One that comes to mind for the second category was Star Trek Online. Once you started a boss fight in a ground-based area, it'd often lock the room; anyone who died and couldn't be resurrected on the spot by another player would basically have to stand outside the room, on the other side of an impenetrable forcefield, and watch the fight go on without him. It made a lot of people unhappy, but it did reduce some of the zerg-like tactics you'd see in other MMOs; people would actually be careful not to die. (What a concept!) As to the original topic, I think the problem here is that we have several different sets of folks asking for changes, all for different reasons: 1> People who wanted to experiment a bit with their builds (like the tooltips suggested) and are now unhappy that the costs have become high. Now, given that the costs reset every week, these people shouldn't be too unhappy in the long term; once you fine-tune your build, going a week without a respec is nothing. Suggestion: Free respecs until you hit level 10, and a very low cap on respec costs until you hit level 20. At that point, you should have a pretty good idea of how each tree works and which skills are good for each, at which point you can go back to the quick cost scaling to allow for a small number of changes per week. Level 20 is the point where a single-tree specialist unlocks their first role-defining activated ability, so it's a good cutoff point for experimentation. 2> People who want to tweak their build back and forth between PvE leveling/PvE raiding/PvP at need. Personally I don't like this concept at all, because I absolutely hate how in some other MMOs there's this eternal desire to optimize. If you're not using the exact best abilities to maximize your role, you're looked down upon for raids and PvP. Making players have to use a one-build-fits-all setup helps reduce this, as it's understood that each player will have sunk at least a little of his resources into abilities that aren't strong in the current situation. 3> People who are unhappy when an ability they depend on gets changed in a patch, or when an ability they'd previously viewed as weak is suddenly boosted by a patch. Some other games (like City of Heroes) would give out a free respec at every major content patch, just so that people could avoid this one. It was basically viewed as a free respec every month or two. Now, I'd hope that TOR won't massively change things in patches, although it's always possible in the early days of an MMO. The worst part of this is the "Flavor of the Month" syndrome, where someone figures out an ubercombo, posts it online, and lots of folks immediately want to copy it before it gets fixed in the next patch (at which point they'll look for the next optimum build). Suggestion: Add an option for a "mini-respec". Call it whatever you want, but it'd basically be a skill tree modification where you can move a handful of points around to compensate for an altered skill, but nothing more severe than that. You DO get free respecs once a week, so it's not like we're that punished by having to adjust for patches, but being able to immediately tweak your skill layout right after a patch, without worrying about the respec timers, would be a nice addition. 4> People who want to be able to switch between filling two different roles in a group, because of the changing makeup of a group. If they ever added dual-spec ability, then this'd become the norm. It does have some advantages; I was in a group last night that was doing flashpoints just fine, but then our healer had to log. My DPS Agent switched to a healing role, and I really wasn't set up for it at all; if I'd been able to build up a separate healer build, then it would have been trivial to switch roles. Beyond that, I generally don't like when people do this. It basically eliminates any sort of character identity; that's what multiple character slots are for. Granted, two characters means twice as much time leveling, twice as much gear you have to buy, and so on, but you'd have the added flexibility of being able to use a different class for each role. (And, two storylines.) Perversely, #4 actually opposes #2 in a way. If raids and PvP require completely optimized characters for each role, and no deviation from that is acceptable (as in quite a few other MMOs), then this sort of role-swapping is not desirable, because you'd have a DPS player trying to fill a healer role; he might have the right skills and talents, but he won't have the gameplay skill developed over months of leveling to make him know instinctively when to cast X or activate Y. The other issue is that if the devs give us 2 specs, then what happens? Some people might make their two buildings PvE and PvP, while others use the extra spec to fill two roles instead (such as DPS or healer). And we're right back where we started, because now people will ask for a third build so that they can do both of those... ---------------- Anyway, my point is, when asking for a change in something like this, make it clear WHY you want the change; if you want cheap respecs for role-swapping reasons, then you should find out whether that's the sort of behavior the devs even want to support. Similarly, when responding to someone who asks for things like this, don't lump in everyone else who wants a change with them. There's a nice middle ground, where small changes can be made that help the reasons you see as legitimate without also helping or harming those who have other reasons.