player pvp looting is getting a bit off topic and perhaps hard for people to understand who haven't seen it before - different games implement it in different ways too. I do agree with you that with this difficulty selection idea that it could affect aspects of PVP interaction though, but just not perhaps in this type of game. Whether that is some sort of monetary losses or pvp downtime (unable to fight other players) etc. Maybe you'd get a certain fraction of a players money in world pvp when you killed them? At the very least... they shouldn't be able to attack me 10 seconds later after rezzing right? However, this game is really designed around warzone matches and non so much world pvp. At maximum level the entire point of the game is to get increasingly better gear. You wouldn't want to spend weeks doing dailies and farming gear to die and have it all looted. Plus, gear in this game (and wow) is hardly unique.. if you killed 3-4 players to what purpose would that gear serve? Vendor? [but to talk about player looting since you mentioned it] In Asheron's Call PVP was largely random world based pvp. Fights lasted longer and people were harder to kill. When you killed a player they dropped money and items of highest vendor value. Sometimes, a careless player without high vendor value items would drop his actual gear (because he didn't cover it). Some differences was that not everything was dropped, just a set # of items, and most all items were unique (randomly generated). The winning player would receive half the players cash (aside from trade notes.. basically a sort of bank) and X number of items that would usually vendor for a good chunk of change. Possibly that player could receive an item that was unique and modified that was very useful and tradeable / sellable to other players. For others... I'm not suggesting player looting. I was mostly focusing on PvE aspects of the game, but I admit that some PvP aspects could factor into the scaling too. Not necessarily looting, but maybe cash loss / rewards for pvp deaths.

It is interesting scaling some of the player attributes (not just creatures), but I'm not sure that I follow how that would relate to playing with other players. Surely "easy mode" players would not be able to play with "hard mode" players in this case, or else they would just be a burden to the group. (Why would someone invite players with decreased stats and abiltities? Surely, you'd find the player with the non nerfed abilities if available). I'm just saying that while changing player stats is an interesting means of accomplishing something similar that it would also need to be server-wide.

Thanks... As far as the PvP idea I agree.. but it depends on the game. It sounds like you have come from another game like AC or UO. I agree that I really enjoy pvp which has consequences and looting, but the game would need to be designed with that in mind. SWTOR/WoW doesn't really work with player looting very well (players die too easily, and gear is too much a focus). A different more old school type MMO could have variations of these types pvp concepts.

if you are doing warzones to make money you are dumb or just making a ridiculous comparison on purpose. It takes me 10 minutes to make 50k. go running boarding party regular, kill only the needed bosses and loot chests, vendor everything... There you go 50k! lol.. go respec

I don't get your point here.. this is exactly what the idea would solve. Those "not up to the task" would select an easier server to play on in which they were up to the task. It wouldn't "split up guilds" because in my imaginary MMO the game was designed this way from the beginning... The only possibility is that real life friends or people who already know each other from other games may prefer different difficulties. But then again, my other friends already had some friends that played on some other servers and some that wanted west coast time or east coast time etc.. so it that's not the only problem with picking servers with people.

I'm glad someone gets it.

umm it isn't just a timesink you are playing a game in this massive explorable world. Isn't part of that at least enjoying the scenery and the game? There has to be more the game the a room full of stuff you just kill over and over for points right? Why move at all

You need something to blow your commendations on when you have everything else.. so they let you buy blue/purple loot boxes. The description was clear enough for me to understand what it was based off all the other similar rewards in missions. Space combat is not a bad source of money, and lately daily commendations as well. Some people enjoy it too so we may have commendations to blow on something. they are under the same vendor because that vendor sells everything that you buy with space commendations. I'm wondering if it may be more worthwhile to buy several blue item boxes rather than 1 purple for the value of the items inside. edit: If you are disappointed.. go auction your purple and search the auction house for purple craftable spaceship upgrades if you don't already have them. That way you get a ship upgrade!

No additional work because I'm not suggesting adding it... it is just an idea here. No I'm not saying you can switch servers... Well you could.. but you cannot switch difficulties (or else you could easy mode your character then switch to a harder server where other people had to work harder for same benefits) Each server has a difficulty. Each player chooses a server based off their preferred difficulty. All creatures and raids etc are scaled to be harder on the harder difficulty servers. Players only pvp with others from servers with the same difficulty.. etc Oh yeah, and there are no hard, heroic, or nightmare modes to instances anymore.. they are just harder in general for those on a harder server

Very difficult to find a piece of armor. Searching through chest pieces to find boots etc.. No option to search for orange gear separate from blue gear The usable by feature doesn't work or do anything useful The search box by name doesn't work unless you use the drop down menus. Because of the previous flaw, sometimes it is nearly impossible to find an item you are looking for because you can't figure out what category it is in especially if that item may not even be for sale! (is it in here? no.. ok how about here? no... hmm here? no... does it even exist? am I just getting the category wrong?) Selling items is difficult because you have to alternate between searching and selling to find other items of similarly priced items. While other games are no better, addons were available that added this functionality. The reset button is too close to the search button which sometimes results in me clearing my search accidentally Almost impossible to find items based off stats. For example try to find an implant or earpiece with relevant stats considering you do not know the name of it. All of them are grouped together. On my server there was 20 pages of epic implants and none of which were the right stats for my companion. Switching to blues made the problem worse. Completely unsure of its automatic pricing scheme. I would like to know how it decides to suggest a buyout price. Pretty sure that pricing scheme doesn't work on some items. For example mission discoveries have the same name despite having different crafting skill levels. I could keep going...

There are always lots of discussion about SWTOR or other MMOs being too easy or too hard. Usually both are argued at the same time by different players. "Casual" players complain they cannot get the best gear because it is too difficult or requires too much time. "Hard core" players complain that with more effort there should be greater rewards. Now, we have instances with difficulty settings like normal, hard, and nightmare. Or in other games heroic mode. However, this doesn't change the game outside of those instances and often we have to have multiple tiers of the same gear with slightly better stats to reward the extra effort to which the other players will never receive. I think an interesting concept would be to make servers available with different difficulty settings. Instead of PvE, PvP, and RP servers only. You would have maybe something like Normal, Hard, and Nightmare servers. The gear could remain the same, but the creatures could scale in difficulty across the entire server. Players who enjoyed a tougher game would play with similarly minded players. In a way, this is very similar to how a FPS works. When you play a game such as battlefield at the beginning you select your difficulty level. No one complains that another player got to beat the game on easy when it was much harder on the hardest setting. Both get what they want out of the game. One disadvantage would be that if you had friends that played the game it could be harder to join the same server as them if you had different outlooks as far as difficulty. However, and advantage may be that players of similar skill levels or expectations of player skill would perhaps be grouped together. What do you think of the idea? I'm not suggesting this be implemented, I'm just posing the idea.

Maybe you have another computer or friend's computer to try it on? I dunno I had my laptop hang on a conversation before. It could work, or rule out any install or hardware issue. Update your graphics drivers if you haven't

I like tumult just because it is fun to roundhouse kick something in the face. Really only useful against standard enemies or weak enemies though. What I normally do if I'm not standing close enough, is to force speed run to the mob and spam tumult. You end up flying over his head with a round house kick and hitting for over 3,000. It's not bad at all, compared to thundering blast which requires setting it up with affliction and then a long cast, tumult can be quicker and definitely more fun. You can use shock, electrocute, break a CC, or even finish off the last mob from force storm AoE stun. I don't think tumult is entirely that useful, but it is definitely fun. I don't see why it can't work better on strong targets though, usually they have enough health anyway that it would not seem imbalanced.

I can only extricate once every 45 seconds... How bad can this really be harassing you? Are you so sensitive you can't handle a guy pulling you into the lava or something similar once in a great while and take a joke? Maybe you completely flip out and they think it is funny and keep doing it. I know I would.. =) Extricate has good functionality. Knocked off a ledge on G4-B3 extricate back to the ledge. Need to get up to some platform? A sorcerer and extricate you up there faster. Not to mention saving a dumb player from standing in something, helping someone get somewhere faster, etc.

I've had it happen with a sniper.. and I think myself an inquisitor. One thing that seems to help is to have your entire group stand right on top of him where is starts. It seems standing close to him helps. Also attack the boss whenever his shield is down and only kill an add if you need to remove the shield. You can still kill him it is just more difficult and random than it should be. The bug needs fixed, but I'm trying to help people figure out how to beat him for now. We just grouped up on the boss the last few times I've done it and it seems to help, although you won't necessarily get 0 duplicates.. but it should be manageable.

Orange items are supposed to allow you to customize the look of your character. I think this is a great way of avoiding us all looking like clones in the late game (like WoW was) and is a more elegant solution than transmorification or whatever WoW came up with. However, aren't set bonuses currently excluded from Orange gear making them less worthwhile? It would be nice if just the armor mod, or another socket included that set bonus so that you can equip it to any orange item.

people who complain about the instancing are foolish.... You can still play the game with other people just form a group and shock.. go into the group instances. what's much worse is getting to a building going inside and seeing every mob spawn being camped by 10 players and making it hard for you to complete your quest. or, being able to walk by about 50 dead bodies and just clicking on the objective instead of having to do the actual mission. Bioware solved this problem by creating quite a few group areas where players can still group up to complete missions but don't have to worry about these problems.

me too I dunno, I suppose if you were a tank and healer you could use 2 DPS companions.. you may have to try a slightly easier flashpoint though. they don't have any 2 man flashpoints in the game. Of course you could stick to 2 man missions?

I haven't run across any world mission that required a tank/healer/dps/dps group. It does it make it easier though. I was even able to 2 man a [Heroic 4] quest (i think level 48 or so Hoth Bonus Series). We had two sorcerers a healer and a lightning DPS. The champion had 180,000 health and 3 strong adds that hit very hard. It took us 5 tries or so, but we found the correct strategy to do it. We ended up using a tank companion, and a healing companion + player healer to keep him alive, while we CC'd 2 strong targets and killed 1 at a time followed by the boss. It took a while and required good execution but was possible. It was pretty much impossible until we figured to use a 2nd healer companion to help keep the tank companion alive.

World of Warcraft.

wow you don't back up that claim about not playing alts because it is nonsense right? He is asking for an option to do something... meaning it wouldn't affect anyone who didn't enable that feature.

I was a bit bothered by out-leveling the content before I actually got to it. However, I think you are in a very small minority of players that would actually want to toggle off XP to play through all the content. What I would suggest is to do all the quests anyway. Even if you get to a planet that is 24-27 and you are 28 just play the quests anyway. You'll get considerably less XP for quests below your level and you can still get the credits for completing the missions and seeing all the content. I believe I'm going to go back and finish the quests even though I'm level 50 to see them and for credits.

This is the first space mission which actually isn't easy. Here's some advice. 1. Focus on the capital ship turrets (blasters and missiles) and not the fighters when they are on the screen. Use your missiles to destroy as many of them as possible because they do the most damage. 2. After going through the asteroid field, right before the point you'd normally die there is a brief few seconds where you see a capital ship in the upper left corner of the screen. It is imperative you fire 4-6 missiles at its turrets. If you do not have many missiles save at least 10 for this part of the mission onward. This is the most important thing you need to do to pass the mission. Believe it or not, it is possible to go into the asteroid field with almost 100% of the space ships health and it is possible to finish the mission with well over 1/2 the space ships health. I think I've done it with 80% health or so.. not sure.

I see a lot of complaints about ability delay and the HeroEngine. I completely agree that this is the worst problem in the game right now. However, why is it that people think that a game engine is some sort of unchangeable piece of software? If the problem is in the animations, they can change the way they work. If the problem is in the netcode they can change the way it works. There is nothing permanently broken and they said they are looking at addressing the issue. Those type of game engine changes are not simple though. I'm sure that it will take a while to figure out how to fix the problem and any such fix would need to be tested thoroughly. The important thing is that BioWare makes it high priority and fixes the problem. There are still many bugs and parts of the game that needs to be fixed and new content that needs to be developed. I just hope that BioWare doesn't underestimate how important it is to fix the ability delay issue. Basically, for those of you who say the HeroEngine is broken and the game will never be fixed. You are wrong. There is no reason that an game engine cannot be improved. BioWare would not need to completely throw away their game and start over just because it isn't working as well as it should be.

only 1467 gb of memory and sixcore 3.3 mhz LOL. I believe you meant MB and GHz? As far as the thread goes.. 32 bit programs would be limited to a maximum of 4 GB of memory. There is no reason SWTOR needs to be using 100% of your CPU or even GPU for that matter depending on your settings. Effective usage of available resources is a valid concern, but it is not as easy as opening up task manager to determine that it is doing good or bad job. If you have VSYNC on and your graphics cards are capable of rendering 100+ frames per second, but you are limited to 60 FPS refresh rate of your monitor, then do you think it will be using 100%? Do you think there is a reason that SWTOR needs 6 gigs of memory? 12 gigs? 100 gigs? What makes you think 1.6 gigs of memory isn't just as much as it needs?