Should have clarified, we are republic. I appreciate the responses.

Awesome, I appreciate the info. I'm trying to move my semi-casual guild through content in a natural progression and this helps.

As the title indicates, which hard mode instance would be the easiest to start with gear wise? Yes I know there are people out there who downed hard mode EV in quest greens, I'm just not that good . Suggestions on what avg level gear should be for hard modes would be appreciated as well.

The problem is that even if they fix it, the damage is already done. Empire now has a gear adavantage and there is no way to fix that. It smells of Warhammer and we all saw how that turned out.

I agree with the OP. I feel very useless as a melee character. Whenever I get into melee range, the ranged class just continues to nuke me. Then they throw down a snare and then a KB (or better yet, a KB that applies a snare) and continue to dps me while I have run back to them. Honestly it feels like Warhammer's Brightwizard/Sorc problems at launch.

I've seen this, I have not noticed anything special about it though. It seems like a bug/missed coding. Like that choice was originally flagged for LS/DS points, but they never went back to put it in.

Whenever I reached 10,000 light side points, I still had around 60 dark side points. Whenever I received any more LS points, it subtracted that amount from my dark side total. Soon after I earned my "the pure" title from LS V. So I do not know what is going on with anyone else, but I have been able to reach Light V and I have made DS choices. Edit: it should be notes that my DS point total did not drop until I had 10,000 LS points

I want you to address certain points that have been brought up. 1. If you work to form a group, instead of having it given to you, you will be more inclined to care about it because it took effort to form. 2. In order to ease future group formation, people will work harder by being nice to others and effective at playing. By implementing a LFD tool, there is no incentive because forming a group will always be automatic and easy

I think your point is that it doesn't matter how good/nice you are, the lack of an LFD tool means that you will never have enough players to form a group, or at least making it prohibitively difficult to the point of skipping the content. I think that is a great point, and one I had not really considered. I still believe that effort should be required to form a group, and that forcing players to be more proactive in their group formation will encourage better group play (for reasons previously stated). A better solution would be a bracketed LFG channel based on level. This channel would be server wide and would allow every player in a certain range to communicate for heroic quests and flashpoints. I agree that this deficiency is hurting people's chances to experience the content It should be noted that LFG between zone shards is shared (Tatooine [1] and Tatooine [2] talk in the same general and LFG channels.) this is really a side point and I only included it because someone stated otherwise. I agree that this is not enough.

Motivation through positive reinforcement is always better. The incentive for people to be a nice person and effective player while in a group is ease of getting groups in the future (through friends and reputation). The LFD removes this by making it always easy to get a group.

He was talking about adding people to an ignore list that would gradually grow until they could no longer find a group. Having an LFD allows a person to not care if they get kicked because they can immediately queue again, go back to questing, and try again. Sitting in LFD requires NO effort. My point is, if forming a group requires effort, people will recognize that and act accordingly to protect their own interest by insuring the group is successful.

You assume that people think that far in advance because you do, however that is not the case. In order to truly modify behavior, concequences need to be immediate and out weigh perceived rewards.

The problem I have with the LFD tool is that it does the work for you. Effectively ruining any responsibility or initiative in forming groups. If it takes work to form a group, people will be less likely to ruin it by being disruptive because they know that if they are kicked, it will take more time and work to get back into another group. For people, all actions are the results of their concequences. If there are no negative concequences for negative behavior, it will never be corrected. You only have to look at how people treat each other on forums vs real life to understand that.

The problem I have with the LFD tool is that it does the work for you. Effectively ruining any responsibility or initiative in forming groups. If it takes work to form a group, people will be less likely to ruin it by being disruptive because they know that if they are kicked, it will take more time and work to get back into another group. For people, all actions are the results of their concequences. If there are no negative concequences for negative behavior, it will never be corrected. You only have to look at how people treat each other on forums vs real life to understand that.