I finally decided to pull the plug and unsubscribe. I almost did in July when my 3rd guild and 5th different raiding force fell apart, but I decided I'd give the game one more try and see what 1.4 and the future brought. I've enjoyed my current guild since then and actually intended to stay til at least the F2P launch to see that and spend my cartel coins on the Nihilus mask or something. I'm not gonna go on about the countless problems with broken promises, the terrible engine that prevents large scale world pvp, the insanely slow release of quality new content that have been brought up countless times before in this thread. Mainly I'm just focusing on the many problems 1.4 brought that finally drove me over the edge: 1. The graphics issues with the introduction of shadows. Even with settings turned lower and shadows turned off, I'm still experiencing the FPS destroying stuttering, have had the crash to desktop bug hit me on numerous occasions, and several other glitches. 2. The incredibly hamfisted and, frankly, scummy thing Bioware is trying to do to prolong content. An absurd 350 BH comms cost for an implant that is either a minor statistical upgrade for some classes (like my Sorcerer) or actually a DOWNGRADE (on my Marauder). Literally 10x the cost of the 1.2 ones and a ton of grinding for the most minor of stat differences. Secondly is the droprate of new loot in hardmode TFB. When I heard from PTS that the loot drops were going to be reduced to 1 item, I figured that meant 1 armor piece and 1 other thing per boss for 2 total, and thought that was fair. But 1 item altogether is just absurd, and just screams of Bioware desperately running out of content they'd been working on since last year, lack of manpower to create new content at a satisfying pace, and to artificially slow down the progress of raiding guilds by slashing dungeon drops by 2/3. 3. On a personal note, I just haven't found TFB very fun. Particularly Operator IX, the puzzle boss. My guild had been clearing HM EC for months, and at first did it really efficiently, but after a few months people started getting bored and not focusing on the bosses, we started wiping repeatedly every week on Toth & Zorn due to people either dpsing too fast, dps standing in the doom circles, the healers not paying attention, or the tanks not doing the switch properly. The same happened on the minefield puzzle boss and people would either forget an interrupt on the robot or absentmindedly walk into the defuse bomb square when they didn't have the bomb. I can see the exact thing occurring on Operator IX. I already don't find the fight fun as is, and it's gonna be even more annoying a couple months from now when people are zoned out from doing the boss week in and week out and we spend hours wiping on it due to lack of execution. On the second night of attempts we killed it. When the first day of the new raid week started I was sat for the regular Marauder who showed up. As in WoW I expected to feel a twinge of disappointment at not getting to go that night. But I didn't feel that....what I ended up feeling was ...relief. And that's when I realized it was time to go. Raiding was really all I had left. -I grew tired of running dailies months ago. -I grew tired of doing the Starfox rails space missions even before that. -I'm burned out on FPs as I am on Ops, not to mention the GF's propensity at putting me in the same ones 3-6 times in a row. -I got fed up with the PvP's imbalance and grindfest after a few characters. -In 10 months of playing TOR I'd leveled almost as many alts as I have in 8 years playing WoW. So goodbye TOR, I won't regret the $150 I spent on the CE or the months I played this, and I'll always fondly remember the great stories of the Sith Warrior and Agent long after I'm gone. I just wish endgame had more substantial and quality options to keep me logging in.

1. IA - definitely the best in the game, well-written, interesting companions. great twists, memorable antagonists. Very enjoyable as either alignment. 2. SW - Particularly light side. Massive deconstruction of everything it is to be Sith, trolling Jedi left and right and taking the moral highground away from them (if LS). The only real class storyline where a major storyline decision actually matters Really entertaining villain. 3. JK - As light side it's the quintessential Jedi Knight Hero story, as Dark Side it's hilarious watching other Jedi, especially Satele, look on at abject horror at everything you're doing but unable to do anything about it since you're . Fantastic companions, great villains. 4. SI - As dark side it's pure hammy comedic sociopathy, LS is ok too as the sympathetic former slave that doesn't want to see others go through what they did. Fun characters, especially the enigmatic bro Khem Val. Story itself is not all that strong. 5. BH - Hilarious one-liners, great companions, decent story but it is what it is storyline -wise. 6. JC - Terrible storyline that's completely predictable as LS or makes no freaking sense as DS. Mostly forgettable and shallow companions. Probably worst storyline in the game. Haven't played through Smuggler or Trooper yet, but I have a hard time believing either is worse than JC.

No one can say for sure now because until EA/BW releases the numbers it's just pure speculation and guessing. But I'd be SHOCKED if the game was still above 500k at this point. The previous sub numbers were from early August before GW2 and MoP came out, which took sizeable chunks of the population especially PvPers going to GW2. Plus the general attrition the game's been experiencing since release and a lot of people being really annoyed by all the bugs introduced in 1.4.

As stated in this thread, some bugs just crop up when the new patch is rolled out to servers like the GTN not working, things like this can't be helped. Others are because BW took a very closed and focused testing on the PTS where the guilds already on there only cared about testing the new operation, instead of letting people freely copy over to test the PvP balance changes and do other things outside the operation where glitches like this have cropped up. Maybe when 1.5 rolls around they'll actually let everyone on there to test drive it.

Confirming I've had the problem with the game just crashing, happened to me yesterday during Foundry at the end of the very first conversation at the start of the FP. Also had the bug where the daily BH commendations weren't awarded to me at the end of the run. Why can't things just ever work right in this game

Well, at least BW didn't let the patch slide on into October and realizes they had to put this out before they lost another batch of people back to MoP. Good work guys!

If someone who is actively subscribed to the game requests by CM ticket the name from an account that hasn't been subscribed in awhile and may never be subbed again (whether you consider 90, 120, or 180 days a fair amount of time) the long unsubbed account's character name should be flagged for rename and the person who requests it should be able to claim it. WoW's done this for years because they use the same type of archaic MMO naming system Bioware also employs, so they should operate by this as well.

The CM staff is not in charge of fixing bugs, that is the domain of the programmers. The CMs in this game already do many of the things ones in WoW do like transferring items mistakenly looted to the wrong player over to another (which won't be a big problem anymore in 1.4 since items from a killed raid boss can be freely traded between raid members for 2 hours, freeing up even more time for them) and flagging names of inappropriately named characters. Flagging a rename on a character on a long-unsubbed account at the request of a current, active, paying subscriber takes little time. "They are busy and don't have the time for this" is not a valid excuse.

The funny thing is despite all these suggestions for a better naming way to be implemented, Bioware already has one in place that can easily be started with a company e-mail. Simply send an e-mail to all the CMs instructing them that from this point forward, any active paying subscriber that fills out a ticket requesting a name from an account that has lapsed (they can determine what length of time is fine: 60 , 90, 120 days unsubscribed etc.) and flag the unsubbed account's name with a rename and let the person requesting it have it. Works wonderfully in WoW, problem solved.

Mitigation-wise Juggs are fine, and are not really appreciably better or worse than Shadows or PTs. Threat generation & dps output are another story, I've seen our dps PT pull aggro a lot easier off our Jugg tank than either our Shadow or PT tanks. Personally I'd hoped BW would've looked at this in 1.4 and maybe reverted the change to Crushing Blow/Guardian Slash or addressed it some other manner. Not looking like it's happening, though.

One that has at least a dozen 400lb people in moomoos riding scooters on it.

If it succeeds the game follows LotRO & DCUO into successful Freemium transitions. If it doesn't the game continues to limp along til it either dies or EA institutes P2W and puts it into maintenance mode and tries to squeeze out the last bit of juice they can get out of it like Warhammer. We'll just have to wait and see.

They introduced 1 new raid and 1 new flashpoint. A lot of people here don't consider 1.1 true content release considering it contained the second half of a raid already in game and came out a month after release. It was definitely intended as launch content but EA pushing TOR out for a Christmas release kept it from making launch. Are you seriously saying Ilum world PvP actually still exists since BW removed the quests relating to it and shuffled everyone to the WZs? This is one of the few things defenders & critics of the game agree on, organized world PvP is dead outside of ganking and Black Hole griefing on PvP servers, and who knows when it's coming back. The hacked up version of the Hero Engine they use is incapable of handling huge PvP battles and tends to chug along even on some high end machines. 9 months later it is better, but still problematic. MoP is launching with basically as many raids and hard mode dungeons TOR has, try again. The same balancing and metrics that make Snipers/Gunslingers the only effective range in competetive ranked PvP, make dps Sorcerers/Sages completely unwanted, and have kept Sentinels/Marauders almost Bright Wizard-level unbalanced for 9 months? Yeah there is a lot of PvP QQ here, but to say it's completely unwarranted is fallacious.

Bioware really should have given people at least a two week heads up that this was happening for two reasons. 1. The good PR they would have gotten out of it and curbing some of the drama. If Bioware could be bothered to do a mass e-mail telling people to log onto one of the new megaserver shards to stress test it, then they definitely could have let people know this was coming. Not doing so flies in the face of their recent promise to improve communication with the playerbase, something that's been a major problem with the game from the get go, the lack of transparency and consideration. This just further enforces that view and that the promises were empty, nothing has changed, and it really is the same old song. 2. People could've planned to have that day off so they would have had a better chance at getting an alternative name that they want. If I'd known about the forced merger date onto new shards a couple weeks ago and the odds I may have to rename a bunch of my characters again, I and many others would've gladly taken a day off work (I have a bunch of paid personal & vacation days just sitting around I haven't used) just so we could be home when the servers came back up. In the first server merger in July we ended up being in the first wave of transfers, and I remember our guild leader asking someone on our guild forums to see if his name was available while he was at work and save it. I actually was wondering how many characters I was going to have to rename (which ended up being 3) in the back of my mind all day til my shift was over. In the first wave of transfers Bioware was excused because they themselves didn't know what servers were going where. They were essentially taking drinking glasses filled with varying amounts of lemonade (origin servers) and pouring them into a half-filled pitcher (destination server), and had no idea how many glasses each pitcher could hold before they had to move on to the next one. THIS time Bioware had the brand new giant drink coolers (new megaservers) ready to go. But instead of giving us a few weeks heads up, showing us the coolers and telling us they were pouring us into them, they kept them hidden in storage til the last minute, then slung them out and dumped the pitchers into them while we swirled around wondering what the hell was happening. And as for their naming policy, when I first transferred to JC I found that the 3 names I wanted most were all taken, but at least they were by level 50's and not by level 1 placeholder alts, so I figured at least they were being used. I friends listed the 3 characters, and in the past 75 days I have not seen any of them log on even once. When server's merged again this week I figured at least someone new being merged in from Canderous Ordo would be getting the names, and I'd be happy at least someone actively playing was using them. Except in the transfer those names were kept on the same 3 zombie characters that I haven't seen online ever in almost 3 months. In WoW, two times I requested a CM to have access to two character names I wanted and I had never seen log on my friends list. Both times I spoke to a real, live CM, they checked if those names were on inactive accounts, they were, and I was granted the names while the inactive ones were flagged for rename. Good customer service like that is part of the reason I'm still subbed to WoW for almost 8 years now. In ToR I've made three attempts to try and get the 3 zombie character names I've wanted: -My first ticket was responded to with a generic, pre-generated response that made no sense in context to the question I was asking, like the CM answering it just picked a random response from a drop down menu. -My second ticket was closed without a response at all. -My third ticket I finally got a written response and got the usual "that character had the name first" spiel others in this thread have had. Nevermind the characters hadn't been logged into for almost 3 months and those accounts have probably long since lapsed. If Bioware was going to insist on the archaic MMO naming system this game has instead of using a more modern & practical alternative like STO or GW2 employ, the LEAST they could have done was train and empower their CM staff to flag renames on inactive accounts if an actively paying subscriber requests a name on one.

I really hope BW has the presence of mind to release it by or before the 25th. The instance is going to be buggy regardless of how long it's on PTS (every Op so far has been) so it really doesn't matter if it's held off til October or not.