Thanks for posting that, it confirms what I've been suspecting. I really hope they plan on fixing this - for those of us with systems that can easily handle high textures during intensive gameplay it's downright annoying to be stuck at medium most of the time. Most of the ground and building textures are "ok" with 8x AF forced (they could almost fool me into thinking it's 'high'), but there's no fixing some of the more washed-out ground textures, nor the armors, which I think look pretty poor even on medium (I mean I can take low-rez, but these aren't just lower resolution, they're just a blurry mess).

The two main things I know of to improve the graphics beyond what's available by maxing the graphics settings ingame (and if you can't max those on your setup, I don't suggest trying the tweaks below because they will not be kind to your performance) are: 1. forcing Anisotropic Filtering (8x or 16x for the best results) on swtor.exe through your graphics drivers (nvidia/ati control panel) 2. adding AntiAliasingLevel = x (where x = 4 or 8 for best results) to the client_settings.ini file located in C:/users/<username>/appdata/local/swtor/swtor/settings There is also an improved lighting option ini tweak from beta, but I don't know if that's still useful since they seem to have changed the shadow/lighting since then. Short of better textures for the game itself that's about it for know, at least that I'm aware of.

As already said if you preordered the DDE from Origin it'll be mailed out later. If you preordered a CE you'll find the retail key on a slip of paper inside the CE box.

Two common suggestions for FPS problems seem to be: 1. if you updated from a BETA version of the game, uninstall that and download + install the proper retail version of the game - some things changed significantly and beta -> retail updating through the launcher seems to break performance 2. the game defaults to low settings, but many people have noticed that those defaults don't seem to perform as 'low' - try raising your graphics settings to all High, hit Apply and then change them back to lower values. This seems to boost performance tremendously for a lot of people, indicating that the defaults are... screwy somehow.

No no, you don't have to redownload anything. I may not have been clear enough - what I mean is you just run the installer for the game launcher (this is the small SWTOR-setup.exe file you can download from the website/early access email). Once the game launcher (along with a few small unupdated game files) is installed somewhere, take the full files you copied over from your friend's computer and copy them ON TOP of where you just installed the game launcher to. Make sure you copy it to the correct directory (it will tell you there are existing files with the same names if you do it right - click yes to all here) and let it replace all the files. Now when you run the launcher, log in and see what it does. If you had the full game folder copied over from your friend's computer it should not need to download anything (if you really want to save bandwidth you'd need to go back to your friend and copy his entire directory), but with just the assets copied there will probably be some files missing, most notably the movies, which the launcher WILL try and download.

As the OP pointed out, once you activate him the first time he turns into a skill in the Abilities - General menu. They could make this a little bit clearer though... it's not exactly obvious.

How about putting a ' somewhere in the name, since SWTOR accepts both the - and ' in names. So for example "Ha'leigh". Not exactly elegant, but as close as you could get to the name without adding additional letters. Ofcourse I'm not sure how this would stop copy cats from putting ' marks in other parts of the name... At least you'd be fairly certain no one could pretend to be you under "Haleigh" since that's forbidden... Just out of curiosity, have you ever considered creating an alternate username/identity just for such occasions and make it known to the people that matter that BOTH represent you, and that the alt identity is used in cases where the main identity is unavailable or taken? I found that a much easier solution that trying to come up with a custom solution everytime someone beat me to my usual username somewhere. Given that Haleigh isn't that farfetched, it might not be a bad idea to have a 2nd known name ready.

Try to install SWTOR from the installer FIRST and then copy over the entire install directory from your other computer on top of that install (and click yes to overwrite any files and merge folders). If you do it the other way around it usually won't work as the installer will be overwriting some of the uptodate files you just copied and the launcher will try and reupdate stuff. I've installed the game this way myself using the installer from the website and then just slapping a friend's install folder on top and it works perfectly if you do it right. If you're paranoid you can run a repair through the launcher afterwards to make it check all the files are complete.

Do we really know for sure that the same naming rules were applied to the beta as the ones applied to launch? I saw people running around with names like "God" and other names that would be among the first to be put on any blacklist post-launch, which leads me to believe the naming restrictions were much lighter or even non-existant during beta. All I can suggest really is to send a ticket into the email support directly and ask them if there is a concrete reason why the name is suddenly not allowed. These forums are unlikely to produce a concrete answer from Bioware as usually their reps are much too busy with other things to post on the forums.

I have and I can confirm it's fully functional. You should get the VIP wristband in your ingame mail as part of your "CE/DDE bonus items" mail after you've redeemed your retail key. All your other items will be in there too. If you've only redeemed your preorder key so far, then you won't get anything yet - the items are purely linked to the retail key you need to enter to continue playing after launch.

That's also a major possibility. Haleigh just didn't strike me as a name from major SW lore, but if it is, then that's probably why it's not allowed. The use of "Lore names" is usually a big no-no in large well-guarded IP's like this. LOTRO has a similar system, where any name that is in the lore, even if it's just a place name, is not allowed to be used as a character name.

It's possible the name is in use by an ingame NPC. Most MMO's add NPC names to a "blacklist" of names that aren't allowed to be used by players in the character creator, along with any names deemed offensive, racist or otherwise inappropriate for use by players. The errors messages with such 'blacklisted' names often aren't specific to the reason the name is blacklisted, which can lead to confusion. For example I've had some MMO's tell me the names "Bob" or "Shadow" were 'offensive' when in fact what the game meant was "sorry these names are in use by NPC's and can't be used by players".

Possibly might also want to think of an age limit.. 72 spinsters incoming...

...and were just as surprised as me when their copy up today? I didn't get a "product dispatched" notice until after the postman came to deliver it, so this was really a complete surprise. Two thumbs up for timely delivery!

Fast-turning camera's in games annoy me to no end (I get disoriented really easily if the camera turns too fast). I had to turn it down to 2% to be bearable with the sensitivity of my mouse, and I'm only at 50% of the max DPI of my mouse... I pity the folks who use a really high DPI.

No they don't. It's just the server status page that's broken. Server list ingame has them neatly split across 2 different tabs.

At least you'll be home before I am! I'm stuck in a foreign country, not getting back til very late tonight. Curse them for opening the servers 2 days early.

I put my key in somewhere on day 1-3 from the start of preorders (I know I was a little late, but can't quite remember how late) and can log in already. Unfortunately no play time for me as I'm off to the airport in an hour. I would have been home in time for the start of early access if they'd stuck to the original plan of 5 days early access! I just wish I could give my extra hours of unused access to someone who can actually use it and isn't stuck on planes and trains most of the day..