Classic Star Wars, not in the context of the comics, is the story of the fall of Anakin Skywalker, and his redemption through his son, told against a very broad stroke brushed backdrop of a galaxy-wide civil war. Nothing more. It's book-ended, and nothing comes before, and nothing happens afterward. That's all there is. Nothing else, according to George Lucas. That's the canon universe he kept himself boxed into. Any other detail that's occurred, including many of the backgrounds of characters and places and events that were shown in the movies, is still considered primarily expanded universe, with certain special exceptions given to some of the West End Games STAR WARS The Roleplaying Game sourcebooks that were given to early EU authors as "reasonably CANON" reference materials. Some of the early novels attempted, with assistance from actual Lucasfilm staff, to stay within realms of reason...

They were originally called "laser swords"...

Actually, I made it about black holes, because we're talking about what is and is not considered "canon", and crystals are part of lightsaber lore. Lightsaber crystals are quite special, as is the process by which the blade is created and *limited* in its properties, lest it be one infinitely long and increasingly diffuse beam. Lightsabers were considered super-high technology... going from having to wear backpack power sources to more compact ones. Instantly we're talking about highly exotic materials and processes... such that creating a beam that absorbs all visible spectrum ranges of light is not too terribly far fetched. This is STAR WARS... let your imagination expand somewhat... it's soft science fiction, not hard science fiction.

This discussion has slightly branched now to include topics addressed by one word. Canon. Simply put, there are THREE "real" STAR WARS universes. 1. The movies. 2. Things licensed. 3. Things in the imagination of the fans. Things are kept pretty much in that order as to what is considered "official". See http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Canon for an excellent discussion on the topics. You are free to disagree with something that is considered "canon" in any one of those three areas... (I know I do... Vong... really? Coralskippers? skippers!?) ...and you may be correct about them going wayyyy off the deep end the past few years. But for a while, they did try to keep things reasonable and relatively in line. I do wonder if they've given up. However, considering how lightsabers allegedly work... why can't a complete absence of light be a particular effect? You do know that we've predicted that black holes, at their extreme edge... may actually have a rainbow like glow to us... so why not a black core with white light exterior?

Speaking from direct experience, Lucasfilm allows their authors certain levels of creativity within a specific set of boundaries that differs for various properties. While I have no direct knowledge of what BioWare's limitations specifically were, they were allowed to create planets to fit within their story before, it only made sense to allow them to create others to fit within the expanded story that SWTOR represents. Dromund Kaas is perhaps the most glaring example of a planet they created specific to the story within SWTOR. Some examples of creation are far simpler than you may think; not everything need be fleshed out. A simple mention of a location or name is all that is necessary for others, afterwards, to take the proverbial reins and continue the creation process. Lucasfilm has historically been very liberal with at least the initiation of that process.

Ideas and Feedback are most welcome. Throughout the beta, they were also entirely ignored; not a single major suggestion was implemented, not a single major change was made, for the entire year. What we see is what we get, don't expect anything to change overnight. Maybe one day. But the Gamasutra interview with James Ohlen pretty much covered how they think. The most arrogant dev team I've ever seen, and I've worked with a few. To be clear, there were *hundreds* of pages of suggestions that were well thought out, well written, and well supported by most non-Psycho Rabid Fanboys, who did what they do in all of these forums; shouted down anyone with a negative opinion, no matter how small, about any aspect of the game. Pretty par for the course.

Level scaling is an awesome idea, but gets difficult when you start mixing in groups of players with wildly differing levels. I think it was City of Heroes that came up with a "reverse" level scaling option; to dumb down the effective level of the higher characters to that of the lower character, so that adventures together can occur at an identical level without making it too "easy" for the lower level character to basically be power levelled by others. A novel approach.

They've had SIX years.

The end is nigh! The end is nigh! Destruction of the community? WHAT COMMUNITY!? If you're playing on a server with people who can't be bothered to talk to anyone else, there isn't a "community" problem, there's a maturity of the player problem that won't be solved by taking their toys away from them. Give people options. Or watch this game die as an antiquated dinosaur relatively quickly because someone decided to be arrogant, stomp their feet, cry, and proclaim "no no no no no" for features that other MMO players *expect*. If a feature isn't present, and there's no actual alternative that offers similar functionality, then there is a severe failure on the part of the developers. Harsh reality lesson.

Didn't happen to us. Pick-up Groups (PUG's) were always full of rude people. The DF tool actually made it easier for times when there were only a few guildies on to run things together by finding specific player roles much easier. It brought us together because it actually allowed us to experience content. Imagine that.

What server "communities" are you talking about? Are you talking about RP-specific servers, or just merely PVP or PVE servers, which are NOT about "community"? Your arguement is a red herring. LFG tools allow players to experience content that they PAY FOR. Anyone who wants to make it more difficult to experience content and elements of a game is merely on a selfish power trip to impose their will of how THEY want to play, on others. Wanting to experience a particular flashpoint or heroic quest, trying to put together a group, waiting for everyone to make it to the instance, can take upwards of 30 minutes or more on some worlds. In my professional opinion, that's NOT fun. Blizzard's cross-realm Dungeon Finder was a phenomenal addition, that allowed you to adventure and expand your friend base to more than one server. Ultimately, it will result in the elmination of multiple servers, though that's a few years down the road. Such solutions bring diverse communities together, they don't fracture what already exists. After all, your arguement is thoroughly false and devoid of any truth; nothing stops you from spamming your local chat channels and angering everyone with begging, the same way groups are put together right now. DF tools add another choice. Choice is good, citizen.

And here's where I'll defend BWA, for a change. According to Darth Hater's DB, this released with about 2,500 quests. Vanilla WoW released with about 2,500 quests, as well. Now... as with most OTHER aspects of this game, it was code released with a feature set even LESS than that of WoW's initial release, which is unforgivable. However, in terms of the amount of quests, they're out there. Of course... with WoW, they're really divided primarily in half... not in half, with a lot that are class-specific.

That and an AH app were early suggestions in beta. Like every other major suggestion, they've been ignored so far.

1. No, we weren't sleeping. We were testing. SWTOR was in closed beta since at least October 2010. 2. BioWare made a sum total of ZERO major changes that were requested by testers who actually took the role we were spun with seriousness. Instead, fanboy rage enabled what you see before you, today. About 2/3 of the posts on the forums were (and are) fanboys, gushing over how wonderful something with 1/10th the features of other games was the best one out there... 3. Power levellers exist for all games; there have been reports that at least one in SWTOR has been running entirely since the beginning of early access constantly, which likely means its more than one person playing the account for the sole purpose of power levelling, or someone realllllly dedicated/addicted. Furthermore, its not unusual for whole guilds to mass power level through a variety of content. 4. Power levelling likely has a sum total of zero long term repercussions. Other shortcomings will take care of that.

So... in your OPINION, everyone should be forced to spend 30-60 minutes arranging groups and trying to get to the content they want to experience... and that any system which makes such content more readily accessible in a shorter time span means that the game is on "easy mode", which is some how a horrible, world-ending occurrence? In your OPINION, everyone should play the game how YOU want them to play, and they should have NO CHOICE to play in any other way? Because that's what those who keep espousing "LEET mode ONLY" opinions seem to be saying...

So... being able to get in a group quickly and experience content that we're actually paying to experience... kills "everything"? What "everything" do you possibly think a dungeon finder kills?

And with this, their failure is compl... oh... wait... yet *another* lesson they failed to learn. ::sigh:: This list is growing way too long...

There have been wild claims that the Simutronics HeroEngine will essentially scale up to 100,000 players in one "shard" ("server"), though it became clear that with whatever hardware setup was being used for SWTOR testing, it clearly wasn't stable with SWTOR at any numbers even close to that. We do not, however, know that those were actual production server setups close to final testing. While it's not unusual for MMO "servers" to be able to handle somewhere in the 5-20,000 client range... it would be nice to get some raw stats from BWA on what their technical architecture seems to be currently handling, if only to get a clue on why the queues are so INSANE. After all, we *know* they're running HeroEngine... that's been marketed for years... there's no reason to withhold super high-level benchmark info.

To be fair, Blizzard did *not* expect such a massive positive response to WoW for its launch, sold out multiple times, and did *not* have the infrastructure available to handle the massive influx early in the games release. BioWare simply has ZERO excuse for what we're seeing; they've had six years of development time, and have been tracking the sales numbers very closely. Considering that nearly every single west coast server is full, shows the massive failure in their infrastructure and release planning, and a thorough failure to understand their customers and the demand from "Oceania" and other pan-asian markets. They *should* have blocked IP's by geographic location or used an intelligent switching mechanism to force regions to play locally, at least during pre-release and the initial game release. Can't actually say I'm surprised, but we'll leave that for discussion under more professional and calmer terms.

To be fair, Blizzard did *not* expect such a massive positive response to WoW for its launch, sold out multiple times, and did *not* have the infrastructure available to handle the massive influx early in the games release. BioWare simply has ZERO excuse for what we're seeing; they've had six years of development time, and have been tracking the sales numbers very closely. Considering that nearly every single west coast server is full, shows the massive failure in their infrastructure and release planning, and a thorough failure to understand their customers and the demand from "Oceania" and other pan-asian markets. They *should* have blocked IP's by geographic location or used an intelligent switching mechanism to force regions to play locally, at least during pre-release and the initial game release. Can't actually say I'm surprised, but we'll leave that for discussion under more professional and calmer terms.