HA! I wish I lived in a manor! :D

The point isn't as much that it will STOP spam, but if you start to take away their methods of communication, or at least make it a costly method to use, you force them into less desirable avenues. The same is true for real-world spam. I find fleet chat easy to ignore, but whispers and emails much less easy to ignore. If you had to pay 1 million credits for each spam email you sent to random players, would you do it, hoping someone would bite? If an /anon switch helps prevent you from being whispered that would also work. The email "invoice" as it were would counter email spam. Yes, they must use a database of sorts for email spam, because, as another poster said, I can log on to a character I haven't used in months and get a mailbox of fresh spam, and none of my characters are English phrases or names, so they can't be using a dictionary list either. At least not an English language one. Games with non-friend email billing generally have a much lower spam email per-capita than those without, but I guess it isn't a rule. Other developers choose to use different methods of spam control (such as silencing you for a given length of time if you use certain words such as "gold" too frequently or obfuscated words, such as G01D, etc). Unfortunately, SWTOR's only current defense is the report and ignore function.

Dear BioWare: As you are undoubtedly aware, credit spamming continues to be a large issue in this game, and part of the problem is email spam. The relative ease and inexpensiveness of sending email in-game means that people are often forced to deal with spam messages the moment they log on. This of course detracts from their enjoyment of the game, because, lets face it, nobody wants to deal with a real-world problem in-game. Several other massively multiplayer games have implemented a system wherein players are able to set a fee for receiving emails from senders not in their Friends list. If such an option is set (You could make it a Cartel unlock for non-subscribers), the sending party must pay the fee, and most of the fee is attached to the email and delivered to the recipient. All of the games in which this system is implemented have little to no in-game email spam. Some games have even extended this as far as "private chat channels" and "whispers" (Though the last may be taking it a bit far). When implemented, email spam in these games disappeared virtually overnight and never came back. It also provided a "reward" as it were for reporting spam messages. I would like to encourage BioWare to consider such a feature for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Thank you for your time!

Yeah well, I see a lot of "I"s in there. "You" are not a developer. If you were, you would realize that even the most rigorously tested software might have unexpected consequences when it's rolled out. SWTOR is not the only one. They ALL have these issues, some more or less than others. When you sign up for SWTOR, or any other MMO, you are agreeing to the possibility of unexpected lengthy downtimes, whether or not it states it in the ToS. If you think that games and their patches should work flawlessly from day one, I pity you, because EVERY PIECE OF SOFTWARE EVER WRITTEN AND WILL EVER BE WRITTEN has bugs and flaws.

YESS!!! THIS!!! VERY much so!

I agree. I've always gotten good service from BioWare, and the fact that they are fixing this now instead of when a million players have encountered the issue, is better, as the alternative is a rollback. I'm a sub. I don't care about the early access time (or the endless referral codes). I just want the game working right.

If you read the ToS of this and virtually every other MMO out there, there is nothing about uptime and/or availability guarantees. They owe you nothing, just like your ISP doesn't owe you anything if your internet drops for 6 hours.

Why should Europe get preferential treatment? Side note: It's fun watching all the posts go by threatening to unsub and calling the dev team monkeys. You think that SWTOR is the only MMO that has problems on expansion days?

But not until an hour after things started, after the first person finally got through to CS. By then, this thread was 25 pages long.

As a professional IT person myself, I understand that communication is key to placating customers. Maybe they don't know what the problem is, but I highly doubt that. Even if they didn't it's common sense policy to have someone at the client site (even if you are working on the problem remotely to explain the details in an extended downtime. That said, I stated earlier that most web service companies have an up-time guarantee (my ISP does, even, at least as far as my business Internet account goes). Free CCs, in-game credits, and or subscription time for this is perfectly justifiable (after all, we are paying for a service we can't use)

A single tweet on their Twitter account, and one post on this thread: We're working on it. You know, the same basic ********.

I heard they were looking to cut back on costs so they hired gerbils with Construction Barbie-doll tools

My guess is they found the Server Electrical Quick Disconnect Conduit that the Aperture Server Enhancement and Maintenance Associate tripped over when he was going for coffee... Sorry, I went over to Portal when SWTOR wouldn't work

*Mechanical voice* Error: The Flaming Response Generator Apparatus has malfunctioned. Please contact an Aperture Flaming Response Generator Apparatus Service Associate. Starting backup Flaming Response Generator Apparatus in 3...2...1...

Professional web service providers - such as those that host web pages, usually have an uptime guarantee, wherein a certain percentage of downtime outside of scheduled maintenance windows will require that the service provider issue usually a month of free service to all affected. Usually the maximum amount of unannounced downtime is either 0.1% or 0.5%, which equates to about 45 minutes a month or 3 and a half hours respectively. This has been going on for an hour and a half. And we have had no contact from BioWare.