Story is baseline. Story is necessary, but not sufficient. Story is NOT REPEATABLE CONTENT for most people. The story itself is well done and a good intro to the expansion. However it is virtually the only thing of substance when it comes to new content for this expansion. Star Fortresses are the KDY of this expansion: samey, repetitive and with minimal useful rewards. The companion influence system is excessively grindy, especially since it is on a per-character basis. The alliance influence system isn't too bad to do once, but it is not good, repeatable content; mainly because it is gated behind the story which is lacklustre to do more than once or possibly twice. Virtually everything else that has been altered with this expansion is old content buffed up to try and make it relevant again. The heroics to grind alliance heads of department influence are recycled. All of the flashpoints are recycled. All of the operations are recycled. None of the PvP maps have been altered or added to in any way and so are stale. After little new content and lots of recycled (and thus boring to a lot of the playerbase) content we then come to the bugs and other screwups. We have had a major, major exploit. We have had an event with an event-breaking bug. We have had companions being too powerful and thus making the game a snoozefest for a good proportion of the playerbase. We have had companion power riding a nerf rollercoaster. We have had server rollbacks on three servers. We have had the "correction" to the operations on KotFE blog 151 DAYS after it was released. We have had the announcement of the announcement of a PvP warzone to try and ameliorate the backlash from that little 151 day beauty, with that try failing almost completely. We have had threars where feedback has been asked for and then gone on for 70 pages with nothing being posted by Bioware after the first post starting the thread. So what exactly is it that Bioware has done right since KotFE and indeed during the KotFE buildup period? Very, very, very, very little. Some senior Bioware people need to pay for this debacle with their jobs. The fallout will also likely cost the rest of Bioware Austin their jobs as well because this will be a financial disaster for the studio. Their business model was flawed from the very start of this expansion#s development, but they have leavened that with a myriad of screwups and made their situation vastly, vastly worse. There is pretty much no section of the player base of this game that they have not managed to piss off at some point during the last two months.

The announcement of the announcement of the warzone was it I think. That's what they think is an adequate response. Just shows how out of touch they are.

I saw that and I should have linked to your post after that paragraph. Didn't quote all of my sources and that was wrong. However moving on from that there is another aspect to the Starparse data that is very, very interesting as well. I said that the dramatic decline in HM ops participation was statistically significant and not the sort of decline of people getting bored with participating in something. What IS that kind of decline of people stopping doing something due to boredom is the SM ops figures. SM ops participation figures peaked during the period 26/10/2015–01/11/2015 at 131,812. The following weeks saw these figures: 125,550 104,948 86,442 71,767 65,159 52,506 Now if someone were to jump on these figures and claim that fewer people are doing HM ops than SM ops they would be smoking something pretty serious. The fact that people doing SM ops are far, far less likely to be running a parser program than people doing HM ops must be borne in mind when looking at the absolute numbers. However the trend is irrefutable. The first week after peak sees a 4% decline. This is then followed by 16%, 17%, 16%, 9% and 22% declines from week to week. Last week's activity of 52,506 is 38% of peak activity. Just before the expansion dropped the SM ops participation figures hovered between 35,000 and 40,000 or so for four weeks. So if 37,500 is taken as a rough average and compared is to 52,500 we get last week with about 40% extra SM ops activity compared to before the expansion dropped. Again that is not flattering to Bioware at all. Looking at the trend it can be seen that things were reasonably stable for the first two weeks of the expansion, followed by significant losses for the next 3 weeks, then a slowing of the decline. Finally last week showed another, even more dramatic decline. That can't be easily attributed to the same cause as the HM ops plummet last week, but I suspect that when taken in context even the SM ops participation numbers were affected by the snapping of the patience of the higher-tier ops community.

More new content. More new content. More new content. THAT is what is needed and quickly. This NiM drops debacle has merely been the last straw and trigger for a lot of people. The fact that they felt the need to respond with that announcement about the announcement of a warzone shows you just how bad this has been. They didn't respond as quickly as with the companion nerf, so it can't have been quite as bad as that, but they did attempt to put the fire out. Unfortunately for them the attempt to put the fire out has at best done nothing and at worst actually exacerbated the situation. It has confirmed that new PvP content is still at least five months off (given the 16 week patch cadence they seem to be adopting with KotFE). It has also confirmed that they haven't even started working on new multiplayer PvE content. Whoops. The fundamental problem that Bioware is now facing is that things have gone beyond their control. Again Keyboardninja summed it up very eloquently: "The sad thing is, at this point, we're all just venting. Nothing we say can really change anything. Even if the leadership at Bioware reads through this thread and has a complete change of heart. Even if they decided right now that they need to get an op out as soon as possible, and put a heavier priority on end game group content, it wouldn't make a difference. The die was cast six months ago. Maybe eight months ago. They made the decision to abandon their multiplayer endgame and focus almost exclusively on solo content. They could reverse that decision, but the lead time is immense. It takes a long, long time to create and balance an operation. Operation bosses are far more demanding in terms of mechanics and uniqueness than anything else in the game, meaning that it often isn't just a matter of scripting things on top of the existing engine. …" "The sad reality is that the community cannot wait this long. Bioware may even realize that now, but it's too late. They're committed. 4.0 is the NGE of SWTOR, and even if they wanted to go back, it would take them long enough to do so that no one who remained to see it would care one way or another." http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=8694364&postcount=893 I said that we need more new content and quickly. As Keyboardninja's post I have quoted above shows the lead-times that they have for proper multiplayer PvE content simply don't allow this to happen. THAT is what has caused this to go beyond Bioware's control. They literally CANNOT REACT FAST ENOUGH to sort this out. The die is cast. The bet is made. They've gone all-in for the sabaac pot and suddenly realised their cards add up to more than 23. Their fancy "metrics" were interpreted to say that raiders are a very small proportion of the player community. They are now finding out that raiders are NOT such a small proportion of the player community. Raiders have certainly never been a majority of the community, but Bioware has completely misjudged the size of the raider community. More importantly they have completely ignored the importance of the raider and high-end PvP communities to the fan sites and promotion of this game. Another very, very, very telling statistic can be found here: =HM&metric=Toons"]http://ixparse.com/stats/?boss=&mode[]=HM&metric=Toons Characters recorded in HM operations using Starparse during the period 30/11/2015–06/12/2015 131, 255 Characters recorded in HM operations using Starparse during the period 07/12/2015–13/12/2015 56,971 The 131,000 number was significantly higher than previous weeks as it had been around 100,000 for about the 4 weeks prior to that. However even compared to 100,000 or so going down to 55,000 or so is a huge, huge drop and is statistically significant. That is a reduction of 57% in activity compared to the previous week and a reduction of 43% compared to average activity over the four weeks prior to that. You don't get those kinds of drops from random fluctuations in activity. You don't get those kinds of drops from attritional decline as people gradually become bored with an expansion. That is lots and lots and lots of people stopping playing the game during a one week period. Remember that this is statistics from the Starparse website and that Starparse does not produce a census of people doing HM raiding as more people HM raid then do HM raiding with Starparse running. That means the absolute drop in numbers will be worse than the Starparse website shows. It does have to be said that this is characters and not accounts, but still it is bad. TLDR we've reached the tipping point for this game's PvE endgame community and it is too late for Bioware to do anything about it. Bioware have fundamentally misjudged the situation with this game and they are going to pay a heavy price for it. Heck they've even managed to make the situation even worse for themselves by pissing off their crafters and cartel market users with rollbacks on three servers! That's quite the feat.

With all of the stuff going on atm I'm afraid to say that this should be a low priority. Augmenting below maximum level is silly, and even at maximum level the only people who actually need to do it are PvP players and HM ops players (there are no NiM raiders left now). Bolster means that gearing is virtually irrelevant below HM ops. There are plenty of other bugs that have a higher priority to fix than this, even if it should only be a simple matter of changing one parameter for each item in the item database.

Ah you mean in February? That's the next patch we know about and even if there is a 4.0.4 it won't be until after Christmas now.

Not only that but The Progenitor had exactly the same thing happen a couple of days ago. This cannot be population-related as Progenitor is a very much smaller server than Harbinger or Shadowlands. Something fishy is going on. Again they are shooting themselves in the foot over this. If this happens to the other servers as well then they are going to exacerbate their population loss problems.

It's too late. The nightmare raiders are gone. What they are losing now is the entire rest of the serious ops community. Releasing NiM Ravagers and TOS now would be pointless because it would be re-hashing old content which is a massive part of the problem raiders are having atm. It would also be pointless because by the time they release it the people capable of running the content who are left will be gone. Unlike their response to the companion nerf outrage which assuagued those who were complaining for the most part, this response of an annoucement about an announcement of a warzone has clearly gone down like a lead balloon. People's patience has finally snapped. I do not see a way back from here for Bioware, especially since the lead ops designer has just left SWTOR to work on Mass Effect. The time required to recruit someone to replace him will further set back any response which contains proper PvE content. Bioware has made their bed, and now they will have to lie in it.

Well as others have said licensing is definitely an issue. However even if licensing were not an issue this is Bioware Austin we are talking about. They couldn't promote anything competently in any case.

You CAN get there without even starting the story by using the legacy travel perk, I just did. Frankly removing it from the galaxy map like that is just silly and pointless.

That would be me. As for the gear nonsense, guess what I did when I first logged onto the game after KotFE went live for me? I ran an EC SM GF instance on my Red Eclipse sentinel that was level 55 and had 26,000 health at the time. Came out of the instance as a level 59 sentinel. Don't blame lack of gear for not doing SM ops.

Yes we do have information on numbers and percentages. However since such numbers would come from datamined information we're not allowed to talk about them here. Nice of Bioware to be so informative about the implications of their changes isn't it.

Rose-tinted spectacles there I'm afraid. Why did the death threats happen? Primarily because the person making them is unhinged. Secondarily because Bioware made a decision similar to this in quality of reasoning, but smaller in scope and then proceeded to ignore massive amounts of reasoned and sensible feedback about it (with a leavening of flaming thrown in as well unfortunately). That lead to hot-headedness and triggered the unhinging. Such death threats are unacceptable and should never have happened. However it is also immensely foolish of Bioware to handle community relations so badly and to create such a toxic atmosphere. They're doing it again and I hope for their employees' sake that idiot SWTOR players don't take things too far this time. Far better for the players to unsubscribe and hit Bioware in the pocketbook. Unfortunately for the employees that will scarcely be any better because instead of the stress and worry of harrassment and threats they will then be faced with the stress and worry of losing their jobs. Hobson's choice for the poor ordinary employees I think.

Trolls exist on both sides of the debate, and if you had quoted further down my post you would have acknowledged that I said precisely that. However you then talked about asking for more character-driven story and more companion interactions and being able to do more things solo and that's where the wheels come off. When did you get the most character-driven story in the history of the game? Launch of the game. When did you get more character-driven story in the history of the game? Rise of the Hutt Cartel. Titans of Industry. The Dread War. Forged Alliances. Shadow of Revan. Rise of the Emperor. Knights of the Fallen Empire. All of those patches or expansions had at least some element of story in them. The only one that didn't have any solo story in it at all was Forged Alliances, and said discrepancy was remedied by Shadow of Revan turning all of those flashpoints into having solo instances. It we go back to before 2.0 I could name even more patches that had at least some story element in them. It may not have been much, but it was there and some of those had a great deal of story content in them. Story is the basis of the game. It is the start of things. It is necessary, but not sufficient. Doing things solo all of the time is a choice that can be made in an MMO. However it does beg the question: why are you playing an MMO if all you ever do is solo stuff? There may be a perfectly good answer to that question, but it is still a legitimate question and cause for puzzlement amongst traditional MMO players. But again Bioware listened and altered things. Soloing virtually everything has been possible since 3.0. As for companion interactions, well that hasn't really been fulfilled at all now has it? The traditional companions don't have any story to speak of past the 1.0 content and there are still lots of them who are essentially redundant. The new companions are hardly paragons of interactivity at all. So there I think you have a very valid point.

Oh dear, you appear to have inserted your foot in your mouth there. So who runs TOR Community and who is or was closely associated with it? Their about page lists the following: Hayward Chemayla Ohnoto Penther Yusi swtor_potato swtor_miner Xam Xam Snave Yuuzhan In addition Maebeebuzz was associated with them until earlier this year. So let's look at each of those people: Hayward-GM of a prominent Jedi Covenant guild which does quite a lot of raiding Chemayla-not sure whether that person raids or does high-end PVP Ohnoto-not sure whether that person raids or does high-end PVP Penther-not sure whether that person raids or does high-end PVP Yusi-not sure whether that person raids or does high-end PVP swtor_potato-high end raider swtor_miner-high end raider Xam Xam-high end raider Snave-prominent PvP player Yuuzhan-prominent PvP player Marbeebuzz-high end raider Is that the bottom being blown out of your theory? Why yes it is. Out of 11 people there I see 4 people I simply don''t know enough about to say, 2 PvP players, 1 GM and raider and 4 high end raiders. A maximum of 4 people in that list do not take part in multiplayer content and a maximum of 5 people in that list don't do multiplayer content at a fairly high level. You did say not all hardcore raiders, so technically you could be said to be right, but the implicaiton was that non-multiplayer content players took time to make the website as well in significant numbers. Out of those players how many are known to be strongly dissatisfied with what Bioware have been doing? Haywards is. SWTOR Miner is. SWTOR Potatio is. Xam Xam is. Snave is. Chemayla is. I don't know about the others, but that's a majority of the site's staff who have publically said either on Twitter or these very forums that they strongly disapprove of what Bioware is doing. Some have even put it in much, much stronger terms than that.