I just came back to the game a little over a week ago after a three year absence. I've got to say, the more I read about the gearing changes and gearing progression the more I hate it. It's anything but straight forward. It's the most convoluted thing I've ever seen. I don't want a mix of purple and blue gear in my armor. I want to see all blue, all purple or all gold in my gear. I damn sure don't want non-moddable gear either. Especially when the developers have notoriously done a bad job of stat distribution on such pieces. Also, disassembling gear to get other gear that you aren't crafting yourself is nonsense. I don't like that one bit.

Precisely. MMO game developers seem to struggle with basic economic concepts in their own games. Largely unregulated economies like the one in SWTOR will ALWAYS end up with rampant and runaway inflation because they lack the controls real world economies use to control inflation. Star Wars the Old Republic and Star Trek Online currently have the exact same problem and both developers are trying to deal with their respective issues in precisely the same was. They think credit sinks are how to do it and they just aren't. If you are wealthy, doubling or even tripling gas prices isn't going to change your life style or impact you all that much. If you are raking in 10's of thousands of dollars a month, going from $50 or $100 a week in gas to $100, 200 or even $300 a week probably isn't going to change anything for you. For players who have billions of credits, its going to take a lot more than credit sinks of 5,000cr. here and a few hundred credits there to make an impact. On the other hand, any meaningful credit sink for players with that kind of in-game currency would bankrupt players who do not have hundreds of millions of credits on hand. I will say it again as clearly as I can for the developers: In game credit sinks will accomplish nothing but make the poor feel poorer. If you have billions of credits in the bank and can afford to spend millions on something as mundane as dye modules or crafting mats on the GTN today, a 5,000cr. quick travel fee for something that used to cost nothing or 500cr. won't impact you in the least. To put it in perspective, inflation was already becoming a problem years ago. When I quit playing this game about three years ago a basic craftable black and red dye module went for about 45,000cr. on the GTN. I started playing this game again about a week ago. Today, the very cheapest black and red dye module is 650,000cr. on the GTN. I only have a couple of hundred million credits, and I feel broke. With what I have currently, I don't think any of the proposed credit sinks will impact me. Do better.

This isn't entirely accurate. BioWare has often listened to feedback from the absolute last people they should have. Want feedback about PvP? BioWare listened to the people who hardly ever play the game, don't understand its mechanics and can't be bothered to learn how to get good at the game. It listened to people who whine that x class is over powered when it never was. For PvE content, it listened to the same basic group and made story mode operations and flashpoints an utter joke. They've deleted nearly all the mechanics from every fight so that anyone with a pulse can steam roll the content. For the harder operations they listened to that sub-1% group of super hardcore raiders and raiding guilds that claimed everything was too easy, despite running that content around the clock until they got through it. That also leaves it so that much of the harder raid content can't be cleared by hardly anyone still playing the game. Listening to ultra-casual and even "bad" PvP'ers hasn't been good for the game and its negatively impacted PvE players. Listening to players who obviously chew on crayons when not playing the game made story modes and other casual content dull and laughable compared to their earlier versions. Listening to the ultra-hardcore players has resulted in most hard mode and master mode raid content being too hard for most of the remaining player base. Essentially, BioWare has taken things too far in either direction and never struck the right balance to really make the game the best it could be for the bulk of the player base.

Raiders don't want to grind dailies either. I know I don't.

I'd still be pissed. I opened 40+ Tier 4 crates and didn't get a damn thing. It doesn't really matter. They won't do jack **** in December. Most companies wind down during the end of the year. People take vacation during the holidays etc.

It sure seems that way when they are making decisions that lead to this horrendous gearing system that no one seems to like.

Yeah, I checked it out myself after posting that. It appears you can buy gear for alts from one a different character. That is assuming you can put it into legacy gear successfully.

That's a good question. I understood it as not allowing you to get gear for a specific class on anything but the class and spec you were running. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. The vendor doesn't show any such limitations. If its totally character bound and doesn't allow legacy transfers, that's even bigger ******** than I ever would have imagined.

I'd say that the answer lies somewhere in between 1.6 gearing and something else entirely. I preferred things when you earned gear in warzones via comms or earned it by actually killing bosses in raids. I've always thought that alternate solo gearing methods for PvE gear should have existed for non-raiders, and the ****** CXP system did that to some degree. However, the terrible RNG is frustrating beyond belief. It isn't fun or exciting when you open 50 Tier 4 crates and get jack **** that you can actually use. Of course BioWare even made raiding harder as they continue to hit all classes with the nerf bat every single time they find players "over performing" their target metrics. It isn't our fault that BioWare doesn't play their own game and use metrics that are divorced from what players actually do in game to make balancing decisions. They also should never let PvP metrics make choices for the PvE side and vice versa. I don't mind level cap increases and new gear once in awhile. In the past that was always tied to new content. New raids and story missions were introduced in the past with new gear so it felt like we were playing something new while grinding. Now they up the gear tiers while nerfing us and calling that new content. New content consists of basically a new flash point or story mission once in awhile that can be done in an hour. New dailies? I suppose that's content but its not remotely satisfying. Nor is it engaging enough by itself to aid in player retention. What was done in 5.10 is a heavy handed tactic to try and get players to remain subscribed for the next 6 months waiting for new content. If they are really going to drop new gear again in 6.0, then I think I'll just wait for 6.0 and skip this nonsense. However, the problem is that BioWare will see people over performing in 252 and 256 gear or whatever it is and nerf everyone across the board. That means that content you can clear today in 242's, 246's and 248's will suddenly require 252+ gear to progress. They've done it before and they'll undoubtedly do it again. I saved up a couple of bank tabs worth of CXP boxes so I could use them after 5.10 dropped and try to get some of the new gear. I opened something like 40 or 50 tier 4 boxes and never saw a masterwork crystal or piece of 252 gear whether it was useful or not. RNG hit rates have always been painful in this game. I remember getting 7 off hands in the champion bags back around launch. This was back when they weren't moddable and you couldn't get any benefit at all from duplicate gear. BioWare: RNG isn't fun. It isn't exciting. It pisses people off when they put a ton of time in the game with zero payoff.

I couldn't agree more with the comments here. This gearing system is absolute BS. I know this is BioWare's attempt to retain players over a longer term as many players only show up when there is new content rather than subscribing steadily. However, this is going to drive away the players like myself because we don't want to do dailies. I buy stuff with Cartel coins (which costs real money) and sell things on the GTN so I don't have to do dailies. That's right, I use real money so that I can avoid doing dailies. I hate dailies that much. The cherry on top of this ***** sundae is the gating around how many masterwork crystals you can earn and limiting mods and enhancements to specific slots. This creates all kinds of problems for gear optimization, since BioWare doesn't like to give us gear that is properly optimized by default. We all know that game companies are out to make a profit. I understand that, and I think that's fine. However, to do that you need to make a product that people want to play. Somewhere along the way BioWare totally forgot how to make a game fun and it became all about player retention. Unfortunately, this isn't going to work the way they think it will. I'd rather slam my ********s in a car door repeatedly than grind dailies for months on end just so I can get the best gear for raiding.

Actually, I didn't. I had the problem on Belsavis and since leaving that planet, it hasn't happened since. Interestingly enough I am running Windows 10 and SLI. So is the other guy on my raid team with that issue. Neither of us had the problem before 4.6 and not since 4.6a.

Since the update, I've started experiencing crashes / lock ups in SWTOR but only in certain parts of the game. Belsavis for example. It normally happens only during area transitions. Computer hardware is what I deal with for a living. I don't have any CPU overheating, or other hardware issues. I can play far more demanding games all day without issue. One of the guys on my raid team has the same problem I do. This wasn't an issue prior to the start of the event and the patch that kicked it off. .

Its funny that you think SWTOR hates NVIDIA cards. You should try running the game on AMD hardware sometime. In any case, SLI does work albeit not to great effect. If I max everything out and head to Voss, the grass even drops my framerate. If I enable SLI, my framerate goes up and that's with a pair of TITAN X's. It works, but not well.

Just like the title says. It's annoying that the legacy weapon we get at the completion of KoTFE's Chapter nine story is main hand only. It's legacy bound, but mainhand only. So dual wield classes like the Merc, Gunslinger and Marauder can't get a matching off hand. The HK weapons are pretty much the same deal. The only one that isn't like that is the blaster. And now we get an all new hilt / weapon model in Chapter 12 and once again, no matching *********** offhand.

BioWare needs a "MMO management for dummies book" or something. This is beyond ridiculous. I never got my coins and can't imagine I ever will.