The mistake a lot of you guys are making is in thinking that the code creating the loot tables gets a PRNG all to itself. It'd be incredibly wasteful to implement anything like that. A server uses its PRNG to get a number anytime it needs to get some random luck thrown in. Loot tables, yes, but also exact damage done on each swing chosen out of the min-max damage range, whether you crit or not, whether you shield or not, whether the fourth mob from the left dodges or not... That PRNG is seeded long, long, long before you ever zoned in. It's shared for a lot more people than just your group. It'd be idiotic to have multiple PRNGs running for each flashpoint instance spawn -- which means they aren't seeded with anything related to the players. Please, just stop. Now, what is more likely is that the loot tables -- specifically the loot tables, not the entire PRNG -- aren't necessarily random. Outside of hardmodes I tend to see more stuff drop for the exact players running it. For hardmodes, who knows what they're trying to do. If they're trying to do anything special -- by which I mean anything other than just simple random loot -- then it only makes sense to adjust the tables based on class. Not "seeding" with player internal ID numbers or anything else hidden.

They know, or at least they've received many bug reports about it. They've never once responded to any of them, so don't expect a fix soon. Or ever. I know there are some blue-quality willpower shields buyable with commendations, but I don't remember what level range they are (i.e., which planet's commendations or whether you'd find them useful at your level).

THIS. We get fifty billion possible hilts to craft, all immediately replaceable with random drops. This article describes it perfectly. I have no reason to ever craft a lightsaber. :-( And this. Whoever did the list of artificing offhands is pants-on-head retarded, leaving out major categories like that.

Blame BioWare's choice of color scheme for that. Six years of WoW have taught the playerbase that greens cannot be improved to the level of even the crappiest blue, and blues cannot be improved to the usefulness of a purple. Now, suddenly, they can. Except the game doesn't draw attention to that fact.

As somebody who played WoW from about a month after release, I'd like to point out that WoW's original combat log was a flaming piece of crap. It's taken a considerable time to mature into what it can do today. I'd actually prefer for TOR to get a combat log that only recorded the stuff directly involving you (and your companion if you're not in a raid). You can still measure your own performance, but can't stroke the epeen meters in a pug. Would be interesting. :-)

This. This right here. This guy gets it. My eyes start to hurt after about thirty seconds of combat. Pulse... pulse... pulse...

They can do offhand generators just fine, they just can't use any weapons (thus the fist flailing).

Thank you so much for putting this image in my head. I cannot stop laughing now.

Do you experience any weirdness in how much zooming a mousewheel "click" performs? Right now, when I zoom out once, the camera jumps waaaaaaay far back. I have to zoom back in multiple stages to get back to where I was. Which means when I only want to zoom out a little bit, it's "OUT in in in" each time. Very frustrating.

What this man says. I can hear the backing lyrics in my head now.

When I press 'M' I get the local subzone map. Okay. Then I click in the lower right to switch to the full zone map. Okay. What's the magical incantation to zoom back into the subzone detail, BUT onto a different subzone than the one I'm currently in?

No. She kisses you and then it's over and there are no other quests or conversations with her. So, just like real life marriage then? Thanks, folks, I'll be here all week. Tip your waitstaff.

Either you keep deliberately missing the point, or you're just trolling. It's not the blind invite itself that people dislike. It's all the inevitable followup behavior that comes afterwards: going afk to be carried, looting chests, not actually helping in the quest, etc. Because no matter what the forum preachers claim, in practice there's an extremely strong correlation between "random person sending blind invite" and "random person being a d*ckwad". So people tend to sidestep the whole mess and just refuse the invites.

My companion attacks whatever he f*cking well pleases, instead of following my target like a smart AI would. Especially at the start of a fight. I think my keyboard's Ctrl and 1 keys are going to wear out. Full Auto and Mortar Round timing/casting is broken.

I cringe to see Bioware repeating the same mistakes that Blizzard made in WoW, and I've only been playing for a couple of weeks, haven't even seen endgame yet. In no particular order: - Massively uninteresting talent trees. It looks like you have dozens of choices, but as Blizzard devs and WoW players alike learned, you don't. There's a cookie-cutter spec, and you might have one to three choices of moving optional points around. If you're lucky. It's not choice, it's jumping through hoops. - Data loss bugs in the UI. (Allowing accidental clicks on the Delete button for mails with credits or items attached, with no confirmation is one. Another is if a companion returns from a task while you have any editing windows open (sending mail, typing a ticket, etc), all those windows vanish along with your work in order to display the task completion window.) That's just unacceptably sloppy. - Did nobody at Bioware ever have to walk around Orgrimmar? Blizzard learned from their mistake and put mailboxes every twenty feet in capital cities, and near every cluster of vendors/trainers. Now Bioware needs to learn from Blizzard. Things that Bioware got right where Blizzard still falls down: - The whole ticketing system is much, much nicer. Especially the ticket history. - Class-specific missions and storylines. - The companions doing the grindy part of professions. - edit: Quick Travel to a choice of bind points instead of Hearthstones to a single location. The one thing that Blizzard got right that Bioware didn't: - UI is severely inconsistent. I can right-click on a name in the friends list to group invite, but not on the guild list. I get drop-down autocompletion of names when sending mail to guildmates, but not to friends. Some windows open on the left side always, other windows open wherever they think there's space for them. Exactly what keys/mousebuttons you use to open an item for modding depends on whether you're near a mod station or not, but the tooltip doesn't reflect that. I'm okay with not having a scriptable UI right off the bat, but sweet Lord, the lack of something like this is annoying as hell. Especially with 60 seconds of load screen to log out and back in on a different toon.

Actually, it can still be bugged. For the past couple days on my latest toon, every time my companion comes back, I get the little dialog icon next to his portrait. When I click on him, he says he needs to talk in private (nothing about a ship, since that toon doesn't have one yet). Going to a cantina and clicking on him, he still says "I need to talk to you in private." And nothing else. No quest triangle, no conversation, just that same line over and over. Buggy as hell.

So paging through my five bars, I see the usual top-center, bottom-center, left, and right bars remapped onto the main bar. Okay, totally normal. (And if the companion bar is expanded on top of any of those, you can still see the real bar by paging to that bar number. Very cool.) Except... bar 5 has weird stuff. It's not a copy of bar 1, but it has several of my own abilities. I can shuffle things around on 5 and none of the other bars change, so it's not just doubling for any of those either. As I train up, sometimes things appear on bar 5 (as if it were bar 1), but sometimes they don't. Is this bar used for some funky Consular ability at higher levels or something?

The UI at the mod station is less clunky than the ctrl+click combination. (Although, amusingly, you select things at the station to modify by simple left clicking even though the tooltip says otherwise.)

So I just received mail with the bit "got a number of materials, here they are". There's nothing attached to the mail. I know this is a recurring bug with the Coruscant quest involving the stripper leaving her husband. Are all NPC mails bugging out? Is there anything meant to be attached to this message, or is the wording just sloppy?

That's the UI layout and some of the preferences. Keybindings are stored server-side.

That's the bug. The message appears even when you have queued up more items for him to create. He finishes one, and immediately begins working on the next -- but you still get the "no missions defined" spam.