Expectation Setting: Low Reaction Setting: Normal Crush Factor: Zero Business as usual. Nice to finally see a solid and confirmed release date, though.

One billion times this... You can't even use the comms to buy the mod for a 20% chance to learn them. Hell, I'd even do it if it gave me the green version of the pattern and made me RE those to get back up to par with what I could buy with all my comms. But all that aside, it's likely they did this just to give us something to spend our comms on. I mean, how many of us have actually bought the gear available using them? Even more so after the inclusion of the cartel market. But more to the point of the thread... Get a companion with a bonus in the crew skill you want purple mats for. Buy them gifts until they max out. Send them to step and fetch your shiny purple mats. Ideally you'll send them on the grey missions since they have the highest crit chance. While I don't remember what the base mission crit chances are, I do know that any +crit that your companion has are added percentage points on that base. In addition, you companion affection level shaves off up to 5% of the time required to finish and adds up to +5% crit chance. I suspect this correlates to roughly 1% every 2000 affection (at most).

Generally speaking, you'll likely end up with a particular set of abilities that you use most often, another set that becomes situational and another that you hardly, if ever, touch. When I start a new character now, I tend to already have set locations that I put things and I classify them as I learn them. So my defensive CDs go in one area, my main rotation goes in another, my CCs and breaks go in yet another, and so on. In this way I can keep better track of what I'm actually using and start trimming off the abilities that I hardly or never touch. Occasionally I've been defeated because that one time in a blue moon where that one skill would have saved my butt, I had removed it from my bars. But that is rare. Hell, I took my whirlwind CC off my shadow tanks bars altogether. Could I use it? Sure I could. I can think of a ton of ways it would be handy. But it's just easier for me to taunt the mon or force pull it than CC it for a measly 8 seconds. Especially if there's some serious AlE going on. Basically what I'm saying is, start making note of what you use. Either do this by grouping them and placing those groups near one another in order of use, or simply placing the same type of skill in the same area every time. If you find you hardly ever or never use a skill during the course of your normal play session, dump it. You can always trade it out with some other situational ability later if you have to. They give us a lot of skills in this game. Most are useful. Some are necessary. Others are situational at best. You're obviously not going to concern yourself with healing the tank if you're an arsenal merc. Should these skills be in your bars somewhere? Probably. But they don't really need to be hot keyed or placed to be ready at a moments notice. That's not your role. And if it becomes your role mid fight, well you have other things to worry about that where your heals are bound.

You can't actually BUY +41 crystals on the cartel market for use at level 10. There are some amazingly hideous orange ones for level 31, but I don't think I've actually seen one of those outside of pvp. The only way you can get +41 crystals at level 10 is through the purchase of one of the cartel packs and a bit of luck. They're one of the rare items therein. Additionally, once these unbind after a day or so (assuming the player hasn't equipped it) they can be sold on the GTN and are somewhat expensive, but getting cheaper by the day. So with regard to your concern about f2p, the cartel market and this p2w hysteria, no, it's not pay to win. Anyone with enough real or fake money can buy one and for a rare item, they're really pretty common. To the subject of this thread, all that been suggested is that the level requirement for the perk that people actually paid real money for before everything was f2p be updated and brought up to par with the cartel store.

They don't craft them for the same reason we don't buy them. Nobody wants them when you can get one with level 50 stats at level 10. There's also the notion (real or imagined) that these crystals are going to give you an edge in your chosen field of play. That trumps anything any crafter is going to produce before level 50 items. It used to be that they could potentially make some cash off the exotic colors like the purple crystals so long as they had a steady supply of the rare materials, but that was destroyed with this latest cartel pack. Furthermore, the price most people are willing to pay for most of these crafted crystals isn't even enough to cover he cost of sending your companions out to collect the rare materials needed. Especially when you can just as easily scavenge one from a random drop or even buy a custom item from one of the many specialty goods vendors that has the crystal with either the stats or the color you want. Ultimately, outside of the level 50+ crystals, the stats on the crystals have the least amount of impact on your character outside of the aesthetic context.

They don't even need to be in your legacy tree. My legacy tree is empty since I couldn't decide on a main character after naming my legacy. Obviously it put the character I was playing at the time up in the tree, but I removed that, too. Even with an empty legacy tree, I can still mail things from on random alt to another all day, every day. Assuming I spell their names correctly.

Obviously so you can spend your 500CC a month on character recustomization, duh...

I'll start off by saying I have 13 characters. One of each advanced class i've tried so far. And every one that is capable of tanking is spec'd and geared to tank. Currently that number is 5. On the occasions that I'm not actually tanking, I'm shocked at the number of tanks that tell me to stop killing "trash" and then go on to blame the healer when their Rambo-esqe foray into a room results in their sorry demise. Tanking every mob in a room is WoW. This is a WoW clone. Similar, but not quite the same. It has its own personality and quirks that set it apart from the former. One of those aspects is the ability of dps to quickly and efficiently work upward through mob hierarchy until only the "boss" mob is left. CC rules apply and all that, but generally speaking, as a tank in THIS game, I want to see my target(s) die last. That's not to say I want my dps to go balls deep on a second or third elite in a group. Absolutely not. And on the occasions that I heal, I let those dps suffer or die before I'll heal them. I refuse to waste resources on incompetence. It's a disservice to all involved. They either learn from the experience or rage quit and get replaced by someone that knows what they're doing. Dps in this game should be capable of tearing down at least one strong enemy without assistance. If they can't, they need to look at CC options or preparing better for the flashpoint (read as "gear up"). It's all fine and dandy if the tank can stroll into a room and faceroll every mob. But it's hard on the healer, firmly sets bad habits in place and is likely going to get quite expensive after patch 2.0.

I'm not in favor of actually dropping expertise. In fact, I think it's a required stat on pvp gear as it incentivizes progress toward that end. What I suggested was that they not penalize the other stats as heavily (not that the stats are heavily penalized in order to gain expertise anyway), but rather, they only allow the stats effects while in a warzone. In this way, players that take the time to gear up through pvp have the advantage against pve players in their chosen field of play. Conversely, the stats on pvp gear should not emphasize survivability from a pve perspective such that the pve players have an advantage using their gear in a pve setting (but not against other players). This is specifically in reference to operations. from what I've seen, both types of gear are perfectly suitable for open world encounters and I feel the stats already represent this in comparing the different types of gear. Removing the stat to "give casuals a chance" would actually be detrimental to both camps in this discussion. It's the same argument against the free pvp and pve sets that are given out once a player hits 50. Furthermore, everyone is casual pre-50. There's very little noticeable expertise gains and the ones that are there would maybe add up to 5% at most. Pvp prior to level 50 is basically beating the snot out of each other in whatever pve gear you got while leveling. We're not really talking about that since by the time anyone acquires expertise rating, they already have a good idea of what's going on.

They've already stated that they're working on (or at least looking into) 3D space combat down the road. So until then, take the current space experience for what it is: a nice little mini game to give you that xp and credit shot in the arm that you need early on and then an alternate way of earning adaptive armor and crafting materials. I know I'll certainly be taking advantage of them during the double xp weekends since the xp received is some of the highest per minute of play in the game during that period. And you can hammer them all out in about an hour.

My Vette companion for the new Juggy I started this weekend really appreciates her fancy relaxed jumpsuit and the gold eyepiece I bought her from the CE vendor. Thank you BW. I hope this is the start of something new going foreward.

I would have been better if the game could have been supported through the subscription model. But since it wasn't, micro transactions become the game and vice versa. When it becomes overbearing, the game will start to whither and die. At that point, those that remain can only hope EAWare catches what's happening and cares enough to scale it back again.

Quite frankly, the excuse is that, sadly, there aren't that many preorder customers left in the game I would imagine. I believe it to be the fundamental reason why the collectors edition vendor isn't being updated as well. I honestly think they ought to simply tack on a 1 at the end of the preorder crystal stat, add 3 levels to the requirement and call it a day. Change the vendor to only carry +41 crystals and halve the price to 125k each. That way, they're a little more expensive for an endurance crystal, a bit cheaper for a couple other stats and actually reasonable for +power crystals. The preorder guys get their boost. It's on par with the rest of the community, and they still have to pay for more like everyone else.

I don't want to discourage the ideas in this thread because I believe them to be good and valid, however, you can turn on the cooldown timers in the preferences menu and set the font to the largest size to all but eliminate the issue. Audio clues and fancy animations are awesome and highly recommended, but until such time as they get around to spit polishing the game and engine, there are other ways to get the information you're after that are just as effective.

This. They seem to be a way to squeak out xp and credits even after the mission has greyed out on you. Usually, by the time the bonus objectives unlock, I'm only picking up 7 to 15 xp for completion and only half the xp for the daily mission set. But if you want to be sure, just make sure you blast everything you can possibly see. 9 times out of 10 there will be some kind of bonus reward for it at some point.

The wait and see approach is the only thing we can do at this point. We've been beating this horse since day one. We've given them plenty of ideas and options to consider and this is the one they chose. When it finally goes live, the only thing we can do it check it out, and if we don't like it, vote with our wallets and not buy it. At the end of the day, it's still EA. If they aren't making a decent return on investment, they'll change it ever so slightly until they do.

Well, honestly, if they do lower the requirement to level 10, you can bet everyone with a hawkeye crystal on the GTN will post a scathing condemnation about it even though they would only be accessible to an increasingly smaller subset of the population. That said, I'd still likely buy whichever color I fancy from the GTN and simply use these black/piss-yellow crystals in my offhand items that don't have a visible color component like knives and shields and such.

You may want to check the thread on known issues...

All you have right now is "what if". Wait till it launches before you light your torch and brandish your pitchfork. As for character customization... feel free to check the link in my sig for only one of several threads on the subject. They were aware of it. They chose to go with it only after it hit the cartel suggestions box. Take that however you want.

You likely need to go back and read my post again. I said there wasn't any need to get up in arms about it.... yet. The races for WoW had significant benefits depending on the race/class combination chosen (in the eyes of some people). These have been consistently tweaked throughout the life of the game and have, at times, been downright broken for players willing to invest the time and resources to developing the exploit. Suffice it to say I'm happy BioWare has chosen to go the rout they've gone in this regard. And no, Blizzard doesn't get a pass. But they also aren't limiting you to spending cash every time you want to change your hair color. But again, we have yet to see if this is actually the case here.

But a race change in WoW might have (used to?) a fairly dramatic impact depending on class. Obviously this is only true when dealing with "hard core" players, but the fact remains. Everything related to character generation in this game has been intentionally made cosmetic in nature so as to avoid having that as a focus for min/max players (and complainers thereof). Additionally, outside of race/name/gender changes, purely cosmetic changes were made using in game currency. The so called "barber shops". Ideally, I would have liked to have seen a similar approach taken here, and it very well might still be the case. Baring actual role out of this feature, it's somewhat difficult to justify the lighting of torches and wielding of pitchforks.

While I'm highly disappointed that they've chosen to monetize this system, I share your philosophy of "wait and see". I would have much preferred a hybrid system with a "barber shop" for credits and full blown makeover for (a small amount of) CC, but until it actually goes live, we can't say for sure that that's not exactly what they've done. If anything, we should be complaining about how vague they are about the system. I do have one nitpick about your commentary, however. The monthly stipend of cartel coins is NOT free. You're paying 13 to 15 bucks a month for them. They ARE a bonus on top of all the other content you get as a subscriber, but they are decidedly not free.

While I agree with you in principle, I feel it's a net loss for the community. We, the customers, have been barking up this tree since launch and, vanity or not, it would have earned enormous good faith points had they chosen to go with even a hybrid system. I'm incredibly disappointed that I'm going to have to burn my monthly grant to alter my characters in the slightest way. Obviously we have yet to see it implemented and it very well could be incredibly favorable from a cost perspective. But the fact remains, our desperation for the feature lead us down this pathway. We are just as much to blame for this feature being monetized as EA is. Lessons to think on.

What I think you mean to say is sell the level 47-50 crystal at level 10 for the same price... I wouldn't disagree with this, but the color really is hideous barring some deliberate attempt at finding a look to go with it. The only downside I can see is all the crying that would start because those of us that paid upfront actually get something that's somewhat worth what we paid for. Even moreso if you bought the CE. It may sound incredibly entitled, but with all the cartel crystals floating around now, I don't think it would be out of the question to throw those preorder guys that are still hangin on after a year a bone.