Thank you! *prepares for merger*

I just want to clarify. I have 13 characters on Dalborra. I have 7(?) on Harbinger. Consequently, I cannot transfer all my characters from Dalborra manually as I come up against the hard limit of slots I own (currently 13) - though still below the maximum number of slots I could have (22). My Dalborra characters will be merged over to Harbinger in the process of consolidation, and all will be available to play. Yes? No? I do want to end up on Harbinger with all my characters (as it is where I started playing). A timely answer to this question would be helpful as I'm very busy and may not get the chance to manually transfer (if that is what you're telling me I need to do regardless of slot limits) if I don't find out soon enough. (I have had this question answered by fellow players ("don't worry your characters will all move to Harbinger and still be playable but you won't be able to create new characters until you reduce the number of characters to below 13"), but would like something official.)

The Ewok was probably really easy to design - take the Jawa skeleton, put on a different skin, do some writing, do a few voiced lines in the ewok lingo (wouldn't need too much, as like all alien speech those lines will be reused/repeated), and bam... done. I have a feeling that Treek's story isn't going to be all that complicated. SGRA companions would take considerably more time to implement. For one thing, all LIs currently in the game speak Basic, and I think it would be quite difficult to connect to one that didn't.

Sorry, should have quoted for context. I meant that I don't think they'll put SGR or SGRA companions and related mission chains in the Cartel Market. (Or if they do, there'll be some non-CM method of unlocking them, hopefully a bit easier than 40 legacy and 1 million credits.) I think it's just a matter of time before they do add full SGRAs. (I seem to be in an optimistic mood today, I'll come back and be pessimistic next week. )

Wow, you guys are talking like it's a done deal. I honestly think they won't do it.

Treek is just ridiculous, ridiculous enough that I'm not taking it as an insult that they're putting her in first before any full fledged SGRAs. I am certainly not going to be unlocking her - there's really no point. She doesn't do anything that other companions don't do, and despite the fact that there are several non-near human companions, when was the last time you saw Bowdaar, Broonmark, Yuun, or Skadge running around regularly? Or heck, Blizz! When was the last time you saw someone seriously using Blizz as a companion? She might be popular the week of her release, but I am not sure she'll last. HK-51 didn't. I hardly ever see him, even when I'm on Harbinger. ObOT: SGRAs need to be implemented, even handedly across both factions and genders, and sooner rather than later.

Ugh. I am disappointed but not surprised. On the one hand we get "bisexual" visibility (yay), on the other hand we get the tired old thing where all women must be attracted to men (BOOOOOOOOO!!!!!).

I have a question about that. Are those two female Imp NPC flirtable with both genders? (Crosses fingers and hopes for at least one of them being a "no" answer.) I had Jan'neria flirt with them recently, and both of them kind of brush it off. Mind you, I haven't finished either the macrobinoculars or the seeker droid quest series yet though (getting to 55 when starting Makeb at 50 is really really really annoying), so I don't know if there's more than just the initial flirts.

Well, they're trying to persuade us hold outs to move... What do they mean by CA servers? I'm holding out because I have too many characters to transfer on a one by one basis. I want them all on the same server and am unwilling to delete older characters on Harbinger.

Your story is awesome! *bounces* Fanfiction rules, you can do things that would probably never happen in game! Sadly there does seem to be a distinct lack of femslash around (I don't know about the state of m/m stuff). Some of you might also recall me musing about writing over my mid-year break. That never really happened until the last few days before I went back. I have two little more than drabbles to show for that, which I might post at some point. I am planning to write a third and am reluctant to post the other two without finishing that one. They're LS!F!Chiss!Defector!Trooper/Elara Dorne. (To translate, my female Light Side Trooper is a Chiss Imperial Defector who came to the Republic while she was still fairly young (young enough to have developed/perfected a Republic accent). I haven't completely worked out her background yet, but she's actually Jan'neria's (twin) sister.) ETA: Just wanted to say I pretty much agree with everything Tatile had to say. Fanfiction is a supplement, not a substitute, so to speak.

Either the got the date wrong, or sent the e-mail out early. Just wish they'd hurry up and get it done.

You've definitely got a point there. I guess healing technologies are easy enough to use that anyone with a modicum of training can use them. I definitely liked Lemda (in spite of the <spoilers>), and Cytharat isn't too bad for a Sith Pureblood male. I don't think I'd object to either of them being companions. I agree about planet quest NPCs as companions too, there are some very interesting characters that seem woefully under utilized. Sadly a couple of the more interesting ones However, I can't help but think that there is such a thing as too many companion characters. It is part of the reason why I'd like to see some of the current companions adapted to SGRAs.

The problem is: Cytharat: Lemda:

Um. You do know SGR flirts are in Makeb, yes? And the game's rating didn't change. What a silly thing to say.

That's really interesting. When I transferred my last character, I specifically remember it mentioning that there was a level limit. Oh well, maybe it says one thing, but allows another?

You can't transfer a character that is too low to have a legacy. Characters must be at least level 10 to transfer, and legacy begins at level 10. They changed when legacy begins a while ago - I think it was when the game went F2P.

Ok. Aboriginal people existed on Australia for 10,000 years, and they still had what we'd think of as a fairly primitive society until English colonisation. If there are no pressures to develop technologically or change culturally, then societies tend to stick with the status quo. Only periods of great calamity (like war) cause us to develop in new ways... More pertinently to Star Wars - between the Old Republic and the New Republic technology and society has largely remained stagnant. So Ewoks not changing in 3000 years is not really that much of a stretch.

I transferred one of my low levels, one I could stand to lose, and found out that this is indeed the case.

New content could be extra conversations and missions with/for current companions. Why couldn't that include SGRs with them? Or... How would you feel if they were to implement new companions who were SGRable? /facepalm If you don't like love and romance in your game, go play World of Warcraft or RIFT or EVE or... See, I can do that too. To the first point, not caring either way means that they don't care if it IS in the game or if it is NOT in the game. To the second: And yet here you are, in the forums complaining about the idea that some people want different things to you in the game. You're not doing a good job of showing how much you don't care. We have this ONE thread in all of the forums, and you're making out as if we're hysterically demanding we get our way BEFORE anything or anyone else... Which is patently not true. (You know this thread has been going since before launch, right?) For a start, you can't make generalisations about who writes emotional stuff better, because that largely relies on the genre they're writing in, whether or not the story is more character or plot driven, and the individual author in question. Women writing male/male slash fanfiction on the Internet are not seeking to sell a product (because there's no money in fanfiction unless you happen to be both very very good and very very lucky*), they are writing for self-entertainment purposes primarily, and entertaining others is secondary. Yes, they have a story to tell, and usually it involves hot guys having sex with each other! Because that is what they want to read about. If they weren't getting anything out of it, they would be writing something else. For me, being a female writer of femslash, I certainly am writing it because I want to see my favourite characters becoming involved romantically and sometimes even making love (though I find erotica in general to be rather tedious). I am also writing it because that is what I want to read. I am not writing it to sell a product, thank you very much, I am trying to entertain myself and anyone who shares my tastes. (By the way, one of the biggest mistake a writer can make is to try to write to a market, rather than writing what they want to read.) * And by very very lucky, I mean Melissa Good being picked up as a writer for the last seasons of Xena, or E L James disguising her Twilight Fanfiction as Original Fiction and being picked up by a mainstream publisher. (By the way, I have no idea if E L James is very very good, because I haven't read her work - heterosexual (or BDSM) erotica is not to my taste - but she certainly falls into the lucky category!)

I'm not Tatile, but I just wanted to address some misconceptions you seem to have. For me, it's < 0.000000000000001% of the game because it doesn't really exist in any meaningful capacity in the game for me right now. If, like most other MMOs, SWTOR had NO (interactive-ish) romances in it at all, then you'd have a point. But OGRs are all over the shop, every class has at least one for each gender. If your point were to stand, Bioware would have to chop them out too... Because "MMO's [sic] were not created to express sexuality." You're making a false assumption here, that only LGBT players want SGRs for their characters. The majority of slash (yes, m/m stuff) fiction online is written (and consumed) by straight women. Believe it or not, the audience for SGRs is a lot deeper than you seem to think. (I am not sure on the numbers for f/f stuff, but imho the best stories are written by women.) Liara. She LOOKS like a woman, who cares if her race is mono-gendered, her character parses as a woman. Fem!Shepard/Liara is f/f, a femshep involved with Liara is not straight. Asari seem to have a thing for sentient beings, so I doubt they'd mate/bond with a tree (though given their own taboo against mating amongst their own people, who knows what they did before they made contact with other species off their own home planets). As I said above, LGBT players are not the only ones who want SGRAs in SWTOR.

I really like how you've departed from the Taris storyline, and I especially like how you have Jaesa running around on her own and not with Aly all the time. It makes sense in a big war type situation, rather than the very guided quest paths we get in the game. I actually read a different subtext with Thana Vesh. Her anger is all for show, she's using it covering her fear. When LS SW tells her to do something LSed, she does it with little complaint, and big missions where she should have succeeded on her own DSly, she failed. She's not incompetent, she's just... scared, and not really as evil as she tries to make herself out to be. A lot of her boasting comes across like she's trying to convince herself. Maybe I'm just seeing things, though.

Yes, I would like to know this too. I'm hanging on on Dalborra, but playing through some content is impossible at the moment, and there's no market to speak of. I am hanging on because I have 13 characters at the moment, and 7 (or 8?) characters on Harbinger, none of which I want to delete. Which means I can't move characters between servers (well I can, I just won't be able to move them all). Oh not to mention a level 37 legacy on Dalborra vs a level 17 or so on Harbinger - if I transfer characters, do I get the higher legacy, or is that something I need to wait for consolidation for? ETA: I just got e-mail this morning, apparently the consolidation will take place "in approximately one month".

You're right. There are supporters and opponents on both sides of the political divide (for instance, our former PM, Julia Gillard, was supposedly left leaning, but was staunchly anti-marriage equality, while our current PM, Kevin Rudd, is right leaning but is pro-marriage equality - note, they are both members of the "traditionally left leaning" Labor party). However, the most vocal opponents of marriage equality (in America at least, to this outsider looking in) are usually religious (of one denomination or faith or another), and almost always "Right" of centre politics-wise, though I think it would be more accurate to use the term "Socially Conservative" rather than "Right". (Right and Left are oversimplifications of a bunch of different political ideologies all lumped together and divided arbitrarily.)

My legacy name is Lhal, and one of my main characters is Myrmeen. Myrmeen Lhal was the Lady Lord of Arabel in the kingdom of Cormyr, on the content of Faerun, in the world of Toril (aka the Forgotten Realms). She was one of my favourite NPCs in the whole of that world (only Storm Silverhand and Alusair the Steel Regent ranked anywhere near her IMHO). It is a name I've been using in MMORPGs since EverQuest, along with my screen name (*points to the side of the post*). I was able to keep Lhal when I moved to Dalborra (and expect I'll keep it when I'm finally transferred back to Harbinger, as I still have characters in that legacy there), and as I had transferred my (by then) main Jan'neria Lhal (a level 50 Chiss IA) from Harbinger to Dalborra, I decided to make all my characters Chiss and give them the backstory of all being sisters, despite some being Empire and some being Republic (yes, one Chiss of each class!). Now that I have more slots than just 8, the rest are all non-Chiss and don't display the legacy name (though I allow them the title as they're all allies of my characters). On another note, I am well aware of Chiss naming conventions, so Jan'neria Lhal is probably more properly something like Jan'lhal'neria (no separate surname, since family names are incorporated into a Chiss's name). But I decided not to stick to that too closely, so some of my girls don't fit the convention... I suppose I can put it down to them being their common (shortened) name or (in at least one case) their nickname. One character I'm particularly proud of the name of is Cat'astro'phe. That is definitely a nickname taken up by my Bounty Hunter as a joke, with apostrophes to make it look like a proper Chiss name.