Great to give us some choice on this, thank you. One thing I couldn't quite tell from the video or the description was how this will affect the classes that build resources (Knight/Warrior). The way this worked in the previous iteration of cooldowns (not the flashing monstrosity we have right now) was pretty good, in that if you had built enough rage, say, to use an ability, even if it was on cooldown it would be lit behind the cooldown slider. That allowed you to plan ahead (something that is crucial for these reactive classes), but since the removal of that in the latest patch, you're left not knowing just from a simple glance what's available once cooldown has finished. So, will the option in this new patch to have abilities not darkened behind the cooldown address that? Is that what that means? Sorry I have to ask, but it wasn't immediately apparent to me from the information.

Yes, because if you are both the same class, to allow for your decisions to actually matter, since it's your individual story (YOU are the bounty hunter trying to get into the great hunt, there weren't 2 bounty hunters trying to do it the same way; YOU are the smuggler trying to get her ship back, Skavek didn't steal 2 ships at the same time; etc.) then one of you needs to "own" that particular instance in order to be able to progress properly. Which means you have to go in and do it a second time, so the second of you can "own" it that time around. I really can't see a better way of doing it than this. Imagine what would have had to have happened to variations in class quest dialogue to account for there being 2 imperial agents, both trying to get the affections of Nem'ro for the Empire. The story would have had to be changed considerably to account for the presence of 2 agents rather than one. It would have been unworkable, and, frankly, ridiculous. The fact is, with TOR BioWare have focused on a single player style story system for the journey to 50. This really is the only way they could have done that. In The Old Republic's universe, there is only one Jedi Consular trying to get to the bottom of Yuon's mystery. There is only one Trooper trying to work out what happened with Havoc Squad. There weren't 5,000 former slaves stood glaring at Harkun on Korriban, there was only one, you. That's the limitation BioWare have had to shoulder with the story-based format of the class quests. That's what you have to deal with. The stories have to retain consistency, and in order to do that, they have to assume that during class quest dialogue there is only one agent/bounty hunter/knight present - you. You can still play co-operatively. Playing together means whatever you want it to mean. If it's all about being able to get XP for helping out your friend, well, that's a shame. For me it's about being able to experience my friend's journey with them, help them out if needs be, to experience more of the game, to be social, to have fun.

Amen to that.

Most of the armours are reasonably fugly, imo. Add to that the horrendous choices of make up options in the CC (and who on earth thought it would be a good idea to link things like tattoos/head markings and make up together on the CC sliders?), and there are precious few opportunities to actually look like anything other than a circus clown. Disappoint. (If we are doing an "I wish this game had..." thing in here, I'd vote for extra sliders that allowed you to change the colour of your chosen make up option, that also separated out lips from eyes and from cheeks. Because, seriously. I think they let someone's 4 year old run wild with their mum's make up bag when designing half of this stuff.)

Thanks for the advice. I was using SMC in OSX, but I'll check out MSI Afterburner. Sneaky confession: since I got TOR, (and, actually, Skyrim before it) I haven't booted into OSX once

I make a point of checking WHO every time I log on, just to have a chuckle at the various names. Why on earth people think they're being in any way original by having names like Capt Jack Harkness, Jack Bauer, or the various iterations of Star Wars dupe names, is beyond me. It's like the people who fly around in circles on the fleet on their shiny speeders. I'm not sure who they're trying to convince about the size of their epeen, maybe themselves, since, if we are to believe what convention tells us and there aren't masses of women playing the game (I'm always referred to as he, it'd be nice if I wasn't defaulted to male all the time), then are they showing off to impress the other guys? Even if they are displaying for the women, I can confirm, speeder show offs, name show offs, you just draw attention to the fact that you're dreadfully insecure and really not very clever or funny. Sorry.

My MB Pro (mid 2011, top end 15") is running win7 64. I'm a technical no-hoper (the perfect apple customer? XD), so I've not fiddled with anything to do with my graphics card, settings, or anything. Laptop is as it was out of the box off the shelf, boot camp and windows are installed as per general instructions. TOR is installed with no changes to .ini or extra drivers or whatever. It's running just fine. I run it with everything on High except for shadows which are on Low (even AA is on high, since the new patch). I get 40-60 fps everywhere except the usual suspects like cantinas and so on, where it can drop to around 25 sometimes, but is still usually 30 or above (vsync is on). I'm one of those poor beleaguered souls who suffers from macbook pro loud fan syndrome, so when I'm playing it gets hot and loud (that sounds more interesting than it is). But it never overheats to the point of switching off or crashing. And it happens with almost every game I play, in Windows or OSX. After reading this thread, though, I'm going to look into getting more RAM (I have the original 4GB that came with the machine), and closing Firefox while I play too. I tend to always have it open in the background, for checking things relating to the game, uploading screenshots, and so on. So, a question: Is this just a firefox issue? Are there other browsers that are less resource-intensive that I could have open? How does Opera fare? I've used that in the past, and I wouldn't mind in the slightest switching to it while I'm gaming.

Mailbox on ship - absolutely. I can understand the theory behind wanting people to have to go to social areas, to encourage a richer world, but there are still plenty of reasons to go to the fleet. If we keep the GTN on the fleet (and various other planets), and specific vendors, then there's still reason to go there. But email? There are lots of little things that after a while stop being a good idea in theory and end up just being a pain for everyone. No email on your ship is one of those. I have a holoterminal, but I can't access my email? Bah.

I thought I'd get used to it as well, but it's proving more difficult than I thought. It's even worse with my abilities that are on a blue background (playing Jedi Knight right now). The cooldown slider is blue, my lit abilities are blue, I am having even more difficulty trying to see if it's cooled down or not now. There really was nothing wrong with it before.

I don't mind the dialogue wheel as it's been implemented in DA2 and the ME series. It's often not ideal, but I haven't really had the issues others have regarding intent. However, in TOR, I'm not sure what happened, but somewhere along the way they managed to so utterly and completely obfuscate intent in the writing of their dialogue options that it becomes, frankly, ridiculous. Plenty of people have posted their own examples of where "I shall help you" translates into "You're an idiot, I'll do it for you if you can't do it for yourself, moron" (I'm paraphrasing ) that I shan't bother to post my own. But I really do agree that they should have worked harder on making sure the wheel synopses conveyed intent more appropriately, because right now, half the time it's incredibly difficult to work out the tone of the various choices. I also wish they would mix up the placement of choices a little more as well. It falls into nice person = top, nasty person = bottom a little too often. It gives it the problem that ME suffers from: you're picking a wheel position, not a piece of dialogue. That is anathema to role playing.

I've got one of each of the 8 classes (I'm fickle, I like to swap and change depending on my mood. I'm not powering though to 50 with anyone). Due to a handful of early re-rolls and the amount of characters I have, I haven't played any past the 3rd planet yet, so I'm not best placed to say much of anything about the longer story arcs. However, from my early experiences, the stories that have intrigued me the most have been Knight, Smuggler and Agent. I wasn't expecting to be that interested by the knight's story. It seemed like your average "ultimate hero of the republic, go be awesome" thing, but by the end of Coruscant I was very intrigued to carry on playing and see what would happen next. I love my smuggler a great deal, mostly because of her snark and sarcasm. Out of all of the characters, she has the least ties to anything factional, and I like that. I feel like I can truly pick morality choices based solely on what's best for her, rather than with what is best for the Empire or Republic in mind (of course, people like my Inq have what is best for themselves in mind too, but it's painted against the backdrop of the Empire's politics). It's nice to be able to play a character who isn't constrained by anything larger going on in the galaxy. Maybe that will change, but right now, she's her own woman, out for herself. And that works very well with the story. The flip side of that, on the other hand, is the agent. She is very much embroiled in political intrigue (while at the same time not necessarily being involved in the actual politics). Her's really is a story of intrigue, and playing the dutiful "by any means necessary" agent offers some nice roleplay opportunities. Like on Hutta, right at the beginning, roleplaying in two different ways, as the story encouraged. My Inq is fun to play up to a point. At first, the snark and pure evil vibe is fun. And the voice acting (female) is excellent. But after a while it just feels a little like a tired old evil cliche. That is, of course, because I'm choosing to play her totally dark side. I'd expect the experience is different if you do something other than that. Those are the characters I've gotten the furthest with. There are no real, complete duds for me, story wise or personality wise. What I've seen of trooper seems like there's a little less opportunity to play him as I'd necessarily like, win terms of dialogue choices, but we shall have to wait and see how that pans out. The Inq story line doesn't grab me as terribly exciting. I haven't played enough of bounty hunter or warrior to judge theirs yet either. The Consular's story seems quite intriguing as well, but from what I know of the end of the class story, I'm not really sure what to make of it.

I have one of everything. I like them all. I like the change of pace, going from my properly evil, out for power to prove she's not weak Inq, I love my stoic strategist Jugg, I love my forthright noble Sentinel, I love my try to avoid getting hurt and just grab the creds Gunslinger ... I love them all, for different reasons. I'm all about the story and the RP.

Nobody thinks of the henchmen So, OP, which mob member do you most relate to, hmm?

This. Which is a shocker. Because we have 20% VAT (value added tax, or, the equivalent to sales tax). Which usually means we pay way above what America usually does for all sorts of things (most notably electronics, media items, and so on). VAT coupled with greedy retailers means the UK gets shafted time and time again. So I for one am mightily happy we seem to get the better end of the deal this time around. Anyway, there are time cards available for TOR, you're not forced to pay via paypal or credit card. Just shop around. There are deals to be had everywhere. You don't even need to buy your time card from somewhere in your own country. A code is a code.

In preferences, there is a "Camera Distance" slider. It is automatically set quite close. You can set it to allow zooming out to quite a large distance. It's easy to miss, since there are so many different settings. But it's there. Personally, purely from a vanity point of view, I'd love the ability to zoom in just a touch closer, to get that nice screenshot of my character's face at any given time. But it's no biggy. I just stand near a wall or something so the camera is forced to move closer.

I suffer from that too. If I see someone going after the same quest item as me, and they were there first, I generally hang back, watch their progress, if they are having a hard time of a fight I help out, and they get the item. Then I hang around for the respawn. It's just common courtesy. But heck, the fact that the same very rarely happens to me when I'm the one who was there first does start to get annoying after a while. On Coruscant, there's a very, very early gold star you have to kill for a bonus quest. He has a very long respawn time. I was waiting, and waiting, for the respawn. Another player got there after me, stood around behind me waiting. Just as the guy respawned, a 3rd turned up and grabbed the kill. If it hadn't have been for the long respawn, it probably wouldn't have been such a problem, but I'm back to waiting another 10 minutes, not wanting to wander too far in case other people start lining up as well. The other person and I grouped up to kill him in the end, so that was a nice bit of community spirit, I guess. Just one of those little things that gets rather irksome after a while. Also, fwiw, if I haven't quit /general because of immature slanging matches or idiots spamming, I often give help if people ask for it.

I swear I read something in patch notes that they were trying to do something about the ship droid voice over, I don't remember. All I know is that I've not noticed a single difference. Anyway, /signed. It's annoying as hell. Of course, when you're in a social hub, any place with a GTN, that's precisely when you start sending your companions off on the most missions, because you don't need one with you all the time. And that's precisely when you want to spend that time looking at vendors and the GTN. What are you supposed to do? Sit around doing precisely nothing while you wait 10 minutes+ for them to return so you can guarantee you don't get kicked out of your GTN search when you're on page 17/34? And when the companions who aren't even with you cause the same windows to pop up ..... idek.

I suffer from this problem as well. Sure, I spin the camera around to compensate, when trying to loot, scan resources, interact with a quest item/giver, but even though there are ways to get around it, they aren't ideal, and you don't have to do that with the other companions in the game (that I've noticed). It wouldn't, surely, be that much of a job to just make his targeting box a bit smaller. No other companion I've rolled with across all 8 classes have a targeting box that extends that far outside their body area.

I've got a full compliment of Empire and Republic characters, all at various stages of their prologues, with one of them at the beginning of chapter 1 (after a few re-rolls for changing AC early on, and so on). I'm currently here for the journey, what happens when I reach 50 with all 8 remains to be seen. So, as someone who is going through the same side quests over and over in a short space of time as I alternate my characters, I still rarely skip dialogue. If I hit escape because I mis-hit an option, or don't like the way it's said, then I'll skip to get to the same point, but other than that, I wait and see it all. Each of my characters has a different personality. I want to see how they react to each of the quests, be they class or side, and I don't want to skip past that. Perhaps I take the RPG part of MMORPG too seriously for some, but for me the story is crucial, and some of the voice acting has been spectacular, even in the side quests. All of it helps build the image of a richer galaxy (as long as your mind fills in the blanks), and helps me fit my characters into it how I want. I'm glad BioWare put the effort they did into the voice acting and cinematics. Those for whom it's a bother and gets in the way of their powering through to 50 can skip it, and those of us for whom it's very welcome can continue to listen and enjoy it. And please, give BioWare some credit. They react to the market and listen to it very closely. If they didn't they would already have gone out of business years ago. For their first foray into this type of game, in which they are trying to do something relatively ambitious, it's probably a little silly to be suggesting they should have it all right, right off the bat. This game has the benefit of being an MMO, it will continuously be added to, refined, altered, over time. It's not something akin to a single player game, which is pretty much done once it goes gold, bar the odd bug fixing patch or smattering of DLC. Any problems with balance, end game, PvP, crafting, operations, gear, etc., will be smoothed out over time, as real statistics come in from players. I'd expect we'll start to see more side quests in any future content that are delivered via datapad and handed in to mission complete bins littered around the world. I hope the voice acting continues to stay strong, however, and I don't doubt that BioWare will do their best to try to give most people a great experience, even if they can't please everyone.

I agree with the OP. All dark side and all light side can make sense for some force users (but even then not always), but smuggler, agent and bounty hunter lend themselves to a more pragmatic approach in most cases. The constant chasing of light side and dark side points is the exact opposite of actual role playing. You no longer think about what your character would do, what would make sense in any given situation, or make complex moral judgements. All you do is think "where is the dark side choice? Ah, here it is. Must. Pick. That." It's the antithesis of role playing. My bounty hunter and agent make choices based on what is best in that situation, based on their current loyalty, and so on. I'm having to live with the fact that there are some items I'll never be able to use as a result. It really is ridiculous. Last time I checked, inanimate objects don't live by a moral code. What does my lightsaber care if it's wielded by a dark side inquisitor or a light side inquisitor? (I must add that I am likely biased. I've never met a morality system yet that actually added anything to a game other than the prerequisite that you stop actually role playing and instead mindlessly follow the points. I prefer my games without morality systems at all, and would rather see actual consequences to my actions later down the line, in certain missions or dialogue instead.))

I get display bugs for crafted gear second stats, like power, defence and so on. They don't show up in comparison. Also, the comparison of the other stats is buggy, sometimes shows as a loss in stats, even though it's identical, or whatever. Anyway, I found this thread because I crafted a piece of exceptional gear, and wanted to know where to find augments. Now I know. Thanks all.

I'm in the same predicament, I joined The Red Eclipse because friends who got EGA 2 days before me had joined that one - I suspect that's the same for many people. PvP players are being told to simply move to another server. When you've invested hours/days into your characters, and all your friends are on that server, being told your only recourse is to move seems a little ..... well it seems to miss the point. It's not a very satisfying reply. It would be nice if there was a "we understand you play together, we'll see what we can do" rather than a "hey, just move, buddy" message. It would be nice if this issue was addressed a little more visibly by staff, because at the moment it's understandable that people are feeling a little bit left out in the cold.

Pretty much this for me. My friends got EGA 2 days before me, so I'm in a lovely 500+ queue for that server (I got in without a queue earlier, but just got Error 3 booted, so have to queue again).

Oct 11th, just got my email. Good luck to those still waiting.

As I said in my first post, I'm new to bootcamp, and I haven't done anything at all to my drivers, I haven't even downloaded or installed CCC (although I'm looking into it). Everything is as it was out of the box. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know, but I've had no issues so far. I'm not currently in game, haven't got access again yet, so I can't post screenshots of my in-game settings either, but when I get in I'll make sure to come back with my settings.