I totally agree. My point was that you can't achieve "balance" when there's so many things that need an overhaul. Teamwork is required. However, I am concerned that all the best players tend to congregate together on one faction meaning the other team never has a chance. Also agree -- imagine if you decided you wanted to play regular PvP on a new class. You make that class, start doing its story/easymode leveling, and then when you're level 12 you queue up. You're not thrown into a ranked arena versus guys in full ranked gear that are level 65 and have all their skills and hundreds of hours working on their rotations. You go into "lowbie PvP" which IMHO is the most fun PvP. GSF has no "lowbie" mode. However, I think it's a serious design shortfall that it's possible to "choose poorly." That said, the skills you can select while playing the main game, some of them have a "niche" and are there for variety to spice things up and don't have total utility. We have to play the hand we're dealt. On this point, let's think about it not in "real life" terms but in "setting" terms. A. Cinematically, yes, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are "better" than the mooks around them. OK, we see this all day in regular game, you are more powerful than 99% of the NPCs you blast on the field because you are the hero. But in GSF, how do you reckon with suddenly becoming the nameless faceless NPC that dies instantly? It's a small scale arena which means further tweaking needs to happen. There's no consideration of "who the pilot is" -- game design change, what if your character's attributes had some effect in GSF? Currently they do not. But a Jedi flying a ship would have Jedi premonitions, Jedi abilities to dodge etc. B. Let's consider the concept of the fleet. The Sith Empire fields hundreds upon hundreds of small ships for a reason. It's the power of numbers. Sure, gunships might exist in the Old Republic era, but then you might legitimately see a case of one gunship with a couple of escorts having to take on twenty light fighters at once. Again, this would require a serious change in the design. There's no NPCs or external factors in the dogfight other than deathmatch power-ups and the defense satellite turrets at present. What if a "squadron commander" ship could call in fire support from a capital ship? What if a heavy fighter could temporarily make itself immune to long-range fire? What if a ship with missiles would automatically use the targeting computer to fire instead of having to hold down a button to try to get a lock? What if a scout/light fighter could have a handful of NPC buddies with it to screen it? There are many things that did not go into the design that could "make sense' in the fantasy space opera setting but we don't have any of them. C. If you look at the source material, let's examine something like the Battle of Yavin sequence from Episode IV. The dogfight scene basically tells us, "if a TIE Fighter gets behind an X-Wing, the only way out is if another X-Wing comes and saves it by shooting down the TIE Fighter." Or, Luke's about to get shot down and suddenly Han and the Millennium Falcon save his bacon from "out of nowhere." I think it might make for a more entertaining game if you could somehow capture more of this feeling. In the end, we're stuck with what we've got. The only things we can actually do are try among ourselves to improve teamwork. If a rookie pilot has an experienced pilot watching his back that can improve the experience. And yes, we can work out maneuvers ahead of time, good ideas.

If we take a stroll back to the subject of the thread: A number of fundamental flaws exist in the game design. You can't have balance. 1. Rule of Cool is in the game design. What do I mean? Well... you want me to believe that space craft in a high space fantasy setting can't lock missiles onto each other from many miles away even though lowly air craft in the real world can do this. "Realistically" ships with missiles should have longer ranges than gunship railguns. Missiles have much longer ranges than artillery in real life. We need to come up with some crazy explanation as to why a strike craft can't use its weapons until the enemy is flying past them at a ridiculous speed. We could say "oh jamming technology is too good" or something but it's just an excuse; it's a necessity of an arena setting like this. Similarly, strike craft should be MUCH faster than gunships, and scouts even faster again. It's like a speed boat versus a fishing boat. But again, if everything moved at "realistic" speeds the game would be too twitchy and the maps too small. Game engine limitations. 2. The design of many of the ships is heavily influenced by wanting to remind you of X Wings and Tie Fighters and other Star Wars tropes, and actual gameplay balance comes second or third. As a result, it's way off kilter. We are so far beyond the launch period of this that it's becoming inaccessible. The very fact that there's a right way and a wrong way to "build" your ship is a bad thing. Why have so many different possible ways to kit out your craft if a lot of them are useless? This can't be the way they wanted it. Otherwise every ship would have the same equipment. 3. Everything above notwithstanding, how much sense does it actually make for the team to be able to have as many of whatever craft they want? IMHO it does not make sense. The Republic fleet would not consist of an infinite number of each craft. Some are far more expensive or larger than others. Size alone would mean a cruiser could only carry 4 scouts, 2 strikes... maybe one bomber in the shuttle bay... and no gunships at all, they're so big that they're the same size as the Player ships in the rail shooter from launch. See where I am going? The game might be more interesting if in a match only a certain number of each class of ship was allowed on the field. You could even mix it up where in different scenarios, different kinds of squadrons clashed. It would require fundamentally different game design however. Oh, and let's not even get into the inherent illogic of respawns. I saw a guy cap a sat and then smash and blow up on purpose to respawn in a bomber. 4. My firsthand experience of late has been that "Faction A sucks and always loses. Faction B doesn't." You can't tell me that it's a good thing that all the players with a modicum of skill have a huge incentive to join Faction B. Maybe it would dilute the ranks of B with a bunch of bad players but I don't see it. I don't know what the answer to this is, but perhaps eliminating same-faction battles for a start. That way, Faction B can't practice against themselves all day and then Faction A comes up for an occasional 999-1 drubbing. It would require the experienced players to spread out across both sides. (Or you'd never get a queue.) 5. I see many frustrated players trying to express this simple notion: "Being killed in one shot from far away over and over is not fun." No, it's not. But it's the way it's built. They wanted sniper ships. Curious that Darth Vader didn't just fly across the surface of the Death Star in his Tie Gunship X2 and take out Red Squadron with a few well placed force guided railgun shots. There's no gunships in Classic Star Wars, why are there gunships in SWTOR? They're out of place. I know you love them, but they don't belong. And newbies die by the score to gunships and come here and complain that it's just not fair. It may be true that they'd lose fair and square against the same players even if everyone was flying the same ship, but that's beside the point. 6. Go and watch another Rule of Cool thing about fighters: Top Gun. Cheesy awesome movie. "You never, ever leave your wingman." Right. There's nothing inherent to the game design to get people to cooperate and watch each other's backs. Strike fighters are dangerous if it's 2 against 1. You can dodge the first missile, but can you dodge the second?

This whole thread is one giant Too Long; Didn't Read. Let me help you out. TL DR: you weren't actually paying attention and got details confused; naturally this is because the story has been retconned into oblivion so we don't know what the heck is going on. Also the game has been made so easy that you don't need armor any more. No one knows why but everyone is angry about it. Except those fools that liked 12X XP so much who are responsible. The Nerd Rage is strong. Many have fled.

With the number of "we accidentally broke all of everything" bugs, including nigh inexplicable things, I think this is a sign. Whenever a game has major broken stuff that doesn't ever get fixed, that's the end times.

Tried tweaking various graphics settings and nothing affects it. Noticed two other items -- 1, some of your attack animations don't seem to display on target dummies, e.g. bounty hunter's rail shot. 2, seems to mostly be blaster bolts coming from player characters' weapons. NPCs that attack you sometimes have much brighter shots; other times they seem dull and needle-like. Animations like background turrets shooting and GSF laser shots don't seem to be affected. Lightsabers look nice and bright. Which brings me to the last point, wouldn't people be screaming if suddenly all lightsaber blades were tiny and colorless?

Actually the bug is a bit more irritating on Odessen -- if you take a queue to go into a starfighter game or a pvp match, sometimes the music that was supposed to be playing on Odessen starts playing... at the same time as the score from the warzone plays. What a racket.

I skimmed through the forum and did not see this posted elsewhere. Since the last update, it seems to me that the visual animation for blaster bolts doesn't look the same as it used to, it's like the bolts are really skinny now. I'm trying to determine if that's just some weird interaction with my particular graphics card with something that changed in the patch, or if others are noticing the same thing. Or perhaps is it a case where the game was updated to allow for new sparkly lightsaber effects and it had an adverse affect on other animations? If it's my imagination I apologize but it seems distracting and not a coincidence. For reference my graphics card is a GTX 980.

Honestly I've struggled with this. It seems to me that what REALLY happened was the writers decided to ret-con the Emperor's actions. Up until the end of Ziost the writing seemed to be going towards "OK the Emperor has become COMPLETELY unhinged and he just wants to cause the apocalypse." ...and then we get KOTFE where we now have to accept Valkorian as being the same guy but the whole thing was a lie. He didn't really want to destroy the galaxy, he just told you that to keep you on your toes. He vaped the people on Ziost and that was good enough and now he's different. Heck in game if you ask him the question, Valkorian just says "change overtakes us all" i.e. "they retconned my personality! And changed voice actors!" So now we have our retconned supervillain with his infinite starfleet of droid battlecruisers that he pulled out of nowhere and yet somehow, one stupid bounty hunter shoots him in the back while Arcann keeps him distracted and it's all over? You're saying he can be in two places at once on the opposite ends of the galaxy but "hey look, what's that over there?!" works on him?? Now he's a ghost inside your head? Now that I see it all written out it's laughable. I give up.

I've been told in whispered tones that a lot of people use an exploit which I shall not repeat here but which involves causing yourself to lag on purpose. And that this has the effect of making your ship look like its in 2 places at once. I've seen it myself. Is HQ aware of this? Are they ever going to stop people from cheating?

OP XP + level sync + OP gear (especially crafted leveling armor) = boring. I keep seeing this. So, here's an idea, and I don't know if this has been suggested before, but why not use the tools we know exist? What if it was possible when arriving on a planet for experienced/veteran players looking for a challenge to enter an instance where all of the enemies on the world you're working on your class story etc. are tougher opponents, like what you see in hard mode ops and flashpoints? Obviously the game engine can be set to a higher difficulty and there can be mechanics. Why reserve it just for endgame operations? As an optional feature, players could choose to go into a much more difficult version of the instance, if they want to and select it. In said instance, the enemies would actually require effort to defeat and would be able to damage you, even if you are in level 65 "raid" gear. If you're not interested, enter the "normal" instances we have now. Players leveling this way could be rewarded with additional common data crystals etc. so that when they hit level 65 they can afford to purchase a set of the baseline endgame gear. Bioware implemented challenges in Dragon Age Inquisition called "Trials" which you could optionally turn on to seriously impact leveling. One of the options called "Tread Softly" made it so at any time, any mob on the field could randomly spawn as an elite instead of a regular/weak enemy. In large battles this can get hairy; imagine if every rakghoul on Taris was silver or gold. All of them. Another trial is the player earns XP at half the normal rate. Yet another made so all enemies spawn at the same level as the player no matter what. They have the tools, they just need to use them. As an aside, if you are leveling and you find it boring, just don't bother to get any equipment. I was running around on Alderaan wearing level 16 green armor and only then could enemies actually, you know, hurt me. I had a decent weapon and offhand, but that was all.

Go back out to the bug report forum and follow Tait's instructions the streaming/bitraider bug sticky. In a nutshell you delete a few files out of the Bitraider folder and then re-run the launcher. For me once I did that it started the process of "reorganizing" and "verifying" the game. As I write this, it's currently re-downloading some files. This problem is likely related to so many people needing to patch and re-patch all at once. Was never a big fan of the Bitraider software. In all likelihood some of the important game files were corrupted for some people and therefore the patcher actually needs to download files other than "just" the 4.1a hotfixes. Will advise once it's finished if this actually got it going again.

I feel compelled to point out that the quality of your team can have a drastic impact on how you do in GSF when starting a new character. I have my share of wins and losses. On my "main" on Harbinger I have a couple of ships mastered (one scout and one strike fighter.) Trying to start out a new character on a different server was extremely exasperating. It started to devolve into "oh look by the time I got to the objective, everyone else on my team was already dead and respawning. So now it's me vs. 5 and I die." Wash, rinse, repeat. A system could be implemented that matches up players based on their upgrades. So the folks going into the queue with a gunship with everything maxed out would only come up against opponents with everything maxed out. But there aren't enough players that the queue would ever pop.

In the absence of new flashpoints designed for level 55, perhaps to increase the variety, the existing level 50 Hardmode flashpoints could be tuned up and offered again with the same challenge level as the new versions of Athiss, Cademimu, Hammer Station, and Mandalorian Raiders. The only logical reason to keep the old structure for a time is for those people who have not purchased the expansion pack to still have level 50 endgame content. Therefore level 55 versions would be welcome. Doing the same 3 or 4 missions gets tedious. That said, I think we would all love to see some new flashpoints (as opposed to more operations) along the lines of what was done with Kaon Under Siege and Lost Island.

Yes I would expect the schematic itself to bind on pickup. But when you use the schematic you learn to make an item. And the item you make binds on pickup, meaning that only you, or one of your companions, can use it. I forgot about offhand sabers in the description but that's also BOP. But the offhand focus or shield for a Guardian is NOT bind on pickup when you craft it. So something is wrong here. The only other examples I know of where crafted items bind on pickup, making them only usable by the crafter, are reusable Rakata adrenals and medpacs and stims. But those schematics are purchased from the Biochem trainer for credits, not for commendations. The old Exotech med unit schematic can be purchased with Classic Commendations now but the produced product does NOT bind on pickup. I would really like to believe this is a mistake. It makes no sense. At least if I was a smuggler class then either myself or a companion could use the crafted shotgun. But as of right now it's vendor trash and a total waste. I could have bought an Arknanian Relic for the same price as the useless schematic.

I want to register my extreme displeasure with the fact that the Armstech offhand schematics that can be purchased for 150 Basic Commendations produce items that bind on pickup. How absurd! Artifice offhand shields/foci bind on equip. Biochem implants bind on equip. Cybertech earpieces bind on equip. Armormech armor parts bind on equip. So why on earth do the offhand weapons (which are only even relevant to scoundrels and mercenaries!) bind on pickup when made?!? I recognize that these items can only be obtained by crafting with Isotope-5, but the high price and the fact that they can't be sold on the GTN, unlike the offhands produced by Artifice, makes this a complete waste of time. Furthermore, if a mainhand weapon of rating 156 can be purchased for only 85 Basic Commendations why does the Offhand SCHEMATIC which requires a unit of Isotope-5 (drop from Toborrow's Courtyard operation or bought for ANOTHER 35 Basic Commendations) cost 150 and can basically be used one time?? Please tell me this is actually a BUG that can be FIXED. Otherwise I just bought a shotgun schematic on my Vanguard who can't use shotguns! (I intended to craft for an alt.) It failed to register that in the list of dozens of schematics the offhand weapons said bind on pickup while everything else in the list says bind on equip.