Yes, it is harassment. Yes, you should report it. In the meantime I think the best thing you can do to protect yourself is to use the /ignore command on anybody who harasses you and immediately leave (use quick travel) any area where they find you. Don't engage with them at all. I would also second the advice to leave general chat. Personally I *never* have general chat turned on, and I find that makes my game experience much, much more pleasant. I'm really sorry you have to deal with this.

I feel you! I am *deeply* worried for Corso. He promised my Smuggler that he'd never let anybody hurt her again! I just don't see a universe where he deals with this well.

You read it wrong -- I completed three and played most of a fourth. If I could have continued the class story of any of the characters I got to level 50 I'd still be playing. But re-doing the same planetary content time and time again gets old after a while.

I don't post a lot in the forums, but I'm going to give my personal take here because I think a lot of players like me tend *not* to be forum posters or the types to participate in general chat, and so to other players we are invisible and they assume we don't exist. I'm a female player and I am drawn to SWTOR mostly for the story content. The romances are a big, big part of the draw for me too. I came to this thread specifically looking for whether the romance arcs would be extended with the expansion and I'm really disappointed to hear that they won't. I mostly prefer to solo, because I like to immerse myself in the RP content of the game and I usually find that grouping destroys the in-world immersive experience for me. So I am the sort of player who levels alts instead of participating in "end game" content. I have three level 50 toons (a Consular, a Sith Warrior and a Smuggler) and was leveling an Imperial Agent before I got bored with redoing all the planetary quests and unsubbed. I didn't return for the free-to-play stuff, but hearing that an expansion was planned got me to resubscribe. I'm playing my Agent again and having fun, now that I've had enough of a break that going through all the same planetary missions again isn't mind-numbing. However, when the Agent is level 50 I'll most likely unsub again. I might stick around until the expansion just to check out the new story content, but it sounds like it's the sort of thing I'd play through once (or maybe twice, with a character of each faction) and then be done with. Here's why I think the developers should care about players like me: I *will* play with friends that I know in real life, and in most cases I'm the one who draws these friends into an MMO that I'm enthusiastic about. My husband played SWTOR for a bit just so that we could play together. He unsubbed when I did, but is thinking about resubscribing now that I'm playing again. I also have five gaming friends who I got to start playing City of Heroes several years back, and we played that game for years. *ALL* five of these friends are gay (three are men and two are women). The guys are currently World of Warcraft players; the women dropped out of MMOs when we stopped playing CoH together. I could probably get ALL of them to start playing SWTOR...but I encouraged them to wait until the same gender romance arcs were in place. Now I'm hearing that same gender romance may never be implemented, which is super disappointing. The Makeb expansion would have been a great time for me to reach out to my friends and bring them into SWTOR. So, that's five gamers who I might have brought into SWTOR if I were enthusiastic about the content of the new expansion...but I'm not. So sure, gamers like me (gamers who prioritize romance and gay-friendly content) may be a minority, but each of us probably has a network of casual gamer friends who aren't likely to discover SWTOR on their own. I'm one player but I can bring six other players with me pretty easily; I have done it before. The "hardcore" gamer stereotype (young straight male) may be the bulk of current subscribers, but these guys all know about SWTOR already and they're either playing it or they're not going to. if the developers focus only on what those guys prioritize, then their player base will never expand beyond that narrow sliver of the population. There's a much MUCH larger population of potential players that all care about different things, and it's through us and our networks of casual-gamer friends that a game like SWTOR has the opportunity to actually grow its player base. So throwing us a few bones is NOT a waste of resources. I understand resource crunch and the necessity to make hard choices, but it's also necessary to make sure that the game has features that will appeal to lots of different types of gamers, not just one narrow stereotype. Bottom line: I'm interested in checking out the expansion content, and by putting in at least SOME new content BioWare/EA has earned my resubscription. My husband will probably resub too, sooner or later, if I stick around. But without new class-specific story content, my subscription days are numbered, and without same-gender romance arcs, I'm not going to bring in my gaming buddies. So just because something doesn't matter to YOU doesn't mean that it won't affect the player base in significant ways. There are more types of gamers than are "visible" on message boards and general chat.

Yeah, agreed. The Tatooine interactions with you, the Jedi, the Sith, and then Risha calling at an...inopportune moment are priceless. The Smuggler feels exactly as he ought to feel: a dashing rogue who is constantly fighting against odds that are stacked against him/her, cracking wise and taking ridiculous chances, and maybe coming out just a little bit ahead every time. The thing about being a smuggler in a world of Force-users: you're not the guy who's mowing down Sith with your blaster fire. I mean, eventually, you are, but your place for most the story is as the underdog, not the bully who everyone cowers to. So yeah, the Sith gets to be the bully in that scene, because that's what Sith are. If you enjoy having all the NPCs wetting themselves when you threaten them, then go back to playing Sith. The Smuggler's story plays out in a much more lighthearted, flirtatious, adventurous kind of way, and if you can't appreciate that then you won't like it.

I know you're mostly talking about PVP, which I can't comment on because I'm strictly PVE, but I can say that out of the classes I've played (Gunslinger, Sith Juggernaut, and Jedi Shadow to 50; Agent to 25) the Smuggler is far and away the strongest in PvE. In my opinion it would be balanced for them to do a little less well in PvP, considering how monstrous they are in PvE.

I think the smuggler story is great. You're personally invested the whole way through -- for most of the story you're working for yourself, not some random NPC questgiver. And when the random NPC questgiver does show up, you can either play along or you can decide that you're still working for yourself. You get the choices to make that happen. And the writing is just top notch. Filled with snappy banter and various random moments of awesome. Smuggler is my favorite of the classes I've tried (including Agent, although my Agent is only level 20 and I hear the story for agents doesn't kick into high gear until later).

Huh, Wikipedia agrees with you. Well, you learn something new every day. I admit my first MMO was not WoW but City of Heroes, and it's quite possible that the players I chatted with regularly there used the word in a non-standard way. It does seem to me more useful to have a word for the whole crowd. "Crowd" works fine, I guess.

Sorry if this has already been posted, but I didn't see it linked from the first post. This is my lady smuggler modeling the TD-03A Prototype Saboteur's Jacket, which dropped from a champion-level enemy among the bandits in the Taris bonus series. (The rest of her gear is the level 49 crafted armormech set). I like it because it's colorful and gives her a sort of space-bandito look. If I remember right, I also saw an identical-looking coat from the Hammer Station flashpoint.

This is also how my Jedi Shadow solos heroics (she has a similar power, that will control one enemy for long enough to take out the rest of the mob). But the equivalent power for my gunslinger only works on droids, which makes it much less useful.

As a side note, it's interesting to me to see people using the word "mob" to mean "a single enemy." In the early MMO days, you used "mob" to mean the whole group that would aggro if any one enemy was attacked. What word do you guys use for the group, if you're using "mob" for just one baddie?

Oh, no worries. I've actually moved past wanting advice and deeper into just loving my fishy sidekick. We're level 50 now, reasonably geared up (no PVP gear because I don't PVP, but I'm an armormech and I have us both in purple crafted gear). I went and got my level 50 datacron too. Then we started taking on the level 50 missions on Ilum, Belsavis, and Corellia. We just soloed "A Lesson Is Learned," the Heroic 2+ mission on Belsavis that includes two champions as well as four three-man mobs consisting of an elite with two strongs. Neither of us dropped once, and I only used one health pack clearing the whole dungeon. Yeah, I'm perfectly happy with turning this into a Guss appreciation thread! "Pretty sure you won't die." That's the spirit, kid! Stick with me, this "living" thing will pay off, I promise.

This is my new headcanon. I totally got shivers reading it.

I've played Jedi Consular and Sith Warrior to level 50, Smuggler to level 48, and Imperial Agent to level 20. I started with Jedi Consular and in retrospect I'm kind of amazed that I came back for more. It helped that everything was new that time around; each world was new, all the side quests were new, etc. So that kept me invested. The writing on the Jedi Consular is definitely the worst of all the classes I've played; the storyline is dull, and your companion characters (ESPECIALLY the female romance option) are flat and lackluster. It's just a really boring, trite, predictable story. I saw the final enemy coming from twenty levels away, and was SOOOO annoyed that I couldn't do anything to expose him before the game wrapped it up with what was supposed to be an "ah hah!" moment, but was really just a "yawn" moment. To be fair, Tharan Cedrax is an exception--he was funny, and I was genuinely touched by the conclusion of his personal story with Holiday. "I am but a monkey dancing in your shadow"...something like that. But on the whole, I would never have played JC to level 50 except that it happened to be the first class I tried. And I enjoyed the mechanics of how the Jedi Shadow plays. Sith Warrior is okay, except for one highly, highly aggravating, and badly written, part of the story involving one of your companions. To be as clear as I can without spoiling anything: it's great to have twists and surprises, but only if there's emotional payoff and resolution commensurate with the degree of the twist. The Smuggler storyline is a great example of a well-written, twisty story that pays off well. The Sith Warrior twist, on the other hand, is a huge emotional blow that gets no resolution whatsoever: you're just back to the status quo, no pay off, no closure, nada. It's especially an FU to female players because it flushes our romance story down the toilet. There's a huge amount of anger out there among Sith Warrior players, male and female, because of how badly this one plot twist was handled. If the devs would just re-write that one mission to give players more agency (companion affection should matter!) and better closure, Sith Warrior would be fine overall. Smuggler is fantastic. I personally think it's the best-written storyline in the game. It has humor, romance, dashing derring-do, twists and suprises, great NPCs, great companion storylines--it's got everything, if you ask me. The writing is killer throughout. (By that I mean: dialogue sounds right, jokes are actually funny, you believe in your character and the NPCs that you're interacting with.) I don't think I've gotten to the point in the Imperial Agent storyline that everybody raves about yet. I like it fine so far, and once I've wrapped up my Smuggler I'll probably switch back to the IA. The voice acting on the male IA is particularly good, so that's a big plus.

"My friend is going to get you!"

So I'm reading through the companion threads with interest, as I've recently had to drop Corso as my gunslinger's favorite companion. I love the farm boy, but around level 45 I started noticing him dying a LOT more often than he had before, and when we hit Corellia it just became untenable. He would regularly go down just fighting normal mobs. My slinger doesn't heal, so I couldn't do a lot to support him except kill things quick, which is the strategy that worked for us for the first 45 levels. Against high-level elites, though, I just can't take 'em down fast enough to keep Corso alive. I tried Bowdaar and Akaavi, but the situation was even worse with them (granted, they weren't geared as well as Corso). I've heard great things about Risha, but we're just too squishy together -- we can plow through some mobs, but if things go south they go south really fast, and it can be hard to recover before we've wiped. So, lastly, I took Guss Tuno for a spin. He had probably the worst gear out of all the companions, since I'd never dreamed of using him. And...he rocks. On Corellia, with Guss at my side, I regularly walk away from fights at full health. It doesn't take any longer to wipe out a mob using Guss than it did with Corso -- since in both cases I'm the one doing most of the damage -- and Guss' control powers mesh really well with some of my attacks (like Headshot). It's pretty easy to get Guss geared up, too, since I can craft him a second set of whatever I'm wearing. We're getting even stronger together as I'm slowly improving his gear. I'm interested in hearing from other high-level gunslingers whether you've had the same experience, or whether there's another companion that I ought to take another look at. It's surprising to me that the healer/gunslinger combo is such a strong one -- I didn't really expect that. I have a level 50 Sith Warrior (Juggernaut) and a level 50 Jedi Consular (Shadow), and for both of those characters the healing companions (Quinn and Tharan Cedrax) are definitely the strongest, but in those cases it seemed natural that a melee fighter/tank would want a healer. Are healers just always the best? Or am I missing something?

This is my favorite so far. He is awfully ******! Still dunno if he could dom the Sith Warrior, though.

"Ooooooh...Lieutenant! Oh, oh, Lieutenant!" Are you weeping yet? <g>

Yeah, the issue with Quinn's..."event"...is not so much that it happens, but *how* it happens, and the lack of resolution afterwards. Especially when he's married to the SW at the time. It really, really feels jarring, and leaves you wondering if your marriage is a sham and if the romance ever meant anything at all. His dialogue in that scene is just terrible, if you're on a romance path.

Or maybe "Julian."

Well, in the absence of any information to the contrary, I think I'll call him "Cassius."

I'm sleeping with the guy, I'd kind of like to know what name I should be moaning into his ear.

Argh, so, I keep coming back to this. I actually wrote out in my head the text of a post-betrayal email that would "make it okay," for the SW who was on a romance track with Quinn. What do you think, fellow Quinn-mancers? Would this work for you? My lord, I am a blithering idiot. All this time I have assumed that you were angry with me for the clumsiness of my assassination attempt. Because I allowed my feelings for you to interfere with the execution of my work. It has only recently occurred to me that I may have truly hurt you. I have since reviewed the programming of those droids, and the code is nonsense. It is clear to me that I sabotaged my own work. That some part of me was resisting Darth Baras' manipulation. There is no excuse for my weakness. I know that. I never expected you to forgive me. But you must know that I always loved you. Your captain, Malavai Quinn

Oh yeah, totally. My issue isn't with the betrayal itself, as a plot point -- it's with how it's executed. I feel like our choices, and the relationship we've built up with Quinn to that moment, should matter. Especially if you're married to him, I mean, at that point it just gets so blatant it's like a slap in the face. "We didn't write this scene for you, gals." Yeah, we get it. You know, if the writers wanted to throw the female SW players a bone without spending a lot of development resources on it, they could do it by sending a heartfelt e-mail. Quinn talking about how he only betrayed us in order to save us, or some such (maybe Baras made some unspeakable threats? Like -- "You could give her a clean death now. But if I get my hands on her, she'll only die after weeks of torture...of all kinds. I trust I need say no more.") I'm just throwing that out there. My point is, anything would be better than nothing, and it doesn't even have to be expensive.

Okay, I finally got to this scene myself last night. My SW was married to Quinn, 10,000 affection. Went to the station alone with Quinn. There was no recognition of our marriage during the dialogue, and the word "love" never came up. I just got to say the standard "I thought our relationship meant something, I thought we cared about each other," to which he basically replies with a shrug. It's really an incredibly irritating scene, and very, very jarring to go from his declarations of love, talk of wanting children, etc., to such a flat and unemotional declaration of murderous intent. He really ought to have some sort of special dialogue for his wife, at least. I told him he was no longer welcome in my quarters, but I'm left not even knowing what these means for our marriage. Are we going to get divorced? Do Sith have divorce? Am I trapped in a loveless marriage? I don't know! The scene is just way too brief and sketchy -- something that important to my character's story needed a lot more fleshing out. The only way I'm going to be able to continue playing this character is to do some fanwanking -- decide that Quinn went temporarily crazy after exposure to the Dark Heart on Voss, or something like that. Because really only some kind of serious mental break can account for the difference in his characterization in that scene vs. all the ones that came before. REALLY THE BARE MINIMUM that the writers should give us, if it's intended that the romance progression continue "as normal" afterwards, is that Quinn should reaffirm his love for the SW either during or after the betrayal. As it's written, he never gives the slightest indication that he cares about the SW at all. I'm really, really unhappy -- not with the plot twist itself, but with the way it's executed.