I don't get why other players should care how someone else wants to play a game. Why not play the game the way you want and leave someone else to play the game the way they want. As long as they aren't harassing, spamming or the like I think they should be able to enjoy the game the way they like. IMO, the guy up in someone else's business reporting them is acting like a child tattling to me. Oh and no I don't macro in SWToR before those chants start up.

They removed the restriction, there is no real "historical" reason why the restrictions should exist and it seems the only decent argument for the restrictions are for game mechanic reasons (grind loot, prestige, etc). I think this poor horse has been beaten enough but that is just my opinion... continue flogging if you feel it necessary.

Do you hate money or is this strictly for boasting? Very few games will take advantage of this setup including SWToR. Most good games these days are console ports and have no way to take advantage of this rig. You are building a machine to play games 2-3 years from now only then this rig will be out of date. The i5 2500k OC'd is going to return a couple percent less performance than any processor you listed. Few games will see any real benefit from going higher. SLI is a waste here. Some games take advantage of SLI others including the desktop not at all plus buying it out of the box gives your computer little upgrade headroom down the road. More than 8GB is also a waste unless you are a graphics designer, run a lot of VMs, high end developer or similar. Few people will use more than 8GB at least for the foreseeable future. The places to spend money these days is on an i5, single higher end video card, above average MB and a quality SSD. The rest is just for bragging, enthusiast or for people who wipe their rear with 100s. BTW if you are dropping this kind of cash might as well look at the 7970. I am not an ATI fan (I actually avoid them when possible) but that card is showing ridiculously good benchmark numbers. It is also cheaper than two 580s and much faster rivaling even two 590s in some benchmarks.

I agree with the OP. I enjoyed the game the first time through and feel I got my monies worth. However I now find the PVP too gear dependent at the top end and lacking in other aspects. I started characters to PVE a second time through but 98% of the quests are exactly the same from one character to the next. The separate stories for each class archtype are good, but it is such a small portion of the game overall. To me SWToR was designed safe. It feels like a retread with a novel Bioware twist in an interesting universe. Enjoyable for a while but lacks the soul of a truly great game. Time will tell though.

I would guess number 1. It is easier to implement than merges and it is a revenue stream. Hard to argue with either point from a profit standpoint. Cross server PvP could top a what next list. I doubt LFG PvE content would make it very high on their list.

Skills were only limited while in combat areas, but the diversity of skills rivals any game I have played ever. Even the secondary class could be changed when in non-combat areas. Limiting the in combat skills was almost all an upside to the game. IMO the place GW fell down was advancing a character post cap which I am sure will be rectified in GW2.

8k is probably worth about 10 cents in real life money. It is ridiculously easy to get an extra 8k in game by level 25. I have never once had a problem coming up with the cash at any level to buy stuff. Once you have a character at level 50, money is relatively useless. Now had they included a Champion Bag that might be worth talking about.

Battlemaster without kill trading... that requires some effort.

Yes for a single play through, no for continuing after that. Yes for checking back in later.

All about scale and engine selection. SWToR has to scale to a much more sizable number of people also the engine chosen by Bioware for ME3 is a proven well constructed limited scale multiplayer engine (Unreal) versus SWToR's Hero engine which is in its infancy by comparison. That said even on my aging laptop SWToR plays reasonably well. On my 1k desktop, it runs very well. Maybe not CoD or Battlefield smooth, but smooth enough.

This type of game development is very much like movie development. It is unlikely a studio is going to pump out a ton of cash to build something like this unless it is relatively safe paint-by-the-numbers result. This is the reason virtually every big budget movie resembles every other years big budget movies. Unfortunately this game is more Phantom Menace than New Hope right now. It seems to have all the pieces but missed the innovation like the first Star Wars run, has little Bioware magic in it and feels uninspired. It is a good game that is judged on nearly an impossible standard. However, I doubt it will ever reach Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect or Kotor cult status. Hope I am wrong though!

I agree with the too much trash sentiment. I would much rather have harder longer fights than dozens of empty mindless ones just to get to the "fun" part. Some people like the grind though so to each his own I suppose. As for travel time, there is too much of a time drain traveling in this game. I don't care that it is partially instanced or the world would be too small if they sped up travel. I just want to maximize the time I get to play the game and travelling to and fro is not fun in my book. Probably great for those people who can play for hours on end, but for many of us married guys our play time is quite limited so spending a half hour on a DK run sucks.

I think the story instances were a good idea since they allow a player to enjoy that part of the story. They even have a good system to let the play know when they are entering one. Zone instances I also agree with because it allows zones from becoming overloaded with too many players. Where they fell down IMO is not having a single world with a lot of zoned instances like GW. Having separate "servers" was a poor design decision. It left a lot of republic players stranded on low pop servers and leaves empire v republic PvP limited.

I like GameRankings myself: http://www.gamerankings.com/pc/951199-star-wars-the-old-republic/index.html almost an 85% which is higher than my grade but just by a bit. These professional review aggregation sites do a decent job of scoring games IMO.

This game is ridiculously stable compared to other MMOs I have played at release. Their QC is actually pretty good based on the overall stability of their product. The graphics are dated and the clipping is obscene but MMOs have long development cycles so I am willing to cut it some slack at least until something better comes along. Ultimately the buy versus build is not a question of being a lazy dev or not, it is a product design decision and not done by devs. They likely had input but probably didn't make the decision.

Another feature to bring over from Guild Wars... the Mercenary Hero. Not sure how the story lines would work but it is a fun concept and well executed in GW.

If a player doesn't spend money buying gear or crafting and does most of the quests, the player will have plenty of money to buy all their skills and speeders. Some players craft as they level which burns a lot of cash. Also shopping the galactic market often consumes substantial cash. If players avoid those money pits, most players will be fine.

running

I don't know about the quickest but running Black Talon on normal with a high level character can be done in a couple minutes and pops out quite a few dark side points.

How much play time did you expect for your investment? A traditional game costs about $50 and that will probably yield say 25 hours of game play (just pulling a number out of a hat as it will vary greatly by game/player). If someone levels a character to 50 then quits, they probably got a pretty good bang for their buck. Only if someone buys a game for retail and play it very little should that person have a regret for spending the money.

If I have one BIG suggestion it would be way less running and way more funning. The level designers are sadists at least when it comes to getting around in the PvE game world. If I have to run back through Coruscant to the commanding officer one more time on my Commando rather than get a holo mission, I will yell at my monitor in a completely impotent fashion about how much this game sucks... yell into Vent about it... then keep on playing... but I will still be irritated about the stupidity of all the running.

The graphics are some of the better MMO graphics and designed to run a myriad of computer systems (my 2 year old laptop can run the game well enough), but this game simply cannot compete with its non-MMO cousins nor does it expect to be in that league since its complex coding is other places. Ultimately the one horrible thing this engine fails at is clipping. It clips worse than any top quality game in recent memory that I have played MMO or not. Compared to non-MMOs the graphics are pretty dated. Looking at Bioware's other offerings with the UE3 engine (Mass Effect for example) this game looks 3+ years old with max settings on its best day. It certainly is not on par with Skyrim's engine. In no way can it hang with the prettiest out there which IMO is Battlefield 3.

Aside from a surge when the promos start this game has likely seen its highest subscription numbers unlike the WoW arc. Not that this game doesn't have the same or more potential as WoW but SWToR was dated on release unlike WoW. If this game hit 2-3 years ago, it would be a monster by now. However new titles will come shortly with better graphics, truly innovative game play and while not having the massive story lines of SWToR they will probably succeed in being more fun and less run. All that said, this game has been a success till now by nearly every reasonable measure and will likely continue for some time. IMO SWToR lives up to the Bioware name but certainly not their best title.

Grav Round, Grav Round, Grav Round, Grav Round. Sure mixing in HIB is smart but this video shows a player need only beat on the GR key to be effective: Until logging hits and a detailed analysis can be performed this "technique" is effective, dead simple and ridiculously boring.

Yes. Every class cannot do everything, so expecting a non-AoE class to manage multiple targets is an unfair comparison. Having played both, I can say this class is the trash mob king with its numerous AoE abilities. The marauder is far more versatile IMO with its built in interrupts, burst DPS, excellent Oh Crap abilities, on the move damage and zero wind up time waiting for an ability to start damaging. From 1-30, the marauder is a leveling machine. Past 30, things slow down as armor and HP scales up. This class doesn't seem to notice it as much with all the AP it has, at least thats my theory. However single target with a quality player, the marauder is one of the best DPS classes running.