I have bought and paid for this game's original sale price 10x over just in monthly subscriptions paid to Bioware since the start of the game. This does not even include the multitude of cartel coin purchases over almost 4 years time that puts the amount of money I've spent on this game into the thousands. I have played every class, advanced class, race and option (Light side/Dark side) available in this game to at least level 60. I have the top publicly listed Tatooine, Yavin 4, Coriscant, and Nar Shadaa strongholds on the Harbinger server. I believe my prestige score is #2 on the server (I've only ever seen one person who had higher in the public listings, so there is no way to be certain of this... but I'm up there, regardless). I have 98% completion of Operations achievements, and high 80s and 90s in most other categories (except Starfighter, never really could get my head around it). I have played almost every aspect of this game, and most of it I enjoyed. I even made a second account, free-to-play, just so I could experience what it was like to play without a subscription (and I wouldn't recommend it), but I leveled to 50 in tandem to being a subscriber, playing on two accounts pretty equally during that period of time (a month or two total).

You have no idea how entirely annoying it is to try and accomplish things in this game and be someone who cares about Achievements, Titles, and Legacy. Every effort put into any area of the game is met with bugs that I'm certain are not intended to add additional challenge to what is already sometimes a difficult task. But that's exactly what it does. It makes your game hard to play. It makes your game hard to have FUN playing. When Cartel Market items are practically hot-fixed because there is so quick a patch, or an exploit or glitch gets a near immediate response after people complain enough here on the forums (but not until the complaint threshhold is met), you have shown us that you can work quickly to fix problems. Why don't you do that more? And when it actually impedes people from playing your game? It starts to seem like if it costs Bioware money in lost cartel sales, you are right on it. If it might give any advantage at all to a player in any regard, you can be slow to fix (until the forums are utterly frothing at the mouth) and quick to punish those who abused something in your game for weeks and months. If not in category a) or b) however, it may never get fixed. There are still bugs in operations that were there at launch. I know, because I've been here since then, too. Trying to play this game. Through all the bugs. This area of concern has probably been my biggest pet peeve with SWTOR and Bioware from the very start of the game (aside from hero engine and entirely outdated DirectX - but that's a whole different ball of wax that I know you can't change now without major investment of time and money... which won't happen).

I'm pretty sure people would be happy to play test on the public test server any new content that is outside the spoiler zone. Putting something new on a vendor? Since that's been a problem multiple times now responsible for player bannings, how about you let us test it for you and fix it BEFORE it goes into the game instead? That's win/win and won't cost you a dime (or many dimes when upset players cancel subscriptions over how you handle it.. too harsh, too lenient, etc.)

Instant Level 60 should have rank 10 on all base companions and ship droid. If you are going to put their crafting at max, this is the very least you can do since we're paying for this with real dollars. We cannot go through any of the companion quests or conversations to gain affection with them, I think it should be assumed that if we have these companions at all, we did the quests to receive them and would have done the companion conversations that went along with leveling up this character. A baseline of 10 (which is where we would be at the start of 4.0 with a character we leveled the normal way, in most cases) only seems fair and would make me slightly less annoyed at having to grind affection with yet ANOTHER set of companions only to see myself at 1/5 their potential.

Legacy Quick Travels should be unlocked if you have maximum Legacy Level on your account.

Let us choose which crafting/gathering skills we wish to take. What if I want my level 60 to be an Artifice crafter? Too bad. This should be a choice in character creation of a level 60 and not automatically assigned based on Force user/Tech user with only Synthweaving or Armormech as options.

Give the option to choose class specific titles to the character from the 1-60 storyline. If you want to roleplay that your past didn't exist, you can choose to take none of them, but if we're assuming you played to get to level 60 in all other ways, this should be available to those who wish to be Darth, or Lord, or Baroness, or whatever other titles are available via class stories only.

Unlocking every planet's Star Fortress on each character is a grind that should not have to be repeated. Repeating the entire story line starting at level 60 is enough, considering that it is not significantly different no matter what you choose (yet). But to then have to unlock alliance contacts, grind affection with them while unlocking planets... it's too much of a grind. It's not replayability, and is sending players to find content that is actually new to them, and unfortunately very little of that is in SWtoR right now if you are a long-term subscriber.

Alliance contacts should also be legacy wide. Their influence should be individual to each character, just as companion influence is... but the introduction to them and the availability of the Star Fortress associated with them should be available from the moment you hit Odessen if you have already been through each planet on another character in your legacy.

The companion grind is not fun and is not what will keep people playing (and PAYING for) your game while new chapters trickle out. Since we have to do it though, (and there is little else to do if you've been around awhile) here are some suggestions that will make it at least a little bit more bearable:

#1: Some of the people there at Bioware who have time between working on the main KotFE story would do well to write a few cut scenes with companion conversations to earn influence. A little would go a LONG way here. Especially with the new companions you've given us in KotFE. This is how we "bond" with our companions and how they become meaningful to us. We need to really get to know them better AFTER they choose to join us, in the same way we did with the classic companions we earned from 1-50. There is a reason people are so tied to those companions, and it isn't from standing around feeding them gifts.

#2: Take a look into giving us more influence with the companion we are using to do all the heroics and other parts of the game you are forcing us to repeat in the name of content. If we have to repeat stuff that some of us have been doing for 4 years, give us more meaningful reward for doing it, including more companion affection for the choices we make in mission conversations and potentially tied to the "kill X number of mobs with <companion> as your active companion" achievements.

#3: For the love of all that is holy, PLEASE let us hand an entire STACK of gifts to our companions if we wish to do so. Give us a slider as if we were splitting them up when we offer a gift to a companion that works just like a reverse engineering crafting slider that allows you to choose how many of a stack you wish to reverse engineer (from 1 to entire stack) - except for how many gifts we are using at a time.

Since you are so focused on companions in this new expansion and game direction, the very first thing you need to do is fix the bugs with companions. Romances, I'm looking at you! Force users with tech abilities and vice versa, I'm also looking at you! Also, if it isn't a bug that you cannot put an "outfit designer" style set of gear on your companions, it should be considered as important as a bug. Cookie cutter companions don't appeal to anybody. Sure, some may not care... but many DO.

The trend you're taking with the Cartel Market packs worries me for the future of SWtoR, because I realize this is where a lot of your paycheck comes from... and if that doesn't pay the bills this game will suffer. The direction you are going with it after 4.0 seems like another move to get more money for less content, or continue to get the same money for less content. That may work in some aspects of the game, but I fear it will not in this one. You can go years without a new PvP map, you can go more than a year without new Operations and end game content (even though you promised you would never do that again), and most of the time these things will not cause people to leave the game as long as there is something else to do. But you can't work the "get the same money from players and offer them increasingly less for it" angle with the Cartel Market because it is an entirely different thing.

People enjoy gambling when it has any chance of paying off. The smaller the chance though, the less enjoyable it becomes after awhile. I know you've been beat over the head with the Contraband Slot Machine, but this is the perfect example of what I'm talking about. I own 4 of them. I have them available in my Nar Shadaa stronghold. People still use them once in a great while, but I always hear the same complaint: "This isn't worth it!". And then they quit gambling. The Cartel Market is a gambling endeavor as well, but this time played with real money. That just means if we find it isn't worth it, we will quit gambling more quickly. I bought 1 hypercrate of the new packs that came out with 4.0. I quickly regretted it after looking at the meager pile of items I was given in exchange for the same amount of cartel coins as before.

Not to mention, the boxes you give away for courting your alliance contacts are about the same, with a couple small (very small) exceptions. Yes, I get a small amount of jawa scrap from the Cartel Packs (smaller than before, but at least it's still there). But with the alliance reward boxes, I get gear that is bound to my Legacy, and I will not have to pay further coins to unlock it should I wish to equip it on more than a single character. This trade-off is worth it when all I would have to do is take myself to whatever planet I wanted materials from and hit a few nodes of whatever I'm looking for and the jawa scrap suddenly becomes unworthy of the cartel coins.

Also, CARTEL CERTIFICATES. Enough said.

This is the primary reason I've continued to play this game for 4 years. I'm a serious end-game raider with 98% Operations Achievements. I won't repeat all the arguments that have already been made in this vein about the severe lack of end-game content in the last year. I agree with most of them, but instead of re-hashing, I just want to point out that when you start losing people who contribute significantly to the community as a whole because they are serious about end-game, gear, rotations, and really knowing how to play the game successfully, you hurt everyone. Theory crafters, people who write guides for everybody to improve game play for ALL players and SWTOR community supporters (Dulfy!) are your bread and butter. They are free publicity, new player assistance, customer service, and much more simply because they love your game. All they cost you is a little effort on the parts of the game that make them stick around, and they will continue to care about helping your entire community. When you take away what they love about your game, you will continue to see them leave and that hurts every single player in the SWTOR universe. The utter lack of replayability in the end-game as it stands now (for anybody who has been here for very long), will indeed affect every single player, raider or not, when you no longer have that part of the community working for you.

This isn't about elitist know-it-alls being made to feel special... this about people who take their free time to write extremely detailed guides about gear, rotations, and other advice. Or those who maintain entire web sites and databases devoted to helping every single type of player in the game enjoy it more and have the information they want/need to be better players and make it more fun for them to play the game. The people who code parsing programs specifically targeting to SWTOR don't continue to do that when the people they do that for aren't playing your game anymore because there is no new end-game content once in awhile. I know it's a lot of work. But I'd argue that the type of people it attracts to your community are more helpful than not and are worth the investment.

I obviously care a lot about this as it has been another big part of my game. Therefore, it may not apply to all but I would like to give you feedback on this regardless. Whoever designs the hook layouts in strongholds doesn't have the greatest sense of design. Granted, I work for an Architect so I'm around this kind of thing every day... as such, I'm kinda a design snob. But I honestly was so frustrated with Yavin 4's hook layout and how limiting it was that I wanted to cry. There are a lot of things that I would love to see done with this, and I am not knowledgable enough about the code requirements to know if any of them are even possible, but if you can find even a close substitute to some of the following ideas, I think it would improve the Stronghold system drastically.

#1: FIX BUGS! There are endless cases of things being broken, some of them long term. I feel badly for anyone who spends hard-earned Grey Helix tokens on Blue Gree Light pillars. They disappear as soon as you use them, and those of us that had them from as far back as they became available show 0/0 available to use if we dare to pick them up. The walls of the Yavin-4 stronghold are not kind to many of the holo signs that lay flat against the wall. The achievement for getting 50 people into your stronghold is another example. I did it, it took a LOT of effort and time, and even though the achievement popped up on my screen when I earned it (I have a screenshot of this moment somewhere), it is not listed as complete when you inspect my achievements. Multiple tickets submitted, each time telling me this is a bug and cannot be awarded to me unless I repeat the endeavor once the "bug is fixed". That annoys me. FIX BUGS!

#2: Make strongholds a grid and let us place our OWN hook layouts (within a limit, perhaps just over the total usable hook limit). Short of that, the ability to change a hook layout exists, but is limited in what you can change into what... I think we should be able to arrange a Starship sized hook into the equivalent sized EVERYTHING, down to a massive area of medium hooks, if we wanted to do so.

#3: Please have someone at Bioware place every SH decoration on every hook it is supposed to fit on and review the size of the decoration vs. the size of the hook required. Some of this you have fixed (Security Camera decoration, I'm looking at you!), but some of it is still way, way off. Much of the new crop of decorations from Star Fortress require large hooks, but if you go and look where there are several large hooks available TOGETHER, you spend a lot of time realizing you can't really use those decorations in a way that makes sense.