I hate PVP. The only reason I PVPed was to get the relics because the PVP WH relics were best in slot (and now of course the Elite gear came out which rendered all my agonizing effort moot because 3 weeks later the WH relics cost nothing and the Elite WH relics are another 87 billion PVP losses away). Why would I waste the comms buying PVP gear when I don't care about my standings and against all the pub premades it wouldn't even matter if I was in full Elite War Hero gear because they'd still be winning on the basis of being a stacked premade? So yeah sorry you don't like losing but if you don't want PVErs in your PVP then complain loudly to Bioware to get them to make a PVE equivalent of the PVP relics. I'm not going to waste time min-maxing PVP gear that I don't want to use to play a game mode I absolutely abhor. Sorry to inconvenience you all.

Doubt it, that would require actual effort on EAware's part instead of just ****** reskins of stuff they already have that they can sell for real money.

You are the wet dream of every single MMO developer ever. "More tedium!" Haven't touched Section X because I'm already fully BH'd/Campaigned out but I have been there for HK and to kill the Drouk and was astounded by the mob density. No, the mobs aren't hard to kill, but when you have to wade through 30 groups of them just to get to the mission that's tedious and boring, not challenging. Will continue to ignore it, even when I get an alt to 50.

American here and I have the same problem although I get both the French and German tabs. Little annoying but easy to fix.

People who are forced to because Bioware is stupid and put the best in slot tanking relics as the War Hero ones. I almost unsubscribed over how painful that was to get my Jug two of those. Yeah it's fairly easy to get all your medals just running in and taunting everything in sight but being completely unable to kill anything gets boring. That and on my server over 50 PVP is absolutely DOMINATED by the Republic, namely two guilds who stack 4 person premades against randoms, so not only was I not killing anything but every match was just getting rolled over and over. I also hate PVP with a passion and would hate it even if I was a DPS char because MMO PVP is boring to me (someone who prefers shooters for competitive multiplayer). PVE all the way. I enjoy playing my tank a lot when I have a good group. I don't like queuing with randoms and having people just being idiots and not listening and then whining that I am not tanking right when they are derping around pulling 9 groups at once on Kaon or pulling aggro constantly after I've already used my taunts. Tanking is a thankless job because if you do it right no one will realize how much heat your taking off them and will think it's just their epic DPS or healing that made everything so easy and if you do it wrong (or, more likely, if THEY do something wrong) they will blame you for it. I have a great guild now so I don't have to worry about idiots but there were several times before where I'd have idiot DPSes yelling at me for stuff that wasn't my fault (usually because they were standing in some boss' fire and thinking that meant they had aggro, the example that comes to mind is the first boss on Eternity Vault when he shoots the rockets everywhere and those red circles show up on the ground. Apparently "DON'T STAND IN THE RED CIRCLE I DON'T CARE IF YOU'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A ROTATION" is too complicated for some people) and that just sucks. Dual spec would be nice or like someone said earlier make tanking vs. DPSing more reliant on stance than gear. Bioware has already tried as hard as it possibly can to make PVP a living hell for PVE players with its idiotic expertise points so not only do tanks have to respec their skills every time they go into PVP but if they are just trying to casually PVP they also need a completely different set of gear which also sucks. I didn't notice leveling being that difficult going full tank but now that people are mentioning it I bet if I rolled a full DPS character (my alt is a healer but like someone said before swapping between healing and DPS is just swapping skills. Swapping tank to DPS requires gear and skills) I would be amazed at how fast I would be getting through stuff.

That. Would be a major pain to have to keep track manually of which datacrons I had on which character. Otherwise I would like lore entries to be account wide.

The game was "ruined" by them not listening to the players or communicating with the players at all. That has been what has damaged TOR's reputation more than anything else and they continue to seem out of touch when their F2P model is ridiculously gimped. In another month the populations will be back to what they were pre-F2P because no one is going to want to put up with the ******** restrictions and EA will have (once again) squandered a chance to do something great instead of just competent (and many people would argue they can't even manage competence).

If they opened more servers they would end up just having to close them again when the rush died down in a month or two. They did that at launch after all and it only led to ghost town servers for several months until they finally merged them.

As much as it would please me if the population stayed up saying "DAY ONE EVERYTHING IS FULL **** YEAH!" is kind of premature. There was this one time in December...

That's how I come up with names for any characters I use in anything. I'm personally a fan of Greek or Russian and then translating into phonetic english that works pretty well and gives good options. That's how I came up with my legacy name.

Agreed. I've run every HM dozens of times and I don't need gear from any of them, I'm just there for the comms. That said if someone in my group wants/needs gear from a boss I will not say "No, **** you" and I would imagine most people would probably be willing to help if you say at the start you need stuff. If you don't want to skip the boss then don't skip it. Don't make me have to spend 3 times as long clearing trash in an FP just because you want to fight more mobs. I run with a guild 9/10 so my skipping is not hurting anyone in the group finder looking for loot and while the FPs were cool the first few times, but at this point I have them all memorized. I want to get in and out as fast as possible for my comms.

That and expertise means if you focused on PVE you are absolutely useless in Warzones without spending a week or 2 grinding (and losing CONSTANTLY) to get some Battlemaster gear to be competitive. TOR was never going to be about PVP so seeing people ***** about that makes no sense. There are other MMOs that are PVP centered and advertised as such, go play them. But real content would indeed be nice.

They do elsewhere also: http://kotaku.com/5950920/pile-of-industry-awards-for-star-wars-the-old-republic-a-sad-reminder-of-the-game-that-might-have-been There is negativity following TOR wherever it goes, it's not just the official forums it's EVERYWHERE. I heard people talking behind me on the bus a few days ago. Neither sounded like they knew all that much about gaming beyond Madden and CoD on their Xbox but one of them said "Hey have you heard about The Old Republic going free?" and the other said "I heard it's *********** awful, that's why it's free. Won't be worth playing". When someone won't play a FREE game because they heard it's that bad you have PR problems. EA needs to fix that. They won't, of course, they are content to just let this game steep in mediocrity but if EA was a well-run company they would work on fixing that.

10 for potential, 5.5 for execution. Would be higher in execution pre-1.4 but after having 4 different ops all end up going to **** because of bugs and graphical glitches in the past week I can't go higher than 5.5. It's a solid MMO to be sure but the lack of effort EA is putting into the game has made me worried about it's future and the super buggy 1.4 patch has not helped at all. If anything it serves as a warning of things to come when F2P hits and the number of developers either stays the same as it is now or EA fires more of them.

Hey fleet's not that bad. I need my daily dose of comedy from somewhere. But yeah in all seriousness Fleet can be pretty painful if you're trying to socialize and everyone else is trying to cyber. I've had occasional successes there but most of the time I've found myself ignored while the various guild cliques RP among themselves (usually related to cybering). I've had no luck on Nar Shaddaa either but supposedly every Thursday on the promenade/cantina there's an RP event (I have work on Thursdays so I haven't seen it for myself) that I've heard is decent.

Coming up on 200 daily comms and need to decide if I want a campaign relic. I am a PVE player and only a PVE player because of the stupid decision to make end game PVE armor suck in PVP due to the expertise ********. Right now I'm rakata/bh geared around 26ish% defense chance, 40% shield chance, 42% Absorption. I have an augmented matrix cube in one slot and a Rakata Relic of Imperiling Serenity (the +290 Defense Rating one) or a Shield Amplification Device (forgot the exact stats on it, it's one of the "For 6 seconds you gain absorption rating when shielding attacks" relics) that I've been switching off since I just got the Shield Device and was testing it. My question for all you jug tanks out there is for my new relic should I get a proc'ing one again or are the activation ones for defense better overall? It seems like the procing ones keep you fresher at the beginning of a fight but because of how they work they might let you down when you really need them (IE if you hit a rage timer or something and desperately need to stay alive) while the Defense increase (or I guess the ones that increase shield by 300+, I haven't tried those yet but I'd imagine it'd be sort of like defense) doesn't help much until you really need and then it saves your life. Statistically is one of those options better? Another option is to go with the Battlemaster relic of imperiling serenity and lose the big mitigation on use but gain the 103 defense rating at all times. I think I may even have one of those already from when I hit 50 and bought some BM gear with comms saved up during the leveling process. I've heard the War Hero relic with 113 Defense Rating on it is the best in slot for PVE as well as PVP (which is beyond stupid) but I am not grinding PVP for days getting facerolled because I don't have any expertise PVP gear so that's off the table. The downside of that relic that I see is the asymptotic nature of defense rating and how adding more to it increases your percentage less once you get past like 30ish% or so. I suppose with the BM relic you can then get closer to the 25% defense rating number without augments for defense and then throw those augments into Shield/Absorption but I think survivability in an Ops boss fight could take a hit without the big boost. Thoughts?

I like the idea someone said earlier in this topic about the differences in armor being cosmetic only. Expertise sucks. I PVP'd to help level my jug to 50 but the second I hit 50 I find myself completely locked out of PVP. That does not really bother me because I don't find it that fun but unless things have changed the best in slot relic (for PVP and PVE) for jug tanks is the PVP WH one. I am not spending days queuing up and getting shat on so I can grind enough comms to get that. It's not fun for me and it actively hurts my teammates since the only PVP gear I own is a set of BM implants, a BM relic, and a BM ear piece that I bought with the comms I saved up doing under 50 pvp. I'm not buying recruit gear because apparently that doesn't help much. It seems like the only option to PVP is to just suck it up and lose A LOT for several days until you can finally grind enough comms to get in BM gear to actually start competing. I've been playing this game since like a week after launch why am I effectively locked out of the PVP side of it because of this expertise ****? Why are people who grind PVP effectively locked out of Ops (although from what I've seen and heard PVP armor is less gimped in PVE than PVE armor is in PVP) ? We both put a lot of time into our characters why should we be punished for favoring one type of content over the other?

This. A lot of the anger at the game is due to how buggy it is and the lack of content and communication. If you are paying $15/month that is going to piss you off a lot more than if the game is free. I do not think this game was designed to be F2P from the beginning but I believe that people who knew better than EA were trying to avoid a subscription fee.

I haven't had a lot of good things to say about TOR's patches in a while but this is actually something I appreciated immensely. Those damn crates for the AREA quest in BH were always a colossal pain when anyone else was around.

Because when you are trying to justify a $15/month subscription cost in a world that has largely moved past that model it requires you to actually make good on your promises of content. If TOR was free to play from the beginning no one would care. It wasn't and it's suffering mightily for that. I wish I shared your optimism but with the layoffs I have a hard time believing there is any meaningful content coming down the pipe beyond Makeb. Tux has the right attitude.

The engine can't be changed but number 2 is spot on and so is your conclusion although I will be a pessimist and say we probably won't see additional content either, at least not meaningful amounts of it. Maybe a warzone or something simple here and there but I would be very surprised if any story mode stuff came out beyond Makeb (and seeing as we've been waiting for Makeb for ages with no updates on it at all perhaps we won't even see that) which was in development before EA decided to abandon the game. Whoever said this was WAR again was correct. EA gave up on TOR ages ago and unless F2P generates a huge amount of revenue (which it won't because there's no content being created for people to pay for) it's not going to turn around.

That. F2P might turn the game around but I doubt it. EA seems determined to spend as little money on this as possible and will likely just let it run in "maintenance mode" with a skeleton crew for another year or so and then pull the plug. Unless F2P suddenly means a lot of new content in a very short time it's too little, too late as everyone has already given up on TOR and is calling it a failure in every outlet I can think of for gaming news. It's a shame.

I am not taking the blame for EA's hubris. THEY were the ones who thought "Star Wars name = instant 10 million subs" and then promptly started eviscerating Bioware Austin 2 months in when the game wasn't hitting WoW numbers. Which only amplified the problem because it's kind of hard to make exciting new content when your studio's workforce is cut in half (or third...or tenth, not sure what the exact number is). That is squarely EA's fault. Complaining about content makes players "entitled"? Really? Bioware/EA was the one saying early on (I think it was in February) "Content every 4 weeks!" which they then upped to "Every 6 weeks!" which they then just ignored and released content whenever. Now they are back to saying "6 weeks" but given that Bioware is still losing devs (apparently the lead designer just walked out today) that seems unlikely. In today's environment with plenty of good F2P offerings TOR was asking a lot for a $15 subscription fee and it failed to provide enough value to make it worth it to, what was the number, 1.1 million subs? Out of 1.7 million that is hardly an "undeserved sense of entitlement". Standards are higher and TOR didn't meet them and then EA decided to stop supporting it. I remember telling several of my friends in November right before launch "TOR will be free to play in a year or sooner" because there is no way a subscription model will survive in this world unless the devs do something crazy like content every month to really make it worth it which of course is unrealistic to expect. Yeah I think some of the community's response was wrong. Anyone complaining about PvP comes to mind because from the beginning this game was going to be about PVE and the story. But most of the other complaints I see on the forum are entirely the fault of EA/Bioware. They were the ones making promises and then breaking them, they were the ones ignoring the player base and failing to communicate anything, and they (well EA) was the one that decided to put the game in maintenance mode after 6 months instead of actually developing it and trying to turn its fortunes around, thereby guaranteeing it lingers in its current state until they pull the plug. If TOR is going to turn around it's the devs that need to fix it. Yes the forums are full of negativity but most of it is legitimate from fed-up customers angry at being ignored by a company trying to charge them $15 a month for very little meaningful content. It is entirely possible F2P will turn the game around but I really, really doubt it. EA doesn't want to put any resources into bettering the game and they seem content to let it remain a solid, somewhat generic MMO for another year or so until it stops covering its costs and they shut it down. Which is a shame because it could have been great. In response to the post above me "What would make the game grow?" Bioware/EA needs content and they need to communicate with the players. The community will get positive when we have something to be positive about. The only time I ever see TOR mentioned on gaming sites these days is either someone saying how hard it failed or someone reporting more people are leaving the studio. I don't remember the last time I saw something positive written about TOR anywhere not just on the forums but elsewhere. The closest I saw was some analysts sounding cautiously optimistic about the game's F2P prospects. That needs to stop or no one is going to play even if it is free.

They haven't even been able to keep to their own patching schedule and Bioware Austin is dropping employees like flies. There's no one left to make content at this point.They are banking hard on F2P being a huge success and maybe after that they will have the interest and funding to do some major content but that is a big if. I'd rather have smaller chunks every month or two than a huge expansion ever 6 months that I then have to buy (although I guess they could give that out for free for subscribers or something in the F2P model). The gap between expansions means that if you finish the content in one you are then bored for the several months until the next expansion. Granted that's how it is now because content updates are coming out only every several months but in theory that's not how it's going to be moving forward (although Bioware made the promise "Content every 4 weeks!" back in February and couldn't make good on that with a full studio, now that they have all of 2 people in the studio I really doubt their new "Content every 6 weeks!" mantra holds any more water).

EA doesn't care. They are doing the absolute bare minimum to keep the game turning some sort of profit and advertising is expensive. Maybe when F2P comes closer they will start advertising again but I would be extremely surprised if we saw anything like the original TV ads or the cinematic trailers that sold so many people on this game in the first place. TOR's in maintenance mode and unless F2P causes a huge uptick in players and revenue it's going to stay like this until EA has had enough and shuts everything down.