Not when there's no repercussions for them they don't.

Map designs are quite nice, if not very varied - could do with some more epically sized, less linear ones (thinking gantries and stuff over hangars). I suppose more maps are a WIP. Matches seem always very one-sided; playing as the Republic I've never seen a Republic win, always seems to be no shortage of Imps rushing around and swarming and a deficit of Republic, leading to constant 1 vs 7 engagements... 5/10, I'm pretty ambivalent. It just doesn't seem to work well atm.

In a dream world, it'd be nice to be able to animatedly pull the hood up and down; but a whole set of animations for something purely for RP/aesthetic value is a bit much to ask.

You can't merge servers indefinitely, and the longer such a practice goes on, the more assets EA would pull from development towards abandonment. Business is business; if there aren't enough subs to make it profitable or even if the profit margin becomes too low for the output they reckon they could get with the same money and manpower elsewhere, things get cut. Same with any business.

I'd have thought this would be obvious... Less people = 1. Less people to talk to. 2. Less people to play with. 3. Less people to fight. 4. Smaller ops, warzones. 5. Inability to muster enough people for world bosses or even ops? 6. General emptiness. 7. No-one to trade with. 8. Less subscribers = either increased subs (in the long term; short term a reduction might be tried to gain attraction I suppose) or less servers. I don't care whether EA loses money, but they do! 9. Less new content - idk about EVE et cetera but EA with their abysmal track record are certainly not going to maintain and keep enlarging a game which isn't growing or at least going steady with an existing population. 10. Little purpose to endgame... If we're stopping at 50 and that's the end of the stories and major PVE themes, then we surely look to PvP. See points 2 and 3 for why one would then feel like leaving one's self! So uh yeah, I've never even played a proper MMO before and all this seems pretty evident...

Hoods are fine; just about every Jedi robe we'd seen before swtor had a hood. Crappy hats are not fine. I don't want to wear something that resembles a vacuum attachment crossed with a bouqet of flowers on my head.

I've never understood why one of my starships innumerable computer panels can't act as a mailbox also - how come a measly little metal stand in the middle of a devastated warzone can receive mail from across the galaxy, but my state-of-the-art ship with a direct link to Republic Fleet Command and a full holographic subspace communicator suite can't? It's really impractical to have to load a whole new instance and then load the ship again just to check mail.

I just wish there were some modifiable robes for Consulars which aren't either ridiculous colourful fancy dress or dull battered overcoats that look like they've been used to wrap sewage pipes to keep them warm in winter. Hideous pauldrons and ridiculous impractical armour designs aside, the Knight can at least get some traditional-looking robes with added armour. Why the Consular classes can't have access to the unarmoured lightweight normal robes we see Jedi in the films wearing I just don't know. The headgear is hideous, the robes are just... No, I don't want to look like an Arcane Scholar of Candle-freaking-keep and I'm not going to save Neverwinter from the King of Shadows; I'm a Jedi Master and I want to wear a plain hooded robe, jump from a gantry and land in the middle of a small army, smile and say 'Hello there' before kicking a cyborg's 4-armed backside. /signed

Immediately super-nerfing all the defence chance based classes (especially Shadow but also Guardian and their equivalents). It should be quite simple; one can obviously parry the lightsabre swing from a force leap, but a lightsaber isn't going to help you much if something explodes on your or there is a Force earthquake around you.

You'd think after decades of computer gaming people might have learnt that the word is spelt ROGUE and not 'Rouge'. For those who insist on keeping saying a synonym for 'red' which quite clearly cannot be pronounced as rogue, I'll spell it again: ROGUE

On some accounts you're right; many of the companions are useless - especially as DPS or Tank, and not everyone wants to sit around healing a companion all day for the entire game. Zenith is too stereotypically bad boy traumatised by his home's destruction, Qyzen is a pretty one-dimensional killing machine and Iresso is a whiny badly done to soldier. To then draw out Dr. Cedrax (perhaps the only one with an iota of charisma) and spin him into some 'offensive' misogynist pig is just sad; even is he is that bad it's a fictional character who has been purposefully scripted to have that specific persona - I cannot see how he could ever be viewed as offensive unless one is on some unrealistic moral crusade to rid the world of diversity of personality, but I digress, since he barely does anything that could really be considered sexist. He likes women, big woop. Many women like men in the same manner, it works both ways. As for complaining about Holiday... The whole point of that character is that she's comic relief. No doubt you didn't see the point of the character; she's a play on the stereotype of nerdy males - the computerised companion to a technology-obsessed man; she's meant to be an analogy to nerds who enjoy playing through romances in RPGs, except Tharan is the player. It's a caricature, once again the character is intentionally scripted to be that cringing and that stereotypical; she is the mockery of the stereotype of a lonely male geek made into an actual character for comic relief, especially in a game that will be played by so many male geeks.

The tank spec'd shadow has some decent DPS as well as (naturally) good tanking. My lvl 44 shadow is not technically pure tank; it's got a few tiers of the Balance tree to buff the DPS - full upheaval, for example, which gives a good chance (45%?) of having a second projectile whenever you use project. This, in combination with the damage and threat boni to Project in the kinetic tree and particle acceleration means spammage of always critical Project, which is quite a bit of DPS so long as willpower isn't neglected. The 3% resistance to all damage from the Balance tree's first tier can't be a bad thing for a tank, either. I've only invested in the Balance tree just up until 'Force in Balance' however Besides this, whilst the double lightsabre isn't aesthetically pleasing always, it does have a damage boost over a single, and with the kinetic tree and combat stance means you can become a veritable behemoth of defence. As it stands, I have about 36% damage reduction, 30% shield absorption, 27% shield chance and 23.5% defence chance (the chance to entirely parry/deflect/dodge an attack); and I'm poorly geared. Put into a battle context, there's rarely a time (at higher levels) that you will be without kinetic ward, i.e. in most battles my shield chance is actually 42% (+15% from kinetic ward), and in any PvP or stronger mob battle with relic buffs activated, the shielding goes up a few more % on both absorb and chance, and the defence chance raises to 28-29%. With the Deflection ability for 12 seconds as well, that makes my defense chance almost 80% at its heighest, which results in some pretty good feeling movie-like scenes deflecting blaster bolts everywhere ... That's one of the reasons I enjoy the Shadow... you get to feel a bit more like a movie jedi with the light robes and epic deflection skills... I have a Guardian alt which is soresu spec'd and it doesn't look like it'll come anywhere close to either the defence chance or shield qualities of my shadow; but of course it'll have better damage absorption from armour. The damage output isn't shabby at all either; the kinetic tree has some nice buffs even for your force abilities (especially project but also telekinetic throw later), and combined with the melee focus it works well with the spinning kick, tumult etc at higher levels. I already mentioned the extra damage from Upheaval for Project when combined with Particle Acceleration makes you a machine that churns out virtually continuous critical Projects of which 45% have an extra projectile; but besides the Shadow training 15% damage bonus to Project, the Kinetic Tree further up from Particle Acceleration has another 20% damage bonus, i.e. you'll be churning out 202.5% damage Projects pretty constantly, with 45% of them effectively being 303.75% damage Projects ... I also just picked up Force Pull, which is surprisingly useful (and with no force cost or activation time) against both mobs which use push-backs and ranged attacks and in PvP when the sorcerers are running around at range or when people are running away or after an objective YOINK back you come, spinning kick you're not going anywhere... (especially satisfying in Huttball when you pull them to you from another gantry when there's thin air between you!). You get a handful of pretty neat incapacitating and interrupting abilities; Force Lift and Force Stun are the early ones but you also get Spinning Kick later which literally kicks the Sith in the teeth until he falls to the floor helpless; providing you with A) a window of opportunity, B) an interruption to any skill he was trying to activate or channel and C) great satisfaction . Mind Snap will be much spammed on those annoying sage/sorcerers who want to charge up some horrific death ability and the low cooldowns on this and Spinning Kick, combined with the availability of Force Stun if necessary, should mean any one pesky sorcerer enemy should have a hard time deploying nuisance bits of Force on you, whilst you can happily hack away with that dual-bladed lightsabre and your raft of instant-activation abilities. Though it won't be exceptional as a tank, you do of course keep your stealth capability too; means you can CC an enemy with Mind Maze before any battle to either reduce the number of opponents you have to face at once (useful for group quests and flashpoints too; co-ordinates well with teamwork), or to ensure that you get the first strike; e.g. with your mind crush so you have no vulnerability during its activation time. Add on to the stealth a few abilities: Shadow Strike isn't exceptionally powerful given you'll have none of the infiltration tree, but it'll still do a few thousand damage (oh were you capturing that Alderaanian turret? I was just chilling here stealthed), and with the acquisition of Blackout later on (you effective level regarding stealth is boosted for 8 seconds) you can be virtually undetectable for short periods even so. Force Cloak will stealth you in battle - of varying use against mobs, since they reset to full health as you are treated as having left combat (but kill a boss' escort, force cloak, heal and come back? useful) but can be used to slip away quietly after a kill in PvP. Mind control and Mass Mind Control are mainly the concern of PVE to detract attention from your healer or DPS companion, but in PvP I'm told can work effectively: since enemies affected by it obviously can't be forced to attack you, they simply suffer a 30% damage penalty for attacking anyone other than you for the duration. So if you play it right, that's basically like buffing your team-mates 30% damage reduction/debuffing the enemy 30% of their damage for ?18 seconds? if they're not trying to murder you - and in a group situation, it's unlikely they all will be doing... But besides, you're the tank anyway. Finally, you can't really fault Resilience - removal of debuffs, poisons etc. and a large amount of immunity to all force and tech attacks for 5 seconds (and consider your already considerable defence chance against non-force/tech attacks and damage reduction), and of course with the Kinetic tree you get both a cooldown reduction and extra functionality for Force Speed: from 30 to 20 seconds cooldown and using it removes any movement slowing or stopping effects (so long as you're not entirely stunned and can thus activate the Force Speed); useful when you don't want to waste your Force of Will (the pure de-CC which has a hefty cooldown) and of course in battle when the Jedi Knights are all using their leaps - between that and Force Pull you should rarely be struggling to get close enough for the kill. Finally finally , the Combat Style that the kinetic/tank relies on gives you a huge armour boost, a little bit of extra damage but importantly the chance of a significant amount of healing when you hit an enemy, capped at a 50% chance no more frequent than every 4.5 seconds (50% by default, 65% with perks from the tree); I believe I get 65% chance of 357 hitpoints of healing every 4.5 seconds; given my hitpoints are about 12k at the moment it doesn't sound like much, but this applies no matter which attack (melee or force) you use and automatically, so it's no doubt very useful. So yeah, I like the Shadow; feel like a more rounded movie Jedi (despite the annoying looking dual blade even if it does have its merits) and of course you get the Consular voice set which is the suave Obi-Wan type Jedi, making witty remarks and being very proper

I usually have a ping of 30-45ms, but I have occasions (at no consistent time of day) when as soon as I go into combat, this skyrockets for a few seconds to 800-2000ms, before returning to 40 again. I would put this down to my router or receiver breaking communication for a second, but it only seems to occur when initiating combat (whether against a player or an AI, it makes no difference)... Hence stinks of some sort of server issue :/

/signed Great idea, no foreseeable drawbacks, very useful.

*removes bra* *Battledroid voice* Oh-oh...

I will never understand the mentality of people like you who tell anyone who criticises to go away, or calls them 'whiners'. This is not a gift, or a free service provided by Bioware, nor is it a charity. He and the rest of us pay for the service and bought a product in addition, and thus he has every right to whine, threaten et cetera. If there's a problem, he's right to raise it without idiots like you jumping in and licking the proverbial backsides of the developers.

Running in the open world and all PVE content fine; slight lag on group stuff but not usually noticeable. Go into a warzone, and suddenly nothing wants to work - abilities won't fire (neither mouse nor hotkey activated), clicking on enemies doesn't select them, players magically jump to different places every few seconds. It's absolutely not system or graphical lag; the entire interface and the world itself runs as smooth as a button (quad core, 1gb GTX 560 Ti, 4gb RAM... runs BF3 on ultra, for example); it's just as soon as I go into a PvP warzones... Boom; such bottleneck lag you wouldn't believe. Honestly, on the rare occasion that it decides to let me select an enemy, one of two things happens when I then try to attack - either by the time the server decides to update what's going on it's decided that no, I haven't got an enemy selected ('no target') or else that person magically appears miles away in the meantime ('out of range'). Much keyboard mashing ensues. If I'm lucky, by the 6th hotkey mash I can sometimes make an attack.

Quite a good point. It seems I've been unable to get online for almost 3 days at a convenient time now; I first heard that the patch was scheduled for the 17th, then on the 18th the entire system was down until 4PM (GMT) for scheduled maintenance apparently for the same patch... And now the day after we find out another surprise patch coming along?