I agree absolutely. I've looked inside some of the public-access strongholds on my server, and it was a shock to see how cluttered these strongholds were. Then I found out why players were pushed into using up every available hook, and I was like... oh. I really wanted a small apartment like Ellen Ripley's unit in Aliens, but no, it's mansion-sized or get out. The Yavin IV stronghold is large enough to be an operations zone.

Is the learning curve too steep to get into? It's way too steep. As others have mentioned, with the ground game, you have plenty of opportunities to master your abilities, movement, and combat without ever setting foot in a war-zone. For GSF, you're thrown into the thick of things right away, and there are a lot of skills to pick up in order to have a good match. Take games like EVE online and SWG's Jump To Lightspeed. Players get plenty of opportunity to practice their flying skills without interference, and it makes all the difference. You can figure things out, try out different ships and how they handle, experiment with load-outs to see the difference they make to your game... you get the idea. Is ship balance preventing you from playing? I cannot say. I do not know the meta-game well enough to comment. That in itself, is a problem to be addressed, because I think the players should not have to rely fan sites to get this kind of information. Are you not playing because you feel GSF needs something new to bring you back in? Kind of. I'm not playing because I'm not a fan of ship combat, and GSF has done absolutely nothing to draw other kinds of players to it. GSF caters to players who love the idea of dogfight matches. Out of that diminished pool of players, only the die-hard players stick with it; because the barriers to entry are many and unnecessary. GSF also has no impact on the rest of SWTOR. There is no need to play it. GSF simply doesn't compete well with all the other content SWTOR has to offer. You don't have to play it to progress. Why play it? By the way, given how GSF is implemented, I'm actually glad this is the case. When I started GSF, it had been around for almost eight months or more. It was already dying down in popularity. Matches would take hours to appear. It was an exercise in patience to get a game going, and it was an exercise in frustration trying to learn the ropes. When matches stopped happening on my server, I stopped queuing for it, and I haven't queued since because the experience wasn't compelling enough for me to return. Matchmaking issues? Can't really comment because matchmaking is highly dependent on population size queuing. With my personal experience, I played maybe 30-35 matches in total. Out of that, only one game was fun. In that one game, we were all newbies versus newbies, and OMG, it was fun because we weren't insta-killed by the other side. We made mistakes, crashed into obstacles trying to out maneuver each other, and laughed while we did so. It was fun because each player had a fair chance against the other players; each one of us could actually contribute something to the team. It was fun because we weren't food ships. It was fun because we were all learning the map together, exploring, getting kills and getting killed. Together. My side lost, but it didn't matter. It was the perfect match,. Too bad it never happened again. The fact that GSF is character based and not Legacy? I hate how GSF is character-based and not legacy-based. It goes against everything that SWTOR has as a unique selling point. When I try to get people from other MMOs to try SWTOR, the legacy is one of the great selling points. For me, SWTOR's legacy feature is the one thing that I miss most whenever I play another MMO. This one feature has been most effective at keeping me away from other MMOs. On the other hand, I gloss over GSF and Space Missions when trying to entice other MMO players over. Why? These two features of the game are among SWTOR's weakest aspects. So what would I like to see different about GSF? I think you can solve a lot of the problems by having a PvE aspect to GSF. Don't bother with more of that tutorial though. Make a daily mission where the player hunts down a rogue ship or protects a convey from attack. Just having a way for the players to explore the maps outside of a match would help considerably, but having that PvE aspect draws a larger audience than you would otherwise. Finally, make it so that if not enough players queue for matches to crop up, players get treated to a match versus AI opponents, scaled down to match the number of queued players. Make 'versus-AI' a check-able option in the queuing UI, because some people only want matches against human opponents. Hell, make 'versus-players' a check-able option, as some people prefer fighting against AI opponents.

It would be a hard choice. We've already seen what happened with the three original APAC servers--we don't have enough APAC players to sustain a server. Maybe if Bioware had merged the three APAC servers, we'd have kept most of the APAC players, but no. Not any more. Don't get me wrong. I would love to return to a 20ms ping. Going from 20ms to 200ms makes a huge difference in operations, warzones, and starfighter; but what we'd likely end up getting is 20 ms ping at the expense of everything else, simply because we wouldn't have the population to sustain group activities. As for my answer to your question? No, I wouldn't move without a second thought. There would be lots of thoughts. If Bioware map out a clear plan for repopulating and sustaining the APAC server (and it's only going to be one server this time around,) then sure, I'll bite. I like to remain optimistic and give Bioware the benefit of the doubt.

Thanks for the welcome. What was I doing on Friday? Nothing much. Want some more weird player antics? Okay. Sometimes, when I log out a character that isn't going to be played for a while, I will log him or her out somewhere that suits his/her personality or goals. So my consular might head over to the Jedi Temple on Tython if she's feeling nostalgic. My smuggler hangs out in the dives of Nar Shaddaa, looking for the next job, My trooper, as always, like Corellia or Coruscant. My jedi knight might head over to my stronghold on Yavin for some combat practice. And I'll place them in a position that suggests that they're doing something, be it as simple as standing over a balcony, watching the padawans arrive. When I do log back on them again later, I feel as if they have been doing something in their own time while they were on the bench. Recently, my characters have been scrambling to get up to speed on Rank 10 crafting materials and what-not, so they've all been parked near the cargo bays of their ships. Appropriate as always.

What a lovely thread! I too am a casual player of SWTOR. I used to do some operations and war-zones when the game first came out, but that was because we were on the Oceanic servers, and everyone knew everyone. It was a real tight-knit community back before people started to leave the game due to falling numbers. When Bioware shut down the Oceanic servers and moved us all over to the US servers, we lost a lot of that small town friendliness. But enough of that. I too have avoided playing KotFE on my original characters--and for similar reasons: first, you lose contact with your companions, and may never get them back; second, you had better finish up everything in the story-line beforehand, or you'll never get to play them again. So, I've only played KotFE on alts that I'm not keeping around. As for weird player behaviour, I've got a few. When sending companions on crew skill missions, I will often read the text and assign by personality. For example, I will never send Nadia Grell on a diplomatic mission that is clearly dark-sided. Vette tends to get missions that involve some kind of a heist. Felix Iresso gets his fill of parades and heroic stunts. Malavai Quinn gets anything that serves Imperial interest. Of course, not every companion gets a perfect fit, so sometimes Felix Iresso might have to bodyguard a Hutt or deliver swill to the galaxy. Haha. This works in reverse too. If I don't like the companion, they get to do dog-duty. Skadge, for example, gets any mission that sounds nasty, dirty, or just plain unpleasant. Oh, and if a companion fails a mission, I like to send them out to do it again--just so they can get it right this time around. Haha.

Help me out here, psandak? Okay. Here goes. Patch notes 1.2.0 Legacy. Scroll down to the section on Mission Skill Changes. I've made a copy for your convenience. See underlined phrase. Mission Skills Missions granted from Mission Discovery objects no longer have a chance to fail. Mission Discovery items now indicate that they can only be used once. Players can now send multiple companion characters on a mission granted by a Mission Discovery if the player had more than one of that Mission Discovery.

That's a fair point. It is cheaper to use wealthy missions. I remember doing the math (when I was frustrated with those types of mission discoveries,) and they were cheaper. Cheaper and infallible. Yay. Edit: There was a time when the mission discoveries weren't infallible. You could pay the higher credits and wait for the longer hours, only to have your companion fail. Those were frustrating times.

These are all excellent points. Well said. I not only agree, but would like to add that for the crew skills like Scavenging, Bio Analysis, and Archaeology, the mission discoveries are very lackluster. They take so much longer than regular missions. In the same length of time, you could have done several regular missions to make up for the amount you would have gotten. The only nice thing about them is that they cannot fail. Back when you didn't always get the mission you wanted due to RNG, and when your companions' crit chances were much lower, yeah, the Mission Discoveries were more enticing. But now, with everything that's changed, Mission Discoveries have been left behind.

Hey! There's nothing wrong with my aluminium foil hat. Thank-you-very-much. I wear it to keep the Verblingers of Octavon-VI from whispering in my ears when I astral-walk. I have to wear it, or else I'll be bombarded with visions of the doom that awaits us all beneath the endless seas beyond the sunless lands of Ydk. I have to wear it, okay? Okay. As for what I wrote, did I say that it was impossible because it was done in 48 hours? No, I didn't. I said that if it were done in 48 hours, it'd probably be cheating. So far, the evidence shows: the numbers on GTN are significantly less than the theoretical throughput over a 48 hour period. the time taken has been significantly over 48 hours. But as to whether or the player in question was actually cheating? I don't know. Is the evidence on the GTN indicative of a problem? I don't know. We just don't know.

That's the one, that legacy wossname perk thingie. Right. Character Perk. I gotta keep these terms straight. But yeah, the wossname uh... character perk is per-character, not global across the legacy, so you'll have to spend it for every character in your legacy. Overall, it's not a bad investment.

I thought it was a legacy perk, not a global unlock. Legacy perk means you have to unlock it separately for each character. Global unlock means you unlock it once, and it applies to all characters in your legacy. Unless they changed it recently...

Actually, you wouldn't even need twenty characters. At companion rank 50, your companions would complete each mission in around 8.5 minutes. At a login rate of 1.5 minutes, you'd get through around six, maybe seven, characters before the first character's companions are all done. If you cycled through all twenty characters, the first thirteen or so would be idling with their missions all completed by the time you cycled back to the first character, so having characters in excess of seven or eight doesn't improve your throughput. That being said, your post actually supports the 'conspiracy theory' about cheaters using bot-programs by stating the numbers. Yes, you can generate that much in such a short time, but in order to do that, you'd have to be making the same sequence of mouse-clicks at almost the exact same time intervals, non-stop for forty-eight hours. Theoretically possible? Yes. Humanly possible? Not really. It's safe to say that someone generating such a volume of purple mats at such a rate would almost have to be cheating in some fashion, whether it be by bot-program or some other exploit. Finally, I logged onto my server and checked the GTN. I noticed that there was someone posting stacks of 100 Signal Disruptors at roughly 40,000 each, so around 4,000,000 per stack. I counted around twenty-four stacks on the GTN or roughly, 2400 in total. I checked again some hours later. None of them had sold. Is this a problem? I don't know.

Oh man. So many possible replies. Here goes: "And you still can't solo operations with all your companions out, even though they would probably out-DPS your average DPS player." "And not one of them is worth a damn against a world boss." "And you still can't get them to harvest a node that's floating under the world." "Now all they need to do is allow you and your companions to queue for war zones, and you'll do better than most pre-mades." "When they said you can queue for Operations with up to seven of your friends, they didn't have this in mind." "Heroic missions? Great. Now companions outnumber the spawned mobs." "Heroic missions? They have to re-balance those now. And guess what? They'll probably make it easier." "Can we get companions to not count toward the party limit? I want to run a flashpoint with four player characters and... oh, thirty-two companions."

I'm getting something like this too. The game freezes upon exit. Sometimes it closes down after a few seconds of waiting, but if it takes longer than ten seconds, then it has hung indefinitely and needs to be killed manually. Windows 10 usually detects this and asks if I want to force-kill it. On the other hand, if I hit ALT+F4 from the character selection window, then the game shuts down without delay. This is a workaround, but we shouldn't have to do this. It hasn't happened before version 5.0, this is a new feature of 5.0.

So you're using achievements as a legacy-wide mission log. Okay. What's your definition of an achievement then? It doesn't seem to match what the player base (and the rest of the gaming world) have in mind.