Then they should make the ambience less noisy It doesn't have to be people having audible conversations - next time you're out somewhere in the real world listen to the "din", such as traffic in the distance, birds, wind/rain, background chatter of people talking, etc.

I'd rather have the latter. The bad attitudes and elitism simply kills all fun out of the game (The WoW community is the reason why I don't play WoW any more), whereas being in a raid with someone who might have AFK'ed in the middle of a fight could be deemed annoying, it's not really as harmful as people like to pretend. I ran through Mandalorian Raiders fp today with a group of PUG'ers - I was 25 (healing), two others were 27 (dps) and 29 (tank), and then we picked up another guy who was L20. Most of the mobs in MR are between 24-26 - we all knew before we started that the L20 guy was probably going to be doing close to zero dps and his abilities resisted all the time, but we wanted a 4th player instead of a companion. We still cleared the flashpoint, though it was kind of tight and despite using loads of CC + interrupts, we still died a couple of times on trash groups. I have no idea what the L20 guy's dps was, I'm guessing it was close to zero, but it wasn't important really. I remember him saying a few times that he was getting annoyed with his abilities being resisted, but the fact was that it didn't matter to the rest of us in the group - it was fun, and that's what matters

In the Search box of the /who window, you can type "LFG", and that will show everybody who has flagged themselves as LFG. I don't know why the user interface doesn't make this a bit more obvious.. it's not very intuitive really

I've had no problems at the lower levels - Dark infusion seems quite powerful to me. Of course, as with all healing, it depends mostly on the rest of your group and their ability to interrupt boss abilities, not stand in the fire, etc. Healing is always either the easiest job in the world or the most difficult depending on who you are grouped with. Levelling up as a healer-speced sith sorcerer has felt quite easy so far. I don't know what it'll be like at the higher levels, but I can usually take on groups (my own level) with several strong mobs and maybe even an elite if i'm really careful to use CC, interrupts, knockbacks, etc. (i've been keeping my tank companion Khem Val fairly up-to-date with gear, which i guess helps a lot too)

I haven't played sith warrior/jedi knight, but I assume you've got CC and interrupt abilities? (I thought every class had those, but correct me if I'm wrong) If there's a group with an elite in it, I would CC that mob while you clean up all the rest of the strong/normal mobs - I find that wiping out the weaklings first works quite well most of the time (Because the "elite" mobs don't necessarily hit you much harder than the weak ones, they just take much longer to die). Also try hotkeying your interrupt and keep an eye on what the enemy is casting - long-cast and channeled abilities show up as a "progress bar" for a few seconds above the enemy portrait at the bottom - you need to watch carefully for those since the progress bar is fairly small. many of the elites seem to have at least 1 channeled/long-cast ability which they'll use every so often which hurts really badly. I've noticed a few times that Khem Val (my tank companion) can lose loads of his hp to some of the elite channeled abilities if I don't interrupt them - but once those channeled or long-cast abilities get interrupted, the elites don't really seem to hit very hard at all. Oh, and lastly it helps if you avoid "circles" which appear underneath you on the ground if the mobs do that kind of thing too (The good old "Don't stand in the fire!!" tactic ) I also try to save my knockbacks and stuns for elite mobs as well. Sorry if this doesn't help, and you're already doing all of these things then I'm not sure what else to suggest (I've played other MMO's before, so I suppose watching out for stuff like that has become quite natural to me). But from personal experience with my Sorcerer, I'm not having any problems with solo quests - especially not ones which are below my level. Good luck:)

I couldn't agree more. I feel exactly the same. It doesn't matter how many years I've spent playing a character; once I've simply run out of steam with the game, then its dead to me. Although I don't think WoW will die just like that - there are still millions of relatively new players who haven't reached that point, and there's a fairly constant stream of new players still joining, so I doubt that any other game could kill it (that's a bit of a silly idea IMO). I played Counter-Strike for about 6 years before WoW came out, but despite the game itself not really changing much, it eventually "died" for me. WoW came out a short time later and I chose to fill my spare time with that instead. If I end up playing SWTOR for 4-5 years and then get bored with it, I doubt that it'll be down to anything that BioWare may or may not do to the game

That would be a step backwards - other MMOs have launched without staggering player numbers, and it has caused far more problems than a few whiners on forums. They want to be sure that they have the right number of servers on launch day when most people are able to get in; ideally, each server should have some queues but not excessively long ones. There are two alternatives which are both worse than what they're doing at the moment: - Too few servers - very bad - causes a lot of people to get upset when launch day comes around and people are queueing for hours while the server admins are scrambling around for days trying to bring dozens of new servers online. And worse than that still.. - Too many servers - Works fine for the first couple of weeks, then after the initial euphoria of a new game drops off and the majority of players balance out their play time, server loads end up much lower than the initial launch, and they're left with hundreds of near-empty servers with most of their players wondering where everybody else went off to. Thing is, the number of servers isn't based on the total number of players, its based on the number of players who come online at the same time. They might know that they've sold 3 million copies, but if no more than 250,000 players are ever on at once, then it would be a disaster to run up enough servers for all of those 3 million players to be online at once.

Its definitely nowhere near flawless. It solved a few problems and introduced a whole raft of much worse ones - At the heart of it, the dungeon finder is completely indiscriminate and it removed players' options to control who gets to join their group. When they replaced the LFG tool with the Dungeon finder, they removed the ability for people to have a say in who they were grouped with when using the tool, and at the same time removed the mechanism which allowed people to avoid all the well-known idiots or give preference to people who they had previously enjoyed playing with instead (Who would you rather play with? Someone who was fun to play with before? or someone who you met in a previous run who was rude and abusive?). The fact that cross-server communication is impossible in WoW is another flaw with the cross-server part of it (although that could be solved in theory by having ways in which communities can form across multiple servers). There's nothing at all in WoW which lets players have the opportunity to filter out idiots from other servers, or even to know who those idiots are The only way a Dungeon Finder can work is if there are ways in which players can keep control and override the automation (The old WoW LFG tool had an "auto accept invite" checkbox, but most people actually preferred not to use it). A minority of people are always going to act like chumps; the community needs a way to make those people known, and players need a way to avoid them; When something like that exists, then people who are rude, obnoxious and foul-mouthed will all either find themselves excluded from groups, or they'll learn the hard way how to be polite and respectful to other players - 5 years of the old WoW LFG tool before the dungeon finder shows that community self regulation can work very well

BioWare announced 3 difficulty levels for Operations: Normal, Hard, Nightmare. I also vaguely remember they announced the same 3 difficulty levels for flashpoints too (There were definitely 2), but maybe that was just wishful thinking and perhaps the 3rd "Nightmare" mode was only for operations. I don't know for sure, but if I were to take a wild guess, I would expect the group leader to have a "difficulty mode" setting in their right-click menu when they click on their portrait ... But the reason I expect that is because I've played WoW for too long But in any case, the right-click portrait menu seemed fairly familiar to me from WoW when I tried Black Talon in beta (around L11-L12, I wasn't the party leader, just a groupie). There were all kinds of options such as "leave party" and marking mobs and players with icons like a yellow star.. Very familiar

I don't think you can change the difficulty of flashpoints until L50. A lot of flashpoints like Black Talon have normal modes which you are supposed to do while levelling up, I don't think it'd make sense to have different difficulty modes at the lower levels, since people would just outlevel them fairly quickly, and completely negate any increase in difficulty by doing the same flashpoint 1 or 2 levels higher. At 50 there's most likely a hard mode version of each of the levelling-up flashpoints, and they'd just be like the normal version tuned for L50 players - that would make more sense because people won't be able to out-level these. I don't know if there's any normal-mode L50 flashpoints yet, but presumably those would have a L50 hard mode too, otherwise maybe those kinds of flashpoints are going to get added to the game in a future patch.