That doesn't mean free flight. Could be still rails but giving you the option to sit on a turret while your companion pilots your ship (sounds familiar?. 1 word: KOTOR). Besides, my experience with what devs says about their projects and what players expects never is the same. Said that, I must stress that free flight is the only thing worthy to be considered a significant gameplay change, not just space gameplay "expand". With huge staff reduction in development teams and all the issues with the game they must address, and considerering that ifree flight means rework the whole space up from the ground (no way to patch JTL code, or any other bizarre idea like that, into the game, forget that), I don't see BW rebuilding space in any way. Whatever they'll do will be worked on top (expand) of what already exists because is the easiest and cheapest path, thus will be rails. Another reason why we won't see any significant change in rail space is because it was a strategic decission. They had time enough to implement free flight space but it was clear from early development stages of SWTOR that space wouldn't be free flight. I'd love to see free flight in SWTOR. I'm sure would be a blast even if it is mouse contrlol flight (I love Freelancer). But I'm realistic and I don't have reasons to think that wie will have free flight not even in 2 years.

Is not a player, is a bot that blames everybody else's pcs when they report issues with the game.

As far as I know all those new games are F2P (not sure about Mechwarrior) so MTs is their main profit souce, not subs.

Very bad PC and/or network you had if you experienced such lag. My computer was not a top one of those times and my network connection was a 56Kb dial-up and I never experienced such lag. The only places I had problems was starports, but almost everybody had problems at starports. Other than that the game ran pretty smooth for my rig (if my memory doesn't lie to me was an AMD K7 333MHz with 512MB RAM and a Nvidia GeForce TI-4200 128MB). Considering the size of world maps the housing in SWG worked pretty well. We can argue if for some planets the number of player structures allowed should be less or not, but the fact is that what people remember with a deep nostalgic feeling is how wonderfull was housing in SWG. For me was a deeply inmersive element that made me feel a galaxy citizen. I played SWG from beta times 'till NGE release and in the months before the patch that introduced housing the game, for me, was rather lifeless since there was nothing between NPC cities, just a void landscape with some critters and mobs here and there.

Day/night in every planet. Moons with phases. Changing weather in every planet. Crowded player cities. Crowdwd NPC cities (Theed, Coronet, Mos Eisley. Anchorhead, Moenia, etc.) in all planets. Really barren and lifeless... lol

I read the OP and I couldn't help think that what OP is asking for is SWG pre-CU 2. With all it's flaws SWG was for me way moe inmersive than SW:TOR with all its voice acting and storylines. You were free to do anything you wanted and that freedom was what really made you feel a true SW universe galaxy citizen. There was no need of a storyline. And there was always something to do beside combat. I spent almost more time dancing and playin music in cantinas with my Twi'lek entertainer than fighting. Even I was a slave dancer in Jabba's palace What can be more inmersive than be a slave dancer in Jabba's palace? Oh, wait!, to be a Tie fighter pilot chasing an YT-1300. Or engage in a battle against a team of imperials with a couple of AT-ST. Or go to Tatooie to kill a Kryat dragon. Or just go hunt Rancors in Dathomir. Or just spend hours setting up your tatooine's house furniture. Or.... However, lack of inmersion is something we all knew that was going to happen when BW/EA decided make SW:TOR a themepark and its space content just a 20th century rail shooter.

You're wrong. The client is yours. You paid for it, you downloaded it or got a hard copy of it, even you got extra items with special hard copy editions like Collector's one for which you paid more thus those items are yours not BW's/EA's property. What is BW's/EA's property is the server side softwar. But, to access to the server side softwer create an account is required so the account is also BW's/EA's property. That's why EULA states clearly that you cannot sell your account but if you want to sell your client you can because it is yours. It's a puzzle of 3 pieces the client, the account and the server software. You owns one: the client; the company owns the other 2.

We've came from "average" to "esrimated relative average". I haven't laugh so much in my life reading a post. lol

Exactly. Lame you didn't catch the irony in my words.

I guess you are talking of illusion of choice, because the wheel decission doesn't have any effect on any character story or the world. Everyone has the same class story with the same series of quests despite their "decissions" which, in the best case, just triggers one dialog or another (the guy is dead the guy is not dead) and gives light/dark points for allignment that has no meaning at all except how beautiful or ugly looks the character. The whole game is railed. It takes you through a predefined path and you have no other choice than follow that path because is what the designers want you to do. If something lacks this game is freedom. You are right, they made a new standard: railed MMO. And forget get a system like EVE. That means turn the game into a sandbox and that goes against this new standard.

Why you keep trying to insult our intelligence? Average is average, not just for what you want it to be. You can't take out of the equation planets to justify your hipothetic numbers, just because you stays all the time in your ship or in fleet taking elevators

Don't insult our intelligence.

Totally agree. Guild Wars 2. All players in a team have a set of DPS, CC, and Heal (self and others) skills, so the idea is already put in practice. However, a deeper analisys of the professions and their gears makes clear that tank-dps-healer(supporter) model is underneath. But is a step in the right direction. Of course we see the pattern, but some sort of factionalization is required. If you want PvP you've got to give a porpouse to most players. Yes many will do it for the fun only, but many others (like me) needs feel that join a PvP fight has a meaning and that it'll have an impact in the "world". Otherwise I'm not interested in PvP just for fun, or a rank, or a title, or a cool reward. One of the games I PvPed most was Guild Wars, but I didn't joined PvP 'till they implemented the Legacy system for Guild Wars 2 and I had to aquire certain level in a PvP title to earn the Point for my character's legacy in Guild Wars 2. You can argue I PvPed for a reward, and is true, but is a meaningfull reward that will have an impact in my character in Guild Wars 2. And another game I will surely PvP is Guild Wars 2. Why? Beacause they've gat a Server vs Server PvP arena called The Mist and is a meaningfull PvP since have control of the area gives global bonuses to the winning server. This is not a new feature though, I saw it already in Black Prophecy, though there the bonus goes to the winning faction. I'm with you here too, but some sort of leveling is neccessary unless you makes everybody start maxed. The only game I know that is not completely based on leveling is EVE Online. However, what you can or cannot do is determined by the skills earned through books and these books are hierarchicaly organized into levels, so, in the end, you have to progress trhough "grinding and leveling" too. But I admit that EVE Online skill books system is amazing and innovative (I haven't see it before neither after). The industry is not completely stagnant as you can see by the examples I just pointed, but we are speaking of an Industry that looks for profit and quick results thus investors bets only for what has proven it works: WOW, and ran away from "experiments". That's why the industry advances slowly and looks stagnant, because only when a small company with guts enough to break the rules with its small budget MMO gets a success as big as WOW was/is, the industry will change to the new paradigm.

It's a flaw in the engine, so speeds up load times means tweak the engine core and that won't happen anytime soon. You can speed up a bit your load times in 2 ways: 1) The obvious: get an SSD and play the game from it. 2) You've got enouhg RAM to creat a RAMDISK and copy there the game's data files and mke the game acces those files instead of the hard drive copies. The second is the cheapest but you've got to work on the setup (there are threads and articles in the net explaining how to do it).

I have no Assassin tank but I'm with you because I'm PT tank and my armor is 8K+ and sure at some point in the future BW will nerf our armor too to make people play Assassins tanks again,

No you're not alone. I'm PT and I hate that piece of crap, but is a minor issue. There are way more important issues in this game we have little hope to be addressed.

Honest question: What choices are those you talk about?

I never had big expectations about SWTOR. I folowed it since it was announced its development, and it was clear from the beggining (it's my personal opinion) that was going to be a huge disappointmen to many, many, many people, specially those we quit SWG at NGE release, precisely because SWTOR it was going to be SWG-NGE 2, but worse because of rail space; at least SWG-NGE had free flight space content (old JTL) . Why I bought it? Because, like you, I'm a Star Wars fan and I was waiting for a SW MMO since SOE killed SWG with its NGE, and I grew up with the movies and playing all SW games for PC, so I decided give the game a chance. Why I still play it? because there's no MMO out there, yet, that interests me enough, and to support my guild which is small and we've got problems to assamble an 8 man team to do a weekly OP..

And you cannot buy a main hand gun/saber and rip off mofs and put them in an off hand gun/saber? It makes no sense. There's no reason to not have an off hand gun/saber in black hole vendor.

Forget it. Don't expect anything near like that. We will be lucky if they give us something near to Battlefront's space combat. To be fair we all knew from start that SWTOR space was going to be rail. They never had plans to make it free flight. But the worse is that they also said they wanted it to be one of the major features of the game. What a fail!!!!

You don't need remove the HDD, just make it hidden, and install Window 7. The installer will see only the SDD. Once you finish intallation unhide the HDD and boot from SSD (sure your BIOS will allow do that) and you'll see the HDD in Windows again. Then backup, copy, or do whatever you need to do and when you are done, reformat the HDD. Is that simple

The problem with free flight is that requires a complete redesign of space content and that means make an important investment. I don't think that will happens and what we've have seen so far is the contrary, employees fired and smaller programming teams The odds are against free flight

If they've got a small team working on it then they should have a plan. Leak that the plan is free flight is already something, at least for me and, I'm sure, for thousands of Star Wars games fans like me. I'm not asking for details. However you just gave me another reason to think there's not going to be free flight and just more of the same: they've got a small team working on it. So this project is of little importance for BW and they want it cheap, so they'll go the easy way: more rails. Too bad, too sad

If that "super secret project" would be free flight space combat be sure they would leak that for commercial reasons. Is what makes me think it's going to be more of the same we've already got with some additions like guild ships or any non significant feature or cosmetic. I'd love to be wrong, honestly, I grew up playing X-Wing saga and my first multiplayer game was X-Wing vs Tie Fighter (and I still play solo Balance of Power campaign), but I've got little hopes seeing how badly is managed this game.

There's a basic flaw in your logic that makes your whole premise false: AI is based on predictable rules coded in scripts, PvP is random and completely unpredictable since behind each charcter there's a real inteligence. Any approach to balance PvP from PvE leads to desaster because players doesn't follow any coded script. That's why PvP skills, if they're the same in PvE, must have different stats that shouldn't affect PvE when nerfed and viceversa.