Heh, that reminds me of the previous patch that "fixed" PvP missions not counting victories...

I am a Cybertech myself, able to make armoring and modifications, and have stopped bothering at around level 20. Ever since then I've only buying mods and pieces for commendations, and made green mods just for levelling the profession. I've not even tried to discover a single blue level 50 schematic through RE, as there's literally no point. On Ilum a run through all dailies gives me an artifact-quality grade-23 armament, the best I could ever achieve as a crafter is 22. In a week you can have pieces from Ilum in all your gear, while at the same time you could waste piles of money, recources and much time just trying to learn any (and possibly not even the desired one) schematic for something that is still worse. I wouldn't even expect a viable market for crafted mods and armoring to be there to begin with, considering the availability of easier ways to acquire them. Now I am just hoping in the future Cybertech will be expanded more into the gadget department (think WoW engineering) that armoring/mod production. *shrug*

My initial plans had been to play a Jedi Shadow, but after trying out this and a couple of other classes in the late beta weekends, I came along the Bounty Hunter and found it to be more fun, both story-wise and in terms of their class mechanics and style. As a faction I would have preferred Republic, but in the end my own character and their class, skills, styles, story etc. matters more than faction, so I ended up Empire after all.

Well you already gave an example against your initial claim. The existence of target dummies has no effect on the tunnel vision of some people - they are just like that anyway. I also disagree on raid warning addons dumbing down the player base. The problem with them is more along the lines of developers taking them into account when designing boss fights, ultimately making them so complicated that you are almost required to run them if you don't want to miss any of the two dozen boss mechanics to watch out for.

The texture is the same, but reflections are on. It's really weird, there are like a handful select places where reflections on metal armor works, everywhere else it does not.

Also: see Diablo 3. I would be surprised if Titan will not turn out to be based around real money item trade (with a cut for Blizzard on each transaction, of course) and possibly also Blizzard's own item shop.

There is a tremendous difference between having something worthwhile (read: crafting, galactic market) to spend money on and being required to spend it on annoying money sinks (read: repair costs). So you are saying that at that rate, playing a couple of hours every day - let's say you raid 3 hours on 3 days and on 4 days you play 3 hours without raids. So basically it takes 4 days with the same play time just to offset the repair costs of 3 raid days. If you think that is fine, ok. I find this outrageous. Compared to WoW (and yes the comparison is valid, raid maintenance in terms of equipment repair costs due to wipes learning encounters is still the same in both games), you may need a single hour to offset the cost of an entire wipe-heavy evening. Which in your example would mean one of your days off raids would go to repair costs, and 3 days would even net you something.

(I'll ignore spelling, formatting etc. and just assume you already tried your best) Ah the common logical fallacy. Any advice to make money off the Galactic Market only works as long as not too many people heed it, as it requires a certain number of people buying more (in terms of total money) than they ever sell. The same actually holds true in real life, e.g. when people tell others "if you studied this you'd get this job and make so much money", except if everyone would do so we'd only have doctors and lawyers and know one would even make food.

As the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. F2P games do cost money, the trick is in making people believe they do not. They live off a (this is simplified for the sake of brevity) separated player base: a) players who do not pay at all, experience only the basic game, ultra-slot levelling, weakened characters, no access to the more interesting content etc. and b) players who do pay for items, temporary or permanent buffs, access to premium content, premium character options etc. The second group tends to pay considerably more than someone would for a P2P MMO, making up for the portion of the player base not paying a dime. The caveat is that for non-paying people, F2P MMOs tend to be a rather sub-par experience (so that there is always incentive for buying stuff in the shop). For example, when Champions Online went F2P, I considered having another look at it. I stopped the client download the moment I learnt how without premium access, character creation would be severely limited, char slots would be less than what I already had etc., and that I couldn't even play any of my characters because they are customized but F2P only allowed certain limited pre-sets - basically not even worth looking at outside of a free trial mode. F2P means must Pay-To-Win and/or Pay-To-Have-Fun, and quite often also require a certain number of non-paying, non-premium members for those who put down many times a typical P2P fee each month in order to make their chars superior, faster at levelling or generally feel special or entitled above the non-paying players.

I agree, though I wouldn't bet on them actually doing anything about it. The way it is now, I am expecting some people having to unsubscribe from some raid days for the mere reason of "not enough money for repairs", something I have never seen in any game before. The OP's example is not so uncommon, he's got less than half a million and what he has can be consumed by repairs alone in 2-3 raid days when learning content. This can also have the detrimental effect that even more than in other MMOs, many more people than usual will try to gravitate to the raid groups which have the content clear and are only farming it now. Also - huge incentive for money farming/selling/spamming here. Then consider that repair costs will only go up, as they scale with equipment quality. I am at ~4.5k for a single death, and I am mostly at Columi gear level. Some people might possibly see ~10k repair bills per death at the end of the year, depending on the amount of gear progression/inflation of course.

Tell that to the guy on my server who's running around with the name of a beer brand well known around here (EU/GER); reported, nothing happened. I say Bioware does not even care about these rules. [Mel Brooks Voice On]Murlocs in space![Mel Brooks Voice Off] scnr

What are your plans in regards to chat bubbles for say, yell, party and operation chat. They were hinted at some time ago, but since then there has not been a word on this. This has been a standard MMO feature for years, and many are still surprised at SWTOR's lack thereof.

Anyone else feels reminded of Culture knife missiles? Such a thing would be awesome.

They are going to allow it; however, they will be slot-bound, i.e. the armoring from a Columi/Rakata/PvP helmet, for example, can only be put into any other helmet, so you can't equip yourself by ripping apart 10x the same item. And yes, they should have done it like this from the very beginning.

I say in addition to the current crafting-crit-gives-augment-slot mechanic, there needs to be something craftable that adds an augment slot to any item that does not yet have one, no matter where that item came from. That way we can have maximum diversity and freedom of choice, instead of always having a certain item type superior.

What they need, instead of crit-crafting (which could still also, provide them), is for a reliable way to add Augment slots to existing items, even ones dropped from bosses, bought for commendations etc. It is possibly the only way to make orange items and purple items equal in value, and give people maximum freedom and choice in combining stats with character looks. Right now purple items are better than modded orange ones, with these changes (+removable base mods+set bonuses from purple items) crit-crafted orange ones would be best, and both purple and non-crafted orange items would be behind. Thus, I suggest every crafting profession receive the ability to create a consumable item that puts an Augment slot on any item of the type that profession typically produces: ArmsTech - Blasters of all kinds, tech- vibro and electro-weapons Artifice - Lightsabers and relics of all kinds ArmorMech - All non-force-user armor SynthWeave - All force-user armor BioChem - All implants Cybertech - All earpieces Then, in addition all professions needs some unique profession-only perk that is really useful in the long run. BioChem has reusable version of what is consumable for others. So the other professions need something as powerful as that (and no, the Cybertech grenades are in no way comparable, too weak, too long of a cooldown, too situational. Buffing my stats or free instant heals are useful in any(!) environment). Maybe even get some inspiration of from what WoW does in this regard.

They'd just need to fix social points being awarded from hardmode flashpoints properly, then all complaints about how hard they are to get were moot. No fancy new ideas necessary at all.

Simply said - stealing from other players, ninjalooting etc. is not in-character, but out-of-character, metagaming, and directed against that player, not against their character. There it is absolutely NOT ok to do this.

I'm not too fond of the Mantis' design, either. Compare with the cool and unique design of the Slave I (especially in Ep2, love that paint job), it looks embarassingly poor. The slave I look functional yet elegant, useful yet beautiful, neither overstyled nor purely functional... The Mantis, however, looks like someone did not even bother what it would look like at all.

I would go with Vanguard Mercenary. Dual Pistols really fit the Bounty Hunter (especially as a Pyrotech - Arsenal uses them far too little for my taste), while the Assault Cannon of the Commando is so large, clunky, unwieldy that I would never play one myself. Have a look at some fellow Commando players ingame, these impossibly huge blocky pieces on their back - some (the more elegant ones) may look right when drawn, but on their back it looks just... impossible, like they should fall over backwards any moment, or fall off their speeder bikes. On the other hand, a Vanguard with a blaster rifle looks just right, just the way I would expect a Republic Trooper.

/signed This bug is serious and has to be fixed. And if, as mentioned, some other classes/speccs have similar trouble, fix those as well!

The answer is "maybe". Some orange items have a built-in level requirement that you cannot get rid of. Those still dynamically require the level of the highest component you put into it, but will fall down to lower levels if remove, however never further down than their innate level requirement. For example, search the GTN for orange bracers or belts, as these always come with empty slots - still they have certain level requirements.

They just need to enable gaining social points from conversations inside hardmode flashpoints etc. Currently they appear during the conversation, but are not awarded at the end. It's absolute nonsense that rushing through normal BT, carrying 3 low level guys, in 15 minutes gives 150-200 points while doing BT hard, with a decent group of 50, in an hour yields at maximum 4 if everyone accepts the flashpoint hardmode mission outside together, 8 if you win the roll on clicking the "start hardmode" option. LOL

Not playing a Scoundrel, but I can feel the pain here, having experience similar bugs and delays in other MMOs where despite you initiating a fight with a stun from stealth or outside their aggro range, the mob gets to hit you once, and that hit happens to be a stun, too, so you are both stunned. Combine with a more positional specc requiring to use stuns to get off positional attacks, this is a major PITA. Fix it.

As does getting on your speeder bike and hopping off again. Hilariously stupid but it works.