Interesting that you'd bring up that game in this context. SFC3's gameplay was significantly simplified relative to SFC2/OP, undoubtedly in an effort to reach a wider audience that may otherwise be turned off by the complex tabletop ruleset and mechanics of the previous installments. They even abandoned the old SFB setting to move to the more commercially appealing TNG. Yet, predictably, not even Sir Patrick Stewart could save the game from being a complete bomb, and Taldren folded some time after they released it. I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned somewhere...

Do you have any hard figures for all that? Yeah, didn't think so. Yeah. A school shooting also draws attention. What is your point? Get it through your skull. I don't have to be "helpful". I am merely stating a preference. I'm sorry this bothers you so deeply that you need to write a treatise every time you reply. Yes. I will unsub and uninstall the game. Plenty of stuff to keep me entertained. What the hell? I said I unsubbed and forgot about the game during the 4-5.0 era. Came back when I got word that they had completed GftM and were moving away from galactic command -- decided to stay when they announced a new full raid. I do not have any ulterior motives, I do not intend to "punish" Bioware, that's just stupid. I simply don't like where they are going, so I stop paying. I have no attachment. What's so hard to understand? No, that's the impression you are getting because that's what you want to believe, as it's what fits your narrative and validates your discourse that all will be well regardless. Go ahead and check out the feedback threads. Never in the history of the game has there been such unanimous negative reaction against proposed changes. Wow. Those trends match what I said almost to a T. Dec 2018 is when 5.10 dropped, which is the Ossus and nim GftM patch. Oct 2019 marks the release of 6.0, which is a big chunk of content including the new raid. It's almost as if... people don't want stupid changes and more content draws them in and keeps them around. You're making this too easy. Trying to be seer now? Don't quit your day job. I don't really care about story. I haven't even done the latest bits. And there's plenty of other games with good stories. Star Wars games, too. I can get my fix anywhere. I see what's happening. You are a revolving door story player, and think everyone else is too. Nah, I've been logging for raids almost exclusively for more than a year now. Other people just do pvp. Just because the gameplay isn't keeping you around doesn't mean it's not keeping anyone around. It seems to be keeping enough people around to keep the lights on between content drops at least. See above. I'm excited to get new raids. Yes, that's combat. I don't care what "a lot of people" (i.e. you) do or enjoy. You don't have any hard facts on that, either. You are literally imagining a bunch of stuff and attempting to pass it off as facts. Your hypotheses don't even explain what's been happening, either. Heh. It's becoming increasingly clear that you have no clue what you are talking about. It took them close to two years to finally scrap galactic command (from early 2017 to late 2019), not two months. And during the transition we got the lame Ossus gearing which, while not as bad as the atrocious GC, was still not good. Nice framing, but no. It's not "game will die regardless so it doesn't matter if we do this". It's more "this is looking like it might significantly harm the game's health, so why do it?". And again, it's not EA making decisions on what resources Bioware pools for SWTOR. That's a Bioware decision. It was a Bioware decision to move people to Andromeda, to Anthem, and now to DA4. Not EA. Lol. The costs of keeping servers running are peanuts these days. AWS, Azure, you name it. One click and you double your throughput instantly. A few hundred subscribers can probably keep those games running. And your own figures show that's not where SWTOR is necessarily headed. So once again it falls to you to prove why SWTOR needs this when even your own figures show relatively stable and respectable population numbers between content drops. Stop reasoning back from your desired conclusion. "No that's a fallacy" is not an actual argument or rebuttal. But I see you are short on those, even if you try to cover that by typing a whole lot. Maybe spend less time chopping up posts and writing theses and more playing the game. Who knows, you may even learn to appreciate the gameplay.

I like that you arrived at this conclusion by retreading your basic argument throughout this thread. That is, that Bioware know what they are doing, that they have always been doing the same thing, and that nothing will really change because this is a repetition of past cycles. So no point asking for improvements and we should instead offer business advice because then they might just listen. However, that glosses over the constantly changing development focus and priorities and instead uses an ad-hoc infallibility hypothesis to suggest that it was their plan all along rather than the far simpler and more likely explanation that they have no clue where to take the game. This is supported by the turnover in the company and the changing of game directors. It seems to be a pattern throughout the company, not just in Austin, and affects other products as well. So how about you address what I actually said rather than what you wish I said -- that the announced gameplay changes will, in their current form, cause me to stop giving them money because it is a strict downgrade in the gameplay. That seems to be the opinion of many others as well. We may or may not come back to the game at some point, but that seems like an unnecessary gamble to make when sticking to making more content and bugfixing has significant less risk of alienating current customers. Again: in a market oversaturated with options, it's... extremely optimistic to assume that your next content patch will draw back all the customers you sacrificed when chasing after yesterday's fad. Is the revolving door strategy paying off when after several server merges, you still end up with dead servers and content is hard to pug even in the more active ones? All part of the plan, I guess. Oh, and since you brought it up. Have you actually played any of those other MMOs you mentioned lately? Because for example DDO is a complete wasteland, with the remaining population being a few dozen vets grinding high reaper on their way to their 285th TR. No LFG, no guilds recruiting (because there is no one to recruit), no non-reaper raiding. And that's even after a massive promo last year where they gave away 95% of the content. Doesn't sound like a winning strategy to me, but I guess they also knew what they are doing, right? Because so long as there's at least one server running, it's technically not dead. No. I kept my subscription when they made a move away from the dreadful "thrill of the hunt", stepped up group content delivery, and committed to tech upgrades. That all happened during the later 5.x up until 6.1. I kept subscribing because they seemed to have veered away from the terrible 4.0 and 5.0 direction for good. No. I am playing the game in its current form. I do not think of my subscription as an investment or an ongoing development funding vehicle. Once it stops being worth it for me, I will stop paying. I am simply noting that with the current proposed changes, that will happen when the expansion is released.

Funny. I actually unsubscribed when they released KotFE. Only came back when they had completed their ridiculous episodic release plan for GftM, and decided to stick around when they announced a new full raid for 6.0. So about the time they did away with the atrocious galactic command thing and appeared to be committed to making content I'm interested in, steadily if slowly. So yeah, I am very mindful of the value I get from my money, and have been for years. When this goes through in its current form, I will once again take my business elsewhere. No drama. I don't think the game will "die" from this as in they will pull the plug either. They can still make a bit of money from whatever subscribers they can keep in maintenance mode. I will simply not be one of them. This is an irrelevant digression, in any case. You keep bringing up hypothetical reasons why Bioware (not necessarily EA, other studios have done fine and keep releasing quality products under them) keep doing the absolute minimum as if that were my concern. It is not. I do not care. RoI is their problem, not mine. I will convey my dislike of the changes they are proposing, and exercise my discretion when they implement those changes. Once again, that this fact seems to make you uncomfortable enough to keep trying to convince people how this isn't the right way to approach what is essentially a consumer-provider relationship is... baffling.

Perhaps you can explain how "do not implement a gameplay overhaul that no one asked for or wants" is a pie in the sky idea. Again -- whatever resources Bioware have at their disposal or want to devote to this game isn't the customer's problem. That's a business decision. If the game isn't profitable, kill it off (but we both know that's not the case by a long shot). If they insist on offering less and less for the same price tag, they should expect to lose business in what is an extremely competitive market as their customers wise up. Business overheads are not something that us, as customers, should be understanding of or sympathetic to, for the same reason that we do not get dividends from video game companies when they are successful. At the end of the day, this is me getting less value out of my sub fee, owing to simplified and less involved gameplay. I understand it may be good for them from a business standpoint. It is still bad for me. It is perfectly legitimate to voice this concern, and the need from many people to squelch this is frankly baffling.

This mentality is... completely backwards. And yet, so common. It is not up to me, as a customer, to tell Bioware how to make more money with less resources. It is, however, to convey my displeasure with proposed changes before they implement them. If they do go ahead with them regardless -and they will- then the only option left is voting with my wallet. Not gonna lie, it's pretty entertaining to watch the lengths to which some folks will go to rationalize their Stockholm syndrome. This notion that consumers need to provide business advice to companies to have their opinions heard is a new low. I doubt this is the kind of entertainment they were going for in their design meetings, though. Businesses compete for my attention -- not the other way around.

That's my point. He barely has any game knowledge, so it's hardly surprising that he gets manhandled by people who likely have hundreds, if not thousands of hours of experience, regardless of how much of a wizard he is in whatever other game he plays. He hasn't read stuff, he hasn't put in the time to learn. I don't know if he thinks it's too many buttons but that's what it looks like seeing as how he didn't use more than half the tools at his disposal. That's a problem with the player, not the game, and using him (or any other player like him) as a yardstick for problems with endgame content is a colossal mistake. If this 'problem' is what these changes are intended to address, then I understand the rationale behind them, but then their justifications as well as their promises of what the game will be after 7.0 and beyond ring rather hollow. Instead of addressing the learning process itself, by means of detailed tutorials, adequate practice modes and a mentoring system which facilitates knowledge transfer from experienced to new players, they simply intend to cut what's there to learn in half. A focus on a revolving door business model wrt customers rather than long-term engagement is one of this game's biggest problems as well, imo. So I don't know that a handful of stream subscribers trying the game for a week and then leaving is in fact good for the game. In any case, there's little point in engaging much more here. Minor adjustments may be made but the course is set. This is happening. It's too late for a significant overhaul. I doubt they'd be able to put out a polished version of what they currently have in six months -- a complete redesign of this according to the feedback they have been getting here seems like an impossibility.

Haha. You mean the big professional gamer that got globalled without using a single interrupt or stun and only popped a cd when under 30%? The big professional streamer who can't be ****ed to gear his character? The big influencer for whom force crush is 'a waste of rage'? I mean, if that's the kind of player they are targeting with these changes, everything makes much more sense now.

The CD on Force Charge is no longer affected by alacrity, even though the tooltip will say that it is. Warmonger is supposed to help with this for tanks (who should run no alacrity), but DPS are SOL.

Gross exaggerations really do not help the case you're making. I couldn't, for instance, just "face tank" Styrak's dragon in NiM before because 60% DR for 2s wouldn't do much... though it did help if didn't time a spit correctly, and it was great to have against Thundering Blasts. And, if anything, I had to pay even more attention, not less, because syncing the small 2s windows with incoming spikes is literally the opposite of "face tanking". Face tanking is what I did on my PT, so I'm glad they are getting a set bonus that rewards paying attention. Note also that the biggest cheese (shroud) is not only still there but actually got a buff because you can now have 2 charges on your cloak. I did play on PTS when you could stack Phasing Phantasm with the DR from spike (was 20%, not 10) and that was a bit much. Now you get an anemic 10% DR which you'll barely notice when Tyrans is hitting you for 40% of your HP with his TBs. They need to give tanks the DR from DPS FS, or up the % on the Spike set bonus to ~30%.

The ME trilogy was made in Unreal Engine 3. It wasn't "sold" to EA because devs use UE under license, and using a competitor's tech is understandably a big no-no for EA when they have their own tech.

Also fixing the seed would have worked. But doing it this way also stops you from circumventing the TF cap, so two birds with one stone and all that.

I tested this on my jugg, on Immortal and Rage, and it seems to work fine, looking at parse logs. However, Force Charge's cooldown is still not reduced by alacrity, as far as I can see. The tooltip says it does, but in fact it doesn't.

Oghren's doodads is where it's at.

There's also Jedi: Fallen Order coming out in a few days. That'll be clearly more up OP's alley than SWTOR, seeing how it's a typical action game where you can run around spamming one button and everything melts. I guess that's what passes for "rewarding" for some people. For me, rewarding is gradually shaving a few seconds off each of my dummies.