I bet you'll change your mind when you actually start trying to get them. Even if you find them (and you almost certainly won't without a guide), getting to them still sucks. It's not a matter of difficult combat or puzzle solving, though. That would be just fine! No, the problem is that you have to engage in platforming with a game engine that really doesn't support it well. Jumping on junk piles and pipes is frustrating and tedious. Besides, where's the lore to support these things? Why the hell would powerful artifacts be in these locations, of all places? The whole system is just poorly done. I do disagree with the OP on one thing, though. There's a datacron on Coruscant that you'll almost certainly run across if you just play the game normally and that one serves as an introduction to the system. I don't see the need for a quest. That said, it's easy for players to assume that this datacron is the first and then never backtrack to the started planets to find those six, so perhaps each starter planet should have an easy one instead. Some people complain when everything is "on the rails", and some people complain when things are "off the map". Generally, these two groups don't overlap much. Is the concept that different people have different ideas and preferences than others really that hard to grasp?

I take this entire topic as proof that fanbois will defend anything in this game, no matter how poorly it's implemented.

Thus far, yes. If I continue to outlevel the enemies, I can see the fun factor dropping significantly. Story is great, but I want to play a game. Killing grey enemies isn't fun for me.

I think we should focus less on time spent to level and more on how fast you get the XP when you're playing. I'm just starting to run into the same situation as the OP. I arrived on Taris last night and I'm already almost level 20. According to the galaxy map, I should be level 20 when I finish Taris. The enemies on Taris are too easy! That's no fun! I really hope that the game corrects itself at some point in my near future. I do every quest (and bonus quest) that I come across, I've done The Esseles and Hammer Station once each, I've done each heroic area once, and I did each of the first three space missions twice to finish those quests. No Warzones, yet. I think this should be the standard for XP gain, not the guy who doesn't do anything but solo quests. It's a multiplayer game!

They're in Austin, Texas. Austin is the liberal enclave in Texas! The real answer is probably something like this, though: "We had X zots and we had to decide how to best allocate them to make the game the best we could for launch. Since romance plots have always been a large part of BioWare RPGs, we decided that each class needed at least once option for males and one option for females. We could have made each romance option bisexual, but that didn't seem right since not all of those characters are bisexual in concept. Thus, we decided to forgo same-sex romance until after launch." Which is BS, of course. From what I've read, some classes have more than two romance options. Also, some of the characters could have been gay or bisexual. Why did the "one option for males" have to be a female for every class? Are you afraid of the backlash you'll get from conservative fools? Anyway, I'm not going to rant about it anymore. BioWare has already said that they'll get to it eventually. It's just too bad that same-sex romance wasn't important enough to make it for launch.

I still don't understand why BioWare was able to implement 16+ heterosexual romances and not a single homosexual one in time for launch. That's poor.

You weren't given a warning? BS. The game tells you that once you've made your choice, the other option is locked to you forever. Anyway, this is no different than saying, "I rolled a Warlock, but now I want to play a Mage. I should be able to switch!"

I was specifically talking about items that you don't really see. I mentioned lightsabers for two reasons. 1. So far, I haven't seen variation at all. Do the hilts change at higher levels or something? Aside from the color of the "blade", they all look the same to me. 2. I can't seem to preview lightsabers on my character the way that I preview other items, so I can't tell if a new one looks any different than my current one anyway. You're still missing the point, though. Let's say that you find your ideal lightsaber at level 35. Now what? You hit level 50, you join your guild in a Nightmare-level operation, you defeat the final boss, and he drops a lightsaber! Excitement! Except, not. You already have the one you want. You've had it since level 35. It's already modded to be equal to the new one in stats. You get nothing. How boring.

There are two big downsides to the current system. 1. Not all items skins are available as orange items, so we're limited in appearance customization. 2. Orange items make finding new gear boring. Consider lightsabers. I received two orange lightsabers at levels 9 and 10. Now, I never need to find another lightsaber ever again in this game because my initial two can have the best stats around. Similar for any other gear that doesn't have a visual appearance. How lame! Honestly, I loathe the idea that you can wear one set of gear and look like you're wearing another set of gear, so I'd really rather not have the current mod system or any appearance tab system in the game. But if we're going to do it, we might as well do it right. I'm especially unhappy with the second point because it ruins the risk/reward part of the game. When I run a flashpoint, down the final boss, and a lightsaber drops, I should be excited. Instead, I usually just look to see if it has any mods that are better than mine and, if so, dismantle it, steal the mod, and vendor the rest. How disappointing.

There seems to be some confusions about what the OP meant when he said "skills that level as you level". He's not suggesting that you never have to visit your trainer to learn skills. Rather, he's suggesting that you don't have to visit your trainer to learn "Skill Rank 2" and "Skill Rank 3", etc. Instead, each skill is learned from the trainer only once and then the numbers on that skill (damage, healing, etc.) scale with your level. WoW introduced this system in Cataclysm and it's fantastic. When questing in SW:TOR so far, I usually get 2-3 levels for a quest hub and I'm usually just as many levels behind on my skills because the only trainer is on the other side of the planet and there aren't enough speeder points to get back there quickly. (Quick Travel only works once every 30 minutes, so I'd still have to choose to spend time getting there or getting back.) Right now, 2/3 of those levels are usually just "Skill Rank 2" and not new skills. Thus, using WoW's system would be better since the trainer wouldn't have anything to offer on those 2/3 levels and I wouldn't feel like I'm missing out. Get it?

I guess you don't know what innovation means! Look, a lot of what Blizzard has implemented over the last seven years didn't exist before they did it. The developers took a lot of feedback, acted on it, and invented new things. Your argument that it was all possible in 2004 is ridiculous. You know what? Microchips were possible in 1250 BC, but we didn't have them. Nobody had invented them, yet. EDIT: Speaking of microchips, your argument is flawed for another reason. Computing power has increased drastically in seven years. It's very likely that some of the things WoW does today weren't at all possible to do in 2004 with the hardware available at the time. There was no such thing as a dual-core processor in 2004. Memory was much more expensive, much slower, and much more limited in quantity. Etc.

I'm not sure what your argument is. Do you know what the word innovation means?

Um. I'd imagine that such a feature would take at least a few months to develop. We're letting BioWare know now that it's a feature we want so that they can start development soon. Don't be silly!

Comparing SW:TOR to release-day WoW is stupid. WoW is 7 years old, now, and there's been a lot of innovation in the MMORPG genre since 2004.

If by "pick the people you partied with" you mean "spam trade for 30-60 minutes and hope that you can find one tank, one healer, and three DPS that aren't total scrubs". Besides, a dungeon finder tool doesn't have to mean boring dungeons. The reason that you can fly through heroics in 15 minutes is the same reason that guilds have already killed 7/8 heroic bosses in the newest raid: Blizzard made WoW easymode to get more subscribers. Don't blame a useful tool like dungeon finder for that! I simply don't buy your argument. Besides, you're ignoring the bigger problem. Story is supposed to be a big part of SW:TOR. Leveling is supposed to actually be fun and interesting. Flashpoints are a big part of the story. Without a dungeon finder tool, characters below max level are going to have a very, very difficult time finding groups for flashpoints in a few months once we've all hit 50 and start end-game content. That's terrible!

So don't make it cross-realm. A dungeon finder tool within a single realm would still be a vast improvement over what we have now.

So much dungeon finder hate. Did any of you actually play WoW before the LFD tool? Did you forget what it was like? Nobody ever wanted to run dungeons or heroics because finding a group could take 30-60 minutes and required you to sit in a city and spam trade chat. You could pretty much forget about ever running a dungeon below max level unless you have some friendly guild members that happened to also have toons at that levels. In short, it sucked. Anyway, I'd imagine that we'd be just fine without the cross-server component for at least 1-2 years if the population stays high.

Definitely. All the people whining that LFD killed WoW don't know what they're talking about. Spamming General/Trade for 20 minutes to find a healer sucks and it ruins the chat for everyone else. This is very much needed. My action bars need to be in one place, not spread out everywhere, and my chat needs to be at the bottom. I've noticed increased eye strain from looking up to the top of my monitor all the time to see the chat box. Also, I have trouble seeing some of the very small numbers with a high-res monitor. This would be nice, too. It's no fun having gear ninja'd for someone's companion. Those should be greed rolls! Eh, I don't care about this one. I think shorter queues are more important than selecting a specific warzone. Besides, the idea is that you're helping your side in whatever way they need you to. If it's time for Huttball, you best get in there! If it sucks for melee, well, fix it. And a credit sink! But seriously, this sucks. I usually end up going 4-5 levels without learning new skills because the trainer is all the way over there and I only have Quick Travel once every 30 minutes. More taxi points would also help alleviate the tedium of learning new skills every level. I'd like addons, but I'd like a lot of restrictions in place. Addons are a mess in WoW. I'm not against a combat log or a DPS meter, but perhaps it should only track personal DPS? That way, we can all optimize our own skills and the players afraid of epeen contests can rest easy. I read that this is already planned. Please, no! Achievements are the worst. /suicide

Seriously? Not only do I have to run the game as administrator because BioWare's programmers don't know how to write a proper manifest, but now I have to run Vent as administrator, too? That's poor, BioWare. Please fix it.

The best way to prevent hacked accounts is to include a security key with every game. Sadly, EA chose not to do that. No, security keys aren't foolproof, but they're a huge step up from what we have now. If we can't eliminate this nonsense, we should at least make an effort to minimize it.

In this game, we are the 1%.

Hopefully soon!

Sitting in Fleet for 20-30 minutes to find a group sucks. This problem will only get worse as people reach max level because there won't be as many people playing the lower level content. They don't have to implement WoW's system, but the current system isn't good.

What a ridiculous thing to say!

There better be room for DPS since 25% of the classes can't tank or heal.