What is the design logic behind the Belsavis teleporters? I mean, they are teleporters. Why aren't they all linked? And for that matter, why is there an entirely seperate set of teleporters for each faction. These things are like 20,000 year old ancient Rakata technology that you are just now discovering. It doesn't make any sense that each one is restricted to republic or empire side. I am sure it would be a low priority, but is there any chance of connecting them properly in the future?

Ok, this is a minor pet peeve of mine I have been wondering about for a while now. If you go Datacron hunting, you will discover that each one is color coded according to which stat bonus it will give you. Stims are also color coded according to stat. So why is it Datacrons and Stims don't use the same color code? Strength (red) is the only one that's the same for both. Purple Datacron = Willpower Purple Stim = Presence and so on... Again, it's just a minor pet peeve of mine, but shouldn't color coding like this be universal?

*comes to a screeching halt* Wait, what? Character specific legacy stuff? Doesn't that defeat the whole concept of what the legacy system is? The whole reason I love the legacy system is because everything is global. Sure some things may seem expensive at first, but I buy it knowing that every character I will ever play will have those perks ready and waiting for them. I feel like I am powering up my account, rather than invididual characters like we do in every other game. This is pretty disappointing news in my book.

I didn't say it was completely pointless, but it can feel pretty meaningless sometimes. The only truely useful / valuable things slicing produces are purple augment materials and bonus missions. Both of which are rare finds. The more common items that slicing produces (lockboxes and blue materials) are not very useful. I can easily log onto any of my scavenging characters and send all five companions out on missions for grade 6 metals and compounds because I need them. I need lots of them, all that I can get, I eat them up quickly. I am not looking for a critical success to give me some rare item. I actually want the basic mission reward. The same can typically be said about most skill missions. For Underworld Trading, I do not yet have a need for luxury fabrics, but I happily collect stacks of companion gifts for use on future characters, and I get a good amount of use out of both the blue and purple underworld metals. Diplomacy is similar. I am happy to gain light or dark side points. I am happy to obtain more companion gifts. For materials, it's iffy. Blue grade 1-5 materials are very useful to me. Grade 6 blue and any purple materials are not so much. But the baseline rewards are for the most part valuable to me. The point is, slicing is the only skill I can think of where I am not looking to obtain the baseline mission reward. It's rare rewards or nothing. With lockboxes I just hope to break even. I will never make any real money off of them. With augment materials I already have more blues than I will ever know what to do with.

I am rather bothered by slicing as well. It's a rather dissapointing skill, and the lockbox missions in particular feel pointless. The primary reward for a lockbox mission, is a box full of money. But with the mission costs the way they are, we don't realistically gain any money at all off these missions. Maybe a couple hundred credits here and there, when we are probably already dealing in hundreds of thousands if not millions of credits. The only real gain I am getting out of lockbox missions are the occational bonus missions that come back. Those at least I can mail to my other characters who can use them. But for the most part, lockbox missions really aren't delivering what a player would expect them to. The only monitary gain I get out of slicing is picking up the slicing nodes in the environment when I run dailys. And then, that's usually not very many. Augments used to be the domain of slicers as well, but that's been butchered up. All we needed were for Augment slots to become more commonplace, which they finally are. However, Augments are no longer the product of Slicing. Now we purely produce the blue and purple materials for other people to craft augments. But let's face facts here, the blue materials are largely pointless. Augment crafters only need blue materials until they RE the purple scematic. Purple augment materials are all anyone realistically cares about, and as usual, purple materials are time consuming and costly to obtain due to the need to score a crit. This of course leads to stacks and stacks of blue materials that no one wants. Honestly, I think I liked the old way better where we simply produced a finished product. As far as lockboxes go, something really should change with the lockbox missions. It makes no sense to do a mission that costs 1450 credits, primarily to obtain a locbox containing ~1450 credits. Thats stupid. These missions should offer a wider variety of rewards. What if these missions had a chance to reward commendations in addition to the lockbox? Grade 1 - 5 lockbox missions would reward planetary or fleet (space combat) commendations . These could then be used to purchase the random item boxes that the com merchants offer. In the very least we could save them up to obtain a random purple item. Grade 6 lockbox missions could sometimes reward tionese coms/crystals, or have a rare chance to produce columi or black hole coms. As for the Augment materials, something should change with those as well. Blues are not useful enough. We really need a way to up-convert blue materials to purples. Give us some way to craft or trade 20 blue mats for 1 purple. Actually, this can be said for all crafts. I recently vendored about 1000 grade 6 blue medical supplies (biochem materials), because they were completely useless to me and wasting bank space.

See, that's the absurd part. There is no reason to attack me for that. Sure I missed the part about it being neutral. But that's not important. This is not a matter of buyer's remorse. You are just making me sound selfish and demeaning the problem with comments like that. The point I am making is that it should not work this way period. If you have any common sense at all, you should be able to realize that. I am posting here, because I am trying to improve this aspect of the game. Sitting on a high horse and saying "I didn't buy it" solves absolutely nothing. Telling bioware that they need to fix this is the best thing we can do. Wether I personally bought it or not is irrelevant, I would still be taking this stance if I hadn't. We keep hearing Bioware devs say things like "We wanted feature X to be the best it could be..." and if that is their stance, then they really dropped the ball on the ship GTN. Thing is, I already know why the GTN is lackluster and doesn't get used much. I explained it in a different topic a little while back. And I doubt bioware will be willing to do what they need to in order to fix it properly. It's not buggyness in the search functionality, although that is certainly a problem. The biggest problem with the GTN is how the entire solo game is itemized. The solo portion of SWTOR rewards people too well. As you level up, you get useful stuff from quests, from drops, from commendation merchants. Most of this stuff might be greens, but it's roughly your level, and is good enough. On top of that if you are doing a craft such as armormech, you are even better able to fill in the equipment gaps and keep yourself equipped in green/blue/purple gear that is roughly your level. There is little or no need to go use the GTN. Likewise, this diminishes the value of flashpoint rewards. It sucks running a flashpoint, seeing your item drop, and already having something better, but you haven't out leveled the flashpoint yet. Now look at how WOW does itemization. Solo play rewards very poor equipment. When you are 15, you will be getting greens that are level 6ish. They might appear to be an upgrade for you at first, but you are actually better off just taking those items to the AH and buying a level 14 item for that item slot from someone else. Likewise, when you go into a dungeon in WOW, you will get blue items that are typically a huge upgrade over the stuff you got out of solo play and crafting. But there is typically only a couple items for your class in each dungeon. You need to fill in the gaps some other way, which means auction house, crafting and solo play. Does that make sense to anyone else? If Solo play is too rewarding (and it very much is), there is far less need to use the GTN or to run flashpoints. In order to get more people to use the GTN (for both buying and selling), bioware needs to nerf the solo item rewards throughout the entire game, so that people have a reason to buy stuff from each other. Of course I doubt they will do that. They are going to keep trying to implement stuff like crafted augments and augment kits in an effort to give people something to buy from each other, but that's a bandaid on a far bigger problem.

*facepalm* This doesn't make it right. Having a feature being horribly ill conceived can be just as bad as being entirely broken, if it is functionally useless. And yes, that does mean it needs to be fixed. The same thing happened with Rocket boost. In 1.2 it was a serious waste of money. It was classified as a vehicle, which meant it could only be used in vehicle permitted areas. This made it pointless if you were 25+ because you were much better off just jumping on a speeder. And, coming in 1.3, we will be able to use speeders at level 10, which would have made rocket boost even less useful. But guess what? They fixed it in a later patch. You can now use it anywhere as long as you aren't in a warzone, nor in combat. Rocket boost is now a worthwhile legacy purchase. I get a lot of use out of it on characters of all levels. The GTN is in the same situation. It is very ill designed, the devs should have known better than to implement it this way. No matter how you look at it, the GTN's value entirely hinges on them changing it. Either by connecting it to the fleet GTN like it should be, or by doing that supposed GTN merger. Either way a patch needs to be coming for this. And I can't imagine why anyone is argueing with me on this, I am sure you would all love to have one if it were useful, and the sooner the better. Making the ship GTN functional benefits everyone.

Thats another nice rumor I have heard, but I don't recall seeing an official dev statement to that effect. And even then, 1.3 isn't even on the test server yet. It could easily be a month or more away yet. The ship GTN is essentially non-functional NOW. It has been since it was added in 1.2 a month ago. There is no good reason for the devs to leave the single most expensive purchase in the game broken until 1.3, whenever that is. This is something that is in the game, right now, that should be fixed. And for the record, my server has a pretty good population, not the highest, but far from the lowest. Simply put, no one on my server is using the NS GTN. As it stands, this thing should have cost 5k, not 5m, given how valuable it is.

Not exactly what you are looking for, but I am going to chime in here and say that the biggest issue I am having with the GTN is my Legacy ship GTN. You want to talk about not finding stuff when you search... I can't get ANYTHING to come up on my ship GTN. The rumors I am hearing is that it's connected to the nar shadda GTN system, which I have to believe is either a bug or a massive oversight. Reguardless of the explanation, my ship GTN is 100% not useful, and therefore very broken. I have been expecting to see this fixed in every patch that has come along, but so far nothing. Until you guys fix this, this was an unbelievable waste of 5 million credits.

I just want to say, that I find this bug hilarious.

With 1.2 not only did we get some Legacy stuff to earn, we also got a page listing "comming soon in 1.3". What I am wondering is, Is that a complete list of all the legacy stuff we are getting in 1.3, or will 1.3 offer us some additional legacy perks that aren't listed there? Any chance of 1.3 giving something cool and unique to those of us who are legacy 50? I would love to have something like a star on my name (over my head) so that people can tell I am 50.

This is more or less a bug report, but it's going to take some explaining. On my Sniper, my favorite companion to use is Scorpio. Whenever I run dailys on this character, I prefer to use her. Using my Cybertech, I have fully equipped her in the highest level purple droid parts a cybertech can make. However at the same time, I am a raider, and every once in a while I will win a greed roll for a Columi or Rakata item for a different class. My tanking companions (on various characters) are getting better equipped than Scorpio thanks to those raid items. So, I had this idea. I used my Cybertech to craft a full set of the green (moddable) droid parts. Crit crafted with Aug slots. I planned to use some Rakata Supercommando items to pull the mods out and create Rakata level droid parts. As it happens I actually have 4 Rakata Supercommando items ready to have their mods ripped out. But right when I start blowing huge mounts of money to rip these mods out, I discover that you cannot put the armorings into droid parts. As you know, Glove armorings can only be placed into Glove type items. You cannot put it into Cores, Motors, Parts or Sensors. Ok, so that's pretty dissapointing as well as frustrating. So this is basically a bug report / request of the devs. Please allow customizable droid parts to accept any kind of 'set' armoring. Players cannot equip droid parts, and set bonuses don't matter to companions, so this change wouldn't break anything in terms of players and end-game equipment. Just let me build a rakata level Scorpio please.

Can you please explain the design logic behind creating a daily quest (a quest where lots of people will be trying to do it every day) that requires you to kill 3 Ratataki Leaders, when only 5 actually spawn? Please explain the design philosophy behind creating such an irritating bottleneck in our daily runs. There are a few others in the dailys as well, but this one is the most noticable. Any plans to do something about these bottleneck dailys? It's irritating to have to pause your daily run to wait for respawns because someone else beat you to the spawning ground by 30 seconds or so. And no, "We did a better job on this when designing the Black Hole dailys" is not a solution to the existing problem quests.

Interesting read, and a lot of questions answered. Nothing really mind blowing though. I am glad to see that they have been at least choosing some better questions lately. On the subject of the GTN problems, I will be perfectly honest I never use it anymore. If I am going to post anything for sale on the GTN it's going to be a purple item. Be that crafted or dropped or whatever. The problem is that when I do infact post some nice purple items, (usually at the default price) they don't sell. So then they get sold to a merchant, because I don't want to put up with the hassle of re-posting it every two days. Pretty soon I will be able to buy my ship GTN and then maybe I will use it more often. There is also the fact that purple crafting materials (like mandalorian iron) can be a huge pain in the butt to actually obtain. I have a good stack of it currently, but I would rather save it for my own future use than to burn it up making purple items that other people probably won't even buy. If you want me to sell more stuff on the GTN, make it a LOT easier to obtain the purple materials. As for actually buying stuff, there isn't much I want off the GTN. Between my four level 50 characters, I am largely self supplied in terms of the stuff I am most likely to buy off the GTN. Overall, with the way SWTOR is designed, the GTN is just a poor source of getting stuff. From 1-50 generalized questing is plenty rewarding enough in terms of blue and green stuff. If you take up crafting that will fill in the gaps very nicely. And then even if that wasn't enough to keep you and your companion nicely equipped, there are commendation merchants too. So why in 1-50 would I bother with the GTN? The only thing I would consider buying off the GTN in the leveling phase of the game would be grade 2, 4 and 6 ship parts. And even that doesn't matter anymore because I have my own cybertech. At level 50, the name of the game changes in terms of items. Now you are almost completely working with items that are non-tradable. You are working on grinding dailys for rakata earpieces, implants and relics. Of those, only the implants can be traded. You start working on hard flashpoints and raids in order to obtain columi and rakata items, none are tradable. Crafting has some level 50 items, but they are either inferior to the previously mentioned stuff, they are non-tradable, and / or they require hard to obtain end-game crafting materials to even make in the first place. Overall, the GTN is just a failed source of stuff. With the way the game works as a whole, you can ignore the GTN entirely and never miss it. If you want your Auction house to be important, you need to make some major changes to the rest of the game. You can start by calling it an auction house, instead of being snobs and trying to re-name the 'wheel'. Second, get rid of all the commendation merchants throughout the game. Third, cut WAY down on the items obtained as quest rewards or random drops. Do you realize how WOW does it? In solo play, every item you obtain is roughly 10 levels below your actual level. When you are 15, you will see level 5ish items dropping from enemies, or rewarded from quests. What you do is sell those on the AH and purchase items other people have posted, which are actually your level. So you find level 5 items, sell them, and buy a level 14 item instead. This likewise makes crafted stuff more desirable. For group play (dungeons), you get items much closer to your level AND they are generally blues. A far better reward than the stuff you obtain from soloing. I hope this makes sense. All solo play needs to produce very poor equipment results, in order to make buying items off the GTN, or doing dungeon runs, more desirable.

I wish that I didn't have to reconfigure a lot of my settings every time I start a new character. Off the top of my head, certain keybindings I use need to be set for every new character. I have to reload my saved UI on every character. I have to adjust my hotbar cooldown settings for every character. I really wish all of these were universal settings. As is, every time I start a new character, I have to stop and try to remember everything I need to adjust. Also, here is a list of stuff that would be nice: - A combat log (A real one) - A threat display - Better on screen notifications for abilities. Currently a lot of skill trees operate based on key buffs frequently poping up during play. Things like Harnessed Shadows or Particle Acceleration for shadows. When you see these, you know it's time to hit ability X. Currently these important 'buffs' are stacked up with all the other buffs. Please find a better way to display this kind of thing. - A guildmate of mine requested a button that gives him 1,000,000 credits. - I wouldn't mind seeing a "Get me the heck out of this mind trap" button. - Allow me to unbind CTRL A. I often hit CTRL A or CTRL S on accident, which messes with my sound. I can unbind CTRL S, but not CTRL A. - Blue interface is fine for republic side, but Empire side should have a red interface. - Fix the "Your ship" button for the republic side belsavis shuttle. - Remove the "Your ship" button from the shuttles that are on the orbital stations. - Show all crew skill missions on the list, instead of just 5 at random. Maybe I don't want any Luxury fabric or companion gifts. Maybe I want light side diplomacy missions but my list is filled with dark side missions. Give me the ability to do the missions I care about. - For dropped scematics, add a notification for wether or not you know this one yet. - Fix the crafting window so that it sorts by rating by default instead of difficulty. - Create a better more functional raid looting system. The current master looter and need/greed systems suck. I suggested this a few weeks back, but give us a looting system similar to the auction house display. A big window that pops up for everyone when the boss is looted, and lists everything that dropped. Let everyone see all the loot up front, and 'opt - in' for the items they want. This would let the master looter and everyone else double check that everyone is rolling on what they should be, before hitting the 'accept' button to distribute all the loot.