Oh, I'm not talking BAse game through Shadows of Revan. I'm only talking about the past 18 - 24 months. That is why I sad many in in the community would be head over heals for SWTOR again. I am one of those players who loves solo game play, story content, big missions and interesting side quests, but craves group content like Ops, Flashpoints and the occasional PvP as well. I like every aspect of the game and can play just about anything over and over as long as the replay ability is high. Base game through EV, KP, Denova, Lost Island and Kaon Under Siege and Terror from Beyond has an extremely high replay ability factor. Makeb and Scum and Villainy have a low replay ability factor. Oricon and the entire Forged Alliances and Shadows of Revan patches have a high replay ability factor. Ziost is Meh KotFE is touch and go, but mostly not very replayable, the Star Fortresses were a joke... Soloable in HM... seriously? That isn't "hard mode," it's solo and lean a good strategy mode. KotET felt like they were phoning it in at times, although the last 2 chapters were interesting.

Me too!

I'm typically very long winded and write several pages when I post on the forums. I know I'm not alone, many of us post long threads talking about what we would like to see vs what we are getting. Today I thought I would break from my norm and just break it down Barney style for a change. BW, you are giving us Quantity, more CXP for our time more crates over the course of time. Thanks, that really isn't the request though. We are looking to receive more quality for the time and money we spend. Quick example: I was gaining 2 CXP ranks per raid night and getting 0 piece of USABLE gear from my crates. Now I'm getting 8 - 10 CXP ranks per raid night and still getting 0 pieces of USABLE gear. I would be satisfied with 3 or 4 CXP ranks per raid night and 1 USABLE piece of gear. You have given us 10 Uprisings and 25 total chapters of story content. None of which rank very high on the replayability scale. You gave us several BEAUTIFUL Blur trailers, none of them equal playable content and cost you MILLIONS to deliver to us. Many of us would have been happy with 5 or 6 chapters of GREAT story, 1 operations with 3 challenge modes that give us that "omg THIS is F'in' STAR WARS" feeling! Toss us a couple trailers built in studio with actual gameplay footage showing impressive new PLAYABLE content and many in the community would be head over heals for SWTOR all over again. Ok, that was longer than I wanted it to be... Oh well, guess I'm not good at short posts...

Reading through the thread this morning I'm glad you all understand the financial reports and are able to articulate them in plain english, because I tried to look at them and my brain was like.... Wall... of... numbers.... I read your posts and it starts to make sense, I think. Basically, because SWTOR isn't mentioned, but had been in the past, we can speculate that they are either doing so poorly that EA chose not to point out the problem and leave them lumped in with the different financial groups that they fall into. Or.... We can assume that they have plateaued and are neither failing nor prospering, but holding their own and because that doesn't contribute to any net losses or gains there really isn't anything to talk their investors about regards to SWTOR. Furthermore the announcement of a brand new IP being DELIVERED before the end of the fiscal year (March 2017) lends support to the years old rumor that BW Austin has been working on a secret project. Take into account that over the past 2 years, SWTOR has felt like a game that is understaffed and under appreciated. Then add in the news that BW has indeed been working on a brand new new IP that they are building from scratch. Also keep in mind that BW has had all 3 offices working on pieces of Mass Effect: Andromeda to get it out the door in February. Now... A.) One can speculate that the Austin Office has been more focused on everything except SWTOR, but now that BW's other major products are nearing completion they have begun to shift a few more resources back to SWTOR and will continue to reinforce it in the coming months. Hence Musco alluding to the idea that all our SWTOR woes might be fixed by the beginning of April Or... B.) BW is planning to spend the remainder of this year propping SWTOR up and preparing it for a long term maintenance mode. Honestly the Galactic Command system feels like a "set it and forget it" system that, once perfected, would work well for a popular game that is being put in maintenance mode. They pre program a bunch of different tiers of gear, make said gear difficult and time consuming to obtain then set an in game timer that populates the system with new levels of gear after a set amount of time. Convert Bolster and level sync so that everything in the game is buffed or debuffed depending on the average level of the gear that the player or group is wearing.

In my opinion, from reading the comments of non-raiding, PvE minded, story mode connoisseurs (aka casuals), your point of view is the exception not the rule. Many of the casuals posting in these forums enjoy GC because it gives them the opportunity to earn higher level gear faster than they were earning prior to 5.0.

In all reality I would say it is up in the air right now. All speculation aside the only facts we have are these: 1.They understand that the community wants to see the game return to Imp vs Pub 2.The majority of their voice actors are part of the strike against EA, Disney, Sony & ect 3. SWTOR has stated they are dedicated to providing voice acted story 4. The Dev team is very secretive about everything they do and have not given any definite details about the future of SWTOR. We know we will get an update in April and this update will include some story, some returning companions and 1 raid boss. Past that the information is, "we are working on this, we want to do that, we would like to give you yada yada." Ultimately we have to wait and see where it goes if and when it arrives because there aren't enough details to available right now to be able to create intelligent speculation.

Buy the vaccine for 2,000 credits, now you aren't forced to participate against your will.

I don't believe that BW or EA will let Dragon Age fall, nor do I think that they will abandon Mass Effect given it's popularity. BW has 3 studios which leads one to believe that they can support 3 titles and leave one active title in maintenance mode. I'm going to guess that when the new IP is announced (and if that is toward the end of their fiscal year then the announcement will be soon) support for SWTOR drops down to monthly cartel market updates only. Once Visceral is ready to ship their new Star Wars title then SWTOR is a gonner. Since Neither Mass Effect nor Dragon Age require an abundance of support BW is in position to support a RPG based, cooperative Loot shooter. I'm envisioning something that uses a large part of what they already had built for Shadow Realms but incorporating everything that is popular in gaming now. I think that the Galactic Command system, loot, the interface, all of it, is something we will see again in that game, or at least the ultimate evolution of it reskinned and rebranded. At the end of the day, I still believe that right now we are paying BioWare to test and help them perfect the systems they are going to implement into their new IP. Right or wrong, we shall soon find out I'm sure. Oh, and I agree completely, EA never tried to save SWTOR. They let BW take it and try to do what they could with it. I think that BW did a good job for a while, but in the end to much money was spent on Blurr trailers and not enough spent in actual game content and development. I don't believe that EA ever intended to help make SWTOR a success as evidenced by all the other Star Wars titles that they have allowed to be produced in the interim and none of them included characters or references to SWTOR. The fanbase kept SWTOR going this long, not EA. I'll give BW some credit, if my assumptions are even close to accurate then they made something out of nothing for a long time. It's sad to see what has become of this once promising MMO.

Please remind me, when does BW/EA end their Fiscal year? Isn't it something weird, like April?

I couldn't agree more.

Here is my speculation, pure speculation based on what we have seen and what has been happening. This new IP has many who work on SWTOR double hatting roles for production on that game as well as on SWTOR. We now that nearly a large portion of the SWTOR team was double hatting roles with Shadow Realms and that was one of the reasons that Game Quality suffered between the launch of Oricon and Shadows of Revan. I'm betting that the largest part of the development team is focused on the new IP with limited time dedicated to maintaining SWTOR. They are really excited about the new IP, they have been able to keep a lid on it for 5 years. Little things have leaked here and there that BW had a secret project they have been working on. This has been rumored to be SWTOR 2 since the whispers of a new game from BW started, but this leads me to believe that the new IP is going to be a SIFI MMO. Now I'm gonna go off the deep end for a moment; I'm speculating that they are using SWTOR as a testing ground for the systems and aspects that they are creating for the new IP. What better way to determine if a game will be successful than to get paying customers to test portions of it in a game that is slowly fading away? This would explain several things things; 1 the reason almost everything they release lately has major bugs and problems because they are copy and pasting the code and then bruteforcing it into the game engine to make it work. 2. It explains why they have had a laser like focus on stuff that is quick and easy to create. They know the only players left in SWTOR are those that are loyal to the Star Wars Brand and will be here until the servers are shut down. They know we will keep paying them as long as they throw us a bone from time to time. 3. It explains why they don't appear to really care about what the community thinks and are just giving us what they want to give us. 4. It explains why they haven't even tried to capitalize on the release of 2 Star Wars movies or time some really big, really awesome releases alongside the release of The Force Awakens or Rogue One. As for SWTOR not being mentioned in the Quarterly report and Subscriptions having gone up 15%. I think that they don't want to mention where SWTOR is in their radar because compared to this time last year it is not even close and it probably continues to slide. Also don't forget that a great many of EA's games have subscription plans, not just SWTOR. They could probably post an increase in Subscriptions across all of EA even after shutting down the SWTOR servers. For sometime I have maintained the opinion that the only thing that will kill SWTOR is BW pulling the plug or making a huge mistake. I think that 5.0 is that huge mistake, but I think it was done on purpose to test the stuff they are putting into their new IP.

I read the above quoted post, specifically the part that I have left in my quoted section and I ask; for a player like me, (and there are many like me out there) other than gearing what else is left to do? I mean, other than move on to a different game until you get things sorted out? Your statement practically says, "for those who have been around since launch there really isn't much for you until the Op is complete and we fix the gearing issues." Seriously, you might as well suggest what game we should be playing in the meantime. Allow me to explain a little: To be fair to the community this game encouraged us to level 8 characters to at least level 50 (via the 8 original, chapter based stories) before the DvL Event with the "Legendary Player" achievements. Then we were encouraged to speed level 8 more during DvL this summer. So I, for example, have a total of 28 characters on my main server. I have seen all of the class stories multiple times, I have at least one of each character type (multiples of others) and I have played through all of the story content that you have provided on many occasions. Players similar to me have progressed every Operation, every flash point and even the new uprisings to the point that it is all muscle memory now. The one thing that we had to look forward to in 5.0, 5.1 and so on, was chasing that next level of gear through Operations and checking out this new Galactic Command progression system . But, as it turns out, Galactic Command isn't much fun. Yes most MMO's are implementing some sort of endgame progression system that keeps players interested and keeps them playing long past the provided content, but those progression systems are based on Character progression and the improvement of your characters stats and attributes. SWTOR has made a progression system focused solely on gearing. The problem that I fear that you have created is that there is nowhere to go from here. No real reason to ever up the level cap or the command ranks. With Level Sync there is no reason to retool Operations to be more difficult or challenging and with bolster there is no reason to make many more changes to PvP. However, many of these systems aren't working well together. At this point SO MUCH about the game is broken that, for many of us that have been playing since launch there is FAR MORE frustration than there is fun in SWTOR. What I would like to know from you Eric is what reason do players like myself have to continue to pay a subscription to Bioware to play SWTOR? What reason do those of us who have been here since the beginning of things have to stick it out? Your statement above indicates that for long term players who are simply hanging out and waiting for new content we might as well move on...

I would rip his heart out and make him eat it if I could...

I'm trying really hard not to be a downer on this because things do sound promising. At least You are giving us some new game content and it is a balance between Story, small group and Operations. My concern is that the fact that you don't already have Ops or PvP content ready to roll indicates that you have been "all hands on deck" with what has been rolling out lately and it appears that the next releases will be all hands on deck patches as well. For me this confirms the idea that you have a smaller staff than during past releases and that is part of the reason that the content drops are getting smaller. 1 boss at a time with it taking most of the year to complete the entire Op just feels all sorts of frustrating though... It's 1 boss, just 1. If you screw this up or launch it with game breaking bugs then I'm gonna have to call SWTOR quits. I'm sure you don't care, but I do. The fact that you are being just a little more straight forward and slightly more transparent is nice, but you have a long way to go. I want to believe and I want to be optimistic, but your track record leaves me extremely skeptical. One of my guildmates coined the phrase skeptimistic (skeptically optimistic) and I think that describes the situation extremely well. It's a good move putting the content on the PTS I hope plenty of us participate and that you actually listen to our feed back. I'll be on the PTS, I hope to see many others there as well. I believe that the PTS should be a permanent thing and all content should go there as soon as it is playable. Give the community the chance to give you feedback on a more constant basis. The time for being secretive and trying to surprise players is over. On one wants your surprises anymore, we want a game that works and your surprises have just generated more animosity the past 2 years to be honest. Gearing still blows, not just because of the grind fest that CXP has become, but because the waters get muddied and the system gets even more confusing with each change. You wanted to give us a less confusing method of gearing that opened end game gear up to even the casual players. Well you are failing miserably on the less confusing part... Here's an idea, why not name the gear sets after the Spec? Instead of Sage healer gear being called The Force Mystic's Set why not just call it The Seer Sage Set, so on and so forth. This would go along way in clearing up some of the confusion that folks new to endgame gearing often have. I don't think that the use of Comms and unassembled pieces made garing confusing, I think it was all the different gear sets and the naming convention. Good luck, I hope it all works out because I enjoy playing SWTOR. As much as I want to go buy a Nintendo Switch I'd rather you produce something so awesome that I decided to sink that $300 into SWTOR and my PC instead.

Come one come all Souls of Fate is looking for anyone looking to join a guild, have fun playing all aspects of SWTOR and enjoy the social aspects of playing an MMO! If you are looking for a guild of veteran players that can answer your questions and help you experience all the aspects of playing SWTOR please check us out! http://www.soulsoffate.enjin.com

Are you frakin kidding me? Seriously, this is one of those changes where community feedback and testing on the PTS BEFORE the change was put into place would have done your dev team a world of good. At the very least some early warning, a week, maybe two would have allowed you to be able to think this through before doing it. Changes like this one and teh complete lack of transparency with the playerbase make it pretty obvious that the SWTOR team is out of touch with the player base and that you don't play your own game...

Come Check out http://www.soulsoffate.enjin.com. We are a small friendly guild of gamers who just like to play and have fun. We do have raid teams and we run group content regularly, but we also play SWTOR casually when we aren't raiding. We Have discord and most of our members are on for at least a few hours every night. Most of our guild members have been around since the game launched and have a decent amount of experience in almost everything the game has to offer. Some of our folks casually play other games as well and hang out in discord while playing. Check out our website, feel free to ask me questions and look us up on the Republic side of SWTOR on JC. Hope to hear from ya! Drivan SoF Recruting.

Lots of people are on both sides of this topic and there are plenty of good reasons given for both cases. I'll say only this; The last time the topic of server mergers came up in a live stream Ben Irving shot it down VERY quickly by saying, "We do not plan to merge any servers at this time, however we do have server transfers on sale for 90 Cartel Coins." In my mind this is a very clear message, they don't plan to do any more server mergers and if you want off your current server in favor of one with more population you are going to need to pay for it. They aren't going to give away anything that they see that they can profit from. By all means continue to ask them to merge servers, but I think that all of these requests are simply showing them that they have a market for their paid transfer system.

We are looking for a DPS to fill a spot in one of our Raid Groups. This group runs from 9 - 11 EST on Monday and Tuesday nights. We are a raid team of players that has been around, doing hard mode Operations for 5 years and counting. Gear isn't an issue since we have folks in guild that can craft you all of the pieces you will need and even many of the higher grade stuff too. Please contact me in game as Drivan, Maya'Rae or C'aboose or here on the Forums. May the force be with you, always!

They appear to be extremely rare. I only found 3 on Ebon Hawk and 4 on Shadowlands last week. 78 Million was the cheapest one I found and I think it was on Shadowlands.

Sage/Sorc was nerfed hard because of PvP imbalances. They are "average" in PvP now which means that they are not favorable for that content. The nerfs needed to bring them down to average in PvP has made them not even reach the necessary DPS to be able to be a sufficient DPS member of a progression raid team. Their force management is really bad and they are now the #3 (out of 3) healer. A skilled healer can bandage the force management issues in most fights, but in tough fights teh Sage/Sorc healer cannot compete with a Scoundrel.

Why didn't I think of that... Crap...

I agree completely, there is no reason that an MMO can't have an amazing story and awesome group content too. Maybe that is what breeds the toxic community. Some of the Hardcore progression folks dislike those who enjoy the story and the solo play and think that they are lesser players because they don't raid. Some of the solo and story players dislike the progression folks because they feel an MMO revolves around them. I have been guilty of being on both sides, no extremes, of this and what I should be doing is staying happily in the middle enjoying both, since ultimately, I do enjoy both. Thank you again for the conversation. You have helped me put some things into perspective and I appreciate your point of view.

It was actually a crippling exploit that gave out gear to quickly and easily. Combine that with a conversion from Comms to crystals that, I will assume, was supposed to take as many comms out of the game as they could to try to slow people down from getting gear to quickly. That failed too because people just amassed as many comms as they could on every toon. Then there was a bug that allowed you to buy things with Crystals and send that item to another character and sell it back for crystals. All mistakes by BW that could have and should have been solved in QA or by extensive player testing on a PTS. Then a lot of brand new players started complaining that all these players who have been playing since launch all have gear that they can't get, in some cases cosmetic gear gear that isn't in the game anymore. So they made many of the old shells craftable under a different name. Then they created the Highlighted Hardmode system so that these players coming in after watching "The Force Awakens" could gear up and join the game veterans as quickly as the could. If the highlighted hardmode system had excluded Eternity Vault, Karagga's Palace and Terror from Beyond and instead had focused on Explosive Conflict the 2 Dread Ops, Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice, all would have been fine. EV, KP and TFB are too easy and S&V is just too long and shouldn't have been included in that rotation. People geared quickly by focusing on the 3 easy Ops and then progressionists chased the harder Ops for progression. I think BW was trying to stall progression raiders by making the Old Ops relevant and tooled towards level 65. The problem was that they were still incredibly easy and we had ran them all so many times that the mechanics were muscle memory. No one other than new players were going to see EV, KP and TFB as progression. Honestly they shouldn't be. Those Ops bosses, even on HM should have dropped random 216 set bonus pieces at best. Leave the 220's and 224's in the more difficult Ops. Let SnV continue to give decent rewards, simply because if you have the patience to complete that Op all in one night you deserve SOMETHING GOOD for it...

I snipped out a large portion of your post just so that I wasn't taking up a lot of room on the page when replying to you. I have to say that what you had to say was probably one of the best posts that I have read on these forums in a very long time and that I completely agree with everything you had to say. If more players, or at least if more of us who post on these forums thought as you do and acted as you have in your post then this game and these forums would be a much better community. Thank you for your post, I appreciate your insights.