Almost no other MMO offers cross-faction communication, it's a gameplay thing. If you want to play with your friends join the same faction.

After 1.2 we'll see a spike of player activity, then it will get quiet again, and then 1.3 will hit and we'll see the same process repeat. Hopefully TOR will keep selling and pulling in customers, but the quiet period between patches is one of the curses of the modern style of MMORPGs.

Just re-read that old article and it appears you are correct. According to DarthHater there are still 1 million concurrent players (well...a month ago) and this earnings report was from after the first month, meaning that there won't have been that many still on their trial period, so when they said active subscribers, they meant mostly paying players.

Usually I don't weigh in on topics like this on MMO forums because it's usually just two camps of people flinging weightless arguments at each other. What I will say is that Bioware and EA have released official subscriber numbers as well as a ton of metrics on game time played. I have only ever seen one other release official subscriber numbers and that is WoW. AoC released initial sales and so did WAR, but they lost so many subs so quickly that they never releases subscriber numbers. Unless the game is doing well, developers are careful to keep subscriber numbers ambiguous. Also, EA officially said there is 1.7 million active subs, and while some of those may be inactive players and whatnot, they can't lie about that number, so they're at least raking in the money, Furthermore, they opened up servers in Asia, a move that usually isn't done so quickly after release, implying that there is at least some demand for this game. I'm not saying they haven't lost players since release; they obviously have, there are no longer server queues. However, they must at least still have a decent playerbase over 2 months in to be doing what they're doing, and in my experience if an MMO can survive the first month without hemorrhaging subscriptions it's doing well. As for the poster who said 'Players who quit tell their friends how bad the game are spreading bad word of mouth', have you considered that the gaming outlets and players who love this game might be singing it's praises? Not everyone hates this game y'know?

Everyone forgets (mostly because it's only mentioned in a few sources) that there was a dark age towards the end of the New Sith Wars that resulted in the Ruusan Reformation in which a lot of technology was lost, and the level of technology in the galaxy went back by a few thousand years. Many planets even lost hyperspace technology and the ability to communicate with other planets. The Sith were finally defeated 1000 years before the prequels, and then the Republic completely demilitarised, with the only remaining standing force of peacekeepers being the Jedi. So when the Clone Wars started, it was essentially with the level of military technology that was seen at the end of the New Sith Wars, as there had been little military innovation since then as there was 1000 years of peace. That's why the technology in the Original Trilogy is only a small improvement from the technology we see in TOR.

Contextually speaking, all the trooper animations feel right. They're soldiers, well trained killing machines there to do a job as efficiently as possible. Pushing a button on their top-of-the-line, high-tech armor to do abilities makes sense. The combat animations are still very well designed, and look great. The point is that Troopers were never going to be as flashy as Bounty Hunters. It wouldn't make sense, Bounty Hunters are very individual, resourceful and inventive. They have to rely on their wits and the ensemble of equipment they can get. Troopers don't need that, they have the entire power of the Republic R&D department behind them. They have the best equipment in the galaxy. If you really want to compare the Trooper's animations to anyone, compare them to the Agent. They're both Military classes, more professional than the other classes in the game and less showy. On the other hand, compare the bounty hunter to the smuggler, as they're both independent agents, who use any means possible to win a fight (sucker punch anyone?).

Umm...when it's dramatically and emotionally appropriate? It's called storytelling. Beowulf doesn't exactly have a happy ending but that doesn't mean it isn't an important fable. On another note...I don't really see any problems in the way the Mandalorians are presented in TCW, as it doesn't necessarily mean they would never go back to their warrior ways. Say they created another cartoon series during the Yuuzan-Vong war and made the Mandalorians in that era a bunch of peace-loving hippies as well, then you can all get mad at ruining the continuity. Final question, I thought the desert on the planet in TCW was because the Republic had glassed the planet's surface, though that may just be me reading wookieepedia wrong.

Here's the one thing I don't get. The Rule of Two (if it was never accidentally subverted i.e. killing your master in his sleep rather than overpowering him) obviously means each new Sith Lord was even more powerful than the last. Darth Bane was probably the most talented force user of his generation, meaning that Darth Sidious would be exponentially more powerful than anyone from that era of the Old Republic. However, surely this doesn't apply to Mace Windu. While Mace Windu was undoubtedly a highly skilled lightsaber duelist, surely there would be no-one in the Jedi order even remotely capable of defeating Darth Sidious as they weren't worried about becoming more powerful following the Ruusan Reformation as they thought the Sith were defeated. If anything, as their most worthy adversary had been defeated and the Republic entered a period of relative peace for 1000 years, their skills probably would have atrophied somewhat. Therefore, logically, there should be little chance Mace Windu could ever have beaten Darth Sidious. Perhaps a fight between him and Darth Bane would be closer, though I'd give the edge to Darth Bane, if only because Darth Bane had lots of experience fighting Jedi and because I don't think Jedi of the Clone Wars era would have been as powerful as their counterparts 1000 years ago.