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Estelindis

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  • Location
    Dublin, Ireland
  • Interests
    Martial arts, role-playing, reading, writing, music
  • Occupation
    Theologian

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  1. So far, I've only played the date nights for Theron and Arcann. Pros: They exist at all. I am grateful for any companion-focused content, but particularly for romance stuff. There's so little, anything at all extra is a boon. Repeatable. This is very important! I like how they're written as the kinds of things the characters could plausibly do multiple times. The dates are sweet and appropriate to the characters. Facial expressions are very good; they seem a lot subtler than some of the terrifying expressions we've seen in older cutscenes. Animations are also very nice. Cons: Very short. I am looking forward to the next date nights, whenever they come out; I just hope they might be a bit longer.
  2. This gives me flashbacks to some of the dev comments when we were playtesting 6.0 crafting. One of them commented that the intended way to get materials was via gathering, not running missions. But why does what the devs intend matter more than what players enjoy doing? Is there someone out there who thinks we should all be responding "Well, I like X, but since the devs intend me to do Y I guess I'll just have less fun"?
  3. Thank you very much for reconsidering! No one gets everything right the first time (or sometimes the tenth, speaking for myself), but it's also true that not everyone is willing to listen to feedback or change their minds. Fair play.
  4. Seconded. It would be incredibly useful to be able to filter all items by collection status, instead of having to individually search for each uncollected item.
  5. I posted about this in another livestream reaction thread that has mysteriously disappeared, but the change I'm most looking forward to from the livestream is the updated GTN. Having only one entry for each item (vs. pages of the same item) will be a huge quality of life improvement. The mandalorian civil war story has been very well implemented, with several really great moments on Ruhnuk. Nonetheless, as a story arc, I don't find it that engaging overall. Even though I'm mainly interested in this game for the story, the new story update for 7.4 therefore doesn't quite have me fired up. I'm glad that class companions like Torian and Akaavi are getting content, at least.
  6. I've never been able to figure out what achievements are supposed to unlock these? It's irritating the BW replaced the look of our original circular sign decorations. The new looks should have been in the new decorations, not the other way around. I have a Havoc Squad HQ stronghold that used to have lots of Havoc signs (aka Trooper circular sign), and the one they replaced it with is just not the same.
  7. Well, from the sounds of things, letting someone else (well, a different company with a lot of the same people) run the game is precisely what EA is planning to do? Star Wars: The Old Republic Going Third-Party as BioWare Focuses on Mass Effect and Dragon Age - IGN
  8. While I appreciate that this topic's question can be sincerely asked, I still find it surprising. I spend some time in my job updating people, but not a whole lot. The rest is spent researching and developing content, plus testing if the things I develop work the way I thought they would. I can't imagine my communication-to-other-work ratio is massively unusual compared with the average job. Or am I just out of touch? 😅
  9. Trade has been a way to avoid GTN tax for a long time. In any serious effort to sort out the market, it would have to be addressed. I think that any person nice enough to give a randomer a bunch of credits is also nice enough to cover an extra 10%. What I'm less sure about is how these changes will account for trades that don't involve any credits.
  10. First off, these changes look much more promising than the quick travel fees (which I still think are needlessly punishing to new players). Regarding suggestions, it would be great to be able to pay for items on the GTN directly from the legacy bank. This is assuming that you intend to raise the GTN price cap, something it's hard to imagine not happening with these changes. There are so many credits in the economy. If the GTN is meant to be the main trading venue in the game, it needs to be able to trade items with prices above 1b. If the personal credit limit is an impediment to that, and there are issues that discourage you from raising the personal credit limit, the ability to pay directly from the legacy bank might be a way to get around that. I would love to be able to search for items I haven't unlocked legacy-wide in collections. Way too much time can be wasted sifting through items that are of no use or interest to me (since I generally just want them for myself, not to resell). Being able to see price trends on items would be cool. Thanks for your efforts.
  11. I fiddled with my monitor settings a bit and it's looking far better now, thankfully.
  12. I decided to do this at the end of doing a bunch of other activities, and then log out so I could return at the same place the next day without having to wait - only to find that it didn't work that way. But why shouldn't the timer tick down while I'm logged out? The way it is now seems like an anti-convenience measure. In this, as in a few other parts of the game, I don't see why "how the devs intend us to play" should be more important than how we want to play. Dev intentions are all very well, but why should they impede us having fun?
  13. I don't remember noticing the darkness when I gave the 64-bit client a quick spin on the PTS. Maybe it was because I wasn't in spaces whose looks are extremely familiar to me, like my personal strongholds. I wouldn't say that I notice it everywhere, even now. But in spaces that I would've previously described as "atmospheric," it's now often quite hard to make out details due to the increased darkness. For the record, I'd have reasonably high settings. Thanks to others for posting about this, as I would've questioned if I was imagining this.
  14. I was stunned to see that this cooldown persists over logout. Why shouldn't we be able to avoid the wait by logging out and returning the next day?
  15. Eric, thanks for coming into this thread and giving us some details on your thoughts. This, and every other effort to explain the intent behind your choices, is genuinely appreciated. I really mean it. I know it can be difficult, but more communication is always better. There can't be any doubt that you understand the game from angles that we can't. I hope there's also no doubt that the reverse is true: players also understand the day-to-day life of the game from an angle that isn't always accessible to devs (though yes, I do acknowledge that plenty of ye play the game). I feel like devs can be so focused on intended play as to sometimes lose sight of actual play. I'll always remember giving feedback on 6.0 crafting during that PTS, explaining (for instance) that there aren't enough grade 11 gathering missions that give green-quality materials, and being told that running gathering missions as a main source of materials was not intended play. I was stunned by that answer. Intended play may matter to you. But I don't think it's helpful to imagine that it matters very much to us. Gamers will game things. It is fun for us to find ways to play the game that may not have been intended but are nonetheless enjoyable to some of us (e.g. finding areas of a map we're not supposed to be able to reach). Trying to appeal to us on the grounds that you don't want a particular behaviour won't get anywhere. If people can do something, and like doing it, they're going to do it. And why not? Of course, you don't have to appeal to us. You can make the game however you deem fit. I feel like that's largely the approach you're going for with these economic measures. You know that gamers will act in their own personal interests, not with a lofty view of the overall good of the game and the wider playerbase. You're prepared to impose credit costs, for what you believe is the good of the game's economy, so that people don't have a choice other than to pay them if they want to use a range of common functions. However, while you can impose any measure you please, players are just as free to choose not to play. The more irritating the measures are, the more players you're likely to drive away, or just make miserable (which may lead them to leave later rather than sooner, but still leave). Because the increased credit costs you're suggesting will clearly, mathematically have an outsized impact on players with few credits - and because they're imposed on quality-of-life-improving features like quick travel - said costs will feel particularly unfair and annoying. That may have enough of a QoL impact on new players that it could be bad for the game's health. But why should it have to be a contest between players' self-interest and your intent to improve the game's economic health? Surely the greatest chance of success lies in making allies of those two principles, not opposing them. Don't make the costs you're imposing feel like punishments. Make them feel like rewards. Then you will have people actively pursuing them, rather than (entirely rationally) trying to avoid them. You will never persuade people to stop avoiding things they don't like. The more you try to close various loopholes, the more functionality you're likely to remove from players who weren't using those various functions for game-damaging exploits, just regular play. Instead, offer us things that we do like! Want to put costs on travelling in and out of strongholds? Well here's an idea off the top of my head. Make a series of achievements that track how much is spent on such travels across a legacy, and have those achievements give decorations as rewards. The final level should be extremely high, so that this series of achievements continues to seem rewarding for a long period of continued travel payments. Similarly, you could have quick travel achievements that track that spending, and give mounts (and other travel-themed items) as rewards. Perhaps repair costs could have something similar (I don't spend enough on repairs to know what high-repair-cost people might like most). Etc, etc, for a range of other possible costs! Then, whenever people spend credits on one of these costs, they won't just feel like they're being nickel-and-dimed. It'll have some aspect of investment in a savings account, with an eventual reward in view. Yet credits will nonetheless be removed from the economy, just as you wanted. My suggestion is just one idea. The specifics aren't important. The key is the principle: to work out how to get what you want while enabling and encouraging gameplay, not thwarting it. I have to reply on the quoted point specifically, because I feel like you might not be getting the main thrust of our objection here. We know that it's not about punishing the rich. We know it's not about pointing at them and saying "this bloated economy is your fault, and we're going to take away your credits to punish you!" Rather, what we are saying is that your proposed measures do not hurt the rich, but they hurt the poor. Not hurting the rich is chiefly mentioned to contrast with the hurt we expect to happen to the poor. So it feels like you miss the point, in this case, because you comment about not wanting to hurt the rich, but you don't seem to have any comment about not wanting or trying to hurt the poor. To avoid overly harming players with fewer credits and actively impeding their gameplay to the point where quality of life feels drastically lower for those just starting the game, repeated costs for low-to-mid-level characters should be extremely small or non-existent. In higher levels, where it is easier to generate credits, costs should be higher. One area I'm uncertain about is repair costs. Endgame content will, of course, be played mostly by high-level characters. Now, personally, I don't play content at the cutting edge of difficulty. I play story content with a wide range of alts, and otherwise enjoy dressing up my characters and strongholds. I don't witness the scenes mentioned by other posters here, where people spend hours wiping against tough content and lose a large amount of credits in repair fees, to the point where players with fewer credits can't afford to keep playing (even though they want to). I feel bad for those players when I read about that. Don't you? Tons of dev effort goes into making that content. You want people to play it, right? It feels counter-productive to stop players with fewer credits. Would it be possible, perhaps, to make single repair costs higher, but have a daily cap on total repair costs? I don't mean something that would help people that wipe just a few times; I mean something to help people who spend a long session with many wipes. That way, you could make the credit sink substantial, but beyond a certain point people wouldn't be punished for continuing to face the toughest challenges in the game. Like I said, this isn't an area of play with which I have much experience, so I'll admit that my angle here may be off. I just feel bad for players wanting to play the game and stopped by repair costs. I admittedly don't know how well a daily repair cap would mesh with my system, proposed earlier, for rewarding various credit sinks via achievements. Perhaps a consumable item for turning off the limit, if someone actively wants to drive it up? (Like the consumable for lowering xp - the... acute white thingummy? - for people who want to level slower, for whatever reason.) Anyway, I think I've said enough for now. I hope something here is helpful.
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