Sadly, the best stuff in the game isn't crafted. Some parts of it can be, but most of it is dropped by one critter or another. Also, and even sadder, is the fact that once you hit 50, they give you a free set of recruit PvP gear for your chosen AC. That gear is actually better than the crafted items you are able to make (without getting patterns from HMs). Patience and grinding in PvP war zones will see this gear upgraded to Battlemaster gear and higher, but the only reason to go higher is for the mods available from the next tier. In fact, once you get any piece of modable gear, you already have the potential to have a "top tier" piece as all you need to do is spend the credits on the mods and slot them (though this may not be cheap).

The brief answer to the OPs question is, yes. You can play the game entirely solo. The long winded answer is actually, sort of. You will basically need to funnel all your resources into maximizing 2 characters instead of one. Your companions becomes an extension of your character to the extent that the sum is greater than its constituent parts. That's actually not an easy thing to do and that doesn't even take into account your class and role choices. To a certain extent tanks do this the easiest and, with the right crew skills, the fastest. Healers are about in the same boat. Dps.. not so much since you tend to pull off your companion tank more often than not and you're usually too squishy for even an extraordinarily geared companion healer to keep alive in heavy combat. Hybrid specs for certain ACs can do better than pure builds as well. It can be done, but you may not have fun doing it. It will also require some research on your part to find out the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen AC and how to bolster strengths and plug weaknesses.

That's not entirely true. While the companion AI is rather... blunt.. I know several tanks (on my old, dead server) that were soloing regular flashpoints with just their healbot, albeit a very well geared healbot. I can see the same holding true with well geared healing players with their well geared tanking companion, and to a lesser extent, similarly geared dps players and companions (assuming they wouldn't pull threat every 2 gcds). Furthermore, it's not about the effectiveness of the option, but rather the option in and of itself. Player like or dislike also has relatively little to do with it. If they hate it, they will find a group. If they like it, they'll find a way to make it work, or find a group anyway.

That actually wansn't what the OP was saying entirely. The OP was saying, while the wait was long, when he did get into the group for the FP, the group would quickly fall apart and he'd be back to square one. It's a valid concearn when, as you pointed out, it's a massively multi-player game. If your masses can't mass effectively, then a solution must be found or the masses will dwindle. I personally like this idea for regular modes. It's hard to equip your companions with enough gear to really make them on par with another (equally geared) player anyway, so there's already a built in handicap. For heroic modes, I think I'd like to see the option disabled, but I'm kind of thinking many of the higher end HMs would be impossible with highly geared companions anyway (or at least I would hope so).

I'm honestly not sure what's on their to do list right now, but I'm sure there are several threads around here that will enlighten me to the fact. But that's not really the point. I can't see it being very high priority, but one of the teams they've got could be (have been) working on this on the side and have it out in relatively short order. It doesn't seem like a complex thing to do.

The massive amount of things found in the cartel packs, as well as the number of cartel packs themselves, on the GTN would suggest otherwise .

Right up there with merc dps. Known issue is known. We've been beating this dead bantha for months now.

The problem here is, even if you charged cartel coins for it, you would have to charge so much in order to compensate for potential losses on a player making a new character, that no one would consider it worth while to porchase. I'll demonstrate by example. I don't know exact numbers, so I'm gonna flub them a little. Let's say you have a Jedi Sentinel. You've ranked him up, done all his quests and finished top of the class at Epeen University. Now you want to use the "what if" machine to see what would have happened. Currently, you would have to start a new character and start the grind all over again. Only this time through, you have help. Your previous Sentinel had eleventy billion credits, but you blew it all on Twi'lek ******s and blow (you did name your character Charlie Sheen, after all). What you do have is all this cartel coins you've been collecting because you had so much hard currency. So you start unlocking things on the new character to make things go faster. 5 ranks of class quest xp here. 5 ranks of war zone xp there. A swanky new modable chest piece. Let's say they're all 150 coins each and all of a sudden, you're out of coins, but you absolutely NEED to unlock that speeder piloting. You're gonna do one of 2 things. Switch to your main (slowing progress on your replay) to farm cash, or buy cartel coins without breaking your stride in order to just snap up that perk and go. THIS is exactly the kind of situation BioWare wants the player to be in. Because, given enough of these situations, a person is eventually going to break down and drop a dime. If they were to implement your idea, which is a good one, they would have to somehow extrapolate how many coins the average user would spend on perks, add a "premium" cost to it to cover variables and then throw it up there for someone to buy. Using my examples from above for costs, let's say you burned 2000 coins for all the perks you bought. Now let's say that you actually skipped on a lot of the perks because you simply didn't care. BioWare has to decide if 2000 coins is too low or if it should be around 3000 coins. If they settle on 2500, then the player has to decide if dropping that much money is worth it when they can simply restart a character and grind it out for free. On the flip side, if BioWare sets a cost of only 1000 coins, they are missing out in potential revinue by players not purchasing their coin packs beyond that initial investment of 1000 if it turns out the average player actually spends money for 3000 coins, but over an extended period of time.

It might require some labor to redo the story scenes depending in how they're coded, but why even lock the race? I might not take advantage of it, but it would be cool to see a Twi'lek Jaessa or a Cyborg Jorgan. Some of their backstory might get a little wonky at that point (particularly with characters like Jorgan who specifically mention their race in some scenes) but it might be a small price to pay for coolness factor.

I flipped back a couple pages, but didn't see any thread titles suggesting something similar, so I thought I'd touch on it or at least dig it out of the back of the closet. Character Recustomization? It really needs to happen. Now that it's easier than ever to unlock races with cartel coins, it would be nice to be able to go back and really do what you wanted to during character creation, but didn't have the tools to do it unlocked yet. I'm all for restarting a class just to do things better. Not that I make it a habit, but this is a hobby more than a way of life for me, so I don't mind spending the time to start over. Especially when there really are only 4 stories and playing through them gets faster the more you do it. But not every (many) of the player community feel this way, especially the newly acquired f2p crowd we have. It's especially unfair to them since they only have 2 character slots on the account total. They can buy your coins to open up a race, but then they have to sacrifice their only other slot to take advantage of the character creation options, even if they bought the unlock for the race they're currently playing. Throw us all a bone here, BW. Give us a vendor, on each respective fleet perhaps, that will allow us to recustimize our character. I'm not asking for an AC swap or a race change (although race does nothing from a gameplay standpoint in this game). I just want to be able to swap out the old busted bionics for the new hotness once I unlock the cyborg race or something similar. I'm not even asking for a body type swap. Just the cosmetics. Maybe a new hairdo. The new swanky bionic eye that I mentioned. Maybe get a new tattoo or have one removed. Charge us credits for it. One more money sink can't be all that bad, right? Hell, I'd even be ok with a (SMALL) cost in cartel coins. You could even make it into a legacy item for player ships just like the GTN, mailbox and repair droid. You could even make it a function OF the repair droid (he dabbles in facial reconstruction on the side). Please, BioWare... You're our only hope. EDIT: so this thread has (thankfully) gathered a bit of momentum and a few suggestions have poped up that I hadn't taken into consideration when I originally posted it. So with that in mind, I'm going to simply provide a list of suggestions here. Call it an overall thread TL;DR for the attention deficit crowd. - Legacy customization droid similar to the repair droid to recustomize your character at will or with possible credits - "Barber shops" for players to spend credits for minor cosmetic changes - Cartel store full recustomization option with possible name change (not legacy name) - Cartel store race/gender/name change only option - Cartel store Legacy name change (not really a fan of this one, but provided for completion) - Vastly upgraded or revamped character creation tools with more range of features and options (CoH anyone?) - Character faction change (possibly considerably more complex with having to change ships, story arcs, etc. Maybe causing all story flags, skill points, etc, to be reset. Would need to lock AC to cross faction mirror class, however. Provided for completion.) - Character "respec" token available from the cartel store with limited uses. Perhaps legacy bound on use. Perhaps multiple purchases available. Total scope of the respec yet to be determined, but possibly up to and including name, gender, species, etc. (Provided for completion) More added as and when the need arises. P.S.: Woot! Thanx for the 5 star rating guys! Your posts and support keep this thread alive.

Honestly, I like the idea, but they WANT us to have to spend weeks going through the story all over again. It provides that time investment mechanic they're looking for and, more significantly, puts the player ever more into a position of buying unlocks to make things go faster or smoother now that the game has gone f2p. So sadly, I don't think this is going to happen.

They certainly could impliment day/night cycles and keep the mood of their planets intact should the choose to devote the time and resources to it, it's just not high priority for them at the moment. I don't think WoW even had day/night cycles for quite a while after launch. It's an immersion thing and I hardly notice it between city/industrial planets anyway. As far as republic and imperial stations blasting away at each other, they're still bound under the Treaty of Corescant. That's not so say they aren't sending covert agents after each other, but open hostility would restart the war and neither side wants that for now. And I agree 100% with your last point.

Honestly, OP, I don't think many of your examples have much merit. The only gear your friend can't use from his quest lines are purple quality and he won't see much, if any, of that until after he's put at least 20 to 40 hours into the game (barring random drops, of course). With only one exception, everything else you describe is a quality of life or purely aesthetic component and WILL NOT affect your ability to progress to the full extent of your f2p experience. If you absolutely NEED to change the appearance of your companion or hide that hideously ugly head gear (most head items are pretty horribly, sadly) then he should be willing to drop 5 or 10 buck. It's account wide and he only has to do it once. Furthermore, he gets preferred status at that point and gets a few more perks for free. The credit cap and chat limit is there to prevent currency farmers and is a good thing, for the most part. If your friend (or any f2p player) needs help to such an extent, they can get into a party and not have to wory about the limit as far as I know. If this isn't the case, it certainly should be and I would have to have to agree with you there. Credits aren't so hard to come by that capping out is really any hindrance anyway. It simply means you don't have to be gouged at the GTN and can't afford the big ticket legacy unlocks. The only part of your post I can get behind is the UI limitation. I somewhat understand why they might have chose to do this, but I don't think it was required and it kinda sucks.

Preferred players have a higher credit cap, but not substantially so. I believe it's only 350k. But I also thought f2p players were limited to 100k based on information I read, so...

Deleted due to wrong quote and irrelevant content by user.

Except it's not 20 bucks. It's more like 5 to 10. I don't really agree with the hotbar limit of 2, mostly because I'm so used to having more, but it's genuinely not a big deal. As far as head slots and titles go, those are pretty much the epitome of novelty and flash. If you REALLY want to have the title "Mr. Epeen" or hide that (admittedly horrible) head slot, then drop a dime people. You can play the game (free) without it, but you pay for customization. Quite frankly, for the cost of what I pay every month for a sub, another player can get almost the same customization and UI function. And they only have to pay for it once. If you're a returning player, this might be a bit of a culture shock, but as a player that abandoned their sub and left the game anyway, I'm sure there were other reasons for you to do so and your expectations were set overly high on your return to begone with.

Yeah, wow... I haven't seen that at all on harbinger and I've been doing fps like mad trying to get a new hat while leveling. As the previous poster mentioned, it's your game too, if you don't like the group your in, drop and get another. It may suck if you're dps and the queues are long, but if you want to make the stand, that's how to do it. Honestly, as a sub, it's well within your right to report them for griefing as well. I'm not sure how robust their policy enforcement is these days, but I couldn't hurt. Moreover, if these douchehats do get popped and word starts getting around, the behavior might drop off. It's definitely not good to be scaring off potential new players if you're really on board with this game, so I hope the behavior you describe is limited to the ignorant minority. Btw, props to you for going to bat for the f2p and winning the weapon for them.

People can hike prices all they want. Until they realize the only people able to afford those prices are the subs who either have it, don't need it, or don't want it. Subs have an unlimited credit cap. F2p and freemium players are limited to 100k and 350k respectively. So with the exception of purple gear (which these players can't use), I have a feeling most items are going to drop drastically in price to open up to the wider market. But this isn't the topic. As has been mentioned, industry standard seems to be 1/3 of sub price as complimentary store credit. I find this acceptable. Moreso since they give you another 100 if you have a security key as an incentive to buy one and promote account security. As a former guild master in other games, I actually applaud this step.

I would be more inclined to believe the other players in the example group were rolling on the polesaber in order to throw it on a companion. They might have been friends and were "hedging their bets" so to speak by simply all needing on it and then giving it to the player that wanted it. It's not a new phenomenon and is considered rather douchey by most. Also, unless it was stated by the players themselves, there's really no way to directly tell if someone is f2p, premium or p2p. You can extrapolate based on interaction, but without confirmation, it's all speculation. As I said, I think it was more a mater of douchebags being douchey.

I have to agree with you 100%. I've only ever seen people get hostile when the f2p crowd starts in on how it's BS they have to wait till level 15 for sprint or other such nonsense. But all this is to be expected. It's rather hard to find a definitive source on exactly what you get for free and, more to the point, what all of it means exactly. There is literally nothing that a f2p player is going to do that is going require epic quality gear. Furthermore, why would they even need it except for its epeen value? If they want to compete in PvP at that scale or do Ops, then they're actually on better footing to do so since they can pay a one time fee on specifically the character they want to use as and when they want to use it while the rest of the sub community pays regardless. Furthermore, it's not even a very substantial cost. 5 or 10 bucks or so. That you never have to pay again for the life of that character (except maybe if you really got addicted to Ops and PvP. But then you'd get a sub, now wouldn't you?).

What I don't think the community as a whole (at least the GTN community) realizes is that f2p and preferred players have a pretty severe limit on the amount of credits they can hold on to at any one time. I haven't looked too far into it, but barring the assumption that they can increase or eliminate this cap (I believe they can increase, but not eliminate it), they're limited to 100k and 350k respectively. Generally speaking, the GTN market is going to have to come down unless they're content to try to sell thing to people that most likely don't want or need those items. Obviously there will be exceptions to this by way of mods and such that players moving through tiers will always need. I see this as potential for a good thing.

I believe you've stubled onto the point of this thread. Giving not just bounty hunters, but all non-force using classes the option to use different weapons to do their ranged damage would go a long way to improving the quality of play for many players. They wouldn't even have to modify skills other than to unlock their use for other weapon classes. Certain classes maintain their "feel" specifically because of their weapon limitations. Smugglers and Jedi/Sith are prime examples of this (although it would be nice to see more force users able to dual wield or use bouble bladed sabers). Combat medic with a rifle instead of an assault cannon.. not quite as testosterone laden, but it makes a lot more sense from a "real world" perspective. Imperial operative with a blaster pistol instead of a rifle to go with her vibroknife... way more in line with what you'de expect an agent to be carrying. I absolutely LOVE this game, despite all of it's faults, but I believe this to be an oversight on Bioware's part if only to bring the player into their world even more.

so you have your companion in the same gear as you and you want him to tank multiple strong and elite opponents... Are you a tank? Is your gear set up for tanking? hmm.. there is actually tanking gear out there. Might try giving your companion some of it. +defense gear and mods can go a long way to improving tank survival. For all gear based games, the clothes make the (wo)man. You don't have your tanking hat on, you're not tanking.

Long story short, it is actually your hardware. More specifically, the software running your hardware. I'm going to assume you're running a quad core processor since that's where a majority of the complaints seem to come from. The game doesn't yet support multi threading on a scale that your computer can handle efficiently, so only one of your processers is handling the load, which bogs down your system something fierce. It has to do with nvidia cards and amd processors.. wish i knew the specifics, but they're just way above my head. I found a link in the general forums here to a site with a workaround that essentially overrides a lockout implemented by microsoft to prevent another, non-related issue from having the potential of crashing your system. I downloaded and installed the program the other night and saw what appears to be significant improvement in my PvP fps, but there is still some chop.. especially when you get everyone in one spot and they all start burning their AoE. That's most likely a function of my video card, however. If i find the link, i'll try to repost. Sorry i can't be more help, but unless or until nvidia/bioware/microsoft all get on the same page, AMD users might just be left out in the cold.