Actually, City of Heroes does but only on a very limited basis. They sometimes feature store bought versions of a Very Rare enhancement set (the best type available) but only as weekly features rather than full time. In general I would assume that the real money items will be along the lines of: - Vanity armors and weapons (like social items, but no social rank required) - Special races / emotes / goofy items like the Party Bomb or Holodancer - temporary XP, credit, and valor boosts and possibly Legacy unlocks

To be fair, companies often hire extra staff to work on paid expansions. They expect a significant amount of revenue from box sales so they can push the team size back up to full development levels for a few months to prepare the expansion, then scale it back down to maintenance levels once the expansion is out.

This. I assume you'll pay a certain amount of credits to unlock it, after which you'll be able to do a normal respec (at normal cost) any time by clicking a button instead of having to go talk to the guy on the fleet.

Ever play City of Heroes? That's eight years old and still going strong, and it didn't even have an endgame until a couple of years ago. I personally think that Bioware should focus on story, small group PvE, and game balance and keep PvP and raids as secondary priorities. This game was heavily PvE-based from the start and it's never going to appeal to the hard core PvP crowd, and the serious WoW-style progression raiders are going to run out of content long before the next batch is ready. Bioware should accept that they aren't going to have a lot of luck hanging onto those players and focus on catering to the more casual / story-based crowd rather than wasting their limited resources trying to keep players that would be much happier in a different game. Pretty much every player who cared about PvP has left City of Heroes because PvP there is horrible, but the game still has several hundred thousand subscribers. And that's the thing that I hope EA can accept... you don't get (or keep) millions of subscribers by focusing on story. You don't get millions of subscribers by focusing on PvP either. You get those kind of numbers by having a huge team that got there first and cranks out PvE content, PvP content, and a huge variety of non-combat content... in other words, by being WoW. This game can have a long run with several hundred thousand subscribers who play for the storylines or because they're Star Wars fans, but it's not going to have millions of people playing unless they get a massive boost in development resources and redesign the engine to handle mass PvP content responsively and without lag, while also releasing a bunch more PvE content. In other words, ain't gonna happen... and there's nothing wrong with that since most long running MMOs have fewer subscribers than TOR does. The problem is that they sunk a fortune into trying to make the next WoW, and like everyone else they failed to do so. I just hope EA doesn't decide to cut and run just because they aren't making their 200+ million bucks back fast enough...

More likely they're going to limit trial accounts by level rather than time, like WoW does. Play as long as you want but you can't go past the first couple of planets... hopefully it'll be in the level 15-20 range instead of 10 so people can at least check out the advanced classes.

I have to agree with this. Ranked PvP is a feature designed for the elitists, not average players. Someone without a guild group, voice chat, and every 3rd party addon available has about as much business playing in a ranked warzone as a guy who plays in his company softball league does playing in a professional baseball game. This is a feature aimed solely at hardcore PvP guilds and which will have absolutely zero impact for 99% of the population since no one who isn't in a top PvP guild will have a chance in hell of winning a match. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have something for the "pro" PvP crowd to do, but the high end 8-man guild groups are going to absolutely crush PUGs or casual guild groups so the only thing adding solo queues would do is give more casual players a way to guarantee themselves a loss unless there are so many playing that you end up with enough low- and mid-ranked players to have entire teams formed at those skill levels (something I can't imagine happening). There is one way to support solo queuing... have full teams only compete against other full teams and don't allow queuing with a partial team. That way you'd have premades fighting premades and PUGs fighting PUGs, so things would be somewhat balanced. But if premades can fight PUGs then solo queuing is pretty much a guaranteed loss.

Actually, my Vista gaming machine ran fine except for the annoyance of having to use Alchemy to get EAX effects on my sound card. Of course it was a fairly high end gaming rig that I had built new specifically to run Vista so I already knew every component was supported before buying it... that makes a huge difference. Trying to upgrade an existing machine to Vista could be a royal pain. Not to say that Vista wasn't a bloated resource hog that no doubt lowered my gaming performance, it's just that it still worked acceptably if you threw enough horsepower at it and built an entire new system around it. Win7 is much better while still keeping the actual good stuff from Vista though...

Wow, there really is no pleasing you people. No server merges or transfers? People scream about dead servers. Transfers announced to be coming in a few months? People scream about them not being soon enough. Transfers plus increased server caps announced for 1.3, which is probably not that far away now? People screaming about... the very things everyone was asking for being a sign of doom? Seriously, I don't get it. This is good news for anyone on a dead server, not something to be worried about. (And regarding ranked WZs needing a full 8-man team and not being able to find those on light servers, don't worry since when the ranked WZs hit you won't have to be on those servers.)

There's a very important difference, at least for the suits who actually make the decisions: server merges create enormous amounts of bad press and transfers don't. That is what this is about. That is the only thing this has ever been about. What is best for the game is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is what looks best from a PR point of view. Marketing clowns and bean counters make every decision at EA, so they are going to do things in whatever way their market research says will give them the least bad publicity, regardless of whether that's best for the players. Yes, letting us transfer off of low pop servers and letting them quietly die off is just a slower version of a merger, but it's also a form of merger that doesn't alarm investors as much because it creates less speculation that the game is tanking. Investors matter. Players don't.

I rerolled. My server wasn't completely dead, but it was pretty low (20-30 or so people on the fleet in prime time). Finding things like ship upgrades and medpacks on the GTN was getting very hard and I knew that when I started doing raids it was going to be a real pain to get groups so I switched to a higher pop server (Ajunta Pall, which has a decent population but no queues or overcrowding).

You might try a different companion. I tend to have the best luck against bosses when using a high single target DPS companion or a healer, unless I'm playing a healer myself in which case a single target focused tank is nice. When using a DPS character + DPS companion I like to order the companion to attack, then wait a few seconds and join in. If I time it right I'll pull aggro off them before they die, then we'll (hopefully) kill the boss before I die. If it's a melee boss then the cheap way to do it is to just use your highest DPS ranged companion and start the fight yourself, then kite him once you have aggro (works best if you have a ranged snare or some KB)... then if the companion grabs aggro turn and shoot nonstop until the boss goes back to chasing you. It's cheesy, but so are some of the bosses, so...

I believe that different sabers have different sound effects. I know the "snap-hiss" sound when you activate it varies and the level of the ambient hum might also be different. So maybe swapping sabers would help?

I can see it being a problem on servers with low GTN activity. For example, suppose that on your server there are an average of 2-3 purple starship shield generators posted to the GTN per week. If you need one you could be checking the GTN for quite a few days before getting lucky, especially if you don't play daily. If an item gets posted multiple times a day and you play 5-7 days a week then it shouldn't be hard to find it, but if you play 3 days a week and the item you are looking for gets posted only once every few days (and there's only enough demand to sell one every few days, so some still expire) then it gets a lot harder. And yes, supply and demand really are that low on some servers. I used to play on one where you were lucky to see one single purple ship component (of any type) over the course of checking the market several times a day for an entire weekend.

Odd... I've found the various planets to be very distinct for the most part. There are a few similarities but really there should be, since similar features (like a mountain gorge or a desert) on any Earth-like planet are going to look kind of similar (unless it's an ice world or something). I do kind of wish they'd do more with varying the ambient light and sky color a bit to make each world feel a bit more distinct (after all, different stars should have at least slightly different light spectra even if they're all "yellow" type suns) but overall I love the landscapes. I haven't played nearly all the FPs yet, but let's face it... interiors in Star Wars aren't that varied aside from the occasional massive open space with few (or no) safeguards against fatal workplace accidents to be seen. A certain amount of sameness is to be expected, especially on ship-based maps.

My guess would be that there's a flag for "in PvP combat" that gets set when you attack or are attacked by a player (or heal or buff a player who is in PvP combat) and that flag determines whether expertise is used. That's just a guess though.

Performance can be improved. Many MMOs have been optimized to remove a lot of the lag from mass combats, so there's no reason why TOR can't as well. The current engine probably can't handle the kind of mass battle that makes RvR fun (100+ players per side, possibly even 400 or so) but both the engine and the servers can be upgraded and optimized. Look at EVE Online: when it first came out any large scale battle involving more than a couple dozen ships turned into a horrible lagfest but apparently now they can actually handle huge fights between alliances with literally 1000+ ships involved and keep things playable. "The engine can't handle it" is never a valid excuse for not considering something... "we don't have the resources to upgrade the engine so it can handle it" can be a valid reason but it's worth looking into, at least until they determine whether or not the needed upgrades are feasible.

I have to admit I'm puzzled by this too. Bugs happen in MMOs, but we seem to be getting a lot of strange ones that don't even appear to be related to anything that was changed (based on the patch notes). It makes me wonder if there's a problem with Bioware's version control software or something, or if maybe the code is really tangled and overly complicated (even by MMO standards). Maybe they should go for patching every 2-3 weeks with more robust QA testing for a while? Though I do have to wonder... if you equip Ashara with the slave girl outfit and a helmet does she turn completely invisible and just show a pair of floating sabers? Because that would be cool...

True, but once players buy Madden they aren't bringing EA any additional revenue until the next Madden title comes out. Once people buy The Sims they aren't bringing EA any more money until the next expansion / DLC pack that they happen to want comes out. TOR players are paying 15 bucks a month, every month... that's a lot more revenue potential per customer than any non-MMO game has, even after operating costs are factored in.

Well, the standard procedure in most MMOs is that at max level you switch from XP as a motivation to gear. So the idea would be to do ops and hard modes until you get your Rakata gear and then do the new op for Campaign gear (or go Battlemaster -> War Hero if you prefer PvP) and maybe get some Black Hole gear too. Once you are fully geared (or before, if you don't want to do raids) then you'll need to find something that isn't based on progression to occupy you. Sadly, there's not a whole lot of that in this game since crafting isn't really that attractive as a full-time occupation and there's not much in the way of PvP aside from warzones (which tend to get old faster than open world PvP does). You could try to collect all the remaining codex entries or hunt vanity pets I suppose, but the sad fact is that in a game this heavily focused on story you're going to have a lack of things to do once you run out of story, especially if you don't want to make multiple alts. You might try making a new alt and going the other way with regards to Light / Dark Side as you did previously for that faction... that can change things up a fair bit on the side missions that are the same for all classes.

Have you seen how slow our speeders are? I'm pretty sure a reasonably motivated pack mule could do the job just fine...

Blame the lawyers. It's virtually impossible to do an international sweepstakes or prize drawing without spending a fortune because you basically have to hire lawyers in every country to research what is and isn't legal, then have more lawyers try to draft a set of rules that fit all of those laws. So you either spend way more on legal fees than you do on prizes and take a ton of extra time to set things up, or you just say to heck with it and limit participation to one or two countries. Nobody wants to spend more on lawyers than they do on the actual prizes they are giving away, so guess which option everyone takes?

I won't be paying for a transfer, so if the server I have my "retired" main on is eligible for a free transfer I'll move him, otherwise I'll probably just reroll him since he doesn't really have any raid gear yet. My new main is on a decent pop server so no problems there, and most of my alts are low enough level that it's no big deal if I have to reroll them, though I'd prefer to transfer them if it's free.

If you don't care about Legacy then find a server with a healthy population and reroll on it. I would suggest something other than the Fatman since that's over-populated by now... you can probably get some good recommendations here on the forums based on what you are interested in (PvP, raiding, etc...)

If the people are quitting because of dead servers then fixing the population problems should stop a lot of the quitting and bring back a decent number of former players. And it's not like we'll keep losing 200k people a month anyway... plenty of people actually like the game as it stands now, and they will presumably be staying. Most of the people who don't like the game will leave in a short period of time, so the only way subs would keep dropping rapidly is if a whole bunch more people stopped liking the game each month, and that seems unlikely.

Is there any way to break line of sight? On my Sorc I had to fight a boss that spammed Force Storm and Chain Lightning and I basically ended up running from cover to cover taking brief potshots at her for several minutes. Mercs don't have any true interrupts (they have knockback, but that doesn't stop the enemy from immediately reusing the ability like true interrupt abilities do) so the best way to deal with charged abilities that you can't just shrug off while you burn the enemy down is to break line of sight or use a tank companion and let them eat the first few hits.