Most MMO-PvPers that I've gamed with over the last 6 years hate FPS games because they don't have the reflexes for "twitch" gaming. No PvP focused MMO has had any great success. It's a tiny tiny niche market and any company that focuses on it deserves to fail. I also can't wait to see Blizzard's 4th quarter numbers this evening, especially since TOR is supposed to follow the "rules set by WoW".

Interesting, you became immediately defensive and accused me of "flaming you" and "didn't read my post entirely". I'll stop right here and leave you be. Be safe, stay warm.

You must be new to the forums. If you had actually read half the posts here you would see that people with computer builds that make yours look like an overgrown pocket calculator are having issues. Note also that computers that run Skyrim and such at max settings have issues with this game, yet Bioware lists dual core systems as a minimum that can run the game. If a high end system is required to run it, that should be on the box. If we were trying to run a game that required your i5 on a dual core, the arrogance would be understandable, but most of us are running the game on systems above the given minimum. Bioware's first quarter earnings will tell the truth of it all. Great that you have good fps, hope you enjoy the game.

Forgive my skipping most of the posts in this thread, as I'm pressed for time at the moment. If I started my own thread instead it would be titled "Lightning Brings Balance". In MY opintion (IMO), PvP faction numbers balance and Customer Satisfaction could be helped greatly by allowing Force Lightning visuals to Consulars. This could be as easy as an option in the settings alongside displaying Dark Side Corruption and whether to display your helmet or not. Just click the button and you use Force Lightning visuals instead, with possibly a small change in tooltip text necessary. Force Lightning has been an issue for quite some time. Many people hate the object throwing and pebble shooting of the Jedi Consular. Many people LOVE the force lightning effects in the movies. Yoda himself had Force Lightning duels with both Duku and Palpatine. Now I fully understand the idea that Jedi are more in tune with their surroundings etc etc, but many people are naturally drawn to the Inquisitor just for the "cool spell effects". If you want more people to be attracted to the Republic side for the sake of PvP balance, letting Consulars have Force Lightning as an option could help caster types not immediately be drawn to the Inquisitor. As for bugs, I've noticed that the Inquisitor Force powers seldom seem to persist or have odd effects as far as Lightning goes, as compared to running around with a stream of pebbles still shooting from empty space, but that's on MY system and I can't speak for others. Naturally, for the sake of entitlement rants, Inquisitors could be given the option to have the Consular visuals, but if the Consular visuals are just trashed, some will be offended by that as well. Again, Yoda used it, and I wouldn't consider him to be neutral on the Light / Dark sides, so I wouldn't really want to lump it in with any upcoming middle-of-the-road / Balance Jedi / Sith features. Rather, just throw it in now, with no need for explanations. The code is already there for the Force effects for Consulars and Inquisitors. Again, the EASIEST WAY to impliment it that I can think of at the moment is to just set it as an option, just like displaying your Dark Side Corruption or even displaying your helmet.

There are several posters that have posted in the "Horrid FPS" section that had systems that would run Skyrim and such on high settings that were suffering from low framerates. Many many posters listed their exact system specifications that were equal to or beyond any other people claiming that someone "just needs to upgrade their systems", including the trolls in this thread. SWTOR is built on the HeroEngine. It's a seperately developed game engine licensed out to game developers and sells itself on claims of ease of use. The game engine itself is apparently a single threaded application that has to / will have to be heavily modified to work effectively with multi-core CPUs. Also, a section in their sound developement area mentions that hardware sound acceleration has a large effect on framerates, stating that without hardware sound acceleration more than "10 sounds" in an area could cause issues. Essentially, the HeroEngine lacks the ability to turn off environmental audio effects, such as that annoying echo in stone corridors, as well as being unable to set fog effects to limit view distance, both of which have been basic settings in WoW for years. The only suggestion I have is, if you're running onboard sound, pick up a 24bit soundcard that has hardware sound acceleration abilities. The older PCI 16 bit sound cards are dirt cheap but won't be worth the effort. But even this is no guarentee that it'll help. Also a friendly reminder, posting in a thread without making a productive comment, especially if it's considered an insult, is a violation of the terms of service and will get you points against your account.

WoW has all the features that the OP wants and has lost millions in net subscriptions in the last year. Following a game that is obviously failing, so much so that they have to buffer their numbers with F2P accounts, is naive. Every single MMO that has focused on PvP has failed. Every F2P game with any measure of success was built to intentionally burn out quickly and be replaced. Console gamers buy a game, use cheat codes to finish it in one sitting, and then complain about lack of content or how easy the game was. There is no secret to what kills a MMO. The sqeaky wheel gets the grease and the rest of the machine fails.

Many people seem to think in very simple terms. It seems to be that people either consider a game a "grind" or that it's "boring". It always seems to be one extreme or the other. Gone are the days of someone actually earning something and feeling a sense of satisfaction for a job well done. People are used to pressing a button to send a message, cook their food, or in the case of video games, entering a code to get that weapon / armor / powerup so they don't have to wait for it and can use it NOW. It's "now or never" it seems. But one of the biggest things that irritates me about the entitlement issues is the phrase, "turning a game into a second job". I'd really love to have whatever job these people have that they think that sitting at a desk and pressing a few buttons now and then is "work". George Jetson himself would be jealous. And if the "Massively" part is eluding people, I refer you to a post by Zoeller:

I just made about 5k credits playing around with Slicing in between spending half of that on Salvage crew missions while sitting around on our slow slow laptop watching the misses play on the good comp. Character is level 16. I gotta say, the way the crew missions are set up as a gamble on invested time and credits vs possible returns is fun in itself. I feel more like I'm playing at a casino table than farming or doing dailies. Very impressive Bioware.

Putting all the OP's options into Wrath of the Lich king pretty well froze Blizzards net account flow. From release they climbed up to about 9 million quickly, then hovered around 10-11 million. They then bragged about having 12 million active accounts, did a big official Wrath release in China and bragged about having 12 million active accounts... but wait, shouldn't a big release for an expansion in a country full of gamers INCREASE the numbers from 12 upward? And now in Cataclysm, there was first a large influx to the new expansion amid promises of a more challenging game, and then all content was NERFED to "allow new players to more easily see all the content". A "raid finder" has even been implemented to allow the antisocial "I don't have time" people to do End Game raids. Yet Blizzard now has only 10 million active accounts to boast of, and that number was given BEFORE the SWTOR official release. Was it the constant complaints in /trade and the forums that the game was boring that caused the constant loss of accounts so that the NET number stayed the same? Was it being able to blow through content in a weekend that made people lose interest? Is making a game easier really a way to maintain a large playerbase? Or perhaps it's the people who ask for easy mode all the time that kill a game. Anything that is freely given is seldom appreciated. Even Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, lead systems designer for World of Warcraft, said that God Mode might be fun for a little while, but it gets old really quick. I just have to trust that the Bioware developers know these things. Merry Christmas!

With all due respect, I disagree on your issues with the male body types. Those of us who take athletic performance and "bodybuilding" in general seriously fully understand anatomy and physiology, as well as the differences in body types in males. Those of us who take weight training seriously also understand the relatively wide variation in leverages in body types among men. The variations between the ectomorphic, endomorphic, and mezomorphic bodytypes alone shows a very wide diversity, and are only the extremes of body type classifications. People are not locked into one of the three classifications either (except at the swtor character select screen). Some people perform better at squats or deadlifts as they have better leverage / a shorter range of motion due to shorter legs and/or arms, while others may greatly benefit from simple curls and such due to having long levers that exaggerate the tension placed on a muscle. In addition, the visual appearance of an additional 10 pounds of muscle on a tall long limbed man will be much less than 10 pounds added onto a much shorter stocky frame. Overall, there is no perfect body type. There may be an average to be seen among certain races as for the general shape of a body, but trying to say one appearance or another is "correct" for a male figure is putting opinion before science.

Armstech can make techblades. At worst, check the GTM or ask a buddy / guildie who has armstech.

GTM is fine. If selecting 5 filters is causing anyone serious stress then perhaps this is not the game for them. The GTM is designed to prevent monopolizing or "cornering the market" and thus encourage a fair and even field for all players. The developers did not lightly make these decisions and I fully back their decisions on the GTM. Otherwise, anyone is free to use the trade channel and sell items face to face without limit.

I like the limit on the number of auctions. I think the fees to post items should also increase with the number of items posted. If the crafter in question is actually selling that many items, and thus actively contributing to the player base, then the added fees should have no impact. If however they are attempting to flood the market in such a way as to push their competetor's posts several pages over, then the added fees for failure of sales or frequent reposting would discourage such negative bahavior. Also, if the seller makes a large daily profit, extra fees could be applied as the character is in a higher tax bracket. The "AH players" love to quote real world economics, so how about we show them how real world economics actually apply to high volume and high profit sales? By the way, you all do know that market fees are a % of the buyout price and not vendor value right?

If the purpose of the heavy population is to "have more people to play with", perhaps we could have a setting in the game Options to allow people to preferentially be put into the main population or be moved over into a "shard". This would keep the more sociable players happy and allow others to have an easier time completing quests and such. The catch comes in when friends or guildies want to group and are in different shards. If a party can be formed cross shard then the members can be moved to the group leader's shard. For people who just want to quest solo, the impact would be minimal. I would assume that the programming code for shared story quest instace groups and flashpoint instances could be slightly modified to put this into effect. Also, there could be an option to choose a different shard to join per individual, instead of automatic assignment. This would be similar to the old WoW method of choosing which batteground-in-progress to join. It seemed effective for that purpose and I think might help here. Naturally a cooldown would be necessary for changing shards lest people abuse the system for various reasons.

I've seen quite a few people complaining about a lack of mods and LFG tool in the starter areas and on Coru, but it hasn't degraded into a flame war at any point. There are usually a few polite responses, some references to forums threads, and then any trollers see that no one will feed into their entitlement rants and get quiet. This has been the greatest gaming experience I've had in many many years simply because there is a high level of civility and maturity present in the online community.

Cheers!

I'm a long time alt-a-holic, so I've usually had any tradeskill needed covered. The issue often times was that I had to take said alt out to farm a given item and compete with others after the same item. In TOR, with the crew skills, I can sit around in a cantina and send my crew off to farm things for me, so long as it's level appropriate and I have the credits of course. I don't think people attempting to "corner the market" will be as much of an issue here, so issues with pricing will only affect people who don't have a given crew skill to farm it for themselves, or those that don't have time / patience / desire to level another character to farm an item themselves. The exception of course being instance drops that are unfarmable. I also heard a rumor that auction fees made constantly reposting an item prohibitively expensive to people attempting to manipulate the market, but have no confirmation yet.