They actually mention gametime cards specifically in the official news post about the 1.2 promotions: http://www.swtor.com/info/news/news-article/20120412

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You still have to wait for the reset before it unlocks the next daily quest with an additional piece of containment set armor. I checked and took my BH back to the wreck of the stardream after she completed and handed in the initial 3 dailies and the escape pod (which gives the first consecutive-day daily quest) wasn't useable yet. I will have to wait until tomorrow to pick that up, then the next day to do the 3rd daily for the 3rd armor set piece, etc etc. If you started right now, then with the resets I think you can only get 5 pieces max, don't think you can get all 6. Might even be 4 depending on the time the event ends, which may be just before the daily quest reset time. edit: I double-checked. Starting right now it's 4 pieces max. The daily quest reset time is at 1pm CEST (7am EDT), but the event ends on the 24th at 9am CEST (3am EDT), so you won't catch another reset on the 24th. That means there are only another 4 daily windows, namely: 20-21, 21-22, 22-23 and 23-24. If you started this morning before 1pm CEST, you can get 5 pieces (you'd miss either belt or chestpiece).

Now that the legacy update is live I really want to move my republic characters to the same server as my imperials so they can benefit from one legacy. I'm even willing to pay for the privilege, as it seems many people are. So why in the blazes is it still taking them ages to implement this?

It's a heavily modified version of Gamebryo though. Apparently the reason the devs chose it is because it makes creating new content for the game really quick and easy, which is how they manage to push out those world event updates so often. It's terrible in every other respect though. Like SWTOR's engine it has massive performance issues in busy areas (cities, pvp, zone invasions) which beyond a certain point aren't affected at all by graphics settings or available hardware resources, but rather seem to be caused by the engine just choking itself when there are too many players in an area. That's a really common problem in MMO's, but SWTOR and Rift are some of the worst examples I've ever seen. And another thing that Rift and SWTOR have in common is that due to their choice of engine some of the graphics settings are ridiculously intensive, requiring much more in the way of GPU resources than they would in a similar-looking game with a better engine.

It happened to me as well. I carefully set up my cooldown settings on my Jedi Guardian last night, but when I logged back in on the same character today the cooldowns were back to their defaults. So I redid the settings, then immediately exited and restarted the game and now the settings are stored correctly.

Wow, this is awesome - those customization options a lot more indepth than I was expecting. The thing I don't see that might be handy would be the ability to turn off the vertical cooldown bar completely on skill-specific cooldowns for those who want to replace it with just the text timer. And I mean that as constructive feedback to make the system even better and more comprehensive. edit: It's not part of the settings featured in the video so it's hard to tell, but it seems like options 2 and 4 without overlay should allow you to see a skill's availability (including those triggered by chance or specific conditions) through the cooldown effect, right? If so that's perfect and disregard my earlier statement about that option missing (clearly I was still half asleep).

Well there was one person who said he taped pieces of cardboard on his screen to cover the flashing bars... but that only solves the flashing problem, not the problem of actually being able to see which skills are available. xD

I just got off the phone with customer service to ask them to freeze my account while this problem gets sorted out. They haven't frozen my gametime, but the representative put a hold on my account and told me to call back before the next login and they'll refund me the lost gametime. The impression I got is that they're aware of the problem this change has caused for some players, but there are currently no plans to roll it back or hotfix it, so those of us who can't play will just have to wait until the 21st or later. So if you're affected to the point where you can't or can barely play I'd definitely hit up customer service, at least if you can call for free from the US or through Skype (I called the US number with Skype - zero charge). Also let's hope to god the 21st of Feb doesn't bring us this: http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20120210/

And in my naiveté I didn't think they could possibly make it worse, not after we gave them plenty of suggestions on how to improve the system (none of which at all resemble the horror they've turned it into now) in the last thread... *facepalm* Is it too much ask to just have a simple, functional cooldown display where I can see which skills are ON and OFF cooldown at a quick glance, without all of these unnecessary fuss and frills? I don't need nor want my skillbar looking like a disco floor - it's bloody distracting.

I will warn you, the AMD-A series laptops aren't as powerful as you may think - they're basically designed to offer a really low-end mobile gaming solution for those who can't afford anything better, but absolutely must be mobile. They're not powerful gaming laptops by any stretch of the imagination though. Especially for MMO's and other more CPU-dependant games they can really fall short because the AMD-A series sacrifices CPU power in exchange for slightly more graphics power. The CPU's in these laptops aren't terrible (as an example most netbook CPU's would classify as absolutely terrible), but the low base clockspeeds combined with the fairly 'meh' architecture means they're definitely on the weak side. In more GPU-heavy games the CPU/GPU trade-off nets you somewhat better performance than most other laptops with integrated graphics cards (especially intel-based integrated graphics), but if the game needs both a healthy dose of CPU and GPU power I tend to recommend against these AMD-A machines unless you absolutely know what you're getting into and simply can't afford anything else. The minimum I would look for to play this game on a laptop is a sandy bridge i3 (2nd gen) with 4gb RAM and a GT540m or better (or equivalent ATI). If you don't absolutely need a laptop, a desktop will net you better results for the same price and especially at lower budgets that's the way to go.

And the servers are down again... What a surprise. Maybe it's their new tactic to stop people from running out of content - just prevent them from being able to do the content half the time and you have twice as long to release something new.. And the maintenance team probably gets bonus points for sneaking maintenances in unexpectedly at the most awkward moments so people get booted off the server halfway during a FP or Op.

I had no FPS drops on Alderaan even with everything on highest, but my GPU was working harder there on average than on many other planets. That's not surprising as Alderaan has a lot of grass and trees, and if you have shadows on High all of those trees also cast lots of complex shadows. If your GPU can just about keep up on other planets, you could be running short on Alderaan. Maybe try lowering your shadows temporarily til you get off that planet.

This for me too. I don't mind blind invites in situations where it makes pefect sense to create a temporary group for a single objective. Like uteboy said, if there are 2+ people standing around a boss, there isn't really a whole lot of discussion needed to establish who needs what. To me, a blind invite in a situation like that means, "let's team up for this and then we can part ways again". If I've already engaged the final boss for a given quest and I see someone running up who is clearly in need of the same kill, I'll actually go out of my way to toss them a blind invite. It's my way of asking them if they want in on the kill, as typing it out and waiting for an answer would simply take too long when you're already in the fight. In most other situations though I always ask people first and usually people do the same to me. I've had the occasional random blind invite, but it's not happened enough to really annoy and usually after a decline they don't try again. I've only had 1 case where a player was really persistent and required a trip to /ignore to block repeated blind invites. Given how atrocious today's MMO communities are usually made out to be, I think at least on the servers I play on it's not that bad. On a slight off-topic note: There have been cases where grouping up ad-hoc just isn't feasible, usually when me and my fiancee are duo-ing open-world heroics. Occasionally on the final boss we'll run into another group of 3-4 players and there just isn't enough room for us all to merge into a single group. If that happens we always let the other group go first and help them bring down the boss. So far every time we've done that the other group has stayed around to help us dps down our boss in turn, even if it took a while for the boss to respawn. Who says common courtesy is completely dead in MMO's? PS: just wanted to add I do understand where the OP is coming from. Blind invites can be perceived as very rude and especially if you don't even see the person in question it can leave you scratching your head wondering what they're thinking. However on a personal level I just take it in stride as long as it doesn't happen too often. I just remind myself that not everyone knows the unwritten etiquette of MMO's and that a lot of them probably don't realize they're being (what might be perceived as) rude. The exception is those people who spam invites, whether it's trade, guild or group invites... if you can't take the hint after the first decline you're either being rude on purpose or you're really immature.

The problem is that your SWTOR account is automatically linked to your Origin account (or if you didn't have an Origin account yet it creates one for you). There is no way to unlink these accounts, disable the Origin side or even make them use different login details. That means that if your SWTOR login details are compromised, they instantly have your Origin login as well. Except you can use an authenticator on the SWTOR side as a last line of defence, but for some daft reason Origin doesn't require the same security check, which is ridiculous since it is 100% linked and there's nothing you can do about it! What will have happened here is that the wannabe account thief tried logging into the game, hoping to steal a nice amount of credits, but then got thwarted by the authenticator - being aware of the backdoor in the security he went to Origin and changed the OP's details willy-nilly just to piss him off (and lock him out of his own account). If Bioware/EA had properly thought out their security, this wouldn't be able to happen. There should either be a way to unlink the Origin account OR the authenticator should protect both accounts at the same time. All they're doing by keeping it this way is creating more work for the customer service department, which arguably is already in over its head at the moment.

I pointed this problem out weeks ago to Bioware. They didn't even read my ticket and gave me some crappy auto-response about how authenticators work...

They say a picture says more than a thousand words... Bioware: http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i42/LiselleMorrow/Old%20Republic/bioware-meme.jpg

Why do you think I stopped playing Cryptic's games?

It seems Bioware never learned the ground rule of MMO's: You don't take the servers down during the weekend unless they're about to EXPLODE

The AMD-A machines are intended for extreme budget gaming purposes - you buy them if you absolutely can't afford anything else and you have no choice but to put up with their cut-corners performance. They're not heavy duty in any way shape or form, so it's not surprising an A6 laptop is struggling to keep up, especially in an MMO which relies as much on the CPU as it does on the Graphics chip. The AMD-A6 may be a quad chip, but it has a very little power per core, as is the problem with many laptop CPU's. As for the 3 year old ASUS gaming lappy, I'm guessing that its downfall is mainly the CPU as well, because even the firstgen core i7's mobile versions were dreadfully underclocked and anything older (the mobile core2duo's, etc) were far far worse even. Anything not sandy-bridge won't perform all that well in a laptop I'm afraid, at least not in anything CPU-dependant. The Sandy Bridge architecture at least makes up for the lower clockspeeds that have always plagued laptop gaming. GPU's have the same problem, always being less powerful than their desktop counterparts. Iirc a GTX580m is slightly less powerful than a GTX560 ti and a GTX560m is only about as powerful as a GTS450. Because of this in terms of numbering and price you always need a "higher end" graphics chip to run a game as well on a laptop as you would on a desktop at the same resolution. I wouldn't even try to run games on a laptop with anything short of a GT540m simply because it's only equivalent to the bare minimum desktop cards and even below the requirements (performance-wise) for some of the newer games.

If your E: drive doesn't get wiped then you should just be able to reinstall windows without doing any external backing up. After the windows reinstall temporarily move your SWTOR folder on the E: drive to a different directory, then reinstall the basic launcher using the setup.exe file you can download from your account page and finally move your old (and fully uptodate) SWTOR folder back on top of that fresh install and overwrite everything. Reinstalling using the setup file off the website doesn't take a lot of time but it will ensure anything basic the game needs to work is installed (registry entries, software updates, shortcuts, etc) and pasting your existing fully updated SWTOR game folder on top prevents you having to repatch.

Unless I'm mistaken (I'm not very familiar with using or converting Fahrenheit) 140-155 F is around 60-68 Celsius? That's not that hot at all - a lot of modern cards can easily go upto 80 or beyond without any permanent damage (my GTX 470 has a safety limit of 110 degrees for example). That doesn't mean it's necessarily good to let it get anywhere near that hot for extended periods of time, since it'll shorten the expected lifespan of the card, but <70 degrees you usually don't have anything to worry about. What you should do to be sure is find out what exact graphics card you have and then go to Nvidia or AMD's website and look up the indepth specifications of the chip - somewhere they should list the max safe temperature for the chip, often referred to as TjMax. As a rule of thumb I would suggest keeping it at least 10 degrees (Celsius) under TjMax at all times and preferably 20 degrees or more if you can manage it. The lower you can keep the temperature the better ofcourse and programs like EVGA Precision and MSI Afterburner can help you with this, giving you the option to tweak your fanspeeds and even set up a custom fan profile that cools your card as aggressively as you want. The only thing I would advise against is running you fan really high, not just because it's usually very noisy, but also because it will probably shorten its lifespan.

Yep. I'm dutch and I lovingly refer to Dromund Kaas as the cheese planet.

Yep I saw that and it made me think of TOR as well. In TOR's case it's not just the jumping itself but also the bad collision detection on objects that were clearly never designed to be used as jumping platforms.

Yeah I sort of wish they'd gone for a different approach and unlinked surnames from the legacy system. I would much prefer surnames be non-unique and on a per-character basis like they are in LOTRO. That was a really nice system. It's not just with Republic/Empire on one server, even different races on the same side sharing the same surname can be awkward if you pick a surname that's very racially biased.