Right. I'm not asking for an IWIN button---just some basic QOL improvements. The only reason I suggested they come as mods is because, frankly, I'd rather the devs spend their time developing actual content. Games with modding communities are among the most successful of MMOs. Rift, WoW, WildStar, and others have a lot of player support, with many wonderful and talented players contributing to the experience through (well-regulated, for the most part) third-party mods. SWTOR should allow them, too.

Short & sweet: This game makes me crazy. It is 70% fun, 30% frustrating. My frustration stems from the lack of certain quality-of-life features that should exist in an MMO in 2015, that simply do not exist in SWTOR. Many of these QOL features would no doubt rapidly be added to the game if SWTOR just enabled third-party mods via, say, Curse, in the way that several other popular MMOs have done. Here are four features that I consider basic conveniences in MMOs, but that SWTOR maddeningly lacks. (1) Wardrobes. Many MMOs allow players to set wardrobes for particular activities, such as raiding, role-playing, or PVP, and then to swap between those sets with a single button click. (2) Click-to-Cast. Mods like Healbot and Grid, which allow players to click directly on character frames to cast spells on those characters (without having to target them), are very helpful, especially when healing. Really, healing is a stone-age practice without the ability to do this. (3) Macros. Being able to set up your own macros---to intelligently pair together certain abilities with one another, with messages to other players, or to target enemies---is the bread & butter of most MMOs. It helps reduce toolbar clutter, and facilitates quick communication of important information, as well as quick target-swapping to frequently-targeted objects. The lack of macros in SWTOR is mind-blowing. (4) Saving Character Builds. It's good that the game has field respecs now, but the lack of the ability to SAVE favorite specs is crazy-making. Having to reassign Utility Points each and every time you switch specs is downright absurd. In 2015, an MMO should be able to save your freaking build. Can we please have this stuff, BioWare? Bring your game into the modern gaming era. Allow mods.

Thanks for the input! I will file it in the appropriate receptacle.

Dear SWTOR devs, Hi, I am back. I followed the game religiously in development, played like a fiend for four months at release, and then more or less stopped playing for Reasons™ until my friend asked me to join him recently. After three and a half years, I had hoped for some significant improvements to the game and was looking forward to seeing the new stuff. I did not see the improvements I was hoping for. In fact, the parts of the game I wanted to play had largely not changed in my time away, despite the addition of new content. This post, then, is a wish list for the devs. Here is stuff I would love to see in SWTOR. Some of this stuff I wished for at release, and some is newer. More Playable Species You added cat-people (bleh), and I hear you're adding Togruta soon (yay). Cool. They should have been playable at release. While you're at it, please add Kel'Dor and Nautolans as playable species, since they're already in the game. Then add some more Star Wars species that aren't---Cereans, in particular, would be a classy get. More New Character Art Beyond a few cartel market cosmetic items, there are far fewer new looks in the game than I expected there to be after 3.5 years. The environment art in this game is gorgeous. Please add more items for customizing our look. And, you know, make them look cool. A lot of the existing equipment in this game does not look cool, or great (though I grant you that it all looks Star Wars-adjacent). While you're at it, how about more new hairstyles and facial art (tattoos, piercings, implants)? Fewer (and Faster) Load Screens First, I understand that the speed issue goes away with an SSD. But many of us don't have those. More important to me is that the game still contains an enormous amount of empty transitional hallways. They weren't fun at launch and they aren't fun now. You know what I'm talking about. If you want to go from, say, Carrick Station to the cantina on Hoth, you zone from Carrick > Docking Bay > Ship > Hoth Space Station Docking Bay > Hoth Space Station > Hoth base. It was ridiculous in 2011, and it's still ridiculous today. Way too many load screens & way too much empty hallway running. I know there's less of this in the newer content. Please do a pass on the older content, as well. Some of us like our alts. Faster Speeders This is a simple request. For a far-flung galactic civilization, the transportation sure is pokey. Could you possibly double the speed of speeders? I know you guys set the speed based upon the size of the planets and how quickly you want players to traverse them, but the only speeders in the game that actually fly at speeder-y speeds are the taxis. For me, this is less about getting places faster and more about feeling immersed in Star Wars. Speeders should feel blazingly fast. (SEE: Return of the Jedi.) Speeder/Gear Clipping Issues While I'm on the subject of speeders, I was dismayed to see that the clipping issue with speeders & equipment art--specifically, cloaks, dusters, and other chest items--has not been fixed in three and a half years. I bought a few of the cheaper cartel speeders last night, mounted up on my trusty Jedi and was truly bummed to see the cloak dangle right through 2-3 of the speeders, just like on launch day. Isn't it time to fix this issue? YOU'RE RUINING MY IMMERSION. (Just joking. But seriously, please fix this, it's annoying.) Ability Lag This one is harder to define, as I'm not a tech guy. But basically, there is often a visual lag on the screen between when I press the button, when the action happens, and when the action's animation fires. They aren't always in sync; hell, they don't always happen in the proper order, either. This happens often enough for a guy like me to notice. I've noticed since day one, and the thing still exists. Is it server lag? Video lag from my graphics card? No clue. But I wish animations and actions happened fluidly and consistently, in the order they are supposed to. Especially that crazy death animation, which is almost always ...dramatic pause... out of sync. Static Worlds This is the biggie. The environments in SWTOR, though gorgeous, are largely lifeless. I feel like this is probably for two reasons: one, the game was designed as a standard themepark MMO with rules that are meant to be understandable---mobs come in groups of this, that, or the other, and generally behave in this way or that way. Two, each "world" is really just snapshot of that world, frozen in time, stuck in the precise moment (and level) that the content is meant to be experienced. If you go back to Tatooine at level 60, you are essentially traveling back in time to the Tatooine of your past (specifically, levels 24-27) and not to a Tatooine that is relevant to your current interests. I understand that this is an artifact of both the linear narrative of the game's class stories and the linear leveling process of a themepark MMO. I get it. Here's the thing, though. I want to go back to Tatooine. I want a reason to return to Hoth that will engage me at max level. I want to see Taris again, and not simply for nostalgia's sake. I want to adventure there again, and without making a new character each time. One solution: adjust a character's level to the max level of the appropriate range of the planet when he enters that planet. Pair that with lucrative dailies (hell, the group 4/group 2 quests already there would work) and let players continue to experience their fav places ad infinitum, Guild Wars 2-style. Another solution: Add new, higher level content on these iconic worlds. I'm just saying. Send me back to Tatooine for something other than the occasional rakghoul infestation. ~~~~~~ Those are my main requests of the devs. While you're at it, guys, throw in streamlined stats, a new meeting place other than Carrick Station that doesn't have so much lag, and some new BGs. An underwater Manaan BG would be nice. Oh, and by the way. I'm having fun with Shadows of Revan. Makeb was ca-ca, but Revan is pretty good so far. Looking forward to the next thing. Peace, A more-or-less satisfied customer

The race I want isn't in the game. I want to play a Cerean.

It's just boring. That's the worst thing anyone can say about a game. Having played since launch, when I entered Ilum for the first time with stars in my eyes hoping to be in big epic Star Wars-y battles, it's amazing how insignificant a 4v4 arena "warzone" seems by comparison. God, the PVP in this game is small.

SWTOR was the first game in which I got sucked into the pre-launch hype, internalized it, lived it. I was so hyped for this game from 2009-2011, based upon clever marketing moreso than anything. I got burned for it. The game did not live up to the expectations BioWare themselves set. It wasn't the game itself, per se. It's an okay game, though one could argue that it is not a good game for such a massive expenditure of time, effort and money. No, what made the game a failure in my mind was that so much was promised that wasn't delivered. World PVP was an abysmal failure, so much so that they abandoned all grand plans for supporting it. "Elder game" replayability was a failure intially---they actually didn't think that people would blow through their story content in two days and then demand new endgame content a month later (they should have). Crafting & customizability were crushingly disappointing. The storylines and worlds, while interesting at first go and aesthetically pleasing, were painfully static. Unlike in other KOTOR games, your actions didn't really have the consequences that the devs promised---promised!---they would have. The Legacy system was a joke, especially the family-building aspect, which had no actual mechanical function despite promises. What finally killed it for me, however, was not any of these things. It wasn't the server merges, the lost character names which had once been so carefully chosen, the hasty relaunch as a F2P game, or the glacial content update schedule. It wasn't the ridiculously long load times and endless pointless runs through space stations. The final straw for me was the way BioWare yanked rated warzones at the last minute---literally, hours before patching---after months of hype and promises. Yes, I know it's in the game now, but I'm talking a year ago when it was originally promised. It wasn't the biggest thing, but it was the final thing for me. I cancelled my sub August 2012. After a year, I've come back, and nothing has really changed. A little extra content. Some UI improvements. The difference is that my expectations have changed. Now I'm content to dink around with it, expecting little, until a better game comes along. They fooled me once. Won't happen again.

I suspected that. Thanks for the advice, everyone.

Just wondering which of these I should focus on getting for my blasters. Any advice welcome.

WoW was adding servers to keep pace with demand a year after release. They had 5 million people play the game within that first year.

Rift has four, actually. You can unlock up to four spec options, meaning one toon could conceivably cover any role, if they had the bag space to tote all the extra gear around.

The apparent mismanagement of this game prior to launch continues to blow me away. The Secret World launched last week, with full cutscenes and story dialogue similar to TOR's, but also with lots of other systems one would expect from a modern MMO. Unlike this game. Grrr.

As an English professor, I have to note that your journalist spouse is incorrect---semicolons are used to separate complete clauses (Subject Verb Object; Subject Verb Object), not titles, names or sentence fragments. Sorry!

Pretty much. My girlfriend did the same thing---her toon's name was taken on the origin server, so rather than find a new name, she quit SWTOR. She was very attached to that name. I get it. Two of my three 50s lost their cool names in the merger. It frickin' sucks.

I'm liking the group finder feature simply because I can actually get groups to run things now. So yay. Beyond that, I'm now experiencing the joy of encountering so many frickin' noobs who have no clue what they are doing. But that's okay, and to be expected in a game focused not on group content, but solo stories.