It really is hard for a guy to make a joke. You'd think a video game made for entertainment and relaxation purposes wouldn't cause so much stress in people.

Don't get me wrong, I get frustrated by the lack of communication as well. It would be great to see "this is our reasoning behind why we're doing what we're doing". But the sad fact is that they're better off staying quiet. There seems to be some strange psychological need in people to see this game fail, I don't know why that is. But look for instance at BW's announcement that they were going to offer up to lvl 15 for free. WOW has done this for years, but Swtor decides to and we get a slew of media articles, forum posts, and "insider" columnists braying about how it's the first step in a F2P plan, with no evidence whatsoever. It doesn't surprise me that they've chosen to start shutting up about their plans. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

We have no idea how things have really gone so far. For all we know, only half the population of the current transfer servers have actually transferred. There's already a bunch of threads on how mad people are mad about "overpopulated" servers. If BW does not keep their heads and roll out this process slowly while monitoring everything, it'll turn into a giant mess like a lot of other rushed decisions they've made. Seems to me they're finally learning their lesson and trying to do this right instead of rushing it out in response to the chorus of "MEMEMEME NOWNOWNOW". Giving us more insight into their plans would only result in more outrage, because someone is always going to be mad at the way things go. I know that after waiting for months for this to happen it's a bitter pill to swallow to be told you have to wait a few more days. But is it really that big a sacrifice if it insures that the end results are actually worthwhile, instead of rushing a move that causes more trouble?

I don't think anyone's trying to convince you per se. I think most people, myself included) are trying to be helpful and point out things you may be overlooking. You're free to play your game in the way you like, and it's no skin off my nose if you stay. My thought process is that It would suck for you if one of the issues people have pointed out happen to you later and you regret not using the free transfer while it was available. As I tell my wife often, stubborness can be an admirable quality, as long as you're not being stubborn for it's own sake.

Keep an eye on what's going on around you. If you can't handle the gold and silver at the same time, watch and wait for the roamer to be on about his business before attacking. If you get surprised, use you CC on the gold and finish off the silver, heal up, then take the gold on at full strength. We're given the tools we need to handle pretty much any event. That said, we all make a dumb move without realizing it and end up waiting for the rez droid. It's just a part of the game.

Fair enough. I get that, because I'm the same way. I go out of my way to see all the story, and sometimes that means going back to solo heroics that I missed due to no one to group with. But I've been playing since EGA, and there comes a point when there's simply no more quests, and no more datacrons to find, etc... What are you going to do then? I divide my time between FP's and PVP, and as someone above me said, some of the best story is attached to FPS's. If you remain on a dead server your not going to have anyone to play with when you reach that point. I'm not trying to convince you that you're wrong, quite the opposite in fact. Just trying to point out things you perhaps hadn't considered.

This about sums up my feelings. It's not something that would bother me enough to mention, had it not been brought up by others here. I'm not sure how many crates there are in BH, as I've never counted them, but I know where they all are, and i would guess there's about a dozen to 15. If you say there are 20 people in the BH, and even that they're all grouped, that's still 5 groups, which means that people are having to wait for crates to respawn. It doesn't matter in what context, waiting is not ever going to be fun and just adds one more little annoyance to the back of a players mind. That's all I'm saying.

You know, I hadn't ever thought of it that way. That is kinda odd. I wonder if it's a simple case of "That's the way it's always been done, so that's the way we'll do it"?

I also do a lot of things solo because of limited play time. But the most fun thing about this game is the interaction with other people. You may not agree, but that's my feeling. My genuine question is, if you don't need other people to queue for PVP, or to group for end game PVE content, or to craft things to buy on the GTN, what do you do? I'm not flaming, really, just genuinely curious what it is you do by yourself all the time.

Thing is, people do dailies mostly for cash, and just want to do them and get em done and get on with the other parts in the game they enjoy more. They don't want to, nor should they have to, form groups and make a whole event over something they just want to get done. The BH dailies were always my favorite, because of how easy and fast they are to do. But I foresaw that once I was on a more populated server, they could become almost undoable. What's strange is that BW received so many complaints about quest spawns that went away and then had to be waited for, that they went back and changed a lot of them to not go away, but just be untargetable more than once per quest. Why they didn't do that with the BH boxes, I don't know.

Well I apologize then. sounded like you accusing tanks of running in pairs and guarding each other, which made little sense anyway. That said, I know that tanksins have been kinda considered easy mode (not that I agree per se) and I've been seeing a lot more of them, but that's already going to be dealt with. Tanks in general though tend to be a bit more complicated to play (properly) as opposed to, say, a DPS class, so I can't imagine the FOTM crowds rolling them en masse, because they normally gravitate towards the easier to play classes. To answer your particular examples though, a good tank running with a good healer of course is hard to kill, that's kinda their "thing". As it should be.

You can't guard someone who's guarding someone else. And you can't guard someone if you're being guarded. Pretty much to not have what you're talking about happen.

The Internet: where the strangest things are argued about as if the result is the difference between life and death.

Yeah, something's definitely wrong. A 4 lvl difference should not happen if you followed the progression right. On each of my chars, i was always 2-4 lvls above recommended, and that's with skipping heroics and fps.

That's a tough situation, but not one that should've been unforeseen on your part, to be frank. Your best bet, assuming you don't want to keep those extra 6 chars just to be left languishing on a dead server is this: 1) Transfer your main. 2) Transfer the 6 chars you won't keep, then email their money, crafting materials, even bound gear, to your main. 3) Delete those 6 and transfer your other characters. Now at least you have the money and stuff you worked for, and can even sell the bound gear as junk for a decent amount. Only other option would be to wait for paid transfers and ship those extra chars off to another higher pop server, if you want to keep them.

Yeah, as long as you have internet access, you can do it. I actually did mine from my phone while at work.

But even saying that is wrong. Theoretically, lets say you have one attacker, one healer. and one person receiving the attention of both. Then let's say that the healer can slightly outheal the damage done. Again, theoretically, you would have an infinite damage to death ratio. If you don't factor out healing, defensive cd's, stims, etc... first, every bit of data you extrapolate is meaningless. And since factoring out those things would be near impossible, this whole subject doesn't make much sense. Now show me your damage to death ratio after factoring out all those variables, and I'll happily discuss what the data shows us then.

Queues are a good sign at this point. Once people have tested out their new homes things will settle down. Just as at launch, when the same thing happened. At that time, they panicked and opened a bunch of new servers, which contributed to the current problem they're trying to fix. Hopefully this time they keep their heads and wait for things to settle. Right now everyone is logging on to see how things have changed. that will stop soon enough and people will go back to their normal schedules and you won't have to worry about it. Mark my words. Have a slight bit of patience and it'll be ok.

Switching factions means switching classes. They've said no to that already, but that's irrelevant. Switching classes means swapping story, possibly mid-stream, not to mention planet visitation order, gear that is class specific, companions whose stories are also happening and would have to be swapped out for new companions, changing your ship, having codex entries for a class you aren't anymore, titles that are class specific, etc... In other words, the whole thing is magnitudes more complicated than you'd like to believe. If it could be implemented in such a way that you actually defect through your storyline, that would be one thing. But that would require rewriting a huge chunk of every story line, and frankly, most of us would prefer new story and new content rather than such a huge time effort being put towards something that can be solved by playing a new character.

Very true! We all know (or should) the way resolve +cc break should be used in an ideal situation. But when you're in a corner like described, you have no choice but to pop your break early, just in hope you can keep yourself alive long enough for help to arrive, or at least go down fighting. and then it's more often than not ineffective, because you'll just get hit with another. It is frustrating, but without CC, the game turns into a button-mash frenzy with little strategy. I don't know the proper solution. Oh, and the sheer number of people that don't get sarcasm is staggering to me.

This. I've kept the alt I'm leveling equipped with augmented oranges with the best mods for his level by using the cash income and crafting from my main. It's almost unfair how unbalanced that makes it. Chars without the advantage of the huge income stream of having a 50 main could not possibly bear the expense that I've gone to doing that for my alt. That's not to say that the system should be changed, i actually consider it a perk of having leveled another char to 50. I'm just saying that to say there's no gear imbalance in <50 PVP is naive.

Yeah, you're not taking healing into account at all. Plus, I may be mistaken, but damaged RECEIVED is after mitigation anyway, so you're not measuring mitigation at all, you're ONLY measuring healing effect on that battle.

Keep in mind that we don't really know their thought process. At this point I'd like to think that they're trying to avoid making the same mistake they made at the beginning. What happens if they underestimate the number of people willing to transfer? Wouldn't it make sense to take things slow and deal with lower pop servers so they can adjust their schedule as they go? Or if they overestimate how many people will transfer, they could end with pop problems again in short order when people who resub just to tranfser drop back off. They can change plans to make adjustments. I know after all the mistakes that it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt, but current behavior leads me, at least, to believe that they're (slowly) learning from their mistakes and trying not to repeat them. Impatience, in part, led to this problem, let's at least wait till the process is done and see how it turns out out huh?

No, you're right. We don't have any real reason to expect to hold onto our names. But neither do we own our rakata or war hero gear, but I bet you'd be pissed if they took yours away during your transfer...

It's easy to blame game design for issues like this, because that would mean it can be fixed, and everyone wants to see their pet issue fixed. But the awful truth is that it's not the game design that causes it. It's the idiot people who think that they're being smart and gaming the system when they're actually making it harder on themselves. They're not going to listen to anything anyone has to say, because they're smarter, better, and more awesome than anyone else.There's nothing that can be done about such people, and we'll always have to live with them, whether it's in a game or in real life. The best thing we can do is to ignore those idiots, and their e-peen, don't get into arguments with them, and don't reward them with MVP votes. Too often I see the entire team vote and leave the op before I've finished looking at the data, only to find the majority of votes given to the guy with the most medals, even though he had no objective points. That just shows that people auto-vote for the green bar at the top of the list and exit, without actually paying attention to what's going on. Sure, we know that MVP votes don't matter in any real sense, but they're an intangible reward that says "good job", and it's demoralizing to those that try hard to see those votes go to medal farmers, and strokes the egos of those same farmers to receive them. Some of the blame lies squarely on our own shoulders, and pretending that it's all a design flaw will never solve the problem.