First...if this person is a no name broker, can you name a broker that is not a no name broker? Second, if anybody that disagrees with you is a troll then I suspect your tenure on discussion forums is not going to be very long... Just saying

Wanna bet the forums are going to be separated from the game in the sense that even without a subscription you will be able to post...

Any plans on updating from a 2+ years old version of vbulletin to the latest one? You have the same version as League of legends forums There are still exploits on this version. You added back the search function but I fear tge damage is done

You should NEVER use a third party forum besides your guild's forum. Trust me I am also a Senior Community Manager and I can tell you that people use the exact same login for the games that they use on the same game website...at least the large majority does. To not recognize this as a serious potential issue is un conceivable for a community manager. You have the choice between potential not monitored but secure forums or a third party that can grab passwords in plain text upon registration. Once there what stops the server admin from selling these to the highest bidder. You should be very very careful where you create accounts and for Bioware to not have individual servers forums and asking people to go to third parties is major facepalm material Installing a script that will capture your passwords in plain text before hashing them is child's play.

I disagree...the best thing BW could do would be to move to Unreal engine instead

As for no server forums it was claimed that they did not have the man power to moderate the extra work for the forums. Well catch 22 here again. If the forums were modern enough to have more social tools and options enabling the community to help police posts then you would not need large teams to police forums. I am surprised you guys don t know that fanboys are great at policing forums and going after trolls. The right tools to bury posts and threads can do wonders for large communities. Again take a look at your competitors to see how they handle that part...its not rocket surgery

And please get it right its SENIOR community manager to you

Gosh this must be the 20th time I have posted the same response...please spread it around so people stop asking. There is no search enabled on the forums because they are 2+ years old and there are exploits that use the search function to get to the admin control panel. The forums are run on a $200 vbulletin license at version 3.8.5. The current version of vbulletin is 4.1.9. This version has no optimized search queries. A normal current vbulletin install is able to handle 5.000 concurrent connections...this one clearly is not. Now the question I have been asking since before launch is: Why on earth have you not updated your forums since Sept 2009? Clearly there is some custom coding that went into merging the account section with Drupal and probably some other database but releasing this to production for 1.5 million accounts without being able to keep with updates to fix exploits is really sloppy work guys. I doubt you will EVER be able to search with this version as if they did they would compromise the admin section. Until they decide to migrate to another forum or do an upgrade you boys are stuck with 2009 tech

Xenforo is too young and does not have all the extra that IPB has

Personally I wish they had used the Unreal Engine...but that is only a personal preference

Agreed with the OP, its one of the first WFTs I got when I first got the game. I asked myself why the hell do I need to do things THIS way? Take the republic fleet for example. When you are on the inner ring and go to your class hangar...can someone explain to me why that door/elevator can t go directly to my hangar? Why do I have to run through an other hangar before getting to my ship? Also not being able to port back to your ship is rather silly just like not being able to get mail ie email on your ship. There is a lot of running indeed even in planets buildings where the layout sometimes makes zero sense in terms of architecture but is merely designed the way it is for looks. No architect would ever accept to build some of the large buildings with massive ceilings but ramps on the opposite side of each other forcing you to run to the opposite side. But to go back on the ship part...yeah I don t get the immersion factor. It is more of an annoyance due to the way they separated the hangars. It would have been fine to have a SINGLE elevator then go to black screen then BAM you are at your hangar. That would would have made much more sense but hey...we are not level designers so what do we know...right?

It is not the search function by itself but the fact that there are several exploits out there and can gain access to the admin account by the search... This is unfortunately what happens when you use old tech. The search itself is not bugged. Worst case scenario the 3.8.5 version queries are not optimized and that is immediately fixed by upgrading to the latest version. vbulletin should hold 5k concurrent connections properly managed and with optimized hosting. Just think about it. This version of vBulletin now dates back to 2009 and BW is using it to run the community of a million + accounts. As I saw in chat "The facepalm is strong with this one" If you are going to use a out-of-the-box $200 forum, you should at least update it every patch that comes out. I keep repeating this every week hoping that Mr Reid will kick somebutts but so far nothing. Now if you have modified it so much so that the account section is using the Vbulletin database then now you have a problem because version 4 may have made changes to the database that you didn t plan. I suspect you are not using vbulletin's database but instead an external one. If that is the case there are no excuses for not upgrading...unless your web tech team is from ITTTech or was fired recently

I know how to fix the search functionality... Upgrade from a 2+year old version of Vbulletin (3.8.5) to the latest version and VOILA!!!!! fixed search. Why you are still using 2+ year old tech is mind boggling

One problem I see with the engine is that it looks like even from the demos of Heroengine itself that space combat can only be done on rails. If SWTOR has no free flight space combat ala Halo Reach then the game is virtually not worth it. So far all the space missions I have done are mostly the same in the sense that enemies always come from your right or left and warn you by making sounds. I for one would want to ambush people behind an asteroid and chase them in space and do real space combat. This is what I wanted to play in space with swtor and it fear it will never happen. Most Star Wars fans want a modern version of Tie Fighter vs Xwing

Greyfield...is there any reason why you and others like yourself must make your responses a different color than anybody else? Are you trying to draw more attention to your posts? What do you think it says about yourself? Just saying...