Just for an example, my favorite raid boss in eq2 was designed by 'timetraveling' dev in the Setinal Fate expanion pack. The whole fight was set on a floating grid, and it had a special effect where abilities that normally you couldn't move to cast, were modified so you can cast on the move. Then during the fight there were 4 orbs in the corners you can kill, each would add a buff to the name (and would reward better loot if you killed them) but make the mob harder (one added a aoe, one added some periodic adds, etc) During the fight random block on the grid (say 40x40 in the 'zone') would change color. White ones would drop to the floor 2s later and if you were on it you would die. Orange ones would drain your power but give you more dmg. Blue ones would hurt you but give you more healing. Green ones would give you more dmg protection. So during the fight you would be running around, trying to keep tank on green, heals on blue, and dps on orange, while avoiding the white and moving the whole raid to avoid the gaps in the floor that would build up over time from the white dropping blocks (also an ultimate creative dps check) Now THATS what a call a creative hard mode fight. Take a lesson bioware (or hire timetraveling)

The whole enrage timer stuff is a DIRECT result of the small group size, there is no way to argue it. It is related to the whole solo path to cap VS grouping and risk/v/reward and all that but the core problem is the same. If you have 4 people making up a group, the ultimate end of making content 'hard' for those is more strict than if you were designing content for 6 people to be hard for 6 (or extrapolating to raids, 12 instead of 24). Dang, didn't eq1, the mother of all MMORPG's have 48 person raids? (not that I"m advocating that ) In a larger group size mechanic, there is more flexibility, 2 of the 6 could be less than optimal IF 2 of the other 6 were above expected and the group can still clear a zone, and the zone still be 'hard' (ie if 2 of the other 4 weren't above average they would still fail) I'm a current eq2 raider and I really don't like the super small group sizes in swtor, but if they are going to go that route, it would seem to me that there are better mechanics, like a dps floor on a particular name in a group, or something than the current hamfisted timer fail. I've always been a fan of making 'hard' mode fights 'hard' due to coordination primarily, rather than gear or group makeup. Though again, with 4 people in a group, its harder to make coordination a factor when the requirement of each 'role' is so set in stone by the lean makeup. You can rip off any mechanic from other games to make stuff hard, more aoe that needs to be jousted, death prevents, dps floors, dps ceilings, waves of adds, clicky items, adds to be mezzed, order of mobs, cures of effects, interrupts, positioning, special item progression debuffs, off tanking (kinda' useless with 4grp setup), straight gear checks, etc... I know swtor does a bunch of these already, what I don't get is why some combo of the above can't be used to make a 'hard' mob 'hard' instead of some arbitrary enrage insta-kill timer BS. It just seems lazy.

Pretty sure early access is when you redeemed your code, not when you bought it. So if you bought it in July, but because they had the code go out 24-48hrs later, you forgot to redeem it until November - you won't be getting in until the November purchases go in.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some confusion considering how screwy the original pre-order was set up. Remember there was all of that confusion about matching email addresses to an origin account, and auto-creating an account if it didn't exist. Creating an origin account, and then also a swtor account, and the part where you can pre-order but only got an email with the code a day or two later which you then had to go and claim at some point. Not to mention the password security reset which might have some kind of effect if people didn't take care of. I'm sure there are a ton of people who pre-ordered on that first day, but didn't claim their code on swtor.com site until later that will be getting in late now. Ahhh well its just a few days. Today not such a big deal, but not getting in for the weekend would be worse.