I'll crush everyone. When the right moment comes , i'll just TAKE the light and control it . Bend it according to my will . grrrr , grrrrr, grrrrrr , grrrrr Hopefully this answers the question "why play empire" ? (PS: in case it's not obvious , grrrr = rage )

I agree with the reasons that you mention and that explain why feelings can go to fall to the dark side . However you are reaching a wrong conclusion . There are many kinds of love. And English is a particularly bad language for analyzing it because the word is used even in way too many contexts (for example "i love these shoes " ). I remain with my opinion that the Jedi is supposed to have a generic kind of love : for everyone and everything . And avoid the erotic love which is passionate and instinctual .

You are weak ! it's hard to understand how could you survive the trials at the academy ...

Hello , I haven't reached to the level to verify it in the game , but i am assuming that there is nothing special happening when a Jedi Knight or Counselor character is courting an companion. Judging from the story perspective, a Jedi that does any act of romance should be penalized with a certain amount of "darkside points". For example : offer court gift ---> 5 dark points. What do you guys think about this ?

Regarding companions, it would be nice to see some appearance randomization : at least skin color and different haircuts . I am not suggesting them to be customized by the player (this doesn't make sense from the story point of view).

I perfectly understand that . But here is the catch : i personally don't care about being "competitive" . I don't have time or desire to reach high achievements in games. When I hit the "wall" i stop and move to something else. This is very cost effective...

I definitely like the free-to-play concept. The monthly fees are too expensive. And they are about the same for most games 13-15 euros. This sounds like an unspoken agreement amongst the publishers to keep a standard level of the fees . Noone comes up with a fee of 7 euros . Wondering why ... It's nice to have a choice to play only the free parts of the game. And purchase only specific stuff if you really trully really want . This is good for the customers ....

I would also add : why 3 roles ? It could be interesting to check (after release) Secret World because they apparently intend to try some new things : no classes , you can select any combination of abilities . There are 3 factions , not 2.

What are you expecting exactly ? Sith warriors offering red roses to jedi ladies ? Ships repainted in pink , with red hearts ? A whole day of peace : all pvp fights suspended ? It's very good that there is no such event in game . First, the real-life event is just a massive marketing campaign (let's raise sales for romantic dinners , romantic trips and gifts). Secondly , i don't need a unique day to remember my feelings about the loved one. Thirdly, such an event wouldn't fit well into the StarWars world.

To be honest , I don't WANT to be captivated to swtor or any other MMO for the rest of my life. People are doomed with short lives, too. Isn't it a shame to spend too much of it playing? Probably there is a deep flaw in the MMOs genre : the core idea is to spend many-many hours in an alternate virtual world (so that many-many money is cashed in ) . It's normal that at some point people get bored : it's not possible to keep up the pace with adding new content .

That's not a valid solution. My social skills are ok . I am referring of course to real-life social abilities (these are the only ones that matter . Virtual chat and online friends is not genuine socialisation ... ). The problem is that i don't have unlimited time to waste playing this game . Lots of people say on forums that they spend even 30 minutes until they can build a party. So it would be useful to have "something" implemented in the game for making easy to find party members.

I think it's worth trying to open in-game tickets with request to implement it , too .

My character is a level 19 jedi consular. I visited 3 planets until now . Did most of the quests , EXCEPT from the heroics . Guess why is this happening ? Dear Bioware , the reason are quite obvious : - i don't have a guild - i have no real-life friends who joined the game , too - i have just 2 in-game "friends" - i find it completely silly to beg other players to form a group ! What's the point of implementing heroics / flashpoints when the game has no mechanism to queue for a group ?! The only natural way (for me) to actually play those heroics is to postpone them until my character becomes powerful enough so that he can do those missions solo ! I will also fill in an in-game ticket about this.

Hmm... interesting thread. I have joined the game recently , therefore i didn't have the chance to compare the "old" ui against the "new" one . However : i did experience some minor headaches while playing swtor. At that time i didn't make any direct connection to the game : just assumed that maybe i was tired or something. Now i realize that it happened to me more than once to start feeling a migraine while playing the game. I'll pay more attention to this, to verify whether it's an issue or not.

I guess that it all depends on what does each person expect from such a game. Even if my character is not 50 yet , i am confident that i can't be disappointed : i have a moderate interest for "what happens at level 50". My plan with swtor is to level up 2-3 characters and stop (then wait for upcoming expansions). All i care about is to see the alternative stories , try out a few classes both republic and empire. Most likely it will be just a jedi counselor and then a sith warrior. I have very recently (end of dec 2011) reached to level 85 in Wow , and it became somewhat boring for me : i don't have enough patience to spend time with replaying the same stuff over and over again ... For me swtor is a welcome switch away from Wow. It is true that Wow seems to be successful with introducing new stuff from time to time , so that the players are given new activities to spend/waste time with. For example people are currently crazy with transmog ... And with Pandaria everyone will be crazy with collecting and training new companions for the pet duels.

Yes, but with a separate schedule there will be just much fewer complaints (like people who wake up early who wants to play before going to work , maybe). The main idea is that separate schedules allow the hours to be later tweaked for every region as appropriate. With the current situation : if you adjust the time so that it's better for west US you break the time for east or Europe , and so on ad infinitum. A unique schedule could work only if they manage to significantly minimize the downtime period. I also work in the IT field . Yes, you always increase the estimations whenever it's possible Well, i have played only Wow (for about 1 year). And never felt the need to curse due to the maintenance downtime : it happens somewhere during wednesday morning. This depends on the situation. The fix must be very-very-very-extremely-critically-very important so that in makes sense to rush applying it when there is normal weekly maintenance anyway after 3 days. It's perfectly normal to complain when : on Friday evening i "begin my own saga" , and on Saturday suddenly discover that the game goes offline 10am-15pm. With just a brief "scheduled maintenance" minimal message that didn't even explain which is the critical bug that is supposed to be fixed in the patch. The next time i hope that they do this during a weekend day in US time , so that the other part of the swtor gaming community can also feel the rage , too. It is not fair that only the EU people had the chance to immerse in the hot bugfixing experience ... everyone should benefit Whenever it's something critical being deployed, it's important to at least explain what's going on.

It is a legit request to introduce separate weekly maintenance downtime periods for every region because : - it is not possible to find a 8 hours downtime that makes happy everyone . Remember that the Earth has a round shape and it's rotating ... - an decent downtime would something like 4am - 12am . This allows people to play at night, and also doesn't kill the entire day for those who are home during the day for some reason. This is more appropriate than 9am- 17pm . - in time, it would be of course nice to see shorter downtimes . Maybe 4 hours ? I am quite certain that no other MMO companies own patents regarding the downtime schedules. So there is nothing stopping Bioware to research what are the others doing, and take advantage of the experience of others ... If they used the "industry standards" when setting the monthly fees , they should also use the "industry standards" for choosing smoother maintenence downtimes ... Secondly, Bioware please send your employees home during weekends. No more patches on Saturdays ... thanks

Yeah, please try to find a solution for this . The game was down on a Saturday , approx 10-15 GMT+2 . Very irritating. Especially when I had just joined the game in the previous day and i was looking forward to continue playing on Saturday ... Dear Bioware, perhaps you could also consider optimizing the weekly maintenance period : 8 hours is long. It is probably understandable because it's a recently released game, but it would be nice to set a goal regarding making it shorter .... I fully agree with the OP : the announcement had a bad title . And the contents was not explaining properly that it was an exceptional patch with very high urgency. From my point of view the 28 jan downtime was a complete fiasco. But i am optimistic that such things will be handled in a better way in the future .

That's guessing without having any kind of information. I can easily start guessing , too : - the EU servers are supposed to be located in EU (so that the connection to them is faster) - if they are located in EU , there is already a different staff who takes care of them - most likely , the maintenance team is already working in shifts so that someone is always available to take care of unexpected problems with the servers 24/7 But the truth is that EA can increase the monthly fee anytime. And if they ever do so they don't need to provide any kind of explanation : if it happens you'll never know whether it happened because of multiple maintenance schedules , or because the free coffee offered by company to the employees doubled its price due to the economic crisis , or simply because of greed . Rest assured that even doubling the maintenance team wouldn't affect EA's profits ...

Indeed they should : most of them tend to use this opportunity to show arrogance and selfishness "we are not affected , things are perfect as they are , stop whining , bla bla bla " . But they were not directly affected. This kind of attitude is not constructive and helps nobody. The downtime scheduled on Saturday 28 was complete fiasco : servers down during a weekend day (approx. 10pm - 15pm, gmt+2). And they planned an insufficient period. Then extended it, giving no estimate. The argument that "a different schedule would make people create alt characters on US servers " makes absolutely no sense. So, dear gamers located in US, please let us the Europeans voice out our complaints about the downtime schedules without cluttering the forum with bogus contra-arguments. PS: I make no difference between the regular weekly maintenance and the "special" downtime schedule that happened on 28 . The same people are responsible with setting all of these schedules, and they need to be made aware that they should care about finding a better schedule for Europe in future. Personally, I'll fill in an in-game ticket every time when see again such a downtime planned badly during weekends. I think that this is more effective than arguing on the forum...

I can tell you my reason : because the game is happening in the Starwars universe. It's fun to to improve the Force skills of my character... SWTOR offers me a nice shift away from Wow : i have recently levelled up my paladin to 85 , and am currently beginning to lose interest in continuing with it . Yeah, sure, I am supposed to go raiding with the guild, or do arenas, or farm for transmog items. But for some reason i got tired of all that stuff. Oh, and the ore prices got ridiculously expensive lately ; this was frustrating because i had just learned jc and enchanting to max. My point is that people are different , and it can happen that each gets bored because of various things. It is quite possible that i will get bored of swtor after levelling 2-3 characters upto 50. In fact this is my plan from the very beginning : play SWTOR for only about 2 months and then stop .

Yes , I like it . But my main interest is for the story : level up a jedi up to 50 , and then a sith. I don't have expectations focused on mmo features (no plans to do any kind of pvp , don't care about becoming proficient and spend weeks to get the best gear , ... ). So I'll probably suspend the subscription after 2 months. And come back later if there will be exciting expansions in future.

Why close it ? There were still no appologises for what they did on 28 jan. Bioware/EA/Lucas are offering services for Europe. This means that they like to get paid in Euro , and that in theory they want to have European customers. So they'd better introduce a separate maintenance schedule according to Europe's time (and leave the US schedule in place if it is already convenient for the Americans) . Or, at least optimize the maintenance so that it takes just 1-2 hours . What they did on Saturday 28 jan was nasty : downtime from 10 to 14-15 , which means most of Saturday. In my case , this crap happened the next day after joining the game ... If "the leading mmo giant" can do the maintenance for Europe on Wednesdays from 7-10am , it means that it is technically possible and that Bioware could do it , too. If they wanted and cared.

Geez : it's not possible to express an opinion (actually a disappointment) because the vultures swarm around the victim shouting "troll troll troll". Vibrosabers ? ok, they are a bit different. But from the fighting point of view it is no difference when duelling against a NPC with lightsaber compared to someone with "vibro"-saber . It's just a minimal visual difference. Whether Grievous can be considered a sith. And there were a few droids with lightsabers (indeed i forgot about them). All of them were elite level . This is my problem : a jedi is duelling against elite enemies . It is weird to duel against ordinary mobs. I said what i wanted to tell.

Hello people , I have noticed a particular detail that bothers me , which in my opinion hurts the starwars "feeling" offered by the game : some of the NPC's are using sabers ! I can't believe this : flesh raiders with sabers, droids with sabers, justicars, etc. At least Tython and Coruscant are full of random mobs using sabers ! Wondering whether the people who designed those NPC's did watch the Starwars movies ... The lightsaber is the weapon of the jedi and sith . Noone else uses lightsabers. This is cannon knowledge. Period .