Said it before in earlier threads, and I'll say it now... some sort of class story reset, awesome idea. The class stories are some of the game's best content. Why have it able to be done only once? The Heroic Missions are repeatable, flashpoints and ops are repeatable... I know those are to keep group content alive, but even so. Call it 'Cinematic Mode' or something.

You cannot deny our triumph!

If anyone would still like to take part, either as a judge or a participant, then there's still time! As long as you can show up around half an hour before the event starts, then we can make it can happen!

Only three days to go! Be you entrant or judge, time's running out to get involved! Get your names in soon, posted here or PM'd to me!

The Progenitor, as it happens.

Sometimes RPers do awesome things. These are some awesome things I have taken part in: - Week-long war events with a dozen other guilds (Rep and Imp) involved set over Belsavis, Tatooine and Hoth, in the style of historical re-enactment fighting. - Seen and spoken at a multi-representative peace conference at Voss, intended to decide the fate of a sector of space. - Fought a black-armoured Sith cyborg army, played by other players, through the streets of Coruscant over the course of several days. - Gone behind enemy lines on Balmorra with other guilds and helped liberate it over the course of several days. - Investigated a murder that led to the discovery of a Sith agent in the Republic Senate. - Held Trials of Knighthood to determine whether Padawans could become Jedi Knights. And more! Rediscovered ancient treasures, fought dangerous enemies... had adventures.

While this is true, it's unfortunate that Belsavis and Voss had to be those planets, and they don't lend themselves well to power-building intrigue.

Happening here also. Progenitor server, Republic guild <The Lost Praxeum>, Guild ship (Valor-class)with custom name, on the crew deck. 57% decorations placed, many remaining. We unlocked crew deck in this order: HERE Green room being the first room we unlocked, which works fine. Red rooms being the second and third rooms we unlocked. Neither of these rooms have decoration hooks that are interactable. We can see the hooks, the mouse cursor moves over them, you click, and nothing happens. None of my guild officers can get this to work, and we've all tried. Purple rooms are rooms we have not unlocked yet.

Can't add much to the interpretation of the Jedi Code already given, except to say that it's not meant to be taken completely literally. I've seen too many people look at the first line, say "but of course there's emotion, we're not robots" and proceed to miss the point. It's a kōan, a seeming impossibility that nudges your mind into thinking through it, not about it. You can treat it as a mantra and live your life by its surface meaning, and you'd likely make a perfectly good Jedi if you did, but I think realising that the words and their meaning aren't what's important is what makes a Jedi Master. There's a Buddhist emphasis on truth over meaning there. What's really true, what's really important in life - and what's just a distraction? Getting you to realise that is what the Jedi Code is actually for.

After many, many requests, we're opening up this tournament to include a veteran student's category, so if your guild has some more experienced Padawans who want to demonstrate what they've learned, sign them up too!

Happening here also. Progenitor server, Guild ship with custom name. We unlocked crew deck in this order: HERE Green room being the first room we unlocked, which works fine. Red rooms being the second and third rooms we unlocked. Neither of these rooms have decoration hooks that are interactable. The mouse cursor moves over them, you click, and nothing happens. None of my guild officers can get this to work, and we've all tried. Purple rooms are rooms we have not unlocked yet. I urge for this to please be looked at. I have guild members who worked hard for those rooms, and are itching to decorate them.

NB: If you're short on students, or you have only a few potential entrants because you're a guild wih a more general focus on Republic RP, don't worry! As long as you can let me know who your guild is entering, it doesn't matter if there's only one or two. We still want to see you there!

Sounds about right. We knew this was coming since about March, and had 15 or so people just devoting one day of the week to group up and hit every Daily Quest area they could to get credits to stick in the bank. We had enough and a bit extra by the time the guildship was available. You just gotta... hate to sound pithy here, but you just gotta stop thinking of all the reasons why you can't do it and just do it.

Know that the time has come once more. The reconstructed Jedi Temple of Tython hosts a tournament of martial skill! The chance is there for students of all to sharpen their abilities, and witness new and unfamiliar techniques. And though the Tournament seeks to honour the purity of lightsaber combat, all are welcome to watch, or - if they are a bladesman - to enter and take part according to the ancient rules. So come! Location: The Training Arenas, Jedi Temple, Tython Time and Date: Saturday, October 11th, 1900 GMT Judges and Entrants to arrive at 1820-1830 ---^--- OOC Talk WHAT WE NEED... Hello! I'm Alen, guild leader of the Jedi guild, the Lost Praxeum. I'm trying to reach as many guilds with a strong Jedi presence as I can. Here's how we're going to try and do this. What I'm looking for is groups of entrants from guilds with Jedi. Ideally, no more than THREE per guild. Hopefully, that will give every guild involved a strong presence in the event, while keeping things to a manageable size. Your guild can choose those three any way they like; set up your own mini-tournament, pick names out of a hat, take volunteers, anything works! Hopefully, you've got plenty of time. We have two basic categories: Basic Student for those whose skills are still a bit raw and may not have a Master yet, and Veteran Student, for those who have received some tuition and have more developed skills. Let me know which your entrants are! What I'd also ask for are two or three Judge volunteers per guild, as well - Masters or senior Knights. We'll organise Judges into panels of three, usually made up of different guilds, and these judges will score the lightsaber bouts. We'll be using as many arenas as we need to, to keep this manageable! Do try and get the names of your entrants and judges to me before the day of the event. This means we can organise everything relatively smoothly. It's a bit restrictive to limit entrants in this way, I admit, but I'm keen to include as many different guilds as possible. Send me a PM with your entrants and judge volunteers. If you're not part of a guild with a heavy Jedi influence, but you ARE a Jedi Initiate, Jedi Padawan, or some other sort of swordfighter, and would like to enter, send me a mail anyway! There may well be a place for you. More details here. Aside from that - any and all spectators are welcome. Come watch your Guild's entrants, or just enjoy the spectacle! --- THE BOUTS The lightsaber bouts themselves will be conducted using emote-combat, with /emotes and attacks used to give it all visual flavour. The entrants will be arranged into a series of one-on-one duels, each of which will last 25-30 minutes or until a winning strike is made. Their objective is simple: to try to disarm or land a disabling strike on their opponent in that time, while abiding by the standard sparring rules: - Do not leave the Arena - Do not use the Force for anything but basic physical enhancement - Stop fighting when your opponent calls Solah. --- SCORING Judges will be asked to give each entrant scores of 5 in the following categories: Style - how clever and succinct a player's written emotes are - how imaginative they are in using attacks to create visual flavour - points lost for writing too much, or emoting plainly, without much imagination Control - how smart and tactically aware a player is in combat - how well they react to the other player's emotes - points lost for fighting with unnecessary brutality Technique - how well a player seems to know lightsaber combat - how a player is able to direct the flow of the fight - Whether or not a player succeeds in landing a victorious hit - points lost for emoting moves that just don't seem to make sense Sportsmanship - how cool-headed a character is, before, during or after the bout - how closely they abide by the duelling rules and good manners - whether a player is willing to emote good moves on their opponent's part having an effect - points lost for using dirty fighting or potentially dangerous moves These points will be collated into a total score that'll both reflect the character's ability with the lightsaber, and the player's abilities as a roleplayer. It's intentionally difficult to get a perfect score; some people will naturally be better at some things than others, and that's fine! *** FINAL WORDS Though the Jedi would not glorify violence, keeping one's own skills and the skills of others sharp is especially important in a time of war, and appreciating the achievements of others is a worthy thing, as well as giving young Jedi a chance to impress a potential Master. Do feel free to gather before the start time of 1900, especially if you want to take part - but if you can't make the time, do try to come along anyway! Maybe you'll get a chance as a late entrant. The hope is for various different Jedi guilds to meet and how that we're all pretty cool, and I hope you'll come along and mingle with us as we watch the tournament play out. This is a chance to get as many Jedi guilds in one place at the same time!

If you want an opinion respected you need to justify it. What was so challenging in False Emperor that marks it as a greater example of a difficult flashpoint than Lost Island?

On Thanaton:

Could work. However! In the novels in which they're introduced, the ysalamiri are described as sessile tree-dwellers - that is, they stay in one place, having fixed themselves into a tree and stay there, deriving nutrients from the tree. When they're used as man-portable defences, the Empire had to use bulky nutrient frames on their backs to keep the ysalamir alive. This may come with a few issues, such as not being able to wear a jetpack. Also - although the ysalamir does prevent your Hunter from being detected and from direct uses of the Force, it's not complete immunity, as you note yourself. Even if you can't be detected through the Force, you can still be seen and heard. A force-user with a lightsaber is still able to predict and deflect blaster shots and the like if they pass out of the ysalamir's 'bubble'. The Dark Jedi against whom these were used initially soon figured out a way to attack someone with a ysalamir, too - he simply telekinetically threw rocks at them from outside the bubble, and let physics do the rest of the work.

There's something psychotically frightening in the Rule of Two: and it is that every Sith had to accept their inevitable death at the hands of their apprentice. That's the intimidatingly pure part of it. Yes, being a Sith made you a treacherous, devious, totally amoral villain, but the point was that you were breeding an even MORE treacherous, devious villain and you had to accept that it was part of your job to one day be betrayed and killed. Yes, many of the Banites trained a second apprentice in secret; but none of them thought, 'wait, this sucks, I don't want to die' and simply started their own Sith mini-Empire with multiple weak disciples, or gave up on the idea altogether. They were committed, as much as Sith could be. It's that point which puts the Banites above the TOR-Era Sith in terms of ideological purity: they were all prepared to die for it, rather than live for themselves. The Sith Inquisitor story makes this point, in fact, that the Sith of the Sith Empire are too much like normal people in terms of greed, love of power, fear of death etc. Bane got them off the relatively pointless goal of building and maintaining an Empire, and reminded them that they were supposed to be a crazy religious death-cult. Completely removing the possibility of being able to ally with others to turn on your rival was a big part of this. Even in a rigidly policed Sith Empire, you'd inevitably have powerful Sith fighting other Sith via proxy, etc. Bane didn't want any of that. The one thing I'd say there is that this is not the case; lots of Sith does not mean a more powerful Dark Side. The Dark Side was at its canonical strongest during Palpatine's ascent to power, and had been steadily gaining strength due to the actions of the Banites. The spread of corruption in the Republic, the moral decay everywhere else, there were rituals undertaken in secret... This was why the Jedi in the Prequels were frequently muttering that the Dark Side clouded everything, and this was a key part of the Banite strategy, to blind them. The corruption in the Republic and the unpreparedness of the Jedi Order was at least in part due to the work of the Banites. As far as success goes, the way I tend to look at it is that the Banites were so successful that it took a specific prophecy and a very specific destiny to take them down.

That's not really the Sith way of thinking, though, is it? The Sith are extremists - they take that kind of thinking and turn it up to eleven. They don't drop bombs until someone surrenders; they drop bombs until nothing is left, so that no-one else will ever think of resisting them ever again. And then they say, "Better in the long run, right? It's not like we were going to occupy the place; at least we get some use out of it this way." I don't get it when folks say that a violent religious cult dedicated to the spreading of fear and hate are 'more our kind of people'. Hell no. The Jedi, at least, are trying to be the best people that the galaxy will let them be. The Sith don't even bother, and might not even understand why you would want to. A heroic Sith would be that in direct spite of his training and teachings, not because of them - if you follow the Sith way to the letter, you are a genuine villain.

Bane's Rule of Two was as much about philosophical victory as it was about practicality. He wanted to see the Sith way triumph over the Jedi, so he wanted the Sith way perfected. Banding together in large numbers was the way of the Jedi, and Bane hated that, because even if the Sith armies won, they wouldn't have done it using the Sith way: deception, treachery, and the power of the individual will. The Jedi might be gone but the Force would still remain. And the way to do that, he thought, was to create a system where the Sith would have to constantly be on their guard, or die - where they'd have no choice but to fight the Jedi using subtlety and cunning, and eventually prove that the Sith way was the superior, that two sufficiently dedicated Sith could defeat thousands. Do that, and the Dark Side itself would win. That's the Rule of Two's purpose. So you could say that many of the TOR-era Sith might have been a match for Sidious and company in terms of power. But power doesn't always equal philosophical purity. Malgus had a twi'lek sweetheart, for example. Bane wanted Sith who were 100% SITH, every hour of every day.

It seemed a weird decision to kill Malgus off anyway; he was the visible face of the Empire for most of the game, the guy that gave you the flashpoint missions, the most visible face of SWTOR's marketing. Hoping for a Malgus return to save the Empire, if the Emperor is ever finally killed.

I can answer both those, maybe, with the same point. *** As an aside, something I like about the composition of the Inquisitor story is that it has two 'bookends' that open and close the story of the Inquisitor in a very nice way.

Even though it's all unlikely, marriages between two level-headed Jedi are more likely to be considered than a marriage between a Jedi and a non-Force-sensitive, simply because the Council know that both participants are likely going to be sensible about it.

I started to like the Inquisitor story when I realised what it was. It's not Palpatine's story - it's Darth Bane's. Here's the question the story poses. What is a Sith? You get to decide your personal take on that question. If you look at it from the point of view that the morality system isn't really about your character's internal alignment, but more about an external alignment, with the Dark Side options being about causing as much chaos, uncertainty and fear as possible, thus making the Dark Side (and you) more powerful... then yes, if you take the logical course every time, you're actually inhibiting the Dark Side's growth.

No, not too LAZY. Just either: - unaware that running stuff can, in theory, done by anyone - have their energies directed elsewhere - are too nervous to try - haven't got an idea they like yet ... but yeah, in the end: getting something going on your own is the key. If folk wait around for things to get better, or float about hoping for someone else to push something forward so you can join it... if EVERYONE did that, then nothing would ever happen, so I agree with the stone analogy. An example: back when I played World of Warcraft, I was an average not-really-doing-much player, until I sort-of snapped after nearing a long, long complaint about nothing ever happening in Stormwind General chat. My reaction was - okay, this can't be hard, let's do something. So I planned a jousting event using the arenas in the Argent Tournament on Northrend. Spent a couple of months advertising it, got together some prizes, and acted as the announcer. I got 9 participants, a small crowd of people, folk were entertained for a few hours and it inspired a few people to make their own joust-themed events. I never did anything else on WoW, but it contributed. It might not have been much, but as you say, I threw a stone into the water. If twenty, thirty, fifty people on a server with a population of thousands all did the same, then bam, you have a lot of happenings! From there, people meet people, little connections are formed, and it all starts to add up. That feeling of the 'small surface' will start to feel bigger. But if you start from the opposite angle, think 'ok, how can we do something big to fix this' and try to do it all at once, I don't think that ever works. You have to start from the bottom, and focus on what you can do yourself, alone, first. If you can't do that, then you'll never be able to do anything bigger. Communities don't just appear, they need to grow. *** So I say, don't worry about the big picture. It's too big to be handled, without a massive amount of planning and investment, which is time that things still aren't happening. Focus on what you want to do, and see what you can do. Just try to entertain people, and make them happy.