I'm leveling great as shield tech. Any standard enemies still drop in just a couple rounds of abilities (flamethrower then 1-2 flame sweeps) and strongs only take a couple rocket punches and a rail shot more, with rocket punch cooldown being reset constantly from shield absorbs. With Mako, I never have to stop to regain health or drop heat.

Stop throwing words around like you know what they mean. Lower level characters don't need that storage unless they're pure crafters (mains or alts) and, if that's the case, they should be able to afford it. Stop trying to get something for free.

They're guaranteed purple materials. I don't know about you, but I've gone 100 missions before without a single purple material reward. If you don't care about the purple materials, then no, don't buy them.

Then it sounds like you started with WoW. With the exception of a very small handful of classes, it was certainly not easy to solo on, say, DAoC or FFXI. SWG did it a lot differently by making it specifically easy to level while allowing people to change their profession/skills at will as they desired. WoW really introduced the "easy to play" gamestyle and is one of their claims to fame in vanilla. They appealed to a much broader audience under claims of being able to play for short periods time while still making progress, and succeeded.

How do you know that the shards weren't created before you arrived at the planet when the population was higher? If people aren't leaving the planet, it isn't just going to merge them into other shards. The server I play on is one of the heaviest population from pre-launch and one of the ones with the longest queue times and I rarely see multiple shards on any planet.

There are a lot of games that have you start off as a base class for a few levels before deciding on your actual class. Dark Age of Camelot is one that quickly comes to mind. I think you've been playing World of WarCraft too long and are simply used to it and unaware of other MMO styles. There's nothing wrong with that, but don't complain just because everything isn't exactly the same. There is not a lot of investment in your character before you hit level 10, and you can easily get a new character up in half the time if you really wanted to do so.

Requiring 25 wasn't as big of a deal as you make it, unless you literally talk to no one outside of your own guild, in which case you might as well not be playing an MMO. My guild could barely make 10 people three times a week to run our Karazhan raids, but we did it and started in blues and greens like it was designed for. It was really hard, Moroes and Aran especially, but we progressed through and after a month or so eventually had all the bosses down. This was in the day and gear level where you stop-casted on bosses because your mana wouldn't last the entire fight, even chugging mana potions. Don't waste a single cast. After we got Kara down, we started talking to other small guilds and eventually found one to merge with and start running Gruul's lair. And the rest is history. Raiding just 3 times a week, I saw every single boss downed all the way up through and including M'uru pre-nerf (and later in WotLK sarth3d 10-man pre-Ulduar with only one night of attempts per week). You don't have to raid every single night to down content. What matters is how you manage the time you have. Talk about mistakes, learn from them. Don't just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over.

No, Taris is not in KOTOR 2 at all.

You are correct that from a game mechanics perspective, the BH is the mirror of the Trooper rather than the Smuggler. However, from a theme/conceptual standpoint, the BH and Smuggler are very similar characters. They don't operate directly under the command of any faction and adhere to their own rules. I would enjoy playing a Trooper on the Imperial side.

So the game is programmed to use multiple cores in some areas but not others? You think they have an if(player.location=="Imperial Fleet") runSingleCore(); ?

A healer being harder to level in this game is a myth carried over from other games that needs to stop. It is not any harder to level a healer in SWTOR than it is a DPS. You simply need to gear up a DPS companion and umm, heal them. They don't do as much damage as a player, but you don't lose all of your damage as a healer either. I level faster as a healer than I did as a DPS. I haven't leveled my tank up high enough to say much for certain about them, but he's doing just as well so far at level 28.

I find leveling as healing is perfectly fine. I'm actually leveling faster as a healer with a DPS companion than I ever did leveling as a DPS with any companion. A fully blue-geared DPS companion can really dish it out well enough to more than make up for the DPS I lost and I never have to stop.

Except that you're glossing over the fact that it means at >10m, you can use one skill that's pretty strong, <10m you can use one skill that's a bit weaker, <1m you can use two skills with separate cooldowns, and at <1m behind the target you can use three skills all with separate cooldowns. That means if you deal 1.5X at >10m, then you can deal X at <10m, 2X at <1m, and 3X behind the target. They don't all have the same function and they all work together to control the amount of damage you can deal at various combat positions.

Your reasons aren't as good as you think. -"Lorewise there are reasons"? So your first reason is to simply state there are reasons? This makes no sense and I can't think of anything specifically in the lore to make me believe that the Empire would not have special forces units everywhere. They are a necessary component of military operations. Virtually every army in history has had a special forces unit in some form or another to bring the elite together to be able to perform actions the masses cannot. -The only technical concerns are that storylines would have to be created. You would still have to select a faction at character select, and an Imperial Bounty Hunter would be identical to how it is now. Why would that change? Race selections would be limited by faction as it is now. More could be added in the future, but that's not a limitation. -About adding storylines, see previous comment. This isn't a reason to not do it, as I'm sure there would be a lot of people in this game that would be very interested in rolling any new characters with new storylines that BioWare creates. I know I plan to eventually play a character of every base class to 50, and I'm sure that I'm not alone. -Companion work would be part of the storyline work. These classes wouldn't use any existing companions, so I'm not sure what you're referring to that would need to be updated. The Republic Bounty Hunter wouldn't start on Hutta and may not even compete in the Great Hunt, depending on how they wanted to tell the story, and so would not meet the same people. -Look and feel of the game could be a possible concern, but is very subjective. I think the classes could be distinct enough that they would still be unique. What would you think if instead of the Imperial Trooper being a mirror for the Republic Trooper, it's a mirror for the newly added Republic Bounty Hunter and they were to both use aim-based medium armor with new, unique mechanics? Nothing says they have to be identical to the current classes. -It hurts replay value? What? I don't understand how you can even claim something like this, because it's complete trash. Adding new classes to a game ADDS replay value.

In that last paragraph, are you describing SWTOR or WOW? I think you're trying to describe SWTOR, but it looks like you're talking about WOW to me.

That's an old-school crafting design paradigm used by SWG and EVE. It's less popular these days because the general player audience doesn't like to work to obtain things that they could possibly lose later.

Why do guilds have to do anything more?

If you really want to believe that WoW was "hardcore" at launch, then go right ahead, but you're just showing off your ignorance. WoW built its entire playerbase on being friendly to the casual gamer. Based on your other asinine posts, you obviously have no idea what that means. Casual does not mean bad or uncapable. Casual simply means playing at a slower pace (i.e. less time spent per week). There are tons of casual guilds that clear all raids, including hard modes, and have done so for the entire existence of WoW. Casual guilds generally aren't the first on the server to down the new content (though some are), but there are still plenty of casual guilds that will finish all content before the next content patch, or at least before the next expansion. Stop acting like you're high-and-mighty compared to the inferior casual. When WoW started, it was heavily advertised at being easy to pick up and play for just short periods at a time and still be able to make progress in the game. This was accomplished mostly through quests that could be completed quickly and rested experience. During vanilla, most casual gamers didn't raid at all because it was so time-consuming to coordinate 40 people with consumables and buffs and still be able to make progress. Most casuals stuck to PuG UBRS and other 5-mans to complete their tier 0 set. As an example of how WoW showed its support of casual gamers even at endgame, this was the entire reason why tier 0.5 was released. Even AQ20 and ZG generally required guilds because of the additional coordination required and the difficulty of PuGing 20 people. Burning Crusade made end game raids even easier to access for casual gamers because Karazhan (and later Zul'Aman) were only 10-man raids. It's much faster to get 10 people together than it ever was to get 20 or 40 people. Additionally, the next raids up may have been 25 people, but they were far shorter and easier to reach the bosses because there was a lot less trash. And then so on and so forth in WotLK with the splitting of raid sizes and raid difficulty. So yes, WoW built its entire playerbase on catering to as many people as possible, and I can guarantee you that casual gamers far outnumber "hardcore" gamers on there.

I ran into that problem on Balmorra; I was level 28 when I finished the bonus series and completed the planet. My solution was to simply do my class quest and ignore everything else on both Nar Shaddaa and Tatooine and go straight to Alderaan. It worked for me and, on my second character, I completed just the main quest on Balmorra and am now going through Nar Shaddaa and Tatooine completing everything. I expect I will be able to skip a good chunk of Alderaan with this one. Eventually I'll go back with my main character and complete everything just for completion sake, but that is the solution that works for me in the interim. I'm ok with skipping a few quests as long as I skip all of them

SWTOR Website, Advanced Classes: As your character becomes more seasoned through adventure, you will be given the opportunity to undertake one of two Advanced Classes. This decision is equally as important as choosing your initial class at character creation. Your choice will not only make your character more distinct and powerful, but will also help further define the role you wish to play in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Seems clear enough to me. Perhaps nothing explicitly says that you cannot change advanced classes, but nothing says you can either. That's an assumption. Furthermore, it clearly states that the decision is just as important as your base class decision. Do you normally expect to be able to change your base class in games?

Every item that I've posted that didn't sell included the deposit attached to the mail when the item is returned.

What money do you lose when you auction something and it doesn't sell? Pretty sure I've not lost any.

And how much effort did you have to put in to make that 10k? Slicing is a gathering profession, not a mission profession, and other gathering professions tend to get a much lower rate of return on their missions. While your companions are out farming those credits, you're still collecting the numerous lockboxes that are all over the world for 500-1500 credits each.

Blizzard only compensated for unexpected server downtime. They never compensated for the planned 8-hour maintenance outages that happened every Tuesday from about 7 a.m. until 3 p.m. CST for the first year or so after the game was released.

It's a simple case of the client not being perfectly sync'd up with the server. Your client is telling you that you have finished casting and are mounting. After which you press the key to move, this command is sent to the server and the server says, "Hey, you were summoning your mount, so that gets cancelled since now you're moving!" The client gets the result from the server and then interrupts the mounting and leaves you unmounted. That is the proper result based on the events as they happened on the server. Perhaps the actual cast time on the client-side is faster than what is configured on the server, or the server has a slight delay in processing the command. Regardless, every MMO that I've ever played has similar issues in the first few weeks. It's a matter of tweaking the system so that everything syncs up just right. If this bug, and others, are game-breaking for you, then I would recommend not playing any MMORPG immediately at launch, because you will always be disappointed. The determination in the quality of the MMO developer is how they handle the first six months after release. Most major bugs (not that I've personally encountered any, but the forums bring up some) should be resolved by that time.