. . . If they're the ones who work with PTS they probably have more of an idea of what's going on with content that is still in the pipeline than any of the other CS people...

It's probably fine to contact her through facebook, but it may not be that useful. Her job title makes it sound like her duties are more about dealing with HR and internal LBGT issues at EA. I'm not sure though, as it is clear she does a lot of community interaction with EA sponsored things like Gaymercon. I think you're only going to get an answer from her if you're asking about something like the issues we've been having with the community team, rather than the general question about SGR.

Given BW's comments about this, it is probably more accurate to say all PCs are Pansexuals who in their travels across the galaxy have never met a gay person that is interested in a relationship with them...

One of them was, but from what I understand from reading up on this it doesn't matter if a character is already married to a companion for legacy. Apparently that is something they're going to fix at some point. I'm not sure what the problem I was having was. A few of my clones on PTS got gay married this afternoon without any problems, so whatever it was is fixed now. Either that or I was paying attention this time...

That is weird. I've heard other people complain that they couldn't set certain characters as married. Maybe it is an Imp/republic thing? It could also be that I'm fairly lazy and have never messed with the family tree that much.

Is that in 1.5 over on PTS? (BTW, is it just me or is 1.5 running so slow it is unplayable?) I haven't actually messed with Legacy relationships in since 1.3, but I remember that I could only set my SW and JC as sisters tragically devided by war. ;.; I felt it was very sad on a great many levels.

Ack! You went and pulled a ninja edit! Personally I would be interested in knowing if anyone has ever tried getting in touch what that Ginger Maseda person. From that article it sounds like she is senior management at EA in charge of LGBT issues. A statement from her about how flakey we feel BW's community team has been about SGR would be pretty interesting.

Well, to be totally fair that is just with NPCs. There have been issues in the past with other MMOs customer service types getting touchy about players RPing as being a gay couple.

Okay, I just saw something kind of neat in an article at Gameindustry International linked from the PA report. . . . Nice to know EA is cool about this anyway.

When people talk about a toggle they're usually talking about a content filter so they don't have to deal with SGR. It sounds more like this is a question about why can't a player define their character's sexuality at character creation, which is something a little different. There is some merit to the idea of being able to roll a gay toon, as it would be the easiest way to implement SGR flirts, but BW doesn't like the idea. The short answer is that BW doesn't view SGRs in their games as being related to RL concepts of sexuality and they regard it as just another aspect of the RP system in which choices define a character (which carries all kinds of unfortunate real world connotations). Personally (and this is probably going to sound like trolling) I think BW doesn't like the idea of openly gay PCs as it would screw up their favorite method of adding "depth" to SGRs. About 60% of BW SGR stories involve breathless schoolgirl types going "*gasp* I know this is forbidden and so very wrong, but..." In a setting where it is okay to be openly gay it screws up that dynamic.

For about five months I bought into the mindset that there wasn't much point in playing the game with the lack of SGR. Then I figured out how the Legacy System works. If you aren't just interested in m/m SGR, a female JC's SGR story is only going to be 45+, so there isn't really a point in holding off leveling one up. Once you have a character like that you can go get Legacy Gear and other bonuses that will make leveling up a new character take quite a bit less time. That's my solution to the whole dilemma of wanting to play the game, but not level a character past being able to do SGR.

I tend to agree that it is very hard to mess up during class quests. Honestly, the only one I ever had trouble with was the final boss fight on Tatooine as a SW. The room that fight takes place in is so cramped there is no room to properly use knockback abilities to buy time to heal. Having said that, it would be kind of neat if they added a "story mode" where boos fights difficulties could be lowered to the point where you could basically skip them. A no drop penalty and nerfed quest loot for taking the option would probably keep it for creating too many balance problems. I'm just saying, they include an option to blow off tedious dialogue, an option to skip boring fights would be nice too.

The Old Republic Era is mostly covered in comics rather than novels. The fairly new, and ongoing, series Dawn of The Jedi covers the origin of the Jedi and Sith. The comic series Knights Of The Old Republic is pretty good, and gives a good background on the era. A lot of the backstory for TOR comes from a series called Tales of The Jedi, which I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone reading. The only Old Republic era novels I'm aware of are the TOR tie-in novels and Red Harvest which is a prequel to the amazing book Death Troopers (which if you haven't read is my top recommendation). If you're just looking for a good SW book try the X-Wing series, a new one (Mercy Kill) just came out, and every novel in the series is wonderful. A lot of people like the Clone War era Shatterpoint and The Medstar series, but they weren't my favorites.

Yeah, but a lot of the stuff the devs have said implied that F2P would launch with more content than just vanity items. Things like real content, which presumably means Makeb.

We don't actually know that the stuff in question is for 1.5. The short version of the leak, as I understand it anyway, is that the guys over at TORhead were tearing through the code for 1.4 and found a bunch of items that aren't in game yet. Most of the stuff was vanity items, which probably means F2P content. Take from that what you will.

Jedi marrying and having kids is probably the craziest tangle of retcons in the EU. It was a fairly common backstory for characters in the earlier New Republic era stories (e.g. anything that was written before the AoTC) to say that a character had a Secret Jedi parent who tragically died during the "dark times." They actually preemptively retconed this in the book Rouge Planet, where they explained that it wasn't uncommon for Jedi of the pre-clone wars era to go into semi-retirement once they reached the rank of Master and go off to raise a family. I think the current canon they've settled on is that marriage was against the rules of the Jedi Order, but a lot of people did it anyway and the Council could grant exceptions to the rule for good reasons (like; I really want to) to people that they thought could be trusted (for example, someone who wouldn't do stupid things like have a quicky vegas style wedding and then lie about it). It is little weird that there are rules about this in TOR. The main original source for this era is (the unreadable comic series) Tales of The Jedi, which was lousy with 10th generation Jedi Nobles off leading The Army of Light. I think it was added to KoTOR mostly to add a touch of "forbidden romance" to spice things up and add a connection to later canon. On the topic at hand though, I liked the story about Satele having a kid. I thought It added a nice touch of tragedy to the character. I saw it less as abandonment, and more a choice she was forced to make between duty and family.

Hey, could everyone try to keep the other SGR thread over in general discussion going? I think one of the better tactics we can use to try to get an answer out of BW is to keep the mods swamped trying to keep that troll bait clean. Remember, don't engage the trolls and haters, just flag and ignore. ;) /nudge /nudge

Yeah, but we can be optimistic. Plus they keep promoting the droid, which is part of Makeb content.

So, um, any chance of getting a official reply on this? We're just looking for any clarification the devs can give on if we should really be expecting SGR in 1.5.

I've never played a BH far enough to romance her (I keep meaning to, I really want to unlock Chiss), so I can't really say with much certainty, but I always thought she was meant to be more mousey than loli. Even if she is intended to be young I think it counts as "legal loli" since the story takes place over an indeterminate number of years and her lack of aging is just a limitation of the technology. That sort of thing bothers some people, but I tend to think of it as a "don't like, don't play" sort of things. /shrug

I actually like BT1. I never took the difference of that type to be about weight, but rather age. The effects BT1 has on heads, especially when combined with one of the clean (or heavily freckled) complexions, tends to create characters that look like they are about 16. Whereas, if you combine BT1 with a very weathered complexion and one of the more lined heads, it can create a very nice wizened look. I tend to think that was the point of BT1, the extremes in age body type.

I'm always surprised the JC Nar Shadaa quest line, which I tend to think of as the Macross Plus story, doesn't come up in conversations about droid romance more often.

A million and half jokes spring to mind. Seriously though, BW maintains such a secretive attitude about SGR that I wouldn't be surprised if the patch notes about this was "expanded story for companions" or something that sounded equally innocuous.

I've seen a lot of patches that were as bugged as 1.4 since I started playing MMOs waaay back with EQ1 in '99, but I've very seldom seen one that generated as much negative reaction from the playerbase as this one. I honestly don't think it is that bad really, it was mostly just hardware conflicts they didn't catch in QA, but it feels like it was something of a perfect storm to make a lot of players crazy about it. There was too long a delay since the last major content update combined with the common wisdom that it was rushed to compete with WOW's new expansion. that just left a lot of players turned off from the game right now and venting their bad feelings on the forums. I dunno, I just kind of feel there is a bad vibe going around. Trying to attribute causes to it is probably futile.

Sorry to hear that, you always add an interesting perspective to the discussions. To me it kind of feels like it isn't just this thread. Ever since the last patch hit with it's super buggy content everything feels kind of down about the game's community right now. Or maybe that is only part of it, since the server consolidation the vibe in game has gotten pretty bad too, it's like those two jerks every server had all met when the consolidation happened and are now busy forming whole new guilds of jerks. I dunno, all I can really say for sure is it feels like there is some kind of bad vibe going around that is tainting the community. So, I get where you are coming from. To me the weird thing is that all the information we do have about SGR is fairly optimistic, so I'm not really sure why everyone is so down about this. Maybe it is just that we're attracting a higher number of trolls and 'phobes than usual, but it feels like more than that. I don't really know what the deal is, but it isn't just you Kioma, this place is starting to feel tainted by the un-fun variety of the dark side.