I'm a Collection Stan, so because I gained knowledge that none of these were gonna be in Collections, I immediately decided that I was gonna throw them away. Why should I bother hunting down new cosmetics if I can't even spawn them at will for an alt or in the event of an outfitter flub?

So...what are you going to do about the rewards that were in there? What about the current Season's reward? Leaving this ambiguous is not the proper move, here.

YOUR OWN STORY-DRIVEN STAR WARS SAGA. Just because there is the option to group and Guild, that doesn't mean it's the main focus. You can group for Origin Story & Eternal Empire Story missions, but nobody else will show up in the cutscenes. You can group for Planetary Story missions, but it's more efficient to do it yourself as you do your Origin Story. You can group for Post-Corellia Story, Post-Zakuul Story, & Heroic missions, but the recent addition of the system that allows you to hop into someone else's fight un-grouped and still gain rewards if they're part of your faction nullifies the need for that. You can group for Flashpoints, but most people don't unless they're using Group Finder to grind Hammer Station. You can group for Alliance Alerts, Star Fortresses, Eternal Arena, & Uprisings, but most people don't unless they're playing with friends. You need to group for Operations & Instance Bosses, but only Guilds and close friend groups do them. You need to group for PvP (Warzones, Arena, GSF), but you can do that Solo via the Activity Finder. You cannot group for Space Missions/Heroic Space Missions, because the entire system is on-rails shooting and most players have completely forgotten about it by now. NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU QUOTE THE DEVELOPERS AT ME, THAT DOESN'T CHANGE THE FACT THAT THERE IS LITTLE TO ZERO REQUIREMENT TO DO ANYTHING WITH ANYONE. GROUPING AND GUILDING IS IRRELEVANT OUTSIDE OF ONE MISSION TYPE, AND YOU CAN STILL DO THAT ALONE BY USING THE GROUP FINDER. STOP BEING A GUILD ELITIST AND ACCEPT THE FACT THAT SOME PEOPLE PREFER TO PLAY ONLINE GAMES BY THEMSELVES.

@Lenlo He's got a point. SWTOR was, is, and always will be primarily geared towards Single Player activities. It's why only 12 out of 36 Flashpoints aren't trivially Solo Swept. The first time they tried to make a storyline heavily intertwined with Ops was Dread Masters in 1.5 & 2.X, and the last time they heavily tied an Op to a storyline was Shadow of Revan in 3.X; and they haven't done it again. Likely because nobody played because the majority of SWTOR players are Solo Players. Supposedly Nature of Progress and R-4 Anomaly are part of a new Czerka arc, but I wouldn't know because I don't play Ops because I can't solo them to get the full experience on my own without dragging down 7 other people. And that's my main issue with Ops and why, if they EVER connected Ops to the Main Story like you want, they'd have to put in the effort to make 2 completely different versions - one for Solos (so they don't lose 80 - 90% of their Sub revenue), one for Guildies. And with the current size of the team, they're not gonna do that. I PROMISE you, nobody wants to be required to play an Operation in order to continue the main story. That's anti-player behavior.

Yeah, so is Temple of Sacrifice. You're not helping.

Temple of Sacrifice also had an alternative workaround added in for people like me, who have no guild to pester about playing whatever raid on a whim. So I really truly have never seen the inside of an Operation. I still have the Gods from the Machine starter quest on all three of my characters that have made it past Iokath, and I've completely ignored the Dread Master arc for the same reason.

I mean...doesn't that prove my point, though? That the feature is really only useful to Guilds or other duel-focused PvP players?

Who actually does that, though? Like, honestly. I can't see that being useful to anyone other than Guilds that run private dueling tournaments; which is likely a minority even among PvP-focused guilds.

I mean yes, you're right, but I have no idea what they could do to Strongholds to make them more than just "Hey, come look at my level of creativity"/"I needed a Credit Sink". And the money thing is something I rail against all the time. Having a limit on each decoration that you then have to boost by spending obscene amounts of Cartel Coins? Nah, bro. That ain't right.

There are decorations in the game that serve as resource nodes, but they're inconsistent. Sometimes I'll go in and harvest 3, sometimes I'll harvest only one, and the entire function is on a weekly cooldown. I kinda get it, as it's a super-easy Credit farm without it, but that can easily be changed by making the vault nodes give sliced tech resources instead of Credit cases. If they could change it to either each node having it's own cooldown or having a "collect all" button that went on a weekly cooldown, that'd make it far more useful.

I don't play Ops (guildless scrub), so educate me if I'm wrong; but aren't all Ops non-cinematic? As in, do even the Oricon Ops have cutscenes to experience? Because, at least with Flashpoints, they're starting to go the way of Hammer Station again (Shrine of Silence has little-to-no story to it. It's just a glorified Heroic).

That's something I'm confused on as well, tbh. It feels like the actual developers still care about the game and want to make it better for us (I think there are still people on the current dev team that have been there since the start), but the corporate suits don't want to give them the funding needed for everything they want to do (the game is twelve years old and has no relevancy in current gaming discussion outside of it's curious longevity, so I honestly wouldn't see it as a worthwhile investment either); so they have to make small changes here and there. Because, at least from my point of view, it really does feel like they (the actual dev team) don't have the money and manpower needed to deliver more than what we're currently getting. But who knows? Like I say when talking about the 7.0 story: we're still in the middle of things, and don't have the complete picture yet. If the game can survive until 8.0, we may be able to see a larger picture than we can in the current moment. Hindsight is always clearer.

I do agree that the devs likely were forced into a few choices by money-grubbing suits at EA, and have to stand by those choices now because it's too late to change them without a massive overhaul that would take more time and money than anyone really wants. Not even just the Tech Users, I think even the Force Users should have had some competence to their dialogue. There are only a handful of choices I can recall off the top of my head that The Commander actually gets to feel like a leader. Kaliyo and Jorgan infiltrating Zakuul, a handful of semi-forced choices in the interim quests after Echoes of Oblivion, and that's about it. A great touch would have been dialogue options to use relevant experience from an Origin's 1.0 quest if applicable; even if it was just an illusion of choice. That's true. And, again, I feel like that's part of the limitations of the MMO medium over a fully Single Player experience. It's necessary to trick a player-side client into seeing the same NPC with a different skin and voice, just so your choices don't disrupt other people's experiences. I very vaguely recall killing Quinn once upon a time, because that's what makes sense for a Sith Warrior. Quinn betrayed you, and that betrayal is even worse if you romance him like I did with mine. It makes perfect sense that a Sith would kill him for his actions. But now, with how Companions have literally become another Collection item, it makes 0 sense for any of them to die (Torian or Vette; the one time where I adamantly disagree with a narrative decision). Right? At the end of the day, while I don't like that the game feels less impactful than a game that came out in 2003 (KotOR), I recognize that without major investment of time, money, and manpower that Disney/EA/Broadsword likely don't want to invest into a 12 year old game, I can at least accept that many factors far outside my control have led the game down this path.

They do need better writers, but they won't hire them because they don't have the money (why else has every update been so small?). The only thing I can say is this: Either learn to accept that it's not going to be exactly what you want/think is best, or drop the game and find another one to play for a while.

We kinda do, but ti's still got Force-undertones with Heta trying to harness the secrets of Darth Nul, and the Mandos still treat you like an outsider even if you play as a Hunter, who was made a Mandalorian by Shae's predecessor after the Great Hunt (my Hunter declined rejoining the Empire and stayed as The Commander, but I doubt it's much different from the route I didn't choose).