I think the OP got that mechanic, what he/she is referring to is that light armor with an AR of 50 has lower Armor than heavy armor with the same AR. The question was if this applies to Orange gear as well, as in, light orange gear with an armor mod with AR 50 has lower armor than a heavy orange amor with the same mod applied to it, which I believe is the case.

My smuggler is currently at level 35 and I am starting to get worried that my character/story is bugged in some way... Has anyone else experienced these issues? I've filed a few bugreports in-game, but all I get back are generic "thanks for filing a bug" messages (which is the worst customer support ever).

I have no clue, it didn't say it was used, it simply said "This name is invalid". I figured it was either taken, or too short, but then again, Ra'ven gave the same error, while Rayven worked, both have 5 characters. It could also be Raven is too close to Revan (lore character), which would be extremely stupid, as I can think of 1000+ names that are close to lore character names but not the same.

Doesnt seem like it. You can disable it in the options, but it will always be part of your characters on that server. While I don't hate the feature, I do dislike having to choose something this unique and personal this late in the game. I tried to level up as fast as I can (given the limited time I have), and was able to pick my legacy name just a few minutes ago. Only problem? The name I ALWAYS use (in SWG primarily) gave back some kind of generic "Invalid name" error (the name was Raven). So I went downhill and tried Ra'ven, R'aven, Rav'en, Rav-en, etc, but they all came back the same. After searching the web for any known restrictions (Using Raven' it specifically said no ' or - at the start or end), but couldn't find anything, so I sucked it up and went for Rayven. Looks soooo bad, and I dread people seeing that, bug there was nothing I could do.

Aha, I was wondering why I was 200th in line in the middle of a working day. I have the day off, and figured I would hop into the game and enjoy me some lonely questing... guess not. Hmm, perhaps it was a bad decision to pick this PVP-RP server after all, especially if they don't open up another anytime soon. It's gonna get crowded in here!

I would like to see this as well. It's almost 2012 and the website for the next big MMO after WoW has a Drupal website which uses ancient technologies (flash and vbulletin(?)) and a pretty skin. This is really lackluster, especially for such an ambitious MMO as SWTOR.

I think you mean most bug-free, or least bug-ridden

I think I read ingame that Cantina will sometimes do, but the most private place is on board your ship.

Just here to put down my vote for this feature. Although I have to say, missing it from the start feels like its an engine restriction (or perhaps it would tax the servers too much?), and I really doubt things like this will get added in a patch/expansion. For a patch, this seems way too big of an undertaking to do, and for an expansion, well just look at WoW, all their expansions have been to add new content and expand the level-cap, only in the last expansion they redesigned all the areas of the game, but this was with them sitting on a multimillion dolar product with 10 million customers. Only thing we can hope for is that this game gets the same attention and number of subscribers. The more money we give to BioWare, the more likely it is they hire designers/programmers for these kind of "afterthoughts".

I have to agree with the OP, this has annoyed me in the past (SWG) as well. It's not a big problem (as others have pointed out), but I do remember reading a BW post somewhere saying they where gonna try to schedule maintenance downtimes around both US and EU "peak" playtimes. Obviously 8 in the morning is hardly a peak time, but on a day off I would likely enjoy myself a few hours of TOR in the morning before lunch, and even then, this is a multi-million company/product, would it be that hard to schedule downtime somewhere around 3 or 4am on both sides of the ocean?