There are two easy things to limit your companions. Use a companion with influence level 1. If you wish to do the companions' quests, use the ship droid as your level 1. The second thing is limiting their abilities. The companions have hotbars for each stance. Under each skill on the hotbar is a bubble. All skills are automatically set to be used by default. Right click the bubble to uncheck a skill. I routinely prevent any companion in healer stance from using their "freeze" or "mez" ability, you would actually want to keep that checked with maybe one heal, as the companion will frequently stand there mezzing rather than healing. For real challenge, you might try letting the healer do nothing BUT mez. You can do the same tweaking with the tank and dps stances. I do understand your reasoning. I played Everquest 1 from launch, and soloing was challenging to the extreme. I have just never thought SWtOR's solo questing to be difficult. Occasionally time-consuming and grindy, but that's not the same thing. I've looked for my difficulty in other activities, so I love the changes. But that's because I have 16 toons. Saving time is a bonus, and I'm only interested in seeing variations on the class stories. Honestly, given the new movie release and the market they're trying to attract, I think solo questing will remain an easymode activity. My hope is that they continue to add things like Eternal Championship that will theoretically be a challenge for the average soloer. And while I know it isn't ideal, I hope my companion suggestions help make the game a little more challenging and enjoyable for you.

All the artwork is ingame. Certain races like Togruta and almost all the non-human companions such as Guss Tuno or Xalek trigger chestpiece versions without hoods. In fact, there ARE four or five circlet-type headpieces on the Pub side that will hide your character's hood. Unfortunately, I have found none on the Imp side that do the same. They absolutely could make a Covert Energy head slot to hide hoods if they wanted. It is nothing more than a single database toggle, and I have no clue why the option isn't available. I'd pay a buttload of cartel coins if they put that on the CM.

I have no problem with most of the changes to companion weapons. Allowing companions who could use either sniper rifles or blaster rifles to use both, as well as removing restrictions so techblade/vibrosword users and techstaff/electrostaff users can use either, were great changes. But I can see no reason why you would take Corso's ability to use a blaster rifle AWAY, rather than just ADD the ability to use blaster pistols. Additive is good, subtractive is bad. Please return blaster rifles to Corso, since a) there is no programming reason not to, as he used them previously, and b) it's always better to increase options for the purely cosmetic than it is to remove them. My Corso would like to use the CM Czerka blaster rifle I bought for him with RL cash.

I would love this. I have five or six standing themes for each of my characters, such as a cold planet outfit with some sort of suitable cold weather mount (tauntaun, rimefrost whitefang) and pets. It would be great to have all this on the appearance tabs for one clicking. The thing I'd like to see regarding mounts would be a designated mount hotkey you could assign (like the random one) that would be tied to appearance tabs and just switch out the mount on the same hotkey every time you changed your appearance. I use so many hotkeys on mounts!

They should go or become tradeable. It's pointless to me to have them when I can't get a sufficient number of older packs, ever, to get the reputation to use them on anything good. You don't hear much about reputation tokens being unavailable as a result of the permanent pack embargo. They lost a lot of money I would have spent to get a couple of older reps up. To...spend Cartel certificates. No incentive now. Or point to untradeable Certs. The return for time spent on the slot machines is ridiculous. Make it comparable to the Nightlife event golden ticket tokens, whatever they were called, and I would play. Currently, I did enough on the contraband to raise my rep from 0-max and received not one cert. Carpal tunnel is not fun, add other avenues for cert gain and I'll bite.

I'm not one of the people who thinks the game is overly buggy or broken in comparison to other games I played. When you release an expansion with the endgame completely unfinished (not unpolished, unfinished) like Sony did with EQ1, I might complain. It amazes me what people consider "broken" these days, and the game is doing just fine catering to the casual story set. Anyone who EVER thought it was in any way going to be a good pvp or hardcore raid venue or reach out to every gaming demographic after they saw it upon launch was mainlining the good stuff. I love this game, but it cannot possibly be all things to all players. I'm sure you went where the projected money is. CM though...when did I spend a lot of real money blowing it on virtual stuff? When you brought back all the previous packs prior to Nightlife last year. And not because I bought the packs. I bought specific items on the GTN, mostly rare old armor sets and mounts, from the people who bought the packs. Where you got lots of my real money was UNLOCKS. Specifically, the armor half off unlock sale. Your current unlock prices for gold and silver make me feel no desire to unlock anything. If you have a sale again, or reduce gold to about 300 and silver to 120, I would go to town. I used to spend boatloads on actual Magic: The Gathering cards. I know how rarity and RNG and value work just fine, and these days, I will farm virtual money up the wazoo to get a specific item on the GTN. Of course, that assumes some level of attainability, which you've been steadily reducing. If I can't get what I want on the GTN, I won't gamble for it. And you're ensuring the people who would gamble and then sell to me don't want to. Unlocks were a sure thing, though. I am totally a play-with-my-dolls person, who won't touch new companions because I can't dress them to match my toons. Lots of money gone there BTW. Who made that decision? It's not like there are that many humanoid companions who would have used clothes! Anyway, back to unlocks. I have something like 20-30 gold and silver unlocks waiting on my monthly CC grants. I would buy more CC, but not at the moment. Because....the...unlocks....are....too high. Like everyone here is saying, reducing prices would get you more money overall. The real economy sucks....we don't like to feel like we're wasting real money on virtual pixels. It should be a Starbucks coffee to buy this virtal stuff, not a gourmet dinner-feeling cost. It is now way over into "why am I spending $40 on this little of a virtual reward?" territory rather than "Whoohoo, I got 20+ unlocks this week, half-off, baby!" Guess which felt better to me? If you're catering to story-interested people, guess what else? We're into making toons and companions in our stories look good. Replayability, ya know? Make them unique, costume them. $$$! And duh, the younger people lured by Force Awakens that you want to see playing do not have the disposable income to sustain a lot of CM spending and unlocks at the current prices. So have a few sales, for the love of Yoda, if you won't lower prices more effectively. I cannot understand the overpricing strategy. You totally shut my spending sprees down. Including my purchases for my 9-year-old FTP niece, a devotee with a lovely Jedi Barbie since last year. I got her lots of pretty in pink stuff because you actually put it on sale. Half off! What happened to those on the expensive CM items? Eric, sorry you keep getting blasted, my "you's" refer to BW/EA. What PR rep has any choice in the majority of the announcements made? You do what you can with what you're given, and I wouldn't be stuck between us irate players and your management for anything. Despite my CM woes (and super thanks for finally acknowledging the companion romance bugs--my first and main toon is a fem consular romancing Iresso!), I really enjoy the game. And appreciate the overall quality of the devs' work. Since you mostly hear only how much everything sucks...not to me, I'm enjoying my 17 toons and their stories immensely. Even if I'm now totally turned off the entire CM!

I do know what you mean. I've said since launch that this was, at the very most, an MMO-lite, as in light on the Massively Multiplayer. It has ALWAYS played as a very, very casual MMO to me, far more a single-player game in a shared world than an actual MMO. But I started out in 1999 with the original Everquest, on a server with one of the top two worldwide raid guilds, when raids actually became a thing. Hardcore on my server meant camping rare mobs with other people for days, weeks, months, with phone trees for raiders and lists of the next player waiting to come to the camp for the "casual" group player. Heh. Like anything was casual in EQ. And you had no choice in most circumstances but to group, because solo content was nonexistent for a very long time. At any rate, I am considerably older now, and while I get a little thrill out of discussing my uphill both ways in the snow helping lead 72-person pickup raids without VoIP-software days with EQ, I really, truly have no desire to relive them even a little. I kind of laughed at all the people who b*tched about the companions being OP and having people kicked out of groups because the companion was better at healing. Anyone who really wanted a challenge should have simply run, um....without a companion at all in their group so as to make it tougher? Is there a rule that you HAVE to use a companion if they were better rather than those actual players that the complainers were complaining the game is not an MMO without? It seemed a tad hypocritical to me that there were people moaning that the game was not an MMO at the same time as they said their companions were OP in groups. Since they were arguing that MMO's are about grouping with living people, and not with NPC's. So....they believed that SW should be an MMO, but they were upset when, rather than doing group content with a full group of actual PC's, thereby displaying the uber skillz they talked about possessing, they chose to pop out an OP companion meant to assist the people with fewer skills and then whined about how easy it was? Hmm. Of course, given how fubar the bolster is for lower levels, by far the quickest way to make a FP difficult is to use the groupfinder. Though nothing is preventing pre-made groups of friends from using the groupfinder to avoid the less-skilled, though that defeats the purpose of the whole meeting real people MMO thing for me again. So many elite players tend to advocate this weird combination of difficulty for them while somehow expecting the devs to get more people to play. But only already GOOD players. Counterintuitive. I won't argue at all about a dearth of PvP, though I think they give PvP probably precisely the amount of attention its revenue stream generates. As they do with emotes and such for roleplayers, and raids for the small percentage of raiders. If anything, raids will get MORE attention now that the content has become truly usable at SM level for the overall population. It takes nothing away from NiM raiders completing difficult content for unique rewards for the average person to get to go in a zone and see the content. The last time I did current expac raiding was EQ1...by EQ2, I didn't have time to do more than raid old content with a raid alliance, mainly just to SEE it. I'm delighted I won't have to jump through hoops to see the raid content in SW. I applaud the move to make the game mainstream friendly overall, because they have not dumbed down the portions meant to be most difficult, like HM FP's and NiM raiding. More players means more content development at all levels, and more opportunities, should people choose to take them, to meet new friends. And it is up to the player, not the devs, to choose difficulty over ease when it's offered. I totally grant that the story quests themselves are dead easy, but even then you could make it at least a little more difficult by playing sans companions or with no or crappy armor to make it challenging. I used to pick my armor for looks, and THAT was challenging with no appearance slots and very little orange gear at the time. Will it ever be challenging in the sense that truly interdependent MMORPG's with larger group sizes and no companions are? Nope. But it NEVER WAS challenging in that sense. It's amazing to me that people look at a casual game, designed originally for casual players, based on a franchise that is appealing to everyone from my 3-year old nephew who was wearing a "Have a Very, Merry Sithmas!" t-shirt at Thanksgiving and my 9-year old niece who has Jedi Barbie on my server with pink everything, to their dad and I who were 4 and 5 years old when we stood in line to see Star Wars at the theater, and our parents who stood there with us and bought us every 70's SW toy known to man afterward, and think the devs should shoot for anything BUT the lowest common denominators. Recall that a bell curve guarantees 50% of the people playing are going to be below average at whatever metric you're measuring. It makes no sense to tune a mainstream game for the top percentiles when 75% of your demographic is slightly above average to well below average. There ARE great niche games with emphasis on other MMO aspects, and some of them do extremely well. But I don't think BW/EA has gone wrong in choosing the emphasis on story with a dash of MMO thrown in. It might not satisfy the people who want a true MMORPG experience, though did it honestly ever? But it is actually looking pretty good for their bottom line. SWtOR is consistently in ratings among the top 5 healthiest non-Asian MMO's. I'm hoping to continue my story for a long time to come, on all seventeen of my characters. And HK-55! I prefer to enjoy this game for what it is and has always been, rather than what it will never be, given the demographics the devs have clearly stated they are shooting for.

The problem with gaining god-like powers is that then your story arc has nowhere to go. What do you do at that point, find nothing but gods to battle? Annihilate planets like Vitiate? When the main character in a book achieves that kind of ridiculous overpowering they get termed a Mary Sue or Gary Stu....and it not only makes it difficult for the author to come up with any kind of credible storyline in a continuing series, it makes those storylines escalate to the point where they make most intelligent people cringe. A shining example of this would be Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake and Merry Gentry series, where both the heroines seem to gain two or three "oh, so totally unique" superpowers each book, with the result that they have become caricatures of themselves who seem capable of achieving everything but global peace with a wave of their hands. It might make it fun to be an ultimate fighting hero for a while, but it kills character progression (storywise) in the long run. I mean, I loved the Anita Blake books until Laurell K ditched her husband, who was also her main editor, to marry her fan club president. Since that point, around book 8, a formerly interesting character who had to use actual intelligence to solve problems has become the reference to have in any definition of Mary Sue, complete with an ego the size of Manhattan. Or the Emperor's. But these days, I don't even bother to check the new books out of the library. Though I do look them up on Amazon to see the always hilarious reviews battle it out between the people like you who think supreme overpoweredness is awesome and give every book a five star rating, and people like me who think it makes for enough cheese to feed an army of rats, and give them one star. I am delighted the SWtOR writers have more sense. Five stars from me so far.

I'm good with that. And I have never thought the devs would anger huge numbers of people over decisions made under the "companions don't much matter anymore" paradigm. When the last real affection we get is the FIRST Belsavis dailies... I just felt I had to respond to the idea that I made a huge ingame ethical error by cheating on my companion when all game mechanics at the time pointed in the "totally doesn't matter" direction, and all I was doing was viewing some cutscenes I wouldn't normally somewhere besides YouTube.

I played EQ1 from launch. My server, Mithaniel Marr, had a community that was usually helpful, in which a character's good name meant something and where everyone knew the best guilds and players by reputation. Everyone. A character being blacklisted for ninja looting or other general ***hattery was not unusual, and was truly painful for a couple of years until they allowed paid renames. But why did we have such a strong sense of community? Camping. Endless camping. Killing the same fricking room of mobs every six minutes for days, if not weeks, or months in some cases, with essentially the same people who leveled at the same rate that you did. I still am friends with some of those people 15 years on, because we had literally nothing to do but talk for hours and hours while camping the loot diamonds among the vast amount of gear coal. I helped lead 72 person pickup raids later, and you saw the same people over and over, and raiding for sometimes ten hours in a row was a bonding experience. Kind of like MMO boot camp. You never forget something like attending the second (and for a LONG time, the last) pug raid to down Rallos Zek the Warlord. That crap mattered. But I would rather never play another MMO than be forced to do any of that again. I can't believe I did it to begin with. I have no solution to the community problem because the best communities I have experienced were predicated on shared suffering. Talking to a fellow EQ1 vet is like joining an MMO Players Anonymous group. We mainly talk about how it was totally awesome in the same way binge drinking is awesome. Fun at the time, but jeez how bad it is in retrospective. And how we will never ever play that kind of game again. There are totally people who would, and do. I, personally, will take the loss of community in exchange for my ability to see more content how I want and when I want. I spent too many years in games where solo content was group content you just had to LEARN to solo. And I did. Uphill, both ways in the virtual snow. But mainly I was forced to group to see new content and that sucked. I simply do not have the time or energy to group with strangers much anymore. I helped two new 55's complete Oricon today and it took me twice as long as I can do it solo. They were perfectly nice guys, but I was perfectly sick of herding them like cats when it was done. And group finder does nothing to foster community. Cross server would do even less. Every group finder I've run is a race to the end complete with spacebarring and a "ty for group" when it was over. Now if they made us camp something 12 hours straight together....but then I would /ragequit :-D

Pink or pink and yellow. I was quite excited until I looted the birthright kit.

Good air and water aren't even "free". Heinlein was totally correct with his TANSTAAFL philosophy, because there is indeed no such thing as a free lunch. However...when paying for a subscription service of any sort, items or services not normally included within the subscription model may be considered " bonus" content. This is certainly subjective, as we don't, as you said above, have a precise definition of what content they'll provide. Based on past content, though, I still have no problem calling togruta a "bonus," even if not completely free.

Seriously? I knew it would have no affect because previously I could not flirt in front of a romanceable companion and not lose affection. Why would I assume I would lose affection at some future date with that companion when ALL PRIOR experiences suggested no immediate affection loss=no consequences? I should be able to predict future interactions based on that past established experience. Not on some dev decision to rewrite the current companion rules to suddenly make my choice to view alternate cutscenes (since it didn't MATTER for two entire years, real life years no less, which was entirely BIOWARE'S decision as well) come back and bite me on the butt. I thought, oh, hai, all my goody goody toons (never managed lower than -200 on any character, and I have one of every subclass) will finally get to see some flirting scenes! I treated it like an extended dream sequence, as there were no ingame consequences. My consular, in my mind, just had some naughty fantasies about Theron. Had they followed their own established pattern and had me lose affection when the companion saw me flirting, I would not have flirted. Period. This is not real life, we base our choices in MMO's on the game's established ruleset and how it affects our characters. Yes, this can change. But changes do NOT usually have retroactive consequences, and expecting us to predict that is asinine. Given that, if my characters don't automatically end up in divorce court, I will be fine with getting chewed out for cheating. If my choices matter, then that choice should be mine to make at that moment, based on current info for the expansion, not info that was absolutely accurate when I made the decision to let my characters "daydream".

May I suggest birthright/inheritance construction kits instead? 50 basics, Black Hole or Section X vendors. I would go nuts transferring comms at the rate of 10 at a time. My legacy bank is always full

And yet, I would take the "Hide Hood" option that is implemented automatically when we put armor on a companion like Qyzen Fess if they can't make a "Lower Hood" option that avoids clipping. I don't actually find most of the disappearing hoods disappointing graphics-wise, but then again, I don't much like hoods at all. I would absolutely have bought more CM armorsets if I could get rid of the fugly hoods. Fortified Defender's comes to mind right off, since there IS a no-hood CM version, which I have, but it is not the same color scheme. And there is no way to duplicate the Fortified Defender's color...it doesn't exist ingame at the moment, and I think I'd need the ability to dye the tertiary color. A toggle for "No Hood" should be perfectly possible, since Qyzen can wear any chestpiece and have the hood go away automatically. As it would be an optional toggle, if you hate the chestpiece graphic without a lowered, rather than a disappearing, hood, then you wouldn't have to use it. I would use the heck out of it. I'll just lobby for a companion outfit designer while I'm at it

I don't think "jumping off point" for operations means "BiS gear." Obviously, new level 65 ops, which I'm sure WILL be coming, probably the first major patch after Fallen Empire, which might well be around Christmas given their update schedule this past year, will have new gear requirements and drops for those doing it at level 65. Lower levels appear to me to receive some kind of gear prorated to their level. Hard Mode and NiM look like they will retain their unique gear levels/drops, they're just giving people a way to easily get entry level raiding gear suitable for up and coming level 65 ops. As they do now with the elites we get like candy for doing dailies. This obviously benefits people currently playing casually like I am the most, no argument there. but I do believe they have no intention of giving away top end raid gear for completing SM ops or HM FP's. As for all those people unsubbing....enjoy your break. I played EQ1 from launch in 1999, EQ2 from its launch in 2004, SWtOR from launch, and other games in between, and all I have EVER heard since WoW began to give EQ competition was progression raiders talking about the grass being greener in the next big MMO, all I have seen is progression raiders departing in droves when said MMO's are beta'd and launched, and progression raiders returning to the game I played when new content was released at endgame, then repeating the same cycle. I don't think any MMO expects to keep progression raiders for longer than a few months after new raid content is released. Y'all just consume content faster than it can be produced by any dev team. And that has been true since EQ1 days when guilds like Fires of Heaven and Afterlife finished months of progression raiding within a WEEK of the launch of a new expac. As for me, I am looking forward to the FP changes, and will reserve judgment on the ops until I have more info. Because the sky hasn't fallen yet, even if the Empire did.

Ditto, just ran it on my scoundrel. The only group that worked was the one up the stairs to the left as you face the tower. Very, very frustrating, as I waited until it was "patched" to do it

I see. You expect subs to jump through hoops sending legacy gear with credits and remember things like whicht toon has what, yet it's apparently asking too much for people who have to be AWARE they are dropping from sub to preferred to take their credits out of the legacy bank if they want the max escrow available for each toon they have. Subs must take responsibility for their actions while the poor preferred players need BW to hold their hands so they don't screw their individual escrow amounts up. Personally, I don't think subs should be denied a feature that would make our lives easier on the off chance that someone not even paying for the game will moan if they don't have access to as many credits as they could have had. How about preferred take on some responsibility for their credit management, like the grown people we all say we are when we sign the ToS?

Someone said once that they got their color combos from professional sports teams' uniforms. Personally, I think the green/purple dye module is from some design dev who worked for Sony on EQ2 when the Kingdom of Sky expansion was released. That was the color combo for, sadly, some of the best raid armor in the game. We used to say we were dressed in the dark by Bobo the Clown. And that is how I feel about a LARGE portion of the dye combos, so I would kill to be able to select the primary/secondary/tertiary colors separately. Or pay out the CC for the ability. Though I don't think they would ever get me to pay the 1500 CC cost of the black/black module. That's just stupidly expensive. They would make MORE CC if they lowered the cost to meet the pent demand.

I agree that we aren't going to see special hood down or up graphics that aren't already in existence. But every hooded chestpiece DOES have a separate hood removed appearance already, because we can use those chestpieces on characters and companions for whom the hood doesn't show. A toggle should be perfectly doable.

I would kill for a tab that listed nothing but my collections separated into the same categories. It drives me crazy looking through pages and pages of collections for the ones I possess. I only want to look at POTENTIAL collections on occasion, but MY collections frequently.

I've been turning the 12x off every other planet so I can complete the main planet questlines, the ones that nearly always run parallel to the same locations as the class quests. I do this because those are generally the only quests that have even close to the same level of content put into them as the class quests, complete with companion cinematics rather than just affection gain. I enjoy seeing what the companions say. I would really love it if they just did what EQ2 did with a sliding scale between xp going to levels and xp going to alternate advancement....it could be xp going to levels vs xp going to legacy for SW. For those with max legacy level, as I have, then the sliding scale would just make the xp disappear, but I'm fine with that if I could adjust xp gain on a percentage basis from 1-100. ALL THE TIME, actually. I play with a FTP player and it would be utterly useful if I could actually do quests with her beyond the class quests because I can do NO side quests at all without outleveling her in short order. Turning my xp gain down to 10% or so on all quests would accomplish that. Cause she is a first time player and she wants to do...every....single....side quest everywhere. But I agree with the OP....adding in some concrete reward for doing side quests would give people reasons to do them. I wouldn't mind seeing more grouping at lower levels, since theoretically this IS an MMO, not a single player game. so I would actually advocate the best rewards be added to heroics and flashpoints. I haven't done flashpoints prior to level 50 on more than my first two Republic and Imperial toons, and they're all pretty cool little continuing storylines that add to the world. More people should get to experience them. Rewards are easier than retuning them to solo flashpoints, which I really enjoyed in the Revan prequel, but understand would take a lot more dev time than just an extra added reward.

Considering numerous companions have hoods automatically removed for them, as well as Twi'leks, there can be no arguing that every chest piece has a hoodless graphic attached to it. I could care less about having the hood hang down the back, or appear at all. I simply want the option to have it gone, period. No graphics changes would need to be made at all, as far as I can tell, if they just added a toggle to the appearance windows to hide the hood in the same manner as is done for Twi'leks and companions who cannot wear hoods. It is LONG overdue and should have been included in the outfit designer. But then again, they had to know we would want companions to have the outfit designer as well....I would find it utterly implausible that they weren't aware of how many people would kill to get their companions back in individualized gear over the very nice but uniform 192 sets. I'm sure it's in the works, just as hiding headpieces entirely and unifying colors was added to companions well after players had it. It just annoys me a bit that they chose not to release those features together. As well as appearance weapons....the only thing that needed to be done with appearance weapons for the outfit designer was a limitation that the weapon had to remain class-usable to meet animation requirements. Saying it's more difficult due to animations for the class is the same BS Sony tried to feed EQ2 customers years ago...and amazingly, weapons were added in with no big problems to the appearance slots eventually. I would prefer the pronouncement of "We just didn't have the time to pull it together" over "We can't do it easily due to great technical difficulties" when there is no reason there should BE great technical difficulties unless their code is subpar. Which I just don't believe to be the case.

Perhaps....just perhaps, you could comment constructively. Instead of ************ about their generosity in making the free bonus they added unworthy of you, you might have stated that it wouldn't add any value to your hypercrate buying experience unless they reduced the loot table to include nothing but potentially valuable items or a potential full armor set, rather than a single piece. Though if they're as bad at predicting what will sell as I am, there is literally NO predicting what the community will find valuable. Considering I've paid over a million credits for armor sets that were "rare" while armor sets that are "super rare" can sometimes be dirt cheap. The same is true of mounts. Like I personally prefer the Twilight Vrake to the monocycle, but the Vrake is a cheap 1.7 mil on my server while the monocycle is this xpac's Jetpack. There is never any accounting for taste. It's asking a bit much to expect the devs to read the fickle public's minds on more than a few major things. Like the jetpack was predictable. But when they tell you they are weighing the effectiveness of a FREE BONUS, it simply makes no sense to insult the entire idea without offering ideas to improve it unless you just don't want free stuff in future. As for me....the only reason I get packs is for reputation so I can buy otherwise unavailable dyes. Otherwise, I am completely adverse to gambling on packs for items....I will farm credit boxes until there is no tomorrow in order to get exactly the items I want. But including a bonus with a really good chance of netting me at least ONE major item without much fuss, even if it was bind on pickup rather than sellable on the GTN, would make me reconsider my stance. People will pay if they can cheat the rng a bit.

It's an issue of database storage for holo vs the full rendering. I get that. But I don't display ALL my companions of ALL twelve toons. They could set it so the limit was x holographic companions and/or y fully shown ones, with a sliding scale to decrease x when y increases. I would LOVE to see this feature, and if you chose to have a companion fully rendered, I would really like to see my companion's actual clothes. They could limit it to one fully rendered companion per character.