They did say they are adding new schematics aswell, chances are most of the skins available in the game will be available as a crafted "orange". Though this is of course assumption. Truth is this "belt buckle" system has been suggested several times before on the forum, and each time I read it I like it less. It feels clumsy to me and I honestly think from what I've read about the 1.2 crafting changes that it will be a lot better as Bioware intends to change it

And now straight from this week's Q&A: Seems Bio went for naive and simple there Seriously now though, this does not make purple gear useless. People will still want Tiered gear to rip the mods out and stick em in their custom crafted gear. So in fairness these changes keep current value of tiered gear and give added value to crafted "orange" gear, while adding an extra little bit of "play what you want to play" by letting us choose how we look. Win/win... erm.. /win?

You cannot get upgraded schematics from RE'ing Rakata stuff.

First helmet reward I know of is on Coruscant in Justicar territory

Personally I don't like sandbox games. Fallout 3, Oblivion, Skyrim and the like failed to keep me interested for longer than a day or 2. I think the reason behind this is a constant feeling of unwittingly missing things. I have skipped quests and even entire planets (aside from class quests) in SWTOR due to overleveling content, but at least I knew exactly what I was skipping. I like it this way. That being said, I do like the majority of suggestions you make. Especially player/guild housing (loved this in DAoC), increased usefullness for professions/crew skills and vanity items like trophies from Ops bosses or rare mobs to display in your guild or personal house. There are however a few of your suggestions that make my skin crawl This is probably personal preference though, but I'll list them anyways hehe: I simply detest long winded treks for exploration or having to run around for half an hour just to find the next NPC to talk to in order to advance your quest. I very much enjoy the current linear character of the leveling experience. This is exactly the reason I stopped playing Fallout 3 at some point. I accidentally ended up as a starting character in a zone that was full of higher lvl mobs. I got killed. I didn't like that. If you make a game and your progression in it heavily depend on exploration, then you can't punish people for exploring by making it possible to run into things they can not realistically overcome yet. Again, I like the linear character of the current leveling experience. I do see a lack of replayability though, due to all the side quests being the same for every character. This could be fixed by adding more planets for the same level brackets and making no planet mandatory (aside maybe from starting planets and Coruscant/Dromund Kaas as an intro and a sort of kindergarten that teaches you the basics of how to play your new class). This would allow you to play different planets on your alts rather than repeating the same story every time you make an alt.

I don't understand this reasoning. Add-ons like DPS parsers and threat meters aren't crutches. A player installing them will not instantly and magically improve. Add-ons like these are analytic tools that help improve the player's game and the understanding of encounter mechanics. One can only improve if adequate information is given. And devs don't see an add-on and think:"this will make the encounter too easy, we need to ramp it up!". They see an encounter being beaten by skilled players, who achieved said skill by analyzing their performance, and only then decide to create more challenging content. Very bad analogy, as a human being you have an innate ability to estimate the passing of time. You might not know exactly how big the time difference is between the two but you will clearly sense there is a difference, as you stated yourself. This is just not true for games. Do not try and tell me you can somehow sense wether that sentinel in your group is doing more DPS than that sage. Without even so much as a combat log it is just plain impossible. Yes, I can. But it takes away an aspect of gaming that I thouroughly enjoy, which is analyzing my performance and improving on it when necessary or possible. I'd even argue this is the whole point of end-game for me. If BW says they're in this for the long run, they had better allow me to continually improve my game or I will get very bored, very soon.

BW added new mod tables in one the first patches during live. Nobody knows why. When directly asked why they did this, this was the response: This seems to have passed everyone's attention but it kinda got me wondering what the plans were, since it almost has to be an improvement on crafting, which i enjoy

Erm no... just no. For tanks Exactitude has its purposes, as does anti-armor for some threat. One could even reason that Rampart and Tempest are pretty decent aswell. DPS: I'm not entirely familiar with all the classes yet, but Jedi Sentinel wear Expert, any Sentinel in Watchman spec wearing Endowment needs to read a couple of guides. So I'm certain several classes wear several types of gear and most prefixes have their place. Healing: completely unaware of this role, have not played it in SWTOR. But from my experience in other games, crit is good for healing... critted heals save recources. But unless there is some kind of proc off critted heals i'd say indeed you would stack power over crit as a healer. You're completely ignoring certain talents and abilities in your reasoning. Almost all prefixes are quite usefull to someone, save the ones that add to Presence (what is with this stat anyways? why does it even exist?) So yes, the tree layout would be awesome. I had actually pictured something very much like this to improve the crafting UI. Very nice of the OP to actually work something out in photoshop

That is entirely your decision, but I'd like to note that every MMO has regular patches and server downtime for the first few months. So maybe MMO's in general aren't your thing. You could always leave a while and come back in a few months when the game is a bit more matured and has grown out of these little growing pains. It would be a shame to pass up on what you seem to find a great game because of this.

Once a week is a bit optimistic, but every day is a bit pessimistic It's been just about once every other day, long downtimes (up to 8h o.O) on tuesdays and shorter downtimes the other days (more like 3-6h) excluding weekends save for one Saturday which was a horrible call. This is actually normal for a new MMO though, expect this to not change in the first 6 months. If they keep it up after that, then something isn't being done right.

There is also expertise on it, which is useless in PvE and grabs a chunk of the stat value of the item, making the lower tier PvP stuff about as good as greens/blues in PvE. This is the whole reason the stat exists. That is why i advised focussing on PvE gear for PvE tanking.

PvP gear is not for PvE... focus on getting crafted or normal mode PvE stuff to tank in, your HP has a lot less impact on your tanking then secondary stats like Defence, Shield rating and Absorb.

Just make sure you actually need the items you roll need on. If you're, for instance, playing a DPS commando and a Heavy armor piece drops with aim as primary stat, make sure to check if there's no Alacrity or Defence as secondary stats on the piece. If this is the case, you shouldn't roll need on it even if it is an upgrade, since it will be suboptimal for your DPS character. Other than that you're free to roll on any piece that drops that is an upgrade to you. Anyone getting upset over you winning 3 legitimate rolls is being silly, because you're just getting lucky.

As far as I know most skins in the game can actually be crafted as an orange version and what the current changes do is exactly the opposite of pidgeonholing people into a few viable looks. Making armoring extractable opens a lot of new looks to people... I don't see you explaining why you think it is bad.

As far as I know most skins in the game can actually be crafted as an orange version and what the current changes do is exactly the opposite of pidgeonholing people into a few viable looks. Making armoring extractable opens a lot of new looks to people... I don't see you explaining why you think it is bad.