You're aware it's your own country's laws and exchange rates that cause products to be more expensive over there, right? Not even that, but the laws and currency rates of Europe actually factor into it! Australia used to be a PAL country, which means many are still connected to their European company counterparts. France buys from America at their exchange rate, and then Australia buys from France at theirs, as an example. You're just not taking game products from America and converting USD into Australian kangadollars. Brush up on the vagaries of international finance. Additionally: call me when your censors stop requiring games replace blood with rainbows. You'd think a country originally populated by criminals who kill enormous toads and the most venomous animals on the planet with boomerangs wouldn't be so prudish.

Toroidal space stations are pretty standard in sci-fi settings. Star Wars has the advantage of ridiculous artificial gravity technology that makes spinning for centrifugal force useless, but the sphere/circle still remains the most efficient shape to maximize space with a minimum of material used. I believe the lighting schemes and banners are different, and the Republic fleet has a fountain with lily pads in place of the Empire's skulls that shoot blood out of their eyes which is crystallized into spikes by some undead-looking Sith Lord in red-and-black using his purple lightning powers.

Behold, the correct answer. Collect your stuffed doll at the end of the booth. You'd think the people on these forums never got in ground-floor on another big PC game. This is standard stuff, guys. Even if you think your computer's the hottest thing since sliced bread and was forged in the fires of the sun by Haephestus, you, or a handful of people with rigs similar or perhaps even better are going to have issues with new PC games due to some obscure combination of hardware/software that developers couldn't anticipate or test for. Hell, OP mentions Skyrim and Witcher 2. There are people with better PCs who experienced crippling slowdown on both of those programs when they launched. Magically, however, they vanished once the games were updated, optimized, and new drivers and chipsets came out with improved support for the games. Go ahead, do some Googling for release-week performance complaints regarding both of those games, or others like Arkham City or BF3. You will find people with rigs that completely blow yours out of the water having terrible problems. I'd wager my PC is probably in the mid-to-lower end of the ones running SWTOR, and I've got zero issues as long as I don't leave it open for six hours at a time. This is not a generic "PC power" issue, it's purely obscure performance problems that strike a very small number of people with wildly different components. Hell, you can find a guy who has an identical rig who runs it fine while you chug around at 10 FPS on the fleet--there's probably a driver difference or some different version if Windows to blame for the difference. Update your drivers. Run in Administrator mode. Run in Windows XP Compatibility mode. Fiddle with forced options on your GPU's control program. Alternatively, wait patiently, because this stuff does get fixed--it's just not always on the head of the programmer to do it. Sometimes GPU manufacturers have to step up.

The spaceports and hangars are disguised load screens. You're forced to run slowly through them while your computer loads and caches all the art assets that you'll see the moment you exit the spaceport/hangar, otherwise you'd get some pretty nutzo pop-in. If you actually manage to run faster than your load, you can get stuck on an invisible wall that will root you until enough assets load that going further wouldn't cause entire buildings to materialize before your eyes.

The companion engages combat with the creature but is not above "0" on its aggro table because it hasn't initiated any hostile action against the target; the act of healing or placing a shield on your companion actually throws you up the aggro table and gets your face smashed.

Note now the words of a man who will soon be eating them. The Jedi Knight storyline is the closest thing you're going to get to KoTOR 3, broheimdall.

David Hayter (Jedi Knight) generally doesn't sound like most people tend to imagine him, but how can you confuse that for Steve Blum (Bounty Hunter)? He literally has a patent on "cocky young guy who ate gravel".

Why are all of the aliens bipedal with two arms with two hands, two legs with two feet, and an overwhelming tendency to have one head with two eyes, a nose, two ears, and a mouth? Convergent evolution, man. The same traits can arise in unrelated species. All of the planets we're running around exist within the same narrow temperature range (Hoth, Ilum, and Tatooine being exceptions) and have liquid water and an atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen that standard humans can breathe without difficulty. Maybe that's just how carbon-based plants tend to grow in that sort of environment; it's the most efficient, successful, and easily-arisen form they can take. ..and why would humanoids settle on a planet with completely and utterly alien flora/fauna when they can terraform everything or just pick planets more like their original homeworlds?

BioWare has tons of SW nerds and they've been putting GB and Aurebesh with meaningful translations into a lot of their teaser content--early Satele Shan stuff for SWTOR dropped hints about stuff that happened in their as-then unreleased tie-in comic and the game. You've got to remember that sometimes even nerds slip up, though, and in the case of stuff like upside-down or backwards signs, it's not the art designer who made that particular model/texture putting it into the game world physically--someone else who may not actually understand what this stuff says probably did. Flipped textures are actually fairly common.

Twi'leks were genetically engineered to look homogeneous and appear attractive to a certain species. They are literally an entire species of strippers.

Are you telling me all Twi'leks look alike to you? That's kind of racist, man. They're a diverse species. I guess you just don't get the subtle differences in the wrinkling of the lekku which serve to identify Twi'leks to others of their species.

MMOs pretty much never delete characters. Someone remind me of a time this actually happened, if it has. Your characters could be sitting there gathering dust for years.

You had Hunter's Boon / Fortification (+5% Endurance buff from BHs / Troopers) and now don't, and/or your stats were artificially Bolstered for the Warzone--but the degree of bolstering varies between warzones, as it's scaled based off of the highest-leveled guy in the place.

Squaresoft didn't need Enix's help to make terrible games; they were doing that just fine on their own.

Ding ding. These are just elevators from Mass Effect all over again. Loading screens without loading screens. They hide pop-in and load times by obscuring everything from you behind a long run time. I know someone out there remembers getting on a boat/tram/zeppelin in WoW around launch (or the tram's invention) and ending up back where you started from because you didn't load fast enough and the trip looped back around. That doesn't happen in WoW now, optimized as it is, and with today's computer, but BACK IN THE DAY that was a thing. You can actually see this thing in action in SWTOR already if you go to the right places and are exceedingly quick at moving around but have long load times: Fleet Pass from some far-away planet after a couple hours of planet hopping and play, then run as quickly as you can to your shuttle hanger. If all goes well (or wrong, actually) you'll hit there before the game has cached all the assets in the station and especially your hanger, and you'll run into an invisible wall that roots you in place just outside of the door. Alternatively, go to Tatooine (at least on the Republic side--don't know about Empire) without an SSD and see how chuggy you get in the "hanger", since you're right there and trying to load all of Mos Whatever the moment you show up on the planet. Alderaan is similarly bad for this. You'll see that lag/stutter in hangers on planets WITHOUT orbital stations is a lot worse than those that DO have stations. Caching of assets behind the scene. Elevator trick. Clever, but perhaps annoying if you have great load times. I predict them enabling speeder usage in these all rather soon.

When a game launches, I believe one of the top priorities is actually maintaining server stability and uptime. This is most easily done when you have all of the servers in one (or very few) physical locations and your best techs on-site for monitoring, upgrades, and maintenance. Like any piece of new hardware (not just computer hardware) there is an adjustment period where you must learn the peculiarities of the piece and it settles and develops its.. personality. Maintenance times will decrease as time goes on, and as BioWare and their techs become more familiar with the workings of the particular hardware they're dealing with for the servers, they'll feel more at ease about moving them to different sites or running maintenance at separate times. You have to be careful about moving maintenance schedules around, because with maintenance often comes patches, and as you'd see in Rift or in WoW when servers would crash, people who don't ordinarily play on a given server would flood whatever ones are up and pretty much wreck the experience for the usual users. If Europe gets their patches first, US players will log on to your servers en masse to get the update first, creating queues or installation errors when they try to go back to their own servers. Exploits that exist in new patches may be revealed on the European side early and everyone rushes back to the American servers when they come up to take advantage--or BioWare doesn't bring the patch up for the Americans knowing there is a particularly bad exploit in this now, it having been caught by Europe. That, and the server architecture they're using may just not allow for this kind of maintenance at the moment. Lots of variables. It's not just like there are a bunch of boxes sitting in refrigerated room in London looking exactly like the ones in a basement in Austin, save for the Union Jack painted on the side and a monocle taped to the front, and they just pop in a USB drive six hours earlier on the EU one.

Have you considered some third-party programs which simply alter the hues of everything displayed on screen, regardless of program? I know tons of these exist, and some variations (like one that changes color "warmth" to match time of day and reduce eye strain) are pretty popular. A cursory Google search turned up: http://www.ryobi-sol.co.jp/visolve/en/ http://www.vischeck.com/

Boy, I remember those dark days when I had to figure out who wasn't pulling their weight in a group by simply comparing one awesome DPS to the dude I figured was slacking. That took all of, like, thirty seconds of watching them. Damage meters will come some time after the combat log comes, which is already on its way. Asking for them every twenty minutes doesn't speed this process at all, and no one's going to forget if it isn't mentioned every hour. Patience and common sense are lost virtues, apparently.

It's in the morning for American players, specifically the Central time zone, which is the time zone all of SWTOR runs off of. 6am CST, or GMT-6. I'm sorry you guys live on the other side of an ocean, but guess where BioWare is located and where a majority of SWTOR's players live?

I wish people would make up their minds already over which set is the most ridiculous, Inquisitor or Sage. (secret: it's actually the bounty hunters')

The Rep population for Fleet on my server isn't that much higher and I can't swing a cat without getting into a hardmode. Perhaps there are just fewer high-level Reps there? Reroll or wait; don't be surprised that everyone isn't with you at max level. The majority of players have jobs and school and their /played statistics don't read higher than five days less than a month after launch. They may only have an hour or two a day or every other day to play and level.

Whatever keys you have bound to Forward, Backwards, TURN Left, and TURN Right (NOT Strafe) while controlling your character will also control your ship.. to a limited degree around where your cursor is aiming.

People don't like Consular's storyline, understandably, and a lot of people aren't keen on Smugglers, but Trooper and Jedi Knight are leagues above whatever stupid baby things the Sith all do, including Mr. James Bond Morally Ambiguous Imperial Agent. Yeah, you're a real normal-powered go-getter just savin' the Empire while you're surrounded by psychic dark lords shooting purple lightning and dipping skulls into blood while wearing red and black spikey armor. The mechanical advantage of the Empire is limited to Project not being instant, a 30 second cooldown difference on a Smuggler ability, dual-wield Gunslingers vs. single-wield Snipers, and Troopers having some marginally longer activation times on Full Auto, Pulse Cannon, and Mortar Volley. Whoo. I'll let you know when I actually lose a fight to a Bounty Hunter because of my slower activation times. There are more Imperials because names like "Darth Murderskull Bloodkiller" and the aforementioned blood-dripping skulls and red/black spiky armor is more appealing to 13-year-olds, and there are always going to be a lot of those people.

Angle your camera down. The large cars float way off the ground.

1.5 million, thank you. Or you can get one off of Normal Soa.