ETA on Advanced Class change?

It's simply a matter of preference. The people opposed to it could just own up to the fact that they don't like it and not try to couch their arguments in terms of "It promotes laziness, it's unfair, it hurts me, blah, blah, blah," as if such assertions can lend the weight of objectivity to their position.

That change has a good side and a bad side. I feel it is more negative than positive due to the abuse I described. In point of fact, I do know for a fact that it is being abused in that manner. I know many people both in my guild and just friends in the game who are abusing in that manner. For every one person like yourself who may be working on their first character who may out level the content, there are many more who are working on alts and using their main to farm ultra low level content to outfit that alt in high level mods.

This may be great for the casual, but changes like this only lead to those "casual" players demanding more and using the "casual player with limited time" as an excuse for those demands. I am by no means a hard core gamer. In fact, I rarely get to play more than 3 hours a week, but I do not expect everything handed to me due to my limited time to play. I recognize the value of putting the effort into obtaining something, even if I obtain after 99% of the player base already has it.

I use the term you in a generic and not specific sense.

You may feel it is a good thing. i do not.

Do you feel that farming DK heroics for comms with which to buy the highest level mods available from a vendor is reasonable or in any way does anything other than to promote laziness by handing those comms to players for little to no effort? I know the "casuals" love it with their "limited play time" excuses, but not everyone with limited play time wants to everything handed to them. I know you can say "you want to to work for those high level mods, go ahead, this is a game and I'm gonna take the easy road because I can choose to do so".

If the devs had left the planetary comm system alone, then people could still farm those high level mods to fill in the gaps they had in their end game gear, and even to outfit alts and companions. They just wouldn't be able to farm ultra low level herp derp content to do so, and might actually have to <gasp> put a little effort into doing so.

it still takes effort to find which heroics give which mods, travel there, "derp" as you put it their way through the quests to buy a few mods here and there. its not exactly "handed" to them. less so than giving people starter tionese gear. and that's really all this is. starter gear. its good enough to get you through Makeb but its not even as good as the gear that drops from lvl 50 hardmodes. the lower level heroics are, the less credits you get. there are only a few heroics per planet and even travel time between them adds up. if someone wants to "derp" their way through it? why not. its neither time efficient nor credit efficient and the only thing it does is make farming those early planet kill achievements have an extra purpose.
basic gear? you have to "earn" arkanian gear? you definitely have to earn. one way or another, whether through crewskills and farming (I decided that I like crafting better then I like dailies, so I learned how to craft 66 mods, armorings and enhancements, as well as barrels and hilts, personally), making lots and lots of credits to afford to buy them (or learn how to craft them yourself)
before the system? I had a ton of those coms sitting on my currency tab, because sometimes I would outlevel them and sometimes, there just weren't the right mods for me to buy, and sometimes there would be that one lone comm that was good for nothing.
now? they are always good. low levels cannot "abuse" them because system prevents them to, and high levels who think its a better use of their time then doing something their own level? well... let them?

you are making a mountain out of a molehill. getting those coms from easy content doesn't offer nearly enough advantage over doing higher end content unless you think being able to do content instead of giving up trying to find a group at level is an advantage. (I dare you to try and find groups for Voss heroics, or let alone Corellia heroics on a regular basis. I dare you. one of my favorite things about being able to level to 55 - is being able to solo Voss heroics with relative ease. before expansion I've pretty much given up on Voss rep. now I'm about to hit legend.) actually... it offers no advantage at all, other than incentive to maybe go back and do old content every once in awhile.

You and I went a couple of rounds on the datacron thing in a similar capacity. The biggest divide between your viewpoint and mine is that I believe that the alt-leveling experience vastly benefits from convenience and shortcuts.

If I had to repeat every single side quest, every single planetary quest, every single heroic and every single space mission for every single alt I leveled, I wouldn't have made as many alts as I have. And I would have missed out on a lot of the story this MMO offers. Some of the things that help shortcut this process:

1. Legacy XP Boosts
2. Cartel XP Boosts
3. Presence Bonus for companion power
4. Making money on my 55 and sending to my new alt.
5. Crafting on my 55 and sending it to my new alt for free.
6. Using unlocked +41 power crystals from my collections.
7. Buying gear with comms on my 55 and sending it to my new alt through legacy gear.

You see #7 above is abuse. As cheating the system. As getting something they don't deserve. As if somehow, this fact is indicative of some general laziness and character flaw, bleeding into a videogame and will somehow eventually poison the game and turn it into something bad.

I see #7 above as a way to avoid some of the drudgery of an MMO to see more of the fun parts. I watched a friend of mine play EQ. He would spend uncountable hours doing the same things over and over again. It was about as appealing to me as watching paint dry. I laughed and instead played Baldur's Gate, Planescape and Kotor.

This game isn't devoid of grind, as would be the case in any MMO. But the fact that there are ways to avoid the grind, added by the devs, is a good thing.

Often times players will see anything as abuse or lazy behavior if it makes the leveling process easier or more palatable. That is the nature of how some players view gameplay, and it's really not the wrong way to look at it since it is subjective and we all have a right to our opinions.

However, generally speaking the market favors making MMOs more palatable to casual players. IMO planetary comms is one of those changes, and the game is more appealing to a wider audience as a result.

It was a wise choice to make for the health of the game despite the complaints from hardcore players...and I hope they continue down this wiser path.

I know that this game has gotten, shall we say, a lot more alt friendly, to say the least. They've added things like allowing people to farm ultra low level content for the highest mods available from a vendor.

I also know that since they started adding things like allowing players to "cheat the system" as you put it, by farming ultra low level content for the highest mods, we have seen an upsurge in the numbers and types of things players are asking be given to them for little to no effort, or asking to made available for purchase.

We've seen players asking to be handed datacron stat bonuses on characters that did not earn them because they did not want to put the effort into finding the datacrons on that character since they had already found them on one character. We've seen people asking to be able to buy the class buffs because they don't want to actually level characters to earn the buffs. We've seen people asking to be able to change class because they do not want to put the effort into leveling a character of the actual class they want to play.

Do I need to continue?

Sometimes, people can actually be harmful in an attempt to be helpful, and it's possible the devs are treading dangerously close to that line. I said it before, but if you give a mouse a cookie...

if you give lazy people an inch they will try to take a mile.

There is also a MASSIVE difference in doing things to make a game more alt friendly and then changing the game so people don;t need to make alts, like AC changes.

Bioware said back in beta to the full time beta tester that they added in all the confirmations at the AC select screen because they were never going to allow AC changes. Now being political they will not tell people that it will never happen now that the game is live because that is a negative, but saying it won't happen anytime soon is just a positive way of saying "no will will never happen."

For some reason, it just sticks in the craw of these busybodies who want to dictate to everyone else that the best way to play the game is how they (the busybodies) play and anyone seeking to do it in a more relaxed fashion is lazy or entitled or whatever meme-of-the-hour they choose to run up the flagpole.

I cannot speak for anyone else, but I am not against all conveniences. You may not understand, but it is possible to favor certain conveniences while at the same time believing that some things should remain in the "a modicum of effort is required if you want this" category.

I was not against speeder training being dropped to level 15 for subs, nor the cost for that training being lowered. I was not against the introduction of XP boosts, or even the double XP weekends. Lowering the time required to reach max level allows new players to join the game and not feel overwhelmed by the leveling process as well as making it easier and quicker for those wishing to level alts to reach max level.

Lowering the time to reach max level is far different than allowing class changes or handing someone a character of a new class at any level.

If a player wants to play a new class, then they can make use of those time saving conveniences to actually level that new class. It takes little time or effort to reach max level, even for a player with limited time. Will that player have it today, instantly? No, but they can probably reach max level within 2 weeks, not an unreasonable amount of time. If they instead choose to use their "limited" time for other pursuits, then I guess maybe they do not want that new class, after all.