You have a very flawed understanding of the concept of minority rights & protections within a democratic environment. Technically a pure democracy could (e.g.) have 51% of the people vote that the other 49% should give them all their money, but protection of minorities is a core part of all modern democracies for precisely those reasons. Who knows when they're going to be one of the ones in the minority? Or in SWTOR's case, maybe next week you'll be the one with the weird graphics card bug. A more accurate version would be: "they do what is ok for the majority, and hopefully doesn't alienate the minority so much the minority does something damaging". Bioware is alienating the minority pretty thoroughly here.

So the 90% should get to do whatever they want to 10%? Society doesn't work like that, or at least no humane society does. All they need to do is restrain the development department, fix it once & fix it right. One maintenance is reasonable. Three a week is incompetence.

Actually they do. http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/1023610#toc7 This falls under "A service that: - is substantially unfit for its common purpose and can’t be easily fixed within a reasonable time" Terms of Use contracts cannot sign away consumer protections in Australia. There's a reason why Blizzard had to smile & cough up refunds en masse in Australia when they pulled this rubbish with Diablo 3.

Lets say I'm an East Coast Australian who works a regular 9-5 job & play SWTOR a lot during my free time. Mon-Fri Work 9am - 5pm, get home at 6pm, play SWTOR from 6pm-11pm, eat & go to bed, getup at 7am & go to work. Repeat. That's 5 hours playing SWTOR a night. Sat-Sun: I spend all my "work time" playing, so 8 hours a day of SWTOR, and the other 8 hours doing the "general living tasks" like mowing the lawn I couldn't fit into the week due to my heavy schedule of SWTOR. That's 5x5 + 2x8 = 25 + 16 = 41 hours a week of SWTOR. Hey, we're dedicated, k? Lets throw in maintenance though. It lasts 5pm-9pm, so that overlaps 3 hours of the play time. Then lets calculate it based off the number of maintenances per week: Regular tuesday maintenance #1 knocks 3hrs / 41hrs = 7.3% of my playtime out. Maintenance #2: 6hrs / 41hrs = 14.6% of playtime is removed. Maintenance #3: 9hrs / 41hrs = 21.95% of weekly playtime is gone If they do it, Maintenance #4 will be: 12hrs / 41hrs = 29.27% of weekly playtime is gone --- In conclusion: Are you intending to refund 20% of my access payment for this week? Also, most people probably aren't as dedicated as my hypothetical guy. Getting 41 hours of SWTOR in a week is rather enthusiastic. If you shut down a non-fanatic just won't bother logging in that night. Which means 41 hours of play gets turned into 26 hours of play (41-3x5), which means that this week the game's only online for them ~60% of the time they could reasonably play (26/41). 60% practical uptime for a casual player is beyond disgraceful. I think Bioware needs to look up what a "persistent world" is. It doesn't matter how perfectly you eventually fix problems if the servers are constantly offline being improved. When a game is offline, it's totally unplayable, which is pretty much the ultimate definition of "broken".

So is there a way to go back & get it to suggest a setting again? I just clicked past and setup my standard custom variation, but I'm somewhat curious to go back and see what it suggests now.

Stat finessing. Want to hit exactly your accuracy or crit sweet spot? Your other sockets provide a multi-factor (e.g. accuracy+power, crit+surge, etc) basic building block, then to get the last little bit to hit your optimum you use (e.g.) two or three accuracy augments but leave the rest as power augments. The retentive stat min-maxer in me is Very Happy about this move.

While I think your basic point is valid, I would point out that static trinkets aren't necessarily the best in all situations simply by their design. Throw in 15-20s of higher priority burst window & 5-10s of running around, and it nerfs the PVP trinket a bit. If you've got a class that can sync a trinket use/proc with other CDs or energy pooling for a multiplier effect, that boosts a non-static trinket significantly too. All that said, PVP trinket does look suspiciously strong compared to other current options. Hopefully a similarly good PVE trinket is coming down the pipeline soon.

Average Potential Weekday Play Time of a 9-5 worker: 6pm-11pm Monday-Friday, 15 hours total 1 Night a Week 5pm-9pm Offline = 3 hours off (20% of available playtime), 12 hours weekday playtime available 2 Nights a Week 5pm-9pm Offline = 6 hours off (40% of available playtime), 9 hours weekday playtime available It's a much bigger deal than you'd think if you're from the Asia region. Even if you played 8 hours a day on the weekend, one night is still 10% of your playtime & two nights makes it 20% of your playtime. If it was one night a week, we're sorta used to that level of rubbish service... but Bioware pulls a second night of downtime, always on a thursday or friday night because that's what works with their development schedule, at least half the weeks in a month if not more. And this 10-20% playtime reduction is purely so they can get a fix out only 3-4 days earlier than the regular maintenance. Calling it "Unscheduled" is rubbish... every Australian friend I chatted to had predicted this downtime on monday night. To quote from a post I made within an hour of so of this time on the night of patch release: It's what they do nearly every time they've got an excuse & the most absurdly minor excuse will do. It's terrible customer service & it's routine. It prioritises convenience+speed of their development cycle over providing a stable service. It's the sort of mentality which causes these patches to go out in a buggy, unstable state in the first place. Bioware Development need to learn to get it right once, and then stop fiddling with it. Their issues with premature release are concerning...

Yeah, I like (bordering on love+adore) the rest of the economic system, most of the QQ about credit sinks & the game's economics is short sighted twaddle. But the mod swap cost & the spec swap cost are counterproductive imo. Penalising people for being more useful & testing gear properly is counter-productive for the community in the long term IMO. Making perks expensive is fine, but making useful & productive grouping expensive is no good. A purely token cost is appropriate for mod & spec swaps, at most.

I'm mildly amused that they're apparently consolidating all the feedback into a post call "Legacy Perks Swindling", but just to add my perspective: - I'm primarily a PVE solo player. I'm playing an MMO because I like live worlds (with real people around the place, real economy, the ability to chat to friends while playing, etc - the non grouping to kill stuff multiplayer side) - I have no issues with the costs. Money is easy to get in this game if you do PVE, and even easier if you like to play the AH and craft at least a bit (which I do). I can empathise with the PVPers issues, although I also rather wonder if having an all-in-one "warzones give you gear+money+xp" is appropriate. But it is better than forcing them to PVE against their wishes. But all the perks strike me as dirt cheap basically... even if you hate dailies, grit your teeth & do them for one day and you'll prolly get enough cash for all the perks you wanted on a new toon. - Useful & non-useful perks vary for me, but I actually really like having the choice on a per-character basis. All my toons will be getting the crafting bonuses. The lowbie ones will definitely be getting speeders & possibly companion gift affection boosts. None of mine will get any XP boosts, I'm happy with the speed of leveling as is, but I'm glad it's there for others. My 50s will probably get the respec & at least some of the fieldbots. All up, I see nothing to dislike unless you're bad with money, loathe doing PVE, or don't have a 50 (considering you just about need one to be in the right income bracket, unless you're a seriously keen trader). I'm just about the diametric opposite of all those, so I love the additions.

Just about any game that's ever brought in a "vanish" style effect has had these issues. Generally speaking the problem is missiles-already-in-flight, but slow-to-react pets are also routinely issues. SWTOR has both these problems - loads of projectiles and everyone has a companion. If there are projectiles in the air which haven't hit yet (either from you or at you), then you vanish, then they land... you've just either taken damage or done damage so the vanish instantly breaks. Ditto if your companion is mid-swing when you vanish, he'll just finish what he's partway through doing first & break the vanish in the process. A standard developer solution is to add a brief immunity window to the vanish, and in SWTOR some classes/specs can partially do that manually by using a defensive CD. You can also try to minimise issues by triggering your companion to passive first, holding your fire, and waiting for a lull in the enemies fire (getting out of their Line of Sigh briefly works well). As a primarily solo player I'd *really* like to see this fixed somehow, but I recognise it's problematic... I didn't learn those vanish-improving techniques in SWTOR, already knew them from multiple other games

Damn gouging biochemists

In the May 25th Weekly Q&A Bioware says prices would be higher if it was legacy wide. We can't be certain how much higher, but one would assume it'd be in the range of 4 to 6 times higher...the maximum reasonable would be 8 times more expensive, I'd have difficulty seeing it being only 2-3 times more expensive. The pricing & logic make sense to me. I think they underestimated the number of non-readers in their playerbase though. A big, must-click-to-dismiss sign saying something like "hey blind guy, these are character specific" when you first open the page probably would've been a good idea, but some people'll blindly click through just about anything (would you like a game of global thermonuclear war?)... there's a reason they make you type DELETE on the character deletion...

It's not a placeholder. I'm not sure quite what it's meant to be... tattooing? really ornate skin tight full body thermal underwear? this season's bodystocking look? I quite like the pattern personally, but it seems more like something that should be a clothing option than a skin. It's kinda jarring when it's constantly contrasting against the incandescent head colouration. If they kept the pattern & made it mirror her head colours I could understand it better.

It really comes down to the supply of Advanced Neural Augmentors (the rank 6 epic slicing part). Considering those things need a crit from a 50-60 minute long mission or a rank 6 slicing mission item (plus ~2.5 hours), I don't see the price of augments coming down terribly fast. With average max of about 23% crit (max'd affection + 3% from legacy.. some companions can get a little higher), you're looking at a companion bringing back one payload of A.N.A's somewhere around every 2 to 4 hours... and in my experience they frequently return only 3 parts rather than the 4 you need to make an aug. If you'd rather just skip to the AH, which requires someone else to go through the time hurdles anyway, Adv. Neural Augmentors are currently going on my server for 35,000-45,000 each (they'd gone from an average of 10-18k to 20k-25k+ before the patch even hit). You need four for an augment. So at 150k an augment, the crafter is making a loss & at 200k it's less than a 10% profit margin. It's part of what I love about the swtor crafting system personally... it really underlines the value of time nicely. PS. So yeah.. I'm expecting the price to go up from 200k personally.... although I also expect a whole load of people to start running slicing parts missions like their lives depended on it, so I'm curious to see how long it takes the extra supply to come through and knock the price down... (and/or find out how much supply people stockpiled in the first place... i've already gone through a stack)

I'm happy with something that functions in-sync with the ability rather than prettiness that detracts from precision, personally speaking. Both would be obviously be preferable, but if I'm choosing then function > fashion.

While I tend agree with your general point from the view of the overall game, if we're purely talking about patch 1.3 then I think the other guy's being fair. We could rate 1.3 on the quality of tree graphics added, but it'd be a daft criteria. Rating an individual patch on what you think it should've featured rather than what it did feature doesn't make a a great deal more sense.

you dislike the fact that the kits that require mats you get solely via REing items are hard to get unless you RE items?

While I agree that there was no genuine new content, I'd argue that an accessibility change to content (i.e. LFG) and a new 'level' of the same content (i.e. ranked warzones) are extreme enough examples of re-implemented old content that they fill essentially the same role as new content. Just taking LFG alone & thinking about it. You'll probably hunt down groups for your main, but are you going to bother on your alts? Some would, but many/most wouldn't. Apparently many people aren't even comfortable forming groups for their mains manually. So the playability drops off... until then they add the easy access tool of LFG & suddenly you've got a mass of playtime added that'll keep this patch rolling for a large portion. The sort of people who hang around forums & were already prepared to form groups on their alts? Not so much... hopefully they really like ranked warzones. But the rest of us unwashed casual/altoholic/reclusive masses? Great stuff.

All my tinytoons have speeders & I'm gouging my little heart out selling augments. Game seems smooth & stable. I have yet to mess around with group finder but the gossip i'm getting back is that it's fine. I'm bracing myself for them to decide something needs to be urgently fixed (anyone's relics broken? no? damn... wait.. some augment slots are broken you say? sounds impossible to live 7 days without, power those servers down boys!!). So I'm expecting them to piss me off by pulling the servers down in oceanic primetime another night or two this week though. But so far, so good. 7 or 8.

The terms are interchangeable in British (& therefore euro/au/nz/indian/african/etc english), although shop is much more common. 'Store' would tend to imply "department store" - so an establishment of significant size.

Absolutely. World PVP is great and absolutely needs to be encouraged, but creating a flagging system that ends up with people in PVP who don't want to be there isn't encouraging world pvp or creating fun for anyone except griefers.

I could not guarantee the technology is identical, but one would expect them to be extremely similar to the Blizzard authenticators. Blizzard will ship to AU, NZ, Hong Kong & Singapore - I have a Blizzard physical authenticator sitting in front of me currently. Blizzard charge an arm & a leg for shipping (US$20 for any item, electronic or otherwise, from the US->AU), but they will ship authenticators and US customs is not bothered by them. I haven't done an extremely in-depth examination, but based off my cursory past enquiries the restrictions on that style of security device are largely either superseded or an urban myth. As a general guideline, if you could ship it from the US to Canada then you could ship it from the US to Australia. I mean the US has offered to sell or lease nuclear submarines to Australia... I don't see authenticators being a major hurdle And regarding the Apps - while Australia generally actually has a higher technology uptake than the US (e.g. we have a higher relative percentage of the population with broadband internet than the US has with any internet), some of us still aren't into the latest expensive phone toys

The phone presumably does work, but the security key cannot be bought from an Australian account. Clicking on it from your account takes you first to the US ad & then clicking the "buy now" option takes you to the front page of the AU/NZ Origin store. They are not listed in the AU/NZ store. From looking at the EA Origin store via VPN, you'd need to use VPN to place the order & then have it sent to a remailer service to have it shipped to AU/NZ. Exactly why they put these obstacles in the way is beyond me. There are no import/export restrictions. I'd very much like someone to tell me I'm wrong about that, but I don't think so - there's actually a note in the "Protecting Your Account" thing that says the keys aren't available in AU, NZ, Hong Kong or Singapore Be curious to hear from CS exactly why they aren't available here, or if there's a less convoluted work-around to purchase them. I normally play with Americans so I could easily get one sent over... it's just a question of whether I could attach it to my account.

I didn't comment on the CE because I'm unfamiliar with whether it was actually available in AU/NZ - I bought the a version from overseas too. But making the argument "you could always buy it in another country" is a bit flawed imo, so if the CE wasn't available in AU/NZ I find that oversight odd. And the lack of a physical authenticator when they've got a store here is, imo, unarguably silly. The only reason I can think of is that many people seem to automatically think there'll be some sort of issue shipping authentication style security devices around (which is simply not true, at least amongst first world countries). You'd have a harder time shipping a set of dinner knives than you would an electronic authenticator.