I think there will always be a 1% in a game largely based on player skill. If you remove HM and NiM content, thinking it does not make sense to serve a tiny minority, the top players will leave (I know I wouldn't be here without HM ops and my ops group). Eventually players who can complete SM ops become the new 1%.

If there was no endgame group content I'd have been done with this game years ago. For the past year and a half the only thing that's kept me playing is my ops group. As far as solo content goes the expansions are worth maybe a week each at most.

Conversely, some part of the other 92% may well be good players who didn't enter ToS for other reasons, and we don't know how many. So this statistic alone doesn't really tell us how large a portion of the player base is bads. I guess it's large enough to justify the dumbing down though. If there's one thing I actually like about the companion changes, it's that I can choose my companion based on which of them I like the most rather than their role. I never was too fond of Guss or Lokin, but as they were the only healer companions of their respective masters I was forced to use them from time to time.

All right, I'll grant you that some players are quite bad. I guess I've successfully avoided the worst of the lot by doing story and heroics solo and having a regular ops group. The occasional randoms we get to fill out a HM EV or KP tend to have some clue of what they're doing.

Since when is dual dps not ideal? It's the fastest way to kill enemies and very few solo fights actually require a healer.

Nor is PvP the be-all, end-all of MMORPGs, least of all a story-based one such as SW:TOR. What makes you think warzones are the One Thing that attracts people to this game?

That is undoubtedly the case for many so-called PvPers. Roleplaying reasons aside, it could also be described as bullying or harassment, neither of which is generally regarded as commendable behavior in the real word.

Are you saying it's even more awesome as a force user? Because I played it as a gunslinger.

Such story! So atmosphere! Wow! The last time this game got me so enthralled was when I explored the Theoretica during the HK-51 questline. A welcome break from all the fighting.

All of the reasons for 12xp are gone. Want to play your missing class stories? With the permanent substantial XP reward increases you'll easily keep pace with planet levels. With legacy and CM XP boosts you can skip the planet storylines if you want to. Want to create a new character for endgame content? Use a level 60 token to have it without any quests.

Note that there's two progress bars. The lower, larger one is overall progress and is extremely non-linear. The patching process is divided into phases, which alternate between downloading a thing and installing it, and an equal section of the overall progress bar is allocated for each phase. Since the largest downloads are usually at the beginning, it looks very slow at first but may reach the end very quickly once it gets to the smaller files. Above the large progress bar there's a smaller one which displays the progress for the current phase. This one is generally linear (over each phase), as long as your Internet speed stays constant. Main assets 232 is quite recent so I guess it'll be done soon.

I wonder if it's because you don't have enough coins for even the single unlock? Not that that's any excuse, it would be prudent to show the account-wide price anyway so someone who wants to buy that version knows how much coins to get.

I checked just now, and legacy-wide artifact equipment authorization is available on the cartel market for 2700 cartel coins.

From a storyline perspective the entire leveling system is pointless. I mean, look at how much trouble the Republic is having on Ord Mantell with level 10 separatists. Then look at all those level 48 troops stationed on Corellia. Surely a handful of these highly trained soldiers could wipe the floor with those pesky separatists? And before you say that the different planets exist at different points of the storyline and thus different times, consider that the player characters occasionally get called back to earlier planets and the enemies there are still low level. Level sync essentially tries to detach storyline and leveling from each other. It's a partial success, but as a result story bosses encountered on lower level planets at later parts of the story feel like pushovers.

They can't. It got disabled in 4.1 I think. I won one recently but tooltip says no RE available.

And what exactly would be the problem here? Repeating an action (in this case "give companion gift") is one of the most basic things in computer programming.

Okay, I admit that I grossly misremembered the release date of Path of Exile 1.0. Apparently even the open beta only started in January 2013. Closed beta began on August 10th 2011, several months before SW:TOR was released. I believe there have been no wipes since then, so some characters and items from those days are possibly still around. Still, my main point was the speed at which GGG deploys patches. I don't remember BW fixing bugs in SW:TOR that fast even right after release. These days it seems like we have to wait months for even fairly major bugs to be fixed, unless they are actually preventing a significant portion of users from playing the game at all.

Meanwhile, I picked up Path of Exile again when it got a new expansion on March 4th. The game has since had almost daily bugfix patches and one balancing patch. Now that's how game development should work! It's not like it's a new game either, in fact it's been around longer than SW:TOR.

Too bad all jetpacks have clipping issues with things like lekku or weapons slung across the character's back. I'd love to use a jetpack on my mercenary but she's a Twi'lek and the clipping is a pretty big turn-off. Fortunately I have other characters with no such issues so the jetpack does not go completely unused.

So which features are we comparing side by side? I've never played SWG; I only know what Wikipedia tells me and what I've seen on these forums. Based on those sources SWG is a sandbox game with a rich crafting and player housing system. I guess it has some quests as well, though Wikipedia only mentions them in passing. Endgame content also seems rather weak, with only four raids available. SW:TOR, meanwhile, is a heavily story-driven theme park game, with focus on quests. Its endgame has nine raids and more than twenty flashpoints with different difficulty variations available for each. Crafting and player housing on the other hand are more of an afterthought. To summarize, points go as follows: SWG: Crafting, housing, exploration SW:TOR: Story, endgame, graphics Now, which game is better? This is where we get to the matter of opinion. I like stories and also facing challenges with my friends (i.e. endgame content). I only craft for myself and get bored with decorating houses very quickly. Graphics are a nice bonus, but I usually don't have time to explore just for exploration's sake. So for me, SW:TOR is clearly the better game. Care to add any more comparisons?

Well, you'll have to re-download everything (around 30 GB), but that's only once. A decent ADSL connection should be able to download it overnight or during the workday. After it's done, subsequent patches will be much, much faster.

It is indeed a fact that SWG and SW:TOR are two different games developed by two different companies. When you tout something as a fact, especially regarding something as varied as video games, you might want to tell which measuring stick you are using. Hours of story content? Number of different environments? Peak subscriber count? Average players online? Remember that facts need to be independently verifiable. In case of historical data we'll have to rely on records. Often enough it won't even be possible to declare one game "better" than another because players value different kinds of things and what's better for one may not be so for another.

I paid 12 € for continued unlimited access to endgame content, no credit cap and all the other sub perks. I also got 550 cartel coins which are worth about 5 €, so really the cost of playing the game is only 7 € per month.

Defeating Xenoanalyst II on the Gray Secant will drop a purple reputation token. But perhaps you already counted that as a weekly? It's possible that some one-time missions grant reputation tokens as well. In general though, dailies are the way. To get reputation faster do them on multiple characters.

IIRC a red fps number means it's limited by CPU. Green would be limited by GPU. Your CPU only has a 2.4 GHz base frequency, which is kinda low for this game. The turbo frequency of 3.2 - 3.4 GHz is decent, but something may be holding it back. Check your computer's power settings; ideally you'll want a high performance power plan, at least when it's plugged in.