Are ops/raids outdated?

Really? So people in full 192 gear in TBC standing in the laser knew what they were doing 2 years ago? What's hard to take seriously is the "But it's on the internet, it must be true" mentality required to believe that people didn't complain about noobs in HMs/Ops under the old system, and how everything was butterflies and rainbows in the Progression scene. Of course, it's either denial, or ignoring all the threads to the contrary, so that one can blame those "filthy casuals" for the any and everything.

I'm reminded of a discussion on Alderaan the other day, where a guy was blaming casuals for the removal of gear from comm vendors because he wanted to use it for cosmetics. He disappeared from chat when I asked him why, if he'd wanted to have that gear as cosmetic, he didn't have it done prior to it's removal, since we'd had cosmetic slots for far longer than the gear's been missing. He wanted to blame those "filthy casuals" for his laziness, but when I didn't bite on the catch phrase and run with him, he ran out of argument. Maybe his guild asked him the same question when he went to check with them about how to respond to someone not "toeing the party line" about casuals being the root of all evil?

Of course, it's really hard to take someone seriously when they cherry pick one point out of a post, even though an example was given in the very post that bears out the line they decided to respond to. Bad players have always been bad. They didn't have to be casual to be bad. Gearing up never required that you be skilled, just lucky on the die rolls at all the right times. I'm sure mine wasn't the only guild that carried average or below players to a full set of end game gear.

That would be a shame, but it's harder to show causality vs metrics for the overall health, especially when they don't isolate changes

I agree completely... But I don't believe that they have anyone in management left at Bioware who gets that point...

Not everything is metrics. Sometimes you need a vision and some faith. After all, the game had to be designed and created before any metrics existed.

Look at Apple under Steve Jobs and Apple under Tim Cook, to see the difference between a vision guy and an operations guy.

BW: "This wasn't fitting with our vision of the game, so we made a change"
Player A: "Rawr! Your 'vision'?? How about actually listening to what your players want for a change?! You know, the people actually paying for this game! *rabble-rabble-rabble*"

BW: "We've seen that the majority of players prefer this, so we're going to focus on it."
Player B: "Rawr! Why is it always metrics, metrics, metrics with you guys?! EAWare is nothing but souless corporate drones! *rabble-rabble-rabble*"

If anything KOTFE and its near-exclusive focus on solo Story seems like it is the product of vision. "We're BioWare, dammit, our passion is story so we're going to rededicate ourselves to that. We'll include new group content and PVP periodically, and we'll make existing Ops relevant at max-level, in order to give something to those players, but our focus and commitment is going to be to crafting a compelling ongoing story."

All fair points, except KotFE isn't NEARLY enough story for the cost, and it isn't even that great of a story.

I've read fan-fic more interesting than KotFE. It isn't all that.

KotFE comes across as Vitiate fan-fic, at least from the spoilers I'm reading.

Perfectly reasonable position to have on that front - story quality is a subjective thing, one person's "oh my gawd, that was the most amazing thing!" is another person's "ugh, that was flat-out awful" and a third person's "...meh".

I'm enjoying it, and I'm finding my continued sub worth the expense, but I completely understand how someone else could look at it and say "this just isn't giving me the quantity / quality / type of content I'm looking for in a game to justify the cost."

I halfway want to figure out a way to give you a start-at-60 token to use as a "throwaway" character to do KotFE on; so you can judge it for yourself. OTOH, it's a merely adequate story even if my speculations under the spoiler tag are true, and the writers have plenty of time left to disappoint.

I have the free 60 still, I haven't used it because you just get all the defaults on all the story decisions from the class and planetary arcs.

Hence the desire to get you a option for character you don't have to care about, other than the time invested in playing.