F2P is the final nail in the coffin. I'm a founder, been playing since the beginning, and like many I'm the last of my friends to still be playing. I'm not an ubergeek that will complain about how this or that detailed little pixel isn't up to snuff, or the frame rate here and there aren't good enough. I just really like leveling my character and getting cooler gear, I never even got that worked up over many of the shortcomings of the game before. But this game is a big dissappointment. The "thrill" of having a fully voiced MMO isn't nearly enough. It was pretty cool, but the storylines are way to short. Being able to pick different responses is kinda neat, but it really doesn't affect any of the story line other than to get one different sentence reaction. There isn't really any real consequences for choosing evil/good responses other than a little evil/good graph, and unlocking some small conversations with your companion. Leveling to 50 takes me a couple of months. That is way too short. Bioware's answer to this is to create another character and you get a different experience. I now have 2 50's a 45, a 37, and a 25 character. Sorry, the experience isn't different enough to make it worthwhile. If you stay on the same faction, 90% of the quests are the same exact quests that were done before. Only the storyline is different. Flashpoints are completely non-inventive. I liked the first Esselles/Black Talon where there were a lot of social interactions and decisions, but after those first ones, Bioware got lazy and just went with the standard kill a lot of trash mobs untill you get to the boss boring formula. At this point I've just been levelling and PVP'ing. With the server merge and the fact that PVP pops a lot I started to have fun again because basically I was battling other people in the Star Wars universe. The PVP wasn't great, but I was willing to overlook the shortcomings because it was still fun. Other than PVP'ing, no thank you to grinding out daily quests ever day to one day get a different looking speeder. Hah! the rewards for endlessly doing the same quests over and over and killing the same mobs over and over are to put it bluntly pathetic. Now it's announced it's F2P, and I just feel...let down. All that money I spent went into basically dissapointment, because this whole time it's been nothing but let down after letdown. 1.2 legacy? Oh please, I can get a last name and put characters into a tree. Big whoop. 1.3? I don't even know or care to know what that did. There's just...nothing to this game. It just feels like a single player game that they tried to shoe-horn into multiplayer. I really really wanted to like it and stuck with it a long time. But this is the final nail in the coffin. I play World of Tanks, and I know what the trolling is like on that game when just anyone gets to play. It's already bad enough with the subscribers. Space missions? They are very pretty...and very boring. It's on rails, so after the first 2 times of the mission its the same experience over and over, each mission is just different scenery. You get your own ship? Yeah, but it's not exciting at all. It's just part of the story. There's almost no feeling that the thing is actually yours. In fact the whole game is just on rails. There's no feeling of openness, the quests are all linear, and you just head for the triangles, that's it. Normally I don't get so worked up about a stinkin game, but I was so looking forward to being on-line with a group of friends, and exploring the game and having fun, and we didn't even get close to that because none of my friends would ever renew their subs at all. I'm the only idiot that did, and now I regret it. This is my swan song, my final firework in the sky to get everything off my chest before I leave for good. This game has some fun points to it, but there isn't enough heart in it to get it even close to being in the same league as WoW. (I don't play WoW, I just know how popular it is). There's just too many things that are built into the actual engine that make it a niche game that MAY stick around for a little while as long as it's making EA money, but it sure as heck isn't going to go the distance or make any big waves. So goodbye swtor, it's been an interesting almost eight months. Good luck with all your new F2P friends.

Ok I'll get this out of the way first. I need to l2p. I need to stop being bad. I suck, I know. With that out of the way. I've been searching around trying to figure out if my numbers are bad, and if there's anything I can do about total healing numbers in PVP, and haven't come up with advice I'm looking for. I know I know, I shouldn't go for numbers, it's all about the right heals at the right time, and I generally do feel like I do a decent job of healing in PVP, but I seem to always be 3rd best healer at best behind sorcerers/BH, and at best, very best I can get 400k healing in one match. Generally it's between 200k-300k How can I do better? Or can I do better? Is 200-300k average? or is that bad? I have full battlemaster medic gear, and a war hero rifle, my expertise is 1215. The only times I can reach in the 300-400k Healing is when I sit there and chain Kolto Injection. Of course when I do that I attract a lot of attention. If I run around and spam Kolto Probe and Surgicle probe, I'm back down to the 200-300 range. So I'm not sure what if anything I'm doing wrong. Is it gear? Not sure how I can do better than the battlemaster other than continue to grind into War Hero. Do I need to play with mods in order to get more power/crit chance or something? My crit chance is 35% and Multiplier is 69%, my cunning is 1554. Thanks for any advice.

I agree, and it's not fun at all. Match after match of the republic just mowing down empire because of this catch-22. They will far outstrip us because they get all the gear. The only thing it makes sense to do is sit and defend. That's the only way to get medals. I'm sure it's quite fun for Republic, but I do notice that because of this Empire just doesn't play pvp at all. Republic won, yay. The hardest thing for me to do is not rage-quit. So I'm just about to give up on PVP, it's just one humiliating experiance after another.

Sounds like things have already been fixed by ID'ing the crouch vs cover button, but I wanted to throw my little workaround in. If you have a mob selected, and you hit the cover button, yes you can roll into a bad situation right next to them, 20 yards to the left etc. My discovery was that I simply hit the esc button to deselect any mobs. Then it does a crouch with the shield. It may be easier for folks to just roll up on a mob, and hit the cover key before selecting the mob. You just have to use your best judgement on whether you're in firing range or not. Or shift-F. Just wanted to throw that option out there.

Anyone tried Weston from the show "Burn Notice"?

I'm not as expert as some others on this post, but from what I can tell so far, I would concur with the folks that say sniper takes a bit of skill to solo. So this in fact would confirm your original post stating that other classes have an easier time soloing than sniper. With BH you can roll up like a tank, fire away with your choice of shot, get hit a lot and still roll with the punches, no problem. (I'm exxagerating but you get the point) The sniper though, like a real-life sniper, takes more of a setup. You have to have your position set right, and your rotation figured out, and you need to have an escape plan if things don't work right (In TOR that would essentially mean dying). In my experience you pretty much have to rely on "Front-loading" all your damage which means take them out quickly. You can't take your time whittling them down like other classes that can take damage (When soloing). But that's what snipers do. Tons of damage. It's all about unleashing force in an efficent manner. Not just blast away with rockets and blasters. This of course doesn't work all that well when you're spawned on top of, but hey this class to me does seem intented to be more of a challenge compared to other classes.

I would say Ep III might be able to compete with VI, but that is a STRETCH. Nearly as good as 4,5? Not even close. I actually MUCH prefer the effects of 4-6 over 1-3. The CGI just makes everything look so sterile and unnatural, whereas the "Future-used" effects of 4-6 are much more lifelike IMHO. The guy at red letter media articulates why the prequals suck so bad much better than I can: http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/