Back for 7.0 after 5 years away this is what i noticed, cheating is rampant and has ruined the swtor pve/pvp community. Every part of it, pve, pvp, gsf - there is a current meta cheat for each, Time, like a sieve has strained out much of the good honest community, the game population is now the smallest I've ever seen and those left are of a certain type that multiply and create the current community problems to the point of the game being unplayable as it is. GSF is all the worst because anyone can participate without a sub, on a free email address there's zero consequences for a troll to make an account and cheat using speed hacks, aimbots, and complex macros - all against the ToS but not actionable due to their not caring if that account is banned, they just make a new one, spoof an IP and troll again. This is commonplace and it has ruined GSF for the subbed players who are trying to play and enjoy it. PVP is all about the FOM and finding the latest bug in the bolster system to exploit for quad dmg - which happens constantly; this along with the win-trading discord gangs make pvp both ranked and unranked a complete joke - OPS there are many cheat spots and cheat strategies, a good example is the cave strat for Dash (which was fixed thankfully) - that is 1 of dozens that discord gangs do and then parade around achieves as if they are good players; sadly they perhaps are good, or rather, the best that remains of what was once a massive and thriving ops community of actually talented players Toxic Chat - the game is overrun with the most toxic chat I've seen in any game; it's like being privy to the rantings of a criminal psych ward in a dystopian lockdown; if it is at all not for base comedy and reflects actuality, i sigh that the once great community has devolved into this - it's like all the lovely water drained out, and all that remains are the dregs that have not yet gone down the drain. Can EA fix this? I doubt it. From what I've seen of their other games, they run them like candy machines just making necessary updates to refill the candy, but doing very little to actually; it is a money generating machine plain and simple selling vastly overprice pixels in a store of objects that are at best ok at worst completely ugly and lame (a great example is the lightsaber that has a bear trap on it - what a marvel of artistic vision there) of course, this is all my opinion, but for a first step EA needs to get rid of the cheaters by making GSF sub only, and by monitoring the bolster system in pvp as well as monitoring for win-trading; and ban the toxic names and toxic chat from chat on fleet, though i doubt they will i don't think they care.

I cannot stay silent any more - my level of frustration has boiled over - as a founding player since the first beta for this game and a continued sub since launch, I am Guidmaster of the largest Imperial guild on Shadowlands server, North America, and I have a vested position in this community: I am absolutely floored and outraged Bioware is making a decision to cap, convert, and delete players comms and crystals which represent hard work, time, effort. The conversion ratio capping at 2 million - how was this arrived at? In what corporate office did a bunch of suits who have nothing at all to do with the community of players decide thousands of people's time and effort can be summarily deleted? Converting the community's hard earned comms and crystals into a capped amount of credits is flat out saying loudly that, you, Bioware doesn't care. Just convert the comms/crystal with no cap. What's the valid reason to cap it? A legit, valid, logical reason? A player can run heroics and make 2 million credits in a day - those comms and crystals represent months of raiding/pvping - lots and lots more time and effort than mindless heroics. What's next? Randomly deleting the accounts of founders because they have too much stuff? I have 200K warzone comms and max crystals on multiple toons, and come 5.0 if things proceed as you say, most of it is trash. All that work, gone. All my friends work, gone. My guildies. My community. All just evaporated. Its an insult to us all, the entire community, we who pay to keep this game going, this community which we all support with our time, money, and care. It may seem like a trivial decision to you devs but it is an extremely disillusioning nerf. Come 5.0 my guild of almost 600+ unique accounts may all decided to un-sub and leave this game for another. But it's not too late. Listen to us. You aren't listening to us. You think you are. But you aren't. If you want us to stay. Listen. Don't delete our hard earned stuff. Stop nerfing everything. And for the love of science give us at least THREE (3) NEW RAIDS.

I cannot stay silent any more - my level of frustration has boiled over - as a founding player since the first beta for this game and a continued sub since launch, I am Guidmaster of the largest Imperial guild on Shadowlands server, North America, and I have a vested position in this community: I am absolutely floored and outraged Bioware is making a decision to cap, convert, and delete players comms and crystals which represent hard work, time, effort. The conversion ratio capping at 2 million - how was this arrived at? In what corporate office did a bunch of suits who have nothing at all to do with the community of players decide thousands of people's time and effort can be summarily deleted? Converting the community's hard earned comms and crystals into a capped amount of credits is flat out saying loudly that, you, Bioware do not care. Just convert the comms/crystal with no cap. What's the valid reason to cap it? A legit, valid, logical reason? A player can run heroics and make 2 million credits in a day - those comms and crystals represent months of raiding/pvping - lots and lots more time and effort than mindless heroics. What's next? Randomly deleting the accounts of founders because they have too much stuff? I have 200K warzone comms and max crystals on multiple toons, and come 5.0 if things proceed as you say, most of it is trash. All that work, gone. All my friends work, gone. My guildies. My community. All just evaporated. Its an insult to us all, the entire community, we who pay to keep this game going, this community which we all support with our time, money, and care. It may seem like a trivial decision to you devs but it is an extremely disillusioning nerf. Come 5.0 my guild of almost 600+ unique accounts may all decided to un-sub and leave this game for another. But it's not too late. Listen to us. You aren't listening to us. You think you are. But you aren't. If you want us to stay. Listen. Don't delete our hard earned stuff. Stop nerfing everything. And for the love of science give us at least THREE (3) NEW RAIDS.

The new pricing considering the re-addition of bronze garbage is a total insult the community. All i want is a new raid. Instead the financial advisors at EA just keep guiding bioware into making comic book solo garbage content and re-hashing the old game and events that I've already done while raising the prices on the cartel store that are completely ridiculous. The new pack has nothing in it worth anything - there are no unique outfits, no unique mounts, the color crystal is boring, the mounts are sub-par junk. All that money and you can't even vendor it, you have to destroy it or give it away (But no one wants it) The players and the community are not ATM machines that you can flog for profits. Honestly, this update, with the recycle event of everything I've already done, plus the criminal increase in the cost of the new packs, and the lack of any new MMO (RAID) content, makes me consider just ceasing being part of this broken game all together. Everyone will cheer and be happy because Star Wars is awesome, but if you ask me, the people steering the ship @ bioware all need to be fired, along with the executive who hired the financial advisor who looks at this great community like its a trust fund to steal from.

As a player since beta and always subscriber, lover of this game, I can honestly say I am shaking my head at decisions Bioware and EA are making with the new content - specifically in regards to rewards for Eternal Championships. As an active raider who is almost 100% on all the raids in the game I can tell you I would not be excited to group with any player in static gear. Static gear is a complete and total waste of time. There will be no reason for me, who is geared in full 224 set gear to run these Eternal Championships short of getting the story done 1 time, and getting the decos and mounts I cannot buy on the GTN. I would not do a HM flashpoint with a person in static gear, nor a HM OP, nor would I want to pvp with a person who took that gear into a warzone. Why waste the average players time giving gear that is useless in the elder game? You have killed the lowbie and mid-game with lvl 60 tokens and x2 XP. If you are planning on removing raids altogether from SWToR then just do it. My feeling, and i am not alone on this, is that the Eternal champion Boss 10 should grant a rank 216 piece of raid gear - this is story mode gear. Story mode ops are bolster and can be run by lvl 50 +. It doesn't matter if you give this gear away because no one uses it anyway. The two levels of gear that matter are 220 and 224. I would take a new person in full 216 who'd never seen an op over someone in static gear. If someone is going to put in the time to beat the EC Boss 10, they should be rewarded adequately. I doubt this post will have any impact on anything, Bioware/EA seems to be making decisions in a bunker. But I can say honestly as a veteran player that static gear is a complete waste of time; it is not BiS for anything; nor is it useful considering bolster in SM ops and tactical FPs. I would not run a HM op or HM FP with anyone in static gear so the people who struggle and work hard to collect this crap will be at a disadvantage, not only because their hard earned gear is garbage vendor trash, but also because the community of raiders will not want to run anything with anyone who is wearing it.

Bioware - you need to do something about pre-made groups in regular PvP and make the queue separate solo play and group play. I am really considering quitting this game because of this issue. There are other MMOs that do pvp much better for many reasons. In SWToR, I log in to do my pvp daily quest and solo queue against an x2 4man= 8 man Pre-made who are all mic'd in Teamspeak. It is impossible to have fun in this scenario. It is total BS. Waste of time and it makes one very angry. Bad enough no new operations - how many times can we run the new story? A lot of us pvp solo. You have to fix this, you have queueing rules for flashpoints and groupfinder operations and for ranked pvp - something must be done for regular pvp matches too; you must fix this, the average new player experience in a warzone is that pvp in this game is a joke. Is that what you want?

There's also a lot of chatter on the SWToR forums about this not being a scam, well, as defined: a scam is " a fraudulent business scheme; a swindle. " So when an item normally selling for around 300 credits, is listed for 3,000,000 credits, it means the seller is probably trying to deceive, grief, swindle, the buyer. Let's use Occam's Razor, i.e, the simplest answer probably being the right one: what's more likely, Player X lists various crafting mats for multiple millions of credits because he is storing them individually on the GTN as a sort of 'backup' or has a spastic finger repeatedly hit five extra 0's by accident on his 50 listings of 10 stacks of lvl 2 crafting items or Player x is trying to swindle credits out of buyers by exploiting the comma , and period . displays of the unit sort on the GTN. you can usually predict a person's behavior if you figure out their incentives. So what's more likely here? I believe the incentive to make fast money no matter the means.

The reason it is a scam is it is very specific. A scammer lists bogus items, usually crafting material, example: scammer lists 10 level 3 crafting-items, such as blue goo, which usually sell for, say, 300 credits each, and lists them instead for 300,000 credits each; that's 300,000 credits for 1 blue goo. yep, 300,000 credits for 1 blue goo. There is no reasonable player who would look at that and say that's a fair markup on a lvl 3 crafting material. That is why this is a scam/exploit of the GTN UNIT sort numberical display. Now the current way the GTN displays the UNIT values makes it appear as if the item is valued for much less. The commas and decimals are deceiving. If you purchase in bulk to craft and use the UNIT sort to purchase quickly, chances are you are at great risks of being a victim of this scam. Bioware has gone on the record in the above post saying they will do nothing to help us, the community, and fix this error in the display of the GTN UNIT Price Sorting Value Exploit. Therefore I am urging you all to file tickets and to write to support@swtor.com in regards to this issue. Tell them straight out we as a community will not stand for exploiters and scammers abusing our GTN. Demand the developers implement a fix on the GTN display that properly indicates the UNIT values of a group of items for sale. Please, together we the community are the heart of this game. Are we going to stand back and just hand a corporation money as they tell us what our experience is going to be - or are we going to be gamers and demand that the game honors its contract with us by providing a safe and stable environment for us to game in. Write - speak out - demand - the GTN UNIT Price Sorting Value Exploit be fixed, now.

As a member of this community since beta, I have heard a lot of uproar from friends and guildmates over the nerfs both implemented and coming. I believe if I say nothing else that this post is a candle to illuminate that I too am upset by the way this game is going. I was not a fan of the 3.0 character changes. I ran a hybrid pre-3.0 and I enjoyed it very much. I am sure you, the reader, as a member of this community, have your own list of things you like and hate about SWToR pvp. I think we can unanimously agree that no player wants to waste their time playing a game run by a development team that isn't listening to its community. It is my belief that based on the changes the devs are making to this game that they do not play this game on live servers with real players. (test servers and internal networks don't count). How could they? Wouldn't any sane person experience the broken resolve bar in one pvp match and say, wow, I have to do something about this at work tomorrow, that was terrible. I don't want to speak for everyone, but my feelings are: We don't want nerfs. Bolster needs to be fixed, once and for all. Its currently bugged and being exploited. We want ALL COMMS legacy bound. We want the resolve bar fixed (easy fix, 2 stuns pop buff making you immune to stuns for 30 seconds; 2 roots pop a buff making you immune to roots for 30 seconds, etc; other MMOs do it this way and it works) We want more PvP maps. For the love of all that holy, yes its about time we have a cosmetics system, but we really need more PvP maps. I am sure as a member of this community you have your own list of things you like and hate about SWToR PvP. I think we can unanimously agree that no player wants to waste their time playing a game run by a development team that isn't listening, that makes wildly harsh nerfs and changes to an established and enjoyable game without really examining the long-term fallout in the community. MMOs have died because of a single patch. I have seen it. Are SWToR server populations SHRINKING? I don't know. What I do know is a new cartel pack will not make everything better. We the community need to be respected and appreciated or more players will grudgingly move on to the next game. PvPers especially.