So... Let me get this straight... Your grand idea to make things better... is to essentially block what most F2P players probably start playing the game for to start with (story), force them to do group content, and basically be even worse off overall than they currently are? Have to say, over the years the SWTOR team really have done such a stellar job of embedding a strong core of hatred in their subscribers for any sort of F2P players. Truly, they have perfected the art of having subscribers who really do think themselves utterly superior to those lowly F2Ps who must be punished because how DARE they not pay. ----- Ahem. Regarding your first point. Cutting off class story content for F2P. I started as F2P. If I'd started under the model you suggest... Well... I wouldn't have stayed long at all. I would have probably played the planet stories on each side and then been done with it. 2 characters. I wouldn't currently be subbed with about 40 characters having played for several years. Bioware is known best for their single player RPG stories. So... what do you think most Bioware fans might expect when trying Swtor out? Even regular Star Wars fans, they've watched a movie, seen a great story, what would they like to see? What would impress them? Story perhaps? And... You want to basically take away the main selling point on what... the hope that they'll go 'oh but I know there MUST be an awesome story hidden behind this paywall! So of course I'll take a chance and pay, hoping it'll be something worthwhile!' Not being able to pick what individual Flashpoints I wanted to do would just make me not want to do them. It would stop me from being able to try and do them in order of story, or perhaps I only want to do the ones that I've done before so I don't screw up? Instead I'd get stuck with RNG flashpoints where they'll be in no sort of order, may be ones I have no idea how to play (and so might do poorly and get kicked out), and I might get stuck with the same ones coming up when I want to try different ones. This is a ridiculous idea. The visuals you mention show how little you've actually researched F2P restrictions and the current system. F2P AND preferred currently DO NOT get those heroic crates as you level, those are locked out under the no lockbox rewards restriction (aside from the alliance crates... which can't be opened unless you have done Kotfe). Command crates are also locked out already, because Pref cannot gain CXP and therefore cannot level up their Command ranks. Again, you're showing your ignorance of F2P restrictions. Currently someone starting as F2P already has fairly hefty restrictions on them. Those credit spammers you see? They get through because they play through those restrictions or pay a small amount to get preferred accounts. You don't think credit sellers can get sub accounts? I'll give you a hint: What kind of accounts do you think those spam in-game mails are from where they have 1 credit attached? F2P/pref can't send credits. With a karma system the credit sellers would just bump up their F2P accounts until they had the access they wanted and carry on as normal. On the other hand troll subs would have a field day with it being able to pick on anyone they came across that is F2P. Because I guarantee you that your trolls/griefers are not solely in the F2P population. Yes, almighty subs can be uncouth and vulgar too. The one thing I do agree on is that opening up say PVP and Ops to Pref or F2P players may help with queue times. If you haven't already driven most people away.

A few things... By restricting pure F2P to solo only flashpoints, you're taking away potential players willing to do grouped FPs. So you're narrowing the pool. Ideally what you want to do is open it up so you have more potential players doing it, thus slower wait times. So instead I'd suggest let pure F2P do group flashpoints, but have it similar to the current model: They can do it but with restrictions. Say they can only roll need and/or greed on FP loot a certain number of times. That way you're giving them a taste of FPs to see if they like it rather than just locking them out completely. Currently, F2P don't NEED access to top end gear or GC... Because they can't really do anything that requires that gear (Ops, ranked PVP etc). ----- Letting prefs have GC access would be interesting, though would have to not conflict with the whole prefs not being able to get crate rewards thing. Remember that already locks them out of any credit lockboxes and all heroic gear rewards. As for getting rid of the artifact authorization, what about people who already bought artifact authrization unlocks? Either per character or account-wide? Not to mention the fact that it still isn't even working properly in its current state as last I heard it was locking out normal RotHC items and random blues and greens too from prefs. It's supposed to only lock out purples. But I do agree that it would help open up the GTN market for purple items... that didn't sell above the credit cap. ------ I'm completely uninterested in the GC system so I don't really have anything to say about your proposed subscriber CXP changes. A credit cap increase/removal item would be great though. Only thing is from what I've read around, a number of people list (or used to list) that as the main reason they sub and don't drop to pref. I'm guessing with current prices if you put in a credit increase then you'd find GTN prices also increased with the new baseline. If you had something that removed the cap then you'd have some subs dropping to pref because of it.

Hmm let me take a look... Hutta Guy who gives Hostage Situation is still there, also to give the follow-up Hostage Situation Cleanup. Twi'lek who gave Factory Recall isn't there anymore. Man with the Steel Voice questgiver is gone too. Korriban Armed and Dangerous came from a terminal anyway. The Hate Machine questgiver is still there. Tython Chamber of Speech questgiver is still there. Ord Mantell Cutting off the Head was from a terminal too. Buying Loyalty, Gizmel is still there. Destroy the Beacons questgiver is gone. Huh, so not as bad as I thought, I'd mainly been on Ord Mantell and Hutta. Still, I don't know why they got rid of those three questgivers completely, especially since others were left in. And of course I'd still love to be able to access the end conversations of all heroics somehow.

At first I thought that with the heroic overhaul of 4.0 they'd just taken out all the heroic conversations completely. However after investigating it seems that they took out the starting world questgivers completely, but other worlds still have those questgivers you can start heroics at, the heroics just end automatically when you hit an end objective, same way they do if you picked them up off a terminal. So! I propose that if you go out of your way to pick up a heroic from the questgiver and not the terminal... Then you should also not have it auto-completed once you've hit the last objective, and should be able to return to the questgiver the old way and actually get the full end conversation to the heroic. And while they're at it, put those starter world NPC questgivers for those heroics back so we can do the same with those ones too. Because it's already created and existing content, why not let people play it if they want to? Seems a waste to just not use all those heroic end conversations at all. Just to be clear: What I'm suggesting would leave heroics you pick up at the terminals completely as they are with their auto-completion.

Prior to the Dark vs Light event I'd never ever gone with a full group in a flashpoint beyond doing some with my friend before level synch where we were high enough level to have no problems. I got all the tactical flashpoints needed done on my DvsL character. First I found out which ones had solo mode and took them off my queue, then as I completed one of the ones I wanted I'd again take that one off my queue so I kept narrowing down what I would get. My character was already at 65. Of the tactical flashpoints I did I only had to drop out of one. That was Hammer Station where we were all DPS, everyone else low level and we just kept ending up dead on just the first mob. After two others dropped out I did too. That was my second flashpoint. In my first it was Czerka Meltdown and there was a 65 that just steamrolled through everything in a flash, speeding through with force speed. We has a 50 healer and died once on the last boss but everything was a breeze, I was just struggling to keep up with the frantic pace With all the others more often than not I would get all DPS results with group finder. Of those only ONE of the all DPS groups went through to finish the flashpoint (Athiss I think, we were all high level), with all the other DPS groups I would attempt the fights with the rest while patiently waiting for someone to get sick of it and drop out. As soon as one of those DPS dropped out I or whoever happened to have the highest influence comp could summon it on heal and we always progressed through the rest with 3DPS and a comp with no problems. Another time we had 3DPS and one tank in the Czerka Corporation flashpoint, the tank pretty much ended up healing us and using kolto for us (my mouse button can be unresponsive so I have trouble with kolto which meant someone using it for me helped a lot), And then on two other flashpoints I struck the same person who was kind enough to explain the boss mechanics to me. I don't think any of the people I encountered were unpleasant. One was a little difficult at first but that was due to the language barrier, once we figured out how to work together that turned out fine too. Point is, only ONE of all those flashpoints I did went through to completion with four DPS. Every other groupfinder result of all DPS needed someone to drop out so a healer comp could step in and fill the gap. So yes, I'd say there is certainly something not right with things as they are now.

Same thing happened to me with the appearance modification kiosk. Put everything in and clicked accept... Cartel coins used and no appearance change. I made a ticket 2 or 3 days ago now and still haven't heard anything back yet. I'm going to give them 5 days to a week before I try emailing support. Guessing they're a little busy because of the expansion release. It's important to note though that they don't respond to bug reports, so you should create a ticket as well as the bug report explaining what happened.

Slightly off, F2P, or rather, Preferred (because F2P haven't spent anything and so can't access any content past 50 without paying and becoming Preferred) can access any content that was available when they were subbed (if they subbed). So say I had a sub that ran out when chapter 14 of Kotfe had been released? Even if I haven't taken a character through that I can still play it. I mean if you made the current GC for Preferred and something less grindy for subs you'd still have only those Preferred who had been a sub when Kotet was released or later able to actually access it. Any other Preferred players will have level caps under 70 and thus won't be able to take part. So it's not a huge thing but would certainly be a nice gesture.

Hmm... You know a lot of those planet quests and sidequests reset at some point... I wonder if the starter planet ones did too. Might pay to take a look and see if those quests are available to you now. I know a number of quests on DK that I've done have been reset. Not sure when they reset exactly, but sometime within the past year or two I guess.

I struck a bug a couple of days ago where I used the appearance modification kiosk... and although the 320 CCs were taken from my account, it didn't actually change my characters appearance at all. Created a ticket when it happened and still haven't heard anything. I just assume they're pretty busy at the moment what with an expansion having just been released and all the bugs, exploits etc that came with it. If I don't hear back from them in 5 days to a week I'll send an email to support about it. Just be patient and work on another character maybe? You could also try the stuck command too perhaps, see if that helps.

Making them Legacy bound would work, similar to how I think I ready they made starter class quest weapons legacy bound recently?

As the title says, I was intending to change the appearance of my character, popped everything in, clicked confirm... Nothing. My 320 Cartel Coins have been taken but my character still looks exactly the same. I've opened a ticket, but figured I should post here about it too. I was using the appearance modification station in my stronghold to do this. Needless to say the other characters I wanted to change will have to wait until I know this is working correctly again.

Spreading out 300k to everyone is a good start. As preferred you will have a limit of 350k. Now you can use escrow transfers to use above your limit (the way they work is you reach cap, use one, and it will allow you to use the credits in your escrow up to the amount they specify. So say you were at 350k cap and had a 600k escrow transfer you'd have 950k available to use. And apparently you can use more than one at a time.), but they tend to not be worth the cost that they go for on the GTN these days. There isn't a lot that goes for under 350k anymore, so really the best thing to do is spend it on anything you want now, and when you've gone pref just let it save up in escrow. It will be annoying because you get glaring red text reminding you that you've reached the credit cap every.single.time you gain any credits from something. But you get used to it after a while. Now the point of saving, is that you can use those 7 day referrals once every 3 months. Which means you get a 7 day sub once every 3 months. And with that, you can go on a spending spree with your escrow credits during that 7 days. As for alts, the base preferred amount is I think 8, and the maximum you can get with extra character slots is up to 26. So depending on how many slots you have unlocked, it might be worth trying to spend that 20mil on GTN character slots. Before you do though, there is currently a sale on character transfers for 90cc. So it might pay to quickly level a character to 10 on some of the more popular servers to check out their GTNs to see what the character slots are going for. If they're cheaper than your current server you might consider transferring a character over with the credits to buy them there, instead. You don't need to transfer the character back because character unlocks are account-wide. When I did the above I was able to find character slots going for 2.6mil instead of the 5mil on my own server. When you go preferred you'll be able to select what characters you want active. You can't change that selection. However if you activate another referral over 3 months from your last and get the sub from it, that will open up all your slots again and allow you to reselect what characters you want active when the 7 day referral ends again. Hope that all helps

Probably already been said, but I didn't see it in the first few pages. Also newly relevant what with Kotfe now being repeatable (and at various difficulties too). This shows that they have a system in place that can let us repeat the content, even if the choices from your first playthrough are the only ones that get locked in permanently. There is a lot of content in those class stories with many choices people could swap around to have a look at. So... Why not do the same with the original class story chapters as they just did with Kotfe?

I was invited once, declined, and had the person spamming me with constant group invites and following me around harassing me with AOE attacks until I managed to go somewhere they couldn't follow. Ugh. Generally if I've just started a Heroic or if there are very few of the creatures needed to kill like irradiated rakghouls on Taris, I'll accept. If I'm over halfway done already then I'll decline. If I get an invite in the middle of combat I automatically decline to get the stupid thing out of the way But I agree, sending a quick whisper would work well to... I guess show that you're not rude. Though understandably sometimes you'd have to be quick to let the person know before they've already churned through most of the heroic on their own.

I have to enter mine every time I turn off or reset my computer, and 1 to 4 times a day when my connection decides to reset itself Siiighh. So just three times a week sounds pretty good to me!