Sorry if I was a bit ruffled. I certainly didn't cancel my account over this event alone. My primary peeve is the impossibility of finding groups, and the fact it seems intentional on the developers' part: there's a known MMO dps glut, and having a healer/tank to dps ratio of 1:1 will obviously exacerbate this, as will not having dual specializations. I guess dying in fleet after failing to find a group, when all I wanted to do was employ my second option and go questing, was jut the last straw. With that being said it's important to realize that different people enjoy different aspects of MMORPGs. One of the biggest mistakes many MMO designers make, IMO, is to "tell" the players what we should enjoy, rather than giving us a sandbox environment and letting us do as we please. The things I miss most about EQ (pre-PoP) were the difficulty (and subsequent great reward) of crafting professsions and the fact great gear was rare, thus a model where it didn't bind worked well, and so it could be bought and sold. This resulted in both tradeskilling and bartering with other players being valid paths to advancement, not simply little side games which offered occasional distraction from endless raiding and/or end-game PvP, as was the case with post-PoP EQ and most recent MMOs. As the poster above me said, some people simply aren't into this, and would be fine with others enjoying it as long as we weren't ourselves being forced into it. This is a fun game. The questing is a blast and the voice acting is superb. I will absolutely check back in about 6 months, when I hope some of the gameplay issues have been tweaked and smoothed out.

It's impossible to find groups, that's a given... now I can't go questing either because this debuff periodically stuns / dismounts me. How am I supposed to level up? o.O Edit: just died from it in imperial fleet. Account cancelled, I'll check back in 6 months. I feel like I was beta testing this game.

... My name is Trotheus, and I'm a schematoholic. Yeah, when I think of the time I've wasted being this OCD in MMOs... =(

I'm not really seeing the problem either. Quest reward mods aren't on a different level scale than crafted ones. In fact, they're identical and you can RE them as proof. I can generally make as good or better than what I would get, which allows me to choose rewards for selling on the GTN or vendoring for credits instead of for necessity. And the rest of what I craft fetches a lot of credits on the GTN. But of course, we all have our own opinions. If you don't enjoy crafting you don't have to do it. You can play the game just fine without doing any tradeskills, or with sticking to gathering ones.

I've tanked in other games and hate it when people do this too. Unfortunately, what it comes down to is that if the developers give a class a way to annoy people, many players will do it out of ignorance, and many others out of spite. It's not the fault of sorc's, it's just because we happen to have an ability that does this. I personally never use it in a group, but that's because I'm one of the ones who knows better.

I mostly agree with this quote; it is much more new-player-friendly to gather and sell what you gather to other players than to craft. However, if you have a knack for markets, you can make more crafting than you can gathering. You just have to have a good idea of what to sell on the GTN and what to not bother with, how much things are worth, and which markets to avoid due to saturation from other crafters. These are all things you can pick up over time, but in my experience most players don't. Further, if you buy rather than gather your matierials, it takes you less time per credit earned - yes, the profit will be slightly less, but as the old saying goes, time is money. Last thing is I wouldn't suggest 3 gathering skills. Keep a crafting skill even if you don't plan on using it, just to prevent you from spending time & effort leveling a third gathering skill which you'll quite possibly regret as you drop it later on for a crafting skill. If you haven't already checked it out, there's a stickied thread (stays at the top) in this forum detailing which professions synergize the best. It's definitely worth taking a look. Good luck.