the fourth pillar of an MMO, this is a big deal. The reason why "tanks" work as an archetype in a video game, and do not work at a pen and paper setting, is because video games are not managed by people. They are managed by a complex set of instructional code that is designed to make things happen in specific sequences following a predictable pattern. In a table-top RPG, any creature with an Intelligence score higher than 1 is going to ignore a target it can't hit in favor of one that it can. The ability to draw the attacks of your enemies is a concept that is crucial to a tank and virtually impossible to replicate without a "threat meter". Now within this game there are plenty of options to keep enemies "controlled" and away from other members of the party until you are ready to deal with them. There are roots, which stop enemies from moving, snares which slow their movement, stuns which stop them from taking actions, debuffs to reduce their accuracy, and so on. In Dungeons and Dragons (the table-top edition ) it is an accepted and encouraged practice to have a member of your party capable of doing these things. In Star Wars The Old Republic any enemy of significance is going to be immune to all these things. Because we need something for the tank to do. And if the healer can make the enemy stand on his head and clap while the rest of the party kills him then we don't need a tank, do we? 3. Unfair treatment to "lesser" party roles You may have read above when I mentioned that a good DPS is a damn fine sight. In this game, more so than some others, a good DPS makes dungeon runs go incredibly smoothly. The ability to kill enemies that are focused on them instead of the tank before taking any notable damage goes a long way to completing flashpoints as quickly as possible. Most of the time though, even in this game, DPS is seen as a utility and replaceable. Tanking is "hard", healing is "hard", but anyone can be a DPS because it requires almost no effort. As long as you have your tank. who is geared, and your healer, who knows what he is doing, the dungeon will be completed eventually no matter who else you bring. The trinity system tries to make good DPS feel valuable in a lot of ways. The first was by basically saying "DPS has to be good because you have to kill this guy before the healer runs out of resources and everyone dies." While that functions in theory, it becomes irrelevant if the healer doesn't run out of resources, or the tank doesn't require much of those resources to begin with. Further attempts were made when mechanics were introduced to the effect of, "DPS has to be good because you have to kill this guy before his enrage timer is up and he uses his mega-ability and he kills all of you." This also creates a problem because a) if he can kill us any time he wants then why doesn't he just do it before?, which goes back to suspension of disbelief, and b) there is no quantifiable mechanic for telling if a DPS is good at his job or not. Because success in this game is entirely dictated by stats and gear a good DPS will produce superior results with inferior equipment, But because equipment will eventually allow bad DPS to do good damage, it largely becomes an exercise in futility. Everyone remembers the tank who snatched the attention on the loose mobs and prevented the wipe, or the healer with the clutch heals who kept the offtank alive when the main healer was killed. No one cares or remembers about the DPS in blues who produced the extra 400 or 500 dps that allowed you to clear this wing of the dungeon in eighteen minutes instead of thirty minutes. Who would care because the mobs were going to die eventually anyway. So basically I oppose the trinity system because it is an archaic concept that restricts game play. No where else is it more apparent than when Black Talon/Esseles were made into a 2 person flashpoint, yet Group Finder will not match a group until you have at least four people with the four "required" party roles. It imposes all of these significant restrictions for extremely questionable gains, and I, for one, would not be sad to see it go in the least. Party roles should always be "encouraged", Never "required".

Fine. Since you asked nicely. Expertise. If you don't have any then you lose in PvP. Explaining exactly why this is by using the math involved in comparing stat ratios on gear, the difference in survivability, and general self-sufficiency is beyond the scope of this thread. This is not an opinion. It is a well-documented fact. It is the reason expertise exists in the first place. The stat is working as intended. Getting a friend, or two, or three, is not going to help you in this regard because players are not mindless NPC mobs and do not have a threat meter and are not required to follow scripted commands. Any player with a brain that functions on the level required to play this game is going to ignore a target it can't kill in favor of one that it can... usually starting with the ones that aren't fighting back. There is nothing your friends can do to prevent this. Bear in mind no part of this explanation involves three of you against one griefer. They are traveling in packs of a dozen or more right now. Wading into that is going to get you killed. I tried. If you are for some reason unwilling or unable to accept these facts then the discussion is pretty much over. There is nothing I can do to explain it to you any clearer.

Brilliant! Why didn't I think of that before?! Oh that's right because Shadows and Vanguards can snatch you away from the vendor.

You made your choice of your own free will and readily accept the consequences of that choice. I am having the option of waiting forced down my throat at the point of a lightsaber by a large group of sociopathic trolls. In what language do I have to spell it out for you so that you'll understand that one cannot buy things from a vendor while dead?

Okay this I had to touch on before I turned the monitor off. Just to say that I do appreciate the mission for the ideals behind it, and the intent which you described is not a bad idea. The execution however, as we have seen, has been nothing but a nightmare, due in no small part to people who a) enjoy killing people for the lulz, and/or b) don't want others to have nice things. My proposed solution (cleverly disguised in the "letter") was to change it so you could excavate this part like you can for all the others. I wouldn't care nearly as much if that was the case, and that would actually be kind of fun. And at least that way they would have to hunt me down to kill me. This ain't what's goin' down. You MUST buy this from the vendor. The griefers don't even have to look for you. You go to them. This (and specifically only this) is what needs to change.

In terms of Cartel coins it seems you already made up your mind. In terms of other items? -You get a holodancer (novelty. I've never once used it.) -You get a holocamera (clickable that takes screen shots from a first person perspective and makes a little flash when you do so. I think this one is kind of neat, and use it quite a lot) -A flare gun (can be seen from pretty far away...if you aren't inside... and like attention I guess, I used it for a day when I roll a new toon and toss it in the bank) -A training probe (I still don't know what this does. It targets only enemies and orbits them for about 30 seconds apparently doing nothing but looking stupid) -A free VIP Lounge wristband. (costs 1 million credits from vendors. what they don't tell you is that it gives you access to a lounge which has a vendor that sells a speeder that costs several hundred thousand more credits. And that's it. basically pointless if you don't have Collector's Edition) -A free speeder(HELLO! this one is quite good. and with the new update it scales all the way up to 110% speed) So all in all it was about a 2 out of 6. Will just have to decide for yourself, but hopefully that will help you make an informed decision

While this is a fine thought it is far from guaranteed to work. Because I can also recite a witty story of the time I did ask for help and a group of people not geared for PvP did also show up as a result of having the same problem I am having. I'll spare you the details but the moral of that story is that "The side without expertise loses, even in large numbers." EDIT: and I have somewhere else I have to be at the moment. Giving up Outlaw's Den for the night. If I don't reply to you again tonight it's not because I don't love you, but rather because I'm just not home. But I look forward to quoting more of my responses to repeated questions tomorrow.

Actually I was referring to being forced to try and log in during off hours to do the mission. The "ivory tower" bit was in response to people not actually having been victims of ganking but just taking a moral stance, which I have been, and thus am not. But thank you for trying to take things out of context

Seventh, actually. Forgive me, but I don't see the relevance.

I hope that you do. I like it when other people have nice things. /target BioWare, /hint

I believe I said something along those lines. And even if I could find the time, that's not the point. The fact that I have to consider it should be more than enough indication that there is a problem.

This is too fun.

Boy I never realized before I started replying like this how often the same nonsense gets repeated over and over. I'm starting to lose track of my original replies to quote.

...No, it can't. Remember?

Wrong

No. When people camp the vendor it is an uncompletable part of the quest. If you don't PvP and don't have expertise gear you die to someone that does. Period. Your recourse is to not do the content. People can be carried through hard mode Foundry. Quite easily. You can't carry someone through PvP.

Lack the imagination to try what? Not playing the game? Hint: this is the opposite of BioWare's desired effect. Yes. It is a big deal because: And no, I can personally certify that time spent is most likely not going to be minimal, otherwise I would have this done by now and not still be here. I'm actually alt-tabbing out between deaths to check this thread. I agree with you. ...Except for this step. ^ This is actually the exact opposite of entitlement. Well, as much as I value your opinion... /sarcasm All humans except carebears I guess, huh?

trolls

...Wait... that was a rebuttal? Yeah I deal with griefers just fine by reporting them. Note the Harassment Policy, which explicitly states PvP activities are not exempt:

Still waiting for information on this workaround, btw. ^Oh... wait... you mean stuff like this? Nope:

Oh. That. An artifact from when I was beta testing and campaigning for Jedi Sentinel to be it's own class. Never bothered to change it. Probably because all the guns I tried to make looked like crap.

It's simple. Part of the vocal community that wants it kept there actually does want to grief people for lulz. They argue against moving it for dozens of other reasons to cover up that fact. Part of them already managed to do it and will feel invalidated if it does get moved, because the effort they put into it will be rendered meaningless. These are the ones who most frequently say, "I did it so you can do it too." And the rest just don't want other people to have nice things. Can't help you on that last one. Folks are just weird.