I think that Form I is a bad form. It's elementary compared to the rest of lightsaber forms. I like Form II and Form IV.

Have any of these people even played an MMO before? Do they know what type of game they're supposed to be making? Here's a tip, Damian Schubert; when you lose a huge number of subscriptions and your game is labeled "Tortanic" by the very demographic you're trying to appease, you're doing something wrong. The solution is simple. You put all of your silly projects that aren't remotely exciting any of the players you have left on hold, and you start looking at suggestions from the people who would like to spend an excessive amount of time using your product and giving you money. Put your players first, otherwise you're not going to have anybody left to enjoy your ridiculous Legacy perks. What a terribly mismanaged product.

Haha, I have the same problem with lore-appropriate Chiss names. I'm not going to remember Mith'roo'waa'larrr'deer'fffaa'lek. If I'm having a conversation with them, they'd better hope nobody else whispers me in the middle of it.

Do these frustrate the hell out of anybody else? Now that the servers have been consolidated there are like no cool names left. I spent about two hours last night trying to name an Agent and every single thing I tried was taken. I mean, if I was simply looking for a random name I could just double up letters until something works, but I'm ridiculously OCD about names, and I have a very specific RP role in mind for this character so it irritates me more than it should. There should be a two-month grace period on names. If a person can't be bothered to get a character to level 10 in two months, the name should become available again to somebody who will actually use it. I'm going to start looking ahead and hoarding all the names of characters I might want to make in the future to preempt the influx of F2Players.

I once had a bounty hunter tracking me use General to broadcast a planet-wide comm wave, offering credits to anyone who could tell her where I was. We RPed for a bit in the channel as though it was just a public comm frequency - which is pretty much what I consider the channel to be - before meeting up somewhere for a SHOWDOWN. I see no problem with RPing in public channels like that assuming it's done intelligently and in moderation. If there are people having an OOC discussion in the channel then it's kind of a dick move to start flooding their conversation with RP posts. It's also a little stupid to try RPing in General on Fleet, where you're going to be in rapid competition with OOC chatter, guild recruitment ads, PvP and Trade. But if the planet is quiet and you're cruising for RP, why not throw up an IC broadwave in General to see if you can find other RPers? Just exercise some awareness. Remember that your RP is filling other peoples' chat boxes and that might be irritating to them, so try to move things into /say sooner rather than later.

This is starting to get ridiculous. I actually enjoy the game despite it's numerous faults, and I'd like to keep playing it, but between the one or two new departures we read about each day, and the glaringly bad business statements frequently quoted from EA, it really is like watching the Titanic drift ever-closer to an iceberg. I had every intention to maintain my subscription in November, but if the rumours that even subscribers are going to be charged for content like Makeb are true, I'm not sure what the incentive to subscribe is supposed to be anymore. I'm trying to remain optimistic, but fsck. I'd really like to start meeting the new team that's supposed to be taking over for all these people.

Hmm, the other team is really well organized. They're all over our side of the field and are passing the ball all the way to the goal line every time. It's probably best for our entire team to run and gun at each of them for a few seconds until they pass the ball on, rather than make any attempt at all to grab the ball ourselves and run across the empty field to their goal. Oh look, there's one person coming to attack this node that I'm defending by myself. I was pretty awesome in the 10-49 bracket, I won't bother calling this out. I'll just handle this guy on my own. Wait, what? Where did this other guy come from? Where the fsck is my team when I need them? What luck! That smuggler rooted their ball carrier in place just a few feet away from this health power-up right here. I suppose I could always grab it to prevent the carrier from getting it, but it's probably best if I just keep DPSing him. He'll probably die before the leg shot wears off and he has a chance to take three more steps. We sure are lucky that our healers are keeping such a vigilant eye on our health bars. Let's repay them by completely ignoring them when they come under attack. Uh oh, the enemy has captured two nodes! Let's leave this one person to defend our only node by himself while the rest of us run aimlessly around the map and attack the other two nodes in broken groups in which we're hopelessly outnumbered. Organizing into a single group and attacking a single node isn't as sound a strategy as charging into a horde of enemy players by myself. Somebody has passed me the ball! Oh wow, this is a lot of responsibility. Alright, well let's see... that person is standing alone and has full health, but he's behind me so forget about him. There's a Guardian with most of his health over on the other side of the fire trap, hmm. There's a Shadow standing right over there, ready to make a sprint to the goal line. Oh! There's a Gunslinger being rapidly beat down by three guys! Let's pass it to him! Wow, this PUG is having a really hard time organizing themselves. I should scream incoherently into ops chat and call them all names, that will certainly rally them to victory. I'd better not forget to mention how awesome I am, and how many great feats I've accomplished so that they'll take me seriously. Man, the other team is totally schooling us. Fscking hackers.

This.

I'm of the opinion that social rank should be linked to your Legacy as opposed to your character. As you said, once you've grinded a character all the way to Social X, you really don't want to do it again. I understand that social points are meant to reward players for grouping up and playing with their peers, and that's great, but when you can play all the way to level 50 with a friend and not pass Social III, you end up forced to run the Esseles or the Black Talon over and over and over again in order to unlock whatever outfits or titles you may want to use. Especially for players who aren't stoked about endgame operations. There should probably be a social reward for Warzones as well, recognizing acts of teamwork such as passing the ball or taking an objective with a group, but I suppose I can understand why there's not. In any case, I would love to see more options for gaining social points rather than running the first Flashpoint ad nauseam. Social minigames like Pazaak, Sabacc or swoop racing would all be awesome and fun ways to gain social points. Hint hint, Bioware.

There's a group running around on the smuggler ship on Ebon Hawk right now. I was wondering if anyone else was seeing this. That's a fun new bug.

Like all the standard MMO services that should have been included with the game at launch and now almost a year later have yet to be implemented. It baffles me that enough people at EA thought that MMOs having regular content updates meant it was okay to ship an unfinished game and then fill in the missing features over time. That's like selling somebody an empty bun for full price and then, while they're eating it, nonchalantly trying to slide the burger patty and the cheese and the lettuce and etc into it like you didn't totally screw them over. The fact that the Legacy system - which is like one of their grand unique selling points - didn't make it into the game until the second big patch is ridiculous. The funny thing is that I bet if they'd spun it for the fans, and said "We know the game isn't complete, but we're going to launch early so that all of you players eager to get your hands on it can begin immersing yourself in the world rather than waiting another year!" instead of just rushing the game out in order to cash in on Christmas sales, they would have retained more subscribers and probably wouldn't have been such a colossal failure in the eyes of the community. The fact that they refuse to acknowledge that they made an amateur mistake and continue to play it all off as though it's just a quirk of the genre and they know exactly what they're doing is almost insulting to their demographic. EA's got to realize that they can play Wall Street and make all the hard, fast business decisions that they want, but in the end they're publishing an interactive and player-driven medium. If you don't respect your players, you end up with a game that goes free to play before its first year is up. And regardless of what they tell their investors, that's not 'normal' and 'the direction the genre is going', that's the sign of a game struggling to remain relevant. At this point, it's my assumption that they've finished all the standard MMO services - like name changes and character transfers and recustomizations and etc - that this game should have had on day one, and they're just waiting for the cash shop and the new layout to roll them out. Because if those services aren't complete, it's pretty pathetic for a game of this magnitude. So that said, having the developers working on anything, whether it be minigames like racing or dog fighting, or simple aesthetic fluff like time and weather cycles, nothing is a waste of dev time. Because they need all the help they can get.

I believe Pod Racing is in development. I'll try to go look up the developer dispatch video or article wherever I read it, but I seem to recall one of the developers saying that they tried to capture as many Star Wars fantasies as possible at launch, and that players looking to live their Wedge Antilles, Sebulba and General Veers fantasies should look forward to the future. Which suggests the new space content might be pretty rad, and there's some sort of vehicle combat in development as well. The post is here. I suppose that's not proof that those features are in development, just that the developers have considered it. While we may never see that content, it's nice to hope.

Roleplayer-friendly updates, like chat bubbles and the facial moods and some of the other quality of life patches (like chairs that you can sit in), are really a smart move by Bioware at this point. Lack of (and missing) content is, from what I can see, the primary reason that most of the players are gone, now, and it will continue to be the reason players leave for other games. When the game goes free to play, BW is likely to see a spike in activity any time they release a new patch before it dies off again when everyone has played that content. It's the roleplayers who will continue to log in consistently and well into the game's twilight years (or twilight year, at the rate things have been going) because a lot of them don't care about content, they just want to RP. Regardless of the fact that they're a minority of the game's demographic, they're the group that's most likely to continue playing. Providing a better roleplay experience than WoW or GW2 could keep SWTOR's population at least a little respectable.

It's about damn time.

So if I'm to understand correctly, the group was already flagged (possible by another knobby Imp running into AoE fire and thereby flagging the entire group) and were engaged in combat with a world boss, and then the OP and his friends rushed in to kill them. First of all, I'm sure the world boss killed them. You're like one of those douchebags who stands in front of the TV or covers his friends eyes while he's fighting a boss in a console game; that's all. Secondly, coming immediately to the forums to tell everybody about it is bragging. It's great that you enjoyed yourself, but unfortunately you ARE a douchebag.