The first time he exhibited this behaviour he wasn't in passive ever, at all. I started doing the passive/unpassive thing just to eliminate the possibility of out of range, after he'd already exhibited the behaviour and let me die.

So he's in Med Watch, all his damaging abilities (except "auto attack" which you can't disable for some reason) are disabled, and he stands right next to me (I keep him on passive 'till he runs up next to me so I'm sure he's in range) shooting at mobs until I die. Never casts a single heal, even though they're all on auto-cast. And yet, after I die, and I res, and I'm out of combat, Channelling Hatred, he starts healing me... EDIT: He exhibited this behaviour before I started pulling him in next to me by putting him in passive and then taking him out of it, I just started doing that because I've had bad experiences with Doc (JK) getting out of range and just switching to shooting things instead of running into range to heal. BioWare's AI code is extremely poor...

You don't understand, I've done Voss up 'till the point where you go to the Dark Heart to kill Lord Fulminiss... ...and I'm still ~43.5...

The only Alderaan quest I can get is from the Republic Fleet and is mid-30s (so grey). If by "rushed through the quests" you mean "did the storyline and all the quests you picked up along the way" then yes. Otherwise no, I was sold a story-driven MMO, not a story-driven-until-you-stop-to-grind MMO.

Belsavis is finished.

So I'm level 43, and I've finished Belsavis and I'm a decent way through Voss. All the Voss quests I have (except Need to Impress, which I can't turn in (nice BioWare)) are 47+. What can I do to catch up? Don't say: PvP Flashpoints I've looked for a bonus series that's around my level, but I can't find one, Hoth's and Belsavis' don't seem to be available 'till late 40s (for whatever reason), Balmorra's is grey, Alderaan's is grey...

I was talking about them slapping you as a follow up to flirting (unsuccessfully). You quoted me talking about that. I assumed you were talking about that. o_O

How do you do this?

That's the "massively multiplayer" part. You're playing a game amidst many, many other people -- your whole server. If it was just an MORPG, it would be different, but it's not. I'm not saying this, and if BioWare could figure out how to reduce the sharding by making servers more populous, I'd be all for that. What I don't want is random, automatic grouping, because that creates a set of incentives which conspire to totally destroy any social element to the game and cloister the game into groups of friends and guilds. Imagine TOR without the on-line component. Alternatively, imagine Mass Effect or Dragon Age except in the Star Wars universe. Then why not play a co-op game, that's my point. Co-op games exist. Why are you coming to an MMO and trying to make an MMO into a co-op game. That's the problem. You wanted a co-op game, I wanted an MMO. Now you're trying to make the MMO into a co-op game and deny me the experience I bought the game for the first place. Yeah I just shopped that title in there. Give this up. You have no idea what I did or did not do when I played in BC. Actually address the points that I raise, don't attack the person raising those points. That's called an "ad hominem", and it's a well recognized logical fallacy -- it's tantamount to just giving up completely.

http://i.imgur.com/zaa84.jpg

That's a deliberate mis-characterization of my experiences. Do you seriously think that it behoves you -- and your point-of-view -- to assert that something is true of me when I explicitly said in the quoted text that it was not? Argument by assertion. So people are choosing to play a "massively multiplayer" game, but they don't want to exist in a world that's "massively multiplayer". I really don't understand the mindset. You're going sit down and play a game, the whole point of which is that you play on-line in a community of other people, but you don't want to deal with or be a part of that community, or have any investment in it. I mean that's really what separates a game like TOR from a game like KOTOR or Diablo -- the community. So is your complaint that there's no LFD, or is your complaint that this isn't KOTOR 3? That's what I'm getting at. If you're mad that BioWare didn't give you KOTOR 3, where you could solo everything because it was a single player game, then make that complaint, but coming in here insisting that it's good for an MMO to take the "MM" part out of it is just bizarre.

I don't see how people think that asserting things about another person's experience adds validity to their argument, especially when it's a shot in the dark, and likely to be wrong. I did know several people in their guild, but they weren't my "buddy", they were just people I had played with because we had to group together because we couldn't just hit a button and grab people at random from other servers. The first raid they took me on was an attunement run. Having your foot in your mouth isn't very becoming, which is why you should try and avoid these wild assertions.

I never said that I had a "need" to be thusly recognized, I merely pointed out that being thus had certain positive side effects, and was therefore desirable. Where did I say that I would use "virtual friends" instead of "humans in flesh and blood"? You're treating two things as mutually exclusive when they aren't. I can choose both. That's like saying "you go to movie theatres, therefore, you don't watch live theatre". It's ridiculous because the two actions are not mutually exclusive. You can enjoy the "silver screen" while also enjoying a real live play. That's an argument by assertion. A game is an MMORPG because it is "massively multiplayer", "online", and a "role-playing game". When you take away from elements which define being "massively multiplayer" -- i.e. interacting with people on a massive scale (i.e. your server) -- and replace them with elements which are more traditionally multiplayre -- i.e. matchmaking -- then you're detracting from the "massively" quantifier which is part of the name and definition of the genre. You can just say "[f]or me a MMO is just [...]" anymore than I can say "for me red is just green". That's arbitrary redefinition of terms. In order to qualify a game must be: "massively multiplayer" "online" and a "role-playing game" Meaning that you must play a role, you must do so on-line, and you must do so in a setting where you're interacting with many players simultaneously. Logging in and clicking a button to queue up with 4 random people does not meet the criterion of "massively multiplayer", it is simply "multiplayer" in the same way that CoD and Halo are. I actually wouldn't mind. Especially politics.

Stating that something is "[r]ediculous [sic]" but not giving a reason as to why is not compelling. In both economics and social interaction people respond to incentives, therefore, the two are -- in some instances -- comparable.

Except they don't understand the problem, which is the real issue. People are over-simplifying the issue or looking at only one facet of it, which is the real problem with discussing this issue. The "social" aspect that I -- and others -- are defending is not a part of actually finding and making a group, it's the fact that the group that you make is selected from a base of players with which you have convenient opportunity to socialize again in an environment where repeat socialization earns you substantial rewards. People who actively did 5-mans in vanilla/BC/early WotLK had a network of people who knew them and who'd do groups with them. This was the reward that made socialization desirable. Nowadays people can just click a button so why bother meeting new people? We don't just meet new people because we happen to meet new people, there's always a reason that brings people together, whether it's working collaboratively on a project or both liking the same music. Going to the same class for a semester with someone gives you the opportunity to befriend that person. Going to an event with that same person for 30 minutes and then never seeing them again doesn't. That's the point. That's the problem. That's what people are not understanding. People are focussing on the actual act of getting a group together, rather than the incentives and side effects which are in play and of which that act is a necessary consequence.

I got into a guild that was doing Hyjal/BT wearing nothing from any raid higher than Karazhan, because I had a reputation on the server for actually being good. Besides, who cares? If a guild hasn't seen Kara/Gruul/Mag, why shouldn't they go through it and then progress? It's not like their just redoing content. I don't understand this mentality that everyone must see the latest content or the world will end. You clearly don't understand the system of incentives behind something like that. As soon as you introduce the option of grouping with people not on your server, people are going to take it. They're going to say "oh well I just don't feel like waiting this one time" and eventually that -- in aggregate -- creates an avalanche where on server players are grouped up with off server players so quickly that forming a totally on server group takes much longer than it did before. And there's still the automatic aspect. If I'm automatically inducted into a group, I can't vet the group for people I don't like or don't want to play with, and they can't do the same for me. Moreover, they can't look at the queue of people, see someone they like, and select them over anyone else, because everyone is treated equally by the system. "I want this feature, therefore it should be in the game" is a terrible mindset, because things can have unintended consequences. People in the U.S. wanted houses, so they said the government should conspire to make sure they can get mortgages. I mean there was no downside to that...right? People got houses and lived happily ever after, there was no perverted system of incentives that conspired to destroy the system it was supposed to enforce? ...right?

The argument is stupid when your over-simplify it the way you have. The argument isn't that getting groups easily is bad, or that it's asocial, the argument is that the side effects of an automated, cross-server system, which groups people who have no connection (i.e. exist in the same game world because they're on the same server) creates a massive disincentive for social activity, and also creates a massive move towards "dumbed down" content, because the group cohesion and co-ordination just isn't "there". This starts a downward spiral to where the game because totally asocial and formulaic, and nothing is a challenge, and nothing is therefore rewarding.

What would you give Republic Troopers?

They need to just put in a modding API, which would allow the 3rd party community to give you whatever you wanted in your UI. OmniCC adds exactly this feature to WoW, for example.

Isn't that what I'm doing now?

I don't always have friends who are on-line, and when this happens there are two options (under both prospective scenarios): 1. Find a tank in LFG. Maybe he's really good. Maybe he's a cool dude. Maybe he gets on vent and we have a great time. So I friend him and the next time I'm on at that time we do another instance, and so on and so forth. 2. Hit the queue button. A tank magically appears. There's no difficult content (thanks to LFD skill dilution), there's no social attachment, there's no socialization (vent or otherwise). I don't know if this dude is cool, he's probably decent, but it doesn't really matter because everything is easy. He leaves and I don't really bother with him because I can just hit that queue button again next time. I'm all for systems that brings player together in an environment where there are challenges to overcome, and where they can group together and interact conveniently thereafter. Cross-server systems don't do that. Automatic systems don't do that. I personally liked unilateral kicking. WotLK also disenfranchised a large swathe of people who really loved the game. There needs to be a balance, but the balance isn't spoon feeding the "casuals" whatever they want, and screwing over the people who built the MMO genre in the first place. I left WoW to escape the community corruption of LFD. But apparently the LFDers aren't happy just having their one game, they need to have all the games. It's like politics. The people who want to ban marijuana won't just not smoke marijuana, they don't want anyone to do it. This is a faction balance issue, and needs to be addressed somehow.

This happens in WoW too.

Well I'm a radical voluntaryist (irl), and because of that, that's how I role play most characters in games, so having someone just hit me (i.e. use force against me) and not being able to retaliate in kind would irritate me to no end. If you've played the Jedi Knight story arc, on Alderaan when the security guards (police?) tried to arrest me for a murder I did not commit, I gladly and without regret chose the dark side option to literally kill them all.

This would actually bother me unless I had the opportunity to shoot them afterwards.