I'm on Jung Ma and my experience has been completely the opposite. Because the planets are separated by level, I rarely run into enemies that are more than 2-3 levels higher or lower than me. Level 50s just don't go to Alderaan or Tatooine all that much (this past week on Tatooine being a notable exception). Occasionally you will run into a higher-level player, perhaps looking for datacrons or helping a lower-level friend. In those encounters, sometimes they will attack you and sometimes they will just pass by (in my experience it has been about 50/50). However, it is important to remember that nothing bad happens to you if you die and nothing good happens to them if they win -- so there aren't really all that many people that bother going around low level areas hunting lowbies for no reason. I think that they have done a very good job with the open-world PVP system in this game so that most encounters you will have are relatively fair ones. The lack of penalty means that people aren't afraid to PVP with the people they meet. Yes, sometimes a group of people will gang up and attack an outpost, slaughtering everyone. But I have found that to be infrequent enough to be an interesting diversion rather than an annoyance. Most of the posts that I've seen about griefing have all come from people on PVE servers. Griefers prefer servers where people don't fight back.

You should get enough money just doing solo quests to keep yourself reasonably upgraded. Grouping is not in any way required to get gear, cash or xp. Doing group content can get you better gear, but you are going to outlevel any gear you get relatively quickly, so there is no actual long-term benefit (beyond certain hard-to-get items like orange bracers and belts). You can make extra cash with crew skills and selling the items you make on the GTN, particularly blue items. How well they sell will depend on your server. I've had pretty good success with blue armor (armormech), especially in the level 15-35 range. If you don't want to make things, you can also just gather resources while you are questing and sell those on the GTN.

Something that would really make it feel like an MMO would be the addition of events to draw characters from both factions to the same area. At least on PVP servers, this would mean that you may need to group up to get to the event quests/vendors because the other faction will be there in force as well. Open-world PVP would be almost certain to happen. If the event came with limited initial information, it would promote discussion among players as the worked out things such as where to go and what to do with their quest rewards. People might group up to work things out together. If the event came with world bosses, it would also promote ad-hoc groups and provide something else for guilds to do to bring them together.

If you are running Windows 7 (don't know about earlier versions), you may get some benefit from adding a USB memory stick to your system and activating ReadyBoost on it.

My success in lower-level cybertech the past few week or so (currently working on Might 12) has been pretty consistent with a 20% success chance. Sometimes I'll get the blue on the first RE, sometimes it take 7-8. success after 3-5 tries seems most common.

I also have trouble selecting people. I often do buff people, but not regularly due to the difficulty. I am going to play around with my selecting keys to see if I can improve it. What key do most people use to select friendly players? I forget to rebuff after I die all the time. If I buff myself in a group/warzone, everyone in the group gets the buff?

If you are finding mobs difficult, check your armor/weapons to make sure they are up-to-date. Most encounters should be quite doable if you have current level green armor. Blue armor is even better. Green armor gets outleveled quickly, however, and will need to be replaced often. Check the GTN as well as the various npc vendors near the start of the planet (specialty vendor, armor vendor, etc.). Does your companion have good gear too? Is there another companion you can bring out that would be better? However, some encounters are quite hard and require you to use the various special abilities that you have but don't use very often. Consumables like med packs and stims are also very helpful. If the mob has friends (usually non-elite), and you are going to die, ignore the main mob and make sure you take as many of the friends out as you can before you die. Then when the medical droid brings you back to life, you only have the main mob to deal with. Some of the tough mobs are tough because they have strong special abilities. Make sure you interrupt those abilities as soon as they start casting them. When you see a healer start to heal -- interrupt his heal. Going away and doing some PVP warzones until you gain a level is a tactic that works well too.

Armormech (with scavenging and underworld trading) will make keeping yourself geared in blue armor very easy to do. Cybertech (with scavenging and underworld trading) will make keeping yourself geared up easy to do with blue mods, but you will need to hunt for orange gear early on.

Underworld Trading gives Synthweaving schematics for orange items, as well as Armormech ones. I think slicing gives augment recipes for Synthweaving. You can often find schematics, especially lower-level ones, on the Nar Shaddaa GTN. It's the only place you can sell schematics for other-faction-restricted items to people that can actually use them. Check the regular GTN as well. Armormechs get their recipes from the same places as Synthweavers and will generally end up with unwanted Synthweaving recipes. Make sure to RE the items you know how to make. You can RE green items to get blue recipes and RE blue items to get purple recipes. Also make sure to look for low level orange recipes, even if you are high level. A level 10 orange chest armor piece is just as good as a level 50 one (assuming you like what it looks like) once you load it with mods. However, you can almost certainly easily sell level 10-15 orange armor to players wishing to level up new characters (the choices of orange armor at level 10-15 are few).

I'm seeing substantial amounts of "open world PVP" on Tatooine during this latest event. In fact, "open world PVP" has becoming more and more common on a number of planets, particularly the 40+ ones. Of course, each server will likely have different experiences.

Or they could add "Voice Activated Doors": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7zPr3wDqoY

I find the Flashpoint shuttles to be very convenient when questing on most planets (it's more often than not at the "second" quest hub. That is the way that I usually get to the fleet. They did recently change it so that you can use your speeder inside orbital stations and spaceports. That makes things a lot quicker. The ability to connect directly to your ship from the orbital station shuttle (both on the ground and in the orbital station) saves quite a bit of time as well. I don't mind going through spaceports anymore now that I can use my speeder.

My experience over two characters is that if you do your class quest and all of the regular solo side quests (including the associated bonus quests,but not the Bonus Series quests), you will be pretty close to the right level as you reach each new planet. However, if you do absolutely nothing else, you will find yourself slowly falling behind. You will need to make up xp in one or more of the following ways to get about 1 level in every 10: - PVP warzones - Heroic quests - Resting in a Cantina to increase your "rested xp" - Space missions - Flashpoints - Kill more mobs. - Planet Bonus Series Remember that you will end up with more xp if you kill most of the mobs as you head from quest point to quest point rather than stealth to the objective. Bonus quests are important for xp, both from the quest xp and from all the mobs you kill to complete the quest. You can skip bonus quests, but you will need to make up the xp with something from the list. The easiest thing to do if you need "emergency xp" to get to the next level is to do some PVP warzones. There is no downside to them -- you can't lose xp or damage your armor, and warzone credits can be used to improve your gear, especially around level 40. EDIT: To the OP (who is probably long gone): Many people do find issues with mobs on Voss on particular. Certain mobs on Voss are really tough and/or annoying.

Power is very useful because it adds directly to your damage. Your confusion comes from the fact that "dps" and "healer" both benefit from the same things: Crit/Power/Surge/Aim. I think sometimes healers can make use of Alacrity as well, which isn't very useful to Vanguards. Whether you need crit or power more is really up to your particular build. Therefore, you might find the healer or dps gear more useful for your particular situation. You will probably end up mixing and matching. +Critical will make more of your hits/heals really big. +Power will make every one of your hits/heals a little bit bigger (and the crit ones even bigger). Each piece of green gear re-engineers into a number of different blue items, some that will have defense (Redoubt) and others with critical (Critical) or power (Overkill) bonuses, retaining their original bonuses as well. So it is perfectly possible to make a +defense variant of a "healer" item. These can be useful when soloing if you find your defense needs a bit of a boost, but you look to dps/healer stats primarily. If you don't want +defense on your item, don't make the Redoubt variant. Keep REing the green item until you get another one (Critical or Overkill). From REing Blue items, there are (I believe) usually 5 purple variants, so the number of possible combinations of stats on purple items is quite large. I agree that Elara's weapons could use a reconfiguring.

I would make three small changes. 1. The "Emergency Fleet Pass" shuttle pilot should not let you on the shuttle if you are infected. 2. Some NPC Containment Officers should be added to the fleet. Make them spawn at the level of the person infected. 3. Add a cheaper version of the vaccine that only works on players below level 25 and/or a doctor npc on the fleet that would give you a shot for free when you click on him.

Perhaps they could add a bonus to people that join the game late. If you enter in the second half of the game, you get a 1-medal bonus. If you enter in the last quarter, you get 2 medals. This gives you an incentive to join in a losing battle to at least try and get a medal or two.

As others have noted, orange gear has no inherent armor/bonuses/etc. If you put purple mods into orange gear, it becomes equivalent to purple non-moddable gear. Note that, particularly pre-50, level is important too. A green/blue mod or item that is closer to your level might offer better results than a lower-levelled purple item. Of course, any particular item will have stat bonuses that may or may not be the best for your particular character build. With orange items, you can swap out individual mods for ones that work better for you -- with non-moddable items, you get what you get.

I don't find the General chat channel to be useful. However, I do like being able to talk (/say) to people I meet while adventuring, even if it is only to be able to say thank you when they help me with a tough mob. I also find guild chat to be useful. EDIT: One thing that would be nice would be the addition of a number of "voice emotes", where your character would speak out loud to people nearby. Things like "Thank you!" "Wait up!" or "I'll take the left/centre/right one"

One way to balance it a bit would be to give everyone on the team who received any medals a bonus 10 commendations for each player in the group that got 0 medals and for each empty group slot at the end of the game. This would give bonus medals to those that made an effort but were disadvantaged due to quitters and/or afkers.

There is a trade off. If you run with Plasma Cell or High Energy Cell, your dps will be higher. If you use Ion Cell, you get a LOT more protection (including 60% bonus to armor) and you can use guard, but your dps will be quite a bit less. You will die a lot less (and less quickly) with Ion Cell. If you are using Ion Cell, the assault tree becomes less useful (since it relies primarily on Plasma Cell). You can use the shield tree and a lot of the tactics tree with Ion Cell. For DPS, Assault with Plasma Cell is very good for damage since you can proc free High Impact Bolts regularly by using Shockstrike and Ion Pulse.

You may wish to buy at least some "recruit" armor from the PVP vendors on the fleet (you can buy it for credits). It is pretty good compared to whatever you would be wearing when you hit 50. For PVE, you will probably want to upgrade eventually with things from the dailies and such, but it should bring your base protection level up.

The NPC Vendor Union is just trying the usual union tactics of limiting competition by restricting it to "approved" areas that are under Vendor Union control.... If an NPC vendor wants to set up in the desert on Tatooine and thinks there is a market to serve there, he should be allowed to.

Having the other team vote isn't a bad idea. I usually have a lot more of an idea which of the enemies were the most problem for our side. Often when you gain objectives, there will be nobody else around on your side to see that you did it. Even if friendlies are around, they might not be noticing your name, as they are trying to kill enemies. The enemies trying to stop you, however, have you targetted and see your name prominently displayed. I also tend to start remembering enemies that kill me every time I run into them. Friendly healers do have an advantage since I see their name in front of my character. Give everyone two votes, one for an enemy and one for an ally.

I have no problem adding a 24-hour clock option as long as we can keep the am/pm clock if we like it. However, I'd switch to a new clock if we could get a 30-hour clock. This would give me an extra 6 hours to play each day. Add an extra 6 hours at 4pm (1600) please.

It would be nice if, when you sold a crafted item on the GTN, the price it sold for would be put next to the item in the crafting list. This way, when you are looking for things to craft, you could quickly see what you have sold for good profit in the past and what you have not sold. Similarly, it would be nice if the GTN would use that recorded value as the default sale price when you put that item up for sale the next time. For example, if I sold a pair of level 30 boots for 20,000 credits, then the crafting list would show 20,000 next to that particular item. If I crafted it and took it to the GTN, the default sale price would be 20,000. Remembering the price for augmented items separately would be good, but not really necessary.