Of course it's a matter of interpreting the data... but having sufficient amounts of data to interpret in the first place is important too. EVERYTHING players post on these boards is mere speculation, but the devs running the game have access to information regarding nearly every aspect of the game and what the players are doing in it, going back to the first test runs. It's basically comparing "three blind men describe an elephant" to a biologist who is an expert on elephants. On the Guild Wars 2 forums, the economist who oversees the in-game economy has carried on extensive conversations about the game from time to time. He has demonstrated the ability to look up exact records for almost any in-game activity, such as the number of crafting mats gathered/sold/consumed per hour, the number of ultra-rare items spawned/sold per day, etc. Their jobs depend on knowing what's going on, who is spending their time doing what in the game, and what items/activities generate the most income. It's pretty obvious that while the hardcore players are very dedicated to playing the game, they are not a major financial pillar upon which to anchor the game as a whole. It also appears that there has been some change in management, and policies may be in flux and the game could go in a completely different direction over the next year. People are not perfect and don't always make the right decisions. But their decisions are based on a lot more information than any player has access to, even after talking to a dozen other players in general chat. It's amusing and baffling to see posts by people who think they know more about the game than the people who run it. You don't. Neither do I, but at least I acknowledge that the devs know more about the game than I do.

I read your post and answered it. I do not agree with you, and you are not required to agree with me. The point remains that the forums do not represent "the players" but only specific subsets of the players.

But in order to provide useful data, the poll has to include a sufficiently large and sufficiently random sample of the group being studied. The forums mainly consist of players who: are deeply invested in the game, are experiencing a problem with the game, and/or have a complaint about the game. While studying the opinions of these kinds of players can give some useful information, it does not provide a sufficiently large and sufficiently random sample of all players in the game. This is why there is rarely a response to most of the common complaints here: things like annoying (but not game-breaking) bugs, PvP issues, cash shop prices, PC race variety, frequency of content updates, and so on. While these things may be of concern to multiple individuals on the forums, the average player will not play more often, spend more money, or even notice when these concerns are addressed.

Enjoy. I'm sure everyone at BW will miss you.

Yep. When I was not much older than you and I got laid off from a job I actually had to go into the unemployment office, fill out forms and sit there and wait for someone to call my number so I could file for unemployment benefits. Now most of that stuff can be done online or over the phone so it's a little easier, but get used to it. You'll be sitting in a lot of doctor's waiting rooms and so on, and listening to "your call is very important to us, please stay on the line" for hours at a time that add up to a week or two of your life, eventually.

Are you a young'un? Much of life consists of waiting for other people to get around to doing something.

i would imagine that Twi'leks are not that popular as a race due to clipping issues and lack of headgear options due to the floppy head thingies (lekku?). It would be nice, but the list of things that would be nice if they happened is very very long. It's more likely the devs would focus their efforts on creating new races to sell through the cartel market or customizations that can be applied to several different races like hairstyles and eye colors. I'm sure more options for sith faces, tattoos for the green guys, etc. would make people happy, it's just that it doesn't translate into selling enough cartel coins to make the devs' bosses happy.

You're #152,843 in line, it doesn't matter whether it takes ten minutes or ten hours, there are a lot more tickets than CS agents right now. If it helps, think of it as waiting in the only line to check out at the grocery store. You're only getting two things, but the ten people ahead of you each have a full cart. Once you reach the checkout it will only take a minute, but the people ahead of you want to get out of there just as much as you do and they're not going to step aside so you can get there faster.

There's a "traffic jam" due to a lot of former players coming back to check out the expansion. And just like sitting in a traffic jam, if you don't want to wait you can always pound on your car's horn as rapidly as possible. Because the more noise you make, the faster the traffic moves. Yep, that always works.

You're doing it wrong.

I'm not sure what you mean, are you talking about items being bound to a single character? This is what happens in almost every MMO, once you "use" the item it is locked to that character.

No...

Both Jedi and Sith philosophies fall apart when viewed as something that can exist in the real world. They are storytelling devices created by a young man who smoked too much weed and read a book about Buddhism once.

It always was that kind of game. It seemed obvious to me at launch that someone at EA gave the order to turn a half-completed KOTOR 3 into an MMO as a money grab that largely failed due to the fact the developers had never created an MMO before, and many standard features were missing or poorly done. It doesn't matter what I think. Before creating KotFE, the devs looked at three years of data on player behavior and made their decisions based on what players *actually* do in the game, not what they should be doing. Most of the hardcore players rushed through the story to get to endgame, got bored, and left. Most casual players played the storylines multiple times, don't care about PvP, flashpoints or ops, and come back to check out the expansions or still play. So they did what every successful business does and gave their customers what they want. The only thing is, you don't want what their typical customer wants. They didn't make KotFE for you, so you're not going to be satisfied with it. Whether their target market is satisfied remains to be seen.

It helps if you learn how to speak marketing. Those kinds of claims are not coming straight from the programmers' mouths, its marketing-speak telling you what you want to hear. I don't expect that kind of thing because I know that eight different classes, sixteen specializations, and thirty-two dark/light sides later, everyone has to go from point A to to Point Z. Whether you visit Points B, C, D, or O, P, Q, you know that the story ends at Z and Z is the only place it can go.

Unfortunately there is a much smaller market for that kind of game, it requires a commitment of time and effort that most casual gamers cannot make. And few can devote that kind of effort to more than one game at a time, so what audience there is for those games can only keep a limited number of games active. Game developers have come to realize that it's the person with less time and more money who spends more on the games they play than the other way around. So they create the kinds of games that more people want to spend money for.

So.... (waves hand) This is not the game you're looking for...

I'm not sure what you're expecting, but that's how most MMOs work. The starting zone is always the starting zone, the end game zone is always the end game zone, there are various players going through the zones at various parts of the storyline. How would you feel, as a new player, if you logged into SWTOR for the first time only to find Tython abandoned because of events from a level 60 storyline? In Rift the same NPCs show up in every zone, I can talk to NPC A in the capital city and quick travel to a midlevel zone and NPC A is standing there waiting to give me a quest. Then I can quick travel back to the capital and NPC A is still there but doesn't say anything about the quest I just picked up. The only MMO I know of where this doesn't happen is Elder Scrolls Online, which ironically is much more like a single player game than even SWTOR. NPCs appear and disappear, enemies become non-hostile when you finish their questlines, and there have been complaints because players in different places in the storyline cannot group with each other because of this. Guild Wars 2 has tried something along these lines with their Living World stories, which changed parts of the world in different ways like destroying the capital city. This mostly causes inconvenience and confusion, because part of the storyline involves going to the capital city (which is now a pile of rubble) and confuses new players who weren't around when the city was destroyed. It's the single player games where the world changes as events happen in the story. In Skyrim when you kill a dragon you can go back there and the dragon's skeleton is lying there - kill a world boss in SWTOR and it respawns in a couple of hours like nothing happened. At one point in the story some of the leaders of various towns in Skyrim are killed and replaced, who lives or dies is determined by the player's choices. At the end of the BH story it's mentioned that the governor of Taris becomes the new head honcho of the Republic, but I can immediately start a Pub character and when I get to Taris there she is. It's the nature of the shared world of an MMO, there are thousands of players online at any one time, all at different points of the story. On the fleet stations a 10th level BH can stand next to a 40th level Grand Champion of the Great Hunt, and 20 levels later they're both Grand Champions. Everybody's a special snowflake in his own story, but because everyone experiences the same story, the world itself is static and never really reacts to them.

Wow. I hope you never have to call tech support. Based on your OP there was absolutely no information to indicate you had ever successfully unlocked other decorations for your guild or even that you knew what to do. Your post was simply "this doesn't work and I don't know why." Given that little information it was quite appropriate to start with "turn it off and back on again." If you're going to act like this when ASKING FOR HELP don't bother posting in the first place.

We're still waiting for you guys to give up on that crazy metric stuff and go back to yards and miles, gallons and bushels and so on, like any sensible person.

These layers of "are you sure you want to do this" become less effective as they get deeper, however. People get used to seeing the confirmation boxes pop up and click through them without reading or thinking about them, they become just an annoyance that we turn off if we can. The security levels in recent Windows versions are like that, I actually had to turn off something because there were multiple levels of "are you sure" EVERY TIME I moved or deleted a file. In this kind of environment, they just don't work very well. There are already at least three things standing between the buyer and a shady seller - the buyer can set a price limit to his search that will keep these 25,654,990 listings from displaying in the first place. He can sort the listings by unit price so that the offending listing is last and the 25,654.99 listing is first. And he can read the listing carefully before buying and see that 990 is not the same as 99. Having failed to do all of these things, clicking "ok" to buy the item is just another minor annoyance that he will dodge without thinking about it. It requires major reprogramming of a system that breaks whenever someone looks at it in order to error trap the .0001% of transactions that will mostly occur anyway because someone who isn't thinking about what he is doing won't even notice for the third time that he's spending 100x more than he thinks he is. In Guild Wars 2 there has been a phishing scam going around for quite a while. The scammer emails random players "This is GM_Scammyname, blah blah account will be banned blah blah log in to GW2scamsite blah blah." It's gotten so bad that a while back the devs added a bright yellow message to player-written emails "This email was sent by another player and not by a member of Arenanet Staff" or something to that effect. Every week since there has been at least one new post in the forums: "I just got this email from GM_Scammyname and he said my account is going to be banned, is this real?" Along with a screenshot of the email including the bright yellow message answering their question before they even asked it. Followed by half a dozen posts pointing out that the question was already answered by the bright yellow text in the email. Then there's "I accidentally deleted my toon" complaints when you're looking at the toon, a confirmation box says "Do you really want to delete TOONNAME?" and you have to type "delete" or the toon's name in order to delete it. That's not an accident. There is simply no way to fix stupid when it is this determined to exist.

It's more like this: you bought a $1 can of soda and paid with a $100 bill, but the cashier only gave you $9 change. You left the store and drank the soda, then when you got home you realized that you didn't pay with a $10 bill and the cashier may or may not have intentionally short-changed you. There isn't a lot you can do about it now, you could go back to the store and speak to a manager, but if the cashier pocketed the money there's no way to prove your case and get the money back. It's an expensive lesson to make you pay attention when buying something. I always sort items by unit price, lowest to highest. To make sure of this, I click the selection until it sorts lowest first, then click it again so it sorts to highest first. Then I click a third time and I am sure that the lowest price per unit (even if every listing is one unit) is first. Then and only then do I look at the prices, never before doing this. If you're in a hurry and not paying attention, you are going to make these kinds of mistakes eventually. It's not a race, get used to doing things more slowly and carefully.

This is intentional. BW wants to bring in new/returning players with the new story for l60+. They boosted XP because the two 12x bonuses were so successful and so they push new toons through old content as fast as possible to get players to new content. Now their biggest challenge is how to get those players to stick around more than one month, it seems the new story doesn't have enough meat on the bone to encourage running through it 8x per player like the original class stories.

Welcome to KOTOR 3.

They're discounted too. You just can't buy them.