I have to agree with this. I'm all for being fair, but the fair warning that this was coming happened several months ago. I moved when most of my characters' names were still available on Harbinger, and only had to rename one. People who chose not to move, for whatever reason, must have known it meant almost no chance of keeping their names. Why are the people who moved early being punished for that? Why change the rules now? I did what you guys asked and moved to a higher population server, and now my reward for that is losing half my characters' names. Sounds like I stood a decent chance of keeping some of them if I hadn't moved in the first place.

Well if that's true, then I'm pretty upset. I moved a couple months ago during the first server transfer specifically to avoid the name crunch since it was clear a consolidation like this was coming. Because of that, I lost the name of my main character, that I play all the time. Now it sounds like I should have stayed on the dead server, because my high amount of playtime plus the original creation date for that character would have given me a really good chance of keeping my name. I realize there's no way to do a merge like this and keep everyone happy, but incomplete information is not going to make it better. It would really be great if we could understand all of the criteria, because from the outside looking in this seems a little unfair and arbitrary to many of us. On a related note, it would be great if you guys could work out a better naming system, if there's just going to be one server (per type) for everyone.

This isn't what happened at all. I have several characters who were created at the same time on Harbinger at launch. Some with really common names that certainly conficted with incoming transfers didn't get renamed, while others did. I log a roughly equal playtime on all of my characters. One of my characters that didn't get renamed is only level 11 (a crafting alt) that is pretty much permanently parked on the fleet. The criteria used for deciding who gets renamed seems basically random. It doesn't appear to have much (if anything at all) to do with the character's level/playtime/etc. We really need a CS rep to tell us what the story is here.

Same here, half of my characters, all of which I play with on a daily basis, have been renamed. These are characters that have existed on Harbinger since the first week of launch. I'd really like to understand the "factors" that went into determining who gets renamed and who doesn't. The part that makes me really annoyed by this is that the majority of the characters that were transferred over last night are probably inactive.

This is really awesome, thanks for the hard work on this. Although it does highlight the stark lack of diversity in appearances that are available -- basically just a couple reskinned models per armor class. I wonder when BioWare will ever make good on their implied promise from 1.2 to make all items RE-able into orange equivalents...

@James Ohlen - Monotone reading from the teleprompter FTL. If you're not enthusiastic about these changes, how are your customers supposed to be? And, yes, this is too little too late. You can call us whiners all you want, but we paid for the right to voice our opinions via collector's editions and multi-month subscriptions. This game was massively over-hyped, and in many important ways failed to deliver, and nothing you say can invalidate our disappointment about that. Don't worry, though, we're almost at the 6 month mark, and once we hit that -- just like at the 3 month mark -- I'm sure things will quiet down a lot here, once people like us don't have any stake in the game anymore. I wish the best to those of you who are choosing to stick it out. I can't help but feel that BW's core devs/designers have long since moved on, and SWTOR has been passed on to a 'B' team for sustaining. At least, I can only assume that, based on the rate and quality at which fixes/improvements have been occuring. Maybe this had something to do with EA's influence on the game (cue scene of the Emperor gloating over Luke, "...only now, at the end, do you understand..."). Whatever the case, this isn't something that myself, or many others, will soon forget; it is unfortunately going to be a shadow hanging over every purchase decision for future BioWare titles for some time to come.

If that's true then someone at BW would have to be massively baked on crack. It really does cost 14 million credits for all the current legacy unlocks (not counting race unlocks) -- add it up if you don't believe me. That's almost 24 weeks of grinding dailies. No sane person would consider that fun, and very few people are self-abusive enough to actually do it. Sure, not everyone wants every unlock, but even if you only want half of them, that's still 5-7 million of disposable income you need to have on hand (unless you're willing to blow 100% of your net worth on unlocks, but most people wouldn't). BW themselves stated at the guild summit that something like 90% of players have under 1 million credits. That percentage is probably smaller now, but it still makes the legacy unlocks (one of the few things they promised and actually managed to deliver on in 1.2) largely inaccessible to the majority of players; i.e. a lot of effort on their part going to waste.

Please make it a "no speeder zone" for a few meters around mailboxes and GTN terminals on the fleets. And/or auto-dismount anyone who goes AFK. Thank you.

Just grind out dailies for the 14 million credits is costs for all the unlocks. Plus another million for each race you want to buy. While you're at it, be sure to grind out 2000 fleet commendations to buy a single piece of inheritance gear that will only be viable for a few levels... Really, though, this has to be temporary. They are just trying to sink credits, etc. out of the economy to clean up prior bugs and poor design. They'll lower all the prices once they feel they've bled the economy as much as they can with these features, then come up with some new money sink (e.g. legacy unlocks in 1.3). If you're not part of the 1%, then just save your credits for now.

This is what the "Usable By" filter should do, in the context of schematics -- show you any available schematics you don't already know, that you are capable of learning. Instead it treats it like anything else in the GTN and checks to see if you can equip it. (Or, in some cases, it seems to check whether the item made by the schematic is equippable; I haven't fully worked out its rationale here.) Anyway, here's to hoping the next patch actually gets tested before it rolls out...

Hey, look, it's the "I'm omnicient and and can tell everything about you" attitude. I have several million credits and can buy whatever unlocks I want. (It's not like they didn't make it pitifully easy to rake in credits due to how they implemented the faction specific GTNs.) You're totally missing the point. Let's say you have exactly 14 million credits, which is a lot even for rich players. Would you, or any other reasonable person, spend all of it on the legacy unlocks? No. Some percentage of it, but not all. So what's the budget then for the majority who have less than a million credits? They can pick from a couple of the cheaper ones; the multi-million credits ones are not even an option. The point is, these things are way overpriced in terms of the average player's disposable income, versus the overall value. This stuff is for fun. I'm not going to keep subscribing an extra 6 months because these unlocks are so amazing and add tons of new depth to the game. I'm all for fun stuff like this in the game, but right now the prices are simply way out of line. Between this, the crystal vendor prior to 1.2, the whole "speeders are going away" thing... it's clear they are struggling to find ways to repair the damage done by a few early bugs that made it trivial to amass enourmous amounts of credits. Here's to hoping they lower the legacy unlocks across the board once they've milked all the credits out of the economy that they think they can get with this.

What are your numbers loading into Alderaan? Not 12 sec. Closer to 30-35 I'll wager. Loading into the ship/fleet is much faster because it's caching much less data in the stupid DiskArenaCache etc. files. I'm also starting to suspect that SSDs make the load times worse at some point, due to gigabytes of data constantly being written and TRIM not keeping up (not to mention taking a toll on the SSD's lifespan). And to the person saying they get 10 seconds max on any planet -- you're either full of BS or you're running the entire game completely off a massive RAM disk. I've got two brand new and extremely high end rigs here, and both pause for about 20-30 seconds at the 25% mark on the loading screens, and resource monitor shows the system as completely I/O bound due to disk activity (zero CPU/network activity; it's just the disks grinding away). Same results on a single SSD, single HDD, 2 disk SSD RAID 0 array, and 4-disk short stroked HDD RAID 0 array.

I'm not really looking forward to 1.3 legacy changes. I mean, the whole thing is a thinly veiled money sink. Add up the costs of everything currently in the legacy tree and it comes to a little over 14 million credits (not counting race unlocks). How many more millions of credits will it be to pick up the 1.3 stuff? I know that none of this is mandatory, and it's all for fun. Which is what adds insult to injury. It's supposed to be fun "fluff" for the masses, but it's highly inaccessible to most. Didn't BW say at the guild summit that something like 90% of all players had under 1 million credits? I'm sure that percentage is a bit smaller now, but I don't think a majority of people have 14 million credits to blow on all this stuff.

I should have been more clear about the "Cheap" filter, it was a poor example. But the original complaint still stands. And it seems there are several threads floating around about this, all started at pretty much the same time. If this is WAI, then BioWare's vision of using the GTN is one that involves extra unneccessary clicks and abysmal usability. I also find it telling that every other thread I saw about this posed the exact same question, about how any semi-competent QA department would ever let a bug like this slide through. I considered that maybe I was overracting a bit in being so fed up with the whole "two steps forward, one step back" quality in this game, but it seems I'm not alone.

Before 1.2.2, I could select "Category=Crafting Schematic" and "Subcategory=Armstech" and click "Search", and it would show me all the Armstech schematics available on the GTN. Now the "Search" button remains disabled until I select a "Rarity" as well. Except that it doesn't actually filter by rarity, it still shows everything (Premium and Prototype, even if I select Cheap in the filter). I won't even get into the fact that trying to filter with "Usable By" is totally broken when searching for schematics, since it tries to figure out if you can equip the resulting item, rather than whether you can learn the schematic. Do you guys even have an actual QA department, or do your devs just do a few minutes of ad-hoc testing before the code gets integrated into the ship branch? Or do you just have some sham of a QA department provided by EA? This is getting rediculous. I'm sorry if that comes across as harsh, but it honestly feels like the overall quality of this game is slipping with each patch. I really want to like this game, but asking me to pay a premium monthly fee while you guys finish fleshing out your design and neglect longstanding bugs that have been around since launch AND subject everyone to additional instability is somewhat insulting.

Now that we can mail cross-faction between alts, separate GTNs are just a pointless extra layer of inconvenience for everyone. Why would I e.g. pay 50K+ for a mission discovery on the less populated faction when I can get it for half that on the more populated side? I know that, on my server at least, this has basically resulted in almost completely killing the low pop faction's GTN (more than it already was). There should just be a single (i.e. "neutral") GTN. It would also make spending five million credits on the legacy unlock a bit more palatable.

The slow load times are due mostly to the extra layer of disk caching they are doing. When you see the loading screen zoom up to 25% and then sit there for 30 seconds, it's because the client is collecting all the various chunks of data it needs for that planet/area and copying them into a temporary cache file. Fire up a profiling tool (or even just Resource Monitor) and watch what's happening with DiskCacheStatic, DiskCacheStream, and DiskCacheArena. I have the game installed to a fast RAID0 SSD array, so this kind of caching is largely pointless. Not to mention it's putting an incredible amount (gigabytes) of wear and tear on my expensive drives, constantly. I was able to work around the fact that the game beats the snot out of my GPUs by water cooling, but I haven't been able to work around the caching issue yet via RAM drives or anything else I've tried. I agree 100% though, that the BioWare devs are either not very good, or just not very experienced (or just don't care). Five months since lauch is more than enough time to profile your game engine and find the hotspots. BTW guys, I'm still waiting for anti-aliasing support on my Radeon 6900 series cards... Although I can't really blame AMD for not being excited about slogging through your rediculous 35 MB of shader code.

I've defended this game for a long time, mostly parroting the "it's a new MMO, WoW sucked when it was first released, things will get better..." mantra. But we're coming up on the 5-month mark since launch. The simple fact is that WoW, and many other MMOs, improved over time. Bugs got fixed, things became more stable. It didn't happen overnight, but there was clear forward progress, without regressing existing functionality. This has not been the case with SWTOR; quality seems to backslide a little with each major patch. Not to mention that there are still a bunch of serious issues that still remain from launch, which are being completely ignored as far as customers can tell. It's clear that BioWare's QA team is either incompetant or woefully understaffed. But I'm also starting to have serious doubts about the competency of the devs as well. BioWare games have always been a little "quirky", but you overlook that when it's a single player game that you paid a flat fee for. Unfortunately, "average" doesn't fly when you want people to pay a monthly subscription -- you have to step up and deliver something of above-average quality, and that's just not happening here, nor is there such a large volume of new content coming in as to make up for it. Thanks to a billing issue (that BioWare never notified me about), it looks like I'm going to get screwed out of my free 30 days of game time. If that happens, I'm probably gone too, since I was planning to use that time as their "last chance" to get things in a better place.

Yeah, I was excited at first when I saw that on the legacy vendor. But it's not quite right -- the metal parts of the armor have this weird purple/turqoise tint. Oh, and of course the hood is up... /facepalm

Has anyone noticed that some companions have gone completely off the ADHD deep end in 1.2? For example, when I'm fighting with Kira on my Guardian, she will jump around from target to target during a fight, whereas prior to 1.2 she would stay on the same target until it was dead. Freqently now she will go attack a trash mob, then switch to another target when it has just a sliver of health left, leaving it free to continue 100% of its DPS on me unless I finish it off, or explicitly put her back on it. It's to the point where I'm constantly having to micromanage her target during fights. I do switch targets while fighting sometimes, to make sure I'm keeping aggro on everything, like a tank is supposed to. (Especially since she seems to be significantly more squishy since the patch.) Sometimes it seems like she's switching targets in response to me switching (which is wrong), but sometimes it just seems random. I don't get it. With so very many things in this game that need serious developer attention, why is time being spent messing with things that were working just fine? Especially if you're just going to make them worse.

Is there any point in farming this gear and having it take up space in my cargo hold? Will there be some "convert to heavy armor" option in a future patch? I mean, really, the event is a great idea and tons of fun. It's made the game world feel a lot less static, and is a really nice diversion from normal gameplay. But you guys SAID you were working to address the light social armor issue. In multiple Q&A's. And then you go and do this. I'm really starting to feel like Charlie Brown, and you guys are like Lucy holding the football.

You know, the overall design isn't that awful. The graphics are fine for the most part. The color scheme could have a little bit more contrast, but it's passable. The thing that really destroys the readability and overall flow of this site is the exaggerated vertical spacing. It's like someone took the website, made a silly putty imprint of it, and then stretched the whole thing vertically 50%. It's extremely tiring to read. Can you PLEASE ditch the narrow/light fonts, and tighten up the vertical spacing a bit?

The thing that is just mind-blowingly retarded about all of this is that supposedly the whole point of making the mods removable from high-end gear was so people could have the same endgame stats in whatever look they want. But the only new orange armor schematics they added are the EXACT SAME MODELS as the high end gear the mods come from. Take a moment and let the sheer epic facepalm irony of that sink in. There is no new variety, other than the half-dozen per armor weight class of customizable gear that already existed. It's hard to look unique when everyone has to pick from the same few choices. (And where the F is the medium/heavy social gear that was promised, to help with this??) I'm exceptionally frustrated. Like everyone else, I was led to believe something MUCH more was coming in 1.2, with respect to crafting and appearance options. Maybe it was, and got silently cut along with PvP to meet the ship date. Either way, I'm sick and tired of my characters, who are supposed to be "heroes", telling their heroic stories while dressed up like clowns. Or having to hold on to gear from many levels ago, or light armor pieces on a tank, because that's all I can find that looks like I think a Star Wars hero should look. The custom armor system is a really great idea, but it's only been waved in front of us and never really delivered. For all the touted changes, crafting has barely evolved since launch. I won't touch on the many other areas where this game is beginning to seriously flounder, because everyone knows what they are. If BioWare devs care, I mean actually care, about making this game into something great, then you guys need to find some focus, and start executing. Now. People are running out of patience, and once they are disillusioned, no amount of awesomeness will bring them back.

Yes, you can change it as much as you want.

Devs and artists clearly put some time into this UI; time that could have been spent working on other UI features. So I'm assuming there must be some point to the family tree, but I haven't been able to figure it out yet. Do you have to put your chars in the tree to enable unlocked herioc moment class abilities? Or something else I missed? Is this just for fun? Also, the implementation of this would be about 1,000,000 times better if there were some level of control over where the lines connecting the chars attach to the portriats. For example, the only way to get things to attach vertically is to have a parent-child/adopted relationship, which is pretty dumb -- I'm having a hard time imagining more than maybe three generations of people all co-existing at the same relatively short point in time where the SWTOR story takes place. So most relationships are spouse/sibling/friend/rival (frequently the latter two since many don't make sense, e.g. human and twilek siblings), which is fine, but I basically end up with a flat-and-wide family "tree" that stands no chance of fitting on the screen all at once. I think what you guys wanted here was instead of dragging a portrait from the left onto one of the family tree portraits and selecting a relationship, you drag it to one of the anchor points of a family tree portrait and select a relationship, so you can grow the tree vertically and horizontally so it fits on the screen. Not to mention there's no way to express relationships like one character being the child of two married parents, but then that's probably not trivial to implement, and brings me back around to my original question of what is this UI for since if it's just cosmetic then there are probably better places in the UI to prioritize dev/art work. Enjoying the patch overall though. Crafting changes are nice and the legacy unlocks are for the most part pretty cool. Just don't get this UI.