If it was designed with "true" mmoers in mind it would have only every had 500k subs and never any more But I suppose that depends on what you mean by "true mmoers". When I think true mmoers I think of first and second gen mmo's which tended around a few hundred thousand sub's. Till WoW came along and catered to the casual mmoer and borke 1 million...

In order of what I would want most to least… Hapes – The splendor and beauty not to mention the riches! Ithor – The world ships floating around above the jungles that you’re not to set foot on without completing a rite, sounds cool to me! Csilla – Very Hoth like with lots going on underground. Would be cool to see the home world of the Chiss. Kuat – Super industrialized, lots of orbiting stations which could provide some unique “zones” not to mention all the nobility owning lad down below with well landscaped gardens. Could be some very, very pretty architecture. Sullust – all rock and replace water on most planets with lava on this one? Underground habitats, tunnels, etc… Sounds cool to me! Bothawui – Always wondered how Bothawui would look… Ziost – Potential for some very cool Jedi / Sith stories on this planet. Kashyyyk – Right along with Ithor, natural beauty, and exploring the Shadowlands!

Artificers can now craft Magenta crystals if that's close enough to purple for you...

Well if you solo the game then you're set and should just go out and have fun. If you want the MMO aspect of your Star Wars experience then good sir I cannot give you an answer as the answer that will solve your problem is one you do not wish to hear by your own admission in your origional post... So with you not wanting to hear THAT answer then I would sit back and wait till BW does something about merging servers. But that might take a while...

I think you're misunderstanding what your characters Legacy involves or gets you as a benefit. Think of your characters and your legacy as seperate things. All of the characters you play will get experience as you play, they will also get your legacy experience. As you gain Legacy levels you will be able to unlock certain in game advantages (these have more to do with your legacy level then your characters level and include things like being able to get a mailbox, target dummy, gtn terminal, etc on your ship, among other things). Now if you level a character to 50, lets say a Chiss Bounty Hunter on the Imperial side. Then any class you creat on that server, of any faction, may choose to be a Chiss. For example you can creat a Chiss Jedi Knight. To the best of my knowledge that's the only real advantage of leveling a character to 50 as far as Legacy is concerned. If you don't WANT to level a Chiss Bounty Hunter to lvl 50 to make your Chiss Jedi Knight you may, instead, pay a ridiclious sum of credits to unlock this abaility providing you have reached the required legacy level. I hope this answers some of your questions. I may be a little off in some facts. If so hopefully someone else corrects me.

Why put up the reason? There will just be qq'ers crying that it's not a good enough reason to interupt their play time. If they put up a reason what would that change? If the reason was, "Gotta shut down the servers, back up the data base, take out a couple faulty sticks of RAM that are causing some performance issues on our side and boot everything back up", would that make it better? I bet if they posted that as a reason you'd have tons of people crying and whining that it wasn't a good enough reason and that they should do it some other time to not impact those particular players. Knowing why they come down doesn't change that fact that in BW's opinion they need to come down for maintenance. Maintenance, it happens, deal.

I'm not overly sure to what you're referring. If it's population issues then that is something that is specific on a server to server basis. I'd also be inclined to believe that they have a specific team working on populations and not the overall development team. Different teams for different issues, ya know? Now if you're talking about issues with code or bugs in general then that's a pretty universal issue. Game mechanics are game mechanics, whether you're in Europe, Russia, China, or the US. So in that case the issues aren't specific to U.S. Servers but to ALL servers. Absolutely understandable, but content pushed off is content pushed off and has nothing to do with servers or launches outside of the US. You're crazy if you think people producing content at BW are the same as the people monitoring the launch in a new market. If there isn't a new build of 1.2.1 (or whatever version is coming next ) then why bring the test server back up? If it's not ready for general testing it's not ready for general testing. Again the people working on new builds / content are almost garunteedly NOT the same as the people managing launches in new markets. You do understand that there are development teams (and multiple ones at that, that work on different parts of the game), and support teams. Support and Marketing are probably more focused on monitoring Europe, the Middle East and Asia but that would have nothing to do with the dev teams working on content, patching, and internal testing. And that is 100% understandable. But as a little life lesson for you, you can control how you precieve things. You can choose to be unhappy about the push back or you can take it in stride and be happy that they didn't release something that wasn't ready. You can have a little hope that they'll actually have it working properly when it does get released and that you didn't waste a crap ton of time gathering or gaining something when it wasn't functioning as intended. As for the population, I'm sure they are looking at it. But I'm also just as sure that in a big company like BW who has to report to an overprotective parent (EA) that there are a TON of hoops for them to jump through and that a ton of people want to have their input on it heard before a decision is made and a direction choosen. I'm aware of some performance issues with SWTOR but not anything that's game breaking. For an issue to be game breaking it needs to cause you to not be able to play. Because when they give more solid time lines and something comes up (lets use 1.2's announcement of March that got pushed back to April as an example) that requires something to be pushed back nerds/geeks tend to rage. If you'll notice MOST game developers use "in the future", "we're looking into it" etc to avoid the rage. You're crazy man. SERVERS are a priority (or rather should be) and I really don't understand how you can say U.S. Servers... Servers are servers regardless of where they are located. You get some form of communication on a regular basis, dev's post here, check out the tracker. Sadly you, just like the U.S., are not the centre of anyone's universe. And thusly perhaps their communication isn't exactly what YOU want to hear, but they do communicate. And they have been getting better at it since launch. A side note for dev's, please work on performance issues and bugs rather then writing a little forum post to tell me you're doing so.

Not that I've done a survey or complied a report or anything but I believe that statement to be false. You can make an educated guess based on the sheer number of subscribers WoW (I monthly subscription based game) compared to the number of players in any F2P title and reasonably assume that the majority of people playing MMO's prefer to pay a montly subscription. You can also search these very forums or every thread on subscription versus F2P and see that the majority in each of those threads want's a monthly sub and not Micro Transactions that F2P brings about. I think SWTOR will still have a subscriber base of over one and a quarter million for a while yet. I can see it falling still through out the year. Newly launched MMO's always have infliated sub numbers in the first 6 months while people boom to it, play the beejesus out of it, then move on either temporarily (I have a friend who rotates thru around 4 mmo's playing each for a few months till he's "caught up" then moving on eventually to swing back around when new content comes out) or permenantly. And I honestly don't believe F2P solves any of the problems with SWTOR. And as for what's coming, I played TERRA's BETA, wasn't overly impressed myself. D3 is F2P with a Cash Shop, and GW2 is F2P. The Secret World might have a shot at taking me away for a while (I love a good conspiracy and the entire game just intrigues me) but other then that there isn't a sub based MMO coming that I would readily say I'll jump ship for. But that's just me I suppose. Depending on your definition of success SWTOR already has. with the units sold and monthly subs so far collected it's reasonable to assume EA already made a profit on the game. And in business as soon as you're in the black you're successful. I suppose it's a matter of degrees. As for making the game better, well there are lots of posts regarding that all over the place so I won't touch that with a 10 foot pole save to say that the performance issues are probably the biggest concern BW should have. I don't think F2P will help the population. People who want to play are already playing. And in general F2P costs MORE over the long term for players then a subscription model does. I don't think the sub model has anything to do with sales or current subscriptions and IMO dropping the sub model will not fix what's broken. They need to do some server mergers to fix the population issues. They opened up way too many servers to alleviate queues due to the player base crying about not wanting to wait in line. And now here we are. Merge some servers, fix up character transfers and allow them. Then sit down and fix the performance issues and streamline the client. Content is not SWTOR's issue...

My use of Diablo III as an example was because it's a single playing game with a co-op option where you CHOOSE who to allow into your game world. And it seems like that's what you need. Maybe find a different title then. SWTOR is an MMO. It is supposed to be a representation of an online world (now we won't get into how successful of a representation, but it's supposed to be one none the less) and that means having to deal with people and mechanics that you might not necessarily want to deal with. Again that seems to be your overall problem with what you've precieved as griefing. I don't find it surprising that you want to play solo or with friends. What I find surprising is that you play an MMO and expect that you should always be able to play solo or only with friends with no interference from anyone other then those you allow to join you. That's just not what an MMO is or should be IMO. To put it into context, and I know people have purposed this logic to you already to no avail, you weren't "attacked". You were infected. By an intended game mechanic. As it was supposed to work. I'm sure BW was/is well aware that in every MMO there are jerks to be found. Just as in life. That's the problem with an MMO that creates an online world. Just as in this world you can't control who you work with (unless you're the boss I suppose), who shops at the grocery store you shop at, who goes to the same park you go to, who goes to see the same movie as you, etc. IMO you're putting an unreasonable onus on BW to control the actions of people who pay for the same privilage you do, access to the servers. And as other's have pointed out to you, you really are misusing that word, griefing. You sure do toss it around a lot without knowing it's proper meaning. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=griefing Pay particular attention to the first defination, second point. That's the most accurate for the proper use of that word. And your "own team" infecting you to complete a mission is not griefing. BTW I do agree that the PvP flagging is an issue. On a PvE server you should have to enter into a PvP area, a Warzone, or flag yourself intentionall with /pvp, to be flagged for PvP.

You already have people doing that for their companions, I don't think it would really change anything. The other way to go about it I suppose is making quest rewards bind on legacy, but most quest rewards are tailored for the character you're playing or his/her companions.

That right there is your problem my friend. You wanted to play solo, you and those others wanted to specifically play with eachother and no one else. The event focused around a rampant infection running through the galaxy and others infected people. The only way you getting exploded on or infected could be considered griefing is if someone had followed you around and no matter where you went that same person was there trying to infect you and explode all over you. If that wasn't the case you were the victim of an MMO game mechanic... Might I suggest a single player game with a co-op option, like say Diablo III, might be more your style...

I think the most important thing for a Group Finder would be Flashpoints, followed by Heroics, then Operations. Most people that do Operations are going to stick to their guilds for the most part. Though I would say all of the above in the poll. Again my priority list is based on if we can have some but not all when the finder goes live.

You can't any longer. The companion quick bar has been moved and no longer overlay's one of the 4 quick bars you get for your personal skills. The closest thing you could do is open your interface editor and place it beside or below the bar you used to use.

Amen!

You can appreciate that they tried to do something nice for people without spending a **** ton of time figuring out who, out of 1.7 million subscribers or so, was "deserving". That's not at all what I'm saying or suggesting. What I'm saying is that you cannot possibly please everyone all of the time. That it's an extremely time consuming process to determine who's "worthy" in this particular case. And that something for a large section of the population is better then nothing for everyone.