Hello, I am not the most experienced player, so I can only answer a few of your questions. I don't really know what's profitable, and I never played SWG. Armormech makes armor for non-force classes Armstech makes blaster weapons (and some melee weapons that aren't light sabers) Artifice makes lightsaber hilts, off-hand items, and crystals Biochem makes medpacs, stims, and implants Synthweaving makes armor for force users Cybertech makes grenades, droid armor, implants, speeders, and gadgets. I can't speak for how good they are compared to what you get from quests or other in-game rewards. From my experience, at low levels they don't stack up to quest rewards. Maybe it improves at end-game. You can create an item and reverse engineer it. Reverse engineering gives you some mats back, but also gives you a chance to discover a 'better' version of the schematic that makes the item. I've heard that biochem is a good way to make credits since you're creating reusable items like medpacs and stims. Skills are divided in three categories: crafting, gathering, and mission. You can only have one crafting skill. The skills are more or less setup so each crafting skill has one gathering skill and one mission skill that can supply materials. But if you're primary interest is making credits you can just get three gathering or mission skills and sell the materials on the GTN. Sort of. You can use Archaeology o get 'raw' crystals of certain colors (blue, red, green, etc.) Or you can buy them on the GTN. You can then use Artifice to turn them into crystals you can equip in blasters and light sabers, provided you have the appropriate schematic. These posts are probably good starting points: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=425519 http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=530#

And GTN is SWTOR's 'auction house', correct? Meaning people buy stuff from the Cartel Market using Cartel coins, and then sell them on the GTN?

Hello, I am not technically new, but I just came back to the game after a very long break - when I left there was no Cartel Market. So I think I understand the basics of how the Market works. However, I frequently see people with interesting 'orange' quality gear, which when I inspect I see it's a Cartel Market item. However, when I look in the Market, I can't find it. I'm looking under equipment and I see all sorts of other similar items, just not the ones I'm looking for. Are some (or all) Cartel Market items only available for a limited time?

Early on in the IA storyline (on Hutta), if you have a female character: For Troopers on Nar Shadda: On Tython: where revealing that two young people are in love earns DS points. Honestly, I think trying to end their relationship should be the DS choice, not ratting on them to the Jedis. That said, at least it's better than the half-*****ed implementation of LS/DS decisions in some of the flashpoints (Hammer Station, Athiss, etc.) , where there's just some big machine halfway through the instance that will either kill everyone or let them live. At least someone put some thought into those dialogue choices, even if they don't quite work out.

What's frustrating to me is that they provide more info through 3rd party sites than they do on their own website. A few weeks ago on the Mos Eisley Radio podcast they gave a lot of info on ranked WZs, why they were pulled, what the plans are, etc. None of which they bothered to share on this site.

This topic is new and exciting.

Link? I have never seen them say this in a Q&A.

In that article, EA is using "casual" to mean something different than most of you. They just meant people who tried the game for a bit then stopped. It's not referring to the false "hardcore" vs. "casual" dichotomy you alll think it is, where anyone who doesn't raid is a "casual'. I log on for a couple hours a few nights a week, level up slowly, occasionally PvP. By forum standards I am a "casual". But the fact that I logon almost every night means I don't fit in the definition of "casual" that article is referring too.

Because following a cookie cutter stat allocation doesn't mean you're "good".

Yes, you're being "forced" to level a class so you can get a trivial buff that can easily be provided by any level 1 smuggler/imperial agent. If you're that serious about min/maxing you should already have a smuggler in your ops group/pvp team anyway.

Nah. It's more like people went to McDonalds, thought the word "hamburger" meant "lobster" when they ordered,and then got upset when their sandwich had beef instead of lobster.

If it's on Pandora, that's the moment I delete my Pandora account, scan for viruses, reformat my PC, and do whatever is necessary to make sure that song never shows up on my computer again.

As others have said, they could make it take longer (or shorter) to reach level 50 just by adjusting the amount of experience needed to gain a level and/or the experienced gained by completing quests, killing mobs, etc. A few other things to keep in mind: 1) SWTOR provides new abilities from a trainer every time you reach a level and you get a talent point (past level 10). Other games may do it differently: they may give you a new trainer skill every odd level, a new talent point every even level, etc. But the point is that usually a game wants gaining a level to mean something - even if it's just an increase in passive stats. So you have to balance what stats you want at level cap, how many abilities you want them to have, how many talent points, etc. If you have 200 levels, then you'll have a lot of cases where gaining a level is meaningless. 2) If someone thinks end-game is boring, they'll think i'ts boring regardless of if they're level 50 or level 200. There's always going to be some people who will try to get there as soon as possible (just like there will always be some people who never get there). Raising the level cap doesn't mean the game doesn't also have to design engaging end game (and I'm not arguing one way or the other about SWTOR's end game, just making a general statement).

Good point. Whatever failings DA2 had, it was due to direction and game design, not developer ability. People on this forum use the term "developer" way too loosely (of course it doesn't help that Bioware refers to all their employees as 'developers'). But traditionally "Developer" often refers just to the guys writing code. They don't decide game direction, storyline, etc.

In MMOs, the customer often ISN'T always right. Because the customer usually wants to "Buff me, and nerf the guy who killed me!" There can be a bit of a herd mentatility on the forums - if some people start screaming "Gunnery is OP!" then others start parrotting it, without offering any evidence or reason. There's also the assumption that the game company has infinite people able to do an infinite amount of work. Sure, they could have their artists design head gear for the non-humanoid companion models, but that would take time and money away from other things the community wants, such as new player gear models, or models of new NPCS. And how exactly do you find out what the community wants? You can't go by these forums. They represent a tiny fraction of the population. And if someone posted a thread saying the sky is blue, you'd get a flame war from people who claim it isn't. On Blizzard's forums, Ghostrcrawler would often point out that while they do listen to feedback and try to act accordingly, MMOs aren't delicatessens. Each customer doesn't get to go the cash register and order the MMO they want. The game developers have to design the best game they can, and while they should listen to feedback and take it into account when approriate, they shouldn't be slaves to it.

You should ask this in the class specific forum, since it varies by class and role. Generally speaking once you get past your primary stat and endurance, dps go for power, crit, accuracy, and surge. Healers are similar but want alacricity (and don't need much accuracy). Tanks need defense, shield rating, and absorption. Tanks will also prioritize endurance and armor more than the other roles. The specific order will vary by class, and the class forums should have more details.

The number of people who are happy that the servers won't be going down will be equalled by the number of people who are upset their matrix cubes aren't back yet. Morale of the story pt. 1: You can't please everyone. Morale of the story pt. 2: Test your patches before releasing them so you don't find yourself in this predicament.

So they release a patch that breaks something completey unrelated to the original fix, and then have to take the sygstem down again to fix it, you think it's a smooth ride? If your auto mechanic destroys your muffler while performing an oil change, causing you to bring the car back, do you congratulate him on fixing the muffler? Or do you ask why they touched the muffler in the first place?

Firing people is a little extreme...but I do think they need to revisit their process. It's one thing to occasionally introduce a new major bug (and I consider gear disappearing to be a major bug) or for your patch notes to be inaccurate. You can't ever completely eliminate bugs. But to have it happen every patch and every week is just sloppy. So unlike the guy above me, I don't think "heads need to roll". I do think they need to sit down in a conference room and go over their release process to figure out what's going wrong and how to fix it, if they haven't done so already.

Lots of organizations and people make mistakes. But in almost any "professional" organization, if a mistake is made the organization revisits their processes to make sure it doesn't happen again. So while it's perfectly understandable if a mistake is made on occasion, that does not excuse them from making the same mistake several patches in a row. Do you have a job? Is it considered acceptable by your boss and customers to make the exact same mistake three weeks in a row?

Followed by people who say "You know nothing about software development! It's standard to release patches that have bugs that are even worse than the ones being fixed.!"

It was never "pulled" from 1.2, because they never once said it was going to be part of 1.2. They have, however, specifically said that it will not be part of 1.3. It was in one of the weekly Q&A's.

Why are you forced to romance Nadia? It's because she's CRAZY.

He's also a pacifist. Has he mentioned that to you yet?

OOooh, weren't you fancy. Back in my day, we had two classes: left vertical bar and right vertical bar. You could go up, or down. None of that fancy 'side to side' stuff. You completed your mission when you knocked the little ball past the vertical bar on the other side.