Is this the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em solution?" Problem with forums is that everything has already said before. Including the thread you just made But thank you for sharing.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll definitely give it a go then

I've only seen Tython, Ord Mantell, Coruscant, Taris, Nar Shadda, Korriban, Dromund Kaas and Balmorra so far. Of these, I like Taris the best. I enjoyed wandering round the remains of ancient, dead and shattered skyscrapers, I thought the atmosphere was great and it made me wish I'd played KOTOR. I liked the scale of Coruscant when seen from a taxi, it felt just like it did in the films. I loved Korriban for the ancient archaeological monuments and it made me want to find out more about Sith lore. I love most of SWTOR's level design, mainly ito the atmosphere it creates. Logistically the space ports are too large/spread out, the paths a bit restrictive and linear, and artistically the textures are poor but overall I enjoy the different areas. There are loads of little places I get tempted to explore, and seeing blank parts of the map makes me want to go and see what they are like. Best W T F moment was being confronted with a giant gold statue of a Hutt in the lower promenade on Nar Shadda.

Exactly this. If BW devs are sensible they will avoid the forums entirely.

That's good to know. From reading this thread it sounded like there weren't...I'm still only half way through my storyline quests, and I haven't come across any direct personal consequences myself.

Ok, I only read the OP and not the rest of the thread. But it sounds like you want to be a pretend bad guy - you want the aura of being "bad" without actually having to commit evil acts. The problem I see with the dark side is that there is no come-back for evil acts. To create an interesting morally ambiguous game, dark side acts should have a pay-off (which tempts you to choose evil) and a bad-karma consequence. Good acts should have a cost (you sacrifice something) but a good-karma consequence. Vette is an example - she doesn't leave you, no matter what you do to her. Presumably you can gain her affection purely by feeding her gifts every 30s, even if she disapproves of almost everything else you do. Where, in that scenario, is the pay-off for being evil, the cost for making a moral choice, and the good/bad karma consequences of both?

I haven't tried combat in today's patch (1.1.1 — 1/31/2012) but saw that there are two fixes for ability delay issues. I hope these help, and even if these two fixes don't sort all the problems, it's good to know that you are looking into it and working on it. Thanks!

Hmm, it's been ages since I last did it but you went into an instance and your character was transformed into this beetle thing. Then you queued for a race the way you would with random arenas. Your skills were replaced with beetle racing ones...I forget what but there was a speed boost, something to slow another player or push them, that sort of thing. It was on a track, but you had to steer obviously, and use your speed buffs/debuffs etc at the right time, and try and bump or slow down other players. People used to try to cheat the timer so they could get into the same race and work together to win. I think having a partner would make it quite fun if it was legit, so my suggestion would be to allow players to group up in teams of 2, with 6-8 players competing in one race.

/signed

How would it cause problems if it was player vs player? I assume it would be very much like the beetle racing that Guild Wars did. Agree with your suggestions.

I can confirm that T doesn't bind in some cases - I tried to bind it to Target Nearest Enemy, to no avail. I could use other letters though (x or g, for instance).

How about a stim that gives you an xp debuff?

I actually like the level design. I love games that include a lot of vertical height. But the textures are really poor, particularly on the armour and clothing.

People keep asking for this, but how will it help? No-one is going to transfer from a higher population server to a ghost town. And if people can transfer from low pop servers to high pop servers, the low pop servers will just go empty and might as well be closed anyway. Bioware might as well just merge the low pops. Except devs hate doing this...

You would need to have your dark/light points within 1000 of each other. So basically keep accumulating them equally so that you never have 1000 more dark points than light points (or vice versa). I usually find in Bioware games that my ratio is 4:1 or 3:1 light to dark, so in order to stay grey I need to run a lot of dark side crew skill missions.

This, really. I've not been disappointed by SWTOR because I never had very high expectations in the first place. It's fun for now but not the MMO I want. You need to give people a goal and make them work for it. The trick is to a) make the work fun, and b) the goal worthwhile. To get a) you need to put the gamer in "the Zone". That means sitting at the edge of your ability being pushed to do just a little better than last time, it means having your attention engaged on a combat scenario where you need to think, plan ahead, react, decide. That's your ideal gaming state. To get b) imo you need to give the gamer a reward that allows them to express creativity. It needs to build something, like player house, or a guild, or a reputation, or anything. What MMOs do is go the easy route. They give you the same type of gameplay over and over again, the kind of stuff that can get you in the Zone for an hour or two before it gets boring and repetitive, and then they give you a non-creative, impersonal reward e.g. experience points, pvp titles, the Gear Treadmill. And even worse, they usually do it in such a way that destroys the RPG. For instance, in many MMOs you choose a class like an assassin or a mage or a hunter - but all this label does is change your weapons and abilities. In most MMOs assassins don't assassinate, a mage is just someone who makes coloured fireballs, a hunter doesn't hunt. At least SWTOR have tried to change this with the class quests. But they haven't managed to give us any worthwhile goals. I think they could still give us creative goals (ship customisation, armour/weapon customisation, social fluff, a worthwhile crafting system, more meaningful light/dark choices) and still appeal to casual theme park players.

Just press the flag button on the OP and ask the mods to sticky.

It's originally French, and it apparently used to be "leuf" (source) Which "a" is pronounced incorrectly in vaporators? Bioware did actually produce a pronounciation guide for voice actors.

Anchorhead has a good population.

One issue I have had playing this game is that it's very difficult to play at the same pace as friends. A friend and I started the game at the same time, but seeing as he has more time to play than I do he is now higher level, and has to choose either to play without me from now on, or sit around and wait for me to catch up. Which takes ages cos I have altitus and a job, and he has neither. Playing at disparate levels is really annoying, because if he's overlevelled he can one shot my mobs and the quests go from merely easy to yawningly boring. If we do his content, I don't really feel like contributing a huge amount. Would it be possble to have a group option where, if you are the group leader and switch this option on, it buffs or debuffs everyone's hp and armour to your level? It would not affect your skills and abilities, just your base stats. If a system like this was implemented in the game, how would you envision the following be handled? Open pvp areas PvP flags in world pvp Loot tables - if you are level 15 buffed up to level 30, do you get level 30 loot and credits or should it be reduced to your level? Should you get xp while buffed/debuffed to a different level?

Nobody knows. I feel that the MMO industry is casting around for ways to make a product that differentiates from WoW, but no-one is quite sure how to proceed. While I personally love Bioware games (and I am enjoying this one) I don't think their approach is workable. But, as Bioware, it was the only one they were ever going to take. This is a good point.

I agree, I think this is a flaw in SWTOR's design. We are continually reliant on devs to feed us high quality content. It's either that or hop onto the gear treadmill.

I don't think shared suffering has to be the necessary mechanism that drives a community. You just need to have players required to interact in order to progress. Group instances provide this to a certain extent, but only in a very limited, artificial way. If you had more social goals with social hubs (e.g. a reason to go to cantinas), creative building efforts, a crafting system where players were reliant on each other, or an economy, less "follow the blinking icons" style gameplay, etc, then you would have more ways of building a community. But all these are sandboxy things, and that's not the kind of game SWTOR is. Alas.

I think it would be great if the ships that you fight over are guild bases. That would be awesome.

You must develop altitus. It is your only hope.