Or fix the game and improve content. People are leaving because the game isn't that good once they reach the end, there's nothing to keep them coming back other than to grind credits and the same crappy looking gears. Free weekends and friend passes won't solve anything, it didn't solve the problem with other MMOs and it won't solve anything here either because the core game is still incomplete and incompetently put together. The lack of customization is a huge issue in this game, and they're not going to address that issue properly anytime soon when they're still rolling out credit sinks and promoting farmers. They need to work on a more "living" game soon, otherwise people who are done with the game will simply be done, more raids/flashpoint/warzones won't solve anything when they still drop the same ugly unimaginative clone crap. 1.2 should have been there since launch, features that defined the game shouldn't have taken this long to put back in, now they're suffering for it with no real solutions on the table. Cross server content wouldn't help, and server mergers wouldn't help much either because of the idiotic design that went into the game's character saved location. I've never liked this whole binding a character to a single server crap, just set up a character server and log that into the world, generate as many shards as needed and provide grouping and syncing to the same shard when needed. You'd never have to worry about server merges, or low population issues, ever. Follow the mold and you'll get the same issues, server population isn't going to climb anytime soon when they're still focusing on the same stereotypical "endgame" content releases as other games (raid/pvp only). Unless you learn to "grow" your MMO into a living creature, your population will keep dropping, just like how WoW is still losing people.

Lore and story purposes. Some classes do have events that takes place there rather than starting down on the planet surface. What needs to happen is this, If a class has a quest on the orbital stations, they'll arrive on the orbital stations when they exit their ship. Once the class has cleared the quest on the orbital stations, they can choose another travel point when exiting the ship as well as traveling off the planet, skipping the orbital station in between. Simple fix, they might be working on something along those lines, they thought about allowing speeders on the stations but even then that's just a patch, not a real fix.

Honestly, it's like we can't just kill someone of the other faction and use their lightsaber, because you know, the lightsabers and crystals are DNA coded to the original creator or force alignment. I find that to be perfectly acceptable for the imperials, to add confusion to the battlefield, to hinder the jedis from making the decision to strike another blue/green saber user, deception is acceptable from the siths, and they use it well. There is only the force, what "side" you're on doesn't affect the force, just how you perceive it. Crystal colours is just aesthetics and shouldn't be aligned to any side, at most, level restriction but that's it. Talk all you want about "how they should look" but quite frankly it's just a weapon, you can get another one. They've removed the alignment requirements which is great, as it wasn't all that well implemented in the first place as it prevents modding of all items even the ones you don't have equipped, resulting in useless crystals that could've been used for a companion.

After 1.2 vid, not too sure. My sub won't run out anytime soon so I have time to decide whether I want to continue to sub again or not. The game is toting features that should have been there since launch as an "awesome content update", it's like they're not even remotely apologetic about taking these features out and selling them back as a major update. The game's direction in focusing on only endgame raid/pvp content also has me concerned that it's still progressing in the same linear fashion as other MMOs where the core game doesn't matter, just the raiders and pvpers. They may be more vocal, but they're hardly the only ones playing the game, yet every MMO seems to tailor their content updates to them and ignore the rest of the game. I'll watch the game for now, but it's becoming less likely that I'll keep my sub going later on, it's becoming more and more normal of a MMO, and that's just boring.

Will we ever see a gear dye/paint system for SWTOR? And not just the minor adjustment from the match to chest option, but a full on colour customization npc where people can either pay for changing their gear palette or find items from the world to change their appearance palette. Match to chest is a patch solution, a full dye/paint system is the real feature, please think about it if it's not already in the works. Or better yet, a "match to piece" system so we can match to whatever piece we decide instead of having palettes based off just the chest piece.

The only thing "new" about the warrior armor is the helmet, the rest can largely be closely duplicated with what's already ingame. Agent got screwed over a bit with yet another generic appearance and gas mask, really, another gas mask? What's with the gas mask obsession? There's a ton of them for the medium armor tier, smugglers get hats and agents get gas masks? Iinquisitors...wth...it's naked chiss with lightning scar pattern and an alien headslot, yeah, that was really well done... And for crying out loud, another Fett-ish armor for bounty hunters? Are you serious? Everything in the game is already Fett-ish except 1 set of newb gear and now we get MORE Fett-ish gears? Fire the BH gear designer and get a new one, Boba Fett was NOT the only Star Wars Bounty Hunter in existence, not to mention he totally sucked. The consular appearance is actually good, it's real design that is new and appropriate to the class. This is how you add new gear, different than what's already in the game, and explore more ways to show off the class in the universe, not just copy and paste the same design you've had over and over and add a spiky shoulder pad to it. Jedi knight, yeah, suffers from the shoulder pad solution, minor changes to what's ingame already and only seems different because of the palette they used for the promo. Can't really say much at this point as I'm generally not interested in JK. Smuggler...take the helmet off and give them a bandit mask with a long scarf that wraps around their neck, and slap some goggles on top too and it'll look waay better than what's there. Overall meh but acceptable as it's just another jacket/agent appearance, nothing great but not horrible either. Trooper...is like something out of mass effect, which would normally be a good thing but...ah whatever, it looks fine enough, they're troopers, they're supposed to look generic. Personally I'm not that impressed with these gears, one the appearances needs work in the variety department, and second, these are likely to be pvp/raid gears rather than gears you can get elsewhere(exploration, crafting, even less likely from flashpoints). So they're grind gears, and BioWare has stated in a roundabout way before that there's more or less only 4-5 new sets of gears in 1.2, so while we're seeing some from this video, it's likely to be the theme for the entire update. I hope I'm wrong about this, I really do, but the lack of effort on imperial designs really bums me out.

Because people confuse palette swaps as actual "designs". Each class has about 6-8 sets of gear appearances, then palette swapped the entire game. What you see in the class progression vids are basically it for the class, just different colours for the ingame selection. Crafting makes about 3 that are orange customs, again, palette swaps don't count. From the looks of it, 1.2 won't even add that many unique skins to gears. The new tier of pvp/raid gears, no guarantee that it'll actually have a different gear mesh considering the previous tiers (cent/champ/bm, tio/colu/raka) were all palette swaps of the same mesh. The "new schematics", most likely just more of what's already ingame but made a different colour/custom, again, not likely to have new never before seen gear meshes.If they do, they'll put in what, +1 per class/armor type? So that's a +1, maybe 2 at best per character. And then the doubly stated "legacy items". The requirements are legacy levels, meaning it's grind requirement gears, however "cool" they make it, it's unlikely to be that different from what's already ingame style wise. Also unlikely are the variety, legacy gears are more than likely to only have 1 of light, 2 med, 2 heavy appearances per faction, so if people want to be viable then they will add 1 to their new collection of gear sets. So 1 pvp, 1 raid, 1 legacy, and 1 crafting set adds about 4 to our current stock of 8ish appearances, subtract 3 newb appearances and you get around ~9 in total for what each class gets. If you don't pvp/raid as much however, you'll end with -2-4 to that and get 5 per class/armor type. Yeah, still lame in terms of gear appearance selection. So yeah, we'll likely only get 5-10 sets of unique gear meshes per class/armor type, even with 1.2. BioWare isn't that great with unique character customization options, SWTOR has been a palette swap fest since day 1 and will likely remain so until they put in a proper gear dye/paint system. Until then, expect less from them in terms of variety, they've been doing the base minimum to get by so far and unlikely to change anytime soon.

The only problem I have with the alignment restrictions is how it affects item modding, you can't even put a red crystal onto a companion weapon because you're "light side" or vice versa. You should be able to mod however you want, actually equipping it is another story. Removing the restriction altogether is fine by me honestly, I just want to be able to put some of these crystals to use for my companions instead of being locked out of them due to poor coding.

Will we ever see a gear dye/paint system for SWTOR?

Between whenever 1.1.5 goes live, and whenever the next patch notes are posted for the PTS. Eventually it'll be changed again by the time 1.2 rolls around, this right now seems more like a massive credit sink to drain the credits from the people that have been grinding dailies and having nothing to spend with their millions of credits. I'm not particularly looking forward to another game that wants to "create a more player-driven economy", it'll just end up with the rich staying rich by charging ridiculous amounts for everything, and everyone else going broke with no way of ever catching up. "a new tier of Player vs Player and Player vs Environment weapons and armor" -Great, more pvp/raid only gears for the cryhards for them to spend a few days grinding/exploiting to get and resume the QQing... "including new schematics, Legacy items,....Legacy items, new schematics," -Love how they listed schematics and legacy items twice, that's making me think twice about how "unique" these items will end up being. I'm betting on palette swapping of current skins, since we all know BW isn't capable of making a proper gear dye/paint system without exposing the lack of unique gear appearances currently in game. At first I thought, "yay! a whole bunch more items are going to be introduced!". Then I realized that this is coming from clone wars republic, and thinking hard on how the sentence was structured, it really just meant the new schematics, legacy items, pvp/raid gears and nothing else in terms of world/mob drops, or any mention of new unique skins. No mention of dye/paint system either, sigh, so I'm expecting the "new" items to be palette swaps again. Love the new credit drains, people will fall for it, drain a few millions, and then we'll all flock to credit farmers to get more. No wonder I'm getting more spam in my mails, they know they're going to get more business from the changes BioWare is doing, so yeah, good job...

Agreed, my bounty hunter is stuck with Torian at (yes, yes, and yes) and I'm not even married to him nor did I want to. My BH is way stronger than Torian as a hunter, no reason why she should bow down to his level and be forced to kiss him. I chose flirting option to raise his points faster, but flirting is flirting, not romancing. You should be able to opt out the relationship at any point isntead of being forced to choose the same option 3 times. In cases like this there should be a simple "yes", "later," and "No" options instead of yes x3. Redundant choices are exactly that, and completely pointless in terms of offering players "choices". I've chosen the 4th choice so far with my BH/Torian, the "Esc" option.

Currently there is no "house". You have a starship which serves for a player "home" for the time being. It isn't customizable in terms of appearance or interior, so if anything is going to change about it will be a long time down the road. There aren't any trophies or such collectibles that you can display anywhere if that's what you're talking about "collect things".

Because people wouldn't use it anymore if all CC/stuns get broken by any damage, oh great, let's nerf some more instead of coming up with some real alternatives. -brief CC immunity 1-1.5 seconds after break free from one CC/stun effect. -A second breakout skill for everyone with a 5 mins cooldown, this way everyone can resist twice early on in the fight. -Teammates breaking each other free of CC/stun via some pvp skill with an appropriate cooldown (3-6 mins). There are ways of making CC's/stun less annoying than making it obsolete, they are a part of the game, making any damage break all CC/stun would unbalance it towards CC's/stun being useless or have even shorter cooldowns because of it to balance it back. It's fine as it is, if you're getting CC'd/stun to hell by people now you really need to start playing better.

Or simply change these interactive objects to enabled for all rather than to a specific person and then wait for some timer or respawn. If you can get to the item you should be able to use it without worrying who clicked on it first, this is another old mmo mechanic we can do without. Universal interactive objects/nodes, solves all these problems. There are already some objects ingame that aren't bound to any person and everyone can interact with it at the same time, but we need that nearly everywhere instead of objective camping/lining up to complete these missions.

When will we see the previously promised "Class-specific item bags" that was supposed to drop from bosses of Flashpoints/Operations/etc to prevent useless loot situations that we're still seeing ingame now?

The male character creation/ingame gear appearance options are usually not that appealing to me, it's the same bearded/bald guy with bulky drugged up bodies with the standard comatose delivery of the lines that makes me not give a crap about the male options in these games. Looking at SWTOR, the male characters basically sleeps around every chance they get and that's what it focuses on for "story" while the female characters actually has a backbone and integrity when it comes to their version of the same story. Unless a game has a huge variety of character creation/ingame appearances for the male characters, I won't bother keeping a male character, they just looks like crap.

Begun the recruitment wars has, more people the game needs... I'd say get a move on expanding the content and put in actual variety in the game if you want to retain your current player base instead needing to produce these recruitment ads. The better your current game is, the more likely your player base will recommend it to others and build your customer base in a more solid fashion. Recruitment ads/incentives are temporary solutions, more exposure only hook the innocent ones, but it does nothing to retain them. Improve your game quality asap, lack of freedom and variety is the biggest problem that BioWare should focus on as it is the single thing that is dictated entirely by BioWare's resolve and management. Good job on making a good game for 2011, now bring it up to speed for 2012, you have 2 months to convince me this game will actually respond in a timely fashion to improve game quality instead of catering to pvp/raiders. Tera's shaping up to be a solid contender for my subscription fees after the first beta weekend, and with more weekends coming up, that game will only get better in my view compared to SWTOR.

No. No variety or freedom in terms of making the characters we want due to character creator feature bundling and the massive amount of palette swapping going on in the game. If they fix that, then it might shift my opinion to neutral. It's a very shallow game at the moment, not much thought went into improving the genre and mechanics and still managed like a game from the last decade. Lacking foresight for such a "futuristic" game, they didn't look "far" enough when they were working on the content and overestimated their own work by thinking things would be "alrite" when they cut content at/for launch. Stuck in the same old mentality that endgame is just raid/pvp instead of making something entirely new and creative for everyone to be able to enjoy at their own individual pace, again, a flaw born from shallow game designs and weak goals. Plenty of things for them to work on, and even more they NEED to improve.

Will we ever be able to save our keybinds/UI settings and load them onto another character instead of having to set them all again when we create another character?

I love how the companion can do this as part of their special skill but would definitely like to see this being useable by players themselves when they're physically at the vendors. Unless I'm really far from a vendor and inside an instance, I tend to not send my active companions to clear my trash items while I'm questing. When I'm done questing and turning them in, chances are I still have a bunch of trash items in my inventory and I do want still want to gain companion affection points while turning in the quests. So this leaves me with a full inventory, active companion, and me interacting with the vendor and rightclicking all the trash items in my inventory manually to sell them. It'd be nicer to have an option like the "repair all" to just "sell all trash" when you the player is interacting with the vendors. The game already can recognize item quality in a player's inventory, I'd love to see something along this line for the future.

There are times when going after datacrons where sprint can make you miss/overshoot jumps, so having it as an active skill that can be toggled off is still necessary for certain portions of the game.

Or do something similar to the .1 seconds thing right now and allow an option to display the cooldown numbers only during the last few seconds. This way longer cooldowns will just be blacked out, and when it's in the last 30 seconds or something the number will come up. I like the changes so far, the numbers is a nice touch especially with the 0.1s part.

There was promise of a class-specific gear bag pre-launch for resolving situations like this, yet it was never implemented and players are still being screwed for their efforts. Class specific gear bags can easily remedy this problem, it's about rewarding the players when they've earned it, not about giving them items they can't use or trade because it's all bind on pickup. Basically we need to push for them to put it back into the game, this isn't the first time I've seen groups of people repeatedly getting an item for a class that's not even in the group from hardmodes.

As we get closer to March, the supposed promised time for major content patch 1.2 where many new features are going to be implemented, character copying to the PTS needs to be in place soon. 1.2 is supposed to introduce the Legacy system, which I currently doubt can be tested properly or at all if it hits the PTS without character copying in place. Do not implement 1.2 on the PTS without character copying to the PTS, there isn't enough people with adequate legacy levels if at all on the PTS to test such content at this point while the live servers are full of people with 20+ legacy levels and climbing. Content testing on a PTS is usually at least 1-2 weeks before it goes live in most MMOs with a PTS, any less and it's useless and more if you needed time to fix a lot of things. Which means if you're planning to release 1.2 anytime in the first 2 weeks of March, you'll be putting 1.2 together and readying it for the PTS within this or next week... Don't do it without character copying to the PTS, it'll be a massive mistake. You will be doing character transfers/copying in the future, so get this part working asap as it's absolutely NECESSARY for the upcoming patch 1.2 as it focuses on even more endgame content that requires substantial time spent on the characters.

Hells Yeah I'll be getting ME3 at launch! SWTOR just had lots of dialogue choices, most are not good ones. ME3 is what SWTOR could be if they focus on developing a proper game and changes things to make it better. Playing SWTOR just makes me want ME3 even more...one more day, one more day...(demo)