As controversial as it sounds - I expected to play an MMO(RP)G, yeah, a massively multiplayer online game, I expected some degree of evolution over games that were released 10+years ago, heck if you ignore the 3d graphics aspect then The Shadow of Yserbius Graphical MUD was actually more advanced and even had a combat log when it was released, so go figure, not sure what Bioware were thinking, I dont know who approved the game design/plan/model but they royally messed up. I'd say its improbable to produce a game that no-one likes, there will always be a crowd that likes a game regardless and thats fine, the question for this game is: are there enough people that like it and how long will that enthusiasm last? and thats irrespective of the current premium monthly subscription fee. Its one thing to say its earned/earning its money back (it probably hasnt), as with anything they have to pay the bills and this game has a pretty big bill to pay by all accounts. A question no-one seems to ask or think about is just how much reduction in projected incomes will the companies involved lose as a result of direct and indirect damages to reputation and integrity, its quite possible that alot of 'bill's may not be properly paid due to such failings, EA LA and BW have a big trend of delivering substandard smash-n-grab cash-in products atm. EA - I wont be touching their products again for a good while, BW - same as EA, and LA - well I wont be going near a Star Wars product if I can help it as the franchise/IP is now imo little more than a farcical joke that has the sole objective of misleading for the purposes of quick financial gain. SW games are becoming more and more like the films, rehash what has already been done, rebadge it with some alledged 'new features' chuck a load of misleading hype around and re-release at premium rates to milk the masses.

I'll be hesitant in future purchases but 1 rotten apple is just that - 1 rotten apple and everyone has their own view ofc. It would be easy to say "hey! BW can go swivel" but the next game they do may be an absolute winner so never-say-never in my book.

I hope that's sarcastic, otherwise that's gotta be one of the most blind statements I've seen in a long while. 10 days casual leveling (3-4 hours in the evening) to hit 50 isn't a long time by any stretch of the imagination. Hoth I quite liked, yeah there were... inconvenient moments but the planet itself is atleast a wide corridor as opposed to a narrow corridor like Coruscant, my only real gripe is whether or not the planet should actually be in the game. I could never quite understand the point of that cult of half naked people in the ice fortress though, they were... very odd, the only thing that sprang to mind was that it was possibly a jibe at WoW WotLK, maybe just me though lol. Belsavis I hate, I went through it once, the second time around I just got utterly demotivated by its mindless tedium and woeful use of funnelling through what largely seems to be pointless submaps designed only to impede the players, curiously the prisoners seem to be fine with it. Belsavis seems to be a sort of "gear check" for players tolerance, it's like a pre-50 "can you put up with the repetition?" to prepare you for level 50 grinds and the like of killing the same ol' same ol' over and over again.

I'm a big fan of the sandbox approach but they don't dominate, they do last but age isn't related to dominance. WoW is still very much the #1 regardless of its reputation, it still has triple maybe even quadruple the number of active paid accounts than the next best MMO, it is very much the ligthning that struck the same place 5 times. The main fundamental problem with the sandbox approach is getting people to use their imagination, people tend to want everything handed to them, they dont want to go out and have to find it anymore. On the other hand pure themeparks are now pretty much at the end of their life span also as the whole idea of progressing through the 'story' instantly screams stick a level number on me and thats creates the whole end-game vicious circle that had rehashed time and time again over the last near-decade. People are starting to want a themepark that can, on demand, be sandboxy then switch right back to being a themepark again - would this qualify as a hybrid as has been suggested? I'm not so sure I think this goes further than that but who knows, 1 thing is clear: we're a demanding bunch aren't we and once the MMO games industry realises maybe we'll get some serious innovation instead of iteration on the 'next big thing'.

Like I said in the original post, It was purely my opinion and as such open to interpretation and differences of opinion, I even agree with what you have just said, I just worded it differently, but "dynamic" in MMO generally means content beyond the players control that and can change, those rift spawns arent player controllable they just pop up randomly, that qualifies albeit just about in some views as dynamic content, they may well be trivial afer a few months just like alot of content put into these MMOs but they are dynamic regardless of a fan base. The end game aspects of Rift and for that matter other games, are touched upon in some subsequent posts in here. I think we'd all agree that the holy grail of conundrums for developers for the next few years is: in a level quantified system, how do you make the end-game not the end-game? SWG had a good idea for it in my opinion as did EVE to a degree anyway, but players generally seem to prefer having that overarching numeric with which to feel all big n bad, so at max level what became the next best thing? gear, then boss kills, then dps meters, then just out right pointless posturing slanging matches in general chat and after 8 years of that we really need something fundamentally new, hence why I dont play Rift and one of the reasons this game has fallen from grace for me. I honestly believe that the next decent MMO that solves that end game puzzle in a reasonable way will have a damned good chance at being the next 'WoW'.

Thanks for that, it appears that arguably the most accurate answer to what happened is a phrase containing the words 'arse' and 'elbow' or another containing 'bitten' and 'chew'. The Bartle Test hmmm I'm more of a passive observer type I guess I'm not supposed to play MMOs and the 'OODA' model oh dera oh dear lets rush through things as fast as possible without thinking them through properly - yeah fabulous stuff, I hear they did that with the Titanic mid journey. Still ya gotta give kudos to BW on being so open about it.

Its clear ya stopped reading as you blatantly skimmed it, the line reads that EA invested ~$80million on SWTOR from the point of their involvement as is reported, note that this is seperate from the approx $86million they spent when they purchased Bioware in 2007, all other figures are speculation as we do not know how much LA and Bioware themselves invested prior to EA takeover of Bioware. Oh just to clarify, there are no official final figures for Rift just the initial budget of "over US$50 million" according to Trion Worlds CEO Lars Buttler but perhaps you know something he doesn't? To Kubernetic: You inadvertently helped make my question all the more worthwhile so I must thank you for that, I'm not sure that was you intent however, but you might also wish to re-read my original post as I made it painfully and simply clear as to why I compared SWTOR to Rift and in the 1st line of my post I state rather clearly that these are my opinions, the paragrah re budgets and timelines are fact as best can be found from historical articles on the internet, do you wish to take issue with those? if so then feel free to contact the various outlets that published said info in their articles. Since you lodged such objections regarding the audio aspects of the game, lets take another look at this VO audio then: 200,000 lines 3s avg per line? 166h36m, 4s avg per line 222h13m but I bet a good chunk didnt make it to the final cut, lines recorded does not equal lines used no matter how many Guiness World Records the thing has. So the question remains, all the more potent now: What happened in development with this game as I can asure you they were not ALL working on the audio engine or audio asset organisation (one would hope not anyway). Kubernetic I'll never understand why people get so personal with their arguements in forums, you dont agree and thats fine as thats you prerogative, just as its mine to state what I believe. Most of the people in here whether they agree with me or not understood clearly what I wrote and discussed in the manner of the original post, which was calm considered and unprovocative, you didn't ... oh well, sith happens.

Like I said Rift isn't as fresh as I wanted thus I dont play it anymore, the comparison isnt about promoting Rift or demoting SWTOR its simply that Rift is the current measuring stick that most modern MMOs are compared against, its especially apt in the both Rift and SWTOR went into development at roughly the same time and were released sufficently close to each other to provide as near as possible a direct comparison between the 2 and in that context SWTOR comes up woefully short in terms of a quality product. Rift however is/was fairly innovative and much better designed for the reasons listed, but innovation quickly becomes convention especially when hindsight is thrown into the mix. Rift like WoW and some other MMOs managed to put enough semi-dynamic variety into their games to keep the leveling aspects from becoming stale too quickly they also made sure the leveling process wasn't too quick this atleast allows the boring aspects to fade a bit before you run them again with alts should you be so inclined. Sadly Rift WoW and SWTOR all suffer from this phenomenon called end-game and that in itself creates the dreaded gear-grind/ rep grind/ currency grind etc that we've come to hate, 8 years ago it was fine but now.. it's just too old. The only game that I can recall that came close to solving the riddle of no end game was SWG pre-CU but players seemed to want something that allowed them to feel better than others and the easiest solution for that is a simple numeric, it also helps the developers with game-mechanics and balance issues but thats another can of worms. However, any modern developer that can solve that no-end-game puzzle and get a reasonable game wrapped around it will be onto a winner I would think and I dont foresee another WoW type behemoth unless a developer solves that puzzle. In my opinion the holy grail of the MMO world for the next few years - how do you make the end-game not the end-game.

A question for the older gamers: do ya think that SWTOR will become the new Daley Thompson's Decathlon? As someone said, we'll never know what happened, I am of the opinion that either 2 versions of the game were developed and they went with this version or some point about 18 months ago a decission was made to drastically cut down/ what they had both in terms of complexity and/or size and scope most probably for financial and release schedule reasons ala an accountancy decision. We all know that marketing machines hype the hell out of everything, but if you look back to the dev diaries of the time on what features they were working on, its as if its a completely different game to what we have, yeah things change in the development cycle but does it all change this much? other hints that suggest the above possibilities are some of the datamined items on torhead showing totally diffferent stat terms and numbers indicating a completey different set of underlying mechanics, one of the high end spaceship upgrades has such on it. Of course datamining is somewhat questionable in its accuracy anyway and lord knows what beta build or whatever it is from but it is none-the-less from a later-stage version of the game be it alpha or beta.

This is probably gonna sound like a hate post, it isn't, it's a harsh honest appraisal from my perspective, backing a question that really needs answering. Bioware formerly announced SWTOR 3.5 years ago (October 2008, rumours were abound in late '06) and Bioware stated that story writers had been working on the project for 2+ years at that point, so at launch the game ahd been in development for over 5 years probably more towards 6 years. EA purchased Bioware in 2007 but this SW MMO was already in development at that point and would have already had a massive amount of cash thrown at it due to project funding negotiations with LA when they decided they wanted another SW MMO, so its safe to say that the game design was 1st drafted ~2005 So my question is what the heck happened? that amount of development time, and we get a cut down KOTOR with an IRC channel and an MMO frontend on it. Something seriously changed direction late on in the games development cycle such that I would say alot of the development at that point was effectively thrown out the window. EA stated that SWTOR cost them about ~$80million, thats quite possible as typically the lions share of a budget is allocated at the start of a project thus prior to EAs involvement since LA nor Bioware was likely aware of what the future held at the time this game was sanctioned. This is probably why there appears to be such disparity with the typical US$150-200 million that most games analysts put on the cost of this game. So a follow on question: is that ~350k subs break-even figure that EA throw around just for return on their own investment? So we have a game thats been in development since 2005-06, had more than double what most other games get spent on it, has about 10hours worth of voice over dialogue sound files on an otherwise rudementary basic-features-only cookie cutter MMO game model on a 3rd party game engine, we have the after thought of a drunken friday night out that is the space combat mini-game, loads of half finished stuff such as dark/lightside alignment and companions and we have the 4 main classes with 20 talent trees (5 per base class) sub-dividing those 4 classes into 8 advanced classes with 3 trees each (1 tree is common between both Adv classes per base class). Lets look at a contemporary alternative: Rift by Trion Worlds Development: Started 2006, similar to SWTOR although SWTOR probably started a bit earlier Budget: Initially reported as over US$50million - well thats alot less than EAs SWTOR contrbution alone Game Engine: 3rd party as are most modern MMOs Launch: March 2011: 8 months before SWTOR with arguably slightly less endgame content Base-Classes:4 (same as SWTOR) Talent trees:8 per base-class (3more than SWTOR) Advanced Classes: 224 (player selects any 3 trees from the pool of 8 for the base-class resulting in 56 Advanced Class combos for each base-class) Both games started development roughly the same time as each other so comparison at a point shortly after their launch seems the best, for that its the 6 month mark as thats where SWTOR is at: (some of the following is subjective and personal opinion) Interactive dynamic environments? Rift yes, SWTOR no - rift spawns and zone invasions, SWTOR is 100% static Storyline: Rift sort of, SWTOR yes - SWTOR akin to reading a book in places (good and bad) Sense of immersion: Rift yes, SWTOR no - SWTOR feels like you're on a train ie your just along for the ride. Sense of grand scale/living world: Rift yes, SWTOR no - Rift is largely free roam, SWTOR narrow corridors with nice scenery, exactly the same as KOTOR 6 years ago, tatooine is a partial exeption. Free Roam Exploration: Rift yes, SWOTOR no - SWTORs "I'm on a train, I cant complain" well actuallly I can complain as there is no possibility for adventure or exploration Crafting and Player economy: Rift no, SWTOR no - I've been spoiled with the systems of SWG and EVE that anything less feels frankly like playing shop with a 3yr old. Combat: Rift yes, SWTOR yes - they both use the same tried n tested hotkeys gallore approach Alternative gameplay: - Rift yes, SWTOR ish - Rift adveture+exploration, SWTOR space (cringeworthy I know) LFG: Rift yes, SWTOR no - its coming but frankly they took 8 months longer than Rift so it should have been in at launch. Ingame Events: Rift yes, SWTOR yes - the ones in Rift are in addition to the rift spawn and zone invasion systems. X-Sever PVP: Rift yes, SWTOR yes - I dont pvp so I cannot comment on either. Additional post launch patches/content: Rift every 4-5weeks typically, SWTOR sporadic at best. Addons: Rfit yes, SWTOR no - like them or loathe them there is no denying that the basic supplied action bars in MMOs are always next to useless due to sheer number of keybindings required. I could go on and on and the harsh truth is that Rift would tend to win or be equal to SWTOR on all the key features that we have come to expect as basic requirements for modern MMOs, the surprising fact is that SWTOR lacks so many of these and the ones it does have it has pretty much made a mess of. I must make it clear, I dont play Rift anymore as that game wasn't quite as fresh as I was hoping but it is certainly far more advanced in design than this game and has a reasonable degree of longevity and replayability to it and right now I'm taking a break from MMOs as this one has somewhat deterred me from the genre. Of course the above is somewhat subjective and open to personal opinion and interpretation. The bottom line for me, and the reason I unsubbed is sadly that lightsaber and blaster graphics just dont make up for the otherwise mundane bottom of the range simplistic copy-paste MMO game model that is lurking underneath regardless of subscription costs. If you want Star Wars graphics and story especially relating to the KOTOR era then this game is worth a look, but for anyone not so attached to that or that wants a reasonably well done MMO then I honestly would recommend staying away from this product. Rift is considered middle of the road and somehwhat of a measuring stick in the MMO community atm and is clearly leaps and bounds ahead of this game both in terms of design, coherent finished features, polish and responsive proactive development. Star Wars is arguably the biggest IP on the planet and the brand new flagship MMO game for that IP is 1/10th as succesful as the 8year old aging behemoth that is WoW. People say "oh xyz game was rubbish at launch also" surely the defining point that seperates humans from everything else is that we learn from our mistakes!? perhaps the games industry is exempt from that and we have to wait 5 years for this game to be at the same level of game xyz when that was 5years post launch. We got something that should've taken ~3years and about US$30million to make that is now seemingly having to have its financial performance fabricated to keep shareholders happy.

Yep, same as OP is the sense of being completely bored out of my mind, Levelled my 1st char, a BH merc, to 50 in a little over a week with no prior knowledge of the game, maxed out its gathering and crafting skills I then started a Trooper, got that to 47, then hit the zombifying planet that is Belsavis with its grotesquely linear questing path and pointless meandering side-stories, I lost all interest in my Trooper thanks to that planet, 1st time through it with my BH was more than enough for one year, I started several force user characters, all level 26 or lower but I really cannot face doing the same stuff over and over again, I cant understand how a game can become so stale so fast, I honestly have never experienced this level of near insta-boredom in a game before and I've been playing games since the wood veneered Atari 2600 console, so I've either been insanely lucky or this game really is a narrow-band niche mmo which most certainly isn't for me. I bought this game early march, did most of the above in the 30day free period that comes with the client, I was going to cancel before being charged for my 1st month but then I read about some of the changes in 1.2, decided to hold on for a bit longer and gave 1.2 a chance, had a right good chuckle due to the infamous events of Friday 13th lol, but ultimately, this game really is far too shallow and unimaginative for me so I cancelled last weekend, a group of my RL friends cancelled in the 2-3 weeks prior we're all somewhat disillusioned with what was offered in terms of features, playability, longevity, scope, innovation etc. I wonder what will happen in the meetings once they can no longer give people 30days free to artificially maintain subscriptions, if that is part or all the motivation then I sense a large Ice-berg ahead, I hope not but it make little difference to me either way.

As has been said already, a damned thorough indepth to the last detail sandbox with multiple smaller themeparks placed in it in a nonlinear construction. To illustrate for those who can relate to this, imagine this game broken into its seperate story components and then placed into SWGs open plan sandbox world, that for me would pretty much satisfy just about everyone. Using the above: i) non-combat sure go for it, we have tons of non-combat stuff, makeup-artist, dancer, crafter, resource gathering, bio-engineering (sort of involves combat but hey). ii) so you're an economist? go for it, everthing needs replacing eventually due to item degredation from use iii) combat? hell thats everywhere go knock yerself out with it, maybe even escort your local gun maker to get some nice bits for a discount perhaps . iv) exploration/adventue? great vast open planet-scapes, points of interest etc etc etc go get lost for hours v) in game events, yep both publisher driven and player created, we have tons of em vi) space? got that also, and its highly customisable as we all know, proper 3d free flight, cockpt views, muli-player ships etc etc and the best bit, they're all player made complete with rare schematics here n there, what would star wars be without a decent space game in it. vii) pvp, got that covered from pretty much all angles and its emphasis is on world pvp viii) crafting and gathering, does it really get any more involving and rewarding than SWGs crafting a resource models? ix) socialising/community yep we got masses of class interdepencies x) 'unique' characters yep we got that, right from armor appearances being user determined all the way down to your skillset/build, your character is defined by how you want it to play not by what you're told you can have. xi) Travel, well ya got mechanical and organic mounts and combat pets, all player built/created ofc, the animals have to grow first though so you can have a hell of a time handling them and training them then selling them on to the shooty fighty types and they'll end up killing them or they'll die of old age and need another one xii) proper implementation of player built towns/settlements thus the scenery gradually changes/evolves ofc not every planet is suitable for settlement. xiii) no simplistic level indicator, no more of this, mob i x level ,i'll kill it, instead you genuinely dont know until you shoot / hit / stab / kick it. xiv) Skill trainers, yeah we have those 2, but guess what? your friend knows the skill so just learn it off of them The main point being that if you dont like doing something then you dont need to do it, you're free to play how you wish. All items and consumables would be player created and interactible right down to the furninture, not to mention the plethora of equipment that will eventualy need to be replaced so we have a damned good economic base there to keep people rotating through the markets and content for materials and credits/resources. Maybe people would actually play the game for the purpose of playing rather than egotistical purposes. Ofc there would be some progressive content but with more purpose other than ego RNG looting like most MMOs seem to be these days afterall you want the best materials for that new gun/ sword/ knuckle duster/ lightsaber you want right? Just my take on the discussion.

Subscription cancelled: I did all this level, gear, rep, add nuaseum etc grind with WoW, I have no motivation to do it all again in a game this stale and limited. If this game came out 10 years ago it would have been borderline reasonable, but for a modern release!? there's hardly anything in the game other than a pile of sound files and a couple of hours worth of storyboards, I sincerely cannot help but be bamboozled as to what exactly the development time was spent doing!?. This game falls woefully short of any measure of acceptability for me, I would have still cancelled had this game been free to play, that is frankly how dire and narrow this game is in my opinion. I am staggered by the complete lack of features and innovation, you cant even call it cookie cutter as half the features of a cookie cutter MMO are missing. If you take off the voice over nonsense and the star wars wrapper you're left with something that would have been scrapped a decade ago and described as pathetically unfinished, yet somehow we're being charged prime rates for it!? no thanks, not doing that nonsense anymore, how many times do we have to go through this kind of half-arsed half-baked nonsense before game developers get it, how many times are people gonna say "its a new game give it time" thats what development time is for! to get rid of all the nonsense glitches and make sure everything is present and correct, I'll be damned If I'm going to pay to alpha-test another damned game again. Even if you diregard all of the above, this game still has all the issues that you would associate with a major MMO release but with the depth and scope of an iphone app. I'm not sure what age some of these so called game developers are living in, or what the target market is for this particular game, but frankly, to say you have dropped the ball would imply you had actually picked it up in the 1st place and in all honesty the game proves time and time again that you never actually even had a ball to pick up so.. I hate to see things fail/flop/go south etc but <insert chosen deity here> couldn't ressurect this mess in time to save it in my opinion. Ubisoft tried making people play single player with a permanent online thing a couple of years ago, you've just done the next logical step, put multiple people in the same single player game then throw in some 'multi'-player content at the end of the worlds quickest levelling system and charge prime rates for the priviledge of the arduous task of sitting through the debacle. This maybe a bit unfair perhaps but should illustrate things reasonably well: SWG had 32+ professions on launch (all fully dynamic in terms of selection), WoW had 9 classes and 27 talent trees, Rift had 4 classes with 32 user selectable trees, SWTOR has 4 classes and 20 trees on launch. SWG at launch had no direct means to assess peak level as there were numerous options and factors to consider but 3+ months wasn't uncommon due to the nature of multiple xp types required, WoW 1-60 took over a month minimum excluding crafting/gathering professions, Rift I've only played trial so level 20, but that took me a good couple of days without touching the crafting/gathering side of things, this game!? my 1st char with no prior knowlegde took 10 days to get to 50 complete with 2 gathering and 1 crafting profession all maxed at 400 with the personally useful schematics to blue/artifact level. In short I played this game to the point of personal boredom within the free 30day period that comes with the game, I only paid for my second month due to the misplaced hope that 1.2 would fix the issues and alleviate the tedium. I wont hold the monumental messup that was Friday 13th April against anyone, we're all allowed a monumental messup from time to time and it was sheer comedy that of all days to make a pigs ear of things it had to be on friday 13th lol. Imagine buying a brand new washing machine, the delivery guys come round and only part plumb it in, they leave the waste pipe sticking out over your nice expensive carpet, would you accept excuses like, "well we've yet to figure out how to attach it to your waste water pipe" or "we'll have that fixed next week for ya"!? no you wouldn't, yet that is pretty much what most major games releases expect from us. Waht we seem to be prepared to accept from games publishers/developers we would call unacceptable cowboy/con artist behaviour in just about every other aspect of society.

First and foremost, any employee being fired as a result of EAs poor performance has my deepest sympathies as they're doing the job as dictated to them by the higher-ups, sadly the root cause of most of these failings is bad/poor business decissions and the people that are responsible for them will not be fired (the afore mentioned higher-ups) and as we all know, excrement rolls down hill. I'm reminded of a dev called Blixtev who worked at SOE on SWG who conveyed such problems from the perspective of a plumber: if the customer wants the toilet in the middle of their living room then thats where the heck its going as its not our job to determine or decide where to put it, even if we know its a bad idea we still gotta do it. As to this game, to be honest, I personally think it came out a year or 2 too early, there's so much missing from the game even compared to F2P browser based MMOs its frightening the sheer amount of features missing, then you look at its spiritual predecessor - SWG, and to think that somebody somewhere thinks that this game is worth charging a premium for both the client and a monthly subscription, it just smells of a quick smash and grab by LA and EA at the expense of alot of people, us included. With hindsight I would never have bought this game, it is in all honesty, from my point of view, utterly not worth it financially and from the point of view of gaming it is totally lackluster in all aspects, I would have considered this game old hat 5 years ago. I hope this game can be saved, but I really doubt it, development just really doesn't happen that fast and this game really needs to be pretty much gutted and put back on the drawing board, sure there are some good bits to it, just nowhere near enough to make it a successful MMO even if it was totally free I would think twice about it, and that's before you consider client AND monthly charges. Three weeks ago, 4 of my RL friends played this game (fully purchased game not trial), we had moved from WoW for this game, I sent trial inivtes to 2 other people the remainder of our WoW friends had already declined trying this game. So now, out of a total of 7 people I am only one left playing and I've decided not to renew my sub. My eldest looked at this game, he's 21yr old n said "bleep that, it looks bleep" he's playing Rift, both my partner and eldest used to play SWG with me, we all agree that this game is inferior both mechanicaly, features and scope to SWG. Alot of people I have spoken to in RL that play MMOs all say the same thing, its a glorfied single player game with a monthly fee and that if you remove the star wars wrapper and voice files you're left with a very limited cookie cutter copy-paste mmo combat model with nothing innovative or fresh and I have to agree, it's completely obvious someone somewhere high up in the parent companies really has no idea what the hell they are doing with regards to games or they think they can make a fast buck by churning out the same ol' rubbish and get away with it, either way. I sincerely hope a miracle happens that convinces me to stick with this game and gets my friends n family interested in it (again for some) but I really cannot see how.

I kinda have to agree to a point with the OP, the event itself was imo pretty poorly orchestrated, server resets get a larger fanfare, the website was behind the times by almost a week and the ingame story/event support stuff is/was rather basic to say the least and not very coherent eg; major rhakgoul outbreak unconfirmed beyond taris system-> confirmed in multiple imperial, republic and unaligned systems -> unconfiirmed rhakgoul outbreak beyond taris system rinse and repeat. I know the game is new, but crikey this rhakgoul thing really constitues an in-game event? My character(s) is supposed to be some sort of insta-hero yet the mundane NPCs and all my companions are completely immune to this rhakgoul plague.. go figure. In my opinion it is essentially a deterent to using fleet GTN and a bit of Tatooine. Had the plague and supporting content been progressive then it could have been so much better, but it is/was a one off thing thus little more than a gimmick with a crystal and/or vanity pet shoe-horned in masquerading as event level content. Treat it like a gimmick and its not so bad, look at it as an ingame event and its prettty lackluster. Examples of effective plague-esque 'events'; Corrupted Blood from WoW (accident or intended is irrelevant), pre-launch buildup for Wrath, both of those were far better than this, events in general: player created and dev supported events in SWG and lets not forget the mundane run of the mill standard zone-rift spawns in Rift they're better and more compelling than this rhakgoul plague 'event'. I just cant help feeling no matter what I do in this game, it seems to have missed out on the last 6+ years of MMO design 'advancements', it's almost as if the devs (be that Bioware or EA or LA etc etc) seem to have been in hibernation or some form of enforced social exclusion for the past few years and are now constantly trying to reinvent the wheel at every opportunity and I'm not sure why.