So, just to make sure I got you... You think that this change in Blizz's subscription rate has to do with a change in the mindset of the customer and not the fact that they have not released a damn bit of content in a year? You mean that those of us saying that we're quitting "because BEAware has not release a new Op since 1.2 and they still haven't fixed the bugs in the ones they have out" are not getting through to you? Maybe I can say this and it will sink in. I left this game to go play another MMO that charges a monthly subscription. They have also release an update including new content every 2 months. They have 7 Operation-level instances and something like 10 FP-level instances, all of which have HM (i.e. max-level) versions. The game is 6-9 months older than SWTOR. Do you see SWTOR being close to that? I've also played a few F2P games and enjoyed them. World of Tanks comes to mind most readily. They also release new content although not as quickly by any stretch. It's also worth pointing out that WoT went into their design with F2P in mind and they have actually built an F2P model that is not a bolted-on vanity affair. I'm not against F2P when it is well designed but even the article in the OP's link devotes the last 1/3rd of the article to reminding you that F2P is not a panacea and it has to be done right. Let me ask you... Given the model you have seen from Bioware/EA over the last 8-9 months, do you honestly believe that there is a good reason to pay a monthly fee to access the Operations content? Since Operations is what I wanted to do and signed up for, the fact that I cancelled my account because I was not satisfied with the Operations content should give you a pretty clear idea what *my* opinion is on this subject. It's been clear to me for some time that EA doesn't understand *me* as a customer. I liked the game. I liked it enough to have 2 50s and 2 more in the 40+ range who had actually done the planetary content more than once. I found that there was no reason for me to continue playing once I had hit 50. I'm fine with that, not the game for me then. But let's look at what they're doing with the F2P model. If people want to level alts they're solidly in the F2P area and not going to be funding EA. EA is building their model on the premise that the Ops are going to keep people playing? I keep reading people who are enjoying the game and who don't mind that it is going F2P. I keep reading posts about "I'd be willing to pay a little money to support the game because I like it." Ask yourself. Given the pricing model that they have put forward *will* you be paying? Has EA put themselves in a position to actually make any money here or have they built a model that, yet again, misses their audience (the way they missed me)? Then tell me again that you are not worried about where this game is going.

So here's the issue you are missing with this. It's not to say that BEAware is going this route, just that it's happened in other games before... The fact that something drops during play does *not* mean that it is readily available. Say that a difficult world boss drops the item (e.g. the Nightmare Pilgrim). Now imagine that the Nightmare Pilgrim only spawns once per week (dunno of any examples in SWTOR, but I can think of some in other games). Then imagine that the drop rate is 1 in 10,000. Even if we ignore the difficulty of the boss and assume that he is killed within an hour every time he is up on every server that is populated you *still* don't expect more than one of the items to drop THIS YEAR (across all players on all servers). Now, let's take a more likely example... The item you want drops from Kephess in HM only. The drop rate on it is low (like Karagga's hat) so maybe 1 in 1000. But in this case, it's not cosmetic... Say it's a Campaign-level weapon. It's bind-on-pick-up so it can' t be bought from other players, but it can be purchased in the shop. Never mind other players, we're only gonna worry about how long it take you to get yours... By your logic you could still get the item in game so it's not that bad but if you just do the statistics you' could run HM EC every week with 5 different characters and you expect to see one (and only one) sometime by the end of 2013. And the reason people are naysayers about the cash shop is because although they keep saying that they won't do that kind of thing there is a history of broken promises (release dates, content, required server transfers, a whole gamut) *and* we've seen other companies and other games figure out that it's a *great* way for them to make money (see STO, who promised it would never happen and still had p2w before they actually went fully f2p). Again, I'm not saying that this is what will happen. I'm saying that I don't see it as a terrible stretch given history both with Bioware/EA and other games who have tried to make the same transition.

Look, it'd be wrong to say that I hate SWTOR. Now, Bioware/EA... Maybe.... I *want* to like this game. The problem is that no matter how much I want to like this game, Bioware/EAA has dropped the ball. I have played MMOs for 10+ years. I can live without high-end graphics. I can live with limited animations. It'd be nice, but it's not what I want from a game... I want something to do. I want to log in for a few hours and actually feel like I have accomplished something. SWTOR does not deliver that.... Don't get me wrong, there are lots of things you can do in a few hours in this game. They just have zero replay value. Even if you buy into the argument that you should have alts and do all the storylines that means that you also have to do enough other things to level so that you can continue to the next step of the storyline and that's just painful. By the time you have finished two or three 50s you have already done every planet quest and all the space missions and you have to begin repeating content to get through the next storyline. Assume you *aren't* into alts and want to be able to do something to improve your main. You can get in an go run instances (FP or OP) to get more gear... First you do your HM FPs and see all the content you have already seen (yes, the same cut scenes and dialog) with the same fight or something close to it. There are exceptions where a new mechanic appears but these are rare. No new content here. Then you go run Ops. These are new content and in some cases even innovative. The Soa encounter was actually kinda cool. And it only bugged out 20% of the time (not including the reset bugs that we knew how to trigger and hence how to avoid reliably).... And once you got a fight down the loot flowed like water. Never mind that there were multiple sources of gear at the same tier (e.g. Rakata in HM Ops and then in EC Story plus crafted plus dailies). Just doing Ops was enough to gear a full raid in a month. The additional difficult of HM or NiM? Why bother doing it again? You don't see anything new. You don't need the gear and you certainly don't need to deal with the headaches from the bugs. This might be forgiven if there'd been any sign that they were working on the bugs or even new content but their patches showed little or no promise in this direction. New operations were slow out the door. Bug fixes were slow and not particularly directed. Bugs which had been reported prior to launch were still in the game.

I don't see an optical drive of any kind (DVD or Bluray) and no OS license. I assume you're running on-board sound and networking and scavenging keyboard, mouse and monitor?

Will there be paid transfers? What will happen to people who have more than 8 characters slated for the same destination server in less than two weeks now? That's unfair? Tough. As a paying customer, people kinda have a right to ask what they're paying *for*. Yeah, I'd like to know about upcoming content and stuff (that happens to be important to me) but I can understand why BW doesn't want to talk about things like that.... The furor within this community when deadlines have slipped for things like rated PvP and group finder has been completely juvenile. On the other hand, BW has done a remarkably *bad* job of addressing the loss of things which are claimed or possessed by characters (e.g. names, whole characters, eventually money if paid transfers come through). And before you start, yes, I know that the ToS say BW owns the character, not the player, but you also know that if they did a server wipe today, which is within their ToS, they'd lose most of their player community... And if you don't get why you should be concerned for the other guy in this case, you should probably read this poem.

I'm just amused reading through this thread.... All the people screaming at the OP for how "entitled" he seems to them... I can't help but laugh. Lemme see how SWTOR works... More than one person talking about how easy and fast it is to level. A claim that you can have 3 50s in just over a week and people seem to think it's legit (and I agree). A full set of entry-level PvP gear (or 300k+ credits) upon hitting 50. Prices for Tionese and Columi through the floor. BH comms being handed out right and left... Where, exactly, are you going to draw the line on giving stuff out for free? Some people are even referring to leveling as "the leveling grind"... You're berating the OP for wanting to avoid the leveling grind in order to do something else? As for complaining that people learn to play their classes during the leveling process, am I allowed to vote to delete someone's character and make them level over if they don't know how to play their class? I can't count the number of times I ran into people who could not play their class... Maybe that has to do with the fact that there's no penalty for being bad at your class.... Everyone believes that they should be able to solo to 50 and no matter how bad they are they should be able to get to 50... Talk about the entitlement crowd... And yet you hammer on the OP? Too much.... /popcorn

THIS ^ All empty gear (orange anyway) is created equal. The only question is what slots are available to fill (note that bracers and belts do not have all three slots available before an augment slot is added). Not exactly. For your purposes they are the same but one has a social rank requirement and the other has a PvP rank requirement which might affect whether or not you can actually equip them. I don't recall whether or not the mods pulled out of war hero retain the PvP rank requirement or not. Generally, set bonuses do not transfer. The exception is for Campaign gear (that which comes from Denova on hardmode). The set bonus for Campaign HM gear comes from the armor mod which you can pull and move around. For Tionese, Columi and Rakata, the set bonus is tied to the shell. Look in the crafting forums here or on other sites like Torhead.com. I don't recall which classes can make the augment kits offhand but the augments come from almost all tradeskills (not Slicing and I don't think Biochem) depending on which bonus you want. (I.E. only one skill makes Aim augments but it's not the same skill as makes Willpower augments) Best is going to depend on what you want to do. If you mean PvE then the best is the mods coming out of Campaign gear which drops exclusively in Denova on hardmode. For PvP I never kept up since I don't like MMO-basd PvP. Read the forums here. Also might want to read the forums somewhere like sithwarrior.com (or whatever they have become now) where you can get more specific information about tuning gear and talents for your class. Note that a forum like sithwarrior.com or any other theorycrafting forum is going to be very dense with a steep learning curve to begin with but can be very rewarding if you can get up the curve to the point that you can begin using the information to the fullest.

The problem with this attitude is that the guy who is playing alts and putting in 40 hours per week is happy. He doesn't care what else is going on in the universe and he's enjoying himself. More power to him. Even the causal raider has already "finished" everything there is to do in SWTOR. If you want to see new content. If you want to work to optimize your gear and get "the best possible gear" (BiS is the acronym the theorycrafters use) then even the most casual person who bothered to actually group could finish those tasks in less time than it took Bioware to get from 1.2 to 1.3. So the altaholic is happy but everyone who wants to focus on a single character is bored out of their skull waiting for something, anything, meaningful for their character to do.

Tried that lately? It didn't work from release into 1.2. In fact, the guest on a ship is in whatever zone the ship is in. Ever noticed that there is a difference between being on the ship and in "space" which is where you are when you're flying the missions (which represents a change in general channel but just about nothing else)? Makes for an excellent smart-alec answer but doesn't jive with facts.

Seriously? How much time do you spend each week? I averaged about 15 hours per week and that makes me hardcore? I know guys who game 80+ hours per week which is why I consider myself a casual... Now 15 hours a week is hardcore? (I know that statement was not aimed at me but with my limited playtime I am still out of content to explore and things to achieve outside of PvP which I would rather do in other games.) Ask a different set of questions... If a game has more content than you can possibly explore in the time available to you are you going to give up and quit playing? If a game has so little content that a large number of people who game 10 hours or more in a week become bored and quit playing will it leave enough population to support the game? Will there be enough people on for those who still play to actually do things?

You know, I get the people who don't understand why people want content. I get the idea of casual gaming and roleplaying in an MMO. I used to think I *was* a casual gamer. See, the problem is that Bioware has taken casual gamer and made it an art-form. I work 40 hours a week, my commute is another 15 hours per week. Between work, keeping up the house and actually spending time with my wife I manage to create about 15 hours per week to play... Take that for what it's worth, more or less than you get. I'm throwing it out there so you can compare it to your playtime if you want. I've got two 50s and about 8 more alts in the 20-40 range. I've "finished" all the content that is available at this point on one of my 50s and most of it on the other because I didn't have problems looking for and finding groups on an RP server pre-transfer... I don't mean to denigrate the need for QoL patches. They're necessary and if 1.3 was working as intended, the QoL improvements would be a good thing. The problem is that EC was released on 4/12. There is no new content as of 6/26 and no announced release of 1.4 however it's not unreasonable to *guess* at a similar elapsed time before it gets here... So we project and maybe 1.4 is due in late September? That means 5 months with no new content and users with subscriptions running 1-6 months. Now that 1.3 is here, you'll be getting BH comms right and left. You'll have better gear than I did when I went into EC. You've got the LFG tool so you should be able to get a group if you want it. As someone who is primarily motivated by exploring and seeing new content (and despises PvP in a game that is not and should not be balanced for it) I now sympathize with those asking when 1.4 is coming. I used to think I was a casual... How did Bioware manage to make this game so easy that *I* could "finish" it? And now 1.3 is designed to make it even easier to "complete" without adding anything new to complete?

What will you do when they tell you that the only character that's free to play is a Sith Warrior/Jedi Knight and all others require a fee? Every MMO I have played that has gone F2P locked me out of my existing characters. There's no way of knowing what model would be adopted for SWTOR but the fundamental problem with moving to F2P post-launch is that you often lower service and cut new content but require people to pay in order to continue accessing the material that they had been accessing. Take Champions Online where I had 5 toons who were locked the day they switched over (and therefore not accessible to me). I could continue to subscribe at the same rate to get the same content but less support and less new content because support was cut. Or STO where they made 3 of my 4 starships inaccessible. Nope... Cutting service and then telling me to subscribe or lose my existing characters is a sure way to lose me as a customer.

This is a misnomer. At best it is partially true and at worst it is being dishonest with yourself about what 1.3 provides. (Keep in mind that there are no new servers... These are just servers with more population as other servers die.) This is an opinion. It is mine and is shared by the 20 friend of mine who up and left the game when 1.3 was announced. It may not be your opinion or experience, but I doubt that the group I left with is alone in feeling this way.... Bioware has a risk/reward problem that makes just about every aspect of the game silly or trivial. PvP is not my cup of tea but if I wanted to I could grind out every PvP reward over time just by doing nothing but playing over and over and over. Being bad does not prevent you from doing anything, it just makes it take longer. Same is true of leveling in general. Operations are a joke. Of 14 boss fights, 4 involve mechanics beyond "know your position on the threat list, know your class and abilities, move once in a while to avoid damage" and they give away so much gear that a raid group is fully geared in about a month. Gear overlaps (I suppose that is one way to combat power creep and save on dev time but they then thwart themselves by introducing large power creep to make new gear shinier) so that if you do all your HM Flashpoints you gain nothing in Story Ops and then if you do HM Ops you gain nothing new in NiM Ops or Story EC. Aside from the need to practice (and given the trivial mechanics how many times do you need to practice "avoid the damage") there is no motivation to run old content. With 1.3 announced there is nothing new coming for PvE players and little enough for casual PvPers that our group canceled subscriptions. There's no reason to pay for the game from now until at least September because it offers us nothing new or challenging in the PvE arena. I've wondered to myself whether or not the game will be viable if they lose their hard-core PvE folks. It's already clearly skewed toward casuals in PvE and is working to reinvigorate PvP (to which I wonder why not go play a game designed around and balanced for PvP, World of Tanks anyone?) but I don't know if that population base will be stable or large enough to satisfy the EA folks. Clearly the RP crowd is getting bennies in 1.3 but the mergers suggest that the RP crowd is barely enough to support 3 servers so I don't see it keeping the game afloat. We'll see, I suppose. I have my issues with the game but those are not so bad that I would write it off completely. I'll look back in a year and see if there is any reason to pay it any more attention. Until there is more PvE content, however, I don't see any reason to pay to access the old content.

Augments are made by lots of different crafting skills. Armormech and Armstech for sure. Haven't bothered to track down the ones I don't use. Slicers will also be in hog heaven since they're the only source of the purple components that are needed to make the augments. It's unclear to me who will be able to make the components to actually create the augment slots (hoping for Artifice since they've essentially been screwed over and over on every item they can make)...

One thing that is *not* clear to me from the notes is this... If I worked hard to get augmentable (level 20) sabers for an alt who is not yet level 50 and therefore cannot put in a top-tier augment, will I be able to "upgrade" the augment slot that it defaults to or am I going to be replacing these sabers and trashing them because having worked to get the crit they are now useless? (I'm not concerned about the slots on my 50s since they'll default to top tier. I'm concerned about the gear I prepped in advance for alts who are still leveling.)