I quite like this idea. If the stat bonuses, or the bonuses at all were about the same strength as holocrons, then it wouldn't be a requirement, nor feel forced. I'm not much of an RPer, but I must say that I'm part of the side who really hates what EAware has done with lightsaber colors; going so far away from canon it's not even funny. So I really like getting that first lightsaber, seeing a lovely blue lightsaber unsheathe as you're about to bash someone's face in. Not RP, but it gives a good feeling. I'd say this Mentor System idea would give the same effect, at least for me; not for RP purposes, but because it simply fits in with the Star Wars universe.

Indeed, server lag could be the cause, however this issue has been happening before at points where we were assured that the servers were functioning at peak efficiency, and that our lag is not server side - not to any extent sufficient to justify such defects as missing spells and wrongly activated GCDs. Therefore, the idea that this time around it's also caused due to poor programing, it's not unreasonable, and a very fair assumption. The only way to be sure is to wait for a month or so for the activity to dial down a bit and just see what happens, though it is quite thinkable that they botched the coding and ended up ruining more than they should have ever been able to. It is EA after all with and understaffed department and critically low funding that it supposed to be in charge of maintaining an MMO with over a million players in it.

Sadly, you are very wrong. BioWare has acknowledged the fact that due to the animations and how the server is built up in form of prioritization, there will be ability lag. This was non-existant during the server stress test right before launch, but it was very severe after launch and for several months after. They managed to make it much better after several patches, but it has never been as good as it was during the stress test beta. If you imagine how WoW's ability responsiveness is, that is how good it was during the stress test. This issue is indeed back in 2.0, and I don't see BioWares 2 monkey debug team being able to squash this within the next 6 months, and even if they do fix it, they won't make it as smooth as in WoW - simply because the game's animations and how the game engine is built up, won't allow it. If EA allowed BioWare more manpower and more funding, I'm absolutely sure they would have been able to make it perfect, but the fact of the matter is; EA is getting it's 4th Worst Company in America award by the end of May, and that is not because they post nudes on the interwebz. Rushed content, withheld necessary funding, and lack of manpower is how EA dictates it's subsidiary companies. Thanks to this, the customers suffer for it as EA is highly skilled at hyping games up and giving the players just enough candy to waste their entire allowance on buying out half the candy store.

Dude, EA allowed BioWare to keep 3 people working on the game, meaning you have 2 monkeys to do this kind of stuff and has no idea how to do anything else, and then you have the 3rd person being, pretty much, a normal person that they pulled from his usual job as a garbage man. Basically, none of them has any idea of how anything works, they were just told to shut down the servers and website for a few hours every now and then to make it look like they are doing something productive. Considering EA is putting less funds and effort into this game than I make in an hour, I doubt my assumption on SWTOR's work-force is any bit exaggerated.

OP is telling EA to stop being money whores and focus more on the Cartel Market. The irony, man. Haven't seen anything this stupid in ages. You raise some good points, but completely fail in most of what you write.

It's already getting late in the evening here, and I can't help feeling that BW will keep extending until tomorrow. I don't doubt it considering like 5 people in total are working on SWTOR nowadays - EA and their money saving ways and whatnot.

Yeah, their incompetence to fix their own incompetence, to, again, fix their own incompetence, is our fault for pointing out that they made a mistake. Makes sense. br0.

Anyone who plays games such as SWTOR, WoW, EVE etc. doesn't have any right whatsoever to dislike the addition of SGR. When you play games with so many different people, from different cultures, with different things they want out of a game, with different playstyles, different personalities, there is really no point in caring about the opinion of some idiot who has gotten lost in the internet and doesn't know how MMO communities work. For goodness sakes, I have a guy in my guild who does drugs every weekend at big party events, he's also a vegetarian, and a mormon. Does anyone care? No, they have no right. Does everyone know this? Yes. So what's the big fuss about being scared people will leave just because of SGR? Those people are fools who shouldn't be on the internet in the first place.

Nearly 50% of all companions in the game being utterly useless and have no place in logic of why they were even able to get aboard your ship.

Kaliyo is one of my top, a long with Vector, Skadge, Gault, and Broonmark.

I'm able to download at around 1 Mbps for approximately 15 minutes, then it slows down to 15-20Kbps. If I restart the launcher the download speed will go back up again, but continuing to shutting down and starting it up again is just stupid. 1 year after the game has been launched and this is the type of download speed I get? New low for BioWare and EA, terrible low.

Since when was increasing the level cap equal to being held hostage? Well, I want to stay at level 1 forever, but those bastards in the game industry wants me to level up. What type of ******** is that, I should be able to get the same content everyone else gets and see it all even though I'm level 1! I pay the same they do and I am entitled to EVERYTHING without doing **** to get it. Does my sarcasm get the point across?

Have any expansion actually regeared all current content instead of making anything new? I know WoW has been a master at doing this to several of their instances and raids, but all of them? Seems way to idiotic to be true. Though, if all you say is true, SWTOR will end up even worse than before group finder and CM.

Is the general lack of logic this prominent among people nowadays? Seriously, I can't believe you guys actually believe they will keep level 50 flashpoints and operations when the cap is 55. The failings in logic among human beings surprise me more and more every day. They mentioned adding new story missions, I don't see why that wouldn't also entail class stories.

Do you really think the lvl 50 flashpoints and operations is everything there is going to be? With a level cap of 55? Logic is a wise thing, my friend. Sure, you can use boxershorts for 5 year old kids when you're a grown up, but will they fit? No. Simple logic, man. Also, I would only assume that class stories would continue past level 50, wouldn't you? Doesn't make sense to abandon what makes the game amazing, at the very least right now. I doubt EA would like to lose more subs than they already have, so discontinuing class stories is out of the question.

3x5500, 2x2400, 2x1040. EA shouldn't even dare say they don't have proper funding to get more people working on this game now

So raising the level cap, adding new class story content, new faction story content, new items, new flashpoints and operations, and new datacrons (more specific for this game in particular) isn't recognized as an expansion anymore? When did that happen o.o

I have been playing this game, decently steady, since launch, but I have never DCd or had any major lag issues unless I was dumb enough to leave a heavy-duty bandwidth program running while playing. When people say they get so much lag it becomes unplayable, one question comes to mind; when this lag occurs, how many **** movies are you downloading at the same time? That is the only reason, unless you have a ****** ISP. Packet loss issues are mostly a thing of the past, and BioWare managed to fix the biggest of them within the first few weeks after launch (bear in mind they did so continuously all through beta as well). I suppose you could blame Santa Claus, but then you'll just be pulling straws out of Section X and that is just uncomfortable for everyone. If you're truly having issues, run a computer diagnostic, check around on the internet regarding your router, modem, wiring issues, ISP issues with certain countries, your motherboard's onboard network card, your self-attached network card, your wireless network card, your house's wiring, tell your ISP to run a diagnostic, and I could go on and on until the end of time, but I assume you get the point? The servers BioWare are currently using has enough bandwidth for over 1M, don't worry about that. Few don't mean slow, in this case it just means "few, but really fracking huge". There is no overpopulation issues, if you notice in your map, right above a smaller version of the big one to the bottom right. There you are able to switch "instances" - copies of the same area, just with different players. And if you pour a little more attention into it, you'll notice that none of them surpass much above 200. This means, in one instance of Balmorra, there are 200 people running around, and considering Balmorra's extensive size and scope, that will have little to no effect on the servers unless you get up to a dozen or so instances, but then BioWare just push a tiny lever and -woops- MOAR POWAH. Please, remember to let us know whether it's FPS lag or actual connectivity lag. If it's connectivity lag then check the section above, if it's FPS lag then there are tons of things you could do. Get a SSD and use it as a system disc, increase your ram, then your OS to 64 bit (no macs with games, then you're just begging for any game engine to attempt the assassination of every piece of machinery that runs on electricity in it (which is everything, so you see the dilemma)), get a new CPU, get a new GPU, update your drivers, lower the in-game settings, use the little tricks about changing the layout of Windows itself to increase performance. I have more in stock, but I'm feeling a bit hungry right now, so I'll just skip it. The point is, it's not the game that's at fault if your computer doesn't have the power to play it, that's just the passage of time into better technologies. I must say, BioWare has done a great job optimizing it for lower-end machines, but there comes a point where you just have to suck in your gut and admit you have to update your Win95 machine for something within this millennium. I admit, again, that BioWare screwed the pooch when it comes to the restrictions put on F2P, but they made the change from P2P to F2P with only good in mind ( ). F2P is a good idea, under the right circumstances, with the right restrictions, but this was certainly not it. Do keep in mind that 99.9% of the administration decisions made for SWTOR (bug prios, content prios, prices for stuff on The Cartel Market, release of new paid features (they will come, just wait)), and many more, are all made by EA, and they haven't achieved the award for Worst Company in the US 2 years in a row because they don't have bake sales outside HQ on Christmas morning. SWTOR's obvious lack of proper administration led to the situation they now find themselves in, that's what happens when a great company sells out. Letting everything be available for everyone with minimal effort is the telltale sign of an Entitlement Generation MMO gamer, and you reek of it. So what if your friend isn't able to get a very rare crystal without putting in some proper effort? Here I put the blame on the right person and highlighted my point about how silly the notion is. Please think rationally about such comments or else you'll just sound like an entitled brat who wants anything and everything the game has to offer without doing anything for it just because you pay the same fee as everyone else. The "Make- Your-Own-Color- Crystal-Color" idea is a bit interesting, but at this point I have to much hate towards BioWare about ruining how the line between Sith and Jedi when it comes to their lightsaber colors, I barely care whether it sounds like an idiotic idea or not. As you can see, I put the blame where it's called for. Don't shove it all on the one guy just because it's convenient. I have shouted my fair share at BioWare and EA, and I still hate them both enough to make my head look like a big tomato, but, in actual fact, most of the issues you mentioned here has a very little chance of being BioWare's fault.

The system is automated, just like the system banks use to transfer money from one account to the other. The support is just any normal person with enough privileges to do the most simple tasks, think of it like running a diagnostic check on your computer, it's not much different with finding out if something goes wrong with the server transfer system. They have already made the system, and we have paid more than enough in subscription for the cost of making it. Just look at Rift, completely free with a 1 week lockout for each char after a transfer, that is very reasonable.

As far as I can tell, it has a very loose smart loot system where it only drops items that the classes in the group can equip. If you have an entire 4 man group of Sith Inquisitors, the chance for Heavy Aim gear to drop is much lower than if there was either an Aim user or a Heavy armor user. That is at least what I have noticed about it, might be it's just coincidental though.

Ehm.... yes. I do expect them to keep a feature free when it doesn't cost them ****. It's a completely automated system and the only time they need to get close to it is when someone reports a problem. Using one of my previous analogies: "Why pay the mailman to put the letter in your mailbox when you have paid the company for the shipment", as in, it's idiotic to pay the man to do an arm movement when you paid for the shipping of the package.

The game should have launched with enough servers to avoid having to launch server transfers in the first place (not the astronomical number of servers BW fired up willy-nilly) and a much better LFG tool. I'm still not sold if it was necessary with the auto-teleport feature, but since it's in it should also teleport you back to where you were.

They will shut down most of the servers at the end of August, so I wouldn't expect the restriction to be lifted until late September. And please, can people stop calling "unrestricted server transfers" for "paid server transfers", please? BW has said they will have free transfers, let's not put any thoughts in EA's greedy mind that people actually wants to pay for it when it costs them exactly 0$ to keep the automated server transfer system running. It's idiotic that Blizzard demands payment for it, and if we encourage EA and BW to keep it free, then SWTOR will get a MUCH better reputation and some much needed publicity for being one of the exceedingly few MMOs that have free transfers. Why pay the mailman to put the mail in your box when you have already paid the company for the shipment, right?

Correction: EA doesn't consider SWTOR among their Top 10 priorities, not Top 5. Incredibly discouraging that EA is leaving nothing more than a skeleton crew to keep SWTOR running, and completely disregard the massive money-making opportunities arise with an MMO of this caliber from such well-known company. The management team on SWTOR has been failing since day 1. One idiotic decision after another (seriously, bring servers down for a 4 hour maintenance on a Thursday to fix 1 tiny bug about augment display that no one even knew existed). There are things like this that are keeping people away from the game and aren't bothering to invest of themselves in it. I keep one foot in and one out the door because I would rather play this game whenever I'm bored, instead of committing all my gaming-time to it and end up being horribly disappointed, as we all have in recent years by both BioWare and EA.

That is the same argument people make for LFD; "Well... you don't have to use it" without recognizing that to stay competitive you were forced to use it. Exactly the same obvious breach in logic with spending real money to buy in-game gear. To stay competitive you would have to buy the gear, so every competitive guild would order their players to instantly purchase the best gear available so they could tackle the newest raids to get world-firsts. Therefore, you would be forced to buy your gear. And don't use the "well.. you don't have to buy it" ********, because that just shows that it's impossible for the person to use his own mind and figure out that people would be indirectly forced, same with LFD.