Let's face it, most developers have zero imagination when it comes to making the good/paragon/light side look cool. Evil/Renegade/Dark always get better looking gear, better delivered lines, and an overall more kick-butt experience. Bioware is no different... I really love how my level 50 Sage PvP gear either looks like: 1) A princess from the planet Naboo. 2) A nurse with a over-zealous seamstress, or... 3) An ancient Mayan Shaman with hand-me-down rags. Wow - the Sith must be trembling in their boots when I show up to a Warzone! Let's not even get started with Sith Corruption...The light-side counterpart...(crickets chirping away in the background.) Zero, ziltch, nada. Geesh, I'd settle for some cool glowing blue eyes for all the times I really wanted mouse-over the evil glowing red dialogue option, (which would allow my character to actually do or say something cool), rather than selecting the light-side option to farm points. Anyway, must get back to the game. Apparently there's a diplomatic situation that my Sage must attend to. This will inevitably lead to her to deliver some long-winded, boring speech where she tells the recipient to avoid anything that involves sex, fun, or emotion. Of course, nine times out of ten, she'll have to 'Jedi Persuade' the recipient because they all know the universal truth - the real party's happening on the Imp side. p.s: Don't tell me good guys can't look cool. I offer you; Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus from the Matrix; Gandalf the White from LOTR; and Brandon Lee from The Crow!

Actually, I have an SSD drive, 120Gb, and haven't really noticed too many issues with load-times. Some due hang for a few seconds, but I think it might depend on the zone and how many players are in it. I should load the game on another system with a mechanical drive to see if it makes that much of a difference. My experience, however, has been that performance issues are usually resolved by MMO developers in the first few month after launch.

Thanks for writing the post - it was a fantastic read. Personally, I started playing and was thinking I would rush to 50, then decided to slow down and enjoy the story. Despite some minor annoyances, I'll be sticking with the game and trying other classes. I have to agree with the gear - I looked through all the level 50 PvP pieces, and they pretty much look the same. For me, having a unique, personalized look to my character is important and hopefully Bioware will have some fixes for this in the near future. In the meantime, I'll be slowly making my way to 50

A sell-back feature for commendations is a great, and much needed, idea. The current system is unforgiving and completely ridiculous. The same situation exists for PvP items, but at least you can earn PvP currency relatively quickly. With Commendations you either have to complete quests or pray some mobs drop the things. Those people arguing against a sell-back system, or telling the OP to simply "be more careful" are myopic, fanbois morons. They believe their precious game will somehow become tainted if any feature, (even a great feature), that appears in WoW makes its way into TOR.

I can't really fathom how other players think TOR PvP is awesome... Playing strictly on PvP servers since the days of DAoC I can`t think of a worse PvP experience. With only 4 Warzones to choose from, no level tiers (sorry you`re a level 10 is no match for a level 50 with Expertise spec`d gear), and zero open-world PvP, the PvP element of TOR seems like an afterthought. This surprises me considering a lot of the Mythic team, (DAoC & Warhammer), worked on TOR. Fanbois will digress into the, `Go back to WoW` mentality, but the truth is there are certain expectations players expect from MMO`s. Like it or not, these expectations come from other popular titles in the genre. Launching a product in 2011 that ignores/omits these basic PvP standards is questionable, and hopefully these choices don't come back to haunt Bioware. MMO players are a highly finicky bunch. With so many titles available on the market, it doesn't take much for them to try something new or switch back to a game they're more comfortable with. I guess time will tell.