Ok, so we seem to be stuck with this event. I am one of the people who is doing it, but you can not conclue that this means that it is a good event or that I like it. I can guarantee you that I am not happy about it while I do it. But I see a lot of potential in a companion, of whom we can determine the fate. The hope that this might become true keeps me going. Therefore I would like to make a suggestion how to let this event evolve during the second season. At the end of the event we will get a companion that is either light or dark. There is no hint that we can influence her alignment afterwards but I would have liked this to be the case from the start. The companion will be part of our alliance. I propose that the companion will be part of the alliance of every player. The players that unlocked her will get to use her as companion while the rest will be simply presented with the results of her choices. Every month there will be a short storyline on already existing planets with her where we help her fulfill some tasks that lead her to her final role in the story. That final role should be substantial. While we adventure with her she interacts with us and our light/dark choices influence her future alignment and behaviour. These choices could be like the following: - We need to decide what to do with a prisoner or some people or property not important for the future story. - We comment on a choice she made. - She asks for guidance what to do in an future decision. Every month at a set date the choices are evaluated and her alignment and behaviour is adjusted to next possible update. Therefore there would be at least one month delay for the choices to take effect. I don t think that would matter too much for us. During season two it should be possible to completely alter her alignment and behaviour if the community continuously chooses to go light/dark. This would really motivate people to play the story several times. You could also introduce some additional ways to influence her alignment through grinding old content if you want to keep people occupied. I think that a companion that makes her own choices that are relevant for every player but are influenced by the choices of all players would feel very much alive and would motivate a lot of players to participate.

A large part of all the frustration that we see here surely stems from the high expections many of us, me included, had when we first read about this event. I imagined getting a new companion with whom we could play and the global decisions of the playerbase determined in which way that companion evolved, more or less unaffected by our personal decisions. It would have felt like there was a living breathing person that made his/her decisions largely by himself/herself. As the story progressed we would have waited to see how the LS/DS points affected the behaviour of the companion again and again, slowly evolving into one direction or another. This or any event that would have included a lot of companion interaction and companion development would have been super interesting. Now we get a huge load of boring grind that large parts of the community abhor. And if you grind through at least 2 complete new alts you will get one of two possible companions. A part of the comunity will get a companion that they did not want. The amount of people even achieving this tier remains to be seen. And once we have the companion there is no guarantee that that character will actually live and breathe. Probably BW wanted to wait and see how many people actually get the companion before they decide if it is worth to do work intensive story writing, voice acting etc.. I expected some background story for the companion we would see evolve during the next months and got the invitation to a grind fest for a few new shinies. What a letdown. Please scrap this event and rethink it BW. It sounds horrible.

First. Big respect to UlaVii for pouring in all the effort. I really appreciated your posts and the work the Wookies did on TOFN. Yet it is 21:15 now and the imperial fleet holds ~15 people. You hear the chilly wind in the empty halls...

Problem seems to be resolved on Freedon Nadd for now. He was all over the place yesterday. Yay!

Hey, same problem here (Freedon Nadd). I have been trying to catch him since the end of last year. I have spent ~ 5 hours at his spawn point and have been checking back numerous times, all to no avail. Only once did I ever see another player there, which turned out to be another lvl 60, most likely waiting for him as well. I have never seen a second instance on Belsavis and therefore I seriously doubt that he has been up on our server at all in the last weeks. Some clarification would be much appreciated!

Hi, after seeing images of Luke Skywalker with Yoda on his back walking through the misty petrified forest of Dagobah I believe that this would make the ideal setting for a future Dread Master flashpoint. (Something similar has been proposed: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=377675&highlight=dagobah) Visually I would try very hard to recreate the "fog all over the place" haunted forest atmosphere and implement some of that suspense in the fp mechanics as well. Generally there is next to no suspense in SWTOR. Everything is well mapped out on the net (thanks for all the nice guides and writeups girls n guys!). Only Boss fights provide some kind of suspense because you do not know if you are going to win and survive. In addition for several good reasons mobs in MMOs are generally static in position and constant in assortment of enemies. Then there are some walkers, but their position is kind of static too as they follow fixed routes. That leads to the awkward experience of slaughtering through the underlings of Boss X with that guy watching from the sidelines. Then when you turn to him he has no support left and dies quickly as well. It s surreal. It is necessary for several reasons but in a fp environment I would try to break that up more often. I believe that such a breakup in game mechanics would be idealy suited for the Dagobah fp. It could work like this: The group ventures into an especially foggy and creepy part of the forest where a dark side force user boss (dread master or what ever) has his or her base. The base is guarded by a fixed amount of his troops. If the boss knows someone is coming and where that someone is, he would probably commit as much troops as he possibly can to stop them. He would use his troops in a concerted action and not let them be slaugthered one by one. Also if he felt that his troops aren t up for the job he d probably join the fray with them. This should be recreated. In order to heighten the suspense there should be only moving mobs in the forest area. Also the composition of the mobs should be quite random. There shouldn t be scheduled routes for the mobs, but a certain amount of fixed paths the mobs travel on. Once a mob comes to a crossroad it randomly chooses its next path. This way it s never the same.Also the viewing distance should be low, so that surprise encounters are the norm. As the boss is suspecting something and has already sent out some of his troops to have a look he knows the players are there when he looses contact to one of his patrols at a certain location. He then decides the patrols are not up to the task and takes some of his more mobile and stealthy men with him and hunts the players. Let s say the boss and his men are perfect stealthers. After a short time they have found the player group and try to figure out if they would win a confrontation. If the group fights another patrol and the boss sees that the players are in trouble (e.g. a player is < 25 % health) he and his men charge and the group has a good chance to wipe. If the players are careful or simply overpowered (health never <75 %) the boss watches then pulls all his remaining troops back to his best defense location or his best surprise attack location and faces the players there with all that he has got left thereby increasing the difficulty. The boss would also call back his forces when he saw a certain number die. The call back would not teleport his patrols, but they would have to walk just as before, thus giving players a chance to intercept them and not have to kill them with the boss at the end. This would add a lot of suspense even to the mob fights as the Boss might already be lurking and watching you while you fight the mob and if you slack he might just jump out of the next cloud of fog. One could also add evil laughter of the boss now and then when he is already on the hunt but has not decided what to do. Also the amount and composition of adds that are there when you fight the boss should vary considerably depending on how many you were able to kill before. These ideas are surely only half baked so far, but I think that great stuff could be done with a setting like this. What do you say? Do you want more random encounters and more "intelligently" acting bosses? Or is there some inherent problem (other than graphic card power for fog calculation maybe) in the concept?