<Scions of Brutality> is an Imperial, U.S. Eastern Timezone-based, social, mostly-PvE, Imperial guild on Star Forge. We're looking for people who are interested in helping to build a community of friends with which to conquer SWTOR's challenges. Over the last decade-and-a-half, our organization, through its various chapters, has perfected the "people over pixels" mentality, and while we encourage everyone to play their very best, we strive to maintain an atmosphere of camaraderie; choosing to build people up rather than tear them down. Right now we're making a big push to round out our Operations team to begin our regular raiding schedule of Mondays and Fridays from 6PM EST to 9PM EST. We need a healer, up to two tanks and a couple more DPS. So if you're interested in running regular Veteran Ops and possibly up to Nightmare mode, come join our guild! We'll also be planning regular events like Datacron Crawls and World Boss hunts, and you can usually find us hanging out on Discord while mowing through FPs and the occasional Warzone or GSF. If you'd like to know more, or if you're ready to join, head on over to our website today! Alternatively, you can message Chiroth or Mysticha in-game. Thanks for reading, and may the Force serve you well!

Here we are in 2021 and I had this issue, too. This suggestion also worked for me (I had to Alt+F4 out of the game and then relaunch.) I tried reloading the UI first, but that didn't work.

Any halfway decent group should be able to show you the ropes in Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace. Those are the introductory Operations and as long as you all have voice comms (e.g. Discord, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, etc.) folks should be able to talk you through each of those fights pretty easily. Once you feel comfortable in EV and KP, you're probably ready to tackle all the rest of the ops. Furthermore, if you're really interested in learning operations, there are quite a few video guides on each of the Ops and their encounters (such as this one) that you could study beforehand to be extra prepared.

You are right. =( Let's remedy that. I still stick by my idea that raiding should be the means for gearing for raiding. You go into raids, the bosses all drop loot, so you can gear up your raid team and prep for the next tier of raiding. If that 's how it worked, I wouldn't have any problem with Galactic Command for myself. But for others, the folks who maybe just dabble in raiding, but mostly spend their time doing other activities, I wouldn't have an problem at all if there were a more-or-less guaranteed way for them to get set piece drops through GC. I think, rather than have specific slots drop at particular tiers, Bioware should take a(nother) page from Blizzard and do something similar to what they did with Hearthstone. When you open packs in Hearthstone you have a chance to get a legendary quality card. Of course, the standard drop rate on legendaries is pretty low. However, while unconfirmed (I think) by Blizzard, Hearthstone "scienticians" (heh heh, Simpsons) have posited the theory that there exists a "pity timer." Basically, if after opening 30ish packs, you haven't gotten a legendary card, the pity time kicks in and starts drastically increasing the chances of receiving a legendary from opening packs such that you won't get too far past 40 packs per legendary. I think SWTOR should operate similarly. If they've already implemented a pity time for set pieces, it needs to be set waaaaaaaaay lower. EDIT: And also be per-character. Don't want your pity timer going off when you've played an alt for a change a pace.

Let's say you do GSF - it has the best UA Components-per-activity in the game right now. You get 8 for a win and 3 for a loss. Let's assume a 50% win rate, meaning you get 11 UAComps every two matches, or an average of 5.5 UAComps per match. In order to get your max tier main hand, which costs 570 UAComps, you'd have to complete about 100 GSF matches. Let's say you can get 3 GSF matches per hour (queue times + time played... I think I'm being extremely generous assuming 3 per hour), that means it'll take you over 33 hours of played time to earn one max-tier item. Now you have 13 more items to max out for a grand total of an additional 5575 UAComps. If you fully gear your character, through the best, most reliable way to gear, it'll take about 1858 more hours. There are only about 720 hours in a month. Maybe you're super active and average 40 hours a week in SWTOR. Every minute you play is devoted to GSF. You'll need almost 47 weeks (five weeks short of a year) to max out your character. Maybe you'll get lucky and get a couple pieces from Command Crates, but that'll likely only save you a few days. Again, that's by doing nothing but GSF. If you like Ops, FPs, Warzones, etc, your time to max tier will take longer. I should reiterate, that we've looked at some "best case" scenarios regarding win rates and queue times, as well. I expect, in the real world, it would not be uncommon for a 50% to 100% increase in the estimated times. Oh, and then you do it all over again on the second of your dozen+ alts. Almost a full year, to fully gear one character. /smh

This! It's really, really difficult to gear your raiders, in aggregate, with RNG from crates. Sure, one or two of your folks might get lucky and get their six-piece bonus pretty quickly, but what about the couple of unlucky friends you have who, like me, only managed to pull 2 set pieces from 90+ crates? If six of your raiders are all ready to go into Hard Modes, you have to leave the two behind - which sucks because we're all friends, and I don't want to leave them behind. Sure, the last bosses drop pieces, but now we're having to farm entire raids just to get two people the 4 other set pieces they need. That means slogging through hundreds of trash mobs and dozens of trash bosses just to get to the juicy loot center of your Operations. Heaven help you when you get to SnV and have to face 6 trash bosses before finally getting to the one that drops your gear. Bottom line: NO boss should be a trash mob. Bosses are bosses for a reason!

Are they really though? So far, all I've heard are some very nebulous assurances that they'll do "something" to make it "better." It's the "something" and the "better" that should concern us all, because they thought RNG crates would be "something" that would make gearing up "better." So far, players have two primary complaints about the RNG crate system: 1.) First and foremost, the rewards in the crates are terrible and unrewarding too much of the time. 2.) Getting the next crate takes too long. As of right now, they've only done "something" about the 2nd complaint which has been to make us get the Disappointment Boxes more quickly. I mean, if the water fountain dispenses 90% sewage and 10% potable water, increasing the rate at which the sewage flows out doesn't really make your drinking experience any less disgusting. For me, the idea that raid bosses don't drop gear is just ludicrous. If they wanted to tell raiders to piss off out of their game, they couldn't have said it any louder or more clearly than this. Maybe the scope of GC isn't quite as broad as the NGE, but the attitude behind it and the unrelenting support for it from the developers, in the face of much negative feedback from their playerbase (both before and after implementation), is exactly the same.

Yup! I agree, 100% This is the only way to make Galactic Command a positive experience for Subscribers. Devs do this and they keep my subscription (I'll even resub my alt account, which I recently canceled due to GC.)

Just like Sony was about the NGE. Where's SWG now?

That's good to hear. Could you maybe try to get a list from the developers of the ideas for Guild QOL improvements they feel are good ideas and willing to work on. I'm not saying they need to list things that are coming out by next month or anything (though if there are some things that will, that would be very welcome news), but just stuff they've seen and gone, "Yeah! Yeah, a guild calendar is a really good idea. That's something we'd like to bring to the game." Such feedback would go a long way toward letting us know that our ideas are being heard and addressed. Thanks!

Honestly? Not really. (side note: are you just here to talk about Rampart?) I'm not trying to be mean, and I only offer the following because I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you genuinely have misread what everyone is asking. There is so much more that I am so much more eager to learn more about than KotET. How about someone addressing five years worth of questions about guild management improvements? How about five years worth of questions about PvP balance issues? How about five years worth of concerns on the illusory nature of player choice in in SWTOR? How about five years worth of concerns about slow-to-non-existent developer feedback? That's just to name a few of the things people are actually "eager to learn more about." Again, I don't want to give the impression that I don't appreciate you showing up here in this thread. I do. However, it seems like you've missed the mark on exactly what it is we're asking for, and I suspect you're only doing as you're directed, so maybe you can take this information I've provided to the Powers That Be™ and see if they'll deign to address our concerns.

I can name one: Star Citizen. It's not even done funding yet. $123,564,224 in crowd-funded donations and counting as of this post. But then look at the scope of that game. You'll walk around a planet, head to your hangar, climb into your ship, fly out of the hangar and then up through the atmosphere and into space. Next you'll Quantum Drive over to a space station in the system, land there, get out of the ship, walk inside the station, buy some cargo, go back to your ship, load the cargo and take off. Next you'll Q-Drive over to the jump point, navigate it to the next system, Q-Drive to the planet, fly DOWN through the atmosphere and land at a mining station where you'll unload your cargo. Provided, of course, that you weren't intercepted by pirates, on your way there, who would have disabled and boarded your ship, wherein you would have engaged in CQB, FPS-style, to eliminate the threat before continuing on your journey. Even though that game is still in development, much of that gameplay is in and working, and improvements are being made fairly rapidly. Even if the total funding exceeds $300M, that'll be a bargain for the type of gameplay Star Citizen is offering. It would be hard for me to believe that EA isn't casting a jealous eye on that pile of donated money Chris Roberts is using as a foundation for his nascent gaming empire. If they can get it through their little grey, cubicle brains that vision leads to profit, we may yet see SWTOR live up to its potential.

Looking around these forums, throughout the years, I can see that not much has changed. There's still a black cloud of negativity that haunts the General Forums area, leaving the atmosphere tinged with a vibe of nihilistic doom and gloom. "Everything's broken," "The game's terrible," "SWTOR should just die in a fire!" Certainly, this sense of foreboding is often exaggerated and overstated; however, there is still plenty of room for honest criticism. I like this game, I think, though it may be more accurate to say that I like the idea of the game. I like what the game could be, but isn't yet. Maybe this is a problem a lot of us have. We muddle through, enjoying the bright and shiny bits where we can find them, all the while hoping that Bioware will come along, and rub away the tarnished parts to reveal a valuable treasure beneath the grime. The good news is that I don't think this is a totally unreasonable thing to hope for, in the coming years. These days, the MMO market seems to have settled down. Game companies have come to realize that WoW's success was probably either a fluke or just the perfect juxtaposition of timing and design. No other MMO (and there were many contenders) was able to duplicate WoW's blockbuster status. So now the market has "cooled off." Even WoW is a shadow of its former self (if a giant one, still), and that's the perfect time for SWTOR to grow its player base. Folks who are moving on from WoW don't have a great many alternate choices for scratching the MMO itch, and with new Star Wars movies hitting the big screen over the next few years, SWTOR is actually in a pretty good place; with one caveat. They have to actually polish up those grimy spots. If your roof leaks when it rains, you can't blame the clouds for water damage in your home. You can't solve the problem by buying new windows. You have to replace the roof. Likewise, if you step on the scale and it shows you being 100 pounds overweight, you can't attribute those results to big bones or water retention. You have work on your diet and exercise. Problems can be fixed, but only after you've correctly and honestly identified them. SWTOR has problems. Maybe the developers know it, but it's hard to tell because many of these issues have been here since the beginning. As players, we identify these problems and give feedback on them, not because we want to destroy the game, but because we want to see it made better. We want it to grow so we'll have more friends to play with. We want it to shine so we can tell everyone, "See! I told you there was something amazing underneath all that dirt and dust!" Now is a really great time for EA to invest some money into SWTOR, revitalize its development team and make sure they have the resources they need to take the feedback we're giving and have a good, honest look at their thought processes and design philosophies. Then they need to enact positive changes in those areas to build SWTOR into a successful oasis of fun in the MMO wasteland.

The free-to-play model is for failed MMOs who couldn't hack it as a subscription. Market saturation and mismanagement are, in my opinion, the top factors contributing to MMO failure. However, the king of MMOs, World of Warcraft, is still a subscription-based MMO and raked in over one billion dollars in 2013. The next highest MMO was also subscription based. If cash shops offered better revenue, both WoW and Lineage 1 would have converted over a long time ago.

I don't see why they don't just make subbing a better deal. I prefer MMOs with subscriptions; because, in my estimation, "There's nothing more expensive than a Free-to-Play MMO." Also, I like paying a set amount and receiving all the content. I hate all the nickle'n'diming F2P games put its players through. I understand wanting to offer content a la carte to folks who aren't interested in a sub, but their F2P time should really just be an appetizer that leads to their subscription....and when they do finally subscribe, it should be one of those "light from heaven, angels choir" type moments that leaves them wondering how they ever got by without paying $0.50 per day. As it stands, I feel like my subscription is just okay. It definitely saves a lot of the hassle of being F2P or Preferred, but is hassling people really the best way for an entertainment company to operate? Also, I feel like there's a lot of content I miss out on as a subscriber. I mean, there are still all the stupid lockboxes (DCUO lets subs open theirs for free) and all the past subscriber rewards that I've permanently missed out on (meanwhile the premium digital content from my Collector's Edition has been made available for $5 to everyone.) Bioware isn't even consistent in that regard. I just wish my Sub here in SWTOR was more like my WoW or DCUO subscription.