I've just returned to this game last month, played a lot of my old favorite content including Eternal Championship: And I will say this: IMO, the balancing game-wide has gone to heck. I'm not going to cite stats since the git gud crowd still apparently sees them as speculation or opinion as evidenced by the previous post a couple comments ago, so to be clear this is opinion. Everything in this game has become a challenge-devoid faceroll or a needlessly hard, unrewarding slog. -Content up to the old lvl 75 cap has become a nerf-herder army. I remember when Lost Island and Blood Hunt were supposed to have GF players instaquitting left and right when it popped up, now you can get through the bosses in half the time as before with a good group -You can't do any ops until lvl 80, so forget about saving them to experience chronologically if you want a little nostalgic RP experience, but idk why they bothered with that since story modes like KP for example are still facerolls, and apparently Dashroode and Nefra are so easy even on MASTER MODE that fleet pugs farm it nonstop, you don't even have to do the mechanics right. so totally cheapened. -lvl 75-80 content is only marginally better balanced, and only if you ignore instances like Secrets of the Enclave where you could bake cookies in the time it takes to whittle down a TRASH MOB's health down to zero. The health pools of endgame content sponges are holding dps to unsustainable standards where a reasonable 340 player is bashed for not being better at their job and reading every note of their discipline's Vulkk guide. -Now Eternal Champs...I have completed it w/ sprint, back when it was endgame content and now, and I will agree with the OP that it has only gotten harder to do. I would forgive this, except BW/BSword has apparently decided not to pay the part of the team that constructed rewards for the game anymore, because all we still get is a conquest point reward and 6-10 gear pieces you immediately sell to the medical droid at the exit. You can say this is a balance issue or a skill issue, but can the game at least make rewards more relevant if they're not going to revisit numbers' coding for anything??? Maybe play the stuff for themselves and tier stuff properly for once?

Today I tried to do it in Master, I thought I was lucky to get into a group with people that didn't just instaquit it, but we tried to do the first boss and experiment with what was killing us and figure out how to avoid it, but despite my suggestions one person continued to fail to follow it and caused us to take too much damage and die. I had to leave bc I don't want to waste time bashing my head against one boss in a flashpoint with no reward (I did warn the group before our last pull that this was the last one) Simply, the threshold of difficulty that people will accept for a random selection before they eat the lockout and quit and try again on an alt to get an easier fp? That's just becoming smaller and smaller each year. Since 3.0, when the team has come out with content that's unique and challenging, random gf groups can't figure it out in one or two pulls and the content dies aside from friend groups that purposely try to clear it with determination. The last time I remember this happening was on Nathema: novel challenging mechanics and a damage table that was actually unforgiving if you didn't do the bosses the right way The people who quit long flashpoints are something of jerks, but the people who quit difficult ones I can understand. Lately there is no reason to go through teaching a random person who may not know how to deal with the bosses or care, when they can get virtually the same rewards breezing through hammer station/red reaper for the 100th time. I'm going to post another forum topic on this soon about flashpoints not created equal. People are more familiar with the older flashpoints, and several of them haven't had their damage tables appropriately upscaled for many patches, which is why you might see groups that stick through the longer ones. Though I'm surprised that people don't drop Lost Island, that always seemed like more instaquit fodder to me. We don't get people who know the content in GF anymore, because the ones that know it also know that the chance a random teammate is going to fail awareness/skill checks and lose to the boss is fairly high, they just don't want to deal with that so most of them will quit right away.

I agree with the need for a coherent explanation. This is literally the only thing besides token credit amounts and grey junk that drops from random enemies, minor unique champions, and blue security crates anymore; at first I assumed it was just at lvl 80 which I'd mayybe understand more, but no it's on my lvling toons too. They could have done something with trash that made people *not* want to skip it all the time, and instead this will have the complete opposite effect. This stuff is 100% useless except for people who enjoy playing dress-up with their outfitter the entire time they're playing (i.e. not actually, you know, *playing* the game and going into the world killing enemies), and it drops so often that it clogs up your inventory significantly quickly. Right now anything that doesn't fit RP-wise with my one new sage is getting trashed as a complete waste of a drop I was happy to do trash now and then because there was a chance a companion gift or something else marginally valuable would drop out of it, now players are going to go to even greater lengths to avoid random trash. It doesn't even have usable stats that could be a nice addition to players of that level, or more likely lvling toons. Spamming generic outfitter items simply defies any possible rationale that could come into my head on how this might even boost sales in-game. I do not understand it and therefore I'm doubly teed off about it

Yeah I'm in the same boat, I recently came back to subscribing last week and I'm kind of just noticing now how much I need to relearn game-wise/catch up on gear wise. A little tooltip of gear recommendations wouldn't go amiss.

I was talking with my friend yesterday and we agreed that mastering your discipline and the enemies is a lot more important. The type of players who want something for nothing are the same ones that will click the same 4 buttons on their quickbar and not take advantage of anything else their spec has to offer, which is how they die. Whatever gets done I hope these FPs/Ops don't get dumbed down again. They need rewards commensurate with the effort they require first, then gear limits if that hasn't motivated "Ossus" geared players to actually learn mechanics. Dumbing down the content should be a last resort. As it stands they might as well remove every group-dungeon aside from the ones that players spam if they're not going to improve rewards

If the devs have any hope left to improve this game, they need to stop lumping all their flashpoints/ops together as the same content/reward system when there are glaring differences in total speed and boss difficulty. Include better reward items, and reserve them for the higher tiers of flashpoints. Go back to the days when the 3-5 latest group content dungeons had a gear recommendation/restriction and separate them to a better tier of rewards. I'm tired of going through group finder only to find a failure and ragequit in Nathema or an insane sprint through Black Talon/Hammer Station

Something with positioning definitely got broken this latest patch, operatives/assassins can't use their holotraverse/phantom stride on the machine core in Revan anymore without a likely insta-death, when normally it would just make them appear further back. (IMO that's the result that I think it always should have had, but our dps definitely aren't happy about the "bug") I think they tried to shadow-patch some things that groups used to cheese certain mechanics (avoiding tank swap in council, preparing for a machine core pull by "porting" to it and ending up farther out) and it went sour in some ways.

These are still just bandaids that leave open an existing wound: That pvp was a side game which was poorly thought out from the start, and that it's so unpopular for a reason besides not enough incentive to do it, even though I enjoy it and will give it my all if I need to do some for a reward. Devs need to find that reason and fix it if they can afford to before trying to fix POs that will remain cancerous no matter what. I'd rather have the 2 weeklys/2 dailies always be 1/1 pve-based and 1/1 pvp-based, rather than getting Warzones + GSF objectives that fill the list. Right now the PvP POs are bland, just "complete a PvP match or two"; they could afford to include earning a certain amount of medals, passing Huttballs successfully, even just earning points of all things. The current reroll deals are fair in a fair world I think. At some point you have to suck it up and either participate or don't if you don't like what the game is giving you to work/play for.

Wow, well first off... What are people reading when they suggest "we should consider listening to what the OP is expressing"? All I read was some entitled guy rich enough to pay $15/month complaining in broken English how much he disapproved of Galactic Seasons and threatening to leave if they didn't stop trying to make profits of all things, not a lot to mull over in bed at night, TBH. And second off...I don't care how much people believe game companies should "care" about their consumers over their bottom line, their #1 objective is making money, that's it; without money this game is not going to run. Pleasing every disgruntled consumer who continues paying money to EA (apparently against their own self-interest) is waaay at the bottom of the list, if it's on the list at all, because in reality it's a herculean task that they'll go bankrupt trying to accomplish. I believe they're coming out with what they can based on the metrics they have on what's going to keep the game going while still hanging on to a player base, and that's all we can hope for. If they're really idiots running the game into the ground with so much as a new rewards system, they'll pay for it when the game crashes, and whoever comes out with a new SW MMO will see where things went downhill and try like crazy not to replicate those mistakes. For now, I'd rather have a game where some of the features make me happy and are worth paying for, than berate the makers into running their team, servers, and creditors into the ground within the year, by wasting time running around trying to acquiesce to every angry gamer's ideas of what's best for their game when they see the PTS

I like features in this game with a random element, so KDY is up there. I've had to run in groups for the rest of the early ones so often that the fun is pretty much gone, unfortunately. Nathema is good, the bosses are engaging as well as some of the trash, and it's good looting for the effort if you take the time to figure it out or teach others how to. Boarding party and Foundry, BP because the bonus is cool, and Foundry because Revan and HK47 duh. And Manaan, it has good mechanics in master mode and the area is just nice and sleek.

^This. I think this is less of a "starved for conquest points" problem and more of a "I overextended myself and I ran into diminishing returns from feeding my guild conquest with a bunch of alts I let exist for nothing else" problem

Tbh, I understand the concerns, but I'm not a fan of the players' version of "play your own way". It's become clear that the majority of the players are only doing the easiest bug-free things that net the most rewards for the work, and it's starving a lot of fine content: starving it of both players to do it with and feedback/play history that would bring attention to improving it. It would depend on what exactly the team wants to create objectives around, but just giving people a choice of what GS objectives out of all of them to do sounds like more of the same or conquest-lite: A place where certain objectives get done to death while others might as well not even be there; and whatever gameplay those latter objectives are linked around will continue to never get a surge of players taking an interest in it even on a monthly basis. Specifically for people that enjoy team-based content which gets less traffic due to any factor, "play your own way" sabotages its own purpose for them. I loved the rotating renown bonus around doing certain things in the group tab such as Chapters, Warzones, GSF matches, etc because it provided a special bonus for every type of thing to do that wasn't there before. It gave all those modes an equitable incentive and it brought new people in to at least try some of this stuff and gave me more pops and playtime with it, if nothing else. I'm hoping for the same type of thing with the Galactic Seasons additions. If you're boycotting a type of activity because it bores you so much or you're not good enough at it to have any type of fun with it, that's still your choice, you're not going to die or make your character a failure if you opt out on a day of earning pixels of fake currency on a game. Those activities you prefer still reward you, I don't see anything wrong with people who have a more rounded participation in the game getting their own rewards for being that type of player.

You'll need to log out and back in when it happens, but yep, something weird is happening with barriers and consoles in phases. Inquisitor story on Alderaan has Elysium vaults that are "double ray shielded" so that you can barely click the console controlling them and even when you manage to, it doesn't let you access your target, because there's still a second shield that you can't switch off. The Oricon watchtower has these double consoles/shields too, but you can only click them once and it doesn't open up the core, which remains stuck in a barrier. It's as if the game is including some other non-member's phase barriers and clickables to down it inside your phase. Spaghetti code strikes again. It needs to be fixed I'm sick of having to log out and back in whenever something like this happens.

Personally the credit spamming thing isn't an annoyance to me. I'm mostly worried about the poor suckers begging for credits from the fleet inhabitants so they can get that vendor mount or gear piece without working for it. They're likely to be a mark for this scam.

I appreciate the clarification. I barely have an interest in unranked PvP and ranked sounds like a whole other bear to me. I mean if they want to ask for special consideration, such as additional accrued tokens to recipients for each day of a delayed reward distribution date, that would be the most reasonable remedy I can think of, but I doubt Bioware is interested in pandering to the concerns of those who subscribe so selectively, either with sub refunds or my former suggestion. We've known forever their moneymakers are those who subscribe for years and don't fuss too much and whales who buy coins for countless Barbie cosmetics. Even if I had sympathy for the OP, I'd just tell him he's pounding sand.