Your first option doesn't work if you are on a different plante from people looking to run the instance. Second option is what I've been using, but not great for meeting new people.

There is nothing wishy washy about Han in the beginning. He is very clear on his identity and what he wants out of life. The only thing you could consider wishy washy is that he starts making self-sacrificing decisions later on, which is different from his original set of choices at the beginning of the trilogy. I think the stumbling point here is that I define wishy washy as being indecisive and inconsistent. Having a different sense of morality than others is not being indecisive- it is just making different choices than others feel you should make. My smuggler is very consistent in her choices- she always works out of self interest but doesn't enjoy causing others unnecessary pain, and she'll even help out a worthy cause or helpless person in need because it brings her a sense of fulfillment. If your view of wishy washy means somehting else, then I guess we just have a problem of definitions. And really, some of the "light" choices I disagree with myself, and I don't find that to be wishy washy. Just a different belief of what is good than what is presented in this video game.

Is not true that you can play without any repercussions. There is gear right now that my character cannot use due to some dark side choices (that are completely consistent with her identity as a smuggler) if I wanted to use it, I would have to put in more effort to grind alignment points. That is a repercussion- though I don't mind it. Repercussions are good and give choices meaning. However, if there is no downside to always choosing the light, then the choice becomes meaningless. I keep choosing as I want to for my character on the belief that Bioware will eventually put grey gear in, or do something at least to represent the characters that land somewhere in the middle. If I become convinced that they aren't going to do this, then I will turn back on the light/dark indicator and start spacing through the dialog, always making light side choices, because why should I take on the repercussions of making role playing decisions, and what is the point of wading through all the voice acting if I'm not going to interact with it?

I think we have different ideas of what being wishy washy means. Han is his own person who knows what he wants, though what he wants changes throughout the trilogy. It makes for an interesting character and story arc.

Was Han Solo wish washy then?

It's not being bland. It's doing something other than just picking the light/dark side in every decision point regardless of the story because you want to make sure you are properly aligned for game mechanic reasons. The current setup breaks the notion of role playing during conversations, which is a huge selling point for is game. I have the light/dark indicator turned off so that when I make decisions I am not tempted to go one way or the other. I'm not really a role player, and I'm not even a huge fan of the emphasis on voice acting in this game, but if I'm going to level with this system I at least want to do my best to embrace the concept of role playing through the dialog- having to pick light side (or dark side) consistently means not even playing along with the idea of role playing the cut scenes. To say it differently, why give us a choice at all if there is an upside for some choices and no upside for others? We might as well choose light or dark on character creation and get rid of all the choices rough out the game.

Actually, probably no developer had any say in the launch date of this game. Unless h game industry is different from other software industries. And anyway, the developers don't control the stuff you want answers about.

Yes, but if some people aren't doing their job and continue to not do their job, the mobs never go down until you replace them. See, with tanks and healers it's a lot more obvious when they aren't performing. If the tank is holding aggro, properly geared, and the group clearly understands the fight mechanics, yet he keeps dying, you don't need a log to tell you to look at the healer. And then what do you do? Do you keep wiping even after repeated attempts when The healer isn't improving? Well ,you can either replace the healer or break up the group. This is the same thing that will happen with dps not performing, only it is more difficult to judge imdividual dps performance because there are multiple people doing it. If a healer isn't performing, I am not likely to group with him again- the same goes for dps and tanks. That doesn't make me a jerk- it makes me someone who wants to have a shot at being successful and values working with a team that intends to contribute and play well. And if the healer appears to be a decent person just lacking knowledge, I'll point him in the way of such knowledge if I know it. The thi is, if it isn't acceptable to group with a tank or healer who isn't doing his or her job, then dpsers should live up to the same standard. Everyone should perform to an acceptable level and work toward getting the mob down. If someone is not at an acceptable level, that means someone else has to make up the difference,

Tools are needed to evaluate how people are doing (self evaluation is the most imoortant). DPS matters because if it didn't, you could do encounters with just a tank and healer. As long as the tank/healer/DPS system is in place, the amount of dps does matter.

I agree that dps is only one factor for measuring participation, and good players know this. When I was recruiting for my guild, I would a take a low dpser with a willingness to improve, but I'd never take a guy spamming meters in groups who wasn't doing the other stuff (and I was watching) well. Honestly, I was pretty selective on who we recruited, and attitude was the most important factor. This is true in how I do life as well- I'm a software developer by trade and I'll easily take someone without knowledge of a specific technology we are using but who has a good attitude and can work with others over someone with all the right stuff in his resume who will bring the team down. But that guy who needs to learn stuff WILL still be evaluated, and if I judged his attitude correctly I'm sure he'll pass just fine. I don't think my guild was alone in how we played the game, and I simply won't play with people who value numbers over attitude. If you have the right attitude, the numbers will follow (as long as you have tools to evaluate and improve the numbers); the reverse is not true.

Often, it IS the lack of dps that's wiping the raid, and often a lack of dps indictes something about the player's attitude toward how he groups with others. I'm not talking about a 5% difference in dps or whose on top, but when you have people doing half the dos of others and your are wiping, that's good indication that dps is an area that needs to be improved. In the end, when my guild was raiding DPS was never the issue because I didn't let people raid who weren't up to an acceptable level. Actually, that's not true,- we'd intentionally carry people through once we out geared the raid so that they could get gear and get a taste of what raiding was like. We wouldn't carry them forever, but if they enjoyed it we helped them work and improve to an acceptable level. I'm general, though, I had modest requirements and once those were met, dps wasn't talked about unless we were wiping to enrage timers or because fights were taking too long.

I just find it amazing that people have struggled with this so much and I haven't seen it, especially given that I'm a pretty sensitive guy. I tend to get bent out of shape more easily than I ought. To be fair, but the end I was running the raids, but in the beginning I was definitely in groups doing sub par dps because I didn't know how to play my character yet. I saw the dps meters spammed in chat and they gave me incentive to do better so I wouldn't be dragging down groups that I was playing with. As for saying MMO isn't for me, I don't know how to respond to that. Part of an MMO is cooperative gameplay in a large level, and cooperative means everyone contributing and pulling their weight. Why would this be out of place in an MMO?

I agree that class balance issues is a negative effect of damage meters. I also think that people get to uptight about minor differences in dps between classes, especially when few encounters are a straight dps burn. Utility can make up the small difference, but is hard to measure. But really, unless you are raiding in a high end guild, small dps differences don't matter. It's the large ones that do- as in figuring out how to get an acceptable (not top) level of dps to do the content you want to do. But without logs, you can't even determine what acceptable is.

Again, I don't remember experiencing rude conduct due to damage meters to the pint that these events stuck with me. It's pretty easy to gauge civility. If you are not enjoying the person you are playing with, quit the group.

Ok, apparently I am unfit to use a computer. Tell me how I know if me or the other guy is the weak link? Or should I just assume it's the other guy?

How do you know who'se doing acceptable dps without a log when the diagnosis is 'not enough dps'?

This is fine if you are playing by yourself. If you are grouping with others, though, it's not good enough. Because you can be doing almost no dps and some other guy can be making up the difference. And you can say you're fine with that because you still won, but what about the next time when you group with someone else doing low dps and you fail? Or what if you're doing acceptable dps but the other dps is too low and you fail? The thing about playing a multiplayer game is that it take cooperation to win consistently. Or it takes compensating for weak links. Saying you want to be in a group and not caring about how well you perform is an insult to those in your group. People can say all they want to about havine fun and it not being a job, but doing something as a team means you have a reponsibility to work together. If you don't want that responsibility because you don't find it fun, then please do not group with others.

You've never stood in line for something you were paying for?

The thing about this topic for me is, I just haven't experiencs AT ALL the negative effects that people are really upset about. Granted, I quit WoW about two years ago, but I never felt judged or beaten down because of meters. Now granted, I took the time to learn my class and do solid dps, but even before that when my dps was crappy (when I first hit the level cap), I played with people with damage meters and I never had my feelings hurt. I just want to be doing enough damage that I felt like I was contributing to the groups. But really, I've not experienced or seen this game destroying attitude apparently caused by damage meters.

What is this judging harshly? I don't think I've done anything that could be considered judging harshly, unless asking a player to improve his contributions is considered a harsh judgement. But really, all that is doing is asking that player to live up to the commitment he made when he said he wanted to contribute to the group effort.

Trial and error only works if you can measure the results. In a raid there is so much input and so little output that you cannot effectively measure an individual's input, at least not for something like damage. It can be pretty obvious to see who is standing in the fire or ignoring adds. It's hard to judge dps effectiveness outside of a group because the encounters are so different. You vary rarely run up against a mob that requires you to go into a full raid damage rotation and sustain it for several minutes.

My meter=hardness argument is based on the idea of the developer wanting to make content that can be beaten with a certain amount if effort. The tools allow them to make it harder while still being doable, because the tools allow players to gain the knowledge to play better. Or more simply Meters and logs->players who want to improve can improve more->overall better players and stronger groups->the content can be made more difficult while still being reasonable achievable.

Based on lines spoken while grouping with others, the smuggler has the best LINES- I actually feel sorry for the Jedi having so sound so noble all the time. I have a female smuggler and I think the voice acting is great and the lines are awesome.

Well then you weren't in my guild. My guild had high retention, good players, and we encouraged everyone to view the logs after raids. Most of us were pretty new to raiding, but looking at the logs and meters helped us move from wiping on the easiest raids to clearing some challenging content. I think there are a lot of guilds out there that use logs in a positive way. And honestly, leading a raid is hard enough with all of that good information- why do non raid leaders want to make it more difficult? If you want to lead raids without meters, form a guild and do that. I don't plan to lead any raiding in this game, but I sure want my raid leader to have all the tools he needs, even if they show I'm not performing- because then I'll do what it takes to improve.

If you do not have the tools to assess how much damage people (especially yourself) are doing, this limits the ability of Bioware to challenge raids and be sure they can output a high level of dps. I remember the days where guild were trying to get down Brutallis. I wasn't in any if those guilds, but the efforts they had to go through to make sure every individual was pumping out the necessary and that the raid was composed in such a way to leverage this dps enough to beat the enrage timer was pretty incredible. Perhaps he was tuned too tightly (I cannot say because I didn't ever get to him), but there's no way Blizzard could have tuned that fight so tightly (but certainly doable) if players didn't have the ability measure their performance objectively If you cannot measure performance, you have to guess at how well the raid is performing and how to improve. This is true for the raid leader as well as individuals. And if people are guessing, the game simply cannot be tuned as difficult because people just don't have enough information available to know how to improve when they fail. I know plenty of aggressive players who talk a good game and simply aren't any good. You wouldnt know the were pulling the team down without a way to measure performance, and they wouldn't know themselves. Right now, I might be terrible but I wouldn't know it because I can't measure my performance. I have no idea if I'm carrying or being carried, despite trying my best. If a raid is going to have a mix of players who are good and who are bad with no way to tell the difference between them, the raids will have to be tuned lower or no one will ever beat them. I'd rather play content that challenges me and know where I need to improve to meet that challenge rather content that anyone can beat because it's tuned to allow for the kind of poor play that exists when there are no tools to improve.