I've been playing most of the afternoon and haven't seen a 10-40 or 41-64 queue pop. Plus the daily/weekly missions are showing as pink in mission log.

http://imgur.com/gtIeS7d That's a clueless player that doesn't seem to understand that, with a Marauder in Fury spec, Raging Burst and Obliterate can and will crit for over 10k in lowbie pvp. When he first started calling me a hacker I thought it was because he didn't know what Predation did. But once he sent me this it just made me grin every time it happened to him and he cried.

Was this a sub lvl 65 player? They could have been sitting on a turned in mission that only needed to be accepted to level them. That would have given them full health.

I completely support this. But, there is something you can do on your own to reduce how often you load into a warzone you dislike. Put the following in the Who search window and you can see what's currently active. 60 pit civil void novar hyper orbital square canyon arena You can replace 60 with 10-29 or 30-59 to get the other tiers. Yes, knowing what's currently active doesn't do you much immediate good. But, if you keep an active eye on what warzones are currently populated, you can see what warzones are new when you get a pop by refreshing the list. You may have to refresh a few times until people load into the warzone but it should become apparently quickly. I've been doing this since they added arenas, which I dislike, and rarely do I misjudge what's pop'd for me and load into an arena or hypergates on days when I'm sick of people not knowing what do there.

They really just need a robust filter. Every string of text that's entered into the chat line should be parsed for non text/numerics, such as , . / ` \ ect, and have them counted and then removed as well as spaces. Any accented or diacritical characters, such as ñ Á ê ect, should be converted to a standard English equivalent. The remaining text can then be parsed for website names as well as key words such as credits, delivered, knowngoldseller.com ect. What you're left with is an inability by the spammer to hide their sale through obfuscation. Excessive use of nonstandard characters plus keyword hits should produce good filter results. Auto silence the account, don't pass the message on to the chat system to display and flag the account for review by CS for possible ban.

Actually I had one more thought. Grab and re-install the latest Direct X 9c package from Microsoft. http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/4/A/84A35BF1-DAFE-4AE8-82AF-AD2AE20B6B14/directx_Jun2010_redist.exe

The first question that needs to be asked is are you running the latest ATI drivers for the card? The latest Betas are 14.11.2 from Nov 17. The latest WHQL are 14.9 from Sept 15. If you're still running the drivers that shipped with the card, assuming they didn't just direct you to download from their website, then the R9 release drivers where a little buggy from what I've rrecall. Did you clean the previous drivers before installing your video card? Beyond those few suggestions I can't help you. I run a ATI 7950 and get 60fps consistently (I run in windowed mode so I'm capped to v-sync) with only shadows set low. The R9 280 is effectively a re-branded 7970 so should be getting better performance.

The various Jedi/Sith animations should be tied to Light/Dark tier. Starting at Neutral with a basic animation that then begins to increase in complexity and shift in color with your Light/Dark ranking. As an example lightning would have less and thinner forks at neutral. As your Dark ranking increases the forks thicken the color deepens. If your Light ranking increases the color shifts toward what ever would be appropriate for a light side Sith and the animation begins to shift toward elongated spears of light that impale the target. For Sages the pebbles would increase in size and quantity as your light side ranking increased. For a dark side sage the pebbles animation would shift toward the light side lightning animation of a Sorc with a different color scheme. Basically the animation for a light side Sorc and a dark side Sage would mirror with color changes while the traditional light/dark path of the class would be scaled up versions of what they have.

You can figure out what queue poped with a little prep work. I use this to avoid arenas without having to load and drop them. Use the who search box and add the following: 55 pit civil void novar hyper orbital square canyon arena You can replace 55 with 10-29 or 30-54 to get the other tiers. Keep the whole thing in your clipboard and you can just ctrl+v to paste it in the who search as you load screens since it doesn't save. That query will show you who's in active warzones/arenas for the given level range. Refresh the search right when you get a pop and note the names of active WZs and # of players. wait 10-20 seconds and refresh search. It should be pretty apparent after the refresh what warzone/arena is popping.

And double xp weekends double those perks and nearly everything else xp related. Which is why some people really look forward to double xp weekends.

The ball should have a DoT, carrying the ball should cause the DoT to stack periodically. The DoT should be able to kill you before you can walk it from the bottom spawn to the top goal, this would force more people to pass. Add cleaning stations for the DoT, they don't work if you're carrying the ball.

So the new Queshball map is out and it's a mixed bag. Somewhat,I suspect, from people still learning all the tricks of the map. Personally I enjoy it but I love hutball so I'm a bit biased. But it got me thinking about what kind map I'd like to see next. To me huttball games accomplish something most of the other maps don't, they don't require a lone member of your team to sit idle at a node hoping for action. Yea there's team deathmatch but it does nothing for me personally. So if you could make an objective based warzone what would it be like? Can you create a map that doesn't a lone player guardign a node. How about something with moving objectives that requires the teams to constantly advance to win. Maybe we can give the devs some inspiration on new maps.

To me it felt as if the legacy xp perks and the cartel xp boosts were not being doubled on NPC kills within Kuat. If you're familiar with your rested xp rate in Kuat then over that double xp weekend it should have felt like xp was going at about 50% faster rate with those perks maxed and boost. It didn't.

Let me preface this by saying I've got a lot of characters (22 on one server and 15 between other servers) and time spent in SWOTR. I've been at the point where I've been looking for something new for awhile now. Wildstar gave me hope for a change of pace and something new. I got a key for the beta weekend two weeks ago. So I leveled a few toons to 14-16ish on both factions. The cartoonish look didn't bother me at all, if the gameplay is fun the look seldom effects me. Granted all the females having kardashian butt was amusing in a disturbing kind of way. I didn't pay close attention to the story, if it had one I didn't look for it, mostly because if I was going to buy it I wanted to be surprised at launch. I like the humor they have in the quests and dialog. Oddly I miss the cinematics from SWTOR even though I'm at the point now where I spacebar everything. I enjoyed the combat system, something I was surprised to find after disliking Terra and ESO. I suspect it's the hybrid system they use between those games and traditional MMOs that kept me from disliking it instantly. The limited number of skills on the action bar was also welcome, after playing some of the classes in SWTOR it's a nice change. I loved the Paths part of character progression. I only tried the explorer and the settler paths but the concept and implementation is pretty fun, particularly the explorer path. OMG do I love the jumping around to get to stuff for that path! The game has some area/world quests that everyone who interacts with the progression process gets xp/rewards at the end, this is similar to the Rift world events. Every MMO should have something like this. I didn't try the pvp because I like a month or two a playing a class to get comfortable with mechanics. Judging from the UI there's more PvP options, particularly battlegrounds which are likely to never appear in SWTOR. The thing is that while that game is fresh and new, I'm not sure it's worth $60/$75 + 15$ a month. I had 2.5 days to play with that beta weekend and after Friday afternoon and Saturday I was back in SWOTR and didn't bother on Sunday at all. I really want to like that game. I'd like to find something new, but I don't think Wildstar is going to be it. Is it wrong of me to want it to go F2P so I can have more to experience it and decide if it's worth the cost/subscription?

Really the pipe sections should spin periodically dumping the players off. It would be a great spot while you're there but not a place you can just hang out.

Regular flashpoints do give double xp properly. Unless you're grouped with someone 5+ levels above the minimum for the flashpoint, then no one gets xp for mob kills. You need to watch the level spread on the group finder when it pops and not accept if there's anyone 5+ above the minimum of the FP you want to run. This xp bug has been around for months and has nothing to do with the double xp weekend. You can find complaints about it in the Bug Reports sub forum. The KDY double xp bug is just flat out annoying and that's about all I'm going to said on that.

Heh. I just started playing my sorc again after shelving him for better part of a year and a half. He's still rocking a mix of Battlemaster and Champion gear (with updated mods) while I level him to 55. I get questions on what it is and where to get it somewhat frequently. I rather liked the look of the old pvp gear, particularly Imp side.

Been playing since launch and always felt that Thana had the potential to be a companion that any empire character could get if Bioware had worked the planet story just a bit differently. Anyhow, was running through Taris on yet another alt with a friend and we had just finished the planet story. So I had remarked in Mumble to him about my long standing thoughts on Thana. And then expanded the idea a little. Obviously Bioware had a fixed number of companions in mind so giving empire characters another companion would necessitate a similar story somewhere on the republic side. Whatever not getting into that side. But with Thana you should still have the dark side option (no spoiler here) at the end of the Taris planet story but choosing the other option should give you, provided you pick dialogs correctly, her as a companion. Thing is it should come at a price, she kills one of your other companions. No good deed goes unpunished and all that. So while the opportunity was misses to have some fun with companions with Thana maybe Bioware could somewhere somehow in the future doing something interesting.

I'd really like to see an increase in character slots. I have 22 characters. I've deleted 2 to roll ACs I haven't played. But I get bored pretty quick once I hit 55. The gear grind does nothing for me. Leveling a new toon is far more entertaining. So, add more slots. Make them Cartel purchases if you have too.

Concealment: Change Acid Blade to a DD instead of a DoT and increase damage by 25%. Give it a higher chance to crit also. Concealment shouldn't have any reliance on a DoT leave that to lethality. Also Acid Blade allows Backstab and/or Hidden Strike (out of stealth) to be used on 30%or lower health targets from any angle. Make it consume 2 Tactical Advantage to use under this condition. Those two changes give a solid opener and better finisher. Explosive probe should be usable without needing cover. Survival: Buff Toxic Scan so when target is cleansed they can not be re-Dot'd for 3 seconds. Evasion works against force attacks also, increase to 5 seconds.

I see that Dulfy indicates there's a new Rakghoul event coming up. http://dulfy.net/2013/11/16/swtor-rakghoul-resurgence-event-coming-soon-new-life-day-items/ How about adding a cool title for people that still have a character infected from the last event? Some thing like Patient Zero would be fitting.

I honestly believe that part of the problem with buffing Op/Scoundrel DPS stems from our ability to self heal. In other words we are a victim of the "heal to full answer" that sorcs/sages got. While Lethality/Dirty Fighting puts of decent numbers the middle tree is rather lack luster. What I'd like to see is a buff to the middle tree through a nerf to healing. Turn the middle tree into a near pure melee spec. Specifics I can't give but the basic idea is that once you begin to spec into the 2nd tier of the middle tree each point spent there reduces overall healing. The further up the tree you go the less effective you heals become to the point their useless. This could allow for significant increases in damage from the skills in the concealment/scrapper tree. Just a thought, I'm sure someone will point out the flaws in this idea.

I truly was against arenas. In fact on day one release of them I got one on commando right off and it was a 3v4 match. I said screw it and figured I'd see what they were like anyway. It was a total slaughter and we won both rounds since we were a man up over other side. That pretty much confirmed my feelings on arenas and I dropped out of them every time I got one after that. Only in the last week have I gotten tired of dropping them when they pop and started not leaving them unless the opposing side appears to be a pre-made. The randomness of the solo queue is actually kind of entertaining. Still prefer 8v8 warzones but I'm more inclined to give each arena a try when it pops. And as others have said, if the match is a total blow out at least it's over fast. You can't say that about a warzone.

The only thing I can offer, and it's a bit of a PITA, is using the following in a who search. 55 pit civil void novar hyper canyon square orbital that will give you a list of level 55 players in all currently active warzones. Sort by instance name and keep track of counts, refresh periodically. When your queue pops refresh about 15 seconds into countdown, find what instance is new on list and if it's one you hate leave queue. I've been using that method to avoid Ancient Hypergates for months and an Orbital Station arena as i was typing this up. I becomes less useful once you have over 100 people queuing for pvp, which is not an issue at the times I play. Also you can make it work for lower brackets by replacing the 55 with 10-29 and 30-54.

Yep totally noticed this when i logged in this morning. For the record past two 8v8 warzones, 70 comms for loss, 80 comms for win, I don't usually pay any attention to them so no idea if it's a random bug or not.