I'd know to know the answer to this as well. I found 5 of these in the bank (I imagine conversions of old-as-dirt stuff), but I have no idea what to do with them at this point.

As a chronically returning player, I'm wondering the same thing. I used to be able to work towards buying the CM stuff I wanted off the GTN, and if not, there were always alternatives I could earn in-game... now I come back, nearly all the shells obtainable through in-game activities seem to be gone and no longer obtainable by traditional means; even the flashpoints don't drop shells (or haven't when I've run them), and the CM crap is all up for umpteen millions of credits, at least 30 to 40 times what the good stuff cost last time I was around. I always contended that focusing so heavily on selling aesthetics in the Cartel Market would discourage devs from adding decent-looking gear to earn in-game, but I never imagined they'd be go so low as to remove even the -existing- shells to pidgeon-hole people into CM-or-die, thereby sending the in-game economy into a tailspin of inflation. Yet I don't see more credit-generation stuff beyond the same ol' daily grind. So how are you people keeping up with this?

Huh? Play KotOR 1 or 2 and you'll see Pazaak. Nothing too fancy. I also think it's needed, and could help add a reason to revisit the planets at level cap that isn't strictly grindy. Could have NPCs in cantinas for folks to learn/play against (maybe even a quest to collect your starter deck and learn how to play), then a few alternatives to get +/- cards and stuff like that (possibly have them be NPC drops, or rewards for playing against others, or as I'm sure they'd end up doing, Cartel Shop items that drop from the silly gambling boxes). Activities besides typical PvE/PvP nonsense are most welcome at this point, since it seems BioWare is otherwise perfectly content with players just grinding rep/dailies for cred, and buying stuff to look cool. Not my kind of model, but someone must be buying into it if they're keeping it.

I approve of this! It would be a great addition. At the very least, the ability to recustomize hairstyles and makeup/complexion on the fly for a nominal CREDIT fee (for subscribers, and add one-time customization tickets to the CM) should be added. This would then allow you to add customization options to the Cartel Market (preferably through one-time payments, not inside the gambling boxes), as well as some more to the baseline. My biggest suggestion would be to make sure that, in your mad rush to monetize it all, you do not forget to add more value for existing customers as well, and letting folks expand their game via playing it, and not just paying for it. It is healthy for the game when some stuff can only be earned, even of other cool stuff is up for purchase. Just my 2 credits.

This is a very typical response, but not one grounded in sound understanding of business, I suspect. As you said, we're not forced to pay for this game. But you ought to realize that if you support it and want it to grow, it is in YOUR best interest that everyone, even those of us displeased with the present offering, continues to pay for it. This game's continued existence and development depends on that. So by trying to dissuade feedback and urging people who are displeased to just leave, you could actually harm the game's prospects, not help them. If you're a strange specimen that wishes to bring on financial failure, however, I stand corrected. I know there are a few of them out there. For a product that is a one-time payment, your statement could hold true -- assuming it is simply a cash grab with no aspirations of repeat customers. But a developer that wants to retain subscribers needs to know what people like and don't like so that it can adjust its offering. That feedback won't always come in a format you, the fellow consumer, find agreeable. But it is not really for you: it's for BioWare. It is posted on a forum that the developers claim they read, and encourage discussion on. So, your services as feedback police are not just unwarranted -- they're detrimental to what BioWare is supposed to want out of their interaction with customers (what they TRULY get out of it is beyond me, given how poorly they use it). If they believed as you did, they'd simply close this deal down and soldier on. As they have not (watch me get bitten as they shut down the forums tomorrow), you really ought to encourage people to post constructively, rather than being passive-aggressive and telling them not to voice discontent at all and leave.

To be honest, your assumptions are not entirely reasonable, and you're being awfully defensive over all this when all one has to do if asked a simple question, even an obvious one, is answer yes or no. The only ways a new player (read: hasn't played tons of classes) would know this is a) running Flashpoints where someone happens to CC (rarely happens while leveling these days), b) doing heroic quests where people happen to CC (again, a rarity), or c) being CCd / seeing CC in PvP and realizing who's casting it (which presumes lots of things). In this age of XP boosts and PvP XP, it is perfectly feasible that people could level all the way to 50 without being very sure who CCs what and how, seeing as you can level 1-50 without doing any of the above. This is all much ado about nothing, though... because a yes or a no would have diffused the situation entirely. Passive-aggressive and distasteful folks start fights, but it takes two to actually fight.

Honestly? I don't. I embrace them. There is a reason why some ideas take, and others don't. That's because those ideas are generally well-liked and resonate with audiences. The key thing is to avoid cliched speech. But building stories around tested ideas is good storytelling; there are no new ideas under the sun, only subverted or reimagined versions of the same ol' same ol'. Don't believe me? Go to tvtropes.org. It is one resource I consult constantly when I'm writing to come up with ideas of where things can go (by looking at how they typically go, subverting some tropes, adapting others).

Well, that's a natural result of this RP community trying to neuter Sith RP because they can't stand the idea that their Bounty Hunter or Imp Agent could get ragdolled around at will by a Force Sensitive. It's simply a fact of the universe. When you have fellows that can MURDER YOU WITH THEIR MIND, they're going to... be pretty dangerous, and you should probably not stir the pot. But nooo. Because Jimmy the Bounty Hunter's player feels his character should be able to solo a Jedi/Sith one-on-one because he can do so in game mechanics. The natural result, of course, is RP that's as bland and uninteresting as fighting trash mobs out in the world. It's a large part of why walk-up RP can be so bland at times. You're trying not to step on any oversensitive toes, and nobody wants to play the submissive/servile Imperial (which is what most ought to be). Personally, when I play my Imps, I get tons of bites from Sith precisely because I'm not disregarding their power level. And I have fun, they have fun. Then again, I'm not in RP to show how bad my character is, so perhaps there's that.

Check! Been a strange ride, but a year's a year. Hopefully the new year brings the glamour back... I remember playing through Tython and part of Coruscant on my first beta weekend and loving it. Can't really beat the anticipation back then.

Feedback on the Cartel Market offerings? Sure: I understand that the reason you put all the most coveted items in gambling boxes is to squeeze every penny out of us that you possibly can... but it looks desperate and low of you. Since I realize that you'll never drop the gambling boxes because some customers are probably spending every penny of disposable income on them, I offer suggestions to make the system something that benefits you, but might alleviate the feeling of gouging that your Cartel Market currently exudes: 1. Offer the "old" Cartel Pack's offerings for individual purchase when you introduce a new Cartel Pack. It is clear that you seek to monetize the new hotness. But surely you realize that there is a sizable chunk of us that would gladly pay a reasonable fee (read: not $15 for one item) on top of our subscription from time to time to obtain specific items that are currently only available through a Cartel Pack. Your current system drives people like us to the GTN, which can be frustrating at the best of times because obtaining items from a store shouldn't involve tons of credit grinding unless one is unwilling to pay. Your current system drives us to the GTN because we're unable to pay for what we want to buy. That's a failure on your part, in my opinion. I see one easy solution to keep Cartel Packs relevant if you made this change: make the direct-buy versions bound (read: can't convert them to credits or mail them to alts, which makes Cartel Packs appealing since repeats and undesirables can be sold or mailed to alts). As it stands, you're undermining your own store by driving customers to the GTN if they know what they're after. Your current scheme only encourages "whales" (compulsive buyers or people with tons of disposable income) and grinders to try for these items, since the "middle man" finds the prices on the GTN absurdly high. 2. Balance maximizing profits with offering value for purchases. I cannot scientifically prove anything, but I suspect that if you polled your playerbase at large, more than a few of your customers would consider the current implementation of the Cartel Market a shameless money grab with very poor tangible offerings. Most items I see are "padded" with potentially undesirable extras to increase the purchase price (sets of shells stuffed with epic level 30 and 43 mods that are largely useless, along with full sets of unmodded shells that only have one original piece in them -- like the Valiant set introduced very recently, just to name two examples). While the store should provide you with a profit margin, the goal should be to provide value and desirable items to show good faith to the customer. Currently, it feels like your intent is anything but. Almost every addition to the Market feels like a minimal-effort attempt bundled in the most anti-economic-for-the-customer way to push them to purchase Cartel Coins. And while this may be the REAL intent, the common expectation is that you court customers to maximize long-term profit... as it stands, you might manage to exploit the current scheme a while before people get sick of it and stop participating. 3. Leave some item categories out of Cartel Packs entirely. Some things, such as emotes, have the potential to sell really well if you market them separately, and offer them at a reasonable price. I feel you're trying to hit the three-pointers, and underestimating the value of lay-ups, to use a basketball analogy. Both are important components for a well-rounded game, but focusing exclusively on one or the other will limit your possibilities. Perhaps this last bit I am about to add will be what trolls and the blindly devoted quote when they respond to this post, but I feel it might be of value to you given that, despite all my displeasure with the current affairs, I am a huge Star Wars fan and started playing MMOs after playing (and loving) KotOR: The introduction of F2P could have been a very positive thing for this game -- and your PR folks have and will continue to spin it as being an overwhelming positive. But as someone that should have been a shoe-in for a long-term customer for your product, I have found myself looking at other MMOs whose development teams have shown better judgment in case this game continues to go the way it has. For the time being, I remain subscribed... I think it's a tad early to call the Cartel Market and this game a complete disaster, but even someone as biased in favor of this game and developer as me cannot help but think that your poor decision-making is going to drive what could have been one of the financial success stories of the decade into the ground. I urge you to take a long, hard look at your current offering, and at the decisions you have made that brought you to this point. Even if one were to grant you the assertion that you've not driven customers away in droves by your decisions or lack thereof, a product such as yours, with its pedigree, IP and foundation should be performing far, far better than it is. It should have been able to stand up on its own two feet with subscriptions alone. As that's water under the bridge, I think that the least you owe your remaining and future playerbase is some honest self-evaluation and a F2P offering that shows you care about your customers and not just their wallets. I haven't posted much since you rebooted the forums prior to launch, but I felt this needed to be said. I hope you're actually listening, as you've said you are.

I agree to an extent... but frankly, alignment gear is an afterthought in this game. At 50, none of it is worth keeping. Even the relics are worthless, since the Champion ones you get for free from the PvP quest are better (and for several AC's, close to best-in-slot). The alignment system is flawed, but it's largely inconsequential as well. Much like Legacy, it just needs a revamp. I think one nice thing would be the ability to buy "swaps" for your ability based on alignment (for instance, DS Consulars could buy a perk that lets them make their Telekinetic abilities look like lightning instead, and LS Inqs could do the opposite. Same with Knights and Statis/Force Choke).

Wow. So first, unify colors for companions -- a feature that was announced as a major part of a previous patch and even on the launcher -- breaks on patch 1.5. Not only is the response time on fixing it absurdly slow, but you go on to break the feature on players as well -- another major feature from an early game update. And you mean to tell us that neither the PTS testing nor internal testing revealed either of these issues before this went live? I know that some unexpected bugs are unavoidable in a major update, but you should not be putting out these Game Updates with bugs that jump at a player's face the moment they log in -- such as seeing your previously color-coordinated companion is back to launch-style leveling clownsuits. Frankly, I just don't see how you (EA/Bioware) expect this game to have high customer retention rates with the decisions you're making. Despite all the marketing double-speak of subscription-based services being a dinosaur and F2P being the future, the fact is that you have never offered a level of service that compels the majority of your playerbase to pay $15 a month to play this game. And rather than fix the service, you chose to downgrade the product to a revolving-door affair with monetization chokepoints along the way to get -something- out of people who will very likely do what millions of your product's most avid followers did at launch: buy into the illusion, only to see that the high note were the first 20 levels... and then hit the door. There is a fundamental difference between folks that say, "I can't pay $15 a month for this game" (the customers you'd hope to catch in the F2P net to monetize for what they can pay) and those who go, "I won't pay $15 a month for this game." It's not that the second group does not have $15/month in disposable income to spend -- most of them do. And truth be told, an MMO is amazing value for entertainment compared to just about any alternative, so providing value isn't as important as reinforcing what should be an obvious choice if these people like the genre. Folks are paying $15/month to play other games, which means they can... they just won't given the level of your offering. That should be what keeps you awake at night as a company, and it should be what shapes your business and development decisions. Not finding a way to pad the numbers so you can spin failure during investor calls. Your problem with customer retention has a lot to do with this kind of stuff: nasty slip-ups in execution, mishandling customer service, and an astounding divergence between your vision and the expectations of the people with the wallets. F2P, in my mind, is a stopgap measure. It will monetize the people with lots of disposable income for a time, and keep lower-level content populated. But beyond inflating numbers, it doesn't fix the core issue that makes your customer base so small compared to the competition. And while you could make a living out of that, it would be a pathetic end to one of the most anticipated MMOs of all time... your product could be so much more. You had the dream product on your hands, and a massive customer pool to begin with. I would be surprised if this game's trajectory doesn't become a case study on how a company can clench defeat from the jaws of victory and then settle for mediocrity. But then I'm sure you'll find a way to spin it and claim you had it tough.

Well, if they just give -everything- away, then there's no point in subscribing. I think that convenience-related limitations are a great way to entice people... brick walls to advancement (read: not being able to equip artifact gear, insufficient quickbars for all your abilities) are not. They're just frustrating. Still, a $5 purchase at some point after hitting level 25 or so (which is when you start feeling the need for those sidebars) to get the sidebars is not unreasonable. As a subscriber that had to downgrade to Preferred status a day after F2P's launch due to credit card issues, I can tell you that the cosmetic limitations are a huge drive to resubscribe (I resubbed after 2 weeks, when my new CC arrived). They're lame, but they work. At the end of the day, the point is to entice you to pay, not to give you enough for free that you don't feel like subscribing is necessary; wouldn't be much of a business unless they found ways to monetize you.

I agree with this. If you're going to eliminate the BM gear from the vendor, at least remove the rank requirement from the craftable shells. It was an absurd decision to begin with, seeing as the BM shells had such a high Valor rank that whomever had the rank to wear them had more than enough PvPing under their belt to have the actual BM gear or obtain it easily. It's why these shells are dirt-cheap and not even very commonly sold anymore. It would be a two-way benefit: keep the shell alive -and- benefit crafters by giving making an otherwise useless shell a profitable item.

I'd happily trade you the (pretty useless) Presence buff for a pick of a species unlock for every 50 human I have (two already, and a 40 on the way). This whole Legacy thing just stinks to high heavens right now. Hopefully it gets redesigned before it comes out, because right now it feels like it was put together at the last minute with very little thought about how it would jive with the most active players. It's a classic case of "cool idea, horrid implementation," and almost a textbook example of an idea that could have been made into something really cool and just fell flat on its face due to a lack of imagination. Here are some of the main issues I have with the Legacy system as it's been shaping up: Forces a Legacy Name on all your characters, which is often nonsensical (and no, hiding it isn't a solution; it's a work-around that involves doing without on some characters due to mediocre design). Legacy names should never have been tied to having a surname (in fact, the surnames could have been a Legacy Perk per character at launch at like, Legacy 5, so that the system didn't come out with a ladder but no rewards). Rewards you for playing the same race twice by unlocking a species only after you play it to 50. How does that make sense? Give us a free choice of a species to unlock for every 50 we have; it makes a lot more sense and rewards time played rather than choices (which were made without knowing the reward system by those of us playing since launch). A more logical system would have given you the more 'common' cross-species combos relatively early on (Legacy 15 or so), and the very rare ones at very high levels (Legacy 30 or above). In other words: reward people who've played more/longer with the more eye-catching species/class combos, not people who played choice lottery and got it right by not picking a Human or a Zabrak. That someone who only has one character will get a rare species/class combo while I (Legacy level 30) will get none because I made the "wrong" choice by rolling Humans is a textbook example of why this system is atrocious. Penalizes the very players it's supposed to reward by forcing them to reroll alts (or roll new ones) to claim their rewards. Again, how does it make sense for a system that encourages altitis to penalize people with altitis for making choices that they had no way of knowing were bad? You're punishing players who played while the system was not yet implemented; which is backwards, you should be giving those players reparations so they start on even ground and can claim rewards proportional to the effort they've put in. If anything, you should be rewarding people with altitis by letting them get additional character slots at very high Legacy levels (30+), because someone that hit 30 recently (or a while ago, as some of us did) likely made many alts already. Instead, they're stuck with a bunch of cosmetic perks they can't even use if they rolled humans or have all 8 character slots on their server filled up. That you went this route without giving people prior warning is pretty poor planning, and no amount of 'we're aware of that, we'll be talking about it more when we have details to share' will change the absurdity of it. You're not putting this out two days in, guys... you're coming out with it a couple of months late. Those of us with altitis already have a bunch of alts. Instead of building the system to take this into account, you just run right over it as if this was launch. It's not. This is where I feel BioWare royally dropped the ball, and it's a big one. It shows very poor planning and quite a bit of indifference towards how their implementations affect their players (in this case, their most active players and presumably the ones that would be most content to stay when content isn't coming at a fast pace). Frankly, as much as I love the game, I'm somewhat baffled by the decisions BioWare keeps making. I'm fairly well-prepared professionally, but I don't get paid to design these systems... so how is it that in a few minutes typing up a post I can punch this many holes in a Legacy system that's designed by folks who're supposed to be building a game for the long haul? I just don't understand, and I'm genuinely not trying to troll here. I'd really love some straight talk explaining these decisions and in what light they make sense, because from where I'm standing -- and despite what some in this forum think, the customer's perspective matters a lot in a game that relies on subscriptions -- this makes absolutely no sense. Put simply: What were you thinking?