Well, the things is, any class will have some abilities you use all the time, and others that you rarely do because you didn't spec for it, or it's not your style. I'm only at 16 right now, but I'm speccing as a Balance shadow. I'm enjoying it as a hybrid melee + short range force powers DPS class. I'm not relying on the stealth, mostly on the melee. Works for me, but YMMV.

I wouldn't be surprised if the devs circle back and do some graphical improvements in a variety of places. I like this proposal overall. I think it would be a huge improvement.

I haven't seen anything. But I'd imagine that if some servers are overloaded significantly more than others, they'd really have to offer some free character transfers to encourage people to switch.

How do you claim them? Or do they just show up n your inventory or something? I didn't see them.

Blue or cyan for me. I'm traditional that way, but I always tend to customize towards blue colors anyway.

Your sig is brilliant, BTW.

They announced the shutdown a while ago, but I didn't realize it was still hanging on this long. Amazing. I reactivated a while back just to see how things looked. Probably about 2 years ago or so, and leveled up a Droid Engineer. It was amazingly empty. All of the social hubs that used to be bustling with activity, instead had maybe one other person go running through every 10 minutes or more. It was empty, and dead. If it weren't for all of the houses still out there, I'd have thought there were maybe 5 subscribers left. Sad to see it go, but but you're right, it died a long time ago.

I think some people are confusing the CU and the NGE, which were two distinct updates, but related. CU introduced level-based combat, where the levels were calculated off of your profession skills. NGE ripped out the sandboxy elements, and reduced the professions to a bunch of level-driven archetypes. The CU angered a lot of people, but it was the NGE that turned the servers into ghost towns. The fact that the NGE pulled the rug out from under people about a week after a major expansion came out made it even worse. Personally I didn't start playing SWG until JTL came out. At the time, I didn't see the point of a SW game without space ships. The JTL combat was actually a lot of fun, and for a while that's how I made my existence in the game, was as a pilot. Later I became a shipwright, and amassed a fortune with an in-game business. I loved the sandbox play that allowed me to choose to do these things, and still be able to fight in combat. The CU made that difficult, since the crafting skills offered no combat level. Once the NGE hit, I converted my character to a jedi, because I could, and played around with it for about a week before I quit. My first few months in SWG, pre-CU and pre-NGE, were just amazing though. It reminded me of my early days in UO, but with SW IP.

I finally caved this morning. Yes, on the 14th. I expect my "early access" will be Monday evening. The sad thing is that I thought that because the early access was already open, I'd get in today. Then I hopped onto the forums while downloading the client. Doh!