Look, I get that you're passionate about this, but before you call Eric a liar, you should actually pay attention to what he wrote: Eric never claimed that Revan's robes are the same color as what they were in the past, and he never claims that they are "supposed" to be darker. The only thing he claims is that currently the CM Revan's robes are the same color as the ones the Revan NPC is wearing, and that this is how BW wants it. You can make the argument that you would still prefer them to be darker, but don't call him a liar or tell him that what he's telling isn't true, when it clearly is. That just makes you look like a crazy person.

Also regarding question 4: In the quest log it tells you what level each quest is recommended for. Usually it's fine to do the quests a few levels above or below the recommended level. How long the group finder takes before it will find you a group depends on both what flashpoint it is, and what role(s) you are able fill (with damage dealer being the role which takes the longest)

You need at most four buttons for movement . Some people never move backward, and some move forward only by holding both mouse buttons pressed at the same time. So decide what you want your movement keys to be and where you want them to be, and then bind everything around those keys to abilities. Some people say that you should start by only binding a few buttons and click the rest, I disagree completely. Bind all abilities to keys which you can comfortably reach right from the start and never click anything with your mouse, else you're just breeding bad habits. Personally I moved my movement keys to ESDF, that way I got an extra row of keys to the left of my movement keys for abilities, while I can still comfortably reach shift. When choosing what ability to put on what key, just think about what makes sense for you personally and how you want to play. Having a mouse with extra buttons on it also really helps. I use a Razer Naga. It took a few days to get used to having that many buttons on my mouse but after that short period it has felt great.

Nice! By the end of this promotion, I'm going to at least have a fifth level 50 to add to my other four. Do you mean that rested XP won't get used at all during double XP weekends, or just that it'll get used like it normally would, only without the rested part of the XP being doubled? Basically, killing a mob with rested XP but no boosts gives 200% (100% normal + 100% rested). Would it then during double XP weekends be 300% (200% normal + 100% rested), or something else?

I think you should do it more often. I think that one of the reasons why things got a bit crazy is because in the past there hasn't really been much communication between the players and BioWare regarding things happening in the game, so now that someone actually said something, the players assumed it meant that it has to be regarding something huge because why else would someone suddenly say something, right? When it comes to communication, in my opinion no one does it better than Riot on the North American League of Legends forums (and when Riot asked the LOL community what they can do to make it so that Europeans would not feel left out, I pointed you guys out as a company where as a player I don't feel like I'm being treated as lesser because of where I happen to live). Some of the people in Riot get into long conversations with their players every day, so players know their personalities and know what it means when they say something, when things happen in the game the players know a lot more about why things were done the way they were, and so on. I do think that BW has improved recently in this area though. It feels a lot friendlier over here when there are people communicating with the players about things that are happening in the game, instead of the main source of communication regarding the game being patch notes.

I was hoping it would've been fixed in the patch today, but nope.... Last time BioWare broke the helmets under hoods feature (in the beta) it took somewhere around a year until it was fixed. Let's hope it won't be like that this time also.

Is there really no one in this entire company who can stop themselves from making foolish decisions?

Gear is not the thing I would be worried about in any way, because as you write, you can just use the bolster system for that. Abilities are talents on the other hand would be a big issue. If you feel like there would be too few players if you made the bracket 50-54, then in my opinion the lowest you can go is 46-54, that way at least everyone who plays in that bracket can go all the way into one of the talent trees. Please don't screw up lowbie PVP, at the moment it's so good.

Yeah it's good that there are more buffs in the talent trees, however when looking at the buffs in the talent trees for the other classes I am familiar with, I still feel like Mercenaries and Operatives seem like the ones which will come out as the weakest classes... although Operatives does have some nice stuff in their talent trees. Looking forward to trying these changes out for myself once it goes live (don't have enough disk space to install PTS...). Talent tree calculator with PTS talents: http://pts.swtor-spy.com/skill-tree-calculator/

LOL TBH when I read the patch notes for both the Mercenary and the Operative, in my opinion both of them reads like what those classes would need right now (other than the Missile Salvo damage numbers, which if they are as reported above, I would assume it's a bug or something). The problem is that all other classes become significantly stronger as well, so it seems as though these two classes will still be far behind. It felt like a joke, like BioWare is in on the "Solution: Nerf Operatives" meme. Hopefully it just looks bad early on, maybe there will be more useful stuff in the skill trees or something...

Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of "youngsters these days don't know how bad they have it". I started playing online games almost a decade ago with Counter-Strike, and on the server I played on in Sweden a lot of people had under 20 ms latency, some under 10, and if you played on a server which was properly configured and if you had the know-how to configure your own game client, hit boxes and hit registration was almost perfect. I don't know if it's just because modern games have more data which they need to transfer now compared to before, or if there's something somewhere in the connection which makes gaming worse, but these days I never have as low latency and always have significantly worse hit registration compared to back when I played CS.

Either those "mathematicians" you've been listening to suck at what they do, or you just weren't paying attention, because this is false. Other than accuracy, no attribute has anything which suddenly happens at some exact number.

No one would ever be banned in any game for cheating based on videos or screenshots submitted by players, because it's too easily manipulated. It can still be good to record suspicious behaviour, and if you wanted to you could still post to other discussion boards than the official ones (such as reddit.com/r/swtor).

As others have said, it's the Commando/Mercenary which is underpowered, not Vanguard/Powertech, and when someone writes something about some class, people generally understand that the person means both mirror classes. It's easier to just write "Commando is ...", instead of always having to write "Commando/Mercenary is ...". Of course there are always some extremely ignorant players who say dumb things like "of course Sorcerers are overpowered compared to Sages, lightning obviously does way more damage than rocks", but you can just ignore them.

Well said. I love what Gingers did. If he hadn't made it so obvious, the people claiming that there are no hacks in SWTOR would've still dominated every discussion on the topic. Stuff like this needs to be sorted out before ranked season 1 goes live, and players do it in stealth while the rest of their team is in on it.

When I got my Spymaster gear, I got it based on what I actually saw in the game, the gear preview screen WAS the advertised appearance I went by. I especially liked the upper body, because it was unique and unlike anything else in the game. Look, I get that you wanted to change it because some people got it based on what they saw in the icon, but when you are the one who screws up, if anyone it's you who are the ones who should suffer for it when you go and try to make it right, not the players. Not cool BioWare, not cool...

Don't use your anecdotal evidence of lower populations on ganking servers as some sort of "factual proof" of PVP not being popular, especially when there exists actual factual proof which proves the opposite of what you claim. Scroll down to about halfway on this page: http://www.swtor.com/blog/meet-developers-jonathan-crow The graph shows you how much time in total is spent in various areas of the game, ordered by popularity at the time when the graph was made. Warzones are ranked number 3, behind being on the fleet and being on planets.

Cool story bro. Video proof of Gingers the speedhacker on POT5: There have been many long threads about this person, most of which have been deleted by BioWare. Here is one of the threads which is still up: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=578645 Me posting this here is probably going to get this thread deleted as well, but it's definitely worth it to shut up ignorant people like you.

A soft cap means that at first a stat follows one curve, then at one point it starts following a different curve (at the soft cap point) and then it is obvious that the stat in question is no longer as good as it used to be. SWTOR has no soft caps for any stats, they all only follow only one curve which never changes. What does happen is that at some points the stat priorities start slowly changing. So in the beginning stat A might be better than stat B, eventually they start becoming equally important, eventually stat B becomes more important. Where those points are depends on your spec, playstyle, and what gear is available in the game at the time, and when figuring it out you should not look at the percentages, you should look at the actual numbers (for example your critical rating is increased by both your Critical stat and your class' mainstat, both of which are on different curves). If you want some rough numbers to follow, then it seems that a lot of people like following the numbers you quoted. All stats work exactly the same in PVP as they do in PVE, there is no "PVP crit" stat. The only thing which does not apply in PVE is the PVP damage increase, reduction, and healing, and all three of those do exactly what they say they do and nothing else. As with everything else with RNG, sometimes you'll be lucky, sometimes you'll be unlucky.

There are some specific techniques which some people use, but in my opinion if you haven't even tried simply changing some keyindings yet, that is the very first thing you should do before trying anything else. Preferences > Key bindings > Quickbar Figure out what buttons you want to use for movement, and everything which you can quickly and comfortably reach around those buttons should be bound to an ability on the quickbar Eventually you'll want to have every single in-combat ability bound to a key, and for this you'll either need some sort of MMO mouse (a mouse with a bunch of extra buttons), or have more abilities on buttons with key modifiers (shift, ctrl, alt). Experiment and try to find out what you like the most.

The numbers at the end of the Warzone are irrelevant in the OP/UP discussion, even without taking player skill into consideration. Let's say BW makes a new class. The class' weapon is a pillow. The class has two abilities: 1. The player hits the enemy with the pillow. Does 1 damage. 2. The player QQ's so hard that the player's mom comes into the game and instantly kills the enemy. 1 minute cooldown. Even though the players final damage done is not higher than that of other DPS, this does not change the fact that ability number two is completely overpowered and should not be in the game.

In response to your first case scenario: This is completely irrelevant, it's exactly the same as it works currently in 10-49. In response to your second case scenario: It seems as though you are assuming that there will be a new ability at the end of each talent tree, and otherwise they will be the same? Bioware has already confirmed that the talent trees will all be reworked, however they've never said that there will be a new ability at the end of each tree, they've said that there will be a new ability per class. Any speculation regarding what will be overpowered because this or that might potentially happen to the skill trees is way premature since we have no idea how the trees will be changed..

In an interview a few months ago Gabe confirmed that they're planning on introducing a bolster system for level 50 PVP. This in combination with the relatively small increases in power which we'll get in the expansion (no new top tier gear, meaning that a level 55 will have the exact same gear as a level 50 does now, and only one new ability per class), makes me think that there's no reason why there wouldn't be a 50-55 bracket, at least at the beginning of the expansion. Remember, the main reason why BW decided to split the brackets in exactly 10-49 and 50, is because at 50 you got a lot of completely new gear which could not be replicated at 10-49.

It's possible that e.g. there was a Inquisitor Force Speed and Marauder Predation combo with the players out of combat, that will make someone get to the bridge consoles really quickly. No, that is not true. For the team on attack in round two to win, they have to either get further than the first team, or reach the same place in a shorter time. Just reaching the same place is not enough.

Seeing as how you wrote that you're in the 10-49 bracket: Are you super-twinked with 1 million HP? In 10-49, I never give my vote to a super-twink, regardless of how well they do.