Reduce the rewards from Hammer Station + Toborro's. In fact, reduce the rewards from all flashpoints and ops, and substantially increase the reward from random queuing for all FPs/OPs instead of specific ones, so the reward from the roulette outstrips the total reward from any single dungeon. Boom, done. There's a smart way and a counterproductive way to solve problems like this. It's entirely possible to look at the dozens of other MMOs on the market who've had these problems and tried different solutions to solve them, and see which ones worked and which ones were ultimately detrimental to the game. It's beyond me why BioWare Austin has chosen not to do that, and insisted on repeating instead of learning from the mistakes of its peers.

I see that a vendor has been added with all the shells that used to be available from Command Crates, as well as (thankfully) the random legacy-bound 75 greens and blues that will no longer be available. However, the Command Crates also dropped schematics for various Synthweaving and Armormech appearances that are also unavailable now, including unique texture combinations of still-available meshes as well as unique meshes we can no longer get. I've been poking around in all the obvious places and found no evidence that those schematics have been similarly added back in. While those appearances are still available through players who got the schematics at the time, that availability will inevitably shrink as those people log off and move on to other games, unthinkingly delete characters with discontinued schematics, or simply stop crafting them if they seem unprofitable. Are there any plans to mitigate this by reintroducing the schematics, either for direct sale or perhaps in lockbox drops through gathering missions, or making those shells available by other means?

Just a little feedback on Fen himself, since this seems like a good place: He feels so utterly, utterly redundant. Especially in comparison to Altuur, who has quickly become by far my favorite companion. Our kubaaz friend has a unique ability in each spec that makes him second-best at absolutely everything, he can wear anything you want to put on him other than a hat, and you can buy his influence up to 40-50 for just a couple million in about twenty seconds, compared to five minutes of clicking or an eight-digit expensive Compendium for anyone else. Fen's rep may end up working the same - without cartel coins it's impossible to find out what he's like on an alt, which is a severe flaw on a test server, by the way - but his appearance is incredibly limited, and his loadout is exactly the same fourth-best-DPS as Theron's, Vette's, Temple's, Q0-77's, and every single other dual-pistol companion in the game, which we're already pretty spoiled for choice on. If you're not going to give him a unique skill set, at least let him have the much more rare 3rd-best-DPS dual-vibroblade, which (not counting the bugged DR-3D) is only accessible on one NPC for most characters, and then only if they can either solo a Star Forge or scrape up a partner to do outdated content that most people aren't doing anymore. Or give him Shae's DPS or Z0-0M's healing so we can have those best-in-slot abilities without having to listen to annoying voice lines. Right now he's just a discount Theron that I can't get free influence with in story chapters or put in a uniform that actually matches the rest of my Alliance on my military-type characters who do that sort of thing.

Hm, didn't notice that. Complaint rescinded.

Oh is that the problem. I noticed it randomly not working, but didn't pick up on the internal cooldown. Glad I already got my Dantooine achievement. I get the basic idea, people constantly re-mounting is degenerate gameplay that they didn't intend, but a) this is a level design issue at its core, and it's just going to breed frustration with your players if you take away our hacky solution to the problem without solving it properly yourselves, and b) at the very least, change the tooltip to reflect the nerf!

It doesn't break anything, it's just that every change you make automatically and immediately saves to the current loadout, so if you have Commando set up just the way you like it and then swap to Vanguard without changing loadouts, it will immediately forget everything you said about Commando, including what spec you wanted, what talents you wanted, and how your quickbars were set up, in favor of the default Vanguard set-up. Your Commando profile is now permanently lost. I cannot overstate how counterintuitive and badly designed this is. (Or how easy it would be to fix with a complete UI rework without having to change anything about the underlying system at all; just make loadouts the top-level choice and don't even let the player mess with spec or talent until they've clearly consciously chosen a specific loadout to modify). But @Trixxie's right, it's also legitimately broken in a variety of ways even on top of that. Sometimes you have to re-log after the quest in order to actually change styles for the first time or adjust their talents at all (this happened to my Guardian, but not my Sniper for some reason). Sometimes you select a second style and just never even get it on your sheet and can't get the quest back (this happened to my Sage). Sometimes the loadouts completely ignore your equipped weapons (this has happened to every single one of my characters so far) - this may be related to the fact that weapons don't work in the outfit designer, period. I haven't had the issue where I can only swap in a cantina even with the Legacy perk unlocked, but I'm sure it'll hit me in time.

You have to use loadouts to make switching work properly. Set up your primary combat style, create a new loadout, activate that loadout, and then set up your secondary combat style, and then never switch your combat style again. Just swap between loadouts. This is one of the things that wouldn't be an issue if the UI were set up properly. Did all your abilties work? It's always been true that about half of shadow/sin or sent/mara abilities work with just the single saber of the original base class. Only the shadow-specific abilities like Cleaving Cut or Force Breach would be blocked.

(double post)

Beyond the difficulty of seeing what's selected, having a "default" option isn't a great idea in the first place, not when some of the abilities are active abilities that go on your bar. You pick a spec, it populates your quickbar with a whole bunch of random abilties, you take your time figuring them all out and sorting them in a way that makes sense, then you go to adjust your talents, and, hey, look at that, turns out some of the things you just spent all that time figuring out are talents that you're about to replace with something else. Default should be nothing selected, just like the current retail game, and just like the Warcraft talents this new system is attempting to copy.

The preview window is broken. Left-click now just rotates the character, same as right-click; there's no way to move the camera relative to the character.

There are no complexions that have scalp hair but not beard or mustache hair. Several of the new hairs are weirdly threadbare and could benefit a lot from a scalp complexion, we should have that option without having to also have facial hair. The bars being click-through unless you land on exactly the tiny two-pixel tick you're aiming at is bad design. If I know the complexion I want is #34 and the one I currently have is #4 I shouldn't have to hit the arrow thirty times to get to it, instead of just clicking near the end of the bar and adjusting from there. The two-level zoom is terrible. Let me mousewheel to a precise distance, or at the very least, make the zoom in actually zoomed in. This new CC doesn't let you get anywhere near close enough to your charcter's face. Combat style descriptions don't refresh properly as you change storylines. Go from Sith Warrior to Bounty Hunter without clicking on a style can leave you with a description of a Bounty Hunter Guardian. Why change the armors? Half of them are still in the low-rez original iconic armors, and Shae's and Valiant Jedi aren't any higher-rez, and the red Havoc armor from the cinematic is 0% as iconic for troopers within game as the Clone Wars style mesh they have on retail. And quizzes are rocking Korriban gear!? Weird choices. If you wanna go for high-fidelity iconic stuff maybe use some of the Remnant looks? Not a functional complaint, but purely aesthetic: I do not like the new graphics at all. The class icons themselves are fine (although the sharp aliased pixelation looks very low-quality), but the all-white, the hard cornered highlighted borders on everything, the hyper-minimalist style, it doesn't match the rest of the game at all. SWtOR has a distinct look, and it's a strong, attractive, distinctive, space fantasy look. The gold, the blue, the clipped corners, the colorful detail, the iconic environment-as-background, all center the game really strongly in the Old Republic era, give it continuity with KotOR and with itself (both the character select screen before chargen, and the game once you launch), and ground the player in the game immediately. The new CC with its all-white, bright lines just feels like it's trying to ape Fallen Order or something. I don't have any illusions that you guys are going to change it at this point, but I really wish you hadn't gone this way. The order of operations is good, though. Gender, species and slider on the same screen is a much better flow. I appreciate the new hairs don't have to be paid for, and unlocking all complexions for all genders is a nice move. Unlock all tattoos, scars and hair across genders and species too and we'll really be cooking.

I agree strongly with the concerns I've seen about queuing (if I can be tank, dps, or heals by changing loadouts, I should be able to apply for all three at once in groupfinder). Requiring the field respec Legacy perk to actually hotswap loadouts in the field is... fair, I guess, but definitely diminishes the appeal of the system. The biggest issue in my opinion, though, is the utterly terrible feedback and flow in the user interface. Here's how this should work: Player opens the user interface. At the top level, the first and only thing they see is a list of all available loadouts. They can select an existing one, edit an existing one, or create a new one. If they choose to create or edit, they get a new level of the interface, and choose [sage] vs [sentinel]. Then they choose one of three specs. Then they choose their tree abilities. Then they click "CONFIRM". This is an incredibly important step and I can't begin to understand why you guys removed it. You could add a reminder to check gear and keybindings to this stage too. That loadout is saved, they go back up to the top level, and can apply that loadout, or go to another. 2/3 of the posts I've seen about loadouts so far are the same thing: "changing my style back and forth doesn't save my quickbar." The game doesn't give you any feedback whatsoever about the fact that you're modifying your current loadout every time you change your gear or ability tree, or that you should be using loadouts every single time you change anything instead of using the much more obvious and intuitive "interacting normally with your interface" method. All of this could be fixed by putting loadouts at the top and adding a CONFIRM button so the user has conscious and deliberate control over what's in each loadout at every stage. Loadouts should never change unless the player intentionally and specifically tells them to.

I copied a lvl 75 Dark III sage to the PTS. My legacy does not have the Dark V achievement. I was given the option to choose a secondary combat style on log-in; I had no option to change by primary style from sage to sorc. I did have the option to choose any Sith style as my secondary style. However, when I chose Sith Assassin, and left the selection cutscene, my character completely bugged out. I did not have a secondary style of any kind, any attempts to change my ability tree reset themselves immediately as soon as I closed the window or chose a different tab, and the combat style UI, when I moused over the empty second style, displayed a message telling me I was still on the quest to choose one. The quest itself was gone from my log and not regainable by any means I could see.

Double posted somehow, so I'll edit this one into something useful; sometimes UI windows will just ignore the ESC button and stay open. You can spam ESC all you like, all it will do is open and close the menu. The specific keybind for the bugged window will still work normally to close it. I can't reliably reproduce it, but I've had it happen to both the inventory and the character/loadout windows.

Character UI is just... too big, with too much wasted space. On 1920x1080 at the default size, I have to close my chat window in order to interact with the thing because it overlaps every corner of the screen. Meanwhile my tiny paper doll is drowning in all that empty nothing. Simultaneously, it is apparently too small; the loadout list has been clipping the last digit of my item rating on characters with triple-digit ratings (306 becomes 30).