Consular is pretty boring through Act I, starts picking up in Act II, and just goes up from there. Voss was amazing. It's also possible to get a near-ideal ending for it (or end of Act III, at least) if you make the right choices. My friends who played the Smuggler and Trooper stories to their conclusions seemed to have some issues with the in-story events at the end, even though they enjoyed their stories, whereas the last Jedi Knight class quest seems to just be a pain in the neck. I don't know specifics; trying to remain unspoiled.

Sadly, this. I enjoy World PvP occasionally, and it's actually more fun to be a little outnumbered, but 2:1 isn't being a little outnumbered -- and I think the ratio's actually worse than that on my server. Cap the number of people allowed in the zone, or buff the side with fewer people, maybe? I do understand that having the two warring factions working together harmoniously to trade objectives is not desirable for a PvP zone, but having nobody show up at all is probably even less desirable. (Actually, I'm guessing that people will just roll alts on the other side and trade kills with friends. So somebody will show up, at least!)

Well, in WoW they did cap the number of people allowed to join the world PvP zone so that numbers could be even, which seems like a good idea to me, since it does encourage faction balance (the 'bigger' your faction was, the harder it would be to get into the zone.) Of course, I'm sure there are people against that idea as well. But I don't think having everyone in the game Empire side and nobody Republic side is healthy for PvP, either.

This. (Well, IMO people who don't like the game absolutely have the right to say why they don't like it, but speaking erroneously for other people just isn't constructive at all.) I'm not a Star Wars fan at all, and I love the game. Many of the people playing with me are not particularly Star Wars fans. Sorry, but it's true.

I play as a healer, and Qyzen/Iresso do their job; hit 50 recently, and didn't have any problems throughout the leveling experience. They're mostly geared in what I picked up through quests, the occasional flashpoint, and commendation gear if I had any commendations left over. I'm definitely better geared than they are. Just CC when needed, interrupt the big damage abilities, kill enemies in order of weakness and focus on healing when the companion's getting burst down by multiple enemies. Don't expect to brute force everything down.

Completed, although I'm a bit wary of people trying to rig the results, since I assume you can just spam it over and over again. I really wish Bioware would just make one of these themselves, and confine it to one vote per account. Thanks for creating this in lieu of an official poll, though!

I've been fine just binding his Attack and Passive to something easier to hit than ctrl+1/ctrl+2, and turning off his AoE attacks if I want to CC one mob in a bunched-up group. (Keeping him on Passive and then running/line-of-sighting to draw the rest of the mobs away from the CC target before re-activating him also works, and doesn't gimp his DPS.) Just need to make sure to have him pick off the smaller enemies first before whittling down the big guys, for harder pulls.

I'm not much of a Star Wars fan; haven't watched the originals in well over a decade. I certainly wouldn't play anything for it. I love this game. Here's why: 1) Story. You may not enjoy it, but others do. I don't consider the voice-overs 'crappy', but in any case, it's not the voice-overs that seal the deal for me: it's the attempt to make questing engaging, to make dialogue responses have an impact. Planescape: Torment this is not, but it's far beyond anything the MMO market has put out so far. I love the fact that a random conversation decision I made in a previous quest actually turned out to change the follow-up quest in a significant fashion: someone who might have turned traitor did not do so, and in fact stepped up to do the Republic proud. Perhaps you don't think much of this; it's just a bunch of pixels doing one thing instead of another. But I care about the NPCs in this game. I love the fact that every time I make a decision, I have to consider how it's likely to impact my companion, and if doing what I think is right is worth making my companion unhappy. Losing 1 affection with a companion doesn't mean much. It's easy to make it back. But I don't think of it that way -- the game is immersive enough that I think of it as disappointing them, upsetting them, making them think less of me. And I think it's awesome that the game makes me care. This might not matter to you. It matters to me. 2) Companions. I play a healer. In the past, it often meant that I'd level as a DPS spec before switching to healing at max level, or that I'd level a DPS toon first, for money, and only level my healer with friends. I've never had as much fun soloing as a healer as I have in this game. But even beyond the convenience of having companions, I love the fact that they're there, populating my ship, making adventures less lonely. These aren't just a bunch of stats and pixels following you around; they have personalities, likes and dislikes, opinions and quirks. I have plenty of real friends to play with when I choose to do so, but sometimes it's nice to have the illusion of companionship rather than the actual thing, you know? Well, maybe you don't. I can't explain it very clearly, except to say that companions don't judge: they won't care if I take a 10 minute detour to pick all the herbs in the area, or if I alt-tab out for half an hour to have a snack, or watch a vid. At the same time, playing completely alone is just, well, lonely. Sorry, maybe you have to be a certain mixture of social and anti-social to grok that. Suffice it to say that I believe TOR would be a completely different experience without companions, and a much poorer one. 3) Lots of random tweaks and conveniences, such as companion crafting, crafting from bank storage instead of just bag storage, fully moddable gear, etc. that I don't believe have been used elsewhere. (Actually, I don't know about the moddable gear; I just haven't seen it used in the games that I've played.) These are just conveniences, so they're not a huge deal to me, but they're nice to have. I also happen to think that the environmental aesthetics are gorgeous, even if they're not as graphically sharp as they could be. For me, that's enough of a contrast from what's come before to make the difference between 'will play if everyone else wants to' to 'would play even if nobody else I knew were playing'. It's just a bonus that a lot of my friends like this game, too. I have nothing against Guild Wars 2, and hey, if TOR has slowed and stagnated sufficiently by the time that comes out, maybe I'll play that instead. At the moment, though, I don't see it happening.

Just wanted to say that we do exist! I'm really enjoying myself, as is everyone I'm playing with. I'd been playing World of Warcraft for about three, four years, and hadn't gotten tired of it yet. I was planning on playing TOR as a single-player game, to get my single-player RPG fix, while still raiding in WoW. When I started asking around to see who was planning to play about a week before Early Access, I got three responses; everyone else was pretty 'meh'. Then Early Access came, I started playing with those friends, we talked about it on Ventrilo, and a couple more people picked up the game. In the end, my entire World of Warcraft raid group switched over, and we're looking forward to ops. More casual friends are having a blast as well. It's a bit disorientating to go from the happy happy fun fun atmosphere in guild chat to the forums, but I suppose the game can't appeal to everyone, and my friends and I just happen to be part of the target audience. In any case, we're here! *waves*

I feel as though a lot of the people disparaging the use of add-ons don't have a clear idea of what they're allowed to do (at least in WoW). Healbot's name is misleading, for example: it doesn't actually make healing robotic. I believe -- I may be wrong; this was before my time -- it did at one point suggest spells to use, or targets for healing, or something of that sort, but Blizzard put an end to that. These days, it's just another raid frame add-on that allows healers to customize the information they see on raid frames and 'click-heal' (bind left-mouse-click to Flash Heal, for instance, and right-mouse-click to Greater Heal), freeing up a few keys for other keybinds. That's it. It doesn't automate the process of healing. Add-ons like that aren't allowed in WoW, and nobody's suggesting that they should be allowed in ToR.

Of course they're not needed. All of us posting in this forum are (presumably) playing the game without add-ons currently, aren't we? That doesn't mean they're not desirable, at least to a certain portion of the population. But hey, I love needing to have a couple extra ability bars visible on my screen just to track the cooldowns of my abilities! I TOTALLY love the current awkwardness of changing keybinds! I adore not being able to tell which DoT on the mob is mine when grouped with others of the same class, or having to make raid frames incredibly large and ugly in order to make out what the debuffs on my party members are. (Alternatively, I adore squinting really hard at the screen.) Not having a sort/restack option for my bags? That's a favorite. And as I've already posted elsewhere, not being able to point to a log to prove that someone died to standing in fire rather than to not getting enough heals -- as a healer, that thought makes me glowy with joy. None of these are game-breaking issues, and while it's nice to hope that Bioware will get down to offering fixes for all of them, judging from the amount of flak they're already taking for not doing enough on these very forums, I rather doubt they'll have time to deal with more peripheral issues for a good long while. If it saves time and money on the part of the developer AND still improves the game experience, why on earth not enable addons? And for those saying that add-ons will make the game 'too easy' -- are you honestly against something that will, according to you, make other players play more effectively? (I personally don't believe in the magical power of DBM to turn a chump into a hardcore raider, but you do, I guess.) I've run with many, many, many people in WoW who, while presumably having DBM, still managed to stand in stuff, get hit by stuff, not dispel stuff, not interrupt stuff, not use their defensive cooldowns against stuff etc. If there's a magical add-on that will grant raid awareness, bring it on, I say. Seriously: if you don't like add-ons, don't use them. Nobody will hold it against you -- probably nobody will even know. But allow the rest of us our toys, please.

Um, yes, it does. And people do look at things like Deaths, Damage Taken, Healing Taken, Dispels, Interrupts, etc. Maybe you're not playing with the right people? I suppose, by your logic, I must be an elitest ******, because I like Grid, Recount and DBM. When doing progression raiding, my Recount generally defaults to Deaths. When pugging instances, I check Dispels and Interrupts to get an idea of which people in my group I can trust to not tunnel vision, which people I'd like to run with again. After a wipe, it's fantastic that I can link the Death or Damage Taken report to show, if necessary, that people died to stuff they shouldn't have instead of having everything blamed on me as a healer because, hey, people are dead! Clearly I wasn't doing my job! Because without a Recount-type mod, that's what's going to happen. (I mean, sometimes it's me screwing up. But it's nice to be able to show when it isn't!) Of course, that's just me. I'm sure there are plenty of people who just look at Damage Done, and laugh at everyone underneath them. But, you know, depriving them of a DPS meter will not alter their personalities. If their group wipes to an enrage timer and they can't tell who's pulling lower DPS, they'll just spread their abuse to the entire group. You can see plenty of that in Battlegrounds, where people don't know who to blame for a loss, so they just blame everybody. Removing damage meters -- let alone all mods -- is not going to make the game a happier place.

...I really didn't expect to see this subject line, but then again, last night I saw someone raging over the fact that companions can be customized, so clearly people will complain about anything. I like my ability bars to be rounded instead of square, I like having a chatlog saver so I can afk for a few minutes and be able to catch up upon returning, I like being able to customize how debuffs appear on my raid frames, and yes, I like being able to see who in my raid is not using the Lightwell, who's taking more damage than they should from standing in things, and what the tank just died of -- was it something I could have prevented, was it not? I don't expect Bioware to cater to every one of my whims -- there are bigger issues they should probably be focusing their time on -- but the nice thing about the modder community is that there's almost always someone out there who wants the same thing you do, and fortunately, some of them have the technical know-how to make it work! If you're the type who just wants a good old-fashioned bare-bones UI, that's fine, too. It's not as though we can't co-exist. I know good players who play with add-ons; I know good players who play without add-ons. I know bad players who play with a mountain of add-ons, and I know bad players who stay with vanilla UI. In the end, who cares? It's the results that count. Honestly, people are not going to care if you (generic you) don't use a mod that tells you not to stand in stuff IF YOU DON'T STAND IN STUFF. They're probably not going to kick you from a raid for pulling average DPS, though they might if you're pulling abysmally low DPS, or DPS that's not consistent with your gear level. It means that you COULD be doing better -- significantly better -- and you're not doing so, either because you just don't care, or because you don't know how. For those who just don't care, um, yeah, don't be surprised if serious raiders don't want to raid with you, because obviously they do care. There's nothing wrong with playing with other people who don't care, either; content will just be more difficult to clear. For those who want to do better but don't know how, isn't it preferable to know that something's wrong so you can fix it? (Of course, there are also groups of jerks who will kick at the drop of a hat, but why would YOU want to raid with THEM, anyway? :/) I just don't see how the answer to 'DPS meters will empower elitest jerks who think everything is judged by big numbers!' is 'Let's take away DPS meters entirely so nobody knows what exactly is going wrong, and we can all spend nights wiping in futility!' or even 'Let's take away all add-ons entirely so everyone has to play with the same UI, hurrah!' To me, it seems rather like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

First off, let me say that I'm having a blast with the game, and I've already dragged a few other people into it (who are also loving the hell out of it), and bought it for one more. I just reached the point where I got to choose my Legacy name yesterday. I've had one planned out since the beginning, and even re-rolled my toon when I realized we'd be getting the option of surnames -- granted, only from level 4. After I'd input the name and hit confirm, though, I got the 'That name is not valid' message. "Lawn" isn't valid? At first I thought the name was just unavailable, but after some experimenting with character creation (needed to select new names to go with the Legacy name I ended up with), I realized that you get another message if the name is merely already taken. I've found that: "Doctor" is invalid. "Lawn" is invalid. "Zoro" is invalid. "Luke" is invalid. "Downey" is invalid. "Mister" is valid. "Old" is valid. "Moist" is valid. "Mara" is valid. It just seems so arbitrary. Some of them I can see the reasoning behind, some of them, not so much. In any case, for those who haven't yet chosen a Legacy name, better test it out in Character Creation first to make sure it's valid. :/