I've always thought this was their biggest mistake. Imagine the Jedi Knight/Sith Warrior as one class and the whole questline is between your jedi master and a sith that is trying to recruit you. Or a double agent working for both the SIS and Imperial Intelligence. In the end you'd end up dark/light or empire/republic based on your choices. If you want to change it you need to do dailies to improve your rep until you switched. If you are the type that thinks it is an abomination that Republic and Empire players could fight alongside one another then form/join an RP guild that forces a faction as a prereq to membership. It not only that eliminates issues with the legacy system, it immediately balances pvp, fixes issues with guild communication a over faction, and essentially doubles available players on every server. It's too late but it's nice to dream.

Mentoring is a great system and every game should include it. There's been many times in guild chat where someone at a much lower level needed help and I'd do it if 1) it didn't take 20 minutes to get to him and 2) I didn't totally outlevel the content which wouldn't make the battles much fun. A system where you could form a group and be ported to your friend at their level would be amazing. It would increase the population to help lower levels with quests and to encourage it, all you'd need is to award a daily 'mentoring' badge like any other daily. After all, while it would be nice, we all like to get a little something for helping well below our level.

If you use all your alts for crafting you will be sending a lot of things back and forth. When you send materials worth hundreds of thousands of credits back and forth it is nice to be able to pull up a list of people as opposed to spelling it out each time. This is especially true now that many people are using non-standard characters in their names like âßĈđĕ due to the server merges. Setting your alts as friends is a good first step but it would be nice if they looked at something like the Postal mod in WoW for ideas of how to improve the system.

Best - Voss - I liked how the planet was split into 5 reasonably sized questing areas. The planet's storyline has a bit of mystery that was missing on most other planets. Worst - Just about every other planet (especially Alderaan, Belsavis, Correlia, Taris, and Nar Shadda). The class quests were great but very few of the planet quests were memorable. The worst part is most times you fight through trash mobs for 10 minutes trying to weave your way using the minimap to find the right quest area. When you finish you usually have a choice of porting to an poorly placed bind spot or fight your way out against the respawns.

When I am feeling pessimistic about the game my thinking is similar to what you state in your post. It feels like sometime last year the SWTOR team made a status presentation to senior management who realized that there was little integration between the teams. To fix the issues would have taken another year and they couldn't do that. Investors had already assumed that SWTORs 2012 cash flows would prop up EA's already dismal profits and the delay would have killed them (worse than is happening now). They had to patch things together to make the system work and sold it knowing we'd buy it. I'm just hoping that EA/Bioare keeps the faith with those of us that have continued to pay our monthly subs. If not then I hope Lucas pulls the property and gives it to someone who can develop something worthy of its fans.

Two simple changes they could have made at launch to improve community: - Add a global chat channel - This would have been easy to code and helped people form groups. For example with this feature people can leave the fleet and still try to form a group to run an flashpoint/operation. Instead they choose to ignore this simple feature. - No server speciific forums - They talk that they don't want to make cross server LFG because they want to emphasize server community. Why then did they totally ignore making a usable server forum? Almost every other MMO I know of has a server specific forum. These are vital to help recruiting, learn the names of the more social people on a server, advertise crafting abilities, or see the progress other guilds are making. No doubt these features can sometimes get out of hand and that's the only reason I can think of that they were excluded. Instead as people got frustrated with how difficult it was to communicate and form groups in the game there wasn't a good way to fill the voids. There are other issues with the game but it has frustrated me since launch that these two simple items were excluded as they would have been easy to implement. It reinforces the feeling that the people that created the game didn't understand what is needed to help players enjoy their game.

If you look at the capital's you can see they are designed to be a hub then thought better of it when they realized the amount of lag it was causing to the entire planet. The reason the fleets feel tacked on is because they were tacked on. Until they optimize the engine we won't see a change in the fleet mechanic.

They could have resolved some of the OP issue two weeks after launch by adding a global "LFG" chat channel. I know they are worried about it becoming like Barrens or Trade chat but I've had a few groups that we put together on a planet only to arrive at the fleet and have one drop. Our choice then is to go back to the leveling planet or hope someone on the fleet is at our level. It's really dumb and they could have implemented that simple solution months ago. The LFG mechanism will resolve it but the game lost a lot of player's in the meantime.

The biggest difference I see is most of the people still playing want to love this game and are playing despite its flaws. The groups I've had so far are much better than anytime I've played in SWTOR and compare to Vanilla WoW when many of us were exicted noobs in our first MMO. Excited players = a much more fun experience

I actually think that the was original idea. You can see it by the way the city is laid out but I think at some point they realized the lag would make it impossible. I also think that's why many class quests send you to Kaas then to the fleet and back to Kaas because when they were originally designed the trip was only in the city. Until they get the engine to work better, I doubt you will ever see this happen. Good idea though. (They need a spaceport in the city too as well).

This has been a major design flaw in the game from the beginning. Quick respawns are necessary in a MMO but the key is to allow safe paths through the mobs to allow quick entrance/exit. That doesn't exist in many areas of this game. The only thing I can figure is the people that designed the maps were used to a single player game and didn't consider ease of access / exit from an area during the design. The shuttle system helps but many times the shuttle spots and the quest givers aren't near one another. That requires the player to figure the best option from a list of bad choices. There's been a few times I've had a completed quest and ported only to realize to turn in one of my quests would require a ten minute fight in and a ten minute fight out so I just dropped the finished quest because it wasn't worth the hassle. The unfortunate thing is this isn't easy to fix as it would require re-making maps and that isn't going to happen so we are stuck with this issue,

At launch I picked Keller's Void for my 8 Empire toons and Jedi Covenant for my 8 Republic toons. My thought was if they gave us 8 slots and each side had 8 classes this would be the best option. Fast forward 6 months and after playing all the classes through the first planet (and 8 through chapter 2 with 3 of them level 50) I find out that Keller's Void is moving to Jedi Covenant. I spent an agonizing afternoon yesterday figuring out which Republic toons to delete. It wasn't the end of the world as I've spent a lot more time on my Empire toons but it still was frustrating. The only positive was since I used the same names on both I didn't lose that in the transfer. It's also solved an issue since I now am better prepared to get my HK driod. I'd love to have a few more slots though.

At launch I picked Keller's Void for my 8 Empire toons and Jedi Covenant for my 8 Republic toons. My thought was if they gave us 8 slots and each side had 8 classes this would be the best option. Fast forward 6 months and after playing all the classes through the first planet (and 8 through chapter 2 with 3 of them level 50) I find out that Keller's Void is moving to Jedi Covenant. I spent an agonizing afternoon yesterday figuring out which Republic toons to delete. It wasn't the end of the world as I've spent a lot more time on my Empire toons but it still was a bit frustrating. The only positive was since I used the same names on both I didn't lose that in the transfer. I'd love to have a few more slots though.

I know it is hard to believe based on some of their past performances but Bioware has a plan. They started with 1 medium pop to high pop server as they wanted to stress their server transfer system. There's no way they can simulate that in testing no matter what they do. Keep in mind that it is much easier to undo unforseen issues with this method than if they started by using 10 low pop servers to make 1 high pop. It seems unfair as you've suffered the most but it makes sense in the big picture. Bioware has all the server stats and know exactly how many people they want on each server. If at the end of the process they prove they can't add then you can complain. Until then you need to be patient. We've seen what happened when Bioware rushes something out. Let's give them the time to do this right.

The game has enough things to complain about. Why make up new stuff that you aren't sure will be an issue?

I re-upped 5 minutes ago. My anger towards EA/Bioware for rushing the game out hasn't abated but I'm willing to give them another $15 as my toons are on a server that can transfer. I'm also anxious to get into the test server and take a look at the LFG and see how it affects the game. I could stay mad at them and refuse to re-up but who am I hurting? My $15 isn't going to make or break them and like all of us, I really wanted this game to succeed. If I think the game has improved and grouping will be viable then $15 is a small price to pay to find out.

Merges are messier because many of the origin servers have a bunch of accounts that will never be reactivated. So it is better to move just the active accounts and then at some point combine all the dead accounts into one big server/database. If any of those players ever return they will be prompted to transfer. It's much cleaner this way.

I'd be surprised if their release isn't in mid to late June. Keep in mind that they server two masters - the playerbase and their shareholders. They want to make sure the patch is ready but they want their subscription numbers to look as positive as possible when the quarter ends. This patch doesn't have a lot of content additions so as long as the LFG system is working it should be good to go. I doubt it stays in beta for very long as there are really only a few things to test and the playerbase isn't really that helpful. I'm sure they want to release the patch around June 20th in hopes that people that have left the game will come back and resub so their numbers spike. That will allow them to report to the investment community that the game is stabilizing and with the things they are adding in the future they expect it to grow from here. Despite what they've said publically this will also have a huge impact on their share price and that will help them convince EA to continue investing in the game. That's really the only road to long term success.

This was from yesterdays Q+A: I think many people are confused by the animation delays but there are a few real issues. It sounds like they have a few issues in mirrored classes but some will be fixed in 1.3 and they are working on the rest.

One thing that surprised me was they missed the boat on the one mini game they included in the game - space combat. Think about if they made the simple addition of a simple scoring system (x number of points for destroying various things in the game). Add a daily leaderboard and you've given a slice of the population a reason to play. Leaderboards were part of the video game addiction back in the day but it is pretty much ignored in MMOs. The reason many people play is for the virtual spot light and games that give players more of a chance to feel like they are a "special snowflake" and that the game caters to them, the more successful they are.

I know for a fact that you can post after your subsciption has ended (my free month ended 2 days ago and my 3 month sub ended then). Honestly it isn't a bad policy as long as the people are respectful. I'm waiting for 1.3 and merges are implemented before I resub. They've made a lot of mistakes but salvage a decent game with LFG. Hopefully they can build from there.

It would be a great addition. Anyone that has crafted on multiple toons knows the pain of trying to remember which character has all your mats so you can craft something. I'd love it if the crafted items from other toons could be posted there too so you could access them once they were complete.

Wouldn't doing one set of dailies on Ilum, Correlia, or Belsavis take care of it? It's like 8 quests.

There's a lot of truth in this. They released an unfinished game because they knew we'd buy it. To bad they've destroyed Bioware's name in the process but it's better than losing a $200 million investment.

Down. Keep in mind that the 3 month subscriptions for people that had level 50s are expiring this month (like mine). That plus the subscriptions that left last month will almost certainly mean another decrease. The percent is all speculation but I'd guess another 100k at a minimum. We aren't going to see another set of official numbers until the next investor call in August. I'm sure they would release them earlier if the numbers went up from 1.3mm but I don't expect that.