You cannot actually unlock the game as a premium player. You cannot get rid of the credit cap. You cannot permanently unlock access to flashpoints, warzones or operations. It's impossible to make the decision between a subscription or a one time large purchase. Non-subscription will have a recurring residual cost no matter what.

Of course. Why would they want to give you nearly worthless items for doing missions that give almost no reward and aren't worth the time they take after they already suckered you out of the money once?

OP - If you do some digging you can find a cached copy of a post made by a developer just post-launch talking about a better space combat solution coming, and from time to time they answer people that the system is still in the works but that they're not ready to reveal what they're gonna do yet. A mission based space combat system that offered an alternative leveling path (not regular exp, but experience as a pilot, unlocking access to better ships and equipment, etc...) would add a whole new dimension of character development to the game. Even something as simple in concept as the old Tie Fighter game where you had a series of campaigns all with objectives and missions within, including secret objectives to serve more than one master, as it were. They could do loads of cool stuff with something like that. And once the system is in place, they could add new campaigns to it as mini-expansions every so often. The sky is the limit in terms of how cool they could make it, and if they made it a secondary development track for your character, there would be little need to worry about how it impacts the pvp and ops and such. And of course they could monetize it by letting you buy access to better ships or equipment from the market as well as by making the campaigns have a cartel cost (300-400 coins if it came out every 3-4 months seems pretty fair). I think the question is not if they want to do it but rather whether they still have the manpower to do it. Clearly the bean counters are calling the shots with the game right now. Dyes in every other game are crafted or you can get the specific color you want. In this game it's a lottery. I did some testing and dropped 11,000 cartel coins on dye packs and go no dye module worth more than 10,000 credits on the GTN. That's 55 dye packs, 110 dyes and none of them were at all valuable or desirable. That tells you all you need to know about what is driving the developer's decisions on this game right now. And that wouldn't be so bad if there were any evidence that the money they're raking in from the cartel market was being re-invested into the game as more content ... but frankly after 18 months they should be absolutely ashamed of themselves given how little content they've put out post-launch. I still hold out hope, but I don't hold my breath.

People still subscribe because if you want to do anything meaningful in the game the restrictions on F2P/Premium players are over the top. If you could spend a large amount of cartel coins for permanent unlocks, that would solve the problem. People who are interested in spending on the cartel market could buy permanent unlocks for the limitations that bother them (currency cap, warzones, flashpoints, operations, etc...) and be premium a la carte players. The issue is that right now you have to subscribe if you want any kind of meaningful currency to spend in the GTN or if you want to do more than a tiny bit of the end zone stuff. So that's $12.99 a month (if you pay them for 6 months at a time). Then all of the desirable cosmetic stuff is gated behind lottery ticket cartel items. The operation gear looks terrible, while the cartel market gets all of the stuff that people actually want to wear (most of which is gated via the lottery cartel pack system). Then all customization also either has a direct real money cost (the appearance kiosk) or is gated behind gambling with a ridiculously low chance to get the desirable items (dye packs, for example). While it is true that subscribers get some "free" cartel coins monthly, the necessity to gamble for the most desirable stuff and the high prices on everything basically means the cartel market pricing is shifted upwards to account for the "free" coins that subscribers get. SW:ToR is an a la carte gambling based game for which you must pay a surcharge if you want to do anything interesting. The fix here is to put in the ability to pay to permanently unlock the worst of the premium restrictions. Then people won't feel obligated to subscribed to do the things they like plus pay to get the shiny stuffs they want. Let them buy unlocks for what they're interested in doing and let them buy coins to get the stuff they're interested in. Of course why do that when the current system essentially extorts players into subscribing if they want to play seriously at 55 in pvp or ops?

The turnaround time on CS requests for this game is abysmal. It's dramatic to conclude that once a company has your money they have little to no incentive to give you better service? Seems like an obvious truism for EA.

I work for a really small development team actually, so I know the very serious importance of specs and having someone whose responsibility it is to make sure everything matches the specifications document. This seems to be where Bioware ends up saying one thing to its customers and doing another thing with the game. They do not seem to have a centralized specs collection nor someone whose job it is to ensure everything that gets pushed live matches both the specs and what has been said publicly. The specs documents should reflect all public statements and if the specs decisions override those public statements, then new public statements should be made /before/ the changes are pushed live. This is just a matter of internal discipline. As I understand it, the culture at Bioware has been much more informal for most of its history, but now they're fighting for their lives (if the layoffs and such are any indication), so it would be hugely beneficial for them, for many reasons, to have specs and someone who makes sure everything pushed live matches them.

Somehow I had an inkling you'd show up and say something like this. You may want to read Eric's post.

And this is how EricMusco- goes to EricMusco++ -- FWIW, the only more detailed explanations for things I've ever seen came from CCP for awhile when they explained specific technical details (for awhile) behind certain game issues. I'm sure that things at Bioware have been chaotic with all the team restructuring and two teams working from two different directives seems like a fairly likely occurrence. Seem like you guys need to keep a specs bible and have someone whose job it is to make sure game change deployments match the specs.

I say, he told the truth. And someone decided to change it, so it was changed. You do realize that people can change decisions, right? And that Eric isn't the one making ANY of these decisions? You should stop trying to attack someone for no reason. When you tell someone you are going to do X, and then you instead do Y, you have lied to that person. It's irrelevant what details precipitated the lie. With each lie, Eric's credibility takes a further hit. Soon they will need a new Community Manager because we will simply no longer believe anything He says. This is a very simple concept. On May 14th, he told us the current dyes would remain BoE and the CE/SV folks could continue to have a market with them, but that in the future a new dye would be added to each that would Bind and therefore be exclusive. In the intervening 16 days, something changed, which is not the problem. The problem is that Eric didn't have the integrity to come back and let us know about the change. If you tell paying customers one thing and that plan changes, its incumbent upon you, the developer/CM, to update the customers.

We care because Eric lied to us. Again.

If I ever see you in a thread where you turn a critical eye on Bioware or the reps, I will certainly change my opinion that you have an agenda. As far as the OP goes, he claims to have a reputation on his server as a high end seller. Nobody from his server has disputed that. If he really is a well known high end seller, that gives even more weight to his already logically believable claim. As far as trying to say that if he was being honest then Bioware would have restored it, you cannot possibly make that argument with a straight face. These forums are littered with cases where someone got generic responses to support requests, frequently unrelated to their problems, only to later have a different support rep actually help them. I've experienced that exact scenario for myself, where one or two or three CS reps give canned responses that don't help and persistence gets me to a rep who knows how to help me and then they do. I'll stop viewing you as a company shill the moment you demonstrate you actually have a neutral starting point and you let the facts guide you. Looking through your post history, I cannot find a time where you ended up criticizing Bioware. I mean, Eric Musco came out and apologized for the misleading free-to-play transitioned promotional language, but in your post history there you are telling people that they're at fault if they made a wrong assumption and that bioware never told them what they think they were told. When the community manager posts something contrary to the position you're taking, and you still insist on trying to bend logic to paint Bioware in the best possible light, and your position is contrary to what the company is actually saying ... what do you expect people to conclude? By all means, prove me wrong. I would love to see how much you could help with constructive criticism if you applied your intellect to identifying things that need to be improved and giving workable solutions and suggestions to Bioware to that end. I hope we can both agree that we enjoy the game, but that it could be better in a lot of areas.

Nope, but you did come into the thread and in your first paragraph alone you insinuated at least four times that the OP is a liar. The worst part about your implications is that they were all illogical. 1.) It makes perfect sense that someone dealing in high end goods would have them all listed at the same time, yet you called it "miraculous" that the OP claimed this was the case. 2.) You implied that having a job that requires sudden travel is unlikely, and yet many professional fields sometimes required sudden travel for any variety of reasons. 3.) You implied that the OP should have easily been able to log into the game even though He was traveling; however, many companies issue work computers to employees and forbid the installation of personal software on them. There's absolutely nothing surprising about someone who works in an industry that requires sudden travel also having a work supplied computer and not being allowed to put their own software on it. 4.) Finally you misrepresented the OP's statement about what CS had at that time said to him. It's unclear from the OP whether the CS rep said that the logs didn't show the items or that the CS rep said there simply weren't logs. It's possible that enough time has passed that there aren't logs, but I doubt that. Since I don't work for Bioware, I cannot know for sure though. You automatically made the worst possible assumption about the OP and went with it. In every forum post I have seen you make, you always choose to believe the worst about the person complaining and/or criticizing the game or Bioware and you always choose the best possible light to view the game and Bioware in. This is a choice. You then attempt to come up with some logic that seems rational to support the position you always choose. The reason I say you always choose is because I can find no evidence in your post history of you actually putting together facts and letting them guide you to a conclusion. Every time, without exception, you paint Bioware and the game in the best possible light. The second reason I have concluded that you choose a position and then try and build an argument to defend it is because your logic against the OP was absolutely horrible and just a smidge of rational thought completely knocks the legs out from under your entire first paragraph. Although, I must say I do especially like the sheer ballsiness of your 2nd paragraph where you begin "I'm not implying the OP is lying or anything" (paraphrase by me) after you just spent a paragraph implying that the OP was a liar. I should hope it's self-evident that (apart from rant threads I've started when I let me emotions get the better of me) I try to think through what people say and apply logic and rationality to it and come to a conclusion based upon the available information and what is most logical or rational to believe based upon that. If people don't think you're a Bioware shill, then why do so many people say you are? Why did several people quote my post completely demolishing your poorly constructed argument against the OP and do things like "/hero" to it? If your "Nonsense" was aimed at the statement "attacking one party is by definition defending the other" then I'm afraid you're the one stuck on nonsense. You cannot pretend to be neutral while you insinuate and imply and attack one party while trying to paint the other party in the best possible light. You do attack people and you do defend Bioware. This isn't an opinion. It's a fact which anyone can verify by taking a read through your post history. I do want to give you a kudos though for coming back into the thread. I thought for a moment that when confronted with actual logic and rationality your response was going to be to avoid responding. Here's hoping that in your next response you will have the courage admit that your insinuations that the OP was lying and your implications against the OP in your first post in the thread were logically unsound.

It's also possible he got in touch with Bioware support and they helped him and asked him to not add any more fuel to the fire. Any "proof" he could supply would only be screenshots of cut-and-paste support replies anyway, and that's not proof of anything really. He can't prove to anyone here that he had those things listed. His story matches up what I would expect from someone who deals in very high end items, and apparently he's known on his server as someone who deals in that kind of stuff. But how can he "prove" to that bioware shill who came in here that he had those things listed several months ago? His reputation and story line up with the way top end items are sold in the game, so I'm inclined to believe him. Whatever took him away suddenly is his business and not ours. Many people work in job fields that require international travel, sometimes on amazingly short notice.

I think you vastly overstate the actual disk space requirements and/or understate the cheap availability of storage anymore. Storage space was a concern when MMORPGs were in their infancy. MMO companies have allowed that perception to remain a concern because they profit from charging for things like "extra character slots" that simply don't have a tangible cost to them. The actual problem is processor capacity. How much information needs to be crunched at any given time has a direct impact on things like load time. That's why people with amazing computers have essentially the same load times as people playing on glorified netbooks. It's not our computer's that are taking so long to load... it's the game being designed so that it holds you on a loading screen until the server is done doing its business with you and ready to release you into the proper resources.

Andryah appears to be attacking the OP though, with very poor logic. By very definition, attacking one side is defending the other.

Haha, that's exactly how I would expect them to implement it, given their recent choices.

I don't have a business/customer relationship with my Mom. If you want to make an analogy, use one that actually could possibly apply. Try again if you comprehend the above sentence.

Is there a thread you don't show up in and spin on behalf of bioware? No wonder people think you're a company shill. You mock the op by saying the items were "miraculously" listed on the GTN, as if that were a situation that wouldn't be common or usual, but simple logic shows that there would be nothing miraculous about it. Anyone who has a significant amount of wealth in SW:ToR and wants to deal in high end items on the GTN is working high margin, low frequency sales. It takes average and even above average players time to amass the kind of credits it takes to plop down 30,000,000 credits for a speeder (or 100,000,000 - 300,000,000 for a czerka crate). People who work those high margin, low frequency sales are all about the uptime. Since deposit is refunded if there is no sale, there's zero opportunity cost to keeping an item up on the GTN as close to 100% of the time as possible. Anyone who works the high end of the GTN understands this and works it to their advantage. If that rich collector goes looking for a high margin item and you're slacking and yours isn't up, then either your competition gets the sale or the collector buys something they wanted less. Either way, keeping the maximum amount of potential profit on the GTN at all times is just about the most fundamental principle of properly profiting from the GTN. So you come in here in your zeal to try and spin things in a pro-bioware/anti-complaining customer way (as you always do) and you make an illogical argument which strongly implies the OP is a liar, but simple experience and logic show that his statement matches up with what one would expect of a high end items dealer. In other words, his statement is consistent, while you used innuendo and bad logic to try and defend bioware. There seems to be no reason for you to jump into this conversation. You had to make a poor argument and implicitly attack the OP. What dog do you have in this fight? And you wonder why people are convinced you're a bioware exec or something.

I think the "finish Makeb" is just a common assumption that seems true but isn't. People will finish Makeb and then head back to their planet at some point where the seeker droid / binocs quests begin. As far as I recall, they actually open up based on level, not progress through Makeb. 52 or 53 as I recall.

I love fanboys, especially of the Mangina type. You do realize that Bioware reps are on record apologizing for the marketing schpiel being poorly worded and not indicative of what has actually transpired, right? They already admitted to misleading (at best) and/or lying (at worst). But keep on white knighting to their defense. They very much need people who blindly defend them on the forums. Wait ... no ... no they don't. http://www.eldergame.com/2008/06/taming-the-forum-tiger/ You, sir, are an unhelpful fanboy. Read it, learn it, love it. Stop being an unhelpful fanboy.

Nah. It's like this. The CS monkeys that work for Bioware have a required number of customer issues they have to deal with during their shift. It's a quota. They are pressured to meet this quota so that the response time to tickets and e-mails is sufficiently quick. Because of this enforced quota, you have many overworked and/or undertrained CS reps who just scan through support tickets and cut and paste whatever response they think might get the ticket "closed" in as little time as possible. Doing a restoration for the OP would require escalation to a senior CS member who has the access and authority to go into the logs (finding the offline time gap should verify the guy's claim of being gone via emergency, then you just go pull up the expired auctions that occurred in the first 48 hours after the final login before the gap, and voila you have your items that vanished. So long as he didn't log in within 30 days of those mails, then it's pretty much a slam dunk that the items got eaten by the server. The CS supervisor then just re-sends those mails and the guy gets his stuff restored). Yes it's that simple. The problem is you gotta get lucky and get a CS rep who isn't behind on his quota and will actually take the time to ensure your issue gets to someone who can and will fix it. It's especially heinous that they would refuse you if you kept paying during the time you were away. They made money off of giving you literally nothing. 15 minutes of someone's salary when they're making minimum wage is still a huge net profit for them since the OP's cost to Bioware was zero during the time he was away. But that's the nature of the CS beast. And before some Bioware fanboy comes to the rescue of his beloved company and challenges the assumption that they have the data I suggest they do, consider this: 9 days ago I killed the 2nd boss in Scum and Villainy and the body disappeared before anyone could loot it (disappeared within seconds of dying). We couldn't go onward because the gate was still closed. We put in tickets, waited awhile, and finally just piled out of the op and reset it and went back in and killed him again. A week later a CS rep was able to verify that all of this happened. He was able to see in the logs they keep that the boss was killed and despawned before being looted, and saw that we had killed him a 2nd time. He even said in the response that since we killed it twice we deserved at least to get the comms twice and awarded us all the comms. If they track data down to that level, there's no way they don't have tracking of the mail system. The mail system is one of the major systems through which an economic exploit could be masked or abused, so you can be exceptionally sure they keep that info.

I love word lawyers. Let me fix what the OP was trying to say so that you can't word lawyer it and pretend like you're the smartest tool in the room. "included at no additional charge for subscribers so long as they purchased the expansion" Oh my ... the obvious intended meaning of the OP ... it was so difficult for me to discern. What ever will I do now that I can't manipulate it by word lawyering into saying something the OP didn't intend?

Sorry this just simply isn't good enough. When you say you are going to do X, and then you do Y, you have made yourself a liar. Whatever reasons you had for not keeping your word are irrelevant. The fact that the dyes are gated behind yet another gambling mechanism designed to exploit people and the fact that anything worthwhile in the "collection" has a fairly steep real world cost to "unlock" (in addition to whatever real world cost was already paid to get the stuff in the first place) shows that your primary intent was to reach into our pockets. If you couldn't keep your word, you should have delayed the system until it matched the hype. Furthermore, SW:ToR has now almost caught up to STO in terms of how exploitative and invasive the monentization has become.

You apparently don't deal in any high end items. The Korrealis speeders are no longer in the game, so there are a very small few of them unbound and still available to obtain. On my server their prices range from 30,000,000 to 100,000,000 credits just for the one thing alone. People who collect stuff and want things like that generally have to spend quite a bit of time saving up for the super rare stuff, and you never know when that potential customer is gonna be looking, so if you deal in rare items worth a lot you keep them on the GTN basically AT ALL TIMES. It makes perfect sense that he had his GTN listings up whenever he had urgent real life crisis happen. I would be much more surprised that a serious GTN player didn't have their stuff listed when said emergency hit.

I don't exactly have a lot of posts on these forums, and even I know you have a reputation for showing up in every thread and going all Brienne of Tarth on anyone who criticizes Bioware in any way ... so much so that people often speculate you are actually a Bioware employee posting from a non-employee account. ----------------------------- As far as the thread goes, I'm not sure why I am amazed that there are loads of nits being picked. Instead of having an evolving discussion, the fanboy patrol dropped in and nitpicked any element of my posts they could instead of interacting with the larger ideas. It would be nice if the fanboy patrol could see the forest instead of looking for one tree to cut down so they can "win" and "defend" poor defenseless Bioware from that meanie poster who said something about them not being perfect. I wonder if I go read through the death by a thousand papercuts thread how often Andryah shows up in there trying to defend all the quality of life issues that add up and frustrate people. Is the over/under on that like 50 ... 100?