Don't listen to these fools, my uncle works at Nintendo, you just have to save Aeris and defeat Shen Long to unlock the NPC.

Yeah, a couple people I know basically killed the game for themselves by playing too many characters at once. Ended up going through Belsavis multiple times in a row and just burned out before even getting one to 50.

I don't know about balancing Huttball, but that smuggler ability to hide behind your teammate sounds hilarious so they should do it anyway.

The class missions are definitely the most important ones. My BH is level 26 and she's done nothing but story missions, instances and PvP so far. I guess you could try ignoring them after you get your ship, but I think it'll stop a lot of the side missions from opening up too. It also gates your companion conversations. And who knows if Makeb or some other future content will require you to have finished your story? The good news is that with a Shadow you can stealth through missions very quickly and there are relatively few story missions overall.

I promise you it exists, because I came to this forum looking for a fix. Never happened to me before today, and today it happened three times. Sometimes I don't feel like tanking, so today I selected "Damage" on my guardian. In the chat window it said "Your group role is now set to: Damage." I double checked that tanking was not toggled on. Group finder window pops, I'm the tank. I sighed and respeced because I accepted it before I noticed it. It also happened on my sorcerer. I queued only as damage and it gave me heals, twice. I don't know what the bug is but it definitely happens.

I liked Vector! Temple is blandy mc blanderson and Kaliyo is... just no. I also got a flirt option for SCORPIO, which is horrifying. I'd way rather have Vector.

Male Rattataki has to be one of the least chosen race/gender combinations. I can't recall... ever having seen one, actually.

That's kinda awesome. I wonder what the hardest thing you can do with a full group of people punching and kicking would be (you'd have to allow healers of course). Could you get through SM ops?

Seriously, just avoid clicking on the [Flirt] options. It is possible that a gay person will flirt with you IN REAL LIFE someday. Think of this as picking up a valuable survival skill so that your head doesn't explode if it happens (although I would go for "flattered, but not interested" instead of "I will choke you with my magical force powers" in real life personally).

I LOVE the last fight in Directive 7. It's chaotic and awesome fighting an entire room.

The name's Rowsdower. Zapf Rowsdower.

I can't see rated Voidstar being anything but laughable either way. With a couple people prancing around pillars and pacing out their deaths I don't see a way the attackers can get a plant. Maybe I'm wrong but the only time I see people getting the first door is when they are either incredibly overmatched or the other team just isn't paying attention. I agree on the client synching though. Way too often the character's model on my screen and their actual location are in different spots. It's frustrating as hell to position perfectly for a knockback into a pit and they go flying towards your goal line, or when you're dancing around avoiding a knockback and suddenly you're flying at a 90 degree angle because they were actually beside you when it looked like they were in front of you.

The five man content in Rift is anemic, the raids are okay -- they seem to be releasing one major raid every six months. The "events", invasions, instant adventure... honestly that stuff was more boring to me than anything I've ever done in an MMO. It's a straight up currency grind with a palette swap each month where you're competing with a hundred other people to tag a mob for credit before it's vaporized. Your contribution doesn't even mean anything.

I'm pretty sure snipers and marauders are the only classes with inc healing and accuracy debuffs? Marauder has amazing panic buttons and some nice group DPS/move speed buffs, sniper has a lot of control, built-in defense, cannot be charged, 20% AE damage reduction, 15 seconds out of 45 not being able to be CCed in any manner... When I DPS on my other classes their bag of tricks feels a lot smaller. Tanks get taunt and healers get cure I guess.

In a modern MMO like Rift, you can change servers instantly on demand without any GM interaction, the only real limit being that some servers are closed because they are full, and you can only do it once per week to throttle the transfers a bit. GW2 is letting you log your characters on as guests to other servers in some capacity. WoW charges because it can or perhaps because its server architecture isn't up to snuff, but new MMOs are competing with the new standard.

Zero. I really like Star Wars, but the choice between paying to transfer all my characters so I can have fun in this game and buying GW2 is a no-brainer. Don't make me make that choice!

Just to give you a sense of where I'm coming from, I have progression raided for server firsts in EQ2 and Rift, and I agree with the OP. HM FPs are too hard. Too hard for people who know what they're doing and love challenges? No. But those people are running HM ops and getting better gear. They're too hard for your average level 50 player joining a pug, and consequently too hard to pug in general. That's bad. HM FPs are one of the only social activities you can do at 50 and no one wants to pug them because the odds are that you'll end up in a group that spends three hours and gets no reward. Now think about what this means to all the MMO newbies Bioware attracted. Traipse merrily to 50, run some dailies, run some normal modes, so far you're having a ball! Then the next step is HM FPs. Spend an hour putting together a group, finally get into the instance, spend 45 minutes wiping on the first boss. Repair. Go back in. Spend another 45 minutes on the second boss. Finally get to the end boss hours later, and you can't beat the enrage and everyone has to go to bed. You've spent three hours for zero loot and didn't even ding your daily quest. Conclusion? "Man these MMOs are really just for poopsockers like everyone said, I don't have hours to waste getting zero loot, it was a fun ride to 50 but I'm out of here." Forgot to mention the first change I'd make (to "vanilla" HM FPs, it's okay to introduce harder ones with time): get rid of hard enrages. It's okay to have soft enrages like adds that need to be focused down, but hard enrages aren't great. It's an arcane MMO mechanics that newbies won't understand either.

I actually haven't finished the Corellia planet quest on any of my characters but they all have access to the Black Hole dailies. When my level 50 friend came back to the game for a day and we finished up her class story, she already had the quest to go to the Black Hole area before we finished her story. So my guess is that it's purely level based.

Rift has really never had a functioning gear progression. Tough endgame raid bosses drop gear that's worse than crafted, for most of the game's existence half of the heroics were skipped entirely, you do a couple weeks of solo quests for a PvP trinket that is one of the best PvE trinkets. I actually don't think I've ever used an item dropped off anything but the last boss of an instance. It was disheartening how many times we'd kill a difficult boss for the first time and no one could use the loot. Once I got my four piece (farming tokens) and weapon (random drop off trash) the only upgrades I had to look forward to in Hammerknell were off Akylios.

I can pretty much guarantee you that it's something like this: "Hey, these guys probably just have been questing through the planets and maybe not on the fleet much. Let's send them back there and leave some quests around as a reminder that they can do Taral V, the Nar Shaddaa bonus series, check out the GTN, and talk to other players in the hub." Especially for the MMO newbies they attracted it makes a certain amount of sense. But in the end it is ultra tedious if you do all this stuff in order: run through Coruscant, run back to your ship, go to the fleet, go to Coruscant, go to Tatooine, etc. Especially since the spaceports count as indoor areas so you can't use your speeder. It's not a conspiracy to make you waste 20 more minutes out of your day running around. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the time it takes you to get from 1-50. Anyway, I believe next patch they're letting you use speeders in spaceports, giving you an option to skip a lot of the dumb airlock passageways, and giving you special one-time teleport items for doing this "report in" missions between acts.

Around level 4 or 5, I think, you can stop using cover and just run around throwing grenades and shooting people. You just need to get the ability that lets you shoot people without being in stealth. You won't get any shotgun moves or stealth until you pick scoundrel at 10, and you don't get a stealth attack until the 30s. For questing you'll mostly be running around chucking grenades, punching and shooting people with stealth as an option to skip fighting.

Honestly this game is not that easy, especially for a first-time MMO player. There are games where if you spec right you can get to level cap just mashing one or two AE buttons with no fear, but this is not one of 'em. If you're soloing and you're not overleveled you will probably die occasionally. There's a bit of a jump in difficulty around Alderaan to boot. So don't get discouraged, just take it slow, set your companion to not use AE, use CC on the big guys, and murder your way from the little guys up. Also don't hesitate to use medpacks or that personal shield that absorbs some damage.

I might actually pay for this.

This is my thought exactly. And while I hope Guild Wars 2 does actually bring something new to the table, I'm super skeptical. Even if there are "dynamic" or "random" elements, they still consist only of the possible outcomes that the programmers put in. The first time you lose to the dragon and NPCs pour out and invade random outposts it'll be exciting. The second time, a little less so. By the tenth time it's routine and just like all other MMO content, the only thing is that it's random so you can't do the ones you enjoy on demand.

Kira's "romance" was super sudden and weird from my perspective. In the space of like four conversations we went from: Kira: I'm bored. Jedi Knight: Wanna go roll around in the cargo hold? Kira: Thought you'd never ask! to Kira: I'm looking up information on Jedi marriage! Jedi Knight: Ummm.... to Kira: So, turns out we can't get Jedi Married. Guess we just have to keep our love affair a secret from the Jedi Council so we don't get banned! Jedi Knight: I... think we should stop seeing each other.