This is a "cat-and-mouse game" you'll never win because you're vastly outnumbered by people playing your game extensively to research the most efficient way to reach their goals. They'll indeed complain it's boring but they'll do it regardless. You "nerf" one farm, some more pop up immediately after. It's a never-ending chase. I feel like the solution you tried in 7.0 creates more problems than it solves. For example, there are new players feeling let down because they want to play the entire story in order but they can't, because not all leveling flashpoints have a story mode and those they want to do are not on the groupfinder. If you're set on keeping restrictions, could you please at least add a solo mode to all FPs that currently don't have one? That would help immensely, at least new players. And no, telling new players they should go to the fleet, form their own group and walk to the entrance, is not a good way to welcome them, especially those coming from other games, where using a groupfinder tool for any kind of group activities is a no-brainer. As for veterans, I am well aware that I can still play whatever I want, all heroics are listed on terminals on the fleet for example, regardless of the weekly rotation, BUT I still believe having restrictions on the groupfinder is detrimental from a "psychological" point of view. It makes it look like there's very little to do outside of playing the story, not all players are willing to go out of their way to find things to do in your game, have you considered that?

I understand everything being discussed about PTS is from a mechanical point of view as it should be, but I would like to add a bit of fantasy perspective since this is a MMORPG after all. Every single ability has its own distinctive animation that plays as RPG fantasy, if you reduce the amount of abilities you also reduce variety in animations, that's a little bit of RPG fantasy that goes down the toilet.

I keep hearing this from people on the forums, but is that really how new players feel? I'd love to have some statistics. I mean, I'm on reddit every day answering new players questions and I see their reactions. Many are confused by game features, they ask all sorts of questions about the story, the classes, pieces of content they don't understand and so on, but I honestly don't see them complaining about having too many buttons. They do complain about bugs and performance, those IMO are serious problems that should have the priority. As a veteran I try to ignore those problems even if they can be very annoying at times, because I'm already invested into the game, but first impression is very important to new people, they will judge that. As for new generations being used to ARPGs, I agree, but I played Classic WoW when it came out (old-school "too many buttons" poorly balanced kind of game, compared to modern ones) and there were teens playing it that weren't even born when it came out originally nor played modern WoW before (so nostalgia can't apply to them) and they were having a blast. I believe we underestimate the abilities of younger generations, they're not all stupid and unwilling to learn as some people on the forums picture them, some of them honestly enjoy the higher "cumbersomeness" of a more old-school game. I agree with this, but that's not an easy feat, at all, I mean even Blizzard can have serious problems balancing things when they make radical changes, let alone BW. An example: when they introduced level scaling, it took BW ages to fix problems tied to it, like for example putting a filter on the leveling dungeons pool to avoid lvl 20 players ending up in lvl 50 FPs and failing HARD because they required a set of abilities that lvl 20 didn't have yet. How many new players felt utterly frustrated? How many left because of it? We don't know. How many new players give up on this game because of the plethora of bugs and awful performance? Again WE don't know, but it's not difficult to go to any gaming subreddit and check opinions on new games, when people massively bash on new games it's because of bugs and performance, not how many buttons there are to press. That's not to say reducing ability bloat is not desirable, but I have the impression that some people here believe that improving the ability toolkit will make the game so much better for new players, IT WON'T, because way before they reach the point of seeing the entire toolkit they can have, they're likely put off by the amount of bugs and poor performance.

I believe the biggest problem is that classes have been mostly the same for 10 years, that means we have 10 years of content designed around how classes are as you see them now, with all the abilities they have now. This game is not like WoW in which previous raids and dungeons become obsolete the moment a new xpac comes out, so whatever Blizzard does to classes doesn't matter because it is suited to new content and old content has scaling capped and is adjusted to make everything soloable by everyone. No, all 10 years of raids and dungeons is all you have to play, they're all scaled up in the same pool. If they radically change how classes work, they should go back and rework all endgame content accordingly. We're talking about BW, they don't even fix long-standing bugs, it will take them another 10 years to properly balance everything to make it work properly IF they radically change how classes work, this we don't know yet since what's on PTS is still pretty nebulous.

Thanks for sharing, 2 things hit me: they listened to their engineer friends instead of their players things were "mechanically" the same but they were very different from a player's "fantasy" perspective These 2 points look so very much close to what's happening here IMO. Ofc noone knows who BW is actually listening to, or if they try to copy WoW as many are speculating, but it's certain they don't fully understand what their players want or what their fantasy is. Nor can I. And if a game can come out again, in the same state it was more than 15 years ago, with all its flaws but also all its "fantasy", and be a huge success even among people that weren't even born when it released originally, something is amiss in modern MMO designing.

That's assuming you'll be able to switch any time without any kind of downsides, we don't know that yet. We don't know if it's free, if there's a cooldown, if it's not allowed inside instances, and so on. PTS should be up this week, I'd say let's see how it works before jumping to conclusions.

What kind of architecture does xbox use? Honest question, I never owned any console. But if it's the same as PC, I see no reason why the game shouldn't work. Xbox OS being Windows 10 is not a good indication though, because Microsoft is releasing it also for ARM (very recent surfaces), SWTOR doesn't work on ARM and I very highly doubt they'll ever make a port.

Rift. I played it up to the F2P transition, you had 4 "base characters" each one coming with 9 different classes called "souls". Each soul had it's own abilities, talents and weapons. At first, only 1 of the base chars could cover all roles (tank, healer, dps, support) then they added the missing souls to the other 3 so everyone could do everything (one single character could cover all roles). You had a loadout system with 6 build slots (they added more later), on each build you had to combine talents and abilities from 3 different souls (classes) of your choice, among the 9 available. True hybrids were not much efficient but you could do them if you wanted to try weird experiments. The game was designed around that from the start, so it was common in raids having people changing builds, up to changing the whole group composition, between bosses. If was much less common in dungeons, but it could happened there as well if the dungeon was new. There's a difference between Rift and SWTOR 7.0. In SWTOR they won't allow you to mix and match abilities and weapons from different classes, they will allow you to respec to a totally different AC. Rift allowed you to mix abilities from different classes but always within the 9 allowed for your base char, the 9 classes were all different for each of the 4 base chars, you couldn't respec to a class belonging to a different base char, but you could mix abilities and talents form your tank/healer/dps/support classes (noone in their right mind would have ever done that on a raid build but you could do it).

Blizz removed bonus XP from heirlooms with Shadowlands, since they revamped the leveling system and it's way faster now. They replaced it with consuming a bit less rested XP. That's useless IMO but heirlooms in WoW can still be handy because you have less sources of upgraded gear while leveling compared to SWTOR. Leveling in SWTOR is faster than "revamped" WoW, we have lots of XP boosts given out for free by just playing the game, double XP events and lots of relevant gear everywhere. Also upgrading your gear matters less than WoW because you usually overlevel content while leveling and main stats are capped (in WoW are not). Implementing heirlooms in SWTOR would be a waste of resources (IMO ofc). I would actually love it if they redesigned the dye system to make it more similar to GW2, that is being able to dye primary and secondary elements independently of each other, a lot more dyes availalble and a sort of "dye wardrobe" with permanent unlocks that lets you apply dyes when you want, instead of having them as consumables. But this wouldn't apply as GS suggestion because it's actually a system feature redesigned.

My 2 cents. Darth Marr as companion, either on the reward track or non-seasonal vendor (since they fixed the bug that let us have him). While I'm fine with past time-limited rewards (even CE ones) being available to anyone who missed them (yes I have them), I don't agree with the Founder title. Founder means you supported the game in its initial phase. It's like backing a kickstarter or founding a company, for example. You can't be called a founder if you didn't actually help founding.

I don't know about Russia but China has their own versions of a lot of things, even games, if you want to do business there you must comply with government requests, whatever they are. As for TPM, I truly hope Microsoft backtracks on it, it's not new for them to set requirements for new versions functionality, but expecting people to throw away hardware that may still be good (even if it lacks a TPM module) seems a bit extreme.

Gaming. Denuvo is a copy protection system (DRM) for games. Gaming works fine on Steam/Linux as long as you don't play games that require a DRM system like Denuvo (or any other similar system). MMOs are free from such types of DRM, so you won't have any problems playing those. I too have been playing on Linux for years, no problems so far, but my points were more general, because we were also discussing why not everyone can ditch Windows in favor of Linux (not everyone plays only MMOs, not everyone use their PCs only to play games)..

I should have clarified that better. With DRM systems I didn't mean something like Steam that either checks on licenses on your account or requires always-on connections, ofc that works, Steam itself does work on Linux. I meant copy-protection/anti-piracy stuff like Denuvo for example, those do not work on Linux.

That's an excellent practice, to protect both your personal stuff and working data. I work for a big enterprise, we have company PCs that we use exclusively to work. We're forced to use Windows on them but I'm allowed to have a Linux VM that I can use for some tasks. My own PCs all have Linux. You can't ever be 100% sure when upgrades are involved, even a regular patch can break stuff, not only on operating systems (can happen on Linux too) but on application software as well, that's why testing exists. At my company, we always test every kind of updates before releasing into production, even if we're confident they'll work (most of the times they do but something unexpected can always happen). Home users are even more "critical" because of the vast array of different configurations, there's no way to predict with certainty what will happen, you can't foresee every problem that could arise, though you can avoid most of the bad stuff by properly testing beforehand. Everyone is free to do what they want ofc, but when big OS upgrades are involved, like Windows 11, I would suggest playing it safe and waiting a few days to see what happens.

It's not that simple. I like your enthusiasm but there's a reason if Linux users are less than 5% of the PC share, though Linux dominates the server market. To use Linux you have to make choices, sometimes you just can't. Gamers are a minority of the userbase, those building a PC specifically for gaming want to play the latest titles, most of them are forced to use Windows because of DRM. Many people use their PCs for several activities, not just gaming, and there are business applications that only work on Windows (or MAC), WINE is not an option in several cases. If you jump on Linux impulsively, without solid reasons to do so, you may end up going back to Windows sooner or later, that happens a lot unfortunately. Linux is a wonderful system, I love it to bits, but it's just not for everyone.