I had this when it was on PTS. To me it seemed like it was somehow related to the sound card issues. Anytime I had this sort of problem it was after a big audio glitch. I haven't had a problem with this on the version that went live though.

I wanted SPACE PONIES! WHEEEE! Seriously though, about the only thing I was expecting that didn't come was that story progression would involve less grinding.

This is actually a somewhat reasonable concern. Except that in TOR romance stories can only be started by you choosing to flirt back with your companions. All you will have to do to avoid unwanted SGR stories is just not flirt with people. Clicking a flirt prompt is the same as activating a "yes, please" flag for starting that character's romance. Having said that I doubt we will see more than 1 SGR enabled companions per class, so I doubt you'll have to worry about love triangles. The most you could have would be more like ME1. Also TOR is no where near as explicit as ME. It should all be pretty mild.

I noticed that too. That is either going to be awesome or the most ridiculous looking vanity mount yet. But, you know, you can totally get chicks in a tank.

This post may end up getting blasted, but let me try to help out the mods and anyone new to this conversion by explaining where the mods are coming from with their rules on this. Over on the thread about this in Story and Lore we've had a long time to figure out where the lines are in talking about this. That means it is okay to post "do not want" type messages as long as you aren't excessively dismissive (I.E. "This is stupid, who would want it.") or crude in doing so. There is a degree to which it is okay to talk about your feelings on how adding SGR would negatively effect the game, but remember to keep your tone civil or your post will get deleted. Try to keep everything friendly and you should be fine. Just remember there are people who do care about this and some of them are devs. What is not okay to do is compare SGR to any other RL issues such as race, religion, or RL politics of sexuality. This is basically seen as trolling by the mods. Even if it is just a rhetorical point, it is not something the mods view as acceptable. There are too many strong feeling about RL politics on sexuality, and the mods do not want them brought into this conversation. Doing so is what will get you infractions. Also, treating SGR as something kinky is likely to get you in trouble. There has been no comment that SGR will be any more explicit than the current romances and that argument carries unfortunate implications that can bring RL politics into this. This isn't just something that applies to people posting negative comments either. Pro-SGR comments are not acceptable if they talk about views on sexuality in RL politics. This is not the place for that sort of debate. So, does anyone think we're ever going to get anything official from BW announcing content that is, apparently, coming in patch 1.5, or are we going to have to wait for the patch notes?

Speaking of us being a squeaky wheel, did anyone else notice they locked the latest thread over on general discussion with a promise that it would be reopened "soon." They claimed they had to clear out all of the OT comments. That was 12 hours ago. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they didn't like us hanging out outside the "ghetto thread" but they've decided that their old line about this being the official thread came across as too harsh.

Yeah, but wasn't there kind of a consensus to turn that other thread into the thread that actually asks for clarifications on BW's position, since it is in the more high profile forum, while we let this thread degenerate into it's natural state of OT SGR discussion?

Can I just ask, why exactly did we ditch the thread over in General Discussion? The mods didn't lock it, they even cleaned it out like they would this one, but no new post in like two days. I'd try to keep it going myself, but I literally can't think of anything to say on it that wouldn't be synonymous with "bump."

This is a pretty minor thing, but yeah, I agree it is pretty annoying for immersion. Backstab in particular is very weird for this. The glowing hole through the mob which only deals like 2% damage is pretty stupid looking.

I dunno, maybe Doc's SGR story could give him even more freudian excuses by saying part of his issue stem from repressed homosexuality. Can't you see! All he needs is some gay lovin' to help him! We can fix him.

I have to admit I kind of like the idea of a class that reflects the story of Leia and Padme. In broad theory, I think that was what BW intended for the IA role, but the class story ended up being something else. BW originally claimed that SI and JC class stories would be based around political intrigue and diplomacy,but that never really paned out. A class story that showed us the political side of the war would be pretty cool.

BW's official line on this back in beta was that they literally couldn't do player species that were too inhuman. All of the animation for the cut scenes has to synch up for any possible species and that means the models can't be too far off of a standard Huamn. Meaning there will never be playable Hutts, Toydarians, Killiks, or any other species outside of a standard human body plan. As much as this will probably annoy people for me to point out, one of the key problems with characters needing to match up for cutscenes is that they need to match up for all cutscenes, including the weak tea romance ones. Which means that any playable species needs to have a (kissable) face. That last one I recall being a key reason BW said they wouldn't do droids (or I'm guessing Kel Dor). BW also said they wouldn't do a species that couldn't speak basic, which sadly means no Wookiees. So with all of those official restrictions in place (assuming I remembered all that correctly) the only major SW species that fit the bill and are "alien" are probably the Nautolan, the Falleen, the Neti and maybe the Verpine.

Yeah, but that really doesn't help about reporting the absolutely staggering number of griefers we've been getting since server consolidation. We need something to let us do a quick chat log copy and send it to a GM. The starting planets are getting out of hand. If you haven't seen the "wacky fun" roll a new toon and check it out.

Wow, got to love a mod response that was basically TL;DR have a vague copy and pasted response. The OPs point is a fairly good one. The two biggest net results of server consolidation I've so far seen have been; 1) A sharp rise in the number of stupid names with special character and/or ridiculous last names. 2) A greater number of jerks getting the opportunity to meet other jerks and prove that in an age where anonymity is increasingly rare online The GIFT is still in full force.

This might not just be PVP. I had something similar happen to me with PVE on Taris with the last build that was on PTS. One second I'm beating on a gold star next thing I know there is a weird graphical flicker, my companion is down, my health is at about half of what it was a second ago, and Rakghouls are COMING THROUGH THE FREAKIN' WALLS AT SUPER SPEED! I would've thought it was just Lag except for the last part. I kind of vaguely remember there being a similar bug during the open beta. Anyone else having anything like that?

Just for practical reasons I doubt we'll see Nautolans as playable. The effect problems with Twi'lek headtails are bad enough, and adding more tentacles doesn't really seem like it would help. Since people are talking about what species they'd like to see, let me just throw out Zeltrons. If BW is mainly going to reskin humans they may as well do it in interesting pastel colors.

My background in QA is pretty limited (one summer during college subcontracting doing QA on DDR of all thing), but I have enough experience coding to safely say the one thing you never ever do is integrate a large amount of new code into a program when you're bug testing. New code is best tested in the smallest discrete blocks you can manage to add to a stable build. Just adding a large lump of new code makes it nearly impossible to track down conflicts. Eventually everything does have to be integrated for testing of a new build, but that is only done after you've already worked on all the subsets of the upgrade. My point is I doubt there is a big file sitting on a computer somewhere called "new story." I would assume BW probably works with about one scene of new content at a time, which has to be tested to destruction on about a dozen different hardware configurations. It is probably about a days work for a single team to fully test a single cutscene. So yeah, I think QA having to divert resources to help fix issues in the live client is probably going to slow them down a lot. Planed or not, the new graphics bugs seem like they have gotten away from BW a bit, and I do worry they will screw up the release schedule. I don't know if it will matter, but if there is a time crunch in QA I could easily see SGR being cut as "lower priority content" since BW has never officially confirmed that it will be in that release. I don't really think us talking about SGR as not being the highest priority will factor in such a decision, but let's not give them any ideas, k?

Very zen. To the OP: Look, man. Galaxies was not everyone's cup of tea and this isn't SWG 2. Even now I'm pretty sure TOR's playerbase is a fair bit bigger than galaxies ever was. For the more cosmetic stuff wait for F2P, that sort of thing is what F2P was made for. Genuine gameplay issues are a different thing, but TOR is still a relatively new MMO. It'll get better in time.

I mostly agree, and that is an argument I've made more than once myself. The thing is that at this point if SGR is coming in 1.5 the story team is done with it and it is probably going through QA testing. I don't know the particulars of BWs organizational structure, but in general there are two distinct teams that deal with fixing bugs. QA who's job it is to find bugs before a new content is added and a Live Team who deal with bugs that slipped by the QA guys into the released product. Since 1.4 was so buggy, it isn't outside the realm of possibilities that they are diverting QA guys to help out the Live Team. that means they might end up cutting down on new content in 1.5 if they are more worried about making a deadline than releasing all the content they want. I'm just saying, this is not the moment to be going "Oh, we're fine, we can wait."

. . . SGR is done! Well, done-ish. Hence the head of PVP talking about it being part of 1.5.

Okay, so let us break this down. Prioritize it for me. What exactly do you think BW's priority list should look like and where exactly does SGR fit on it?

Well, for the moment the mods aren't closing this per usual so we're rolling with it.

Okay, this may end up getting deleted, but I've been biting my tongue to keep from posting this for about a week now and the conversation going on over in General Discussion finally tipped me over the edge. Why the hell do we always say "We're not saying this should be a priority"? Hell yes SGR should be a priority! I don't know about anyone else, but if they decided that they had to cut SGR from 1.5 for "higher priority content" like that damn droid I would go out of my freakin' mind with rage. Look, I'm not saying bug fixes shouldn't be top priority. I would really love to be able to play a marathon session without having a system crash from the new shadow effects, but why do we cede the ground that "more popular content" should be considered a higher priority? The various incarnations of this thread has had more than a half million views at this point and I've seen at least two dozen players announce here that they're quitting TOR over the lack of SGR. To me that sounds like this is important to a fair chunk of the playerbase. Ignoring that though, why do we accept the premise that PVP and group content should be a higher priority than SGR and general story content? Everytime some anti-SGR naysayer says "We need better endgame content!" we act like that is a valid argument. Since we've been waiting for SGR there have been four major game updates which are mostly focused on endgame content! They literally just got a new one and half the forums are going MOAR! I know there are genuine problems that need fixing, but why is pvp balance always regarded as an acceptable priority over story? This isn't a democracy, the most popular content doesn't win, and I reject the idea that what "The Majority Of Players Want" is more raids. I think most players either want impossible pipe dream content or general improvements to the overall game. General improvements doesn't translate to endgame, it makes fixing all of the minor problems in the game (like the lack of SGR)! I know that the "priorities" argument is mostly thinly veiled homophobia, but so what? It sounds reasonable enough to someone stupid enough to buy into the golden mean fallacy. Okay, rant over. I'm off to actually play the game for a while.

The STORY team yeah. It is writers and artists not level designers. I don't think they've just been working on SGR because I keep up with what the team head says. Hal Hood has given a couple of interesting interviews lately. Makeb isn't just one giant raid, it is a full story expansion for endgame players.

Look, ignoring the whole "I find this icky, I don't want it in the game," argument. This whole thread is about asking BW to officially confirm what a head pvp dev said. This is content that is apparently almost ready for launch. Complaining that the devs shouldn't be "wasting time" working on content that has been in development since pre-launch and is about ready to go live isn't going to get you anywhere. Even ignoring the futility of that though, exactly what content do you think SGR is keeping you from getting? BW has distinct teams that work on different content. Patch 1.5 is the first patch that contains new content from the Story Development Team. To quote from the interview linked in the first post; "Uh, yeah, that's story and I'm pvp. That's about the farthest thing from what I work on." There is no new PVP, PVE, or Raid content that SGR is going to keep you from. This is an entirely different team working on adding content that is completely removed from anything "The Majority of Players Want."