Same. Tried multiple times. Reran installer (without uninstalling). Tried again - same.

And I get to travel back in time and prevent the planet destroyers and the planet destroyer destroyers from ever existing.

And if you're a Smuggler or BH in chapter 1, playing that close to the storyline, then your character probably doesn't care about "official business". :-)

One other issue, is for the IC "harasser" to use some basic sense. If your guild is hosting an RP social event in which you are trying to get others from across the server to attend, you might want to seriously revisit that character concept of driving people off. They have to come up with a IC reason to be there, and going to a party to be relentlessly harassed by someone is usually not on anyone's IC agenda. A few might go with the intention of fighting back. But that would be only a few, and only provides entertainment for a brief time. If you are certain your character must be this way to be true to himself, then you might want to find a less hostile character to take to social events. Maybe make a brief cameo appearance with Mr. Hostility and then switch to someone more sociable, or at least more quietly treacherous.

I think it sounds clever and fun to work with.

I also thought the OP was trolling. I still can't quite make it out. He can play that he is THE ONE - but he can't ride a speeder? Even though he is THE ONE to do everything and save everything? Everyone he meets has heard of his reputation and asks him to do something terribly important - but he can't justify riding the speeder for it? @OP - If you're playing that close to the storyline, then everything you do is by definition official business. And if you aren't playing that close to the storyline - then you've proven you can choose what to accept and what to fudge a little or ignore to make your story work. If you are role playing, then it is up to the NPCs to fit your story, not for you to fit theirs. If you are going through the story as written, as you would in a single-player game (which is a lot of fun too) then don't worry about RP. Just enjoy the story. But this weird mash-up of the worst of both worlds instead of the best of both worlds? You're on your own with that one.

1. It doesn't have to really BE official business. You just need to bluff and let the droid believe it is. They just gave the droid something to say - and that's what they gave him to say. I'm not even sure when he stopped saying that - maybe it's on Coruscant only? Look, your statement above looks like you're trying to have it both ways - but choosing the most inconvenient of both worlds. You don't have to RP every detail of your experience with the pre-programmed NPCs, exactly the way they were written, which is exactly the same as every other person's experience. It seems you understand that with the statement "it's a cop out to just assume everything you do is official republic business." So if you are free to reinterpret your character's role in the world (which most of us feel you have to do to RP with others at all), then why can't you also RP the droids responding to you differently than the "official business" spiel?

Seems to me that romancing companions is LEAST important to role players - at least in terms of role play. I guess what I'm saying is while many RPers might enjoy the Bioware story, they don't play the story. But lots and lots of non-RPers enjoy and play the story. All the mostly-OOC light RPers that games like this and KOTOR attract would be far more interested. In terms of how to maximize your Smuggler's hook-up opportunities - on my female smuggler I was able to do a lot of flirting and I think some one-night stands, as long as you don't get mean and insulting to your guy (girl) or lie to them. Basically, at least with the female smuggler and Corso - there would be a sequence sort of like flirt with the other NPC -> Corso objects -> smooth it over. Check the Smuggler forum. I know there's a very long romancing Corso thread. There is likely one for Risha or Akaavi too.

RP relates to interactions between characters. The rules of conduct relate to interactions between players. If you are speaking in /say, and your words and actions are consistent with RP and not as the player of the game, then it's RP and you can say what your character would say. If people get upset OOC, then you can follow-up with a tell and ooc explain it's just your character. If on the other hand, you're saying harassing things in General, group, or in tells - then it isn't RP but is just using RP as an excuse. If you're doing it in say but your actions and words are inconsistent, so that sometimes you're clearly OOC and other times you're IC, then yes people will likely take it as OOC for actual rule-violating (and general d-bag) harassment. Also, even with IC fake-"harassment", if you're going to dish it out, be prepared to take it too. Edit: And as the others have said, if they ask you OOC to stop, then stop.

That is awesome! All of it!

We do not have the ability to configure chat by speaker - only by channel. Changing the say range would be MUCH easier for them to implement than something that sophisticated. Chat bubbles would probably be easier too, since it's mostly done, but they had to remove it until they can fix some performance issues. Edit: Adding a few more thoughts on the same post. You say "it can be worked around" - but the problem is, it can't. That's why it's such a priority. - We can change the color of /say text (which I and many others have done) so that it's easier to distinguish from the other white text (such as General). - We can create a separate RP tab for just /say, and whisper - and emotes if necessary but I can't remember offhand if it's a separate channel or not. Again, something some of us have already done Those things are not the problem, they are useful to separate say from other channels, but the root of the problem is still that there is too much text - from all around, in just the say channel, in a single small chat window. Funny but back in Age of Conan we complained that the say range was too small. It could have been a little bigger for sure, but one thing the small size allowed was to move about 20' (honestly not sure what the actual ranges were) away from others and be out of range so their say no longer showed up in your window. You could actually focus on the text of the people in your immediate group as well as anyone who was nearby.

I heard from one of the devs that unrestricted access to the speeders is one of the etiquette rank unlocks if you play the new Ship Droid minigame. http://www.swtor.com/news/news-article/20120401

Sorry, I do tend to go on when I get started. My other point was that the meaning of these names is attributed by the reader. And the offense is created in the mind of the reader. In the examples of Ipanema and Maginot, even though they were technically probably invalid, hardly anyone noticed or seemed to care. For my part, I thought they were clever and made me smile. I often get the feeling the majority of gamers don't know anything unless it came from another game or a big blockbuster special effects movie - so have no clue about half the stuff going on around them. And for my own part - if someone stole a name from Final Fantasy whatever I wouldn't care or even notice. In the case of my character Mirabilis - the guy who sent me the snippy PM probably only knew of the software company, and possibly only from his job or something in school. He had absolutely no knowledge of the other, larger use of the word. And apparently no clue that names for companies often come from names of other things in the world, reflecting an older, larger reality than the tiny little "gamer" world. I understand and agree that there are names that definitely appear to be designed to be "in your face" to RPers. They are not the majority, and they aren't even that hard to mentally filter out for most people. People bring their own interpretations of the letters and syllables they see, and their own real world and other-fantasy-world knowledge, and if they are looking for something offensive, they'll keep looking until they find it. But whenever I have seen name griefing crusades sweep a server, more good people are hurt than actual pranksters and nuisances. So check your real world knowledge at the door, and just wrap your mind around a different way to read it.

On the subject of copyrights and trademarks, that can still be a gray issue RP-wise. In WoW I had a female night elf druid who I named Mirabilis. I thought hard about a name for her and did some searches - I wanted the name of a night-blooming flower, and I found one. I was very happy with it. Then someone felt it necessary to send me a very snippy PM informing me my character's name was reported because it was also the name of - I forget, an engineering software company I think? That one isn't showing up in my google search just now - many years after the incident. There's also a music project of some sort. Apparently that person bringing his software company name knowledge into his RP, combined with his ignorance of flower names, caused his RP immersion to be egregiously violated. A later character I had in WoW, a female orc shaman, was named Sendra. I got that name from the game's "name suggester" as a good female orc name and I liked it. Because it was a suggested name, and a good one, there were dozens of Sendras across the many servers. But I loved the character, and the name, and have used it since as my persistent cross-game forum identity. But a google search reveals that Sendra is also the name of a Spanish boot manufacturer. Nice stuff - maybe I'll get a pair one day. Of course, now I know I'm setting myself up to be "name griefed" in future games. *sighs* Ah well. In this game, I noticed that the name "Sendra" was declared invalid at character creation. Not "already used" but not valid. I suspect there's a Sendra NPC somewhere and am now really curious who and where. In Dark Age of Camelot, with one of the expansion, a new place and race for Hibernia was created. It was a jungle land called Hybrazil. I saw a character running around on my RP server named Ipanema. I don't generally report names unless they are actually offensive anyway, and definitely did not report this one because I loved it. It made me smile every time I saw it, even though it was in violation of the name rules. For those who don't know (which presumably included most of the players and most of the GMs) Ipanema is a place in Brazil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipanema. Same game, same RP server, there was a new expansion race that dropped little turrets (they looked like mushrooms - did stuff like aoe buffs, or shooting enemies). A guy named his turret-using character Maginot. I thought that was hysterical. It seemed a majority of players and GMs had no idea what it was, so no one bothered him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line Same game, same RP server, there was a race of little people called Lurikeens. One RPer created a delightful little girl lurikeen, her parents were fruit-sellers, her name was Strawberry. It was adorable - and perfect for the people and the character. The argument raged constantly on that server whether such a real world thing like that should be allowed as a name on an RP server. Age of Conan, RP server, a wonderful RPer, thief and assassin character, was known as "Blackfeather". She left a black feather as a calling card. As a thief and assassin, and formerly street urchin, no one knew her real name. Maybe she didn't even know her real name. Some over-zealous RPer "name griefers" as I call them, forced her to change it. Of course we still called her Feather or Blackfeather. That's who the character was. But it was annoying that someone did that. Same game, same server, the company attempted to have an automatic name-cleansing process. I'm not sure exactly how it worked during the brief time it was used before it was scrapped. But scores of perfectly good names, used for the lives of perfectly good RP characters, played by perfectly good RPers (and even non-RPers who respected the rules and atmosphere of the server) were forced to be changed. Just a few anecdotes about RP and names from just my own individual experience. Yes of course there are "terrible" names. But they're easy enough to just ignore. I had no problem ignoring "Aliciakeys" and other such names on my RP servers - although when Aliciakeys decided to try out RP it became much more of a personal challenge for me to interact in-character with that character. But inclusion is my mantra and I did my best. One other anecdote. There was a guy in DAoC named, hmm it's been a while, something like "Thebobistuker". This bugged EVERYONE. Bugged me too, although I couldn't place it. Part of it is how our minds try to parse it - and our minds DO try to parse it - it's what we humans do. So most people read it as a sentence which is not allowed. But if it's a sentence, what is it? "The bob is tuker"? What kind of sentence is that? Another thing that bugs our minds about it is that it kind of looks like "Bob Stuker". My searches are failing miserably, because I thought there was a former baseball player turned commercial professional spokes-goof named Bob Stuker, but apparently that isn't it. Old folks might remember the "I must be in the front row" guy. Anyway, our minds try to make it fit some mold and then find offense at it. I eventually found myself in the same guild with him and found him to be a nice guy. We can make our minds parse these things differently, to not grate at us so much, which is what I did with "Theb". Too often, RPers insist on bringing their real-world knowledge to the RP setting where it doesn't belong, and find offense at way too many things. Report the actual violations, ignore the rest, find ways to reparse them in your mind if you find you need to interact with them.

quib·ble (kwbl) intr.v. quib·bled, quib·bling, quib·bles 1. To evade the truth or importance of an issue by raising trivial distinctions and objections. 2. To find fault or criticize for petty reasons; cavil.

And EVERYONE is straying from the point (the new and more constructive point) of spelling out a set of rules for a role play server that 1) could be enforced, 2) that do not penalize good RP just as harshly as bad RP, 3) provides more benefit than restriction for a majority of RPers.

That sounds great!

Sendira is apparently a bit unusual among Jedi in this world (although as far as she knows, she is perfectly well in keeping with the way she has been taught) ... She isn't judgmental, but is very compassionate This confuses people who keep trying to make sure she sees just how much they radiate "dark side" energy (spooky hand gestures and foreboding sound effects). Confusing people and confounding their expectations is fun and makes me happy.

.....

I love this! May I join? I have no intention of violating canon - or verisimilitude - in obvious ways (and I feel fairly comfortable my play style will be acceptable to the Cartel). I just don't want to take a 4-hour entrance exam to play a game. And I do enjoy creating some interesting characters who are not caricatures or cardboard cutouts and who participate in interesting interactions with other non-caricature characters. Please? I'll pay dues and attend meetings (sometimes) and never ever ever reveal the super-sekrit handshake. You keep the fist - I want the boots!

Yup - good idea. Typically, I love PvP and RP-PvP and have always played in that setting when it was available. I suck at PvP but I don't mind losing - and don't start fights. But even though I started on Jung Ma here in TOR, I just didn't see that the design of the world and game allowed for enough of the open world battles that are what I love about RP-PvP. And I just wasn't plugged in to enough to know and participate when they did happen. I had some RP going on with some individuals, and I miss those guys, but that was it. So I moved to Lord Adraas where I know more people. But - once I moved from RP-PvP to RP-PvE, I also tweaked my stories a bit to be more able to travel freely and avoid open hostility as much as possible.

This entire thread is now a complete joke. That seems to me a wonderful way to end and shut down a topic about "more policing".

You are not on a PvP or RP-PvP server, from the sound of it. So that's one issue I would expect people to have to figure out when they decide to RP in a war-based setting on a non-PvP server. So if you are going with more of a "cold war" rather than "open war" version of the world, you can make comments about how their Empire can't last. You can tell him it isn't too late to turn away from the Dark Side. You can say (to him or just commenting or mumbling to yourself) some gripes about the truce and how the Republic would have your *** for breaking it. But on a non-PvP server (or unless you are both flagged), outright smack talk should be avoided and definitely avoid threats, since the other person can't make you eat your words. Well unless you want to emote fight it out. But there's also a good chance your marauder buddy wasn't really in-character anyway - just felt like messing with you with emotes. You can talk to each other in /say. (I suspect that was really what you were asking/didn't know.) But custom emotes (/em glares at the Sith, one hand moving to his light saber, not drawing, but ready) can't be seen by the other side until BioWare fixes that problem.

You! You are my newest hero. I have nothing to add because you, Darthslaine, Casi, SelinaH, and others are doing a great job saying all that needs to be said.

Most of the issues in the OP would be nice if they existed or worked right, but are easily worked around. In my opinion, the major issues that make RP much harder than it ought to be are: 1. The ridiculous say range. I have never used chat bubbles because I found them distracting, and usually just move my small group out of say range of other groups so that we can converse among ourselves. Unless I deliberately want to be within say range (which was often the case too) to overhear them, or to allow them to overhear us. So cut down on the say range, have yell available for a "raised voice" larger range, and I think the chat bubble issues are reduced. (Not saying avoided, I can see how people have gotten used to them and they are useful - but their absence will be less painful.) 2. Standing around like statues for RP is a big killer issue for me. A few changes of position and posture would be HUGE. I type out most gestures in RP so the animated ones are cool, but less of a problem. But we need to change position or posture. We need to be able to sit ON rather than THROUGH a chair. It's fine with me if we jump on top of it and use a sit command. Give us a reasonable posture (or a couple of choices - an exhausted casual sprawl and a more normal sit, even with legs folded under or cross-legged). A lean would be outstanding! A back or side wall lean. 3. A few more enterable buildings so that we can RP private meetings and not be standing around silently (speaking in guild chat) in the market or cantina. Enterable buildings of a few different styles, combined with a more reasonable say range so that the people outside - or across the planet - don't hear our discussion, would go a long way to help RP. Edit to add: 3a. I suggested this pre-launch after I got to check out beta and I'll suggest it again. It ought to be fairly easy to implement sometime between now and whenever they get around to working on guild ships. An instanced wing on each fleet station, that an operations group can enter. The area could contain rooms of various types, a lounge area, conference room, office, control room, lab, med center, storeroom, and even private quarters. Groups could use it - even multiple groups at the same time since it's instanced, each RPing the space as something specific to them.