As someone pointed out already, Toshiba makes some very nice gaming laptops. The only thing I will say, since you mentioned portability was an issue, is that they are a little bulky. You can't customize their 15.6" screen models, and I found them to be lacking the specs at that price point (although it does offer glasses free 3-d). So you'd have to go with their 17.3" screen model to get specs worth that amount of money. Now, I did say they were bulky (read: big), but they are surprisingly light. When my gf got hers and we lifted it out of the box it was light enough that we looked all through the box for the battery, assuming it wasn't already in the computer. So if you think you can deal with the fact that it's a bigger screen, and therefor bigger laptop, it's not very heavy to carry around. HP also has some nice specs in that price range. Their dv6t-select 7000 can be upgraded to a 2.1ghz i7, 8g ram, 2g nvidia gt 650, 750gb 7200 rpm HDD, and 1920x1080 resolution for under $1200. That or the toshiba qosmio x870 should play this game pretty close to max settings. I have a slightly lesser graphics card and I typically get between 40-50fps at max settings, although I do occasionally have to turn down shadows and the visible characters in the fleet. Hope that helps you out.

I had my republic server transferred to jedi covenant, and my imp server transferred to corellian run. I have to say I agree with your assessment of jedi covenant the OP's comment about corellian run. My transfer to jedi covenant was first , and I was hesitate to transfer my imps but for the most part I'm glad I did (aside from losing my main's name that I've had since UO, that is free on every pve server in the US, east and west. Yes I painstakingly checked ). I've mostly just noticed the corellian run seems to be a lot more mature. Of course there are jerks, but they don't seem to have overtaken the server the way they have on jedi covenant.

I play republic on one server, empire on another. Last week my republic server was selected for transfers. Even though I wasn't keen on the process they chose for transfers, I went ahead and transferred and was lucky enough to keep all my names. Then yesterday my empire server, which was reasonably healthy, got selected to be moved. This time, almost all my names were taken, and like you, I was very disheartened as I've been using some of those names as early as UO (one was actually a name I used for my save file in the first Zelda game). I wouldn't be nearly as unhappy with Bioware if they had made any effort at all in trying to help impact character names as little as possible. There were better ways they could have done transfers that would have impacted fewer players. I still have 3 months left on my subscription, and I'm right there with you in debate about whether or not to renew. It's less about the actual loss of names and more about the poor customer service in trying to fix a problem that they created.

Sorry about the misquote, I got pulled away in the middle of my post and should have proofread better. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt. If I had to paraphrase your first post I would say "The game may not be perfect, but there are a lot of things being done well and we should acknowledge that". This is where things became unclear. If what you meant was that 90% of the complaints on a particular TOPIC are not helpful or constructive than I would agree. Using the example of server transfers, I would agree that a majority of the posts complaining about it were not helpful to the discussion. In all fairness, though, a majority of the posts that supported the way transfers were done were not helpful to the discussion either. If, on the other hand, you meant was: pick 10 topics (i.e transfers, class balance, pvp, etc.), now only 1 of those 10 topics has any merit and the rest is just people whining, then I disagree with your statement. So hopefully now that I have the right quote in the right spot, it'll make more sense what I was looking for clarification on. On to the point Koyi made. This kind of falls into my point of why do you (or anyone else) get to decide what is a valid issue to complain about? For example, ranked warzones. I don't PvP very much (although when I get to do something besides huttball i do enjoy it a great deal), so not having them in the last patch didn't impact me one way or the other. If I were to follow the lead of people who think character names are insignificant I would be on the forums telling people complaining about not getting them to "stop QQ'ing" or "get over it" or "you're just whining to whine". Except that I realize that PvP is very important to some people, in the way that my character names are important to me. Why is it ok to complain about not getting ranked warzones, a feature that wasn't in the game to begin with, but it's "whining" to ask why no effort was put in to trying to help people keep their names? I said from the beginning when transfers were announced that I didn't mind losing my names to someone who had been playing as long as I have and was still using the name. What was really going to bug me was losing names to people who started playing last week, or to people who un-subbed after the first month or just made a trial account. A little bit of effort would have gone a long way.

You had me until you started in on server transfers. There are a lot of things I like about this game. I agree it is important to make posts discussing the things we like, as well as the things we dislike. In the same way as the developers can't fix a problem if no one tells them about, it's difficult for them to know what features we're enjoying and why if we don't tell them. However, server transfers were poorly thought out, and this from someone who kept all their names. While I appreciated the speed that the transfers were carried out in (see, positive), there were much better ways they could have done transfers/merges that would have left more people happier, which should be the goal of any company trying to maintain an MMO. By going on saying things like "Where it should have been nothing but happy campers because that's what they wanted, instead we got "Cry cry I want to keep my name Bioware you're doing it wrong even though I can't name one service that would do what I am proposing you to do!"", I feel like your post goes from "it's important to tell Bioware about the things we enjoy about their game" to "defend everything Bioware does without questin". Now I'm willing to grant that isn't actually your stance, but attacking the community certainly isn't going to get them to quiet down. It seems like you're saying that the only issues people are allowed to have with the game are the ones you agree with. I.E. Possibly having to change my name doesn't bother me, so it shouldn't bother anyone else, and anyone who is bothered should keep quiet or is just whining. What if all servers had been merged into 1 server, with a long queue, and people tripping over each other trying to do quests? Would we be allowed to complain then? Obviously this is an extreme example, but it should make the point. If we don't tell Bioware how we'd like servers to be transferred/merged, how can they know?

My republic server was allowed to transfer today and by dumb luck I managed to get all 6 of my names. Thankfully I had toyed with the idea of re-rolling on what turned out to be my destination server. I decided against it but kept all my characters there since there wasn't much of a point in deleting them. My girlfriend managed to lose all 3 of her character names, but special characters got us around that. My big concern now is that my imperial server is going to end up getting transferred to the same place as my republic server. Losing character names is crappy enough, losing characters is ridiculous.

There are more options than "free for all" or "there is one and only one server you can transfer to". "Targeted" does not necessarily mean, or even imply, that each individual server will only get one choice. "Targeted" could just as easily mean "servers a, b, and c can transfer to server x or y". It's still targeted, just with more choices. The person you quoted was correct. They managed to take what should have been an a huge victory for the player base and make it so silly it may turn out to not be worth doing at all. Obviously transfers TO Fatman would have been a bad idea. I don't think anyone was expecting to be able to do that. As many people pointed out, we're basically caught in a game of russian roulette because of shortsightedness at launch, and the odds are not in our favor.

I do agree that some servers that are being labeled as "dead" are really not as bad off as they seem. I play republic on one server, and empire on another. They're both labeled as "light", even though one gets between 300-400 at prime time and the other is lucky to see more than 50 at any time. So, I think the way servers are currently labeled can be misleading. As far as population numbers, I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. I'm not saying there should only be 6 servers total, I'm saying that a lot of servers (maybe between 30-40 of them) should be merged. But instead of doing a traditional merge, where say servers 1-9 go to server 10, servers 11-19 go to server 20, etc., this would be where servers 1-30 are all closed, 5 or 6 new servers are created, and the people of the affected servers get to sign up for one of the new servers in the order in which they joined the game, or give them the option to transfer to an already existing server. The catch being that it couldn't be one of the top 10 populated servers, to avoid them getting over-populated. Of course these numbers aren't exact, without knowing the exact numbers for each server it's hard to know how many servers need to be shut down and how many new ones created. The main point of my plan was that it would allow more people to keep their character and legacy names.

I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on them losing the same amount of players, I just don't see nearly as many people losing their names under my proposal, which in turn means less people quitting. Without knowing the inner-workings of how Bioware's servers work, it's pure speculation as to whether it would cost them a significant amount of money, or any money at all, to have 5 or 6 new servers open for a month or two, at which point they can completely shut down 30 or more. Also, this could just be the optimist in me, but given how questionable the customer service has been so far, it might just create some much needed good-will. You're right that only a minority of people would quit over losing their names, but a lot of people will quit over being mistreated. Who do you think is more likely to quit: the person who logs in to find out that even in the 5 new servers opened up they still couldn't get a couple of their names, or the person who logs in to find they only have one choice of server transfer and they now have to rename 7 or 8 characters?

I agree. But instead of closing 5 servers and throwing everyone into server 6, why not close 6 and open up a new one? Same amount of resources, with added advantage of eliminating a lot of abandoned characters. So now, instead of having 30 servers with maybe 100 active players each, and many abandoned characters eating up resources, you now have 5 server with roughly 600 players each, and everyone has a reasonable shot at getting their names. Seems pretty win-win to me, don't really see why people would be so opposed to it.

That's why earlier in the thread I suggested a much more elegant solution for transfers/merges. Close a bunch of servers, open a few, let people sign up for the new servers in the order they joined. Yes, people are still going to lose names, and it sucks that we're paying for Bioware's mistake of opening up way too many servers at launch. The difference here is at least I know I lost my name to someone who has also been playing since early access and, more importantly, is still actually playing the game. It's inconvenient and mildly annoying to lose your names to someone who's been playing since day one and is still actively playing, it is downright insulting to lose it to someone who played their free month and left or that just bought the game last week.

This is almost the exact opposite of how I was hoping they would do this. It feels kinda crappy to have been here since early access and have to potential to lose my character names because I guessed wrong on which servers would still have reasonable populations at this point. I would rather see them close down a large number of servers, open a few new servers, and allow people to select from the new servers (or transfer to an existing server) based on when they started playing. While not everyone would get to keep all their names, I could handle losing my name to someone who pre-ordered day 1. Losing it to someone who bought the game last week just adds insult to injury of playing on a dead server all these months.

While true in warcraft, and even though only partially true, it doesn't have to be the case in other games. Eliminating the ability to make groups outside of an LFG tool is not a necessary condition of having an LFG tool. To use your example of wow: There is nothing stopping people from forming their own groups the way they did vanilla. You can still ask around to form groups, head to the dungeon (you're not flying right?), and beat the crap out of things. You mentioned VP and avoiding lockouts. You can still put your group together with people from your own server and queue the dungeon finder. Yes, this means you can't walk to the dungeon yourself, but that seems like a small sacrifice compared to being able to find a group for whatever you want, whenever you want. As an aside, I don't agree with things like rewarding people for using LFG with things another group made the old-fashioned way wouldn't get. I would be opposed to something like the VP system and getting around lockouts. That issue, though, is completely independent of an LFG tool, and it's incredibly silly to be debating the issues together at this point. On a different, but not unrelated, note about the tone of this thread, it amuses me greatly every time someone comes in here ranting about how cross-server LFG will kill communities and then continues to make posts insulting or being rude to others. If you're trying to instill the sense that community is something that should be saved, it might be in your best interest to avoid creating a toxic environment.

So if I understand you right, because of the fact that of the 30 or so "full" servers available I launch I had the misfortune of picking one that didn't stay well-populated, I should lose my character and legacy names to people who probably haven't been playing as long when there is a simpler solution available? That's absolutely brilliant customer service. A cross-server/single-server toggle would fix the grouping issue just fine. People on high population servers would likely run single server and all the low-pop servers would run cross-server. Except for the people who are against lfg because it allows more people to see more content , thus taking away their "special snow flake" feeling.

This is exactly what I'm concerned about with these transfers and possible merges. To me, it's not right to have people who have been playing since day 1 to lose their character/legacy names just because they picked the wrong needle in the haystack. I feel the reason BW is going with transfers and not merges off the bat is so that people can't really complain about losing their names. After all, if your server is still open, no one is forcing you to change, even though not doing so greatly reduces the amount of entertainment you can get out of the game. I'm also worried because, while my republic server is beyond dead, my imp server is reasonably populated right now, especially on the imp side (just over 200 people server-wide when I logged in around 4pm server time today). I'm worried that this server will die out too when transfers become available because it's not one of the top 5 most populated servers and everyone will leave for fatman or one of the other consistently "standard" servers. Even though, as people have pointed out, cross-server warzones and lfg are only treating symptoms of a bigger problem, I think it will at least help fix the problem without creating much bigger problems.

For all the crap the OP has been getting about making assumptions, people sure seem intent on refuting his assumptions with more assumptions. It's basically come down to "You're wrong for assuming x because I assume y". I don't agree with all of his points, but I feel his overall concern of where players are going to be allowed to transfer from/to is a valid concern. People are assuming that the transfers will be from low pop servers to standard/heavy pop servers, which is a possibility but by far not the only option. It's just as likely (if not more likely) that the free transfers will be for people to go from high pop servers to low pop. With the first proposal it's not unreasonable to think that some of the low-pop servers would be shut down. The second proposal make it less likely, although it's still possible. Probably the most ignorant and arrogant assumptions made in this entire thread. When I selected a server for my republic characters, I made sure to pick from one that was "full", to avoid exactly what happened. Some of those servers are still standard to heavy at peak times, others are consistently low. So it wasn't so much being impatient as it was not being able to pick one of the few servers out of 46 pve east coast servers that still has a decent sized population. I don't see why cross-server lfg would be so bad. It would allow people on low-pop servers to do group content, and people in high-pop servers could act like it doesn't exist. Seems pretty win-win to me.

I like the new design for the most part. Is it perfect? No, but it looks more polished than the old site. The only 2 things I would change would be to allow for different color schemes, particularly in forums, and move the main menu bar on the main page to the top of the page. Those 2 minor changes aside, I think the new site is a great step in the right direction.

Pretty much this. My gf and I were relentless in getting our WoW friends to play this instead. We were going to be getting this for 2 of our friends as gifts. We've both been playing since day 1, and we like to try different classes/roles. It's a little disappointing that the only reason we didn't get a free month was because we leveled 4 characters to 20-35, instead of rushing through all the content on one character from the beginning. As someone pointed out, it's not really rewarding loyalty to give a free month to someone who got the game 2 weeks ago and blew through everything available on one character while not giving it to people who purchased this game long before it was actually released.

I was originally all for cross-server. Then I decided that since single-server was already coming, why not give that a shot and see if it helps. Then I waited for 35 minutes for a pvp match, on the republic side, starting at around 9pm, before I finally gave up. I'm still willing to wait to see how single-server works out before saying cross-server is needed asap, but if you're wondering why so many people are saying that single-server won't work and cross-server is needed, there's a prime example.

I've only been following this thread since about page 11, but I did skim the first 10 pages. It's entirely possible that I missed your reply to this, but most of what I've seen you say can be summed up by "it kills the community". I'm honestly trying to understand your position and that response isn't helpful to conversation. If you want to point me in the direction of where you explained how an optional system prevents you from playing the game the way you are now, I'll happily go back and read it. Otherwise, I think us pro-cross-server lfg people deserve an answer from the anti-cross-server people about how exactly a completely optional system will destroy the community. I don't think many pro cross-server people would object to being able to choose cross-server or single-server, as high pop servers would likely queue among themselves and low pop servers would likely queue cross-server. Seems kinda win-win to me.

That's exactly what those of us looking for cross-server lfg would like to do to. The existence of cross-server lfg should have no effect on you playing the way you want to play. The only way this becomes more or less mandatory is if they start giving out incentives to run lfg, which is where I believe wow messed up (and even there, you COULD still find a group of people from your server and just sign up for randoms with them, so it's not a very compelling argument). So please explain to me how this would stop you from playing the way you want.

And when people start complaining about wanting content nerfed I'll be right there with you saying no way. I haven't seen anyone in this thread complain that the content is too hard. You're assuming that nerfs are a necessary condition of a cross-server lfg, which isn't true. So let's suppose that we have an entirely optional cross server lfg tool and everything else about the game stays the same, how does this effect you at all?

You might as well give up on trying to ask why something that is completely optional bugs people. I've asked twice in this thread and didn't get a single answer, they just keep complaining about how cross-server lfg will ruin their "community". It's kinda like watching kids walk by a house minding their own business and an old guy comes out and starts yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. I have no intention of stopping others from forming guild groups or spamming chat for groups, why do you want to stop me from forming groups with other people who enjoy grouping up with random people, killing things, thank everyone for a lovely time, and then all go their separate ways?

Everyone's experience is going to be different. Just because the guilds you noticed broke up doesn't mean they all did, or that lfg had anything to do with. By contrast, the only reason I was in a guild pre-lfg was to avoid constant guild invites and whispers to join guilds. The 2 most meaningful guilds I joined were ones I found after lfg was introduced. One of them was even the result of running random instances. Guilds lost members and broke up long before lfg was implemented, it was not an invention of the lfg system.

That's your opinion, which is fine. However, many people feel the exact opposite, and that should be fine too. Again, a cross-server lfg option is just that, in option. You can use it or not. Quite the opposite actually. People shouldn't be required to group based on my schedule, and I shouldn't be forced to group around others schedules. That analogy only works if you're referring to the act of finding a group and not the group content itself. Some groups succeed, some fail. Given the difficulty of most of the FP's I've experienced I'd say most succeed. However, I would have no problem if my group was unable to overcome the difficulty of the FP. That said, FORMING groups should not be a struggle. The issue isn't with having time to run the FP, it's that the amount of time needed to find a group can vary from 30 seconds to hours. All that said, I still can't figure out why people are opposed to this as an OPTION. I think giving players an option between single-server and cross-server would solve most problems. So my question is, what could you possibly have against something that is completely optional?