I ended up subbing to the game again for a little while to play with some friends, etc and I figured I might as well give the KotFE BS a shot. More than likely no one will care and I think my sub is running out relatively soon so its not like Ill be able to respond to anything anyway, but here are my thoughts on KotFE. There are some chapter by chapter notes that I wrote out as I did them and then more of a generalised discussion at the end. (Oh, I wrote this quite a while ago, but never bothered to post it until now) Ch. 1-9: The Great Blah Boring. One big, cheesy cutscene. I wasnt impressed the first time when it launched. Mostly I remember feeling a sense of "Lulz, all you people on the forums who thought your choices were going to matter, L-O-Freaking-L." Playing through it again didnt change anything. I was going to try and watch all the cutscenes again, but that stopped happening around chapter 3. Ch. 10: Short and Fluffy. The combat was boring, and really just an annoyance, especially the delayed spawns and spread out enemies clearly designed to take up as much time as possible. The most impressive part of chapter 10 was Kaliyo's facial expression as you board the speeder at the end. Eminently forgettable. Nothing accomplished, nothing settled. "..Whole cities, leveled," I dunno, Senya, they look pretty vertical to me. Christ... Oh, and thank you Arcann for literally HALVING the only forces you have that pose a minute threat to me or my forces in combat. Good God you are a retard. Overall, its hard to see why it took so long to release given how short it was and how little actually happened. Ch. 11: ? Epic, awesome, balls to the walls gung-ho militaristic baddass mission to... plant a wiretap. Did we get a court order? Do we really need a wiretap if we can fly a ship RIGHT next to their super-secure base thing and not even be noticed? If we then assault this base... arent they maybe going to notice something? Maybe? Ok, so, everything falls apart and the only way out is deus ex machina from some scaredy-cat ******* who were hiding in the swamp but are now suddenly heavily armed and extremely competent and able to respond instantly to a distress call without a ship. But they need training gear to keep from shooting their toes off. Ok. Sure. I buy it. Oh, and SCORPIO, darling, I love you, but youre a droid, that means you are a rigidly defined program. Maybe highly complex but completely comprehensible. Ch. 12: What is this, I dont even. So, we find the small thermal exhaust port, just below the main port, and everyone wants to just go willy nilly in, blow it up and ... remove the only thing controlling a massive, mostly unstoppable droid fleet? Does that sound like a silly idea to anyone else? And then, I need to talk to Valkorian about it? Why? I have the complete schematics of the entire thing. What do I need to talk to this derp for? Since when has he been anything other than a self-serving ****? What possible reason could I have for trusting the biggest megalomaniacal ******e the galaxy has ever seen? Why do I need to go to a secluded area? HE IS IN MY HEAD! At most, I should step out into the hall.... This is silly, more 'oh, woe is me, Im so weak, Im being thrashed around by a figment of my own imagination..." Part of me wants to see what the hell this looks like on a non-jedi/sith character, cause this seems rather ridiculous. Oh, great, a Rocky Montage. When do I get to punch the meat? Please tell me I get to punch the meat. If I dont get to punch the meat Im going to be really freaking mad. Satele went to see the eternal throne.. Right, they have visiting hours. You even get to sit in the chair and give an order to the Eternal Fleet, its like twitchplayspokemon. So, the defining dichotomy that has reigned over every single star wars movie and game Ive heard of, the Light versus the Dark, jedi versus the Sith, Rebels versus the Empire, all of that, just gets thrown out the window. Are you sure this is "Star Wars?" Cause Im not. Who the **** wrote this crap? ... Holy Hell, what is this? Oh, with this magic blade, you shall be able to strike down arcann? I go from not having a chance to being able to do it because I made a GLOWSTICK in a CAVE? Am I Tony Stark? This is basically the penultimate expression of what I feel is wrong with the overall story of this game. You treat the force as magic. Its not supposed to be magic, we arent supposed to be wizards going 'Can I cast magic missile?" There isnt anything about 'having devotion to a master' that should make you stronger in the force or really anything about Valkorian/Vitiate/BadRPerGodModing that even remotely makes sense. I havent gone through the last 4 chapters yet, but Im betting that EVERY SINGLE thing about this chapter that happened outside the Odessen Base could be simply cut out, forgotten and have a positive impact on the narrative integrity of the story. Ch. 13: 'Where We Ignore the Small Thermal Exhaust Port Just Below the Main Port and Go Rob Fort Knox,' or 'Hey, Vette! Shes Cute!' Thats not how explosives work. Vette with an assault cannon though? Sweet. Vette and Spewie forever! The premise of this chapter was stupid, but Vette and Gault were funny. Still nowhere near enough to make up for the derp. Ultimately, just a useless fluff chapter like 10, and 11. Well, and virtually all of 12. Ch. 14: The Hunt for the Red October Well, hell, heard the Russian anthem and was expecting Sean Connery and Sam Neil to pop up. Massively disappointing. Little bunny jedi, hopping through the desert, jumping to the droids and beating them into dust. Cue Russian singing, SELF SACRIFICE! And, after the scheduled playtime is over all the droids and mandalorians head home to drink motor oil and juice from their sippy cups. After a rousing good time, they all head to bed ready to get back at it bright and early tomorrow morning. All this preemptive sabotage... We are in a fight for our lives and the fate of the galaxy people, dont got time to run around cutting the legs out from under our allies before weve won the war. Thats the important part. So, stop giving me stupid 'morality' choices that are just strategically absurd. "Luminous Engine" How much do you want to bet.... I mean, look at the shape of the Eternal fleet vessels, does the front profile remind you of anything? Like, say, the cranial structure of a certain species that should not have gone beyond Kotor but keeps popping back up? Also, its amazing how stupidly blind the 'Outlander' is to SCORPIO's obvious shenanigans. Ch. 15: Dramatic Irony Well thank the Force that the only route we can go is the shortest route to the bridge. Gawd, imagine if it have been the longest? Hey, Im a droid captain, on a droid ship, crewed by droids, and some pesky organic, oxygen breathing life forms board. Lets shut the doors and gas them. Great Idea. Why the **** is there even an atmosphere on these things? Or hallways? Jesus... Oh, look, the backstabbing droid backstabbed us. Ch. 16: The "Ultimate" Battle with Arcann "This isnt about you. It never has been." Could not have put the words any better. This whole thing about "Come play your own personal star wars saga where youre little better than the comic relief mook that still shows up to everything ...." yeah. This Chapter could also be titled "The Bit Where Everything You Do Accomplishes Zilch" or "The Part Where All Your Choices Are Shown to Have No Impact" or "Where You Show the Galaxy Exactly What a Totally Worthless, Incompetent Screwup You Are." I could go on. Some Generalised Notes: There was far too much fluff. Its pretty obvious that some of the chapters were simply there to take up time, exactly like the encounter design. In almost every single fight, especially in Ch.10 and onwards, there are tons of artificial periods where if you are even remotely competent you are simply sitting there waiting for whatever 'boss' you are fighting to stop being invulnerable or for the skytroopers to finish spawning in random corners of the map. KofFE was marketed and the utter abandonment of MMO aspects of this game were justified by the apparent customer preference for player driven, story content. The info that you (Bioware) based that judgement on was pretty obviously skewed by the 12XP event that ran for months in the lead up to 4.0 and by the fact that both of the new operations with 3.0 had clear noob traps on the second boss of the instance, even on storymode. I mean, of course people werent doing operations, you designed them to be basically impossible for your average (read: bad) player to have a chance of completing. I think I made this fairly clear in my run-through of the chapters, but you completely failed in your intended goals. At no point in the 16 chapters are the players choices more than just slightly impactful. They might change a line of dialogue or a facial expression but overall nothing you do changes squat for the actual storyline. Its exactly as on-rails as the old space combat missions. Example: During the lead up to KotFE one of the teasers that received a lot of attention was the encounter between the Outlander, Lana and the two skytroopers right before Koth swoops in for a "dramatic rescue." A great big stink was made about how your choice here would be so impactful and would carry weight later in the story. I suppose technically, you (Bioware) didnt exactly lie there but no one in their right mind would say you were particularly truthful either. And if youre having to play lawyer games with the technicalities in the language you use to advertise content in a video game... well, theres something rotten in Denmark. It does not matter one bit what you choose at that juncture. Whether you kill the guy or spare him changes nothing more than a line of dialog and probably the tone of the mail you receive after the followup encounter. It was totally irrelevant. You could simply delete it and not affect the course of the story. And whats worse? Every other "decision nexus" the Outlander arrives at is handled identically. The NPCs blab a bunch about how the choice you make here will change everything, how only you can make it because you are Commander Shep.. er, the Commander, sorry, dunno why that popped in there, but anyway, you make your decision and a chapter or two later you get to see how pointless it all was and how your decision had no effect at all. On anything. Building on how inconsequential the Outlander is in 'their own personal Star Wars Saga where every choice you make matters..." is how absolutely useless you are. KotFE is sixteen chapters of you getting your butt handed to you on a silver platter on the odd minutes and having your *** whisked out of the fire at the last possible second on the even ones by ghosts, droids, or incompetent peasants who need training weapons to avoid shooting their feet off (but who are still clearly better than you). And if that wasnt bad enough the one chance you had to make an actual, real, impact in KotFE was totally hijacked by a figment of your imagination who then beats you up and leaves you for dead out in the middle of nowhere. And then, in the same chapter you get told that 'no, actually, you just suck, youll never be able to beat arcann, or anyone unless you make a MAGIC GLOWSTICK in yonder cave. Overall, KotFE did not feel like Star Wars. Honestly, a lot of SWTOR itself doesnt feel much like the Star Wars films. Instead of the primary conflict being between the Republic and the Sith Empire, its the Republic and/or the Sith versus whoever it is that has 'gone crazy and decided to kill everyone' this time. So, in a sense, KotFE just continues the trend but it takes it too far. The biggest issue is definitely Chapter 12. Now, I have my own view of how the force should work, but this is supposed to be a Star Wars game, and Star Wars has always subscribed to the whole comic-book and western style of morality. The good guys are good, the bad guys are definitively evil and they lose because good triumphs over evil. Chapter 12 took that dichotomy, beat it up, peed on it, doused it in gasoline and set it on fire (the magic glowstick cave was bad enough already without this). KotFE feels like a badly written pen and paper rpg campaign run by a newbie GM who manages to make every single rookie mistake in the book. They forgot that the PCs are supposed to be the heroes. They forgot that their job is to provide a dynamic and interesting environment in which the PCs can tell a story. They inserted themselves into the story in the form of NPC characters and are more concerned with what the NPCs are doing than the PCs. And, they preplanned how the campaign was going to go and are going to make it go that way come hell or high water. Some of these are necessary because it is a multiplayer game (at least, its supposed to be) but there really is no excuse for turning the player into a minor member of the supporting cast who acts as the comic relief. Frankly, I have a hard time understanding how this got greenlighted. It boggles the mind how a group of people who are supposed to be in the business of making video games can look at KotFE and say 'Yeah, this is good, I want to sign my name to this." But then, Ep. 7 "The Mary-Sue Awakens" exists, so .... yeah, I dont know anymore. Its one thing to know intellectually that nearly 70% of the population is, at best, mentally disabled compared to me and the people Im used to being around but quite often, its almost impossible to fathom.

Holy bleep-a-bleeping bleep. You people are so full of bleep.

Bioware is completely aware that NiM isnt dropping the right loot. They do not care. They made it that way on purpose to curtail gear acquisition. But, in the fashion of their typical incompetence, they've already had KP as the highlighted HM twice, and EV once, plus all the others are pretty easy anyway. So it basically worked for a month. But, they cant just admit this, obviously.

Um, it kind of was, though. Thats half the point. They are delaying Ch. 10 by a month, and then doing nothing but what they showed us from now till next October. They promised waay back when over a year ago now, that they would never again have as lengthy a drought of content as there was between Oricon and the Dread Ops and the 3.0 Rav/ToS. And now, the absolute soonest that we could possibly get anything thats not story or some reskinned junk they mock up to snare in the "Oooh, thats shiney, I want it" people will be two years after the release of 3.0.

It wouldnt. Its just changing values in a table. The reason its not being fixed is because its not a real bug. They intended to do this to prevent people from being able to completely gear out in full 224 too quickly (even though putting EV in the list for weekly high priority kind of ruined that plan). They are just stringing people along.

The reason that snipers/gunslingers are the worst class in ranked? This: http://www.popartdecoration.com/projects/white-corinthian-pillar-2559-5816-2.jpg

AP Pts are BS. Operative Invinci-roll is BS. Operative Mobility and Slipperiness in general is BS. Sorc Heals are BS. Being versus at least three sorc healers every freaking match is BS. Juggernauts' CDs are still BS. Bioware's treatment of Mercs is still BS. Bioware's decision to make every class but snipers hypermobile is BS. Map lag and general map defects are still BS. The fact that 8v8 was taken out was and still is BS. The list goes on.

Vorantikus-poo has been called, people. It serious. On a more serious note, its actually a "bug." As in, they did it on purpose to keep people from gearing up too quickly. Correcting the loot tables is just changing values in a database, IE, easy to fix, and notice how they didnt fix it on tuesday? They just call it a bug so they can get away with it.

Hey, look, its a person who decides what they want to say in response and says it before they even find out what was said to begin with. And, who has zero game knowledge or common sense to prevent them going full Joe Biden. But really, tell us more.

Congratulations Captain Obvious. Really, I shouldnt even dignify this with a response.

I was running around yavin the other day on a level 60 juggernaut. I have a set of unaugmented exhumed (last tiers 168 set) so I was at 2018 expertise, my hp was just around 38k. And I was attacking, and killing, any of the pubs (regardless of level) who were brave enough to be running around flagged (TEH server, so pve silliness). Then this 65 guardian came along. He was obviously in PvP gear (which a number of the other 65s Id run into had been) but he had a Scorpio with him that had 90k hp. For reference, player HP on Yavin 4 gets capped slightly above 56k. I could not kill his companion. I could barely make a dent in it. Any damage I did was just immediately healed to full. Had companions been as they are now, that guardian would have taken a number of dirt naps that day. He was terrible. But, because he spent a bunch of comms on companion gifts, he was completely immortal.

Id guess you messed something up on your end and still have BitRaider or its something else unrelated going on. Everyone I have shown how to get rid of bitraider has never had a problem with the download. One guy's was pretty slow, but he was doing it last night while everyone and their cousin were trying and failing to patch because of bioware's poor decision making skills.

They did have a beta. They knew about all the bugs that were in the live release. They didnt change or fix anything.

I did two Star Fortress runs last night. One on my min-maxed 208 pvp gear AP PT with a rank 17ish T7 and one on my mix of HM/NiM gear shadow tank with a rank 30ish Scorpio. On my powertech everything was cake up until I got to the first Knight guarding the elevator. It did 3535 DPS to me while my companion was only putting out 1.5k in healing. I probably could beat that guy if I wanted to use a medpac or something and started out with stuns initially. IE, played it super tryhard. I also think I didnt do a full on true opener. My main goal was just to see what the damage was like. I swapped over to my shadow after breaking out of jail (had never seen that portion of the instance before). On my shadow, everything was a joke, with one exception. The paladin fight was close-ish. I ended that fight at roughly 40% HP. The Knights could barely scratch me and the Exarch might as well have not been there. The strange part was, even on the Paladin where Scorpio's healing was 100% effective, a level 30 influence comp was doing worse than a level 17. T7 averaged 1.5k, Scorpio never when higher than 1,250. 13 levels higher and only 80% as good? I havent yet compared their stats, but Id hazard a guess that the stat block for Scorpio will show higher numbers than T7's. The other strange part would be the disparity in outgoing damage. 3535 DTPS on my PT versus roughly 700 DTPS on my shadow. Yes, my shadow is an absurdly geared tank, but an 80% reduction seems excessive. Overall, Im not impressed. I was definitely in favour of companions getting a nerf. They were waay too strong, especially in world pvp situations. But, like normal, it seems Bioware made a royal mess out of things.

The problem with Beta testing updates to this game is not that Bioware isnt getting the right kind of feedback from the people they bring in to closed tests. The problem is that Bioware does absolutely NOTHING with that feedback. Remember that disastrous bug with Coratanni loot that caused so many problems? Players in the beta told Bioware about it months in advance of the release of 3.0. They knew. They knew all about it and they did nothing at all to correct it. And then they let it go on for months and months because they just dont care about the integrity of their game. Same thing here. Bioware 100% knew exactly how overpowered companions were well ahead of even the early access release date, and, like every other time they released a major patch, they did nothing about it. Why? Who the hell knows why they do the crap that they do anymore. Id guess its a combination of 'not giving a crap' and a general mission statement of "Lets see how far we can get with as little effort as possible because we have already all but sh*t-canned this game anyway." So stop trying to pin the blame on "lazy" or "selfish" testers.