I know this is the Suggestion Box, but it's still the closest thing to a "player feedback" category we seem to have, so here goes: I'm a strong believer that letting someone know when they're doing something right can be just as constructive as letting them know when they're doing something wrong, and I just wanted to say "thank you" to the team at BioWare for the continued effort and support you're providing to the game, even in the midst of heated player controversy and the potentially-awkward conversations with EA+Broadsword. The 7.3 update — as small as it may appear to be — has, from my perspective, been a massively refreshing change in design priorities. Straight out of the gate, I'm a lot more optimistic about the Nul storyline, and without spoiling anything I think Malgus has suddenly become a "lot" more interesting than he's been since pre-Onslaught, or perhaps even since the game launched back in 2011. I admit that I've been getting very exhausted from the constant Mandalorian shenanigans, which to me have only ever felt appropriate for the bounty hunter origin story, so my views may be skewed. Heading back to Voss to delve into ruins and uncover ancient weapons has been a breath of fresh (musty) air, and I look forward to seeing where we're heading next. In the spirit of providing positive reinforcement for these recent decisions, I've compiled some thoughts below. World Design: Compared with Ruhnuk, the area design for the Voss Interpreter's Retreat has been a night-and-day difference. With far fewer narrow canyons/corridors constantly forcing you into tediously long fights with elite enemies, it feels like one of our vanilla planets of old. I can finally move from point A to point B in a comfortable amount of time without getting knocked off my mount or needing to trudge through heroic-level trash mobs to get to my solo-quest objective (I still think those northern canyons with gold/elite Vorantiki in them are a pain though - note for future quest zones). Narrative: Without reiterating what I've already said about Nul, Malgus, and the Mandalorians — I think addressing what's happened in the time since the player was last on Voss, and grounding us in a narrative that doesn't cut corners or make assumptions has been the right way to go. While I do think the initial "reason/justification" for returning to Voss at the beginning of 7.3 was a bit unconvincing/forgettable, I do think it got more interesting once I started being given dialogue choices relating to my previous interactions/decisions on Voss in the past. Hopefully one day we can move past the Gormak/Voss diplomatic dramas and into some heavy-hitting revelations that finally result in the Mystics getting over themselves and taking some action — against Czerka or otherwise. Quests: While we continue to be somewhat hampered by uninteresting "filler" content at regular intervals, I must say that at the very least — it's easy filler content. Progress is steady, without many blockers aside from that one bugged quest with the debris not spawning back in properly. It's something to do, has varied objectives, and makes use of quite a few different interaction mechanics. It would be nice if a few of these made a bit more narrative sense relative to the environment they're in, maybe helping to tell more of the story somehow (eg. inform us a bit more about the history of the place we're exploring, or expand on character backstories) but it's certainly not the trash-mob nightmare we had on Ruhnuk, so I'm still grateful for the low-stress tasks. Flashpoint: I hugely appreciate the writers/designers not trying to shoehorn the new "Shrine of Silence" flashpoint into the core storyline. Being able to play that content cooperatively/separately, and experience it for the first time with friends rather than forcing us all into our own solo-story mode instances to "unlock" group mode has been a big step in the right direction. I look forward to sticking to this format for future content, and perhaps even group story conversations could make a comeback sometime soon. Although it was less "cinematic" than previous examples, I thought the environmental storytelling in this flashpoint was awesome, and probably my favourite thing about this release. I'll continue to avoid spoilers for anyone reading, but there were 2-3 moments with significant foreshadowing/very obvious set pieces that got me thinking about "what this place actually is", followed by the area map titles confirming those suspicions moments later when I uncovered them. It seems like the level designers were really thinking about pacing and unraveling parts of the story without the need for dialogue — just gameplay — which I think is a huge step forward from some of the other recent content... I'm looking at you, Ruins of Nul... The final boss design was fantastic, by the way! Great use of an existing rig+animation set to create something that looks and feels completely different. Conclusion: Considering the current state of BioWare, EA, and the Star Wars IP, I think this content release has been a remarkable display of solidarity and commitment to the game, and shows that the devs aren't going to leave this game to the wolves if they can help it. Keep at it, fam!

I can definitely confirm that I received multiple stacks of all of those exact items as well. BioWare's really narrowed the pool on those "Season Pass" Cartel Packs. Certainly not the same pool as standard Ultimate Cartel Packs. If I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, they probably did announce that they were different loot pools somewhere in their Season Pass notes, but it still seems dubious to label them as "Ultimate Cartel Packs". The average player would expect it to be the same pack as the ones sold on the CM. As for the other info - that's all very interesting! It's good to know that the Season Pass was even less worthwhile this time around, as well as the rep requirement for the achievement being almost impossible for a F2P/Preferred player. I still think that limited-time achievements are massively counter-productive to retaining long-term players. There's nothing more discouraging to an achievement hunter than starting a game and seeing dozens of timed-out achievements that will never be obtainable again. I also take issue with the fact that they added a PvP Battle Pass. There are already PvP objectives on the regular Galactic Seasons objective list, so why create a dedicated PvP one, other than to force PvE-centric completionists to play content that they don't want to...? It's a bit of a slap in the face to people who put the work in to finish the main Galactic Season IMO. "Oh, you finished our Battle Pass? Well here's another one that you definitely won't be finishing. Get rekt."

In particular, this is a huge issue with public groupfinder channels such as "Allies". With the amount of people joining and leaving these channels every few seconds, the "System Feedback" filter becomes effectively useless with the amount of spam that ends up in there. There should be a dedicated "Personal Channel Feedback" filter that we can disable separately for specific channels, so we can still see other important system info in our main tabs, such as Ready Check results.

Sure, I agree. I mean, I'm not an RPer myself but it certainly seems like a niche feature even by those standards. To me it always seemed like a "nice to have" tool that the devs put in without thinking too much about how it would actually be used by players, if at all. It's not like the characters on the Tree could ever interact with each other, or even appear on the same game screen next to each other, since you can only have one character logged in at a time. This is something I would expect "pure-play RPers" to put on pen and paper instead, more in line with what JediQuaker is suggesting, since those are the players who would be writing their own massive bios for their characters anyway. Replacing the Tree isn't the only way to implement this suggestion of course. I'm just using it as an example because it seems like an easy thing to update that not many people get much use out of, and a lot of the required functionality is already implemented there. Character names, portraits, relationship icons, etc. I'd be fully on-board if BW just decided to add this as a separate tab in the Legacy window, keeping the Tree if people think it's worth having. I just think a readily-accessible relationship / player info tracker would be more useful to the vast majority of players, since this is information that actually affects gameplay, and future story outcomes as BW continues to maintain and write them. I'm sure a lot of people are already doing that (I do have a spreadsheet for keeping track of my crafting skills). It would be a nice quality-of-life feature if people didn't have to do that though, wouldn't it...? And it would provide a nice platform to display other important character info, as I've suggested.

I would love this. Or at least some way of filtering the companion list by "most used" or "highest influence level". The way they're categorized currently doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. It seems like they're partially sorted by how they were originally obtained, and partially sorted by story importance. Bit of a mess if you ask me

As someone who has 14+ characters at this point, and enjoys taking different story routes on each playthrough, I think it would be a cool feature to have a way of tracking which of your companions is "locked-in" as the primary romance option, and to have a way of confirming when major changes occur, aside from the occasional one-time warning that pops up whenever a conversation option is going to affect a relationship. Personally, I frequently forget which of my lesser-used characters were romanced with which companions. An easy and productive way to implement this would be to replace the "Family Tree" window with a Legacy-wide character tracker, which simply lists important information about each of your player characters. This could also go as far as including major story decisions, light-side / dark-side alignments, assigned crafting professions, and other info. I think this would be a much more useful tool to have than the Family Tree, since the Family Tree doesn't even make sense from an RP perspective. Eg. How could my Sith Inquisitor be the father of my Bounty Hunter? The timelines don't line up in the slightest. As a side note — I'd love to see some more romance integrations with the story in the future. Eg. A significant "bad guy" presumably kills your romanced companion at the start of a questline, giving the player a personal investment in hunting down the one who did it, only to reveal later that your companion is alive and in captivity, giving the player a choice/opportunity to rescue them. I would use the Kyle Katarn / Jan Ors scenario in Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast as an ideal example. Anyways, feature-creep aside I think it would be a good starting point to implement a romance tracker of any sort . I've talked about it with a number of people and we all thought it would be a much-appreciated addition to the game. Cheers.

I may be the only person who wants this, but I sure hope that I'm not. SWTOR has been getting quite the reputation as a "single-player MMO" over the last few years, and as someone who would love more reasons to attract new players to the game, I'm really struggling here. I don't think it needs to be stated that the multiplayer dialogue system was one of the biggest—if not the biggest selling point of the game when it released in 2011 (from a multiplayer perspective). I know people always tout the vanilla class stories as the best part of the game, and often I'm one of those people. But as an MMO, the multiplayer dialogue system is the USP, and I think it's kind of depressing that it's not being used anymore. From what I've seen after completing the Republic-side of the latest 7.0 expansion, it seems that there actually isn't any focus being put on playing with your friends (or anyone else), even when there is ample opportunity to do so. The choices available to the player throughout the new missions are very small-scale character interactions and could easily be implemented for a group, given the writing and the tools that already exist for multiplayer dialogue. The "saboteur" questline is the only exception to this, where some compromise would need to be arrived at. Maybe doing saboteur stuff in-between the larger missions, or occasionally just giving group members different objectives within the same quest area. I'm one of those apparently-rare people who enjoys playing games with my friends on weekends, and while we used to have a great time with the vanilla planet storylines and side-quests, there has been almost none of that over the course of the past 3-4 years, aside from the occasional daily area, which never gave us much content to explore anyway. What are we supposed to do whenever a new expansion drops? Just play single-player for a couple of hours and then go back to 10-year-old flashpoints...? I appreciate that new flashpoints do get added occasionally, but the group versions are always irrelevant to narrative progress, since you're forced into playing the solo-story mode for that. In a nutshell, if the new "main story" quests were treated more like the old planet questlines (being 1-4 players), I think it'd be a reassuring step forward, and I honestly don't think that would be hard to do, given that we're locked to interacting with story characters that can't be killed off or significantly affected through player decisions (Arn, Tau, Malgus etc). At this point I feel like I would scream with joy if I were to enter a new story mission while grouped with my friends, see all of our characters step into frame as a team for the opening dialogue, and then be able to play through a mission together, just like the good old days.

Hey there! I'm a New Zealand player in an active Imperial guild called "Something Something Darkside" on Star Forge. We also have a Republic sister guild called "Something Something Pubside". It's primarily a US-based guild, but I play with two of my NZ friends on weekends, and I know of at least two Australians in the guild as well. If you're interested you can log into the game, press "O" to open your social panel, go to the "Who" tab, then in the search box type "Something Something". You should be able to find any of our guild members who are online, and message them to direct you to someone who can recruit you Happy gaming!

I think maybe you're getting a tad hung up on the 2nd job part. I believe what he means is that the grind is so bad, you may as well just be working extra hours on top of your 40 hour work week instead of playing the game, because it's not that fun (feels like work). As for the actual point of the post, I do agree that Galactic Seasons is quite the grind, even for subscribers. The data the OP has collected there is pretty interesting, and I think it would be valuable for the devs to look into as a reference point for some of their more driven/hardcore players. As a "fairly" casual player myself, I did manage to complete the Season on one server, but I was stressing about it the entire time, trying to make sure I was getting my weekly POs done every week, and my dailies every day I could manage to get a chance to play. Unfortunately, it did mean I was spending about 90% of my available playtime doing POs, instead of the content I actually WANTED to be playing. It certainly is a grind, and honestly the rewards didn't really seem worth it in hindsight (in my opinion). I would much prefer it if the previously-existing Conquest rewards contributed to a daily Season point cap, because a lot of those are activities that I actually do end up doing as part of content I want to play. As long as it keeps players logging on 4/7 days a week, surely that achieves the purpose of Galactic Seasons, right? Just let players do what they want to do, instead of forcing them to kill x amount of bugs on Balmorra for no other reason than because that was the random PO that popped up on that day. At the very least, give players a way to pick and acquire the same POs so they can group up and share progress (because an MMO is about playing with other people, I would have thought...)

This is the Canon one from Legends, pulled from "The New Essential Guide to Characters": https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/3/39/DarthBane-NEGTC.png/revision/latest?cb=20221018161141 So yeah the cosplayer isn't far off. Personally I'm not a huge fan of it in either rendition. As far as CM items go, you win some, you lose some. I'm sure that whoever made the in-game model tried their best, but you just don't know what you're gonna end up with when the art directors ask for this stuff. I have similar gripes with Mandalore the Preserver's armor, and a few other sets based on EU content. Maybe they'll get another pass one day, but who knows.

Agreed. This layout already had complaints on the PTS so I'm not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea to push it live in this state. Classic example of something that's been made purely functional with not much thought to UX.

This is a great list, awesome work! If I had to pick one to support it'd definitely be 21). Friends and ignored individuals should definitely be listed by Legacy name rather than Character name. ESO does it that way without issue, so I don't see why SWTOR shouldn't, especially when some people have 40+ characters now. If the other party needs to accept friend requests for it to be implemented, then that's an acceptable compromise to me. In addition to 55), I would also suggest that the guild player cap should be measured by number of legacies, not characters, again because some players have a lot of characters that they want to be able to communicate with their guild on without bloating the 1000 character cap. A member cap of 200 legacies or so would be a viable alternative. As a completely different suggestion, I would like to add that F2P players should be able to use artifact gear and have access to operations. I'm not F2P, but I do play with people who are, and it's more of a detriment to me, a paying customer, when I can't get a full party to play operations or master-mode flashpoints with when there are plenty of F2P people who would be willing to fill the gaps if they were allowed to access the content and required gear.

I don't think anyone here described it as a "feature", haha. It's a bit of a hack for sure, but it would've been useful if it still worked. I am aware of the importance of the prefix numbers . All of my characters are on the same server, and I always check their original settings files to make sure I'm getting it right. The devs are entitled to fix this sort of thing, since it was obviously never intended to be used this way in the first place, so I'm not complaining. It would be nice if they implemented an account-wide friends list though, to save me the trouble of even needing to attempt this

FYI, this doesn't appear to work anymore (2.5 years later, I know). I copied my character's LocalSocialSettings.ini file and renamed it to another character of the same faction, logged in on that character, and the list was unchanged. Adding a fresh comment to a pre-exiting friend on that list seems to wipe the "copied" contents of the file and replace it with the new comment that was set in-game. Oh well xD

Woah, that's a cool one! Very clean. I can see what Maxitrac was saying about stacking skills around the raid frame. Good stuff. I was playing around with Vulkk's layouts yesterday and I "think" they might work across most of my characters https://vulkk.com/2016/12/12/vulkk-swtor-ui-5-0-installation-instructions-keybinding-guide/ It'll require a bit of training, haha. And I'll have to figure out how to lay out my Sorc skills in place of his Operative ones on his healing layout. Still doesn't accommodate DPS skills very well when I need them, but maybe I can figure something out there.