I really liked the lack of notice. Just logged on and got the announcements about the outbreak. After hearing about it I went off to tat to see what was going on. Although I did check out an on line guide of where to get things it did not ruin the experience of the event at all. I also liked how it was progressive with new things popping in every day although i can understand some peoples frustration with this it was a nice reward for playing through all the content and succeeded in allowing the event to extend over a longer period of time. Liked to see: The plague, or event, spanning several worlds. The fleet military should have attacked anyone who had the plague. To some extend this was present if you were infected and went to the hanger bay but I would have liked to see the immersion increased to anywhere on the fleet or anytime you were scanned by the military in an area. The rewards for companions should not have been chosen and not random. The randomness was the main reason i did not waste any dna on them. Who wants to spend the hard earned dna and get the same thing several times. The vaccine lasting through death Some players were very vocal about not liking the plague idea and not wanting to participate in it. So perhaps something that would allow the person to opt out of the event. Something similar to a PVP tag on PVE servers. If you want to do it you have to make the choice to join in. The choice could be activating the tag or participating in the missions.

I second, or 56th, this motion! I am a bit of a relaxed player and dont play every day like my freinds. It would be great for them to group with me and help me our or for me to group with them and help them out with their missions without feeling like anyone of use was being gimped to much. Like others have said COH and EQ2 have great mentor systems and i think that something like this needs to be put in the game to help improve the social aspect of the game.

No your right. It serves no purpose or benefit in game. Its similar to having low level orange gear or high level orange gear. If they both have the same mods they are essentially the same from a game stand point. What matters though is the aesthetics. People would not be happy with one brown/black outfit for jedi/sith they want options. So bioware is giving people that like to get into their characters a bit more options to how they imagine their character. Its the same reason they are adding pets to the game, or have different color crystals for the weapons. Some people wont care but others will play for days trying to get the pet they want or to collect them all. Other people like me will just say Meh..and move on. For me i come from a household that plays Sims a lot so all this makes sense to me. My family will spend countless hours doing things in the sims and then they talk about their characters at the dinner table like they were family. 'So rose just had a baby boy with jack. I had to build a room for the baby and ran out of money so jack started selling more of his art to pay for the things the baby will need. Its tough because rose is at home all day and so cant really go to her job at the lab, im afraid if she misses any more days she will get fired and have to look for another job..' This kind of conversation goes on and on..you have no idea how much they can get into this pretend life they have created. I would say the family tree/pets cater to these types of people...

The family tree adds a bit of extra fun for players who want that bit of immersion into their characters. It allows one to create a fun story in their head about their characters. Bob the jedi is the long lost brother stan the sith. Its obviously a feature that not every one will like, want, or use but for the other players it will be a lot of fun.

The gtx 560 card is a fine card and on a system with a good processor should be running the game with high FPS. Without knowing anything about your system I would say it's most likely not your video card that is the problem. I would look into upgrading your processor or memory if your mother board would allow it. Remember that computer components are only interdependent to a point and that a low end processor, not enough ram, and various other issues can bring down even the mightiest of video cards.

It really comes down to how much money you want to spend. If you want a quick easy system buy a premade computer form Dell, Gateway, HP, etc. There are a few issues with these systems over just building your own though. First off they are sometimes hard if not impossible to upgrade. Often this is because the cases are just too small to fit a modern high end video card but hey for 500 bucks it's not a bad deal. Secondly, after a certain price point you are wasting money on the prebuilt and you will get a more powerful machine if you build it yourself. There are a few reasons for this but I'll just focus on price. There are a few places that you will want to sink your money; processor, video card, memory, and mother board. When you are looking at the components you will notice a price jump at some point. For instance the Intel core i7-3820 processor is $319, from here we jump up to a $600 Xeon processor. In this case the 3820 processor is the better deal. Video cards are the same with good price points between $250 and $350. Memory is cheap and you can get a good amount, 8gigs, for well under $100. You can also expect to spend approximately $100-$160 on a nice mother board. At this point you have spent approximately $800 on your main system components. You still need to buy a case ($60+), a hard drive ($100+), a power supply ($100+), a dvd drive ($50+), a copy of windows ($68+), a new monitor ($200+), keyboard/mouse ($50), and some speakers ($50+). This puts your grand investment up to about $1400 or so. This is expensive but it will be better (read cheaper/more upgradable) than any comparable premade computer. Mind you this is just base prices on things and is not accounting for you having the parts, buying parts at the best price point, or being a smart buyer and looking for deals on sites such as pricewatch.com. If you were to do that you might be able to build the same system for a price closer to $900-$1000. In the end it all comes down to how much money and time you want to spend getting yourself up to speed.

Bioware is still a bit sore after that stunt you guys pulled at Fishguard in 1797

Over time you do make a profit. I ran nothing but lock box missions a week ago and kept tally of my money over time and after 7 hours and 50 boxes i made a whopping 17,248k which comes out to 39.29 credits per min or 2357 credits per hour.. This is, i believe, what biowares matrix is showing them. What they perhaps are not taking into account is that 17,248 k over 7 hours of game play is a silly amount of money. Im lv 36 with one of my characters and after killing a few guys i can easy rack in a few hundred credits a min. The only real benefit one gets from slicing now days (besides the on planet boxes) is the drops...but as MnMrMustard and many before him have pointed out the GTN economy is a bit cr*p at the moment. Your lucky to get more than 8k for any 340 drops at the moment and i dont really see it changing much in the future. Ive actually contemplated buying up all the low priced stuff and putting it back on for a more realistic price but i fear this would only encourage people to keep posting low.

Yeh, you could farm mobs and get more 2-3 times the exp per hour than slicing gives you

Thanks! End total for just lock boxes was 269,232 End total for lock boxes and M/S was 323,104

Unfortunately i did not keep a log of that or the missions i was doing. I also was not trying to play the market so to speak so my money for missions/schematics was a bit lower than it could have been. Mostly just wanted an easy base line...or a 'this is about the least you can expect to make' comparison. Things as you highlight can get dicey when using the GTM

OK so everyone is saying that slicing is broke and I have seen countless charts showing how each mission pans out to an average credits per minute. What I have not seen is a real world example of slicing during a game session. As I had some homework today and was curious about it I decided to answer this question. Methodology: for 7 hours 19 minutes I did nothing but lock box missions with three companions. (Remember I’m doing homework at the moment so it’s not as lame as it sounds) I did only Rich and Bountiful mission’s level 33-40 and level 41-48 If there were two rich or two bountiful missions I took the more expensive of the two missions I always chose a bountiful or rich mission of the highest level available and always chose bountiful first. I did no questing or any other activity that would earn me or cost me money for the entire time period. Missions were being constantly done for the entire length of time with no more than a 3 minute pause between some missions as I was more concerned about profit I did not write down how much all the missions cost…I seem to remember I was around 170k when I was done with the 50 missions. I sold the 11 mission/schematic (M/S) drops on the GTN for 2x the networks base asking price. I.E. when you go to sell an item it will populate the buyout price spot with a number, I simply doubled this number. Stats: Start 11:00:00 AM End 6:19:00 PM Time in mins 439 Start Money 251,984 Lock box count 50 M/S drops 11 Profit from lock boxes 17,248 Credits per minute 39.29 Credits per hour 2357.36 Average profit per mission 344.96 Profit from M/S drops 53,872 Credits per minute 122.72 Credits per hour 7362.92 Average profit per mission 1077.44 Profit M/S drops + Lock boxes 71,120 Total credits per minuet 162.00 Total credits per hour 9720.27 Average profit per mission 1422.4 Ok so these are just the number I have after doing this and I will allow you to make your own judgments about what it all means to you. I also realize that selling things in the GTN is chaotic, can take hours or days, and one could probably make a lot more money off some of the stuff I sold than I did. The burning question is if slicing is profitable over time. It seems by looking at the above information one can make approximately $2,357 credits per hour without selling items or 7,362 credits per hour if you do.

OK so everyone is saying that slicing is broke and I have seen countless charts showing how each mission pans out to an average credits per minute. What I have not seen is a real world example of slicing during a game session. As I had some homework today and was curious about it I decided to answer this question. Methodology: for 7 hours 19 minutes I did nothing but lock box missions with three companions. (Remember I’m doing homework at the moment so it’s not as lame as it sounds) I did only Rich and Bountiful mission’s level 33-40 and level 41-48 If there were two rich or two bountiful missions I took the more expensive of the two missions I always chose a bountiful or rich mission of the highest level available and always chose bountiful first. I did no questing or any other activity that would earn me or cost me money for the entire time period. Missions were being constantly done for the entire length of time with no more than a 3 minute pause between some missions as I was more concerned about profit I did not write down how much all the missions cost…I seem to remember I was around 170k when I was done with the 50 missions. I sold the 11 mission/schematic (M/S) drops on the GTN for 2x the networks base asking price. I.E. when you go to sell an item it will populate the buyout price spot with a number, I simply doubled this number. Stats: Start 11:00:00 AM End 6:19:00 PM Time in mins 439 Start Money 251,984 Lock box count 50 M/S drops 11 Profit from lock boxes 17,248 Credits per minute 39.29 Credits per hour 2357.36 Average profit per mission 344.96 Profit from M/S drops 53,872 Credits per minute 122.72 Credits per hour 7362.92 Average profit per mission 1077.44 Profit M/S drops + Lock boxes 71,120 Total credits per minuet 162.00 Total credits per hour 9720.27 Average profit per mission 1422.4 Ok so these are just the number I have after doing this and I will allow you to make your own judgments about what it all means to you. I also realize that selling things in the GTN is chaotic, can take hours or days, and one could probably make a lot more money off some of the stuff I sold than I did. The burning question is if slicing is profitable over time. It seems by looking at the above information one can make approximately $2,357 credits per hour without selling items or 7,362 credits per hour if you do.

OK so everyone is saying that slicing is broke and I have seen countless charts showing how each mission pans out to an average credits per minute. What I have not seen is a real world example of slicing during a game session. As I had some homework today and was curious about it I decided to answer this question. Methodology: for 7 hours 19 minutes I did nothing but lock box missions with three companions. (Remember I’m doing homework at the moment so it’s not as lame as it sounds) I did only Rich and Bountiful mission’s level 33-40 and level 41-48 If there were two rich or two bountiful missions I took the more expensive of the two missions I always chose a bountiful or rich mission of the highest level available and always chose bountiful first. I did no questing or any other activity that would earn me or cost me money for the entire time period. Missions were being constantly done for the entire length of time with no more than a 3 minute pause between some missions as I was more concerned about profit I did not write down how much all the missions cost…I seem to remember I was around 170k when I was done with the 50 missions. I sold the 11 mission/schematic (M/S) drops on the GTN for 2x the networks base asking price. I.E. when you go to sell an item it will populate the buyout price spot with a number, I simply doubled this number. Stats: Start 11:00:00 AM End 6:19:00 PM Time in mins 439 Start Money 251,984 Lock box count 50 M/S drops 11 Profit from lock boxes 17,248 Credits per minute 39.29 Credits per hour 2357.36 Average profit per mission 344.96 Profit from M/S drops 53,872 Credits per minute 122.72 Credits per hour 7362.92 Average profit per mission 1077.44 Profit M/S drops + Lock boxes 71,120 Total credits per minuet 162.00 Total credits per hour 9720.27 Average profit per mission 1422.4 Ok so these are just the number I have after doing this and I will allow you to make your own judgments about what it all means to you. I also realize that selling things in the GTN is chaotic, can take hours or days, and one could probably make a lot more money off some of the stuff I sold than I did. The burning question is if slicing is profitable over time. It seems by looking at the above information one can make approximately $2,357 credits per hour without selling items or 7,362 credits per hour if you do.

So basically we have learned that if BW ever buffs up Slicing again we need to keep our mouths shut. Its kinda like the first rule of fight club...