What I have suggested before are small, cheap strongholds on each of the four starter planets. Just like the capital world strongholds, they could simply be clones of each other with the same layout but different decor. All four planets would lend themselves well to strongholds that look more like homes than palaces, temples, office buildings etc. Just a plot of land with a house-sized building, but crammed with all the hooks that can fit!

With all the level 10 +41 color crystals available now from a variety of sources, good ol' artifice blue, red, green, and yellow have really lost their value. I feel like the best and simplest way to address this is to make the original endgame +41 color crystals in the plain, classic colors usable from level 10 like all the fancy ones, instead of requiring level 50 - a number which seems more and more arbitrary with each new expansion to the game. As it stands right now, the colors that are supposed to be the most common and easiest to get are becoming less and less common to actually see... because to use them, any time between levels 10 and 50, is to be constantly at a slight disadvantage. The difference in stats isn't even that significant, but it's the principle of it! I think it would be a fair trade to raise each schematic's cost at the data crystal vendors from 50 to maybe 100 each, and/or to up the material requirements to craft each one. I think it's only fair that they should still require a relatively high skill level in artifice, too. The level 10 +41 crystals are still special, after all, even if they're relatively abundant these days. This would mean the old cheap low-level schematics will be as useful as ever... which is to say, not very, but people who can't afford fancy +41 crystals would still have easy access. It would also be nice to bump the level requirement on the old exotic crystals - purple, cyan, white, etc. down to 10 as well, but it at least makes slightly more sense that they, as rare and exotic crystals, might be reserved for more advanced players.

Along the same lines, more spaceships would be cool. It would be nice to have some medium / centerpiece sized spaceships, like full-sized starfighters or small shuttles, so a landing pad could be switched to the centerpiece block and have a few ships scattered around it for busier spaceport look.

I thought at first that the one I got didn't do anything, but it turns out I wasn't actually standing close enough. I was standing close enough for the cursor to light up and for the animation / progress bar for activating it to play as if I had actually activated it, but it was a fake-out. I had to get right on top of the damn thing for it to work for real. If you REALLY activate it, you can tell because it will light up. The sounds are not very loud even when it works right. And I don't understand why they aren't just on by default when SO many other decorations continually make noise! I have a fountain in the same room that never shuts up, so the contrast there is a little jarring.

I could not be MORE excited about this pack. I specifically requested battle damage type stuff more than once, and I've been buying these things by the stack. The whole theme of my main stronghold has always been an abandoned fortress that's been taken over by outlaws, and random debris and broken stuff was exactly what it needed. Now it FINALLY looks exactly as used and run-down as it was always supposed to. Not only that, but this stuff is perfectly timed because of the Zakuul invasion plotline. The whole galaxy is supposedly going through hard times, and all these decorations are perfect for that war-torn look. I had zero interest in the Sith stuff. Different people actually have different ideas and want different decorations! You don't have to go complaining about it if one pack comes out where it's not your favorite theme. Just don't buy the stuff, and wait for the next one. Like we all have to when every single pack wasn't tailored exactly to our whims!

It's also worth noting that the UI has improved a lot and it's now a lot easier to see, organize and react to buffs, debuffs and procs just by looking at your hotbar / HUD, so the flashy effects on the character are not as necessary for feedback as they used to be. A player who's familiar enough with their class could be totally effective without those cues, even in serious group content.

Lightning is supposed to be visible so that's not an issue. Abilities where a Jedi throws a physical object too. Obviously we wouldn't want to lose laser blasts from guns either. This is completely about secondary effects: glowing hands, flaming auras, that kind of stuff. I really wouldn't have a problem with stuff like Disturbance having no visual effect at all, but maybe there's a compromise there.

In any suggestion thread anywhere on the internet you can find that one guy who has to jump in like, "though other people like this idea, and there would be absolutely no downside to it, it doesn't interest me personally. And you're not me, therefore they should never do it." Of course it's never solipsism, it's "development time!"

This has been bugging me since forever. The Force has always been totally invisible in movies, shows etc. and it drives me nuts in video games where it's all sparkly wizard stuff. I've been able to halfway come to grips with it by imagining that these are "auras" that can be sensed by Force-users, but I'd rather just be rid of them. Same goes for the green glow from healing. My character walks around half the time engulfed in flames and coated in green slime, and it's not the look I was going for... All due respect to the art team who clearly put a lot of work into making these effects visually interesting and convenient for multiplayer situations, but given the option to disable all of them permanently, I would not give it a moment's hesitation.

Now that they are finally viable healing companions for leveling, it would be great to have more diverse appearance options for the good ol' ship droids. We can turn HK into all kinds of different droids now, which is cool, but not everybody has an HK. Everybody has a ship droid! Our only options are a handful of alternate paint jobs, most of them very hard to find. It would be cool to be able to turn the ship droids into totally different droid models, just like HK. And also just like HK, it would be fun to be able to earn them in different ways, like reputation and quest rewards. Standard medical droid skins are an obvious first choice, but really anything to lend a little diversity... In a perfect world, each of my characters would have a different droid!

Don't buy a guild stronghold. It's a terrible deal. Just get the personal one and give silver keys to your friends.

I miss the decoration packs so much. I was just getting ready to buy another dozen or so and then they got pulled. If there had been hypercrates of just decoration boxes, I would have bought stacks of them. I would buy 100 random decorations for $100. Just take my money, damn it! There needs to be some efficient and non-temporary way to seriously load up on decorations. At least a return to putting one guaranteed decoration in every cartel pack. I certainly think that was a better incentive to buy than the clutter like xp boosts and companion gifts and crafting mats. I thought the Jedi-themed set in a recent pack would be good for decorating my Coruscant base, but all the decorations were too rare! It just wasn't feasible to gather enough of those items together to create a cohesive design scheme in there. I got a whole hypercrate and didn't get enough stuff to decorate one bedroom, and prices on the GTN were crazy, so I ended up abandoning that place completely. It now sits fully unlocked and empty, gathering dust until there's some convenient way to load up on decorations again. I'm still having fun decorating Tatooine, but it doesn't seem reasonable to focus on more than one stronghold right now.

I love the /chair emote... but it's nearly impossible to sit on an actual chair with it! It's really difficult for a character to get within a foot of a chair. It's also really difficult to fit a character between a chair and a table, especially with the bigger body types. This problem affects pretty much every chair in the game, but I hope it can at least be addressed with stronghold decorations. Even with premade furniture "arrangements" it's pretty hard to get into a reasonable sitting position, and if I'm hand-placing chairs and tables I need to place them unnaturally far apart to even get somebody in between. I'm assuming this problem has mostly to do with character collision, and not the collision geometry of the actual chairs. The chair collision is probably very accurate - too accurate! I know characters have a bit of a buffer around them so they don't clip into walls and such. As well they should. My suggestion is to correct for this by taking the collision away from about the front half of each chair, so a character can get right up on it, and maybe even clip in a little. Tables and desks too, in a perfect world, but first things first!

Oh yeah, I was asking for this back when Strongholds launched. To add to the list of suggestions: Wrecked vehicles Wrecked droids Piles of debris Damaged wall / ceiling panels with sparking wires sticking out Partially broken / flickering lights Neon signs that keep shorting out / throwing sparks Wall-mounted video screens showing distorted images and static Scavenger NPC's, rooting around on the ground Torn posters

No question: Arrangement: Hutt Full-size Hutt lounger with an animated Hutt who occasionally laughs or grabs a snack, and maybe a little monkey-lizard perched on the edge. It would need to fit on a large hook, not just a centerpiece! It would be useless if it couldn't be tucked in the corner of a room with stuff around. Second place would be the door to nowhere. Just a closed door that goes on a large wall hook, to create the illusion that there's some kind of other room there. You know, like the bathrooms we never see, or a storage closet, or an escape tunnel / escape pod. Our imaginations could fill in the blank. It could be built with a slight downward offset so it's easier to make it flush with the floor, but it wouldn't even look bad high up on the outside of a building or something. It might be an entrance just for probe droids!

I would freakin' love this.

There's a reason some people spring for Tatooine or Yavin and some people stick to Coruscant / Dromund Kaas. The ideas people have for strongholds are pretty diverse, so it makes sense for these things to exist at a lot of different scales. They could make one as big as the entire Alderaan world space that costs a billion credits, and some people would actually buy that. If they made a cramped little apartment, people would absolutely buy that too. The last one they introduced was flippin' huge, and that really doesn't need to become a trend. I have the Tatooine one, and it's enormous. I've really got my work cut out for me decorating that thing. I can't imagine wanting one that's actually bigger! But a tiny one? I would be all over that. It would be a really nice change of pace, and it would offer something that we don't actually have yet. We've got large and medium covered, you know? Time to mix it up! I don't think anybody is suggesting that this should be done instead of more medium or large-sized strongholds. I hope they keep adding a wide variety of them for years to come! I was thinking, the same way the Coruscant and Dromund Kaas ones have the exact same layout with basically just different paint jobs, they could do the same thing with humble little homes on the 4 starter planets. That would be a pretty good shortcut development-wise.

By the way, this would also open up some cool possibilities for new "personnel" decorations, like air traffic controllers, refueling technicians, etc.

I think it would be cool to have a couple variations on this, like a full band on a big stage with lights and dancers that goes on a large hook, and a little 3-piece band that goes on a medium narrow hook, so there are options to liven up spaces large and small!

In Star Wars movies, ships parked in hangars were usually surrounded by clutter and activity. Crew, support vehicles, supplies, power generators and stuff. A starship hook in a stronghold takes up so much room, and the ship ends up sitting there in a big empty space looking lonely and abandoned. I'd like to see the standard starship hook upgraded so it works like the "large/small standard arrangement," with smaller hooks scattered around the edges. Maybe in this case a combination of different sizes. The potential for clipping would certainly be no worse than it is with the large/small setup. Ships could have guards posted outside them, crates ready for loading, and all kinds of machinery. Their parking spaces would look much more alive!

I agree! I would go further and say there should also be more stuff that fits on small floor hooks, and many of the existing decorations should be adjusted to be able to fit on smaller hooks than they do. A lot of the assigned hook types feel arbitrary and inconsistent.

Don't buy a guild stronghold. It's a huge rip-off. You have to spend a fortune to unlock and decorate it, and you actually lose features. They're permanently off-limits to cross-faction characters; even your own alts can't visit it, even if you flag the stronghold as cross-faction. You can't use stronghold labels on them or customize the name in any way. You can't use any of your personal decorations there. The maximum occupancy doesn't go up, so if it's a big guild they can't even hang out there together. I could go on and on. My guild made the mistake of trying to build one of these stupid things on day one, and it was an absolute disaster for us. All it did was ruin us financially and put as all in a sour mood. Just buy a personal one and give out silver keys to your friends. You'll get a lot more use out of it. There's really no downside. If you actually want any help decorating it, your friends can trade you some decorations and offer suggestions. It works out really well!

I agree, I have been really hoping for a cozy little apartment for some of my characters. Tython and Korriban would be great choices for that. I also long ago requested a small faction-neutral "flagship" for small guilds, something not much bigger than a player ship, for a little independent crew to run. I like the idea of a ship's interior as a one-player home, too. Either of these things could be made really dense with hooks and still have a much lower limit than the current ones, so they could be a lot of fun to decorate!

One thing I would really like to see more of are stripped down or partially-built speeders, like the Aratech Basic. My RP guild runs a "Swoop Garage" where we purport to rebuild and customize speeder bikes, so anything that looks like it's undergoing some repairs is great for our stronghold. Besides the Basic, I really liked the "malfunctioning" Hyrotii Scrapper and the recently-added Lhosan with the front forks taken off. Anything with an "unfinished" texture, like bare metal, mismatched colors or spots of primer is appreciated for the same reason. Conversely, it's always fun to have more speeders with really fancy paint jobs for our "showroom." Glittering candy paint, polished chrome, flames on the side, neon accents etc. are all very good.

The point a lot of people seem to miss is it's all made-up. I love Star Wars, but it's not real. It is fiction. What matters in fiction is that it's internally consistent. Each story follows its own rules and adheres to its own internal logic. There is a mountain of historical fiction out there that blatantly contradicts verifiable history, but people will enjoy it as long as it's a good story. It would be healthy to look at Star Wars the same way. SWTOR is one self-contained story. It blatantly contradicts even the other KOTOR games. The other ones allow for a lot of different outcomes, but it was necessary to lay down some "facts" such as Revan was a man, he had this specific face, he hooked up with Bastila Shan, etc. None of that stuff is "true" in the original game, but that is not the same story, and does not need to follow the same rules. It works on its own. SWTOR works on its own. You can safely play both games and your head won't explode. (Well, not as a direct result. Stay safe.) You can extend this to the hundreds of other Star Wars stories that exist. They're different stories. They're all fake and made-up, but they work individually, as entertainment for you. There's not really much reason to be thinking about the video games while you watch the movies, or vice versa. You don't have to stress out because the Super Nintendo version of Return of the Jedi contradicts the movie version. Just try to enjoy it. If you like one story, it doesn't matter if some other story contradicts it. It doesn't erase the entertainment from your brain. You don't need to argue with your friend about what's true, because you're both wrong. NONE of it is true. You shouldn't need Luke Skywalker to sing the ballad of Darth Revan on the big screen to validate your fun.