Skill required for this game: [---]

That's pretty much what I do too. 1-5, Shift + 1-5, Ctrl + 1-5, Alt + 1-5, Q, E, Shift + Q, Shift + E, Alt + Q, Alt + E, and some abilities to Y, X, C (German Keyboard layout). But there's too much crap to bind everything. Hell, there's not even enough room in the bottom bars for everything more or less important. With such a long global cooldown, tho, it's usually pretty easy to click abilities on the sidebars when needed without it being a big deal.

Essentially, he's saying that there were 1.7 million people that, at the time, had set up a recurring bill payment or entered a time card code, and that after the billing cycle the timecard or paid time kicked in. Which of course makes sense. Of the 2M+ boxes sold, 300,000 had already cancelled. And it's not like you can cancel a timecard... Or, in other words, he's saying a whole lot of nothing, that a few days before the billing cycle the numbers were about the same as a few days after the billing cycle. Who woulhaf thunk...

I'm not ignoring anything, it's the exact same CEO chat obviously, they just didn't have the pre-Asia/Pacific quote in the second link. When the 1.7 million players number was first given, they already said it meant active subscriptions, meaning people who had paid for at least a month, that's why they were quoting the high retention rate %. It's the same number. That's all there is. It's a good retention number, and there's nothing wrong with it, but it's the same number that was already given: Number of players after the first billing cycle. In other news: No news.

It's exactly right in the sense that it's what you're saying, not that what you're saying is correct, as I've already explained.

Actually, the first link says: So, it's old news, pre-AP launch, just repackaged. It's the same 1.7M that's been given before.

Your argument is that everyone sticks with the WoW model because it's profitable. It is profitable for Blizzard, but nobody else. They have an established dominance in the genre like nobody else, in any genre. Your tangents are completely irrelevant. Innovation has also made breakthroughs in established industries, and while we can be here all day exchanging examples, at the end of the day your assertion is still invalid. Gaming has had many breakthroughs thanks to innovation, and in the MMOG arena, post-WoW, nobody has managed to out-WoW WoW, though MANY have tried; so calling it the safe thing to do from the investor point of view goes against both gaming history and current events.

With WoW, Blizzard established a very profitable business model... for Blizzard. You mention success and breaking the mold, but let me ask you, how many games have been successful following the WoW model? Truly successful? The answer is... one: WoW. As things stand right now, trying to out-WoW WoW has proven to be a terrible business model. But hey, definition of insanity and all that.

Hehe, thanks for the thumbs up! =) Detox, probably >_> Well, actually, what's in the bag is Consular, Agent, or Smuggler. We'll see... Haha, well pointed out, no need to apologize! While I could make the easy "Well, that explains so much!", HK had good lines in both games. I mean, explaining about the meatbag moniker cracked me up too

And twice as fast with scissors.

Getting the datacron is incredibly easy. Hop on the balloon, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hop out and click. It's unbelievably tedious and unfun, but it's easy.

There are a lot of companies that want to make great products. Why would someone that doesn't like the current product give this particular company $15 a month instead of any one of the other companies that are trying really hard too? There's a whole bunch of indie studios that'd be tickled pink if they had a shot at a fraction of the $15 playerbase SWTOR has. Bioware isn't special in trying to make games, and wanting to make money from it.

Doing (or at least attempting) stupid stuff you're not supposed to do is half the enjoyment of this kind of game!

Actually, some of the quests are indeed the same. For example, off the top of my head Tatoonie has the one where you go searching for yet another artifact from Czerka, and by the time you get to searching the sealed base, it's the same on both sides. Others are more differentiated, it really depends on how much of the map is "shared", so to speak. And of course, class quests will be different regardless of side.

I didn't think there was much need to point it out, as it is quite obvious, but you're right of course (hence why I mentioned real life and Somalia). However, in works of fiction, the romanticized view of pirates has a long standing tradition, and as the examples I give show, it can be traced back to even early 19th Century (Espronceda was born in 1808 IIRC... *Googles* Yep). With the rise of industrialization (which led to the modern urban life) and the decline of piracy, that's what we were left with. It's patently untrue, but it's undeniably ingrained in our collective psyches. You can portray a pirate as the ruthless desperado, and it's correct, or as the dashing rogue, and it's just as widely accepted, if not more. But the thing is, if that's the view they're taking, why even bring up the option of my Lunatic Inquisitor being excited about the possibility of meeting a pirate? If pirates are, in lore, the lowlife thugs everyone despises, as they were considered during the times their depredations were more widespread and felt by a lot more people, then it'd be the equivalent of her saying "I always wanted to meet a lowlife thug!" I just left Nar Shaddaa, the moon was crawling with those, enough to fill several lifetimes if that's your thing. It's not like you couldn't do the same for bounty hunters or smugglers if you wanted to be truthful. And this dissonance is present during the whole quest. Even at the end, I only added one line, but in the whole "welcome aboard" exchange that part went something like this: After the tale, the inquisitor's question is properly crafted so that it's asking, no, begging, for Andy to spin the tale some more. It's really written from the "take me, you dashing pirate!" point of view, that's what the inquisitor writer has been trying to do on HIS side of the story. But Andy's response is just plain awful. No charm, no wit, absolutely nothing; all it took was a simple question for him to fold like a cheap envelope. Seriously, even leaving the piracy aside, he's supposed to be a romance-able companion. The inquisitor's writer remembered this, and left all the openings for the other one to swoop in, but whoever this other writer is, he failed HARD at that. This guy's so flat you could use him to iron shirts on. One of the writers (the poor, disgruntled, inquisitor one) is really trying hard to let us have some fun. He seems to be the only one.

Well, everybody likes pirates, right? O:-)

Yes, the P word: Piracy. Formerly reserved for those who prowled the high seas in search of prey to board and kill, piracy has taken a curious turn in modern times. While it can still refer to that kind of people, nowadays it's usually reserved for those who make a habit of copying copyrighted material without the permission or authorization of the copyright holder. The original idea was to make that act equivalent to the high seas pillage and robbery of the pirates of old, lawless criminals that were often chased for their terrible deeds. It failed. Why did it? Because for some time, "pirates" have earned themselves an aura of, if not respectability, at least of romanticism, and are often viewed as freedom-loving rogues who serve no master but themselves in a bid for freedom from the chains that tie lesser subjects of civilized society. As José de Espronceda put it in his "Canción del Pirata": They are both charming and terrible, killers and lovers, they have a certain romantic angle that makes them that much more special. Or, to defer to an even higher authority, let's hear it from Tom Sawyer, talking about (robbers) raising ransoms: So yeah. While real life piracy ain't much of a joke (been to Somalia recently?), the romantic view of Pirates in fiction is something that goes beyond a stereotype, it's almost an archetype, which as you can see, dates back to the 18th Century or early 19th Century at least. A more than acceptable break from reality. There is a long, rich tradition in literature and, later, cinema, about the pirates of the high seas, and the archetype of the freedom-and-pleasure-loving, charming denizen of the high seas. So imagine my excitement when my Inquisitor arrived to Tatoonie. I was going to meet a pirate! [spoiler and Rant Mode On] [spoiler and Rant Mode Off]

It could be worse, you could be falling to your death while having a useless jetpack strapped to your back, because you can only use to make FALCON PUNCH!

Try typing /stuck while in Space Combat =)

It was a mistake to make crystals have stats to begin with, and an even worse mistake was to make some of them very rare and gated behind large Ops/PvP/etc. There is room for very rare stuff for the different playstyles that is not available to everyone. But those items shouldn't be key cosmetic elemets, as the colour of the lightsaber IS. City of Heroes went through the same thing with their craftable costume parts. A whole category of them, Wings, was gated behind somewhat rare drops that were, at the time, quite expensive to acquire by trade (the Marketeers were hoarding recipes to jack up the prices, quite naturally as it was desirable and not very abundant to begin with). The devs finally got a clue and made them drop a LOT more often AND introduced very rare gear drops - purple crafting recipes - which satisfied the hardcore players and the Marketeers. Of course, there were many flames exchanged while these changes happened. The OP is absolutely right in demanding something to strive for in his particularly favoured play style, something that is useful and desirable. I just don't think different coloured crystals should be it. Which of course sucks if you already went through all the effort of acquiring them already.

This. While the quest tracker doesn't bother me (I play on triple screens, I have more than enough screen space), if there's something that plagues the UI to distraction and annoyance is just how many of the options just don't stick at all.

If by mobs you mean "mobile idiots who show up while you're in the middle of trying to sort the lights and start clicking **** randomly while spouting 'S.T.F.U. noob!' when asked to stop clicking and think" then yes, being in an instance to avoid "mobs" would be awesome.

Partly. The way it works is that your ship will chase the mouse cursor, but WASD will let you move the ship around the cursor itself. So, for simplicity's sake, imagine this is the screen: ____________________________________ | | | ________ | | | | | | | x | | | |______| | | | |__________________________________| The X represents the cursor, and the small square represent the area which you can move your ship through with WASD, which is smaller than the whole screen.

I don't think there is a level gate for the class quests. As I mentioned, level 24 in Alderaan, the class quest is... 29 I think (can't check at the moment); anyway, the main planet quest is "greyed out" above the questgiver's head, meaning I'm too low level to get it, but I can get into the class quest instance no problem. If you only do class quests, however, you'll need help even with Korriban, and it'll only get worse from there.

Sure can, I was just explaining in my example that I played specifically this way, and how much it fell short. In fact, as I mentioned, if you are underlevelled but forge ahead, it cuts on how much side stuff you need to do, thanks to the wonders of the XP curve.