On my server, these level 11 characters seem to be bots, at least the ones I inspected closer. I've patiently waited with one of them for a chest respawn and noticed that the script immediately looted the chest the moment the server spawned it next to us, but *before* the client had even rendered it. By the time the chest spawned, it was looted. This was with ~80ms latency, mind. So the script must scan for that event in the vicinity. I reported the bot manually with a ticket but I can't tell you which consequences this had. On another occasion I saw a level 11 character loot a chest and then race off at lightning speed, i.e. the client had been modified to simulate increased travel speed (='speed "hacks"'). Now, this modification is fairly trivial and should be fairly easy to auto-detect and auto-ban by the server. It shouldn't take a player reporting it. In any case I couldn't make out the name, the bot was on the other side of the map before I could even target it. What I'd suggest for Bioware to consider is to hire a few staff members in different time zones who simply join all servers on the server lists in 'invisible camera' mode and teleport around the spawn points of the Ilum chests. It only takes minutes per server and you'll immediately see the 'customers' that we see there, the static level 11-20 bots. Flag them for further investigation and move on to the next server. Gold farmers who employ bots always base this on a sober calculation. They expect some of their accounts to be closed - of course they will try to re-activate them via customer support "help I've been hacked" - and whether or not it pays is simply something that will show below the bottom line when they compare revenue versus investment. Closing accounts immediately and permanently is the only way to make it not economically viable to bot anymore.

I hope this means that the few angry young men who have spammed our forums in the last few days have surpassed their attention span now. Ideally, the beta of that other mmo with the pandas comes out soon so they will move on to that forum and we can enjoy this game here. For that reason, never argue against them. Confirm that they are absolutely right and that yes, by all means, they should quit and leave. Great idea, they have my support. ;-)

I know how you feel. I posted a constructive and differentiated post in the general section earlier on and it was infested with spam within minutes. Most posts started by saying that the poster had not read the thread but apparently felt the need for negativity and attention. Meanwhile, I'm greatly enjoying the game. Of course it has serious issues, such as the skewed faction distributions and some performance issues with the engine. But that's nothing that couldn't be fixed sooner or later and down at the core design decisions Bioware has done everything right with this game. Once the smoke clears I hope we will have lost the usual internet trash and we'll have ourselves a communicative and social community. In the early days of the last month, I did not come across a single player who was not helpful and positive. So I know for a fact that they are out there, they just don't bother posting on the forums, which does not surprise.

Thanks for listening. When swtor launched we had a fairly good community here and although I have seen a lot of the usual rants and insults I'm used to seeing to on certain other mmo-related websites, I'm sure you guys are still out there. I'd like to speak out in favor of this game and the developers and I argue that we need to give them more time to address the issues before we go ballistic. Given the amount of complaints you see in many threads around this one, this might surprise. It might surprise even more if I tell you that I'm playing Republic and that I can't even land in Ilum anymore now, much less quest there, so I'm definitely on the receiving end of patch 1.1. In addition, my server lagged out several times yesterday, I had some interface lag in warzones and I was disconnected a few times. And lastly, it might surprise even further if I tell you that I've cancelled my subscription for the time being and that I don't intend to come back to swtor for let's say half a year. Despite these circumstances, I have found swtor to be a great game and I'm quite happy with the design decisions they have made. I intend to come back to swtor in some months and I intend to stay for the long haul. I also believe that they listen to community feedback and they respond to it faster than *any* other mmo developer out there, often within a single day. I speak in defense of swtor and the developers and here's why: Bioware is not a traditional 'mmo' studio, whatever that would be to begin with. Same as that 'icy storm' developer wasn't when they made the mmo with the Orcs and the Alliance out of their previous non-mmo games. Bioware has created some of the best story telling there is in games like Bioshock and Mass Effect and they managed to bring in their expertise when they created swtor. And that's excellent because it would have been a crying shame if they had wasted their potential just to mimic what other mmos had done. Luckily, they didn't. Swtor feels like a Bioware game, not yet another Everquest clone, and that's a promising start. The leveling experience in swtor is amazing and I dare you to provide arguments to the contrary. You have never experienced such a dense and well-told story spanning level one to level cap. By coincidence, my first character was a smuggler and the evolving story is a wild chase and space adventure from character creation to Ilum. I have played that mmo with the Orcs and the Alliance from 2005 till today, throughout every patch and every expansion, and I have leveled all classes to 85, through the old content and the revamped content which followed a cataclysmic event. There is no comparison at all. Bioware has provided a denser and more rewarding experience right when they launched than that other mmo provides after 5 years of optimization. I'm not too surprised, having seen Bioware's single player games already, but I'm glad they managed to transfer their knowledge. Not to mention that solo questing in swtor is much more challenging and hence interesting, for a change. The player community is hopelessly biased towards the Empire faction as I happen to know. When I land in Ilum I get ganked by an ocean of red-based players who farm the shuttle point for valor. Shall we blame the developers for that? That seems odd, to say the least. The decision was ours and most of us wanted to play Empire. Period. Furthermore, we all made this decision *PRIOR* to creating our first character and hence prior to everything Bioware did with these two factions. We installed the game and clicked on the Empire logo when asked which faction we wanted to play. Maybe some Empire classes have an advantage in PvP, at least until that is balanced by further patches. Maybe some of their story lines feel even better than the smuggler's one. I don't know and it has not influenced our decision to play Empire anyhow, so we can discard this consideration. We were unaware of how the game will be at 50 when we decided to create an Empire character. We had, however, seen the new Star Wars films, as I am sure is not to far-fetched to claim. And George Lucas has decided to make the Sith look a lot cooler and probably much more appealing to children in the new films than they had come across in the old ones. The bias towards the Empire is nothing that's in the hands of Bioware. It's part of the image the factions have in the franchise and Bioware can't change that. In fact, given how LucasArts handles franchise decision, they wouldn't even be allowed to change that, if they wanted to. I'd predict that action figures of this Darth something with the red two-bladed lightsaber sell a lot better than their Jedi counterparts. We can try to assign blame for this or we can take it at face value. What Bioware must do now is to find a solution to this dilemma, caused by the franchise and by us, not by them. And since we, the players, have caused the skewed distribution with our decision, we should be constructive and try to help them as best as we can to see how you can alter the areas and the rules so that they can still be played in by two vastly unbalanced factions. Or, if that's not feasible, we can try to come up with good ideas how you can provide an incentive to play on the Republic side for a change. As for the bugs and the interface lag in warzones - they do fix bugs very quickly, don't they? And changes to the engine will not be quick fixes, we simply have to give them time. Again, I draw my comparison to the launch of that other mmo with the Orcs and the Alliance in 2005: You were lucky if you were among the few privileged ones who got to experience laggy content. Most of us were stuck at the log in screen, which liked to crash for hours. Some bugs were fixed a year later, some were never fixed and became a feature until the entire mechanic was silently phased out in a later expansion. A month after the launch of swtor we are all still 'early adopters'. Compared to the competition, Bioware is really fast in addressing issues and you simply have to allow them half a year to respond to engine issues and faction imbalance. These are not small 'bugs' that could be fixed next Tuesday. Rather than being ganked right at the loading screen in Ilum by a 10:1 welcome party I'll take half a year off from the game now but as I said at the top: It's a great game and I intend to return. Let's keep our feedback constructive. They respond to it quickly, as we know, so the better and more fleshed-out our proposed solutions, the quicker we have the online experience we seek. Rants, unfounded opinions and other spam in these threads merely dilute our feedback and that is not in our interest. Swtor is a great game with serious, but fix-able issues. That's really not bad for an mmo at launch. Let's see what we can suggest to address the issues. cheers,

I feel I need to do Bioware justice, especially as someone who has canceled the subscription. As someone has pointed out already in this thread, the speed at which they address bugs and balance issues is remarkable. It is, really. My server lagged out and crashed a few times today, I still had some bugs I noticed, but none of that concerned me the slightest. Having played wow in 2005 I'm used to catastrophic conditions in the first *year* after the launch. When I started playing swtor right away, as an early adopter, I expected all this of course and they really take care of the issues at an acceptable pace. So that's fine, I have no complaints. The faction imbalance, however, is something that they cannot simply patch. It's the players' choice, after all. And it might be true that the Empire has cooler story lines and it might be true that they have better PvP abilities. I don't know and it is irrelevant anyhow. I'd like to submit this for consideration: You only learn about such things once you start playing, maybe only at level 50. Therefore, none of these things influenced the players' decision when they clicked on the Empire logo at the character creation screen after their installation was finished. Their reasons for playing Empire had nothing to do with the game, they hadn't played the Empire yet, after all. It must have been because of the Star Wars movies and therefore something entirely out of the hand of Bioware. Blaming Bioware for their players' choice does not make any sense at all since it is made *prior* to playing their game. If you feel the need for blaming, blame George Lucas for making the Sith look cool in his latest movies. Or blame noone at all and take it at face value. Our Empire bias over here at swtor is a mere reflection of the established image of both factions in the franchise.

I have just canceled my subscription and I believe I have made my reasons quite clear in the comment they ask you for: Mind that I *really* mean it when I say that I enjoy this game otherwise. SWTOR really does story-telling well and I appreciate that a lot. So I *really* hope that they'll find a solution to the imbalance that warrants re-subscribing in half a year or so. I cannot go back to WoW. I just can't take that pet battle nonsense that I read about and on the contrary I was having a blast while leveling my smuggler. SWTOR works much better for me. Also, it is not (directly) Bioware's shortcoming that most of the players decided to play the Empire side. Ever since the new Star Wars movies I assume the Sith have become a whole lot appealing to children than they were back in the original films. And Bioware cannot escape the image of their franchise. They'll have to find a mechanic now that makes it possible to play the game at level 50 for republic players. I can't really offer a solution on top of my head but then again, I'm not a developer either, I'm a customer (for a remaining 8 days). I hope they come up with a bright idea. I'd really love to see SWTOR not only stay, but expand and develop further. It's just the right thing for me.