Some players demanded it very heavily, but there were just as many players who were firmly against the idea, so it was by no means a case of Arenanet simply giving in to the wishes of the majority. I think the only reason they added Ascended items is because they became convinced they HAD to retain those players who were not satisfied by cosmetic rewards alone. They probably knew they might lose some of the adamant gear grind opposers and longtime GW1 fans in the process, but they tried their best to mitigate those losses by downplaying the importance of the new Ascended tier of gear. I remember them emphasizing how minimal the increase in stats was and that Exotic gear would still be sufficient to take on any new content (in their own words no one would NEED Ascended gear). What this meant in reality is that Ascended gear was nothing more than an "as-superfluous-as-we-can-make-it" carrot at the end of a very long stick. The reason I ultimately abandoned GW2 is not because gear grinds are a dealbreaker to me - I can cope with a sensible character progression system, but it has to be reasonable and it has to serve a purpose. In GW2 Ascended gear served no other purpose but to make players grind for grind's sake... it was there only to draw out the experience in the most tedious way possible.

I've been playing ESO for a couple of months, since they started turning the game around and fixing a lot of the issues that kept me away from it at launch. It's been pretty fun so far and now that it's going Buy2Play in March I will be able to cancel that subscription as well and just pay-as-I-go from here on out.

You've said it better than I could. I sent Bioware the cliffnotes version with my subscription cancellation, but I just didn't have the willpower left to post an elaborate version on the forums, so I'm glad that you did. It's become obvious over the past few months that the people in charge are completely out of touch with the state of the game and the needs of their playerbase. Changes are rushed into patches without care for balance and when those changes are called into question the subsequent communication from Bioware ends up being more confused than the changes themselves.

Same thing keeps happening to me too. Red Eclipse server (in case it matters).

Actually you'll get 525 coins per month when using 60-day gametime cards, because it counts as a 2-month subscription plan and you get larger amounts of cartel coins for longer plans. The 90 and 180 subs for example give 550 and 600 CC respectively. Regardless of how long a period you prepay for, you'll still receive the CC in monthly installments and they will be added roughly around your monthly renewal date (it can sometimes vary by a few days). More info: http://www.swtor.com/support/helpcenter/7068

Yeah, names have to be unique across both factions. So if there's a Bob on the Republic side, there can't be another Bob on the Imperial side. However the friends list only looks at names present in your own faction, so if you try to friend Bob on your Bounty Hunter, the friends list will say the character does not exit, when it just means the character does not exist "on the imperial side".

Often you have to remove and re-add the name a few times before it'll show you the 'last known' Level & Location of the character in question. For me it's usually the 2nd time I add them that it shows up (very rarely it's only on the 3rd try). I have a sneaking suspicion it's not intended for people to be able to see this information while the character is offline, but if it's a bug I'm not exactly complaining since it turns out to be rather convenient right now.

Probably not a heck of a lot, no. I spent a good few hours scouting for names the other night using the "add friend" method and yeah about 90% of the more desirable (short and sweet) ones were held by level 30+ characters, including my Bounty Hunter's original name. Of the ones that I did write down as potentials, I'm expecting less than half to become available on the 12th, as a number of them will no doubt be secured either by subscriptions or their owners logging in after seeing the email from Bioware. However I don't think the point of the exercise is to free up the really good names - those are always taken within no time at all anyway. The purpose of this purge is to release some of the longer (yet still sensible) names that will allow players to find something they like more easily without having to insert special characters or settle for a Derpymcderpins type name.

I tried the exact same sequence of steps whilst in the process of investigating a similar claim on reddit and I can tell you that it didn't work for me either. When I asked the player for whom it did work if he'd used the same debit or creditcard before, he replied he'd paid with debit card before, but that it was a different one than he used for this. So yeah, colour me confused.

Yes, yes you can. In fact that's how I've been subscribed for the past year and a half. SWTOR is allowed to automatically bill Paypal for the given amount whenever my subscription time runs out. This is not exclusive to subscription services either - I've seen it done by certain online game stores with one-off purchases, where after my first purchase, subsequent transactions were pre-approved and did not require logging into Paypal. There are clearly other options, it's just a matter of implementing them. What really gets my goat though is that even with debit and creditcards they haven't bothered to implement such a system. All they've done is allow automatic repeat purchases based on previous verification through the website - and this is something that took them months to implement?!? It's the most lazy solution they could have chosen and it seems to be buggy (just read the Cust. service forums) to boot. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a bit higher standards from a triple AAA company. :/

So there's no Paypal support and if you've always been paying with Paypal, then you don't even qualify for the offer unless you first make a purchase of coins at full price by card... No sale, Bioware. Not good enough.

If you added the CE key to your account after the 15th of november you won't get the 1000 cartel coins, because they were part of the loyalty rewards for subscribers prior to F2P. http://www.swtor.com/free The info is squirreled away in a footnote at the bottom of the page: 3 OFFER VALID FOR PURCHASERS OF Star Wars™: THE OLD REPUBLIC™ (“SWTOR”) COLLECTORS EDITION PRIOR TO NOVEMBER 15, 2012 WITH ACTIVE PAYING SUBSCRIPTION ON DECEMBER 20, 2012 AT 11:59PM CDT.

http://www.swtor.com/free On the right-hand side there it shows you the bonus coins you get for the different subscriptions, as well as for friend referrals and the security key. 1 month = 500 2 months = 525 3 months = 550 6 months = 600

A GT520 (unless you typoed there and you actually have a higher end model) is a pretty low end graphics card, so your fps drops aren't that surprising if you're running the game on high graphics settings. Your card is only a budget model that's not designed to run graphically intensive games on higher settings - while there is nothing physically stopping you from doing so, your performance will be much lower as a result and you're more likely to experience sharp fps drops because your card lacks the sort of horsepower that dedicated gaming cards do. The reason you're not getting the same fps everywhere is because some areas in the game are more graphically intensive than others and this can be completely seperate from how many players are enemies are around. Because your card is pretty much pushed to its limits, it will already be working as hard as it can, so when you enter a more intensive area you card can't work harder, thus instead it ends up producing fewer frames, which is why you're getting those fps drops. The best solution to this is to manually tweak your settings to achieve the best compromise between performance and graphics and try to reach a point where the fps doesn't drop below the point you're comfortable with even in the more intensive places. Especially when you're running an older or lower end graphics card tweaking the settings just right can make a huge amount of difference. The things I would start with turning down are shadows and anti-aliasing - while they make the game look good, they don't have as big an impact on the graphics as things like high texture quality, but they can make a huge difference ot performance.

They've offered the 6-month subscription since launch, so as already said I don't think it'll be going anywhere. The only thing that's changed with F2P is that in addition to the discount it now gives you a few more cartel points than the shorter subscription plans as well.