Lol, one of the specific reasons I got tired of WoW was because of how annoyed I was with their gear. I put up with it for 6 years, but I honestly don't think I'll let myself wait another 6 years for SWtOR to figure out how to provide aesthetically pleasing garments. You know what they say, "Fool me once, shame on you. But, fool me more than 3 times* of 6 month recurring subscriptions, and maybe I really should stop playing mmos or wanting developers to be nice to me." When I left WoW, it had features I have been praying would be implemented into SWtOR some day, and some of them have, still waiting on barbershop/race-change. I was hoping that SWtOR would have learned some of the quality of life improvements to mmos that its predecessors have mapped out, while becoming a unique and fun game in the Star Wars universe. Just throwing out an idea, maybe they could allow subscribers to submit designs to their developers teams as part of state of the game contests. Award some cartel coins, and develop the winning outfits designed by the community, as decided by the SWtOR team and legal department (i.e. making sure to ban anyone submitting entries including something like the Black-ops 2 swasdckas). Thus we are happy because they let us have more gear to wear, hopefully they won't tack on butt-flaps, and the contest winner gets rewarded twofold with their design implemented and with coins. Also, the developers don't have to stress their creative juices if we are doing the concept art, they just have to pick and choose the one they like, make the mesh, skin it, paint it, and map out the UV-texture on it and finally determine the values of its sub-dermal coloring (the layers of material either skin or cloth or dirt reflect light at different colors and intensity and settings are used to imitate this). Piece of cake =D It just seems like after over a year of waiting for meaningful change in some areas, and seeing little, perhaps the community of gamers that are devoted to the game, and have technical skills could offer their help to improve the game in a small capacity. Submitting concept art for outfits is one, with a bit of help from Bioware/EA/Disney we could have information on what design specs we would need to sculpt a mesh to make a 3D concept outfit. Or whatever. I don't think the Game Developers tend to think to include us in the process as though we could help them, but I'm seriously getting tired of waiting for them to listen to me asking for them to make prettier things. *Final Fantasy XI before WoW came out wast the first [edit]

I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised there haven't been any negative responses so far. I recently looked into a couple more outfits for my Smuggler/Scoundrel and have come up dry in a search for medium armor I like that is feminine and aesthetically pleasing. At least the pub color palette for the dancer outfit is better than the imp one, still butt-flaps though. Anyone know of any other armors I could check out? Or hats/helms that don't make me want to projectile vomit?

I have been playing this game since launch, but I have yet to see a piece of armor that my Sorcerer can wear that does not have a cowl or buttflaps with an exposed midriff, she's stuck with the slave-girl bikini because most of the other light armor looks frumpy. Lore-wise: I don't think fashion dies with the exploration of space, if anything I think it would become more diverse, and colorful. Women might, for instance wear dresses and / or skirts instead of only armor, pants & shirts. bikinis, or ankle-length robes with cowls. Men might even wear formal clothing or even exposing/alluring clothing because the sw-universe isn't entirely male-centric. Most of the Helms and hats are so repellent I'm not going to bother talking about them. I don't expect the designers to create high-fashion, but could we please have better selection? Less of the recolored meshes in the cartel packs would also make the bitter taste in my mouth go away a little faster. I feel like we are being bilked for money while our concerns about desired improvements for the game go unanswered and ignored. After spending another hour in a low level dungeon just to get - Warbringer's Body Armor - for my Juggernaut and finding out it had a hideous triangular tail attached to the chest with a bare midriff defying physics, I was hugely disappointed. The chest piece should only attach to the chest imo, not have extra attachments at the waist... Otherwise it would be a great bare midriff vest, sigh. and before I get off my soapbox, plz plz plz can we get a barbershop? I'd really like to re-customize my character after realizing how popular my choices were. Also it'd be cool if more choices were available to customize character appearance, hair/color/eyes/etc. The whole point is that I want my character to look unique and not just another clone of every other character the same race and gender and class. I used to wear un-augmented chest/leg armor to my detriment prior to 1.3 just to look unique, now everything can be augmented so its nearly impossible to be a snowflake. I'd at least appreciate liking how my character looked, not have to choose between being clothed as a sex-object, butch lesbian, or frumpy androgynous person without taste. So, now I imagine lots of misogynistic replies may ensue, but w/e everyone is entitled to their own opinions even if they are bigoted. But I hope enough people are fed up with the drab gear we have seen and the "new" items in cartel packs that are recolored meshes of old mounts and gear. Sign if you agree, if you troll you are essentially signing too =3

We don't know how their metrics work, but well performing teams have a non-quantifiable ability to work together well while using VoIP programs. It's easy to set up an algorithm to identify healers as outliers, but any formula that ignores or marginalizes healers is flawed. It's just as easy to identify splashers by how few objective points they have, but focusing on the statistics of the best players will also provide a skewed result. Perhaps they have a way to mine useful data, but I'm pretty sure the state of pvp in SWtOR is only observable through actual play on live servers. The really interesting thing is that this act of interaction in pvp by non-vets (gamedevs or not) is an incredibly unrewarding experience full of players calling them noobs when they inevitably make mistakes. It's an interesting manifestation of particle physics where the act of observation changes the environment. I really hope they do change. If they would hire/sponsor high-performing vets that are able to work well with their devteam, they might be able to glean a lot of useful insight in ways they could improve pvp-combat. What we need is a voice in upcoming pvp changes/improvements. Including new warzones on the PTR isn't enough to draw most players away from the live servers due to the exorbitant grindfest currently implemented to only wait for noone to queue up against them or with them. If they want feedback on pvp-matters, there needs to be a lure to draw pvpers to the ptr where their warzone commendations earned won't transfer. If we could load one of our current characters on the live server to the ptr, I think a lot more people would participate and provide better feedback before patches go live. Bioware/EA needs to maintain a good report with their end-game subscribers if they want to retain any mmorpg market saturation.

So you're saying stop qqing for warzones and play a different game, just because i have suggestions on ways to improve a game I enjoy? I have clearly enumerated several ways I would like pvp combat to be more balanced in this game, and I enjoy playing it with the friends I have acquired over the year that I have played it. When half the people state that pvp in swtor is completely based on skill, and you now state the reverse, I believe both are wrong. Skill, gear, class balance, steady internet connection, and a fast computer are all factors. Perhaps you might want to take some of your own advice and contribute to the discussion with suggestions for improvement rather than telling me to go away and making arbitrary predictions about the future. If you want a flame-war, I suggest looking elsewhere, like 4-chan.

I agree to your additions, not to your agreeing that gear is irrelevant. I think gear should be irrelevant, skill should be king. And while player skill is more important, it's more easy to perform well with fast computers and good connections. Arguing that player skill is the only factor in pvp neglects the fact that the player's time and money are also important, because the most skilled player in the world can't do well on a slow connection or a bad computer. In-game character gear is analogous to the time and money invested by the player. PVPers should be rewarded for performance and for time devoted to the game, but should it really provide a consistent advantage over new players when they already have gained more "skill" and experience? Is the advantage necessary? There's not much point to playing classes in pvp that can't compete on equal footing. Without sufficient utility to escape from players or lock them, smashers are rock to everything's scissors. People complain about the Sorc/Sage stun-bubble and the quick resolve fade, but without it as an equalizing force against ridiculous smashers, they'd be king in pvp. They are already really annoying, but as long as I have can use obstacles to take advantage of line of sight targeting and I have my bubble to give me time to pillarhump them, I can elude a geared smasher for a long time and prevent him from capping an objective. Still I wish our CC breaker would last for 2 seconds so we couldnt immediately be stunned after using it. Waiting for resolve to fill before popping makes it easier for operatives/smugglers to predict, vanish, rinse and repeat if we survived the first date with their offhand/fist (not sure if they still use suckerpunch). Also, WTB more pillars that I can run around to make juggs/guadians and marauders/sentinels cry as they chase. I always go center in civil war because it has 4 pillars, two halls AND two levels that i can run around while bubbling my whole team and finally healing when the melee give up the chase to target my team.

If gear truly had no effect, then why have pvp gear with statistics at all? I'd honestly rather have frivolous status benefits, like awesome costumes, or ways to customize my character than min/maxed numbers. The truth is that the numbers make the difference between needing 2-3 global cooldowns to crush a healer to death and 3-5 gcds. That curve shows the value inherent in the gear, and the only people who can afford to buy multiples of the highest tier gear are the "skilled" players. It takes no skill to faceroll people, and the game incentivizes singular builds that either completely disable the other player until they die, or kill one person in 3 hits every 15- 30 seconds. The crux is that each of these builds takes weeks if not months to prepare for their full benefit. I agree that "noobs" tend to underperform due to lack of skill as well as lack of gear. The fact is that there are two mitigating factors, and skill is something that the game creators cannot correct. They can minimize the effect of gear however. I honestly believe the most effective solution would be to provide all players with a buff that is reduced by their valor rank. The noobs would be stronger, more effective, albeit less skilled, and the veterans wouldn't need this handicap since they are so competent, effective and concerned about fairness and equality. If everyone was on equal footing, pvp would be more challenging, rewarding and fun. But it isn't. Even though I am a veteran, as a pvp healer I'd rather receive an accross-the-board equalization of the gear I've worked hard for than continue to watch helplessly while I am unable to heal people dropping like flies to a better geared premade team with optimized class setups and plenty of smashers. Seeing someone at full health die before I can even finish casting Dark Infusion in less than 2.5 seconds makes me wonder how anyone can claim skill made that happen. Maybe your perspective is slightly skewed by tunnel-vision in warzones, or organized open world pvp, or inflated ego. 1v1 duels show exactly how unbalanced the classes are, and gear exacerbates the problem making it much, much worse.

Even with a smaller gap between War Hero gear and Elite War Hero, it will still take people more than a month to get the Elite War Hero gear that will make them competitive. The time required to acquire gear by completing dailies and weeklies alone is much more than a month. After 1.6, the first week will see everyone buying EWH gear with a full stock of commendations they saved up for it, and new players still having to catch up. It still separates the serious pvper's like myself and friends on my server, from the casual who might have started saving less than 2 weeks in advance. On the PTR right now, the pricing works similar to how it is now: _________________________Elite War Hero Cost_______War Hero Cost -EWH Weapons/offhands____3475 rwz + WH piece_______(WH = 1550 wz) -EWH Boots/Gloves_________2000 rwz + WH piece______(WH = 875 wz) -EWH Head_______________2425 rwz + WH piece______(WH = 1075 wz) -EWH Legs_______________2225 rwz + WH piece______(WH = 975 wz) -EWH Chest______________3200 rwz + WH piece______(WH = 1425 wz) -EWH belt________________1425 rwz + WH piece______(WH = 625 wz) -EWH Wrist_______________1250 rwz + WH piece______(WH = 550 wz) -EWH Implants/Earpiece_____1425 rwz + 625 wz________(WH = 625 wz) -EWH relics_______________1250 rwz + 550 wz________(WH = 550 wz) wz - regular warzone commendation rwz - rated warzone commendation WH piece - War Hero piece required to trade in for upgrade to Elite War Hero This pricing is the same treadmill, and they didnt reduce the price of the weapons and off-hands that have been available already. * The really unfortunate thing about the EWH gear is that it is identical to the WH gear meshes, just with a slightly different color pallet. Respeccing from Healer to DPS or from any role to any other role would require having separate sets of gear to be effective, meaning you would have to revisit the treadmill and have a second set of gear, because the gear doesn't adapt to your talents. Some classes don't really have a viable dps spec either. But yeah I try to queue with friends mostly as well, and I can usually guarantee 4 people on the team won't be recruits, and that the balance is relatively good when I'm in a premade.

I can understand that diving into balancing the classes is a giant chore and task because you are limited to making minor changes in order to avoid unbalancing the PvE part of the game when you are looking to fix the PvP. That said, statistics and analytics without a discerning context are deceptive if not worthless. Kill/Death Ratio: This doesn't apply to healers. Also, a dps with a pocket healer is going to work better than another dps. When teams are coordinated they get more kills to their deaths. Sometimes, when a Pick Up Group is going up against a premade, one team might have 20 kills for every death. Sometimes a PUG might end up with 5 healers and be unable to kill any of the other team's 2heals-1tank-5dps at all. Abstracting the total ratio for every class when teamwork, team composition, and gear have a larger effect than the native classes is silly. If you want a good litmus test on which classes die more often, look at Ranked Warzone Matches between evenly matched premades. Even then, the better guilds that form these premades all have VERY stringent requirements on which classes and specs they will field, and/or will accept into their guild. The class/specs that they universally don't take should be buffed/adjusted for PVP if you want to make each class viable with choices for tank/dps or heal/dps. Field Talent Respecialization: This needs to be disabled while in warzones. Letting people respec in the warzone makes the Pit an easy win for premades against PUGs. If the goal is fairness, this shouldnt be the case. If the goal is to reward ingenuity and planning, leave it in even though it is unfair. I love playing in the Pit, it's my favorite warzone, But having my team stomped simply because im facing a premade or vice versa is never as fun as an even match. Gear scaling: I understand that gear grind is a commonplace strategy to encourage players to take time working on a goal for improving their characters. However the discrepancy between characters that are fully geared and new 50s is so large that a recruit can get two-shot by a decked out Marauder. 6-8k crits against a player with 14k health will encourage the new player to quit, not spend 3 months getting smashed while slowly gearing up to the same level. The well geared players will get angry if you make it easier for others to catch up because they worked hard for their advantage, and the undergeared players will refuse to play an unfair game otherwise. All in all, the scale of the gear's affect on damage needs to be reduced. Why bother having healers at all if characters will die before I can cast 1 big heal on them? Warzones are getting closer to a confused FPS without enough cover. Healers can be completely shut down by 1 person damaging them and interrupting their heals, or if the other team is coordinated they can focus fire down any target getting healed because heals are nowhere close to the damage output. Instead of each set requiring months to acquire, providing the players who accomplish it quickly with bonuses like making them more customizable or shiny or giving them a title will ease their frustration when the undergeared players catch up statwise. Randomness: A team randomly full of healers is going to lose. A team randomly with two sage/sorc healers will lose against one with a sage/sorc and different class healer when both teams are equally skilled and geared due to class synergy. Randomness in PvPing through PUGs causes teams to lose because the class balance of the team is such a huge factor in success. PUGs should randomly add players to the teams that are built by factoring gear-level and spec. That way, teams won't end up with 4+ healers, and it won't be Recruits vs. War Heroes. Bubble spec sorcs/sages are hated because of the bubble stun, but their ability to heal is diminished as soon as another sorc/sage is on the same team putting up bubbles and providing the debuff that prevents the bubblesorc from applying a new one for 17 seconds. And if the debuff were to only apply to the sorc who cast it, a full sorc team could have 8 bubbles on each player every 17 seconds. I don't know of a good way to fix this, but its a great example why solo-queueing and ending up on a team with 3 other sorc healers is really annoying for me. I really enjoy PvPing in SWtOR, it's why I have been subscribing since launch. Unfortunately, as people get smashed more and more, it's making my desire to continue being a PvP healer die. Be nice to healers plz. We get focused and killed first, and blamed for lack of healing simultaneously. While it's inflammatory to say this, I truly believe healing is harder to do than dps in PvP, and unless some of the escalating problems in SWtOR's PvP are addressed, healers will continue to quit. Why bother trying to heal people when they die within 2-3 global cooldowns? Anyway, thats my QQ

I'm unsure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Taking games too seriously is what leads to most of the hateful things tossed around in the environment. I enjoy this game a lot, but General Akbar warns us to not get too invested in this game. I learned it was a trap when I decided to quit WoW. I love to play games, but I'm often made uncomfortable by the awful/lewd things people say to each other in /gen chat or /say within close enough proximity. If you look back to the Street-Fighter / Tekken tournament online reality show, Crossfire, there are some people that believe that treating women poorly in games is inherent to competitive game-play. I'm paraphrasing of course, but if you are unaware of the scandal or inappropriate handling of the sexual harassment in the show, here's a link breaking it all down: http://bitmob.com/articles/cross-assault-sexual-harassment-controversy-overshadows-on-screen-combat I appreciate the goal of the OP to demystify the female gamer. Once you humanize female gamers to male gamers, you may in turn cause harassment to become less prevalent. Misogyny perpetrated by the gaming community really gets under my skin.There are more Women PC-gamers than Men. The Nielson media group published a report stating this 3 years ago. Although it does not differentiate genres of PC games. Regardless, female gamers are real and they outnumber male "seriousness" about PC-games in their time commitment to gaming. http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/04/female-demograp/ I think it'd be really cool if gamers didn't care about each others gender irl, and it's silly to assume that all 30yr old male basement dwellers play as half-naked female characters just as much as it is to originally assume all women play as female characters. Any generalization is going to be flawed, all people are different. You can categorize us in a million different ways, but saying female gamers are all [insert ridiculous assertion here] is equivalent to saying all gamers that have irl mammalian pets are better at healing since they know how to nurture their pets enough to prevent their premature death. Still, there's always voice modifying software to avoid creepyness on mumble / ventrillo / teamspeak. Sound Blaster makes sounds cards that have their own processor to manage this without slowing down your computer as much as a non-hardware-native program would to process the mic input and output. While it seems shady to resort to using a tool to hide your gender to people you meet on mmos, I like the idea of side-stepping problems that are difficult to resolve, especially since I game to relax from stress and have fun.

I wholeheartedly agree! - It's especially frustrating when you fail to critically craft an item 14 times in a row. Can their vendor worth be changed from 1 credit to something around its actual cost to make like 5-10k? noone wants to buy the normal versions, they are simply trash clogging my bank atm

I don't know about everyone else, but my game client crashes about once every few hours, usually in a warzone. I've had it crash during winning and losing warzones 3 times today. Ragequitting once the game client is stable should be punished by a 15-30 minute lockout. But right now, it'd punish everyone whose game crashes as well as the quitters. I don't have enough time to devote to this game with school to add another 30 minutes to an hour before i can requeue every time the client crashes.

Nm it got moved Edit: reply rendered moot.

First off, I'd like to mention that I thoroughly enjoy SWTOR. There are many aspects of the game that distinguish this game from its predecessors, mostly for the better. However I'd like to voice some suggestions rather than simply pat them on the back or whine about how the game doesn't solve everything for me. 1: I love the social outfits, companion customizations, varied speeders, and options in character customization. Yet at 50, I've had to replace my Imperial Dancer's outfit which I loved, with purple gear that is vastly superior statwise while looking hideous. I can't wear my favorite outfit without severely hampering my ability to be competitive as a healer in PvP where I can already be locked in stuns indefinitely. 2: I wish there was a barber or some NPC that could alter the appearance of my character, my goal is to make my character unique, however I seem to have chosen a lot of the same characteristics for my female human that I merely blend in with the throng, especially because my outfit is now the uniform perscribed to PvPers. 3: Ilum... sometimes it takes me over an hour to collect 30 armaments from the 12-15 or so heavily farmed spawn points. Republic forces are infrequently willing to clash with the throng of us Imperials. Can there be something like Wintergrasp in WoW where there are capture points and overwhelming numbers are balanced by a stacking buff for the undermanned side. Or perhaps Ilum could work like an instance where groups of 8 imperials can fight each other if the repubs are drastically outmanned. Repubs tend to kill a few imperials then camp the spawn points to allow them to have overwhelming forces for a change. Either way, it tends to be unfair for both sides at best. 4: What do I do with my champion pvp belt token? I already have a champion belt, and I can only exchange it for light armor which is useless for the companion I'd like to wear a better belt. 5: Please please please add a diminishing return for stuns. There's a reason premades dominate pugs in pvp, they stack tanks who can pop unstunable cooldowns, while us sorcerers can only break one stun, then immediately get stun locked again until we are murdered while being unable to move or cast anything. 6: healing throughput is severely limited with having to target without macros and the long global cooldowns. Granted, not everyone enjoys healing, and making it super easy isn't the goal for developers, but it's frustrating to be full of force and unable to keep people up when they move out of my aoe heal since I'm focusing on healing the tank in pve. 7: I enjoy the medal system in PvP, but can healers get credit for the kills of the targets they are busy healing? It seems that PvP is catering to tanks and dps, while healers are forced to commit half their time to do mediocre dps just to pick up more than 2-4 medals. Teams lose when they don't have good healing, but healers don't receive the credit from the endscore in the warzone commensurate to their contribution IMO. I apologize for this wall of text, but I really love this game otherwise I wouldn't devote the time to voicing my opinions on these boards. The single player story is incredibly robust, and I have enjoyed all of my Sorcerer's story quests have turned out. I especially like that my choices have repercussions. It seems that the game has captured a lot of the essence that I loved in KOTOR, and I can see the unpolished diamond that lies at the core of this game. My only criticisms and hopes for this game are improvements to the replayability of the multiplayer aspect of the game. The RPG part of the game is amazing, the MMO could use the aforementioned polish.