So I thought I remembered KotET having a crazy-short lead time as well, but:

KotET was announced on July 15, 2016 and released on December 2nd (early access November 29).

KotFE was officially announced on June 15, 2015 (and had been teased as early as mid-April) and released on October 27 (early access October 20).

 

That's about 4 1/2 months between announcement and release for both.

True... but they also deliberately had a multi-month long set of sub based perks in KoTFE and the DvL event for KoTET. Which is why I think they announced earlier then they did in prior expacs. Personally, I'm fine if they simply stop the long run-up promotions/perks as they seem to get little positive credit for them, but a lot of EMO and railing from players in the forum.

So I thought I remembered KotET having a crazy-short lead time as well, but:

KotET was announced on July 15, 2016 and released on December 2nd (early access November 29).

KotFE was officially announced on June 15, 2015 (and had been teased as early as mid-April) and released on October 27 (early access October 20).

 

That's about 4 1/2 months between announcement and release for both.

They've been bleeding subs since 5.0 and it's not getting better. I would say any funding for 6.0 has been pulled because they can't afford it. At the moment everything seems to be going into bandaiding 5.0. The problem is bandaids don't stop haemorrhaging.

If they would only listen to what their players and even people in their influences program have said, they could have fixed the major issues 6 months ago. At the moment they keep making one mistake after another and all the feed back they are asking for is being ignored. The extra communication is a sham when it's only lip service.

If the sub drain doesn't stop and they don't get people back to the game, there will be no 6.0 expansion because they can't afford it or they don't want to waste what little money they are making on a dying population.

We will only see another expansion once they fix the current game issues. I believe if they haven't done that by this Xmas, the game will be dead by this time next year.

Fingers crossed for Knights of It Was All a Bad Dream.

That would be awesome. As a sith I find saving the galaxy boring and out of character.

I think the next expansion could be expected early in the new year (sort of like 2.0) as opposed to the recent tradition of late year expansions. I conclude this from them having to retool to get a new focus in place (per Keith's post) and just not having time to do an expansion justice. Though on the other hand you would think they will want to cash in on episode 8 but they can do that without an expansion with heavy marketing for a feb-april expansion and some smaller content drops in December onward.

I don't believe they just won't do another expansion, I believe the lack of content this year is to throw resources at a good expansion and do it right, not to mention getting on of a faster content cycle moving forward.

Some reddit data notes the speed of development on the raid bosses for example has picked up substantially.

I see this new flashpoint being a lead in to the next expansion similar to how forged alliances was for 3.0 - I believe we'll get some more flashpoints/uprisings through the year to lead in to this full expansion.

Either way I imagine we'll know on the next roadmap because if it mentions nothing then people will jump to conclusions of "no expansion - game is dying" more than ever and that's best to avoid that sort of bad press. Even just an assurance there will be an expansion, a rough time frame and more details coming soon would do wonders to silence the "no expansion" speculation so I guess Keith ... ball is in your court.

SNIP...

 

From a story-point-of-view, the game is in a dead end. We're at the top of everything. Who would like to be pushed to the bottom once again (like they basically did before KotFE)? Not me.

I very much agree with that.

We are at the pinnacle and given bw's story as of the past chapters I don't see bw pulling of a smooth anything. To see bw try to write some half-wit story to knock us back down would really kill things on a story level. Hard to imagine our characters getting put back to a power level of 3-4 years ago story wise.. Worse yet, knock us back to the Darth Malgus days of his flashpoint suckage in terms of power.

I just can't imagine that if we do get an expansion anytime soon, it will be well prepared enough to cover those blunders if bw goes that route of down grading us but can you imagine how bad the story would be if they didn't discuses how powerful our characters are at all. Just totally skipped it and didn't bring it up. UGH this can so south in so many ways.

... how bad the story would be if they didn't discuses how powerful our characters are at all. Just totally skipped it and didn't bring it up. UGH this can so south in so many ways.

Still, it's the best choice from where we are to getting back to a coherent story. Make no mistake about it, ever since we became the leader of the alliance none of our "go fetch" quests have made the slightest bit of sense. We have people for those kind of things now.