All of this just portends to usher more cash flow into the Cartel Market by diversifying the amount of usable unlocks - which wouldn't be an issue if those unlocks were account wide or bare minimum (i.e. 10 CC in cost). Seriously, when is that going to change? Anyhow, that's the bottom line. Pull back the curtain as to what it means for the beneficiaries of this development (we as the players) and it does provide a lot of potential - provided it's not just "You get to use this weapon and it has these two abilities that are different than those other two abilities from the other weapon. Ta-da!" If it provides a full range of spec, modification and armor sets worthy of a ten-year anniversary. Then good. Thumbs up. If it's just "Yay I can use a double sided stick instead of a single pokey stick - they do the same thing, but cool look how flashy!." Then it's not viable and it'll just serve to really upset quite a few players.

The worst part of it is, they don't encourage a win in this. The goal is "completed", so there's no incentive to even try. This is a two part issue in that 1) those that want to PvP are punished for having poor team members and it's difficult enough opposing premade queues and 2) it forces those that wouldn't PvP to begin with to attend something they don't want to do. No one is winning in this scenario.

“I do get really good feedback – what we call metrics, or telemetry – that allow me to actually do my job. So it’s more interesting for me to get feedback on how many people played the Rakghoul Plague event, something that happened a few weeks ago. To know if people who hadn’t played for a while came back just to play that… was it so that we had a surge in subscriptions so that maybe people that lapsed came back… I get to know how many people – what percentage of people – participated in it, and how many people finished it. And that’s a number I can work with.” HA-HA-HA!...HA! Seriously? You get more numbers from an event that took place on a level 20-30 (essentially) planet during a free weekend? I'm sure that must be "more interesting" for you to get feedback on how many people played the Rakghoul Plague event...than say, knowing that there are 1-2 people in fleet at any given time on most servers. Again, HA! Metrics...are you kidding me? Try logging in some time. Absolutely no empathy from this. It's like bringing a chalk board with a 96 character algorithm into a class room full of art majors. None of them care a thing about the algorithm itself; instead how nice your hand writing was in scribbling it out. Here's your metrics from my server right here... http://www.torstatus.net/anchorhead/history/7d#!/anchorhead/trends/60d

SW:TOR, You won't be missed, bye. Why are you so bad? The above is written out of angst for waiting four years for this game, paying for the CE (which has little no content involved with it, where's the cool clothing? Paid for bad artwork.), and believing all the hype. For those of you staying. Enjoy. Seriously, enjoy this single player game that you're paying $15.00 a month for. I won't be sinking another dime into this thing. EA, you're as bad as NCSoft and SOE. I'm boycotting your future games on the premise that you lie to your customers and play ring leader in a succession of bad design, starting with my first and favorite MMO - Ultima Online...which you butchered. The day you fired a guy that tattooed himself in the belief that this game was going to be successful, is the day you lost all respect from me. For those developers, and even the guy that's going to remove/close this post. Good luck.

Name one MMO that didn't copy a concept from either fictional book, table top role-playing game, or some mechanic that is in every day use in the real world. I agree with you. They excel and are successful because of it, in copying. Original thought is dead. It's so far gone in fact that to convey your idea as original is laughable to those that know better. Those that don't are either too preoccupied (by those that do) or so uncaring to desire the knowledge that nothing is original; they push the idea that something is copied and that it should be looked down upon for that reason. Blizzard is exactly what a company (both in the real world, and game development) should strive to be when it comes to taking "that which works" and tossing "that which does not work". It's simple. What Blizzard does, that Bioware/EA do not do. Survey their consumers until there's no end to it. Notice polling has been stripped from the forums a while back. Incredibly bad move. That's where they get their progression surveys from. This game is failing because BW/EA doesn't care. The lack of polls showed me that.

*Alert! Alert! Alert!* INCOMING TRANSMISSION VIA DROID FA-17-BOT. Transmission Protocol 32-C-A TITLE: SUBSCRIPTION VS. INITIAL PURCHASE BODY: My original purchase was $160.00 for the Collector's Edition. I've played since December, cancelling for a month between that time. So far, in total, I've paid this company $220.00 USD (considering two of 5 months was free). I'd say for the lack of population, service, updates; and for the amount of nerfs, lag, boredom that this game offers to me, I've paid in full and then some. I don't want to see more of my money go toward advertising, empty promises, and inability from developers that can't 'figure it out'. This is the most fail I've seen in a game since Tabula Rasa. NCSoft closed the doors completely on that game. A game I enjoyed. Practices like this from EA, SOE, and NCSoft leave a sour and disgruntled view of MMOs in their customer's mouths. The most successful MMOs are still up and running, still supported in a timely manner, and still communicating vigorously with their communities: UO, DAoC and WoW. All of them mutilated images of their once proud moments, but still up and running, still communicating. Where's the communication on these boards, except for the censorship if you "get out of line"? END OF TRANSMISSION SELF DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIATED. ETA: SW:TOR FAI- *BOOM!* Edit: This little droid was sent via time travel (approximately four months), I'm surprised he made it through the entire transmission. There must have been a 'delay of fail' that finally caught up to him within the time/fail paradox just toward the end there. It's a shame he couldn't have lasted a few years...I liked that droid.

Top 5 reasons for unsubscribing: 1) Lack of population. - I am not going to re-roll and the fact that server transfers and merges seem to elude this crack team of developers astonishes me. Even in Neverwinter Nights I had a tight database that allowed me to manage characters in any manner possible, moving them through IP transfers between two servers. Get it together. WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG?! Should have been done months ago at the first sign of servers going to even half population. I give you Rift as a primary example of handling that issue expediently enough that they retained most of their customers. Are you going to be able to say the same? I don't think so... 2) Design flaws. - When I say design flaws, I don't attribute the issue to programming. Programmers are told what to put in, based on the designers. I blame the designers for not researching their predecessors in completion and surveying more on what is enjoyable vs. what is not. Crafting, dailies and even general combat flaws are the issue here. When you design an MMO you keep in mind that gear plays a prevalent part of a players desire to play. Gear, via daily tokens, raiding, etc. is a good idea in theory but a tried one that hasn't accomplished much in the way of keeping a player interested. At this point you've just reinvented the wheel of grinding. The funny thing is you didn't even reinvent it. It was done by other MMOs that attempted this failed concept and yet, you guys took it and ran with the failed idea. Dailies are a design flaw that came about from laziness. If you plan on making dailies, add some variety to them. Instead you force us into a grind. 3) Legacy Costs. - I could attribute this to design flaws above, but instead I'll take it on a separate note. This is atrocious. You jack prices so high that eventually a player has to grind out dailies (which by the way, take a minimum of 8 load screens to complete all of them so far...why not put them all on Ilum again?) every day, and then run a bunch of flash points, which can't be done because of server populations being so low on most servers, or grinding out mobs mindlessly for hours at a time. So because I'm on a low pop server, with an economy that's flopped into the ground, I have no real outlet but to grind out all those credits instead of say...crafting and selling gear for those credits, and this puts me at a major disadvantage to higher population servers. Horrible design on this. Charging credits for fluff is a joke by the way. We've earned it with time leveling. 4) Crashed economies. - Time and time again, since release, I've seen exploit after exploit that went unchecked for the most part (as I've seen friends and guild members alike state that they've done it and got away with it) for credit duplication, chest farming, speed hacking, etc. that just doesn't get handled. This crashed economies across all servers. Sure some of the high population ones can spread it thin and recuperate but the ones that are on light pop, are destroyed. I give you Anchorhead and Juyo as an example. 5) Simple lack of interest. - I logged on for 5 minutes tonight. Five minutes...and I couldn't stand the game. Mind you, I pre-ordered the collector's edition, followed this game for four years before release (though my current handle doesn't say so) and put a lot of hope and time into this game even before it was release. What I got, from the beginning, was a steaming pile of single-player, a slap in the face for buying the CE (yeah, nice vendor there...so glad I sank the cash in there for the plastic...oh sorry...'resin' statue and book...along with the metal CD cases.) which has now become a hatred sitting on my shelf. Closing this out saying that buying the Collector's Edition for this game is the part that burns me the most. You guys gave absolutely nothing to the CE buyers, which by the way were a LARGE chunk of your pre-orders and existing subscribers. The only reason we hung in here for so long is the fact that I think a lot of us are still disillusioned by how bad this game is and we wanted it to be something far more. All of the PR Campaign was here on this game, none of the delivery. If you guys aimed for making this the first single player MMO, you did it. Congratulations. Edit: The voice acting was the only reason to play through a story, and if played through without space barring was enjoyable. After the first time around though, it's not even the strong point of the game and it all seems like one big grind again, story quests excluded. More time should have been invested in design, less in voice acting.

I've given up hope that Bioware has any control of this game anymore. EA being voted the worst company by the consumerists of America (read the article), having botched up the ending for Mass Effect 3, totally destroying DA2, assembling 'indie' titles that make no sense (as they are a major company and not in the indie range at all) gives me premise to cancel my account. It's not that I hate the game, the game's great to me. It just lacks any depth and has become two dimensional, especially with lack of players on any front within my server, that I've given up hope. Bioware, you guys shouldn't have sold out.. I miss the Neverwinter Nights days when you gave the community content, and allowed our voices to be heard in full. I miss when you put up the forums for your games on IGN and your own portal pages where they weren't so moderated that it felt like censure was predominant. As it stands, I feel like anything someone says that goes against the new "Bioware" (a monstrous deformed version of its previous self) and especially against EA is closed out and censored to oblivion. We have to tip toe around, being passive aggressive with you not to have something removed or locked. So I'm just going to say it in hopes a few see this as well. Your service, updating, and lack of communication in the interests of those paying you sucks. You as a company need to review your own business practices. Your upper echelon that rakes in the money and has no truly geared (as apparent, though unforeseen) interest in the players, sucks. I chalk it up to either pure inability, stupidity, or malice. I can't attribute all three as I simply don't know how, as a company (EA), you can be so oblivious to realizing that consumers have every ability to choose not to purchase another title from you because you continue to do us wrong. Well...enough's enough. I'm out. Diablo 3 is awesome and their support is spot on. I used to stand up for Bioware as the best gaming company out there, now...I'd go with Blizzard any day of the week over what you perverted it to EA.

Hey look another pessimist, just proving the point that nothing's happening. GG.

For those saying that the population issue isn't really an issue, and play on a populated server. Here's a reality check. Bioware, pay attention, I know you guys have this info but aren't addressing it as of late except for 'server transfers'. http://www.torstatus.net/ 1) Click through each server and note the population in the last 30 days and 7 days. 2) Note the fall of population even on Fatman. 3) Continue to post your threads on how this game needs a server merge now. It's sad when a game is really enjoyed by the remaining population and simply playing alone can push that remaining pop out. We need server merges now. (I also find it funny that every single server dropped considerably on the 15th of May, during the release of D3. Most would rather play a game in single player mode, or with 4 people than on an MMO...oh wait...this isn't MMO status at all. Again, emphasizing the fact that we need server merges.)

Except for the fact that the legacy level doesn't have to be tied to your legacy name. The legacy name is a 'token', it could be random numbers for programming purposes (which technically it is). That experience can be retained. The question is simply if you'd give up your legacy name along with a first name.

Most likely the flaw in all of this, and the defining reason that server merges are not present is that legacy names were server bound, as are first names, instead of account binding legacy names. Which is possibly another reason that your legacy doesn't transfer to another server. Design flaw that should have been handled during development. Trying to merge with two conflicts like that (instead of the typical one conflict of a first name) is apparently a cesspool for disaster. Why? No idea. I started a thread earlier seeing if people would be willing to relinquish their legacy names and first names for that very reason. I personally would give both up to merge my dying server with another.

Oh the thread is posed more of a hypothetical and questions why server merges aren't present. If the reason is naming conflicts, the aim of this thread is to have BW/EA see the results of population whether for good or bad, so maybe they can make a more informed decision based on community appeal to either retaining their names, or relinquishing them. Absolutely. Agreed.

Good point. I still wonder if they're in a conflict of having to move both legacy names and first names though. Forcing a change in legacy name (since it seems to be server unique and not account, unless I'm mistaken) and having to change the first name of a character (also server unique) as well when someone transfers. So let's say server X (transferred to) has a player with legacy name Blah and server Y (transferred from) also has a legacy name Blah: conflict #1. Now, let's say the person from server Y also conflicts with another player's account on server X for first name: conflict #2. Glad to know you feel the same for changes though. The issue seems to have been to not make legacy names unique to account in my opinion. (Edited for clarity)

Huxley. As it seemed only fitting for a Republic last name in a Brave New World under the thumb of the Empire