Leaving aside whether they'd be there in force enough to attempt any meaningful warfare... The Vong probably wouldn't like the idea of invading a galaxy with huge militarized factions (as opposed to a relatively weak New Republic and Imperial Remnant) like the Old Republic and Sith Empire. They didn't like the idea of fighting the Galactic Empire and actively sought to weaken what was left of it before invading, so I don't think they'd be dumb enough to jump into the gaping maw of a militaristic empire controlled by a bunch of crazy-energy wielding psychotics, and the incumbent galactic polity which is strong enough to meaningfully /resist/ them. God forbid they actually are formidable enough to be a significant threat. I could see both warring factions uniting just long enough to obliterate them before turning back to killing each other. Yes, I could see the Sith doing that. To quote some Traitors from 40k on the subject of Tyranids: "This is our galaxy. Ours to corrupt. Ours to enslave. The gods will not be denied their prize." The Sith have no gods, except themselves. When the rightful prize is yours, oh will you be pissed if someone tries to take it from you. The Jedi/Republic are people the Sith lust to crush properly due to a history of antagonism. The Vong would be interlopers who are messing with the Siths' business and just victory. If the Vong appeared in any capacity it should probably be something extremely small and isolated that is crushed by both sides in short order. That said, no. Please don't.

This. Not too long before (or was it after), there's a quest where you find what's left of some Jedi who were such bleeding hearts they thought they could fix those rakghouls. They were killed and eaten, and their last message is 'we were wrong it's terrible'. Uh huh, and the ones with the holocron are such an exception. In any case if they're going to do that they should have given me DS points for all the other poor little force lightning shooting rakghouls I killed on Taris. Hey they could've been saved too right?

I'll clarify what I dislike about low-gear toons PVPing: seeing them for more than about a day or two of straight play. The people who come on to try it without preparing beforehand I can understand, maybe they never paid attention to PVP and only discovered it way later at 50, or maybe they're only comfortable with the class by that point (some people take awhile for that to happen). It's when they just are badly geared and flaunt it as a part of some can't tell me what to do attitude over a long period of time that they become irritating. Until then, I'll try to do things like taking one of them with me to cap left on Civil War and leaving them to guard it and call incoming and so on. In Voidstar there's not a lot I can do for them because it degenerates into a melee and having no/little expertise post 1.2 means you're just wheat for the scythe in those situations. Back before 1.2 I started saving comms for the 6 champ bags way later than a lot of people - around 40. I didn't have a ton of credits when I hit 50 (400k at the best) either, but I did hold back on the additional speeders until I had lots of moneymaking dallies at 50. Even browsing the GTN for nice mods on my oranges I saved up a decent amount, and I was leveling my crafting skills to boot. That was back when repairs cost more, and I was a tank for all the questing PVEing my group was doing. Throughout all the bags I opened (probably 30 or so), I only ever got 3 champ pieces. This is why I find the recruit gear system to be unbelievably better despite the price. Having no expertise was not fun at all, you just got swatted aside as a minor irritant. That's been multiplied by a decent amount post 1.2. I don't see how you could be having fun enduring that, because however bad it is for the more geared people on your team to have lesser geared people as teammates, at least they aren't being shown the respawn room as fast as you are. As for current issues, here's an idea. You have expertise less than the total amount of expertise recruit set gives you, the game equips you (for the duration of the WZ only) with a recruit set with the spec being whatever you have the most talent points in, keeping any single piece of gear that has more expertise in it than the equivalent recruit piece. If at any point in the WZ your expertise drops below recruit set levels, you are kicked and a deserter debuff applied. That keeps people from trolling the system and also provides for a minimum level of competitiveness in our expertise-is-your-new-god WZs, while still leaving it up to the player to buy the credit-based PVP gear for open world PVP or whatever. If you're over leveled like I was (50 around the midpoint of Quesh or so), expertise gear helps with the random 50s who come around trying to gank people in their WZ gear. If you don't care and just want to PVP once in awhile then alright, but you won't have dudes with 20% damage increase applying that full 20% on you at least.

The issue is less the fact that people can play as they want (feel free), and more that people who want to play another way are stuck with those people. In PVE, that doesn't have to be the case. If you want to play it your way, and your way involves not putting out a certain amount of effort, then you are excluded from groups who don't agree with that (go sell that philosophy to hardcore raid groups). In PVP, everyone is stuck together regardless of how disparate their little visions of ideal play are. And that breeds...entitlement! Which you are so graciously exhibiting. As a counterpoint: You (or whoever is doing that) pay part of the monthly sub of people stuck with you, then when what you do impacts their experience, you will have made up for it. But no, that wouldn't work either, would it? I guess then you'll just have to accept that some people don't like that philosophy and learn to deal with listening to them. No one is going to 'sit down and shut up' for you - do feel free to stop posting about it if it's just a videogame and thus means that little. No one is going to be happy when you likewise ruin their experience. If you can't compromise your lofty ideals then that is what you need to come to terms with. Addendum: Put your money where your mouth is, and get to 50 with an alt. Don't get any WZ comms, or very few, to pose it realistically for a lot of the people you're championing. Then, do the grind to BM with no Recruit. Come back and tell us how much you enjoyed it, honestly. I dare you to do it. And I'll tell you something: when 1.2 hit, I played a few matches with my cent/champ equipped main that had underpar Expertise. It wasn't fun - recruit geared people had more expertise than me and it showed. When my alts hit 50, I'm going to get them recruit gear because I can't imagine the amount of not-fun it would be to do the BM grind naked of Expertise. 320k is a small price to pay, even with the not-great stats, for having expertise to lessen the amount of pain better geared people hand you. I didn't enjoy the virgin expertise grind pre-1.2, and I certainly wouldn't enjoy it now.

One of the easiest ways to get Theran to consistently disapprove of you is to Force Persuade people. He really takes exception to it.

Sadly yes. After seeing what happened to Mercs (and yet I still run into tracer missile spammers, wut), Shadows/Assassins will probably take the big one far out of proportion. The irony is I don't even find the Harnessed Shadows 3 stack that useful, sitting in one place close to someone is a really obvious sign that they should do something bad to you or just stun/knock you out of it. By far prefer the force potency/particle accelerated Project.

Force Persuade to get a random thug on Nar Shadda to leave a bystander alone by jumping down a pit to get to the ground faster? Very bad thing.

Oh right, I forgot about the TFU games. But the last/one of the hardest to get saber customization options (there is only one grade of black saber too) is about as relevant as saying Darth Sion's double fights the Emperor thousands of years after his death because you can get the little DLC and fight Palpatine as him.

Revan had different Masters, or at least he learned from different ones. He did go back to his original one in the end though. Dooku also was taught by Yoda even though his Master was Thame Cerulian - and that's in an era which is practically Pax Republicana, not the conflict riven time of SWTOR. So it's not out of the question to say that you trained with different people. Different viewpoints producing a more well-rounded student, etc etc.

Normal lightsabers with a black core don't exist outside of SWTOR and awful mods for Dark Forces/Jedi Knight/KOTOR, though there's a weird one-off saber that isn't really like other lightsabers from the Clone Wars show: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darksaber_%28lightsaber%29

I see what you're saying, but I don't blame the Jedi so much as I blame the usual story thread of "the PC is the golden boy/girl who has a destiny we're going to lay on thick from the get go". The moment I heard about that village's issues I went uh oh, I'm going to have to deal with it, and sure enough I did. The idea that some other Jedi would have been fed up long ago and been a maverick and helped the village when it was obviously so close to the Temple never even entered the darkest dreams of the person who came up with the quest line. The spying on the Padawans quest was kind of left field but I could at least understand it, and the Masters kind of had a point with it too (even the guy in the relationship realized something bad could happen). But the village? Why did my Padawan have to deal with that? Are all the other Jedi really that gutless? These guys just fought a war, they are perfectly capable of telling the Republic to shove it for this one instance, and it's not like the Republic could say no. They needed the Jedi and they knew it. For that matter, the Council needed the other Jedi and weren't about to kick them out in their time of need after so many were killed, and they sure didn't do it to the Padawan PC. I can't even remember hearing anything about consequences. If the context for Tython had been different (village way farther away, general atmosphere alot less relaxed, more overall talk about the Jedi being stretched thin by the Flesh Raiders and other things) then I wouldn't have gotten that vibe that the story was just setting the PC up to be the coolest Jedi ever from day 1 in any way it could. At the expense of the setting around them. I say this because I didn't just see it on the Jedi quests. So my poor little Inquisitor got sent into the tomb of Marka Ragnos, and apparently succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of anyone when she returned with a holocron that was, and I quote, 'irretrievable for a thousand years'. She got it by reciting the Code and then shooting some weak lightning at it. Really Korriban-Sith? An Acolyte? Really? Could you awesome Lords just not bring yourselves to enter that scary tomb and take the holocron, or did you just not care because it actually only held Marka Ragnos' collection of vintage Sith pin-ups? I not only insulted Harkun and Ffon for being losers who couldn't tie their shoelaces once I finished the quest, but I wish there had been an extended dialogue tree in which my Inquisitor could gloat over her absolute superiority even further. She sure earned it!

Yep. One of the few times I've noticed you even could, that I took it anyway cause that is my Shadow's job, but it really felt sour. The story generally panders far more to the Sage aspect than the Shadow one.

If I tried to match the effort dudes too cheap to buy their recruit gear and who zerg mindlessly put out I'd never get anything done in WZs. Better to work around them and use them as a distraction so you get something out of the drop.

Totally Odan-Urr's fault. >.> The original code also flowed better.

You just made me think of the Reapers.

TBH, the Jedi Covenant was always kind of weird to me. Not in what they did (it was an interesting plot given how the Covenant was originally established), but how they didn't really receive any direct consequences for it. I guess you can say they got all despondent and guilty over it, but you would figure that for such a horrible act they'd really roll in the Dark Side points. It's been awhile since I've read it so I may be misremembering, but aside from Raana (who became psychotic with rage), they weren't that affected by it. As for the Jedi not being saints, I should hope not. They should show some amount of restraint with their otherworldly abilities like their training teaches them and not be murderers and thieves, but aside from that seeing lots of Jedi who are just jerks or have otherwise bad personalities doesn't really surprise me. That's just what you're going to get.

It's fashionable to attack the less morally repugnant side for missteps while equating the acts of gross criminality and evil which the other faction frequently indulges in as equal and 'honest' (when not ignoring them altogether). Cultural relativism also steps in, where if it's the second faction's cultural philosophy to do those things for some esoteric goal, then all the suffering they deliberately cause is justified because ends make the means ok. This is not the only fandom it happens in. It's a fact of life.

On the other hand, on Taris the Jedi go out of their way to try and help the Rakghouls (and get eaten by the DS using ones for their trouble, IIRC). Anyways, the Jedi are products of their civilization (read: not perfect), plenty of other Republic people look down on primitives, especially nasty, barbaric ones like that. Regardless, they didn't engage in punitive action against the Flesh Raiders, when they're clearly powerful enough to do so, so there's that. Incidentally as to the matter of illegal settlers, I do think it's somewhat amusing that the Senate goes around telling the Jedi what they can and can't do on their home planet to even that degree, but the Jedi clearly are ok with rolling over and letting them do it. Maybe it's Mandalorian War guilt - now they do whatever the Republic asks no matter how ridiculous it is.

I wish there was a bit more actual diplomacy and less 'I just killed this idiot and stopped his stupid plans, now play nice people'-diplomacy, but other than that it's ok. I kind of love how it's possible to play up the irritatingly serene Jedi Master stereotype before you even become a Master, considering the Consular is told from beginning that he/she is so great in the Force and then can become a perfect little Padawan who graduates to becoming a perfect little Jedi who is raised to being a perfect little Master. Except for the incident with those Force sensitive Dark Side Rakghouls - I can never resist exterminating them all (especially as a Shadow). They're just too far for even that perfect little Jedi. Stop abusing me game.

The Force itself didn't want the Emperor around (can't blame it), and Revan opened himself up to it. I've never seen Revan do that anywhere else but there (certainly not in the games as any sort of narrative element people mentioned), so Oneness is the easiest explanation. At that one moment he was permitted to do the impossible. Every other time Revan has been awesome, it was because he was simply strong in the Force, to the point where Kreia saw 'like looking into the sun, the Jedi he'd slay etched into his soul'. I'm pretty sure if Revan could do that normally Kreia of all people would have noticed, given how she was a big proponent of flitting around between teachings and tenets of using the Force and generally disregarded conventional wisdom. Given how she also wound up thinking the Force was some indifferent god that played with people's lives, I'm sure she would have been horrified if she knew Revan was surrendering himself to it (and he did come back to her later, one last time). But no, she never has anything but praise for him. He fit nicely into her worldview.

Kel'eth Ur (guy from the door sealing quest in the Dark Temple) was killed by Vitiate for being one Sith Lord who actually thought to tread off the beaten path. Remember what he talks about, if you got to Dark Temple and did that quest anyway. But Occam's razor applies just as well, and really if we haven't heard any stories at all (I sure don't remember them) of DS users finding out nice emotions worked for their powers, it probably means it doesn't work that way. There are a few other Dark Side factions in the EU, and iirc they're all pretty much jerks who use some degree of classical Dark Side stuff for what they do.

Dude, you're saying they have to prove a negative.

The only real hard line I ever see is giving into negative emotions that fuel the Dark Side. Jedi get all stodgy and hidebound with their institutionalization about avoiding strong emotions of any kind, but that is due to their policy. Plenty of Jedi throughout the ages think that's ridiculous, but it's just an institutional design to keep large amounts of Jedi from falling to the Dark Side because people aren't perfect and a big organization tends toward overcompensating on the practical side. The famous love is dangerous and forbidden thing is because some people get overly possessive once in love and that can do all kinds of things that open you up to the Dark Side. Not because loving someone in and of itself fuels it.

Yeah, and what is the Dark Side almost always used for? Killing your enemies, and dominating those weaker than you (a lesser degree). What is Sith alchemy predominantly used for? Making terrible force weapons and shaping the living to be better bio-weapons you can control. I've heard of the dark side healing Vader always aspired to, but it still used the purity of his hate to do (which he could never achieve, so he could never do it for long). But step back from this for a moment and think about it. What is the Dark Side without the negativity used to access it? Just using the force right? How would you even define that then? What makes it the "Dark Side"? Like, what were you meaning with this:

I'm fine with the recruit geared people. It's the people who refuse to buy recruit gear and drop in a weird mix of under-leveled oranges/blues/greens that I don't want to queue with. They hurt everyone else with their laziness/cheapness and think they're entitled to be carried by people who put in effort to get gear (whether credits for recruit or time for anything else). Notice I don't say skill, I say gear. Because unless you're a healer and have nice raid gear, that lack of expertise is really hurting you.