I could go into long discussion about this but ... Armourtech is broken because of how dependent it is on Underworld trading, which is poorly designed or heavily bugged. On average when you check out the underworld trading missions 3 of them seem to be for companion gifts with one that is either for luxury fabrics or underworld metals. On top of this, when you send your companion on one of these missions the average result is 2 to 4 of these metals. The net result of this is that any item that requires underworld metals is far more expensive than it would be to buy a similar item from a vender. As you start wanting to produce blue items to actually have better gear than what drops, what you get from quests, or what comes from commendation vendors, you will be nearly bankrupt and rarely have any gear that is worthwhile from your crafting. Essentially, the number of companion gift missions needs to be reduced in favour of more underworld metal missions, the quantity of materials returned needs to be improved, or the cost of these missions needs to be reduced in order to fix armourtech.

Playing a Trooper, "Tatooine" was one of the only places I have experienced that actually made this feel like a Starwars game ...

If you're obsessive about being able to craft purple items, I have found that the amount of materials required to craft and re-engineer your items eats up an amazing amount of credits.

The EGAs are not the problem, the awful communication from Bioware is the problem ...

I've never heard of software causing a problem with a hard-drive ... I think you just got a defective hard-drive

I think the mistake was not having the pre-orders issued in waves associated with the day people would be joining the game. If people were buying their pre-order knowing that they were on Early Release day 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/... they would probably be less upset than the (seemingly random) approach Bioware has taken this week.

It will only get worse because of how they staggered launch ... There will be more and more people joining these servers today, tomorrow and on the weekend as more people who pre-ordered finally get to play and flock to the servers their friends and guilds are on. When the game is actually released on the 20th expect another wave of people to enter the server of people who forgot to pre-order; and expect even more as people get the game for Christmas. Essentially, if you have a wait time today and find it unacceptable I would consider re-rolling on a new server that will likely be up in the next day or so.

Honestly, I'm not that angry but I have to wonder who at Bioware was so moronic to have 8 waves today and then leave (probably) 1 wave out for tomorrow? It sounds bad but it would probably have reflected better on them to have kept what I assume was their original plan and have 4/5 waves today followed by 4/5 waves tomorrow. At least then it wouldn't have felt like Bioware was giving the last group the finger.

I agree, especially when you consider how many people they let in today ... They can't really argue it is about keeping an even spread anymore.

Honestly, I see no problem with a staggered pre-launch, but I think that if I was in charge of it I would have released the pre-orders in waves associated with what day they would enter the game.

Take this as a learning lesson teaching you to read what you're buying next time

I suspect that they don't announce their plans as a hedge against something going wrong ... Essentially, if they planned to have everyone in the game on the 16th (to pick a date) and they run into problems on the 15th that delays people from entering the game until the 19th people will be whining more than they already are.

The problem is that merging servers and creating character transfers to solve population problems generally upsets people far more than letting people in a couple days later. In a week people will hardly remember that they couldn't play for a day or two, but if server populations are not well balanced people will have the choice of abandoning their guild, losing their toon, or facing long queues or empty zones.

According to Bioware this isn't really about testing the hardware (although I think there is some element of that) ... Their claim is that they want to control server populations and I think this is something broader than simply ensuring people are at different levels.

How is demanding that they open the servers before they said they would be online being patient? If today was the 18th or the 19th I could understand how people were upset because they hadn't gotten in yet when they pre-ordered under the promise of early play time; but today is the 14th and Bioware only claimed you would have the opportunity to play up to 5 days early (starting on December 15th).

From what I understand of the process, which is as limited as anyone else here, they looked at how things went yesterday and increased the number of people in each of the waves today. They will monitor how things go tonight and, if we're lucky, they will increase the size of the waves tomorrow. While I could be wrong, I suspect that everyone will be in the game on friday ... and if everything goes according to plan everyone might be in the game tomorrow (giving everyone 5 days "bonus" play)

Seriously, the benefit of a couple days extra play time is minimal compared to the power of the Dark Side ... Umm I mean minimal compared to the benefit of people who have far more free time than you.

Sadly, I only pre-ordered this weekend ... I spent most of the last 6 months working 60+ hour weeks and it completely slipped my mind that this game was comming out.

Having played enough MMO games on PVP servers I can say that they almost always are imbalanced because one faction is darker in tone than the other. I suspect this is because the gamers who want to be "hard-core" gravitate towards the toughest looking characters. With that said, I have also noticed that the "underdog" faction tends to be more balanced as far as classes go (the "dark side" tends to be all damage dealers or the "imbalanced" class of the day) and far more organized; and as a result the good side tends to win most fair fights.

Just a thought about the claims of "But the server populations are low" ... While I'm certain there are a lot of people who were all lined up and ready to play this game on launch day, there are probably a lot of people who will only be using their invites later this week or this weekend. While the number of servers may be appropriate for the number of users they invited, it may take days before enough of them are playing at prime-time to make this obvious.

I'm going to wait until the game is officially released before I pass judgement on the launch but, with how bad many launches have been because the developers could not manage the massive number of users joining the game, I think this approach was worth a try. I expect, and hope, that their experience today will allow them to more accurately predict use loads and they will be able to have more (and larger) waves in the comming days and this will be one of the smoothest launches of a MMO ever

While I pre-ordered late and will (probably) be one of the last into the game early, I really don't see what is wrong with the approach Bioware is taking. Certainly, it could be improved by Bioware being a little more forward about their plan but, with how people are complaining because Bioware is doing what they said they would do, I can understand why they're not more forward with information. Essentially, I think most reasonable people would be satisfied knowing how many "waves" they thought they could complete tomorrow but I couldn't imagine how much complaining there would be if they were unable to hit their target.