Damion Schubert Speaks on Phantom and Spymaster Gear Changes

If you spend any time in the forums the past day or so, you probably know that the community was upset regarding some changes to gear bought from the Cartel Market. Many players want their money back after spending cash in the Cartel Market for Phantom and Spymaster gear based on how it looked, only to have the appearance changed later.

They see it as a bait-and-switch and while BioWare claims it wasn’t intentional, we can definitely see the point these players are making. So we were holding on to see when BioWare would chime in with a solution to this problem.

Lead Designer Damion Schubert piped in to this thread about the issue:

Hey, guys —

We care a lot about the fact that you care about the appearances of your characters. In fact, the Mod system is my baby, largely because it allows players to customize their appearance to your liking. We have another, similar, one of my babies coming in the near future, which will allow even greater customization (you guys may have seen me hinted about it in recent interviews). Short form: this is real important to me, and we’re not happy that we’ve created a situation that makes people unhappy. We didn’t think through the ramifications of the bugfix that we’ve made, and we’re acutely aware of the financial angle (cartel coins as well as in-game credits on the GTN) involved.

We are still discussing potential fixes to the issue — and there will be fixes — but there are ramifications to all fixes. Players should keep in mind that previously, we had players who were upset in the other direction. We have a couple of directions that we can go, but we need to explore a couple of things, and regardless, it is not a fix that can happen instantaneously. I do think we can get something in a patch very soon.

We are pretty sure we can avoid a solution that forces players to spend additional cartel coins, and I’m not interested in letting a situation linger that leaves the player’s faith in what we are offering on the cartel market in a reduced state. It is incredibly important to me, and the rest of the SW:TOR team, that players have a high degree of confidence in the market as a whole, and how we deal with issues like this. This has been a learning experience for us, and won’t happen again.

In short: we’ll fix this. Give us a little time to do so.

So they are definitely going to fix it and you have not wasted your money if you bought sets that changed. Just hang on for future updates.