Best way to play sorc is to stop caring. No, really. Stop caring about how you stack up compared to other classes. Ignore it. Pretend it doesn't even exist. If you pay attention to that, you're going to have a bad time, because most of the time, it won't be flattering. You'll work twice as hard to do what mercs faceroll. You'll die when sneezed at twice after your 'god bubble' evaporates. You'll be allowed to freecast in pvp while warriors and mercs kill everyone important before they three-shot you because you're going to be pretty ignorable, unless you're throwing single target heals. ST healing will be your only moment to shine. You will be out-shone by mercs in this. Your DPS will be forgettable. You'll be just fine in pve, but your role in pvp will be to tell the people playing a real class how many people just rolled you at your objective point. You can always stand around objective points and be an ST healer until the people playing real classes get tired of you thinking you're a real healer, sneeze once and force you to bubble, then sneeze again when your bubble drops and kill you. Stop. Caring. The more you care, the more you'll ask pointless questions that won't be answered. You won't have any fun. You'll be annoyed all the time, every time you think about it. Just as soon as you stop caring about any and all of this, you'll be in a good place, and then you'll get to hear crappy players accuse you of being OP because you've got force speed and never want to reach through the internet and pour six gallons of beer into their PC case again.

The incentive is to collect decorations, decorate strongholds, build up a guidl ship and decorate that too. Then roleplay in them. What? You thought your idea of incentives were the only ones in existence?

But will SWTOR be around for years to come? *Slowly fades into a nearby shrub*

What? No. Why? Because this isn't supposed to be fun. What you're asking for is purely based in a desire to enjoy yourself, and that's not important. Now go buy things from the cartel market. That's what you're here for.

ITT: "Can we have this thing?" "OMG NO THAT WOULD BE WRONG YOU'D BE HAVING FUN WRONG" "But it wouldn't affect you in any way. You wouldn't have to solo ops if you didn't want to." "NOPE NEVER YOU'RE JUST TRYING TO HAVE FUN WRONG AND I'LL UNSUB IF THEY EVER LET YOU"

The answer to this and every similar question can be deduced by answering the following question. Can they sell it on the Cartel Market? When you answer this question...there's your answer.

Tank isn't supposed to be fun to play. You're supposed to do everything as a DPS and only flip to Tank when nobody else is foolish enough to do it instead. MMO gaming for many years has taught me this truth.

Representation matters to people that have historically been depicted dishonestly, if at all.

I'm ignoring Ossus gear. Whatever I get out of command crates is what I get. The weekly stuff too, when I bother to play enough to get it. I like the Ossus story stuff quite well. The daily quests are just the usual filler faff and are neither noteworthy or offensive in so being. Bugs will get ironed out in time, I'm sure, so no point getting fussed about those. This whole gear situation though...not feeling it at all. I suppose I don't need it either since I have no plans at all of doing the highest new machine raid stuff, and my 248 toons are rolling around on Ossus perfectly fine to the point that I don't expect I'd notice much difference even if I were rolling around in full 258's. As a matter of principle, I find it boring to once again have the sensible thing to do be to completely ignore the progression-related aspect of the new patch. I've got the entire month of December off so I can't say I don't have -some- time for nonsense like this...but I really just don't feel like spending my time on a ridiculous grind for gear I don't particularly need to do anything I'm going to be wanting to do anyway. I'd like to care, but the cost of caring is far too steep. The treadmill is too stupid. I will not jog on it.

Quoting TUX for truth. I don't really have anything to add to this.

...And I blame patch 5.10 woes, Bioware in general, Doug Shequen from back 8th grade algebra for spilling a Dr. Pepper on my bookbag at the start of class, Elvis Presley for being dead, the battery in my wireless headphones for being 100% charged, pigs for refusing to fly and the city of Des Moines for existing despite popular protest. My pancakes are ruined, and it is absolutely not the fault of the person that tripped on nothing and threw them halfway across the house.

Chat moderators would be excellent.

Fortnite and PUBG also don't exist. Apparently.

I made a character named Jake Peralta ala Brooklyn 99 to run around in PvP spouting one-liners and, every once in a great while, not suck. It was hilarious. I'm a big ol' fan of Star Wars and the lore, though I'm of the same mentality when it comes to PvP; if it's red, it's dead. I'm not out there PvP'ing because I care about the cut scenes anymore. They were neat the first few times I saw them back around launch. Nowadays? That's fossilized news. I think part of the fun is to stop taking it all so seriously and occasionally make something for the lulz. I mean heck, I've got very orange BT4 togruta madness sorc named Oompa Lupus that was specifically part of a now-long-defunct guild's Oompa Loompa themed ranked teams. We made an Oompa Loompa themed team just to premake for ranked. We had a blast. Lore friendly? Not even remotely. Several months worth of fun for a bunch of us, and myriad others that were entertained by it? Absolutely. And the OP seems like the sort that'd call that something akin to heresy and declare us all to be having fun wrong. Yeeeeeah, that's been my experience as well. I've only got 28 alts. I'm kind've behind the curve of some I know. Right? I used to hate PvP on here back when we had PvP gear because I've always hated there being a grind for special gear with special pvp stats in this or any game, but then I got over myself and went all in with the 'whatever, I'll die a bunch and eventually get the gear no matter' mindset, then forgot to care about the gear at all. Next thing you know, I'm not doing much in game but pvp'ing and going 'How the heck did this happen?' every time I thought about it. Lore didn't get me into it and doesn't factor into my going at it even now. In my advancing years, I've noticed a big difference between myself and others nearabouts my age and the much younger generations when it comes to willingness to make my own fun. It doesn't even exist as a question to me as to whether or not I'll just go ahead and headcanon my own story blurbs and my own little details about lots of things into the game, because I realized ages ago that MMO's are shared media that cannot and will never cater to my wants or desires. At the risk of being that person, I've really come to feel that 'kids these days', be they actually young or just young in the head, have gotten extremely hostile to doing that, and maybe even regard it as some sort of insult or imposition if they have to turn their imaginations on, fill in blanks or just flat-out make things up to entertain themselves. I could be off the mark on that. It's just the feeling I've recurringly been getting with increasing frequency as the years keep strolling by. Oh, absolutely. Just the exigencies of an MMO being an MMO guaranteed a flotilla of immersion-breaking realities from the get go. Lightsabers that don't feel any more powerful than a glowing stick? Game balance necessity! Enemies with awesome abilities and animations that the players will never and can never be allowed to have? Check! Jedi and Sith that are depicted as being noteworthily powerful in lore but are mechanically normalized for game balance? Absolute necessity! Repeatable daily quests? Talk about lore breaking. I've been playing since launch and remember when Black Hole on Corellia first went live. How many times have we all killed Torvix? No lore-honoring naming conventions enforced or expected? I'm logged into the game right now as I type this and am watching Fuglisaurus and Kobe-wan hecknobi (spelling changed slightly to protect users) argue in General chat about whether or not it's fair to charge the prices for certain things on the GTN. The list of lore-breaking, immersion-negating things that are merely necessary, let alone that could be included, on such a list would be a mighty long list indeed. I absolutely agree with this. Much as I've generally enjoyed the Eternal Empire stuff, the whole storyline, from beginning to end, never felt much like Star Wars. It felt somewhat more like a Doctor Who season to me, which...I didn't hate, but have spent several years now kind've wanting to go back to when the game felt like Star Wars to me. But I just kinda rolled with that minor disaffection and amused myself, here and elsewhere, about it. I'm utterly lost as to how this, of all things, could even be considered so monumentally important as to quit over it. As you yourself observed, there are so many lore-breaking, immersion-punting things in this game that I'm utterly incapable of understanding how this one, in it's relatively tiny corner of minor relevance, has suddenly become the knife's edge for yet another incomprehensibly histrionic bout of forum PvP. Far be it from me to attempt to debate whether someone feels the way they do (no debate to be had about such things, really), but sometimes, peoples' reasons for losing it over something are absurd, and sometimes the hills people choose to have their last glorious battle on look an awful lot like asinine nonsense to me. The PvP community desperately needs this solution, and attempting to call cross-faction queueing a 'serious mistake' because it's lore breaking sounds like nothing short of incomprehensibly lopsided hyperbole to me. There are hundreds of bigger, badder lore-breaking, immersion-flouting things that could be griped about, but this one is going to be the last stand at Hill 30 for some. I'm long accustomed to being completely confounded by these things though. I don't expect to ever understand.

How on earth do you deal with the proliferation of characters with ridiculous names, hot pink lightsabers and outfits that occasionally look like a clownshow?