There is nothing "wrong" with VOSS, only some people's expectations of it. We expect difficulty in FP HMs, OPS etc. and accept that some will die and sometimes the entire party will be wiped. Why would you not expect that in missions? Does it say anywhere that the cruise through the planets should be constant? Did you expect it to be constant? I LIKE variation and I DISLIKE complete predictability. The fact of the matter is that you CAN vanquish these missions - maybe not as early as you hope to - but you CAN. A game that force players to get tactical in their thinking sometimes is not a bad thing. There a Heroic 4 on VOSS that I've found dastardly difficult even with "on par" levelled and geared players. Every time I level a toon, this one mission looms ahead and I always look forward to it. Nevertheless, I have never vanquished it and I think I have tried it with over 50 different players so far..lol. But I don't EXPECT to be able to vanquish everything all the time and so, I enjoy myself. ...there is enough predictability and grind in the game...rejoice in the fact that something is different than the rest...

We need both transfers and merges. Those of us who did not want to witness the slow death of the first server(s) we rolled on, have already created new chars on better populated servers. We should be able to pull our old chars over to the server we reside on now. Merging low population servers with active players is common sense. Where's the point in chasing people away from the game. It's disappointing that BW and EA are woefully unprepared for this - this particular dynamic is pervasive across all MMOs and it's unwise to let it surprise you.

Whether the rolls are truly random or not, doesn't matter. In formed groups, the person who won the last roll, should be eliminated from the next roll and so on, until everyone has won once. Using "random" as a means to achieve "fair" distribution of individual wins in groups wins is simply poor design as anyone with grade 7 math passed knows that there are streaks. Should be a quick fix for conversations at least. Crafting and loot is a little more complex though.

In a well-populated galaxy with several inhabited planets, it's inconceivable that there maybe a handful of items that has nothing more than visual appeal to any players or companions??? Yea that's a game-breaker for sure, a major critical level "defect" that they should pounce on immediately. The mere chance that a player ignores his/her eyes and buys something she/he might not use is ...ab-so-lutely terrifying!

1.2 is great addition to the game. It introduced a lot of new content and the realization of the legacy system is interesting. The continuation of the great Kaon Under Siege storyline both intriguing and entertaining. New gear to work towards. It's all good

We need both server merges and character transfers. I started on a "normal population" server when I first joined, which was day one of official lunch). Reading all the horror stories here about hours of waiting to get logged into a given server, it seemed prudent to target a normal population server. I figured "normal" meant that there would be plenty of players. Alas, I was wrong. Being so engrossed in the game and the story, I didn't mind that I was 1 of 4 or 1 of 6 on most planets as my trooper schlepped across Tatooine..little did I know. Now this server is a ghost town...in fact I stayed in that ghost town for quite a while before re-rolling a new character on a high pop server. But enough is enough..after doing all the planet stories, the class stories, the bonus storylines and the 400 repetitions of the dailies, you NEED other players to enjoy the rest of the content. So I made a conscious choice to roll on a more densely populated server and haven't looked back since. But I'd still like to grab my trooper and have him come over to the new server. I don't care if 15 low population servers are merging - I'm not going back to it, since my "community" is with my new server. What is most surprising is this: every single MMO - no matter what they are about - follow a trajectory or a lifecycle of you will and at SOME point they ALL encounter this particular issue. Some realms/servers will fall below critical mass and unless you want to chase the remaining subscriber off deliberately, you HAVE to address it - before the subscribers lose patience. More than ANY other aspect of MMOs, this particular dynamic is completely pervasive and predictable - the ONLY variance is WHEN it happens. I must say that I am quite disappointed in how woefully unprepared BioWare and/or EA are. It's tantamount to basically throwing away subscriptions and the maintenance cost of keeping servers/realms alive when they should have been terminated, is not good business practice.

Although it's probably impossible to implement, I'd really like to see some dynamic events, so there is more to do when you're reached level and gear-cap. Also, this artificial "only once a week" or even the "only once a day" can go away. Where's the fun in doing 500 daily missions to get a few implants and a relic or two? It would be a lot more interesting to be able to do the OPS as often as you like. Something to bring people out on the planets would be nice too. Not unlike the recent Plague series...seems such a waste that you never have any reason to go back to the earlier planets... All in all, SWTOR does face a bit of a challenge - there simply isn't enough diverse content for players who are not into too many alts.

+1 It does seem like a waste of development resources to have no re-use of the planets. Would be nice with a dynamic even generator that calls for people of all levels to converge on different planets and cities to deal with threats or something along those lines. I suppose this is "the dark side" of having all content pre-scripted to conform to a linear storyline...

This is an oddly misconceived thread. Even if you have loads of time to play, why would anyone enjoy the feeling that this time is being wasted with poorly designed dynamics? The relative importance of time when there is a lot of it or only a little, is something personal and hardly relevant to the criticisms raised about time-wasting dynamics. Running on foot through orbital stations with no real purpose or content other than satisfying some form of "logic", is a waste of time. In particular held against up against the fact that you can power around on speeders on Fleet. They fixed it and the game is now better for it - regardless of how much time you have to play per day. Going through the extra-long Corellia planet load twice to do the Black Hole dailies, feels like a waste of time no less on days where I have several hours to play.

Everything is transpiring exactly as predicted. Remember the days of the smug golden VIP signatures and *pops flares* arrogance? The ill- concealed nerdling delight at "early access" and the imagined "special status" of being a CE owner. Very soon after, the obvious and completely predictable truth was finally dawning upon a few as they saw only very few players in the lounge. Nothing the vendor has ever offered is remarkable...there was and is nothing that stands out about a so-called CE owner. Fast forward to today - a derelict and completely abandoned CE lounge. Why would anyone hang out there? Guilds can't meet there because only precious few have the CE version and the vendor has nothing of interest. The hungrily anticipated VIP status is a flop and now a poorly assembled small plastic $90 statue stands as a lonely reminder that marketing indeed is a legalized form of public dishonesty.

What disappoints me the most is that they appear to be unprepared to deal with the most common and pervasive challenge that every single MMO since the dawn of time have experienced. Surely there is some form of best practice to deal with this - both from a communication perspective and from a management perspective. While different MMOs experience a different timeline for this decline, they all DO experience it. The math is not complicated to figure out - capacity vs. visitor equations are used in many other industries to direct expansion and contraction of franchises/outlets etc. Not only is is wasteful to keep virtual servers running for a small population, it is also directly encouraging players to leave the game. And the silence from EA/BW about this is deafening - it's poor business management to NOT be prepared for this, to NOT have a communication/community strategy for this and to NOT have the mechanics of population and server management already prepared for this. ...I'd love to be mistaken in my assessment here...all it takes is a few words to reassure everyone if this is in the works...

SWTOR should go in the opposite direction of what is suggested here among the "I want something I can only get in a certain way, in another way that I want". Social Points should yield real tangible benefits and not just be for cosmetic stuff. - You don't HAVE to to space missions, but it does yield benefits if you do. - You don't HAVE to do Heroic missions, but it does yield benefits if you do. Similarly, social points should have more tangible value.

All of you are completely missing the point - this is not about keys versus mouse as an interface device. This is about using two hands versus using one hand. (stop leering you pervs!) A key binder is using both left and right hand to interface with movement and ability controls, a clicker is using only one hand or at best predominantly one hand with the other only controlling the simplest aswd-movement controls. As an interface scheme, dividing all these interface controls more evenly across two hands will always be faster. Not unlike typing with one hand versus typing with two hands. That being said, I predominantly click. In PvE the actual channel times, combined with the cooldown, allows me plenty of time to chain together attacks that are as fast as the game allows. I do admit that there can be some very specific circumstances where a keybinder would have 7/100sec advantage in POTENTIAL reaction time, but the speed at which I interpret the visual input and come to a decision about the best course of action more than makes up for it. All of you who would like to maximize everything should stop focusing on the input devices/schemes and should start practicing your brains to become faster and more efficient in the "perceive-interpret-decide" cycle - that makes more of a difference than the keybinds.

I write: ..and you get "SimCity" out of that? There should be a reading comprehension test as a pre-requisite for forum access...

Player housing fails because the designers forget the golden rule of MMO design: 1) Player housing should come with something TO DO - and continue to do so for as long as you have it. And of course, everything you DO in an MMO should provide entertainment, be interesting and serve a purpose that makes sense to the player. 2) Player housing should give you an advantage of some sort. This advantage or benefit has to be significant enough to an incentive to the player. As a random brainstormed idea: As residential areas grow, missions should begin to spawn. As residential areas grow, it should be possible to contribute with effort and credits, to build an infrastructure that serves a purpose an infrastructure that is useful to the players in the area. That could be vendors with rebated prices that gradually improve their selections and their rebates based on the size of the neighborhood it serves. Transportation services that allows players to reach more and more remote areas directly. As neighborhood reach certain sizes, the vendors there could offer visually unique/branded social items/clothing. As neighborhood grow, they would naturally attract crime which in turn could spawn missions. If left unchecked the threat of this crime - mobs and recurring incursions would increase in number and/or difficulty. In turn, this could offer a market for community security measures - players could contribute to the funding of security walls, droids etc. Ultimately, when a certain size and maturity is reached, Flashpoints and Heroics could become available. ...you get the idea. Bottom line is that player housing has to be MEANINGFUL to players, which in MMOs mean that it must offer something to do and benefits as incentives to develop and maintain it. I haven't yet come across an MMO who fully understood and embraced this properly.

There are several fairly easy fixes possible. It should be considered a defect btw. The bottom line is that a squishy, which Qyzen easily becomes, is completely counterintuitive and it is more wasteful to have companions more or less thrown away than it is to fix them, considering the effort already expended. signed!

No log, no number, no evidence - this thread is speculation. That being said, I will admit I have an impression based on the following: I have played through the game and have a lvl 50 Commando - Gunnery (Assault Cannon). Currently I am playing through the game with a Jedi-Sage. My impression is that the Commando has higher BURST DPS than the Sage, but I easily sustain fire for longer with my Sage than with my Commando. Sage has better AOE as well. The Forcequake you can fire continuously and keep most mobs essentially incapable of fighting back while they bounce around. Again single target the Commando seems to be able to do more damager-per-second until you burn down your ammo, wheras for longer fights I feel the Sage is better since it can keep up constant fire without running out of "juice". Largely I feel I go through mobs faster with my Tank Companion + Sage than with my Healer Companion + Commando combo, but it's very subjective. I haven't played the other classes, so I won't even speculate.

Wow this is really coming together it seems! And fast too - very nice. Just for clarification: Cytrek are you and Master-Pappy associated? Is the consensus that the chosen server is Sith Wyrm? I'd like to roll my new character right away if we're settled on a server and it looks like the friendly folks from Stargeezers (lol...gotta love that name) are rolling out the welcome mat for us. Just need the confirmation on the server..? Cheers :-)

What a fantastic idea and I'd be thrilled to be part of of such a a guild. I'm a mid-forties Vancouver (Canada) dweller Have been rolling with some youngsters in a large guild and while they are all fine examples of the species, I often find myself missing some of the common ground that I can find with 40+ y/o professionals. I'm completely open to roll a new character on any west-coast server and can see new life being brought to the game by being able to run in 2 or 4-player teams through the missions instead of the mad dash to level to 50. Also, being able to run with more people who are in the same time-zone as I am, makes it a lot easier to team up when you get chance for some game time after work. Might I encourage the founder-to-be to settle on a server as soon as possible? I think many are eager to get started - I know I am! Also, if you can share a character name as a contact on said server, it will be easier to reach out. Looking forward to meet all of you in this thread and others out there who might feel that this is just the thing! Cheers :-) PS: A recommendation if I may: Been playing on a sparsely populated server since the start. Based on this experience, I suggest picking a server that is well populated. Hitting Hoth for example, I was 1 of 4 players on the planet throughout the missions there. Choosing aplanet with more life just makes everything more...well..lively..lol.

Sometimes I think we MMO-nerds complicate things too much..lol. We're talking about a simple match-making problem that can be solved very easily: 1. You declare your interest in grouping for a specific Flashpoint or even mission. You can select several and you can specify a timeframe/timer for how long you are available to start, which begins to count down from there. If you have logged out, it will grey you out and if you are not logged in again within a 5min grace period, your posting disappears automatically. You also specify if you are willing to organize or if you prefer that others organize and then contact you. 2. When you do so, your name, level, class and AC is posted on an in-game bulletin board - perhaps along with an optional one-line comment from you. 3. Those who wants to form parties can go there and find candidates for groups and reach out to each person they would like, using the ordinary chat tool. People who do not want to organize can just wait until someone contacts them 4. This can be done from anywhere - hell, it could set up with today's tech on a cell phone (albeit not across the galaxy) so there is no ruination of immersion. 5. When the group is formed, everyone goes to FLEET (actually it should be a different location, since FLEET is located in a specific sector of the galaxy, whereas the FPs take place all over - but that is perhaps a less important detail). It COULD be SELECT CROSS SERVER: e.g. only between permanent trios (for example) of servers in the same timezone/cluster (west coast/east coast) and only engage between servers that have low-population (or some other threshold). This could help the late-night players. It could also just be on a per-server basis.

Prefer Aric as well. While the 4X is imposing, he actually gets in the way...he comes too close and blocks my view too often..and his pathing is clunky. Most importantly - as a Commando DPS - you can give Aric anything YOU have, as soon as you get something better. This saves money and keeps your companion equipped. Found myself shelving out 20K on TATOOINE on 4X just to try him out... Anyway, back on Topic. Aric is a sniper (DeadEyes) and he does use his sniper stance, which I think has the effect of giving ham range and raise minimum damage in particular...