I'm gonna guess 179

This will most likely be the straw that breaks the camel's back for most guilds that are struggling to keep their communities together due to a lack of new group content. As someone on reddit mentioned earlier... 2 months to change a percentage value to apply your "fix"?? Seriously Eric, I can only see 2 possible options for this to take 2 months (and as most have pointed out - making this a chance to drop in NiM is utterly beyond stupid). BW either don't give a damn about their communities, as they are all falling apart slowly but surely, and most of us probably already agree on this point, since you give no new group content to all your loyal players/payers that have been here since the start. You guys always seem to know whats "best" for your game, but you seem to be trying to tank it intentionally and thats leaving a lot of people very frustrated. Given that you don't give a damn about those communities, then this is logical that there is no rush to fix it. The other remote possibility that lies somewhere near the impossible, is that you don't want to fix it due to crafting changes coming in 4.1 and/or the fact that there may be a new Op in the works and you guys feel like it'll only be worth fixing when that comes out... but yeah... who am I kidding, that ain't happening. Seriously, there are issues running rampant on servers as I type and what do we get from BW?! Silence... If its option 2 you guys really should say something... it would save you about 50% of the backlash you're already getting. Seriously Eric, do you guys even care anymore? Do you guys even know what that means? The fact that people are getting upset and frustrated should be a clear sign to you guys that they care a lot about this game... and what do we get in return?!...

Any idea when there will a button, like in the old launcher to select the PTS server, since it still seems to be an option to be available in the options screen, or are you abandoning open PTS from now on? (Yes I know the PTS isn't available to the public at the moment, but given the size of some of the game updates the over the last few months since we last had an open PTS, I'd rather get some of that patched before you decide to only add it to the launcher on the day you re-open it... )

Totally agree. At the end of the day its poor customer service. For those that shout entitlement... lets just say if this was an ISP and you had a fibre connection with 100M d/l and 30M u/l and possible a monthly limit on how much you could d/l or u/l, and the ISP announced changes for your area and didn't tell you what they were planning to change... how would you feel? Now some people care about d/l speed... some are more concerned about u/l speed and some are concerned if their limits will change. Now if said company stringed you along until they implemented said changes and downgraded your connection, when they could have warned you and you could have been seeking better options/solutions... how would you feel? Its about customer service for paying customers... and people that pay for a service should be informed about changes to that service. Generally when companies don't tell you anything its because its bad news and they don't want to deal with the backlash yet. That all just tells me that its bad news for anyone who cares about crafting/raiding/min/maxing/pvp. I like my story, but given that previous promises to maintain cadence have never lasted longer than 6 months or so, from being relatively happy about story changes, I am now very very concerned with some of the things I've read.

I thought long and hard about if I should bother posting this, and with all the negativity flying around, it'll probably just get overlooked. Either way, I think I just need to type some of this out, and let people (even at BW) know that not everyone is entirely disappointed with this announcement. Who knows, maybe George, Tait or Eric will read it. I've played this game since beta. It was my first MMO. Its a BW game, and like many at the start, I was probably hoping for some sort of KOTOR 3. I was impressed with the stories, and I don't think anything of its magnitude with 8 different class stories has ever been done before, and most likely never will be again. The stories aren't all perfect, sure, and neither was the endgame at launch. I remember all the complaints, and although I didn't raid at the time, I got by PvPing and leveling alts. So I think 1.3 rocks up, and I might have been away for a month or two due to real life concerns, and when I returned all I heard was people complaining about no endgame content, and how they were unsubbing, and moving on. SWTOR still to this day suffers from that stigma, especially from people that never returned after quitting. They still jump onto reddit and facebook and anywhere else to complain about it (I honestly don't understand why people can't move on). So all big MMO fans/grinders left for greener pastures, which left the rest of us keeping the game afloat till the transition to F2P. I started getting more involved with the game, PvPing, joining guilds, playing ranked, but still no Ops back then. So server transfers come about, and all the PvPers decide they need to move to PvP servers to get more pops, and they all move, and BW pulls a fast one and pulls 8 vs 8 ranked from the game in favour of arenas. Plenty of PvPers whined and plenty quit. So we were left with just doing regular warzones, and leveling alts. I was still enjoying those aspects of the game, but decided to try and get an Ops group together after another guild fell apart (at least for a while it seems) and moved on to my current guild, where I get to do basically everything in this game. When RotHC launched though, many of us were concerned with, what would later become a pattern, and that was the lack of continued class stories. A few friends left the game because of it. I couldn't understand why BW would drop their biggest selling point in favour of other content. I have since played other games and found their leveling completely bland, since SWTOR spoilt me with great story along the way, instead of just pick up this and do that kind of quests. So where am I going with all of this? Well every time BW makes a decision, no matter how important it may seem to any one of us, it will obviously upset a few. They will rant and rage, unsub, and tell you the game will be dead in a few months. Funny that... the game is still here, and I doubt that these changes will kill the game. Am I disappointed that we won't have a new raid when the expansion drops? Sure... but then again I'm assuming from what I read that there will be new content for Ops and other things after the expansion drops... when? I don't know, and sure BW's track record for certain promises hasn't been the best, but I assume they're well aware that Ops and PvP are still rather important in maintaining numbers. They will have the metrics from the year long draughts of raid content, and well... PvP I think its been longer Now that I've gotten that out of the way, here is what I really think about why things are changing, and most of these changes are for the good of the game. KotFE is basically a reset. They're looking for a fresh start. Its almost like a soft relaunch of the game. They're seem to be trying to break away from the old story content to get that fresh start. They're sticking us in carbonite for 5 years, and offering people free L60's for a reason. They're trying to recapture lost players who left due to a lack of story, and trying to get players that never played the game before. Why? I think that much is obvious. They're breaking from the past, and launching an expansion just before a new SW movie is coming out. They want new players, to arrive and get to endgame and see 9 Ops, that are all relevant. For someone just coming to the game they will have plenty of choices on what to do. Why turn old content obsolete just because people go up 5 levels? I know a lot of you will just see a wall of text and skip over it. I know a lot of you have quit already due to the news of no new Ops. I wasn't totally impressed with that bit either. One extra line about a new one coming soon , say Jan '16, would have settled a lot of people down. BW have their metrics, for what its worth, and could sometimes be interpreted better, but I think this revamp is necessary for the game. There is no fun facerolling through old Ops from deco's or conquest, just for the sake of doing it. On level Ops makes more sense, its more challenging, and gives people more choices. One thing about that has me intrigued. As I read it, basically with KotFE there will be three tiers of gear. They will be equivalent to SM/HM/NiM. So the highlighted Op that week in HM will possibly drop some random drops of gear that would normally only drop in NiM? Also a possible timeline on future content for PvE (raid, FPs) and PvP would be nice. You don't have to give us huge details, but at least throw us a bone. Currently all we know is no new content when KotFE drops, but it has 9 story chapters, and we'll get the next 6-7 chapters at the start of the new year. See, without telling us much, we already know we'll be getting about 6 months worth of story content in the first 6 months of 2016. I get you guys like your marketing strategies and like to play your cards close to your chest, but currently there is too much of a vacuum surrounding many features in the game, not just the content, but other underlying systems that should be filled as soon as possible, as it may affect how we play over the next few months. TL;DR - I get we're all a little disappointed that there isn't a new raid when KotFE drops, but these changes were needed. BW most likely expects an influx of new players around the SW movie release that most likely never played before and don't want to get caught with the "no endgame content" story again. That and most likely those new players will be into story, much like the majority of players that first picked up this game since it was its biggest selling point. Will the game die? Doubtful... but maybe I'm wrong... who knows

The more armor sets the merrier. Also while you're at it BW... could you get rid of all the armor requirements, and make all the old sets adaptable... and remove the class requirements on the original legacy sets sold at the capitals. Jos' armor set would be a nice addition

At the time that it was removed, to the best of my recollection, the justification was that people were getting the free PvP gear once they hit 50 and selling it back to the vendors for credits and queuing without it obviously...

Also.. to answer your original post Raansu... its not BW's fault PvE geared players are queuing... people need to be responsible for their own actions... there's nothing stopping you from doing NiM Ops in PvP gear... you might not get far... but you can still walk in... just like the PvE geared ranked players that will usually get crushed in a few seconds.

Caught your stream after listening to BW's, and did love the community building efforts on your part. I honestly think the ranked 8 vs 8's population versus the NiM progression guilds population, overall in BW's metrics is probably of a similar percentage. As we don't really have "official" numbers from BW, I'd assume they'll count anyone that tries either... which doesn't always translate into doing them successfully. I'm sure there were plenty of guilds back then wiping on the first bosses of NiM Ops (but they were there) just as I remember getting crushed by Nostrum and RC (and a few others)... I was still partaking back then, although not very successfully. I don't think trying to compare NiM Ops and Ranked ends up being fair... especially given the drought of content the NiM Ops groups are complaining about, many are on a break from the game anyway. The question that I would pose the Eric Musco (or any dev that could actually answer this properly) is... How valid is it to compare ranked 8 vs 8 back then to ranked 4 vs 4's? Back then you needed an Ops group to queue, which in and of itself was a gating activity, compared to these days where you can queue a 4 man group or go solo. You lost a lot of higher end PvPers due to this, and they will argue they gained a whole bunch more. Add to this the fact they added dailies and weekly missions to ranked to boost the number of people playing, and added season rewards. None of this really applied back then. I'd argue if all of these extra incentives were in place back then and with a solo queue for 8 vs 8 ranked, the numbers in ranked player would probably have been higher than they are now. That being said... I'd like to see solo and group queues for ranked arenas (4's) and ranked warzones (8's) so that people can play what they prefer (I have a feeling warzones would be more popular). To the obvious argument of queue dilution... cross server queues would solve this, and probably improve their match making system with a larger pool of players... Just my two cents.

I would also like to add, that after trying this on a lowbie alt, the BBA fleet pass is also affecting the experience bar, and while changing instances solves the issue, the cast bar while changing instances was also missing after using the BBA fleet pass. *Edit* After some feedback from a reddit user, a UI reset also solves this issue, but its beginning to become a bit of a nag having to do this after every completed bounty

So I usually fly through the Bounty event as quickly as possible, and only noticed this on the off chance since I decided to sell and buy some stuff on the GTN with one of my characters, and after with either purchasing or selling, my credits wouldn't update. First thought it may have been server lag, but waiting did nothing. I finally decided to change instances on fleet and my credits updated. As to pinpointing the issue... I then decided to sell something on an alt at every point along my next bounty. It seems to be bugging out after using the Bounty Fleet Transport to hand in the missions... after using it credits won't update in inventory until you change instances again.

I wouldn't play something you already know like the back of your hand... I share the first reply's sentiment... go MM Sniper, get to 55 before 2.6, enjoy OS while you can, and then play it some more after 2.6 and let us know your actual thoughts on this change compared other classes AoE abilities... just my 2 cents

While I may agree that being force-flagged in the PvE area isn't very nice, especially on a PvE server, once you're flagged, you're gonna have company really quickly. I'm on a PvE server and I love PvP as much as PvE... That being said... I got the Cyan Sphere on day 2 of the event... and really easily at that... all you need is a character who hasn't done the event before, pick up the Op mission (2 components), do 16m SM (6 components) then do 16m HM (8 components). See... 16 components and done, and the best thing for the people that hate being flagged (can't imagine why one would hate this ), you use the teleporter, spawn in stealth a few meters away from the ship's entrance. See... problem solved... PS: You require Newcomer status first though.

Thanks for the update and info eric

Ok... so after doing some leg work, this is currently what the patch has done to equipment requiring a PvP rating (Valor requirements haven't changed from what I've seen so far): Crafting new [Rated] gear has no rating requirement: http://i.imgur.com/jQqDOzc.jpg Already crafted [Rated] gear has no rating requirement: http://i.imgur.com/Q4k5JjT.jpg Buying items that previously required rating, still have rating requirements: http://i.imgur.com/Ai97YKq.jpg So according to the patch notes all items had it removed, but apparently some didn't. Either there is something wrong in the patch notes, or someone forgot to check the PvP Items vendor before changing things