FALSE. A LOT of Force users across an expansive timeline. Many KOTOR-era/TOR-era Jedi used yellow. Purple was also common. In the NJO era, purple, bronze, orange, yellow, silver, and more are COMMON among Luke's Jedi Order. And this part of your argument... ...ignores COMPLETELY the fact that OUR CHARACTERS are interesting, stand out, unique. The Jedi Knight story, the Consular story, Warrior, Inquisitor... THEY ARE ALL OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUALS. Why do you, and just about everyone else on your side of the argument, ignore that so completely? Oh, and we can deny the distinction, because it HASN'T alwas existed. Originally, all sabers were to be white. Heck, even before THAT, just about EVERYONE in Star Wars was supposed to have lightsabers, from Han Solo to the Stormtroopers. Red and blue only came about to tell the two saber-wielders apart. It was an arbitrary choice of colors. Green was only introduced because the first major action sequence in Return of the Jedi featured many shots with a blue sky background, making the blue blade blend in. If Vader were fighting on a world with a red sky, his blade color probably would've changed, too. And the INDISPUTABLE fact of the OT is that there are only 3 Force-wielders who use sabers on-screen in the ENTIRE original trilogy. One of them gets a hand-me-down lightsaber, then makes his own when he loses the first. So of course there won't be MORE than three colors. How could there be? There's nobody around to display them! It's pretty close-minded to think that "Only 3 guys used sabers so only 3 colors were shown, so back when there were thousands of guys using sabers, they must only have used 3 colors."

Did YOU read the OP? He cites only 3 Jedi/Sith who have off-color sabers. Mace Windu's purple saber is rare FOR THE MOVIES. Pre-Saga and post-Saga, purple is a frequent color found amongst saber-users. Exar Kun crafted an extraordinary lightsaber as he was a particularly gifted individual, sure, but that brings me to my next point... ...Did you pay attention to the fact that our characters, storywise, are rare? The single-player aspect of this game, the class stories, have our characters as exceptional. So we've got as much right to a choice of crystal color as Exar Kun, Mace Windu, Darth Krayt, or any other examples. Our characters are the Exar Kuns, Darth Revans, Zayne Carricks, Luke Skywalkers, Kyp Durrons, Mara Jades, etc of SWTOR. Classwise, we're all unique and rare, even if there's 50 of us on the fleet at once, showing off our multicolored sabers. The EU supports choice, period. If you want to focus on the MMO part of this game instead of the single-player "most powerful Jedi Knight/Sith Warrior in years" angle, the EU still supports it. Luke Skywalker's NJO has total color freedom; but, as most tales of post-ROTJ Jedi are in book form, there's little visual reference. But purple, orange, etc are all common. Blue & green are still the most popular, but others are common. Same with KOTOR, same with just about every era aside from Saga-era and LEGACY-era, but in LEGACY we don't see a whole lot of Jedi (3 that we do see are Skywalkers, and two more are from Saga-era stories and probably never bothered switching from Old Jedi Order colors to new ones when they joined the NJO), and with Krayt's guidance the One Sith may in fact be restricted to red, tho Krayt uses his old green saber along with a red when he's 'reborn'.

Players aren't spitting on the lore by choosing their own color lightsaber blades. The lore is the Expanded Universe, not the narrow range of the movies.

It's easy enough to dislike Dark Empire, especially when you factor in DE2 and Empire's End. There's so much more 'lore-breaking' going on in the DE series than anything we see in TOR... Some sane people may dislike TOTJ or Thrawn because they're those "Star Wars fans" who think the movies are all there is*, and everything else is a profit-grab from fanfic authors/artists (never mind that the Prequels were the biggest profit-grab and fanfic-ish stories in the whole of Star Wars). The only flak I give the Thrawn trilogy is Zahn's obsession with technology. It seemed like every other page in HTTE had some reference to the 'beckon call' which was a remote control for a starship... and the description of the shieldships, mole miners, the Katana fleet, slave drives, etc. TOTJ's art was uneven, but I still enjoyed it. I was just throwing out examples of EU, good AND bad, that people might rather ignore. *and yet, such fans will play SWTOR and tell us we shouldn't have X or Y because it wasn't in the movies

Yeah, you can have your own 'personal' canon, choosing to ignore stuff you don't like... like The Crystal Star, or Children of the Jedi, or Dark Empire maybe... but it's all still canon as far as the Lucas-owned companies are concerned. Lucas himself only considers the movies and The Clone Wars canon, which means this game is right out along with Thrawn, Yuuzhan Vong, Darth Caedus, Ulic Qel-Droma, Zayne Carrick, Darth Revan, all of that. It's an EU game, EU 'rules' should apply.

You'd only have to roll checks if you stepped out of line with the established rules of the game's setting. This game's setting is IN THE EXPANDED UNIVERSE where color is a CHOICE not a REQUIREMENT. All those Sith in the "Deceived" trailer? Run-of-the-mill, aside from Malgus. Malgus CHOSE red. So did all those other Sith. Your Sith Warrior is not a run-of-the-mill Sith, he's remarkable. He should be able to choose red if he desires, EVEN IF he chooses light-side. He should also be able to choose any other color he wants, because there were no restrictions on what colors COULD and COULDN'T be used over 1000 years before the films!

Why not? If you really need a story reason, he could claim he took it off some Jedi he was ordered to hunt down and slaughter... when he catches up with the Jedi, he swaps sabers or asks for the crystal from the Jedi's lightsaber before letting him go, then returns to the Sith and brags about his trophy. The Sith would have to hide his light-side tendencies... but NOT the saber color. Again, Exar Kun--who our player characters are fully as outstanding as--had a blue saber throughout his career. This is an MMO, but it has single-player stories running through it. As I've said before, it may be 'immersion breaking' or just silly to essentially have 20 Revans gathered around each other on the Fleet, but that's what our stories tell us is true. You need to learn to ignore the fact that every single player is a super-awesome-prodigy in the game, just like you ignore the fact that lightsabers don't lop off limbs or heads with one stroke, or that we can get resurrected if we die, or that we can be deep in a cavern or basement and get a shuttle to come pick us up. In our class stories, we are awesome. So there's no reason we shouldn't be able to choose our own saber colors.

It IS grounded in story: the EU's story. Like it or not, and it's been repeated often here, SWTOR would not exist without the Expanded Universe of Star Wars, and in the Expanded Universe of dozens of books and comics, saber colors have been about CHOICE for decades. Re: the "Jedi are light, Sith are dark, that's all that defines them" part of the debate, I disagree: you can have Dark Jedi that aren't Sith, and there's plenty of examples: Tol Skorr, Asajj Ventress, Sora Bulq, Brakiss, Desann, Jerec, Kibh Jeen, and more. Light-side Sith is different, but here's the thing: it's OUR story. All the Force-users particularly are said to be EXCEPTIONAL examples of their class. Taking an exceptional Sith but having him turn out to be a 'good' guy, of sorts? That's perfectly fine. If there was a Star Wars novel published by Del Rey about a young, powerful Sith who was trained in the Sith Order of whatever era he's in, but never fully embraced the dark side and learned to hide his adherence to the light side, and maybe tries to change his order/government from within...SW fans would probably enjoy that story. Well, SWTOR is that book, if you choose to play a light-side Sith.

You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I like that quote, but it's not a quote from George. It's from Supershadow, who is an internet troll who likes to rile up Star Wars fans by posting 'facts' and 'interviews' and 'news' on his site. But the spirit of the quote is still true: we only see 3 people using sabers in the OT (aside from Han, of course), and so we only see 3 colors. And we only saw that 3rd color because blue didn't look so good against the blue sky of 'Tatooine'. If George wasn't so set in his ways by the time of the PT, he may have realized that the reason he didn't show us any yellow, purple, or orange sabers in the OT is because THERE WAS NOBODY AROUND TO USE THEM.

We're quoting KOTOR 1 & 2 because Bioware was involved in them and it sets a precedent. In both games, we're playing exceptional characters. Guess what? WE'RE DOING THE SAME IN TOR! Whether we RP our character that way or not with OTHER players isn't the issue--in our class stories, the 4 Force-wielding classes ARE exceptional. The EU springs from the movies, that's true... and much of it sprung from the original 3 movies, before George had decades to let his 'vision' get altered by his experiences and changing tastes. "Oh, no, Greedo was ALWAYS meant to fire first, ALWAYS." If you buy that, you're delusional. But I digress, the point is the EU springs from the movies, and TOR springs FROM THE EU. It's an EU game. Its story is basically continuing the one begun in KOTORs 1 & 2. If you go downtown and ask 10 people what color saber a Sith uses, of course you'll hear 'red', because none of them know about Exar Kun or Darth Caedus or Darth Krayt. But a lot of us who play this game, we DO know about them, and many of us care, too--if not about the specific character, then about the fact that there's ample evidence in the EU that saber color ultimately is a CHOICE, not restricted to faction OR alignment.

I like your point, but one other Yoda-person WAS shown in the movies: Yaddle, a female of Yoda's species, was seen on the Jedi Council in Episode I. But that was it

You're exactly right except for the part about how most of the novels in the EU aren't considered canon. The only EU novels that aren't considered canon are, maybe, the 'young reader' series from the early 90s with titles like 'The Glove of Darth Vader' and 'Mission to Mount Yoda'. That's it. Thrawn Trilogy, Truce at Bakura, NJO, LOTF, FOTJ, the Darth Bane books, TOR books, KOTOR comics, KOTOR games, and more, all canon. Even--tho it pains me to admit it--The Crystal Star. Ugh. If your definition of 'canon' is 'what George Lucas himself considers canon', then cancel your subscription RIGHT NOW because this game is absolutely NOT canon under those terms. If your definition of 'canon' is what LFL, LucasArts, Lucas Licensing, etc all considers canon, as managed by Leland Chee (aka The Guy They Hired Specifically To Deal With Continuity And Canon Matters), then this game IS canon, and the larger scope of the EU--in which the game is, again, FIRMLY set--ranks higher than the movie-era traditions, taboos, regulations and rules of the Jedi and Sith orders. If you want movie-style restrictions on saber colors, go petition LucasArts to support a Saga-era game for you. Quit trying to apply movie restrictions to an era 3000 years before the movies where it's been established FOR DECADES that movie restrictions don't apply.

You should be pleasantly surprised, then, as this MMO actually IS adhering to Star Wars lore. The lore of the Expanded Universe. Of which the game is a part of, and owes its entire existence to. Without the EU...if all we had were the movies...Coruscant would have a completely different name, Pureblood Sith wouldn't exist (nor would the concept of the Sith as a species, in all likelihood), Rattaki wouldn't exist, nor Chiss. And most importantly, this game wouldn't exist, because according to George, all Star Wars is and has ever been (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, from his own mouth & mind) is the rise, fall, and redemption of Anakin Skywalker. Anything before Episode I and after Episode VI just isn't there.

I don't have a problem seeing Jedi running around with red sabers, its a different time period! So whats your point? The LORE you keep citing fully supports a wide variety of colors on BOTH sides. TOR is firmly set in the EU, NOT in the movies. The EU, which existed long before the Prequels and the idea that green & blue were the only common Jedi colors and red was the predominant Sith color. The OT doesn't count for saber colors. No, it really doesn't. We see THREE saber-wielding Force-users in the OT: Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Darth Vader. Red & blue was arbitrarily assigned in '76/'77 for ANH to help distinguish the white blades in combat. Someone probably thought "Red kinda seems evil, like blood... make Darth's blade red." (remember, back then 'Darth' was a name, not a title). That was it. It could've easily gone the other way, and Luke & Obi-Wan's sabers could've been red. Or they could've been yellow, like the saber on the first Obi-Wan action figure card-photo (or the Tatooine Luke and Bespin Fatigues Luke action figures). And Luke's saber in ROTJ was merely the result of a necessary color change. Even if they'd kept it blue, one could EASILY argue that Luke made his saber blue because that's the only color he knew--I doubt he'd make his blade red, the color of Vader's. Obi-Wan's instructions may only have accounted for a blue blade, as Obi-Wan's own saber--which Luke's was modeled after--had a blue blade. The EU that really got going in '91 very rightly ran with the idea that sabers could be different colors. WEG had outlined a lot of lightsaber details in their RPG books, and I don't think color specifics were outlined for colors. Why wouldn't there be more colors around, when there were more Jedi and Dark Jedi and Sith Lords? Bottom line is the LORE of Star Wars AS A WHOLE supports variety for saber colors across factions and alignments. If you want Saga-based restrictions, petition for a game set during the Clone Wars or Dark Times. And Luke may be the most powerful Jedi ever, but the stories we play in TOR tell us that WE are the most powerful/promising Jedi/Sith of our time, basically. It loses its luster when you have 100+ exceptional people online on the Fleet on a busy night, but the fact remains: our characters are meant to be extraordinary. BEYOND the norm that is the army of Jedi and Sith fighting in the Jedi Temple in the first trailer.

He's bringing in lore from the movies only, when a lot of players are fans of more Star Wars than just the films. "Iconic" in this case just means "something recognizable for people who claim to like Star Wars, but have never heard of Exar Kun or Darth Caedus."

Red/blue used to mean something, but they never should have in the first place. Sith 'tend' to use red. But the Sith players shouldn't HAVE to. They're exceptional. Jedi 'tend' to use green & blue, but again, Jedi players are told right off the bat that they're exceptional. Your comments on WoW... are you one of the ones who was upset when mount levels were lowered from 40 to 20, and prices reduced? When flying became a level 60 thing instead of level 70? I've seen people complain mightily about mounts in that game. "Mounts used to MEAN something! Back in Vanilla, you had to wait until 60 to get an epic mount, and not every 60 had one because they were so expensive! You had to really grind & grind to earn enough money for it, it was something SPECIAL!" No, it wasn't... it was a way of getting around the world faster. Running around on foot for 40 levels didn't make anyone a better player. It made them tired of running. When they finally got a mount, they were so relieved at moving faster that they transformed it into a status symbol. "Ha! Yes! I have a mount! I can move faster than you broke lowbies! Whee!" It's like a virtual runner's high, it's a trick of the brain. It's endorphins being released telling you you feel GREAT, but really you're just exhausted from going at it on foot for so long, your brain is shielding you from the reality. People who talk about how WoW was 'ruined' by whiners forget how many awful things were in WoW at the start. What was so fantastic about having to take flight paths step-by-step so you had to stay parked at your computer while traveling from Darkshore to Gadgetzan, dismounting at EVERY stop on the way and clicking the new flight master again to take the next leg of the journey? Sure, it meant you were likely to see the sights a bit more... but so what? Once you've done it ONCE, you may just wanna make it a one-stop trip and alt-tab out or go get a sandwich, since it's a LONG trip. There's lots of examples like that, ideas that were bad but early players, hardcore players, got so used to them, they felt it was 'how things are supposed to be'. Not everything in a game at launch is automatically 'better' than what gets revised later.

Except all those SW fans who have enjoyed the movies, novels, comics, and story-driven games that are all official Star Wars for decades! And don't bring George's personal opinions about his own universe into it to defend 'movie-only lore, novels & comics don't count', as his vision of the universe DOES NOT include TOR.

<hopefully someone's written a message between my last and this one> If there were a story reason for the colors, I'd be up for that. KOTOR2 let us choose our color in a conversation with Atton Rand, though I think the Exile initially starts with blue/green/yellow like Revan in KOTOR, but then retrieves her original saber (in whatever exotic color you picked) from Atris or something. Been awhile, apologies for any errors in my references there! Luke chose green because his blue blade blended in with the Tatooine sky One story retcon I know a lot of fans, including myself, are behind is for Luke's green crystal to actually be Qui-Gon's. It'd be nigh-impossible to convey in the film itself, particularly since the saber-tinkering scene is a deleted one, but it'd be a fun bit to retcon into the lore, further tying the trilogies together in non-ridiculous ways, and letting Qui-Gon reach out to Luke in a way, considering he was never mentioned (nor invented) back in the day, yet now is the one responsible for finding Anakin & deciding to train him, in addition to teaching Obi-Wan and Yoda the trick of immortality. Obi-Wan could easily have kept just the crystal as a memento of his old master, and it could've been tucked away with his manual on lightsaber construction that Luke used. But back to the story... it's rather abrupt when the Jedi Knight constructs his saber in the game (I forget whether the Consular is sent specifically to construct it or to another mission near the Forge, first). You take down Bengel, Master Din gives you the raw mats, and you put it together. Kinda 'blah'. A bit more choice would've been nice, like the option of choosing from among a few colors. Not as exotic as the Exile's choices (viridian, vermilion, etc--those should be high-level crystals, tho!), but if you had orange, blue, green, purple, yellow, and red to choose from--with a remark from Orgus unique to each color choice--that'd be pretty nice. I can picture him saying something like "Red, eh? You know that's traditionally a color reserved for the Sith. I hope you realize you're walking a dangerous line...and that you don't cross it, for all our sakes. But if the Force is telling you red, red it is." Yellow may be problematic, as you can get a yellow crystal from the two lovers if you so choose... maybe the conversation choice would acknowledge that you already had one if that was the case.

This is an EU game, based on a previous EU game, set firmly in the EU outside the films as it takes place over 3000 years BEFORE the films. And there's a lot of Star Wars fans who--WOW, WHAT A CONCEPT!--actually LIKE having more Star Wars to enjoy, in the form of the EU! We like this galaxy! We like Jedi and Sith and smugglers and pilots and aliens and bounty hunters! So why should Bioware shoot themselves in the foot by limiting this game to what's shown in the 6 films? Goodbye Selkath, Cathar, Chiss, Sith Pureblood, Rattaki, and more. You guys weren't in the films, you have to go. Goodbye Balmorra, Belsavis, Taris, Tython, Korriban, Dromund Kaas, and Ilum. Goodbye orange and yellow color crystals. Star Wars lore is far more extensive than JUST the films. In the originals, he gave the bad guy red and the good guy blue just so there'd be some visual difference on-screen. Not because blue signified 'good' and red signified 'bad'. It was just for difference. Otherwise we'd have had two white sabers clashing in the halls of the Death Star, and it could get muddled... like having two blue blades clash on Mustafar in Episode 3. Green was ONLY picked because of an issue with the background sky. There's a heavy bit of 'lore' to base rules of a game around. "Oh, crap, this blade kinda blends into the sky here... wanna make it yellow? Those Luke action figures have yellow." "Might blend in too much with the sand." "You might be right... how about green?" "Eh, sure." Forget 'movie-only lore'. Star Wars is bigger than that. And it's a COMPLETELY different era.

One problem with this argument is that the restrictions were NEVER hard-coded the way you described. They were hard-coded to alignment, not faction. And I think Empire players would be up in arms if suddenly they could ONLY use red for most of the game. There's no iconic 'second color' for Sith; more Jedi than Sith probably used orange sabers in the EU, same with purple and yellow. Again, our characters' stories tell us we're exceptional, the strongest Force-users or most talented Force-users seen in years. Whether we go dark or light, 'tradition' is something we should be able to CHOOSE to follow or abandon. Most of my Jedi abandon robes, because I don't care for how most look in the game (at least, until hoods becomes an option). Most use yellow sabers, since they're fairly easy to make and look great. I'd make orange crystals for my Sentinel if I could (not enough comms to get a decent-level orange-crystal saber), or purple, but sadly he's not max level. Which brings me to: I don't see how the story of Mace getting his crystal automatically means it's rare in ALL eras. The Hurrikane crystals are rare. Mace's lightsaber is unique in its era. But that little entry doesn't affect KOTOR era, TOR era, NJO era, LOTF, FOTJ, LEGACY, or any other era outside the ~1000 years between the Ruusan Reformations and the end of Episode VI. Anakin Solo and Jaina Solo both used purple sabers a couple decades after the movies. Other Jedi in Luke's order also used purple. Tons of NPCs in TOR use purple, and just 300 years earlier purple was a fairly common drop on the journeys of Revan and the Exile. They are NOT rare in all eras, as any fan who actually enjoys Star Wars BEYOND just the movies could likely tell you.

There's no bending of SW canon going on. Thousands of years before the films, and not quite a decade AFTER the films, colors were completely unrestricted. This has been the 'lore' for decades, and is STILL the lore in new comics and novels set in those eras. Sith tend to favor red, but they are not restricted to it. Jedi have always favored blue and green, even in Luke's NJO, but many other colors are common. And purple has only been a rarity in ONE place: the Prequels. Before AOTC, at least 2 members of the Jedi Council had purple blades. Two of Han & Leia's children used purple sabers. KOTOR saw purple crystals dropping all over the place. There is ZERO lore that says purple should be rare in the era of SWTOR, particularly with all the NPCs sporting them. It's whining movie-only fans that are complaining that color restrictions should be restored; it's fans of Star Wars in its entirety--comics, books, and games included--that want much more variety among saber colors. And the bit about Exar Kun and the player not being significant enough to overshadow his feats; I beg to differ. According to the player stories in the game, Consulars, Knights, Inquisitors, and Warriors are all EXCEPTIONAL. We are playing the next Exar Kuns, the next Revans, the next Lukes. In a story-driven game, that absolutely takes precedence over the fact that there's 50 'next Revans' running around the Fleet at any given time, even if they're ALL running with purple saber blades. The bottom line is that saber color in the EU--where this game takes place--is equal parts tradition and preference. And there are other ways to make alignment choices count; saber color shouldn't be one of them.

I was hoping to go for that on my server, but of course Mal, Malcolm, and Reynolds (as a first name, to at least be Captain Reynolds) were already taken. So I just have a Mal lookalike with a completely unrelated name instead.

You got your purple crystal ahead of time, got to flaunt it for weeks/a couple months, now people who save up a bunch of credits (may be pocket change for a 50, but still impressive amount for a 15-20) can have purple. But it's beyond ridiculous that purple was ever as rare as it was to begin with. TOR is not the Saga. TOR is a mere 300 years after KOTOR, still thousands of years before the Ruusan Reformations (where the Jedi really became stuck-up jerks) which is still well before Episode I. There are plenty of colors that could--maybe even should--be marks of effort or waiting for months/years for a nerf. Gold, black-<color> blades, bronze, vermilion, viridian, turquoise, magenta, etc. Purple should be fairly easy to attain even while leveling, like yellow and orange. They're 'uncommon' compared to the standard red, green, and blue, but not truly rare. Your class stories have you marked as exceptional right from the start, and you do some exceptional things as you go, even in the prologue and Chapter 1. There's no reason other than a misguided adherence to movie lore--rather than the massive amount of EU lore that's appropriate for the time period--for purple to be max level, or for orange to be still rather tough to get. Putting orange & purple on the same level as yellow would be the best solution, giving everyone more options as they level. Even if they implemented that, there would still be LOTS of players sticking with their trusty reds, blues, greens (and yellows). Purple is only special when only ONE guy has it, Mace Windu. Soon as Luke started up his new Jedi order, purple was as common as blue. The colors should largely be personal preference, NOT a mark of epeen until you get to colors that ARE unusual--unusual for the lore as a whole, not just restricted to the movies.

No... Bail Organa told one of his people (Captain Antilles, probably) to wipe the protocol droid's memory, ie, C-3PO. R2-D2 wasn't mentioned in that exchange at all, probably because they figured R2 could keep his trap shut (and in any case, he'd need a translator, a viewscreen to plug into, or someone like Anakin or Luke that can get the gist of what he's trying to communicate in order to blab)