There are not very many mechanisms for DPS gating. Fight timers are one. Boss healing and burst phases (e.g. kill the adds before they do something bad) are also ways to check a group's DPS output. I am sure there are others, but I cannot think of any at the moment. These mechanics are really important parts of encounter design. DPS gating not only functions as a basic skill/gear check (regardless of your thoughts on raiding, this is an important consideration for game designers - it is central to the incremental character improvement and progression that defines the MMO genre), it is also important because it helps determine how much room you have for healers. Imagine that there were no enrage timers or other DPS requirements in operations. In a world with no DPS requirements, the only possible way to lose a boss fight would be for everyone to die (or give up), and people dying is usually a problem you can fix with more healing. Sometimes people die to things you cannot heal through, so you might have situations where your group just needs to get better at interrupting boss spells or moving out of laser beams or something, but for the most part you would be able to kill just about any boss with enough healing. So imagine that your eight-player operation group kicks out three dps for three more healers. It takes you longer to kill enemies, but now you can basically kill everything in the game. Maybe there are a few fights with mechanics you just cannot master. Maybe the tanks get one-shotted a few times before they really start to gear up. But that is pretty much all you have to contend with now. It might be kind of cool to stroll through and kill all the hardest bosses in the game on your first night out, but this creates a whole host of problems for Bioware. If anyone can trivialize the hardest fights in the game by stacking healers, how can they possibly create something that is challenging? Should they start balancing fights around groups that are comprised of five healers, two tanks, and one dps? That would make them literally impossible for any group with a conventional role makeup. How would they even do that? Do they just create a twitch healing game where you have one global cooldown to react before the tank dies? Do they make all major fight mechanics one-shot kills? And how do they design fights that will keep people interested and engaged if they all take half an hour to finish? The biggest problem, of course, is that all of a sudden no one wants to bring more than a couple DPS to operations. Half the people who play the game (more?) are not tanks or healers. If three-fifths of the characters in your guild are DPS and only one spot in your eight-player operations group is for a DPS character, that creates a problem that is absolutely unacceptable by any reasonable standard. That then, is the short answer: some type of DPS requirement is necessary to ensure that people let damage-dealing characters into their groups. That is a really glib way to think about it though. Maybe a better way to think about the matter is that DPS gating is a necessary component of fight design. It would be incredibly difficult to design compelling, fun content that is rewarding for the broader community of people who play this game without using some mechanism to check a group's damage output. Enrage timers are not the only way to do that, but they are a raid design staple. They are probably even more necessary in this game because all three healing classes have infinitely-sustainable resources.

When I first heard about this game, I was extraordinarily excited. I have been in love with Bioware games since the first time I played KoTOR, and I thought that this game would be a panacea for everything that bothers me about modern MMORPGs (which is mostly the people who play them). For the first time, I thought I had found a game where I would be surrounded by other players who are more or less like myself. I thought that a game with meaningful group choices would encourage players to be discerning about whom they play with and to make friends with those of like mind. I mean, who could enjoy playing a character with a group of people who constantly make the wrong choices? I thought that a game with fully voice-acted quests would appeal to mature people with the attention span to enjoy the immersive experience of Bioware games and deter those who simply want to click through their quest text and follow the big yellow arrow to the next thing they have to kill. I thought that an immersive, story-driven game would attract people with enough personal investment in their game characters to give them minimally appropriate names, and I even hoped against hope that the very immersive nature of Bioware games might foster a game community that places some degree of value on basic literacy (because nothing destroys immersion like conversing with a person who insists on typing using numerals in place of prepositions). Then I began reading reports from people who played in the beta and I died a little bit inside. I am sorry if you did not enjoy playing the game, but your inability to sit still for voice-acted quests is a reflection of your own preferences and your own (ill-informed) expectations, not the quality of this game. There are a lot of things I do not find enjoyable about Modern Warfare. That does not make it a bad game. Fortunately for you, there are lots of other games that do not have cinematic cut scenes for every quest. In fact, I am pretty sure that is every other MMO on the market. Hopefully you can find one that better suits your tastes.

I could have just said "randomness is fun and progression without randomness feels like work," but the tenor of your original post suggested to me that it probably was not going to be an effective way to make the point.

I could not agree more. Games should reward effort and time investment in exact, measurable quantities, just like work. You figure out exactly how long it will take to get your next reward, clock in, put your head down, and slog through it. Seriously, Bioware. Do you really think that players enjoy not knowing the outcome of things before they happen? It is like I am gambling everytime I reverse engineer something. Who enjoys that? If your idiot developers actually think that players enjoy randomness, then riddle me this: Why do most people opt to spend their time working instead of gambling? Yeah, that's what I thought. And while you are improving reverse engineering, maybe you could take a look at loot drops. Right now I have to a kill a mob before I know what kind of stuff I am going to get. Are you kidding me? Would you work for a company that said your pay for the next hour is random? I think not! And not only am I left to guess what kind of return I might get for my effort, sometimes I have to kill twice as many enemies as the dude next to me before I collect all my quest items. Am I really supposed to think that is fun? It is radically unfair, that is what it is. If I am going to pay money to play a game, I expect a rigidly hierarchical effort-reward structure that gives to each person in a manner perfectly commensurate with his or her merits. We will not tolerate this hippy randomness of yours any longer, Bioware! If you idiots are not going to make this game feel like my second job, I can assure you there is another game company somwhere who will.

It could also mean that reverse engineering rates were intended to be acceptable to the community, and after the community complained enough Bioware decided to alter them. I more or less like reverse engineering the way it is (though I could definitely do without the chance to learn schematics I already know). It takes a decent amount of time, effort, and yes, luck, to fully master a crafting profession. I happen to find crafting fun. It is something I enjoy working on. I like that crafters can level to 400 and make the BoP gear without a great deal of pain or inconvenience, but that crafters who wants to go beyond that and accumulate a large catalog of high-end schematics need to work harder. It would sadden me if I could learn all the existing recipes in a few days or weeks and have nothing else to do (see: WoW crafting). I also like being able to sell the things I make if I so choose. If every synthweaver or cybertechnician can learn all the purple schematics with a relatively minimal investment of time and resources, that will no longer be possible. As for the original post: No, reverse engineering is not broken. It is called randomness. I have been reverse engineering things steadily for the past few weeks and I have noticed no meaningful change in the rate at which I learn new schematics. Granted it is entirely possible that someone inadvertently pushed an extra button and broke reverse engineering in 1.1.5, and that my own observations are either inaccurate or extreme statistical outliers. Occam's razor coupled with the fact that people in general have a shaky grasp of randomness, suck at estimating numbers, and have extraordinarily little capacity to abstract away their own feelings and view objective occurances in which they have some degree of emotional investment (such as the outcome of a series of dice rolls) as they actually happen, would all seem to suggest that reverse engineering probably works exactly the same way as it always has.

I think you might be reading his statement a tad bit uncharitably. One possible explanation for these seemingly contradictory statements is, indeed, that he knows we know that Bioware is trying to charge us too much for the new legacy features, and he thinks we are so stupid that he can deliberately mislead us by assuaging our concerns in one sentence and then contradicting himself a few sentences later. Alternatively, I think it might be possible that he really meant to say something like "In most cases, the system allows you to unlock things EITHER via achieving the unlock condition (e.g. reaching chapter two in a specific class, reaching a specific PvP rank, etc.) OR by paying credits. It is not both, except for one of two rare exceptions." Maybe he just assumed that we would be able to reconcile those two ideas without needing him to explicitly qualifying them. It is also possible that he was simply thinking of legacy gating as a separate mechanic from the unlock conditions (which, in most cases, appear to have nothing to do with legacy level). They are different, after all; unlock conditions are sufficient and possibly, though not always, necessary, while gating conditions are necessary but not sufficient. Other things being equal, I would probably assume it was an innocent case of miscommunication and not "deliberately misleading double talk." But that's just me.

This saddens me. Fully 100% of the technical problems I have had to negotiate to play this game have been Windows/Bootcamp related (I rarely use my Windows partition except to play SW:TOR). I would gladly buy another game box for a native Mac client.

Will the presence bonuses for humans stacks? If I have say, five non-human characters at level fifty and purchase whatever bonus is available for credits, will all my characters always have less presence than if I had five human characters? For people who enjoy to play by themselves, that seems like it would be a pretty big disincentive to play non-human characters.

I think you are missing the point of the Legacy system. Bioware's overarching design goal for this game has always been to create a rich, immersive, story-driven gameplay experience, and not just textbook MMORPG #133. To that end, the Legacy system is a way for them to create a richer, more immersive game world. It encourages players to become more invested in each of their characters. It creates continuity between your gameplay experiences, even across warring factions. It rewards people for playing through the different class stories, enabling them to see the larger narrative of The Old Republic from a broader perspective. Your Legacy represents a bloodline. It is an extended family. You unlock the races of the characters you have already leveled because your new characters are (well, they can be) the direct descendants of your existing characters. If you establish your Legacy with a Pureblood Sith Inquisitor and then you make a Republic Trooper, your Trooper could be a Pureblood Sith because she is descended from your Inquisitor. It actually makes a great deal of sense precisely because it is designed to turn your characters into a family, not to reward players for playing a diversity of races. Unlocking different races at random Legacy levels, on the other hand, has no basis in the story or the game world whatsoever. It would be a completely arbitrary way to reward you for reaching an arbitrary benchmark in a system that seems... well, pretty arbitrary once you start to move away from the idea of making all the characters on your account into a connected lineage. Of all the behaviors your could associate game rewards with, why would anyone even want to incentivize diversifying one's characters' races? By the same token, having a shared surname across all the characters in your bloodline is quite logical. It is a family. Members of the same family usually share a common surname. I cannot imagine how this could seem "often nonsensical" unless you picked a gimmicky character name/Legacy name combination or something. If you would have preferred a different kind of reward system (presumably a strictly mechanical effort-reward system that attempts to motivate some particular kind of behavior with rewards both commensurate and complementary to the effort that players have to invest), that is your prerogative. The fact that you would have preferred a different effort-reward system does make this one illogical or poorly-designed though; it just means that you have different priorities than the people who are developing this game. As someone who did very little reading about the game in the year before its release, I thought that Bioware was quite clear and forthcoming about the Legacy system, its delayed implementation, and the sorts of benefits it would provide. I am not aware of any other MMORPG that has ever partially implemented an in-game reward system like this. Call it shoddy planning or whatever, but I think it was a more or less transparent attempt to (1) allow us to gain Legacy experience from day one to ensure that players do not miss out on Legacy system rewards simply because they invested time playing before the system was fully in place, and (2) to give players notice about what sorts of things the Legacy system will do. Then again, the large numbers of players who picked the same name for both their character name and their Legacy name would seem to suggest that my own sense of clarity might not be an appropriate standard here.