I would certainly use it— I like to explore and see the cut scenes, but I don’t want to be rude when everyone else wants to get straight to the core objectives.

Playing a force ghost could be fun for mentoring a new character when you're at wildly different levels. I wouldn't want to lose my regular character doing so, but it would be neat to be able to have one as an alt that can group up with people without spoiling their XP awards. So maybe make them a legacy unlock that can earn legacy XP, but lacks any actual leveling.

I think it's good to have the space bar; what we also need is to come up with an easily-recognized term that indicates you'd prefer to appreciate the story, so people joining a group know what to expect. That way, you can post "LFG Story Maelstrom Prison" on the Republic Fleet chat and everyone will know you want to find out the details of the Jedi Prisoner. The followup is to have the group finder collect preferences (require story, prefer story, neutral, prefer skip, require skip) and never match a "require story" and "require skip" person; if everyone is "prefer" or "neutral", it announces how many group members have each preference. Another tweak Bioware could do is to put "skip cut scenes" on the Group menu. If everyone in a group selects it (and doing so should put up a notification that they have done so; if they do it before inviting someone to a group, they get notified of the status as soon as they join the group), all cut scenes jump immediately to the choice wheel.

My wife heartily approves and hopes to see some equal opportunity objectification in the actual game. There should a balance of beefcake and cheesecake, after all! She is a costumer and suggests that a short kilt is much more interesting than the dangling loincloth look; her favorite thus far is the somewhat Roman-toga look.

I heartily support equal opportunity objectification. Why can't my female Trooper put Aric Jorgan and Tanno Vik in some Conan/Barsoom style leather-and-straps outfits? And, for that matter, change the pinup on the locker in her Thunderclap to a beefcake calendar?

Or at least make it possible to search for "red solid" in double quotes to get the exact string.

The game has multiple sets of skimpy outfits for female characters; why not have some Conan/Barsoom style outfits for the boys? We should have equal opportunity objectification!

It would be nice to have an ascension gun (like in the movies!) that lets you set your grappling hook where you're standing, then reel yourself up if you fall. Or maybe sell stacks of personalized MGGS patches (so you can grapple back, but no one else can). I agree that trying to make an MMO into a platformer is quite difficult; I think I spent nearly as much time as you did falling off that one. One thing I eventually figured out is that it matters how long you hold down the spacebar when jumping.

If you wind up getting flagged for PvP because you helped out someone else who was flagged, it’s not clear whether or not you have to explicitly flag and then unflag yourself when you get to a rest zone. When the system starts tracking your timer for turning off PvP, it should put up a visible countdown so you can tell.

Just complete the missions and accumulate the gifts, then list them on the GTN on Friday night and they’ll almost always get bought by the end of the weekend. Skip the fabric missions; that doesn’t sell as well.

This suggests an extension to a Heroic Anti-Armor Ability for DPS classes, with the Rocket Launcher for the Trooper, Manual Grenade Insertion for the appropriate Jedi (like Luke vs. AT-AT in Empire), and Shaped Charge for the Gunslinger and Sniper. Then you can have enemies in flashpoints and operations where you need to crack open the armored walker to get at the juicy champion opponent inside!

And the “pulling the hood back” bit is an iconic Jedi move.

I would like a dynamic hotbar that pops up like the one for companion abilities. That would be the place to keep all the things that I don't need in combat: pets, companion dance, mail droid, etc.

I would really like to have a "movie mode" that would make it possible to play back the story of your adventure for someone else to see. It would be a matter of recording the choices you made in various conversations, having the camera fly between scenes where you do things that advance the story, and a couple of vignettes from each boss battle. That would make it possible to show the story that you played through to friends who don't play the game, with enough continuity for context but without spending hours of watching someone traveling around beating up mooks. It would be good to have a way of inserting "bookmarks" into the story so you could pause it at various points and show people the more spectacular vistas in the game.

I’ve been working on datacron collecting, and was disappointed to discover that some of the galactic history unlocks are only available in the opposing faction. The solution, I think, is that we need cross-faction tourism! So a set of gear, something like: Head: Tourist’s Floppy Hat Chest: Tourist’s Zeltron Shirt Wrists: Tourist’s Wristmap Hands: Tourist’s Datagloves Belt: Tourist’s Large Buckle Belt Legs: Tourist’s Cargo Shorts Feet: Tourist’s Sandals Weapon: Tourist’s Holocamera Off Hand: Tourist’s Fruit-Laden Umbrella Drink If you equip all of these while in your own faction’s territory, you acquire the status “Tourist”. This status has the following effects, which should make it impossible to make a nuisance of yourself: All offensive abilities other than basic attack (which triggers the Holocamera) are disabled. You do not register as a threat to anything. You can ride the shuttles to the opposing faction’s station and planets, and ride the taxis there. If killed by falling damage, you can recover at a medcenter of the opposing faction if that’s closest. You cannot participate in duels or PvP. You cannot unequip tourist gear while outside your own faction’s territory. I think that ought to prevent anyone from using tourist gear to sneak past sentries and then switch over to their regular gear, so this shouldn’t break existing challenges. When using the Holocamera with your basic attack ability, if the target of your attack would unlock a codex entry if you defeated it, you unlock that codex entry. It otherwise has no effect. This should make it possible for Imperial characters to run around Tython, Ord Mantell, and Coruscant doing datacron-hunting, and for Republic characters to do the same on Korriban, Hutta, and Dromund Kaas. Depending on the desired difficulty of becoming a tourist, the tourist gear might be trivially available at a vendor, or each part of the outfit only available from an obscure vendor if you’ve already unlocked particular matrix shard datacrons from your own side, or it And I must admit that I find the notion of having grim-looking Sith running around Coruscant in brightly colored aloha shirts, toting fruity drinks and falling off ledges and pipes, to be hilarious.

While the mechanics in tOR don’t rely on modeling what a weapon actually does, it’s nice to have an idea of how things work if you intend to swipe them for a dice-and-paper game. A vibroblade does more damage than a regular sword because the blade is vibrating at high speed. How is a techblade different? It looks like some models have a caged lightning bolt arcing along their length. Similarly, does a techstaff do any more damage than a similarly sized blunt instrument? In Star Wars, normally I’d expect to see a force pike or electrostaff in that kind of role.

Lannik are another possibility for dwarf-like characters.

I understand that there isn’t yet a timetable for when we can transfer to a server of our choice, though it’s in the works long-term. Can Customer Service find out if “transfer to a server of your choice” will be available before “compulsory server merge”, in which case those of us hoping to transfer from an East Coast to a West Coast server should just be patient, or if the compulsory merge comes first and we might as well rip off the band-aid and get it over with?

When taking a character from a combat situation to a social one, it's a hassle to swap outfits: they take up a bunch of inventory slots and there are seven things to switch out. A quick-change wardrobe droid would look much like the trooper's healing probe, deploying a discreetly translucent force field screen around the character for several seconds while they hurriedly change garb.

It would be nice to be able to transfer from an East Coast server to a West Coast one, or from PvE to PvE-RP. (Well, actually, I’d like to both...)

A few days ago, I was playing my level 44 Commando on Hoth, not flagged for PvP, and ran into a level 50 Sorcerer who thought it would be amusing to heal the elite NPC commander I was attacking faster than I could deal out damage. Fortunately, I had my healer companion out, and she could also heal me faster than the NPC could damage me, so I just kept hammering at the NPC until the Sorcerer got bored and left. This was amusing the first time it happened, then annoying when they showed up to try it again half an hour later. That got me thinking about it, and it occurred to me that someone operating closer to the expected level on Hoth could have been taken out if they ran out of health before they could take down the NPC, which would make this behavior a limited form of griefing. I suggest a fix: when an NPC enters combat with a PC who is not flagged for PvP, that NPC should be immune to healing coming from PCs. (NPC medics should still be able to do their work.) I think that should eliminate the griefing potential without affecting other aspects of play. In 44 levels, that's the first time I’ve seen anything resembling griefing. Nice work!

Kashyyyk and Onderon/Dxun have a lot of great PvE opportunities with the wide variety of hostile beasts, and Yavin IV has a lot of interesting ecology plus the Sith temple. (It would be interesting to add Yavin IV, with the old Sith temple, and Ando Prime, with its old proto-Jedi Dai Bendu temple, at the same time.) Bespin could be interesting, since it’s a gas giant with a flying/floating ecosystem. Ryloth could have some intriguing possibilities with the hostile environment aboveground mirroring conflict underground. The polluted surface of Duro or Balosar could be another interesting hostile environment. Umbara would be a great place for lots of intrigue if your writers want to go to town with convolutions, and it would be interesting to see how a party planet like Zeltros is reacting to the galactic situation. And your artists might have a lot of fun with Christophsis. And rather than Dagobah, if you want a swamp world, why not Nal Hutta?

I was just following the Trooper storyline through Tatooine and trying to ignore the whole “rakghoul plague” thing (my character solved that back on Taris, right up to including generating a new rakghoul serum, so if the story had stayed consistent, she would’ve walked up to the first med droid on Tatooine and had them take a blood sample and fixed the mess), but it was rather difficult what with all these infected sandpeople ready to bring out a bunch of their buddies hidden under the sand as soon as a companion accidentally tagged one in the middle of a combat with regular sandpeople. The plague status really needed a countdown to let you know how soon your character was going to expire, so you didn’t leave other group members in the lurch in the middle of combat. The first time, I had no idea what this annoyance was— on Taris, the infection status subsided fairly quickly, and using First Aid wouldn’t make it go away, and I wasn’t going to fork over 2000 credits for what I thought would just be an instant fix for the status effect. If it had billed itself as "Rakghoul Plague Vaccine — 6 hours”, I might have figured it out from the name, and if it survived the character getting killed by other things, it would have been worth the steep price. (Remember that a lot of players with Final Fantasy backgrounds are going to assume that “Vaccine” is the name of the item that removes a “Diseased” status, not the item that gives you “Immune” status for a duration, so plot item names accordingly.) I went through the available quests once and got infected a few times and wound up with 26 DNA samples, which wasn’t enough to buy anything interesting (a new crystal for my assault cannon might have been good); grinding for them by getting repeatedly infected or playing through the same story on a different day was a completely uninteresting prospect for me, so I just sold them, which did make me enough credits to buy another line of inventory. (At one point, a quest prize offered me light-armor boots, which are useless to a Trooper, even for their companions. I took DNA samples as a prize instead.) I did enjoy being able to cure infected sandpeople, but was disappointed that all it did was cure 5 guys until they respawned and that was it. It felt like there should be a bigger denoument, or at least a little update droid giving me quest updates: “Cure 5 infected sandpeople!” “Cure 20 infected guard animals and banthas!” “Cure the chieftain!” where every time you cure an infected sandperson, all the other sandpeople within 20 meters also go to yellow status and will let you walk past, but you might have to do a bit of sneaking to get to infected sandpeople. The dark side equivalent, of course, would be “cull” instead of “cure”... For the future, I would recommend: Remember that some players are in this game to play through the stories, and have no interest in repeating the same adventure every day. The “DNA for death” mechanic created an incentive to go get your character infected, go away from keyboard and wait for them to explode, repeat. Incentives should be for play, not for waiting. Put events like these into areas that won’t interfere with regular questing. Set a flag on the newscaster terminals on Carrick Station to indicate if there’s new news for you to watch; normally, the game unhighlights things once you’ve completed them, but the newscaster looked like it had something new to show me when it just had the same video I saw the first time. Have some way to make it clear that this is a gamewide special event. The Rakghoul Plague thing started up at exactly the same time as I first made my way to Tatooine, and I thought it was just part of the storyline that I had unlocked; at first, I was surprised that other players of wildly different class and level could hear the public address announcements at Carrick Station.

One interesting option for capital ship battles would be to allow Battle Meditation to influence it. Give a Battle Meditation player a set of varying buffs and debuffs that they can direct at different parts of the battle, shifting them with opportunity. That could open up fun participation opportunities for people who might not otherwise be that into the capital ship battle. (The current “clickfest while you’re riding the invisible rail” space combats have a lot of cognitive dissonance for me, which is why I voted for full 3D space combat.)

It could be very Star Wars to have a flashpoint where some heroes board a capital ship and run around wreaking havoc inside and having the result matter for the ship combatants outside, but it’s a lot harder to get the timing for that right. Hmmm... the pilots would battle waves of fighters until the melee heroes can drop the shields, then the heroes go after the power supplies to the turbolasers...