All of my characters are the victims (though that's a bit too strong of a word) of an inexplicable computer error that changed every record of their family names to the same one. Many of them have become curious about this, and met one or two of the others, but there's no one character at the center of it - just a long, long chain of people who were ALMOST important, but missed out on being involved in big things because they were trying to figure out what happened to their real names. The punchline is that there's no conspiracy involved, no mysterious puppeteer messing with their heads. The error was just something that happened because of incompetent database management.

On a less serious note (and nowhere near the most mislabeled), I always found it amusing how my Sorc was awarded LS points for telling that one scientist that "I want a weapon that will let me kill Jedi by the thousands!" I mean, yes, technically she let someone live who she didn't have to, but one would think the expressly stated motivation of murdering loads and loads of theoretically LS-aspected people would at least stop her from aligning more closely with LS.

If they're clever, they can use those to their advantage and declare that Mr. V was stalling for time while he tried to make a new plan after getting shanked. Bit of a big "if", given that even the best writer on the team has been dropping cool plot nuggets in favor of THE POWER OF THE FORCE since launch. RIP the cool things that could have been done with the Jadus-alikes who showed up for all of one scene early in the Agent plot and were promptly forgotten.

Bioware isn't using an engine made in-house for SWTOR. They licensed an engine from another company, and judging by some previous dev comment, it's actually a really obnoxious engine that makes it surprisingly difficult to do seemingly simple things. They might be having coding problems. (This seems like an odd place to have coding problems since they could just adapt the code that resets Followthrough's cooldown on use of SoS/Ambush/Takedown/the second Snipe in a row, but I prefer to give benefit of the doubt where code is concerned.)

Blizzard is riding high on market inertia and the power of the sunk-cost fallacy. People don't play WoW because it's a good game. WoW would have to be a good game for that to be the case. No, people play WoW because their friends are already playing, the pool of potential guildies is massive, they already have multiple dudes at the old level cap (which represents a titanic quantity of time invested), and it can run on a toaster. Quantity has a quality all its own where MMOs are concerned, you see; more players means a bigger social pool, which draws more players. WoW is huge because it's huge. The sheer size is self perpetuating. TOR lacks that kind of inertia, doesn't have anywhere near the "I-already-spent-a-million-hours-on-that-toon" power, and actually has system requirements. It can't afford the giant botches that WoW got away with; even at a million plus subs, it's still only (roughly) a tenth of that size. Bioware can't count on juggernaut factor the way Blizzard can. Quality is a must. We'll have to see how this actually works out in practice, but so far my subscription's prognosis is looking pretty dire and my Scoundrel is not very likely to see any of my very limited amount of remaining 12x time.

Shoot First has been removed from the game. I guess mister Lucas wasn't very happy about you guys stating the truth, huh?

Welp. With the 12x leveling event, I finally got around to taking my Sniper to cap... only to discover that Snipers are getting nerfed to the ground. We lose having a purge (in exchange for a damage reduction that will mean exactly jack since it only lasts two GCDs and isn't even full immunity), we lose AoE and utility from Frag Grenade's changes (in exchange for a damage boost that isn't likely to matter because Frag was never good single target to begin with), Eng loses having a defensive cooldown reset (for the dubious honor of having its ranged stun take three GCDs instead of two and be avoided with ease by any attentive player), Eng and Virulence lose access to armor shred because of the new and weaker Shatter Shot, and... What's that? Diversion for all? Too bad the Diversion change means that Sniper/GS now hard counters... Sniper/GS, and soft counters people who cluster together for no good reason while not having much in the way of accuracy. Nobody else relies on cover; the one other AC (two if we count the mirrors separately) that can use it sometimes is a stealth class that's more interested in getting behind you. Virulence comes closest to winning out thanks to DoT spreading (and *maybe* poisonsnipe if it turns out to be genuinely good), but it still loses, and the other two trees lose even harder. The previous paragraph may turn out slightly less true if we have really, really, brokenly good utilities that the devs are holding out on us, or if our numbers take notably less of a whomping than everyone else's. I don't expect that to be the case, though.

Snipers tend to be fairly stationary, so if the stationary nature of the AC is his main gripe, he should probably reroll. If his issue is rotational simplicity, Marks at higher levels has five primary buttons, multiple meaningful cooldowns, and an important debuff. It gets better.

I'm not a fan of these changes in the slightest. As a former WoW Hunter, I saw my once-awesome rotation (WotLK Surv) repeatedly dumbed down, and my formerly large and fun-to-figure-out array of false choices stripped away for a far smaller number of equally false choices. The same is likely to happen here. I mourn for the loss of hybrid specs, and sincerely hope that we will see the more interesting non-straight-numbers skills baked back out of the linear skill tree for players to muck about with again. Lethality up to Cull with Engineering for Cluster Munitions may not be super ultra optimal (note: I'm assuming it isn't right now, because it was on the decline the last time I was really paying attention and changes are kind of slow in this game), but it's fun and satisfying in a way that straight-line trees just can't match.

With regards to Act 1, I really feel like the story completely wasted a perfect opportunity with...

It sounds to me like you never watched... ...In which the main villain kills the one guy who genuinely knows who he is, gets all of his accomplices offed so they can't contradict him, gets himself granted legal immunity in exchange for useless testimony by a judge who thinks he's just a small time crook, pulls the wool over an FBI agent's eyes with a completely fabricated story while taunting him in a hilariously unsubtle fashion that the agent fails to pick up on, walks out of the police station unharassed, and vanishes into the underworld, never to be anywhere near the clutches of the law again. It got multiple Academy Awards and is generally recognized as one of the best films of the 90s.

Local pick-up sports do not put anywhere NEAR as much of a gap in communication abilities between friends and singletons as WZs put between premades and PUGs. I'm not even an anti-premade type, and I still have to point this out because your logic is just that bad.