Nope.

Keeping up with your gear used to be a thing in this game. It's REALLY not anymore. I can't believe you were augmenting your gear. That's insane. While leveling, just wear gear that drops if it has green arrows pointing up on it. That's it. Love it or hate it (I definitely don't love it), there's no good reason to think about it any more than that. Once you get to 75, the game basically hands you 270 gear. After that, that's when the gear grind STARTS.

The optimal number of alts is the maximum number your guild allows. 7.0 won't change that. If you're a new player, then you're looking forward to Combat Styles. If you already have 8 characters and seen all the story, then you're looking forward to Loadouts. There's something for everyone in 7.0. Be happy.

Prepare yourself for disappointment, then. There will be no class combining of any kind whatsoever.

Self / Target / Focus Target buff filter lists.

Most people will make alts for the same reason they do now -- for conquest rewards. Other than experiencing the story for the first time, of course.

Most people are still confused. You get to pick your character's story at character generation. After that, you can change your advanced class at any time -- with ls/ds points opening up and restricting choices for force users. So, if you start as a Juggernaut, you have the Sith Warrior warrior story and pull your skills from Sith Warrior and Juggernaut skill lists. You can then switch to whatever class -- let's say Sith Assassin. You then, magically, lose all your skills from the Sith Warrior and Juggernaut lists and they get replaced by all the skills from the Sith Inquisitor and Assasin skill lists. But you keep the Sith Warrior story. You can be whatever, but you still keep the original story you chose. That's it. You're NOT mixing Sith Warrior base class skills (including armor/weapons, which is a skill) with a new advanced class. So many people are hyping themselves up to be disappointed by combat styles. But this is great for new players.

The "Free Market" only works when everyone has perfect information and acts on it -- that includes past prices, sale volume, etc. We just don't have that in SWTOR, so there's really no way to know what an item is worth.

IMO This is a symptom of a bigger GUI problem of not being able to hide/show specific buffs from our buffbar. This problem affects a lot of classes that have secondary resources that have to tracked by looking at the complete mess that is our buffbar. I simply do not care about 95% of the buffs I see when looking at my buff bar. When you right-click on a buff, it should give you the option to hide it -- not cancel it. Why the hell would I ever want to cancel a buff early? It's just bad UI design. All of this filtering would be done clientside, so it shouldn't be difficult to implement.

You're talking about Blade Barrage? It's easily the best looking animation Sentinels have right now. Wayyy better than the ravage animation. The flip looks ridiculous: It might look OKish with a twi'lek female (depending on how the leku animate, I dunno), but otherwise it's painful to look at. It's distressing that this is the best they could come up with.

Sounds like a general instability issue, which could be caused by almost anything -- heat, drivers, hardware failure (power supply), windows screwing up irq sharing, bad overclock, bios firmware bug (regarding power ramp-up for "turbo" mode), etc, etc. Try running prime95 torture test -- first do a small fft test to pound your cpu. Then large to hammer memory (custom setting large enough to use up all available memory). See if any threads fail. 15 minutes is often enough time to force a failure, but it depends. The point is to find a way to make it fail consistently and quickly so you can try basically random things to fix it and test if your change worked.

The face pattern #1 and montral pattern #1 are significantly higher quality than all the others. At least on females -- I didn't bother to check males. There seems to be a problem with the other textures, specifically related to the alpha channel at the borders, which causes them to look pixelated. The issue is very noticeable in cutscenes and the character creation screen. It _looks_ as if face/montral option #1 textures are using DXT5 compression (8 bit smooth alpha) while all the others are using DXT3 or DXT1. That may not be the problem, but it seems that way. It's definitely some kind of problem with those textures. Regardless, it would be an easy fix once you take a look at those textures and see what's different about them. Considering this race absolutely requires cartel coins to unlock, I'd imagine you guys would want to fix it, because right now there's really only 1 option for each that looks good -- although using very light skin/pattern colors hides the problem somewhat due to the reduced contrast with the white paint.

Freelancer was pretty damn awesome. It's still alive, too.

Sins of a Solar Empire + expansion packs is pretty cool, too. Sword of the Stars + expansions packs is similar, yet different. Two very high quality games. SoTS is more mod friendly, though.

That's not true. Accuracy above 100% reduces defense, not armor. It's a different stat in this game.

I agree. The animation for tracer missile is horrible for an ability which is spammed so much. It does not look cool, but there's no avoiding Tracer Missile if you're Arsenal specced. There's so many abilities in that tree which synergize with Tracer Missile that you'd be crazy to not want to use it as much as possible. You may as well call the tree "Tracer Missile" instead of "Arsenal". Fusion Missile has a really cool animation. It's also on a 15 second cooldown. ::sad panda:: Why does the the cooler animation get less screen time? Please switch the animations. I don't care if there's a laser to trace the shots back to me... it's not hard to see the bounty hunter bent over with rockets flying out of their backside, either. Or, you know what... just have them both use the same exact animation. That's even easier to do.

You don't have to dismount when gathering from a node. Just right click it, and you'll automagically dismount.

Ahh, nevermind.

Moving to 64-bit doesn't necessarily make a program run any faster than its 32-bit counterpart... Algorithms would need to be rewritten. But a 32-bit bit app doesn't run at "half the speed" on a 64-bit OS/CPU, and a 64-bit version wouldn't double performance. That's just plain wrong.

You don't actually have to get the level 20 pvp gear at or around level 20. My level 23 Juggernaut still doesn't have a single piece of pvp gear, and was able to complete every quest he's gone up against using green drops and quest rewards. Yes, it's nice to have the orange pieces (if you like how it looks), but it's not necessary to play the game that way if you don't want to. TL;DR: I think the cost in commendations for low level pvp gear is fine the way it is, and I agree that it's possible to level past many quests.

I think I see why they do it. So people will actually go outside/sleep.

Is there really a performance benefit to doing this? How is using extra ram for a ramdrive really that different than just letting the OS use extra ram for a file cache, especially with writeback caching enabled on the drives? I used procmon to monitor file access, and I don't see it touching the cache files on my drives much. This is with 8gb of ram, btw. I did consider doing this myself after I upgraded to 8gb of ram, but after using procmon to look at how often it was touching these cache files... I just opted to move them to my SSD drive instead. EDIT: I just doublechecked again via procmon, and this just doesn't look like this would be a performance issue to me. Probably because I'm not having performance issues. I dunno. I'd recommend just having more ram than you need, and enabling writeback caching on all your drives along with disabling OS flushing. Go ahead and disable Superfetch while you're at it, too.

Wouldn't something like google calendar coupled with guild a forum work just as well?

Even better than unlocking them, would be just to let us drag companion abilities to our own quickbars. There's no need for a separate companion quickbar at all, really. EDIT: Maybe that's what you were saying, after all.

There was a known issue in a previous patch where the loading screen would pop up all the time. That was fixed in a day, though.