TL;DR: Good idea, but needs some work or it could have unwanted consequences. --- I like where you're going, but if you strip gear progression entirely then you need to have a strong and viable alternative. Achievements, etc. might do this - but what gear progression does give you is: * A reason to run the content multiple times and * A regular sense of achievement as you earn the next piece of gear or whatever, combined with a change in performance and * A progression system aimed not at individuals, but at guilds. These are strong motivators, and if you remove them entirely it is in danger of costing subscriptions from the late-game players. That said... I still think the concept is a good one. It needs more thought to what can be done to ensure the points above are not lost. For PvP in particular I am ALL OVER this. Like a rash. I hate gear progression in a PvP environment - in the past in WoW PvP was a great endgame option for people who didn't have time to grind: you could compete effectively in level 60 blues against someone in AQ20 gear. With the introduction of the PvP-specific gear and (worse) the PvP-skewing stats (resilience, etc). that destroyed that - and once again you needed to grind like crazy to play. Anything that lets people who are friends but have different play habits still play together is a Good Thing, so while I'm not giving this a '+1', I still think there is food for thought in here.

There's a bunch of things about the current community tools and features that I feel are working at cross-purposes to each other and as a result damaging the game. Being that I am a firm believer in not moaning too much about things without offering solutions as well, I'm posting both my gripes and some ideas on how to solve these here. SWTOR is a MMO, which means people want to group up and play with friends. There is a lot of content out there aimed at groups even before the level cap is reached (Heroics, Flashpoints). SWTOR is also very much like a single-player game, with strong story arcs for each of the classes that a great deal of time and money has been spent on - and it shows! I've been enjoying the stories. The problem is these two things work somewhat at cross-purposes to each other. The first asks for a community where people are easily recognised, can establish themselves, can build relationships with other players and so forth. The latter encourages people to create new characters, to run through the content again and try a different route, or to experience the story from another angle. Suggestion 1: Cross-Faction LFG channel * A cross-faction channel that any player (over level 10?) can post on to look for teammates, to ask for help, or whatever. A channel. Not a LFG tool, not an automated system, but a channel. This means that when someone is playing their level 15 Republic Jedi Knight and a group is forming to run Boarding Party over on the Imperial side, that player can know about it and swap to thier level 36 Imperial Agent to join the group. A LFG tool just won't let this happen - because the LFG tool won't 'register' a level 36 Agent while the player is doing Coruscant missions with their Jedi Knight. Suggestion 2: Legacy Friends * Friends list that automatically includes all legacy characters, showing legacy name, character name, current faction and current level. Because many players want to experience the different stories, they have to create new characters. Each time this happens, they lose their existing friends, channel subscriptions and everything. For me, even grouping up with the alt characters of people I know in real life involves emailing names, alt-tabbing back and forth to get spelling right and other confusion. This isn't necessary - let us make friends at a legacy level (account/server) rather than an individual character level. Suggestion 3: Better Custom Channel Tools * Easy to use and accessible tools for squelching, banning and moderating custom channels Custom channels are a great asset to MMO companies - it offloads moderation tasks to players! The current custom channel tools are somewhat lacklustre in their performance with regard to setting up moderation and community management tools for channel creators and officers - to the extent that on our server we have some channels to which the channel creators are unable to effectively moderate even after requesting assistance from customer service (the instruction was, in fact, to post a suggestion here. Go figure.) To make these a really useful tool for players to find and talk to like-minded players, these need attention. I'd personally prioritise this over guild-related features, as this brings more players together more effectively. Especially if you include... Suggestion 4: In-Game Listing of Custom Channels * Players can quickly browse custom channels to find one suitable for them A feature that lets a channel moderator list their channel up on a searchable channel list, with tags, means that new players can find out about existing custom channels that cater to their interests. Some simple statistics on the channel (number of active subscribers, current list of members, etc) will easily allow players to assess both the nature and quality of a channel and thus find like-minded players more readily - be it for PvP premades, datacron hunting, Roleplaying, recruiting extra bodies for Ops or even discussing the Star Wars movies. Suggestion 5: Cross-Faction Custom Channels * Custom channels that people from both factions can join and talk on To further help keep the community together - both for people with alts and for people without - a cross-faction custom channel would let people such as RPers or the like keep in touch with each other. If you want to have it disabled in PvP areas that's fine - though there are more than enough third-party tools out there (Vent, etc) that let people communicate that if someone really wants to be a faction-traitor or whatever they can. Suggestion 6: Better Social Points System * Social points for grouping up even when 'ineligible' for a mission I would love to see the social points system reworked so that anyone grouped in a team gets the option to participate in any story option presented, regardless of whether or not they are eligable for that story. A simple warning if they are ineligable can let them know that story progression results of that conversation will not be kept for them. For me, this would encourage me to group more readily, and reward players who are happy to go out of their way to help others who are going through content they have already played. Social points as a reward for social behavior! And the rest of these are more aimed specifically at RolePlaying in-game, since it's something I'm interested in... Suggestion 7: Non-stat versions of social gear OR Legacy Social Rank * The ability to dress walk-on characters in something other than starting gear As a RPer who enjoys creating in-game events, I find it highly frustrating that many of the costumes and the like which are appropriate for minor or walk-on characters have such high social rank requirements. It means that if I am creating a character for a walk-on role in a story, I can't dress them appropriately for that story. I have no interest in spending 20 hours grinding social points in order to have a character for a story event that is going to last one hour before that character is deleted. As it stands, I'm hard-pressed to justify spending the time it takes to get to level 10 so I can have the character participate in stories not on their starting world. Suggestion 8: Legacy Option for Fleet/Space Travel Pass * The ability to grant low-level characters the ability to travel to other worlds without having to grind levels first A legacy unlock that allows me to grant a character the ability to travel to Fleet at level 1, or even to any planet at level 1, would be amazingly useful for minor RP characters. I'm fine with having to earn this through play - the current game experience for a new player is fairly good and I wouldn't want to break that - but for someone who has multiple characters over level 20 (not exactly an amazing feat), I'm familiar enough with how space travel works to know that taking a level 1 character to Voss for anything except RP in Voss-Ka is ... not smart. Suggestion 9: Cross-faction custom emotes * Make custom emotes visible to the other faction WoW introduced the emote obfuscation because they wanted Alliance and Horde to not be able to talk, and for a brief time this was a workaround for that. In SWTOR, Republic and Imperial can use the 'Say' channel to chat to each other just fine - so why are emotes garbled? It's annoying for RPers.... and makes absolutely no difference to anyone else. I think the game has potential, but one of the big things it needs is a way to bring the existing server communities together. This is especially true on servers with low populations - not everyone hangs out at Fleet waiting for groups, but that doesn't mean people aren't on or aren't interested in running a Flashpoint. We need the tools to be able to find those people - especially when those people are playing alts! I'd also love to see legacy progress carried over cross-server (even if the names aren't) - but that's less important to me than the above.

This started out as an idea for an improvement for the RP community on RP servers, but I honestly think it's something that would see a lot of use by pretty much anyone who isn't a die-hard solo player... and even they might get some use out of it too! THE PROBLEM Roleplaying, and in fact almost any other social activity, is contingent on finding like-minded players who are online, in the same general space/area and interested in the same things you are. SWTOR's gameplay (especially for the first 20 levels) does a great job of segregating and seperating the playerbase - you don't get access to your own faction hub until level 10(ish), you don't get access to the popular social areas until level 16+. This makes finding people of a like mind tricky when you're starting out. Players, being resourceful types, have already addressed this with workarounds such as global channels, etc. But for a new player (or a player new to a server), finding out what those channels are and how to find them can be equally daunting - and there is no guarantee that someone will be around to point them in the right direction. THE SOLUTION Grant moderators of custom channels the ability to post their channel to a public listing, with tags relating to what the channel is about (RP, PvP premades, build discussion, questing help, etc.). This public list is then made easily available in a nice list to all players - integrated into the 'social' tab and given search criteria. The panel should include the following information: * Channel name * Number of subscribers * Number of subscribers currently online * Last activity date on channel (so people can spot channels that are dead) * Short description/comment by moderator * Filter tags This means the players can remain in control of their various channels, it puts the burden of channel moderating on the playerbase rather than the game GMs and it enables new players to quickly find people of a like mind to play with. Not all channels should go into the list - only those that channel mods decide to post up, and probably only those that are public access. Alternately, private channels could be listed with a 'contact a channel moderator' feature - but this sounds like more work and is probably unnecessary.