Basically your hope at this point is that the profitable Cartel Market, the revolving door of tire kickers and storyline tourists and everything else you described, will subsidize continued improvements in the things you care about, albeit at a slower rate. If that happens, and if you can stomach the loss of the game you once hoped to see, you can stay around a long time and have fun. If not, well, it's a big market out there these days.

Also, if you get a Google Voice account, you can sit on hold with CS all day for free

At the risk of repeating the obvious, this is why skipping the PTS is penny wise and pound foolish.

Look on the bright side - instead of having just one PTS for this major update, they've got 20 of them.

To paraphrase The Princess Bride: You keep using this word "calm down" -- I do not think it means what you think it means

Unfortunately, there's more to a .x release than the event.

I am well aware of their financials, but cash shop games are actually more tightly bound to concurrents (logins) than subscription games. Subs can be parked en masse (see: PandaQuest®) and still bill as revenue, but you pretty much have to play actively to spend at the cash shop. So they need those numbers up, especially as the initial binge of account-wides and unlocks gives way to a leaner diet of consumable boosts, passes and mount-of-the-month.

I'm not surprised at the precipitate release of 1.7. Concurrents are shrinking again - the post F2P surge may finally be fading, and this title is on a short leash nowadays. Major releases always boost the numbers. I think they'd rather take the heat for bugs than risk further attrition. We'll see how it goes.

If you haven't read the first "sale mail," the second "money mail" overwrites it in the inbox, so there's only one mail. You only see both mails if you're actively playing and checking mail during that hour.

These days they're using the PTS just as a preview server for major point releases, which makes sense for a skeleton staff. The community is basically killed, but testhaters got their wish -- there's always a silver lining somewhere.

Well, they just updated the PTS client with a big new build dated today, but the server's not up.

1. Remember that when you toggle Background Audio on or off, you have to exit and restart your game client for the new setting to take effect. 2. Make sure you aren't running something else - like a music player - that might want to take over your PC's sound when you're tabbed out of SWTOR. 3. If all else fails, reboot your PC. 4. If something like this ever does break, it'll happen after a patch, not in the middle of a quiet week. 5. There is a Tech Support forum for this kind of question. 6. Works fine for me.

Regardless of your feelings about RP in general, the in-game description for RP servers explicitly says that there are no extra naming rules enforced there. An offensive name should be reported everywhere, but an OOC name should not be reported anywhere.

Oh yeah, look at that - good catch. Well, if they're Malgusified already, who knows, maybe we'll have little thimble-shaped Vettes and Cedraxes before too long!

This thread's title is misleading! LEGO® Star Wars is a huge seller in its various releases. If you just discovered it, congratulations. As far as I know, their deal is only with the LucasFilm properties, up to and including Dave Filoni's excellent animated series. They don't do Old Republic era stuff. A shame really - I'd play it

The bottom line is that guys like the OP are going to continue to leave the game, no matter how many forum geniuses sit around and sneer at his posts and bicker with each other. The vital question for EA is whether enough of the F2P tire-kickers who are churning that extra 30-40% of the player count will stick around and subscribe, spend big on the CM, or both, to make up for departing veterans. If the answer's yes, the game marches on. If the answer's no, there's trouble ahead. It's a serious question. That other game PandaQuest™ has thrived on churn for years - people are always leaving in a huff and being replaced by new blood. Maybe OLD REPUBLIC can do that. We'll sure see.

Addons would be fun, but don't hold your breath. It's a religious issue (see above in thread), there's no staff for it, and the orphaned HeroEngine fork likely makes it a major headache even if they wanted to.

Of course we do - because we can count players.

I don't know who you're measuring with, but I have spreadsheets from before, during and after these events - except for launch - and there is no significant change in the break points for load status. Displayed server load is based on at least two factors, one of which appears to be the raw (system) load on the server hardware. That's why they can launch Ilum, for example, and get more red in the list even though player counts didn't go up much. The metric doesn't change, but new game features can be pigs on the server side until they optimize them. After a hotfix or two, things stabilize. it's also why you can get queues on servers that just show Very Heavy. Anyway, the real reason we know we're holding firm (until this week) is from counts. It just so happens that every time one correlates this with Torstatus, it's consistent. If you know how to read those graphs, they're a godsend. The one thing they definitely seem to do is tweak instance sizes. And F2P has completely reshuffled the zone/level player curves for most servers. So I don't count fleets - it doesn't tell you as much any more.

Torstatus shows players, not subs. As far as those of us who take player censuses regularly can tell, BW has NOT changed the Light/Standard/Heavy/VHeavy/Full calculation any time since launch. There IS a calculable relationship between displayed load status and concurrent player population, but it is affected by what the players are doing - some kinds of gameplay, like warzones, seem to be "heavier" than others. The so called "mega servers" appear to work by continuing to accept players beyond the FULL point... but FULL itself is still reached at the same number. Torstatus is actually an EXCELLENT way of tracking server populations, and the way we know this is that every time we go in and measure ourselves, the results match. The big change Torstatus itself made back in July was to stop including the "origin servers" in its calculation - the transfers had been open for some time - and just start averaging the "destination" servers. From July until now, the scale is constant and accurate. We are neither losing nor gaining players at the moment overall, although Christmas is a bit of a black eye. Last year everyone had a SWTOR box under the tree, which is part of how they moved 2.5 million. This year nobody has it under the tree - instead they have some other game, and today they're probably playing it. Let's hope they come back soon! If it seems anecdotally to you like there's more people in your cantina or fewer instances in Fleet or whatever, that's just local experience. Overall we are holding firm, or we were as of Sunday. If the game seems more crowded than it was in October, that's because F2P gave us a 40-45% peak player boost (yay!!). If it seems more crowded than it was in June, that's because of a 10-to-1 merge (belated bittersweet yay). If it seems emptier than ever, that's because you play APAC or Jung Ma.

The General channel is often a poor choice for RP, especially on Fleet where it is used for trade and game logistics. General is zone wide, which means you're listening to someone who might be standing in a valley at the far end of the planet; that's an immersion buster for anything other than "planet wide distress call" type RP traffic. Still, I would welcome RP in Voss General for example. But Fleet General is de facto OOC. There you're better off using a custom channel (just /cjoin rp and tell your friends to do the same) or at least use /say and emotes.

We are not hemorrhaging players, but we are also not growing. F2P took us back to roughly August's numbers - hurray! - but the game was in trouble in August. It's nice to see heavy servers and lots of people in Fleet, but with just 8 US servers left, it had better be crowded - and stay crowded - or we're done. The hope now is that BioWare makes incremental fixes and improvements and the game grows modestly but "organically" for 6-9 months. The worry is that the tail-off resumes. Keep your fingers crossed.

Today (ONLY) is an exception because of connectivity problems earlier and probably it being Christmas Eve, but in general numbers have held strong since the F2P release. I watch carefully. We will see where it goes after the holidays.

A Suicide Booth on the VIP platform, now that'd be something.

The Cartel Market icon can be moved, shrunk, and made transparent in the Interface Editor.