They aren't hard to find. Google is your friend. Numerous companies have done the same study over and over, and it's always the same result. Very often the same kind of attempts to skew the results the way the company wants, too. Like when Square Enix printed off twice as many Chrono Trigger games than there were 3ds' sold, then reported that there was not enough interest in the series to justify any more games.

That's the beauty of what I'm suggesting. You would still be in business, they would still be selling cartel packs. The GTN market would still be viable because paying credits for items is just more practical than not (other wise the gold farmers would be doing all the business), but there's a lot of stuff in old packs that simply isn't available anymore. In addition, people like you would be able to analyze the market, and make smart choices about what to buy and resell, rather than relying ONLY on luck.

I've been here since beta. It's not about me. It's about all the people who quit or refuse to play because of the negative policies. I don't claim to be able to quote numbers, but personally I lost two guilds of 100+ players when nearly everyone quit over the FtP policies. And if that's not good enough, the fact that they had to merge servers, and the populations are still this low should be. I spent the money I did on the features I did for a specific purpose, and part of that was so that when I made this suggestion, it would be from a position of having put my money where my mouth is, NOT from a position of trying to argue to get free stuff.

Well, partially. The studies done were skewed, one sided and done without a real control group. They advertised the cartel packs with all the flash and 'wow' factor, and placed highly desirable items in them, then offered a very small amount of rather dull and plain items individually, then concluded the cartel boxes were better. That's a really skewed conclusion, and that's why the company that owns STO changed their shopping policies so drastically. That's why I wasn't suggesting removing the random boxes, but rather also offering the same items individually at an increased price. You'll notice EA is already going that way, offering narrower random boxes alongside their cartel packs, and you can tell they're seeing success because they're offering more and more. It's true that psychologically speaking, most people will choose the unknown box over the sure item, that's why it's good business to offer the cartel packs, I'm saying it's better business to cater to both sensibilities, rather than relying on only the gambling factor. All I'm saying is if they take that next step and open a full-service shop, I, for one, will be spending a lot more money here.

I'm saying this as a player who already unlocked all the options to make FtP as much like the subscriber experience as possible. The game is fun, the story is awesome, it's a VERY solid Star Wars experience, but EA is SERIOUSLY mishandling several key aspects, which is driving away customers. The main thing is that unlike more successful free-to-play games, which reward you for spending money, SWTOR punishes you for NOT spending money. They do this by holding back basic game features, unless you pay to unlock them. These are game features like having enough action bars to hold all your character's abilities, and trading with other players, things that are vital to the game experience. Then, the fun things that you would pay for in a normal Free To play game, are randomized in SWTOR, so you can't just pick out what you want, you have to purchase random packs that may or may not contain the item you want. I'll be honest, EA would have received a great deal more money from me if I could just buy the cosmetic outfits/mounts/color/weapons that I want. I gave up buying their random item packs very early on. If you can tolerate those issues, SWTOR is very worth it. But the fact that the word 'tolerate' even applies in this context is a bad sign. The thing is, EA wouldn't even have to remove the random cartel packs to fix this. Just offer the individual items at a reasonable price, like $10 for outfits, $20 for mounts, and offer them alongside the random cartel packs at their existing price. I know I would spend more money on SWTOR every month, rather than what I do now, which is maybe $20 a year (not counting expansions).

I hate to say it, but I agree with the OP... Come on Bioware, even WoW is trying to add more spice and variety to the missions... I realize you only had so much time and development resources for launch, that's cool, I'm with you there, but now that the game is out and you guys are working on expansions, MIX IT UP!!!

I would say go to the server you're going to be transferred to and make a name holder character, then delete it when you get prompted to namechange the transferred character.

I'm with the OP %100. the main reason I don't play on the republic side as much as I want to is the clothes. I'm sorry Bioware, your art team is THE BOMB, but there's only 1 or 2 outfits republic side that I'm interested in wearing and those are Smuggler/knight specific.

Yah, he became a knight in that scene with yoda, and wad given the rank of Master by the time that party at the end happens (I don't remember if that was in the Ep1 novelization or what), in fact he wonders at some points if that led to him being an inadequate teacher for Anakin.

Why not? Obiwan became a Master at the end of Episode 1.

This. All of it.

Concidering Diablo 3 is slightly less complex than Super Mario Bros 64 and it's STILL full of bugs, I'm gonna have to go with Bioware.

Giving the OP the benefit of the doubt that he's not trolling, let me explain. When they code features of the game (any feature, from basic ground physics to the helmet fix), they are coding in a hermetic environment. In other words, they are coding in ideal, predictable circumstances. once players get involved, more variables are introduced that may or may not have been taken into account by the programmers. That being said, in an MMO, with millions of players, every single command received by the system has the potential to introduce a new variable that the programmers did not account for. To figure out the number of potential variables you have to calculate the following formula: Number of possible player commands (this includes things camera angles, degrees of facing) = N Number of intractable coded objects in the game environment (This NPCs, Time of day) = E Number of Player using the code (All the players) = P (N x E) x P = the number of possible unforeseen code interactions. (hint: it's in the trillions) So there are literally trillions of possibilities for programming code to act unexpectedly. This is not incompetence, this is the simple reality of multi user software. It's not like a mario game, where there are only 8 player input options, 132 (or so) intractable functions and 1 player.

>.< d'oh... Thank you for that mate!

Then quote yourself. You can even write your own wikipage telling the whole world how right you are, then other wikitrolls can quote your wikipage as 'evidence' of how right you are. It won't matter because you'd still be flat out wrong. As anyone who was there on launch day (or a few days after as most folks couldn't log in on launch day) can tell you. I clicked on those links and noticed that they got A LOT of launch information wrong, editing it to make it look like WoW launched pretty much as the end of vanilla WoW looked; little things like "Glimpse of Instincts: Removed". Oh? If it was the actual launch state, why did it say 'removed', why would it be there at all (Incidentally we had that at launsh)? Under Tauren's special abilities, where is Plains Running? We had that at launch as well. That's called revisionist history, like how American History textbooks used to say Japan's Attack on Pearl Harbour was completely unprovoked, or the American Indians were mindless savages, or that Christopher Colombus set sail in 1492 to prove that the world was round. As for your MMO champion arrticle, notice one of the factors they point out as part of their factoids is the Diablo 3 open beta and info released from Blizzard as of Q4 2011. That's well after the period I'm talking about, which was shortly after Cata launched in December 2010, which was in Q1 2011. That's like me saying the population of the world was 6 billion in 1989, and you linking to an article that tells the world population is 7 billion in 2012. Seriously dude, get a grip. Also it says the population has 'STABILIZED'. Do you know what that means? All common sense aside, do you remember the pre Cataclysm commercials that advertized 12 million players? You should be able to figure it out from there.