Color crystals are not restricted by factions/alignment, but by availability of source material. It is a preference, for a weapon. One can simply take a saber from a defeated opponent and use it at will, light sabers are not dna encrypted or force alignment restricted. Flip the switch and it'll light up just fine, because that's what it was designed to do. If one plays the consular on tython, they do go into how there were no sith/jedis, merely force users. Crystals were not representative of alignment, merely a personal preference of appearance.

They've stated the family tree is purely cosmetic, you don't have to connect them to benefit from Legacy unlocks.

They're just checking the new content, as it is with all content patches in games. It'll decrease over the next few days, and drop back to "normal" in a week or two. The only way to sustain or add population is to maintain a constant flow of new/rotating content. Not something BioWare has figured out though, as they're still stuck fixing basic features that didn't need to be created in the first place...*coughmatchtochestcough*

As it states in the email they sent out, if you have a lv.50 character and still have time left by the deadline earlier today, you will receive the time by the 24-25. I had unsub'd earlier this week and I still got the email, so check your email over the next few days if you qualify. See this for more clarifications, http://www.swtor.com/news/news-article/20120412-1

1) Internet lingo, not exclusive to MMOs. 2) People who post have their opinions heard or at least looked at, people who don't post have no feedback the developers can see and make changes on. It's only natural that they change things based on what people post, after they check with ingame data on their side and decide which adjustments needs to be made, and whether it actually produces a change or just a superficial one to sate the community. 3) Speculative or not, the people who do post a lot of constructive feedback on valid issues still provide feedback on valid issues. It doesn't matter if the majority of the population is not at certain levels or posts as much, these changes the so called "veterans" cause will go on making your experience "better" in the long run. Such as the many class story mission bugs that have been fixed in the early months where many people were unable to progress due to buggy spawns, buggy terrain causing enemies to reset constantly, or line of sight issues when there isn't any object in the way. They got through the content and caught the problems so it can be fixed, and there are plenty more problems to go before this game is problem free. 4 & 5) Vets and newbs never really mixed except maybe on the forums, even then it's only if one side is intentionally inciting the other to provoke the responses. Again, without the vets you'll still have buggy content, except you'll have less people to catch it early and make it a priority for them to fix content. By reshaping the game for the veterans, they can see how one end of the player base will react to the content, and then readjust it as time and demand goes on to fit all other players. This is a practice done by many other games, introduce content for the endgamers to plow through, and fine-tune it and adjust it in the following weeks/months for the non-hardcore to enjoy with much less bugs. 6) WoW is indeed still running, but the reason why people go to other games is because they wanted to try something else. Many came to SWTOR because it promised to be different, it promised to be unique and non-traditional. For a time, that was true. But as time went on the direction the game took became more and more similar to the MMO progression of past games, and that's not great for those games let alone this one. From what I can remember though, WoW subs didn't actually consisted of mostly "young" people, but a good portion of the game were occupied by the working population of all ages. As for voices carrying more weight, people with more experience will always have more "weight" behind their opinions than those without. And as WoW has become the sole MMO to survive this long and actually profited during the MMO wars, their customers are what publishers want, people who will fork over money each month whether there are new content or not. This is your first MMO, so while you may think this is the best MMO ever, it is not the first MMO (nor was WoW) to be made and played. "WoWers" as you put it, are not ruining the game, while there are some players that don't treat others as well it doesn't mean "WoWers" always mistreat others and voice "narcissistic delusions of entitlement" but valid feedback on how to improve the game beyond outdated designs from 2005. Play as you like, and think how you want, but there are many more people out there who may or may not share your view on things, that won't change anytime soon. Get some more games under your belt, maybe even try WoW out sometime down the line, then I invite you to think about whether their feedback are "narcissistic delusions of entitlement" or do some of them actually have a point.

I think that might be working as intended.. Pick a name, as I think the game might not like it if it has to refer to you as " " or some other error codes that it might create if the name was supposed to be there. If you don't like your Legacy name, you can always hide it.

The entire system should have been scrapped when they took it out back in beta and worked to put in an actual gear dye/paint system via npcs or items. Unify to chest is at most a convenience option at said NPC so you only have to choose your palettes for one piece of gear and have the NPC match the rest up so you don't have to find the exact colors for every piece. This would totally be an acceptable credit sink too, so long as it's not uber expensive (it adds up over use, but on rare uses it should be minimal impact on player wallets). This and the social item issue is showing their inexperience with MMOs, you don't have to reinvent everything, only the things that never worked well in the first place. Gear palette changing has been done quite well in most decent MMOs and games, and appearance slots or item remodeling is also another way to give choice to player appearance options and easily solves the vanity items/social armor type issue. But they insist on doing their own version with less than half the payoff (social item will become "adaptive" in the future, expect same situation of it not working for companions). DCUO gave players 3 colors to put on their palette, this can be changed at any time but the palette is applied to your equipped gears so you're never mismatched in terms of colors. Again, a better system was already done, and SWTOR insists on doing things themselves with much less success.

... Just make appearance slots, problem solved, forever, for almost all gear appearance issues... No matter how "adaptive" the plan is, you may be forgetting the fact that heavy armor users can wear all 3 types as choice. How will the item "adapt" if they have 3 tiers? Does it default to the highest set? What if they wanted light/medium for their companion? Does the system work at purchase or does the adaptive item change attribute based on the character it's equipped on? How will it react if the character you want to equip it on doesn't "fit" the current type of the armor? You're adding more work and variables than you need to, appearance slots that are independent of the stats and replaces the current appearance. This was always the best course of action in terms of giving players full control of their appearance, you'd still need orange custom items for the freedom to mod stats, but cosmetics should always be up to the players to choose without a ton of restrictions. By implementing appearance slots you can simply default new social/vanity gears and remove armor types altogether as a variable. So it becomes a skin that people can put on without needing to go bankrupt moving mods in and out every single time you release more "appearances". Not to mention how much more versatile appearance slots are compared to adaptive gears in the long run. It's one appearance override code versus some character class check plus this and that and then allow the user to wear it. Simpler is better sometimes, you're better off reinventing the wheel in other parts of the game (group content, variable difficulty based on group composition, rotating missions as weekly/monthly events) than spending that much time making something you don't need.

Just smack the sibling that keeps winning and tell him to stop rolling on loot after winning so many. That ought to even out the rolls.

Still not a big fan of the credit based RMT system in place for legacy unlocking, sure you can go and reach those other "unlock' conditions, but honestly, who's going to unlock all species by reaching 50 on all of them and then start playing them again from scratch? Getting a human to lv.50 should grant you a species unlock token on top of the full customization unlock, skip the presence boost, it's useless anyways. Lack of race change for existing characters still irks me, and honestly Legacy has devolved to a form that's no longer that interesting or game saving for me personally. It is showing the progression path that BioWare is choosing for SWTOR, like other old outdated MMOs than to improve the game in a more positive manner. Grinding is a thing of the past, yet TOR keeps adding content that's based entirely on grind. TOR is turning into another stereotypical MMO, and I definitely won't be sad when my sub runs out. A superficial "family tree" as BioWare keeps promoting it as, and once again, more Anakin fetish being passionately vocalized by the developers. Enough, seriously, Anakin isn't the entire Star Wars universe, least of all several thousands of years before he was born. Legacy could have been greatness never before seen in MMO history, being able to have a fully beneficial and improvement to your personal stories based on achievements you've accomplished and creating the "legacy" that players choose to envision. Instead, we get a watered down grind list of content that should have been there since launch, but added in as a "legacy feature".

^Good to know, because they've been so focused on the whole Anakin family line in their promotions of Legacy I haven't gotten around to poke at the details yet. My clan is cross faction since they're neutral, they seek a grater goal than the goals of either republic/empire and will work with them if they want to. Ally/rival seems a bit weak though imo, guess it's something at least. I'm just sick of BioWare promoting legacy as the whole vader-luke family thing all the time, it's like they're stuck in the original trilogy... Really? Because I think that race unlock counts as global unlock right? But existing characters don't have access to the new race class combinations as far as I know due to the lack of race change option in Legacy/1.2. But yeh, I know this was directed at the family tree portion of the "global unlocks", but really, who decided the current state of race unlocks and limit it to characters created post 1.2? But good to know that family tree is just another fluff pieceand I won't need to use it in order to get the unlocks.

Only if you haven't made any alts so far as it doesn't allow race change for existing characters. So if you've already made different races of different classes, getting them to be "related" is going to be pretty far fetched. In this game your legacy name can be displayed, so you'd know that someone is of this legacy so they're related somehow to that name. The flaw is that the legacy relationship is currently limited to just blood relations and marriages, instead of making it viable for non-blood related relations like clans (like Ventress' night sisters with a matriarch and sisterhood of assassins). If there was a Clan option for legacy relationships the system would be more fitting and complete, but again, being short sighted in terms of content development, BioWare opted for less and pawned off the whole "Anakin > luke x leia" family crap that SW is supposed to be about and based the entire Legacy system off of that. A legacy can be applied to a great many things, not all of them require blood relations. I don't need the game to tell me that, I for one already made "Clans" for my characters to belong in instead of forcing them to be blood related. My characters belong to the greater will of the Clan regardless of their name, race, and class. They may be different species but they all do work to further the goals of the Clan. The legacy relation system in place in 1.2 is pointless for me since I have different races, and I refuse to bow to their inferior planning and lack of freedom for player choices. Or how about some sort of Legacy crest or pattern to display on your character/gear, or anything that shows off that this character belongs to a legacy in a more meaningful way than turning a title on or off. Other games have capes that display guild symbols, and while capes in this game isn't likely to happen, allow for a little doohickey to show off a player's unique legacy could be well appreciated. Legacy as it stands doesn't really appeal to the people it was supposedly intended for. They wanted to "balance" the benefits of those who utilize it and those who haven't but couldn't figure out how. So they opted for the lazy approach, make it meaningless and have no effect on whether it's used or not. I would have done different skill animations to be chosen if characters are linked, get the linked characters as a combat assist character/or temp companion for a few seconds (on a massive cooldown and restrictons), pass on Legacy gears by turning one of their gears into a legacy item that is available for the other characters to assess via the legacy menus. There are tons of ways to make Legacy and the relationship options meaningful without upsetting game balance, but it wasn't planned as such, and it was delayed till now because they still had no clue as to how to get it to work. They need better designers, it's like they don't know how to make the game better and more meaningful as time goes on and keeps borrowing the same old crap other MMOs failed to do right in the first place. BioWare isn't really learning from other people's mistakes, they're repeating them at the moment and looking like they'll continue to repeat the mistakes until something drastic comes along.

5 star, was going to add this to my other post but might as well add my support for this idea here. Legacy system definitely needs some sort of token feature rather than being purely credit based, but a race unlock token is definitely the best way to go about rewarding reaching 50 with any character and giving players the choice of which race they decide to unlock instead of unlocking the same one they've played to 50 already.

Ugh, seriously? Maybe you guys need to put the most asked questions every week up on a poll, we vote, you answer the ones we want answered. You even get to pick one or two extra ones you want for kicks and giggles like you do now, but with a more focused emphasis on the queries that matter most to the players.

Obi Wan used Ventress' red lightsaber in the 4th season finale of Star Wars the Clone wars. This entire topic is now irrelevant, light sabers are still just weapons, no one gives a rats *** about which alignment you are, not even Star Wars.

See, now if Legacy also included a "Clan" relationship option instead of being purely blood related content, the surname would totally be fine. If one was able to choose their legacy relationships it'd be fine, but as we're currently stuck with only blood-related options, my rataki slave inquisitor is hardly related to my twi'lek consular, let alone their sith pureblood juggernaut "sister". This is what happens when you take a launch feature and delay it by several months, it doesn't make sense.

Agreed. Not a RP thing for me, but basically so I can stop wasting credits stripping mods or look like a clone. It'd also solve a ton of customization issue with the game, such as social item armor type no longer necessary, more variety of gear/vanity appearances can be added via events and boost the amount of variety the game is currently failing to deliver.

Zoeller post, (March 13, 2012) This is now not entirely true due to new race combinations requiring a whole new character from scratch with no ingame recustomization option. Existing characters don't benefit from this one feature, thus "any" is no longer valid. As well as his other posts (Jan 24, 2012,) ^With the current state of race unlocks, this Legacy update is completely screwing over people with full roster of alts and favoring only the people that main and play 1 character by forcing people to delete and start over if they want to use the newly unlocked race combinations. No extra character slots are currently slated for 1.2, and for people with full servers, this is an issue. Had a character recustomization token been given to existing characters, it wouldn't be a problem. But, Damion Schubert's post regarding changing current characters' appearances, community Q&A March 16 2012. "YuvalZiv: Are there any plans to add a barber shop anytime soon, or a feature that will allow existing characters to enjoy additional customization options, unlocked through the Legacy system? Damion: "Are there plans?" - the answer is yes. "Anytime soon" -- the answer is no. It's not that we don't want to do it, it's just a little further down in the priority queue, and so I don't want everyone to have any expectations that are unrealistic in terms of when it will get into your hands. " BioWare doesn't care about letting people create the characters they want and "be the hero of your own Star Wars™ saga" when they think character customization is NOT a priority issue. If the character customization options were complete and satisfactory in the first place, people wouldn't be asking for them continously. We're 3 months past launch and we're still not getting any advancement on the customization issues plaguing the game. From the clone armors, completely palette swapped gear designs, to the lack of the ability to play as the character we wanted in the first place. Had the game actually refer to you as your chosen non-human race by race name, this would be less of an issue and more understandable. But the game doesn't give a crap about being a chiss, miraluka, zabrak or twilek, you're either "human" or "alien". So clearly the game sees players only as those two races. Changing the players race part way through their story has no impact other than a few "find & replace" steps to swap to "alien" or "human" status. New classes come with new character slots to balance the newly added content. Legacy does NOT currently support additional character slots, hence the problem. There should be more posts by the dev teams about the whole "you don't need to start a new character" issue with Legacy from earlier months, but they're either removed or hidden, since I'm sure Erickson had a comment about it once saying players can keep playing their alts and will still benefit from the race unlocks just fine.

Please make sure future Maintenance/Patch notices actually state the patch number if it's applicable. It's been like this the entire time, always with the "there may be a patch to download" copy & paste line instead of actually including the line "Patch to be implemented: 1.1.5.a". Such as, Upcoming Patch Date: Friday, March 23rd, 2012 Patch: 1.1.5.b Time: 2AM CDT (12AM PDT/3AM EDT/7AM GMT/8AM CET/6PM AEDT) to 6AM CDT (4AM PDT/7AM EDT/11AM GMT/12PM CET/10PM AEDT) All game servers will be offline during this period. This deployment is expected to take no more than four hours. Thank you for your patience as we maintain service for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. If there isn't a patch, simply post there is no patch in this week's update. This is part of community communication, it's one thing early Aion failed to do properly and it cost them dearly. Don't continue this blind trend of NOT reporting what you're doing, tell people, and update the notices if things change, we do look, but if you hide things we will get upset. Better to tell us and update as needed than to ignore it altogether, the community communication for this game has never been that great or clear. Keeping the community in the dark is never a good idea, and worse if you persist without making improvements or acknowledgement. It's a few extra words per copy&paste, do apply that effort and take community communication seriously. It's far better in the long run, if you manage to reach that long.

The legacy system is completely flawed as it stands. It's promoting RMT actions by focusing all the efforts on credits needing to purchase instead of relying on the player achievement (Legacy levels). Yes, there are other "unlocking" methods, but for things like race unlocks you have to carry a race to 50 to unlock that for everyone else? I don't know about you but if I've already played a race to 50, I don't think I'd want that on all my characters. And if I leveled them all to 50, I wouldn't have a slot available to create the new race/class combination or be allowed to change my existing characters' race to use the new unlocks, pretty awesome method BioWare! I've never bought into this whole "family tree" thing, it's an Anakin fetish thing from the developers I get, but what's the point of having different races in the first place if your plan is for people to only roll one race on a server? Legacy system should have worked out like this, -Each legacy level you gain you get 1 legacy token. -The tokens are used to purchase feature unlocks once the player has reached the required legacy level. -Stagger out the rewards instead of placing them all at certain benchmarks, major rewards like race combinations can be placed at benchmarks but other minor features should fill in the blank levels. -Credits can THEN be used additionally to purchase the other features you're currently allowed to based on your legacy level. -Unlocks that are character based rather than account based will be applied once the other characters have reached the requirement (such as reach story act #, valor rank for pvp effects, or a fraction of the pure credit purchase fees). -Legacy linked skills should be advanced versions of the current class, or an alternate animation that plays instead of crossing the classes and put it on ridiculous restrictions like long cooldown and requiring an active companion, rendering it useless unless you're just messing around on your own. -All existing characters (at least legacy 5) are given one re-customization token that allows them to go to the character customization NPC to change their appearance and race. No gender change here. -Future recustomization tokens can be purchased via ingame credits (say 2-5 millions) or through BioWare points. Completely understandable and perfectly fine for microtransactions to be used on COSMETICS features, but the first one needs to be a freebie, why? Because you forced people to choose what they didn't want, and then promised they wouldn't need to reroll, and now people HAVE TO REROLL if they want to use the new race combinations, you liars. As it stands the current Legacy system is going to be favoring RMTs, I'm already seeing an increase in spam mail from them and they know they'll be needed soon with the millions of credits you're demanding from players on top of what they're already spending ingame. The Legacy system is supposed to reward players for their time and effort in the game, NOT punish the players for wanting to experience what your game has to offer. I for one never cared about the family trees, it completely negates the whole point of giving players the freedom to customize their characters and stories that SWTOR is supposed to be about. We're here as the characters and their impact on the SWTOR events, not "but my grandma already conquered corellia, why am I doing this again?". Legacy should have the option of having "Clans" as relationship links instead of having to rely solely on giving birth or blood related. -Clan Matriarch/Patriarch/Grand Master. -Clan sister/brother. -Clansman/woman. -Clan outcast (someone who gets no linked features but unlocks a title and aura/emote). The current way is completely restricing and insulting to your original philosophy of "be the hero of your own Star Wars sage", we're not our own heroes anymore, just more clones of what you say we "have to be". Not everyone came in here looking to create a "family" with their characters, had this been implemented at launch this might be a moot point. Since this is now 3 months in at least, people have gone through your game several times, having to start over and be forced to now comply with your new "rules" is just plain sick. Legacy system isn't going to save anything, the brutish backward designs are more than likely going to cause people to leave more than keep them around. Forcing people to grind the game out even more with completely cosmetic rewards is ancient practice. We've been paying and playing the game for almost 4 months now and our efforts are being rewarded with "thanks for playing so long for #legacy levels, now pay millions to unlock this feature!". The Legacy system needs to be overhauled, you are building a game YOU want the players to play, NOT a game where the PLAYERS DECIDES HOW TO PLAY. Building a game that you like means that only you and people like you will like it. Having no MMO experience prior and the long development cycle meant that your ideas are out of date for the current generation and it's showing more and more in the recent content updates where the emphasis is based completely on outdated MMO content advancement. Because it's really that hard to use a flamethrower... Genes can be diluted, or skip generations due to more dominate genes, being in a family doesn't guarantee that you'll share everything, just some of the markers, but certainly not govern the entirety of your abilities, we're not clones after all. If there was a Clan relationship system these can be easily explained and fitted, I'd suggest Clan outcast as an option and it can always be modified to still carry on the Clan traits. What is "anti-star wars" is that they think this only works if you're blood related, it works in some extent for the force users but even they are not guaranteed to have force using children, Leia couldn't use the force in the movies, so active ability not passed on. The rest of the classes don't rely on genes, so that's half the game down the drain. If you had a Clan master pass/teach the abilities onto the others in the clan, perfect, everyone is more than capable of learning and mastering at least one skill even if they're not proficient enough to master all of them like the Clan Master.

In case other people haven't already posted, you CAN change your race in WoW, and factions as well. So it's been done, easily so when there are no actual racial features or importance. SWTOR races have NO IMPACT on anything ingame other than cosmetics. The racial skills are all emotes, no one is ever referred by their chosen race except for "humans" and "aliens". A change of race appearance is completely doable and without any consequence to the game. It's just a matter of "find & replace", but the SWTOR team being completely new at this genre and failed to plan for advancement in time and tech when they were developing this game, this sort of minor issue is now something they can't fix. The real reason why they're not allowing current characters to change classes is the idiotic way they've set up the species unlock for the Legacy race features. -Reach 50 as [race X] to unlock [race X] customization/combination for all classes. Alternate unlocked by spending #million credits with at least legacy level 5 That was a crappy move on SWTOR's part when they decided to use this as a way of unlocking race combinations. Unlocking a race for all classes should have been done by legacy levels, and better yet, by a legacy token system instead of this whole RMT credit based system they're putting out. They came up with a crappy way to handle legacy unlocks and people are screwed over by it when they promised that all current characters will benefit from the legacy system fully without needing to create a completely new one when legacy rolls out. This was a big issue for people with alts and it was promised as such, but they seemed to have forgotten their own comments once again and went for the grind approach to drag out the game in a completely unnecessary way. They're still stuck in a decade old way of thinking about MMO content and mechanics, and it's showing in the "future" content they had planned. They need fresh blood, or at least someone who actually has up to date MMO experience to plan and tailor these upcoming contents.

Changes they needed to make if they want to make Arsenals use more than TM, -Put TM benefits (Heat Signature, Tracer Lock , Barrage Proc , Terminal Velocity, Power Barrier) onto all missiles attacks . -Make Unload not interrupted when moving, allowing for it to be channeled while running unless you LoS'd. -Reduce damage of the skills as needed to account for the added mobility. -Powershot no longer mirrors TM with less effects, or add in %armor ignored to power shot. Arsenal is already balanced by being immobile to carry out any attack, and of course people are going to get the most bang for their buck by using the skill with the most benefits that the skill tree is designed for. Make other skills more/just as viable and people will use them, this change to TM won't change anything about rotation, the excuse they give is just an excuse, flawed and fixes nothing about the TM spams.

See, this is where the appearance tab would have done wonders, you wouldn't have needed to do anything regarding social items and armor class types. Cosmetic slots is the best solution, get on it if that's not what you're doing. You can work on solutions like letting players choose an armor type when purchasing, but that'll still lead to wrong item purchased issues. These items aren't crafteable, so they won't ever get a chance at an augment slot either now that oranges can crit. But if you have appearance slots, done, no worries about stats, armor types, or wrong items purchased, just slap that desired appearance in which ever slot and you have that appearance! Worry about people looking like the wrong class? That's not an issue as heavy armor classes can already look like the med/light armor classes freely and shouldn't be an issue as this is a choice that players should make freely, not restricted to limited stereotypes. Appearance slot is the BEST solution for this and all your future problems when it comes to gear customizations, because if you're not adding in appearance slots you're going to spend way too much time than you should on a solution that isn't even remotely close to optimal. I can guarantee that your "other" solutions won't nearly be as effective, and finally letting people look how they want instead of looking like clones of everyone else would be a great change of quality for the game. You can already do that without social items, it's called "Indigination Chestguard", it's a heavy armor and it's practically just a bra. There are orange versions of it too, funny how the republic version of the item is a full robe while the imperial appearance is a bra...a heavy armored bra...

I know, disappointed yet again by BioWare's "creativity" when it comes to gear appearances. Seiously, Bounty Hunters are the easiest class to design styles for because they're pretty much any combination of gadgets and armor types, yet once again we get slapped on with slight variations of the same crap we've gotten all this time. Look closer at the BH gears and you can see where they ripped the pieces off of other gears ingame already and then paste it on another ingame base and "repaint" it to make it "new". The only thing "new" about the BH gears is the PvE headgear, that one looks slightly more different than the other rust buckets ingame but that's about it. As for the sorcs...c'mon, where's the use of crystals to amplify force powers? How hard would it be to create some more sleek smooth armor for them with force crystals imbedded/encased on them and have a force lightning effect generating from them, not hard! BioWare, enough with these crappy designs based on ingame meshes, make more, not slightly different.

Will we ever see a full gear dye/paint system for SWTOR? It'd be a real nice feature, to be able to finally fully customize our characters to our own preferences of appearances.