Accidents happen. But the way BW is handing this is totally inexcusable. Either wait a day to play, or download (in my case) ELEVEN GIGABYTES of client data that I mostly already have? I'm sorry, but those are both terrible workarounds. You guys need to get a dev on this ASAP, and come up with a set of instructions for people to "delete X", "rename Y", etc. so that we can revert this patch quickly and with minimal re-downloading of client data. The lack of accountability here is, frankly, quite disgusting.

Seriously. Next time they should get the ship droid to narrate. Still, this is a super awesome update, and I'm really looking forward to it. I 1000% agree with others, though, that 4 bars is just not enough. My bars are already completely full, and they are adding even more abilities we have to find a home for, with the legacy unlocks. I already have issues with mis-clicking e.g. herioc moment when I meant to hit a medpack, because everything is so crammed together to get it all to fit. Having more bars, so we can spread everything out a bit more into smaller bars, would really be a big usability win.

Obi-wan's robes weren't a single layer of geometry with a texture mapped on top trying to simulate depth. They had real layers to them. Also, much like my avatar to the left there, Obi-wan still had a hairline when his hood was up...

I would expect that if BioWare is smart, they'll just use all their nifty data mining tools and look at which orange pieces the majority of players gravitate toward, post-1.2, and use that as an indication of what the majority wants. Personally, almost none of the armor looks good to me, because it's all wallpaper. There are some lower-end pieces (e.g. Hydraulic Press set) that are awesome because they have extra geometry that gives real 3-D depth to them. The vast majority of mid-range armor is just a flat texture, and no amount of higher resolution can make that look as good. It's like BioWare started out trying to make all armor have real dimension, but then punted at the end because they ran out of time before releasing and just skinned textures on a couple generic models. Robes need real geometry layers; you can't just fake it with a texture. IMO this limits the current "real" choices for armor pretty severely, as it's hard to feel epic when my character looks more like a paper doll than a sculpted hero. Also, as a secondary gripe, the current "make the character bald when the hood is up" solution is abhorrent. I'd like to have my hood up, especially on my Sith characters, but I should still have a hairline when that happens. I realize it's an easy solution to the myriad geometry clipping issues that come up, but it would be nice to see a more aesthetic solution at some point. You guys put what was obviously an insane amount of work into the mocap and facial animations, not to mention the overall facial quality (the eyes are the most expressive I've seen in any game, ever, by orders of magnitude). It's really a shame that the way the gear overlays are implemented detracts so much from that.

Perhaps you're right, but let me try from a different angle. There are these 8 really awesome class quests in this game, and I would very much like to experience them all. But it's not like DA:O where I can just do the origin quest and then delete the character because the rest of the game is 99% the same. I've got alt characters of almost every base class on each faction, but somewhere between the middle of the 2nd planet and some point on the 3rd planet, I just get really put off by doing all the same content again, despite the "dialog options". I've tried levelling via space combat or PvP on a couple, but that becomes tedious after a while as well (PvP not as much, but I bought the game for the PvE/story). It's almost like there's this big barrier to entry to experiencing all the class story content. I get that BW needs to do this, to a degree, so you don't get even more people whining about how there's nothing to do, and that it's too easy to burn through the content too quickly. But at the same time, I wish there was some sort of legacy reward that unlocked a "story mode" or something, so I could somehow experience the other class quests without it feeling like a giant grind. You can assert that I'm not "alt material" or whatever. But the simple fact of the matter is that I can't think of any game I've ever played through more than twice, or maybe three times in the case of the most amazing games I've ever played. I don't think any game will ever exist that's so mind-blowingly-good that I (or any other typical person) would sit through eight times over.

The class quest line is like 6-10 quests on any planet. The other 85% of a planet's content is identical for all classes of that faction. SWTOR is no better than any other quest-oriented MMO I've ever played, in this regard. This game is most certainly not the "KOTORs 3-10" BW likend it to. It's more of an epic KOTOR 3, with 8 extended side quests thrown in. Very good extended side quests, but not enough for me to stomach grinding through the rest of the game multiple times, which is a shame.

Whatever abilities they pick have to work, animation-wise, for all classes. Anyone can shoot lighting out their hand, but it would look pretty jacked up if your Jedi started unleashing a volley of "Full Auto" blaster bolts out of his lightsaber. (Pew pew!) I agree that sticky grenade is pretty lame, but the truly iconic trooper abilities all involve big guns.

Yeah, that's one version of history. Or there's also:

The "game clock" in the SWTOR client is just asking your PC what time it is, not their servers.

The rate at which you gain rest XP scales with your level. Also, the vast majority of XP comes from quests, space combat, and PvP, none of which are subject to the rest XP multiplier. Because of these two things, if you've managed to accumulate a full rest XP bar by the time you reach level 15 or so, you're pretty much going to be playing on rested XP for the rest of your character's existence. (Unless you go on a 48-hour mob-killing binge to consume several hundred thousand rest XP...) TLDR: To game the system, create a new char, and once you get to your capital world park the character in the cantina for a week.

Same issue here, Win7 Ultimate x64. SUPER annoying bug, because I keep forgetting it does this and start typing my password while the desktop has focus, which causes all sorts of interesting mayhem to ensue. It would be really great if the launcher could behave like every other Win32 app in the known universe...

The servers are almost certainly running on UTC time, which is independent of time zones or daylight savings. There's really no other way -- otherwise you'd have wierd things happen during the daylight savings transition, like auctions expiring an hour sooner and crew skills missions completing an hour early. I wonder if they can tweak the reset time, of if 8AM is the new reset time until fall.

Hah, the grass is always greener. I have the opposite problem on my JK; I want the hood down, and none of them are. I thought hood up/down and additionally the option to show/hide companion helmets was coming in 1.2 with all the other gear changes though... Sad panda if it's not.

Yeah, that irked me a bit too. But I think it's mostly because the people who buy the vast majority of the collector's edition of a game are the rebid pre-order fans, not the people who were so distanced from the game that they only found out about it (or got around to trying it) 3 months later. So they're probably just trying to clear out excess inventory that realistically no one is going to buy at such a premium price.

You have a very curious definition of value. On Apple's website, while configuring a new Mac, they will upgrade you from 3GB of memory to 12GB of memory for $525. You can buy that exact same 12GB of ECC memory from provantage or any other IT distributor for around $100. Does the extra $425 of value come from the unicorn dust that the sweatshop workers at Foxconn lovingly sprinkle onto Apple's products, but not the competitors' products rolling down adjacent assembly lines? It sounds more to me like you spent a lot of money on your computer, and that makes you feel entitled to something. If you make a choice to buy a copmuter whose default operating system is ubiquitously known not to be fully supported by software vendors, and then point the finger at someone else (in this case BioWare) about a lack of support... Well, I think it's safe to say that no one forced you to buy a Mac, so whose fault is it really? BioWare has heard the desire for a Mac client and publicly acknowledged that they would like to make one when it doesn't interfere with higher priority development work. (I'm not sure if you noticed, but this game still has some serious issues, which thankfully they are working very hard to address, but trying to port their graphics engine over to OpenGL in the middle of all that is not a formula for win.) I'm really not sure what anyone hopes to accomplish at this point, by refusing to let it go and being patient.

Agree that the textures for the Sith corruption could use a little love. Right now they tend to make you look more like a zombie than a corrupt force user. I keep having this slight paranoia about Chuck Greene showing up out of nowhere with a chainsaw duct-taped to a kayak paddle...

My 4 1/2 year old flys my space combat dailies before bedtime, while I'm doing the dishes. Whicih says something about the "accessibility" of the space combat in this game, but that's for another discussion. I do feel a bit dirty about it sometimes though, in a Chinese gold farming camp taskmaster sort of way.

Man I hope so. You guys crack me up. Do yourself a favor and go visit the GTN in game. Buy a piece of gear with Presence on it (don't worry, it's all super cheap because the Presence stat is CRAP), and put it on. Now notice how your companion's damage number went up by like 0.2 or something completely unnoticeable. Then heave a giant sigh of relief and move along. Presence is a woefully underpowered stat, when you consider what you have to give up on your character (even when soloing) to stack it. Unless they are significantly buffing the effects of Presence in 1.2, this is a complete and total non-issue.

They're not magically adding more detail to the low-res textures. Otherwise this change would affect more than just your character (e.g. all characters in game). They're allowing the game to use more graphics memory to load higher res texures for just your character, all the time. But by only doing it for your character, they limit the impact versus trying to load high-res textures for everything and consuming 4x the graphics memory.

I'm still not sure what all the fuss is about. Does anyone truly believe that these colors will be gone forever, for the entire time that SWTOR is in existence, once 1.2 goes live? That would be like them saying no more light brown robes. Ever. Again. Those colors may be easily startled, but they will be back, and in greater numbers.

Oh geeze. Let the wookie win. You're not going to convince someone that your Toyota is just as good as their Lexus they just spent a bunch of money on, even though it's made with the same parts by the same company. You're also not going to convince an Apple zealot that it's equivalent to your PC with the same Intel processor and AMD GPU. Just nod, smile, and walk away. The fact that someone paid more money for the same computer hardware, for the privilege of jumping through all kinds of hoops to run anything other than the limited set of software available for their native OS, should already tell you you're not dealling with a completely rational person...

Where are you finding the 1.2 patch notes?

Cant' agree more -- it's fine. It's streamlined, and not nearly as difficult as people make it out to be. We don't need extra hotkeys to muck it up. The only remotely confusing thing about the space combat UI is how it shows the missile count. If the missile/torpedo count included the ones in the chamber, everyone would be way less confused. Go read what CoreDumpError wrote, it's an excellent explanation. It's not rocket science. If you can't figure this out, you have bigger things to worry about in life.

If you understand it so well, answer this: If someone already has 8 Republic characters on a server, how do they take advantage of the cross-faction functionality that the new Legacy system is bringing?

FWIW, you really can't go by the population display above the chat window. It is utterly and totally FUBAR. I've been in the RF in early hours, and had it say 2, and there were 8-10 other people crowded around the GTN with me. And almost certainly a few others around the other parts of the station. I think a lot of people are comparing how crowded the fleets feel versus how crowded the neutral cities in WoW feel, and drawing false conclusions. For one, you don't have both factions in one place. For another, the fleet hubs are way larger than the WoW cities. Also, you don't have a server full of mostly capped players waiting around for PvP or groups or other stuff to do -- most people are still out questing/levelling (which is actually fun in this game, versus the grind it is in WoW), and there is a crapton of space for them to spread out in. I agree that it can feel like a ghost town at times, but I think it's more an illusion than anything. If Bioware added a bunch more NPCs to fill all those large spaces, it would probably help it feel more alive. Of course then the people trying to play this game on a netbook would scream bloody low-framerate murder...