Acceptable is subjective, so if you feel that it's okay to wait 15 mins to get into a single match then sure. Optimally it should be near instantaneous, so people who choose to pvp should be able to access it at the same readiness as pve. Valor is your pvp level, it's just a requirement for some items if they haven't removed them, there are some titles associated with valor but overall valor isn't important, even more so with rated warzones not operational. Commendations are what you use to purchase most pvp related items, that's more important than valor if you pvp less casually.

Crafting has never been that great a route for making money in any MMO if you weren't the first ones there... Want credits in SWTOR? Get to 50, run dailies on belsavis, corellia, and maybe ilum (not sure if the dailies are still bugged, but ran into too many of them for me to want to go back). Within a week or two you should be up a few million credits, yeah, a few million...if you can stomach the grind. Until you complete your leveling and gearing, you're going to lose credits here and there. Crafting is an unnecessary drain on your funds unless you're dedicated to it since it's also community dependent. Had crafting actually offer more variety it might actually work all the way through. But as it stands, there is no variety in what you can craft appearance-wise, so even if there's an augment slot, it's not guaranteed to sell as people don't see it as anything special. Maximize your earnings by minimizing your costs, dailies cost only your time while dailies cost time and money with a dependence on market preference. All in all, do the dailies, they're ingame for the credit grind and for them to point to as "money making opportunities".

That's what they moved it to. This has actually been modified since several patches back, like a month or two ago. Instead of it occurring everytime you start it up and it has the 100% ready, it only applies if there's a patch that needed downloading and finishes. If there are no patching involved with the start up, then there is no sound.

Yeah, you have to open up the UI editor in order to turn this on, note I think this only works for the player and the target, your companion does not have the option to turn on text currently. Really hate it when they move these things out of Options and into these nooks so we have to dig around for it. I had submitted this as a bug report asking them where it went when the patch went live back then and they sent back saying it's been moved to the UI panels, and there's no option to turn it on for companions.

Enjoy it while you can, you'll get tired of it soon enough.

It's not about whether there's an event or not, but how they handled this date. They took the time and process to get this promotion approved and applied to the site and stores, yet they didn't consider that existing players are probably bigger fans of such a date than those who haven't purchased the game yet. So they supported this date as a pure cash grab, without giving much thought to the people they already got money from. My issue is just that they didn't think this through, it was a date perfectly exploitable for them to gain back some good publicity as a game that cares about their community but they turned it to a pure money grab for the ignorant masses that haven't purchased the game. It's just another mishandling of the opportunity, they had the potential to make this promotion become a rallying signal for the game and get people to help support it, but they forgot about the people who are paying and playing already, yet again.

Suggestion forum, there is one. http://www.swtor.com/community/forumdisplay.php?f=349

People are blaming BioWare because they are the ones who made the game the way it is. BioWare isn't just localizing the game like other MMOs, they actually developed it from scratch, so of course they are the source of all blame when it comes to shortcomings within the game. You blame the chef if the food is bad, because ultimately, it was the chef that made the bad food, not the server who brought it to you, or the owner of the restaurant.

2 days, it ends on the 6th, so it'll last the 4th and 5th... As for the topic, nothing's free with this game, heck, I'm still waiting for them to improve the VIP/collector stores...

The problem I saw with this promotion is that they're using Star Wars day ineffectively. Ingame title would have solved the unbalance, not hard to do either since they have the system in place to mail title items to players. Instead of saying "Celebrate May the 4th be with you!" and "enjoy $25 off" they really need to add in something that specify the target audience, such as "Join the SWTOR community now and Celebrate May the 4th be with you with $25 off deals on standard and DD versions on Origin!" Clarification is needed when it comes to posting stuff like this everywhere, not through fine prints after clicking through the links. It's the game's first May 4th encounter, and we're not seeing it being used to its maximum potential.

When Legacy turned out to be a credit sink I lost all interest in it. Had it been an actual veteran's reward system, I'd definitely be using it a lot more and actually playing more of the game on all alts. But having all my slots used up already, new race class combinations are useless for me even if I unlock them via excessively expensive credits costs. The rest of the features, meaningless as I already transfer items to my other faction alts via Nar Shadda, the buffs don't provide any real significant improvements to the experience, and the legacy skills are less than impressive as they're merely just cosmetics when the frequency is every 20 minutes. Not to mention the non-interactivity between your characters was a big miss for them and the Legacy system, c'mon, why didn't they allow your characters to be a temporary companion if they're linked? You don't even have to keep the same skills or equips, just port the face over and the class they are and voila, an extra companion that you don't normally have! Complete or not, Legacy turned out to be completely underdeveloped and unimpressive, I think this is their test for cash shops more than it being a reward system for long time players if anything.

Communication isn't their strong point, a lot of their patch notes are lacking in depth or conciseness. For exploits it's usually not something they want everyone to see and attempt when they bring the servers back up so it tends to not be in full detail... 4 hours can seem excessive, but depending on the severity and time of discovery of the problem it might not even be enough. They first need to be notified of the problem, then reproduce it on their side, decides to take off the servers and come up with at least a stopper solution to prevent it from happening again so they can work on fixing it for good. All at the same time they need to ensure the problem isn't widespread elsewhere in the game and can be exploited in a similar fashion so they don't just stop one and gain another. Most importantly though, is that they have to check to see if their "fixes" whether temporary or permanent will break anything else in the game. Again, breaking their own game isn't what most developers want to do on a regular basis. A lot of things to do, in a very short period of time.

Lots of people not seeing the problem... Group content and the community. Group content is just inflated stats for enemies, trudge through it and get some reward at the end. Heroic 4's in my history has never been that much better in terms of rewarding players for their efforts. Rarely do you get unique skins for gear and usually just more commendations than you'd care and some credits to go along with it. Better incentives for doing heroic 4's would be an improvement, something SWTOR still hasn't implemented is the class item box they promised for the game. If they were rewarded for Heroic 4's I'd see more people at least having some interest in obtaining something different and possibly better for their class for completion each time instead of the same single piece of gear. Heroic 4's don't need to go, but they need to improve it somehow. Better incentives, easier to acquire group, track effort and reward accordingly, something to improve it to the point where people will want to come back to it at least a second time. It is optional content, but it is still content made for the original intent of challenge and more importantly, fun. If people don't see it as neither due to any constraint then the design is flawed and needs to be improved.

To the TC, no, totally not surprised. The ending of this event has been announced since last week, on several fronts (dev tracker/forums/site announcements, facebook, twitter, fansites) so it's been fairly obvious to anyone who checks these places every once in a while. If ingame is your only source of information about the game, then yes, you might be surprised. But people need to put in the effort too if they want to have everything, to be in the know, if you don't, then it's entirely your fault for not paying attention to all the signs around you. I've said this before, but find at least one source of information if you're going to have these issues, either the facebook/twitter, or get a fansite bookmarked so you'd know if something like this event was happening or ending. Make the extra effort, it only takes a few seconds of scrolling to find out about a new event, you can spare that much time a day if you're playing the game.

Yeah, they used to run on more channels but it's really non-existent since like a few months ago (plenty during Dec, a few in Jan, none after). They're doing what publishers think is the best way to get attention; advertise it to people who already know your product... Silly thing about advertising these days, all these ads on game sites and gaming related channels, people there probably already know about the product and either bought or won't buy your product. Now, if you reach out to other channels, sure, the experience level isn't as high but it'll give them something to google and become interested in, and they'll sign up and tell their family and friends about it, getting you fresh new customers instead of the same old crowd that's been around for ages. Marketing sucks for SWTOR in recent months I think, hence the lack of steady growth despite the effort to make the game availableto a lower system requirement.

Not too happy with the way the choices are laid out by lumping no preference with all of the above. The game needs a group finder, and a group finder should have ALL of the content that requires grouping as options, hence, GROUP FINDER, not raider/flashpoint finder. DCUO has a layout that includes all the activities that one can do with groups, you can queue up as a specific role or not and even has options for groups to try content without certain roles at a less rewarding level to learn the group content and how to work in a group as a role. Do it RIGHT, and do a full on quality feature that leaves no room for people to go "that's not enough". And for goodness sakes, RESEARCH the existing market when it comes to MMO necessities and features. Many games have already perfected a lot of the features, and you're running around making these "unique" features that doesn't do half the job of existing mechanics. Don't reinvent the wheel, you can't afford to at this point when you're starting from scratch a decade behind the times.

Pre 1.2, all planets/locations no longer than 10-20 seconds. Post 1.2, most locations have double to triple load times (30-60+ seconds), worse on shared planets between both factions such as Belsavis where the load times are tripled as well as the idiotic splash screen that obscure the screen when you have finish loading into the planet. You're already loaded, can move around, yet the splash screen is obscuring the entire screen for 2-4 seconds. The loading times have been increasing as the patches piled up, it was happening shortly before 1.2 with the last few patches pre 1.2, but definitely more noticeable post 1.2. Shared locations are the worse offenders I find (50-60+ seconds), even the fleets don't take that long.

Partly, except orange quality gears are crappily implemented and are mostly palette swaps of each other. Orange gears are mainly used for the stat configurations, which is a completely different part of the game than cosmetic changes. Not to mention the excessive cost of pulling and removing mods, as well as the lack of balance in terms of armor types for social orange armors. Yes, they are working on "adaptive gears" for social gears, but if they just put in appearance tabs, social items can be used without the need to make the gear change its armor type based on players. Adaptive gears is likely to be bugged right out of release, if they ever get around to it as even I can see the many problems of trying to change a gear's properties with that many variables available for the players. The solution to appearance problems have long since been completed and perfected, appearance tabs and item remodeling has always been the final step in terms of balancing appearance and player choice. Currently the game is NOT in favor of players customizing their appearance by their own choices, visibly evident with the insistence on NOT including a proper gear dye/paint system, palette swapping for the entire game, and the low priority placing on barbershop feature. If they simply add in appearance tabs, that's one problem solved for good with this game. But they don't, they want to be "unique" and invest months of time and waste it away with solutions that are still buggy and completely lacking in ability to deliver the intended purpose. Unify to chest for example, is still a poor excuse in terms of customizing player appearance. You're now more or less the same shade of black or brown all over compared to before due the lack of palette variety in chest piece colors. Not to mention the helmets are now bugged with the implementation of this option as it either doesn't unify or it makes it disappear altogether. They have available a solution that's tested and favored by most for years, yet they don't want to listen to the people that care and play these games and insist on wasting both our time on meaningless and useless features that people don't want. I'd much rather they just stop working on adaptive gears for social armor types and just focus on making appearance tabs and a proper gear dye system up and running. This isn't clone wars and it should never have been the clone wars that we're getting. We've been telling them to do this since beta and they have yet to listen to the more experienced customers they're supposed to cater to. They've wasted more than 6 months by not listening and doing the wrong things, there are other places to make this game more unique, player appearance customization isn't one of them when you can't and haven't been able do it properly after several iterations.

If you have access to the game, you have access to the internet. Not that hard to find a fansite or check the SWTOR facebook/twitter for things like this, doesn't take long either. They do announce the content periodically at the most neutral location of the faction, the fleet via terminals and voice/text announcements. This was a discovery event, meaning players are given the chance to find things out themselves instead of being handheld to checkpoints the entire time. Yes, they could have done a whole bunch of other stuff, but the content does have a level requirement of sorts as the mobs are at least 25+. Any less and you probably can't complete it anyways. Again, can't really say this is that favorite of a game for you if you didn't know about this even within a day or two of it being implemented. It's not even my favorite game and yet I knew about it within a few hours via fansite/facebook/websites. Get a fansite/facebook/twitter bookmarked, and check it when you're using the internet normally every once in a while. If you want to be up to date, you have to make the effort too.

I check the dev tracker quite often to see how the team respond to certain issues, and after the changes to the website it's become a bit annoying to look at yellow text on brown background. Contrasting colors is how you make your comments "pop" and clearly visible, please review your color choice and consider making the change back to black backing for your texts. It would make things a lot easier to read Also do consider some framing around each post that gets displayed in the developer tracker, it seems a bit like it's all just one massive posting now with merely the white text indicating that the topic has changed. This is also more prominent due to the brown backing on the texts, perhaps fixing the color can alleviate this issue as well, but definitely consider reviewing the new website layouts and palette choices. This is the developer tracker, make it visibly clear and easy to read, it's your thoughts on matters that you value, make it count.

Not really...it's a step backwards if anything. It's a step forward for this game, but the time they took to make this feature less buggy they could have simply done a full dye/paint feature already. This feature was there in early betas, removed and supposedly improved upon and only released now but still has bugs. Heh, they won't be adding appearance tabs anytime soon, considering they're wasting even more time on "adaptive gears" as a "solution" to social gears and armor types. Sigh, appearance tabs solves all appearance issues, proper paint system solves all color issues, the sooner BioWare realizes this the sooner they can dedicate all their resources to making new content instead of getting bogged down making things they don't need or can't get working right.

I find this new content to be quite nice, not perfectly executed but a step in the right direction. it isn't necessary to remove it straight away but I hope they take this as a learning experience and do a better job next time. We're finally seeing some more content that can be accessed and enjoyed by more than lv.50s at endgame, and even better is that it ties into the whole fleet. The "plague" part where people stand around is a bit odd though, not sure why they decided to reset the timers when you travel so you'd end up with people afking to get rewards (opposite of what they wanted to do in pvp). In the future I would like them to focus less on passive rewarding, but requiring some degree of active participation for players to get rewarded. Break up the quests so you're rewarded each and every step, and when you've finished the chain you should be able to trade in for something straightaway, not the best things obviously but something. And maybe not so intrusive next time as to be forced to participate because someone ran up to you and exploded. It's a step in the right direction in terms of content development for the life of the game, little things like this that changes the whole world over time is much appreciated in MMOs where things can grow stale really quickly. This is what the game needs, it's a baby step right now, but it's finally going in the right direction in terms of growing as a better MMO. Change the world bit by bit, add in mini rotatable content every once in a while and you're well on your way to a more lively game where people can actually look forward to logging in to see what's happening now to the world instead of the same old dailies.

Credit sink.

Sith's aren't evil by default...we're ambitious...sometimes our ambitions can lead to darker paths, but some can take the none-evil path too. If I could, I'd play my siths as manipulative as possible, defeating jedis but keep them alive, let them doubt the "evil" nature of siths as taught by their masters, and create a rift within the order while securing the trust and aid of the jedis... wait...that's not evil is it?

So...is this about wanting true flying mounts/vehicles in SWTOR or just saying that SWG did it? Because true flying mounts is unlikely to ever make it in this game, due to the nature of holo/datacrons for one, and the restrictive nature of the game in general. Giving players this degree of freedom is not in SWTOR's current plans, if it lasts a few years, maybe.