There is only ONE ability that force user need over the non-force user, i.e. Force persuade. As in "[Force persuade]Point your blaster at your head ... and squeeze trigger." If force user is all empowering over the non-force user, all players will create force-based char and no player will want to play non-force char. For that consideration, force-based char cannot overpower non-force char. It has to be a balance.

This game is character-centric. Like many such mmo, the game design is centric on the player character (E.g. char gearing, customization etc.). This is great. However, there are some mmo like EveOnline, that are ship-centric. Items and customization are centric on the ships. The ship is in effect the player character, the significant difference being EveOnline player can build and use many different type of ships (like you can on-the-demand build and use many type of character). I am not too sure how much more 'growth' is possible in terms of innovative growth in the character-centric direction. However, I believe SWTOR can do well embracing (but not to the exclusion of existing character-centric design) ship-centric design into the existing game. That will give you much much more room to grow the game. EveOnline could be your starting point of reference. For a baby step, you could start off by allowing all players of all faction to use all the existing personal ships (not just restricting class-specific ship for that class only). It may appall some die-hard starwar fan that a sith can pilot a jedi ship. But in real life, why not? If you can get hold of a ship (any ship), you can pilot it (no reason why you have the skill to pilot one ship but not the others unless there are some class-specific piloting skill. But isn't the smuggler's ship a stolen ship which meant that it is not 'native' to the smuggler?) The ability to use different personal ship can be monetarized into the legacy unlock or cartel market. This small change will constructively boost the 'economy' of the game. Constructive because people enjoys the credit/coin they paid for the unlock (unlike destructive meaning people paid credit/coin without any tangible benefit e.g. repair bill as credit sink). Beyond the personal ships, you can introduce many other different ships (plus their armoring, mod, enhancement etc) beyond the current 6 personal class ships. Imagine the huge monetary potential and 'growth' of this design model. And this direction of growth will also continuously engage your post-lvl 50 players in the end game as there will be new ships to collect in every new patch. Furthermore, if you have more than 2 personal ships in your collection, you can opt to purchase/unlock a personal capital mothership, which essential is a bigger ships which you can dock all your personal ship into. This is also a central base from which you can choose and switch to any of your personal ship collection. This perhaps can also double up as your legacy ship where all your alts can access. A tangible purpose would be the ability for all alts to access a common legacy cargo hold on the mothership. I see alot more growth and potential in the development of the ship category. But caution that such development should not be at the expense of the current character-centric development lest the backlash from current player base loyal to char-centric design as seen in the backlash when EveOnline attempt to move into char-centric design at the expense of their existing ship-centric design. The whole new concept has to be an 'add-on enhancement' rather than a 'take-away from existing to introduce a new concept'. Besides spaceships, I would like to also suggest a terrain-based vehicle. This is the same concept as a personal ship as our home-away-from-home concept, except that it is meant for planetary (rather than inter-planetary) travel. Instead of taxi, we can use our terrain vehicle to travel between existing taxi points (or quest hubs). This terrain vehicle also double up as a movable personal cantina at every quest hubs instead of a fix cantina at every planet. Will this suffer existing cantina and taxi point? Yes it will. But hey the existing cantina as a social gathering point is overstated and underutilized anyway. And the lost of income from taxi point travel can be gained back by the huge item gearing (mod, enhancement, armoring etc) market for terrain vehicle. And why not have specific category of quest/heroic/flashpoint that only use team of terrain vehicles to fight (much like forming team of characters to fight). For example, Mechwarrior Online can be your possible point of reference on what is possible. This will open up another huge market for vehicle collection, customization and gearing in parallel to spaceship-based, character-based gearing. So instead of one, we can have 3 (Terrain vehicle, spaceship and character) flavors to enjoy. Different players can choose what flavors suits them best while the committed player can develop into all. Players get what they want, swtor earns their credit. Its a win-win for all. At the end of the day, as a starwar fan, I cannot imagine only piloting one ship or not being able to pilot a terrain vehicle like an AT-AT etc, for the entire of my swtor career here. It does not do justice to the rich content of the starwar story and the potential of this great game. Pls do consider my above suggestion. May the force be with you.

No sir, certainly your role in life cannot be one to provide answers to me. Nor am I expecting anything in that direction. I am just extending an invitation for you to substantial to advance and consolidate your points. I respect your decision to leave the discussion as that. Thank you. PS: We are detracting from the main discussion on downtime. If the paying customer is not driving for better service availability, but choose to be contented with the status quo, nothing will ever improve for the betterment of the industry.

The issue of cost vs profit is always real for any businesses, gaming business including. While suggesting for better uptime (or lesser downtime), I have not plugged fanciful wishes out of thin air, hoping gaming company can deliver the quality which potentially may bankrupt them. That is unrealistic and a futile exercise. What I have brought to the table is a presentation of how OTHER MMO (EveOnline) in the SAME industry has succeeded. If really the cost of such advance technology is so damning, then how EveOnline managed it? Obviously, the cost structure is not something that gaming company business model cannot afford. I tend to see it as a matter of whether gaming company want to extract out more profit than necessary for survival than to reinvest back for the future good of the gaming industry. Is the gaming company a one-time off player raiding max profit out of the industry with every intention of exiting it when going gets tough, or is it a long term stayer and defender of this industry? I stand to be corrected that technical implementation remains the weakest link in this industry. So many creative talents, which possibly can find better use of their talents in other industry, are let down by the lacklustre attitude that IT/technical staffs has displayed thus far. It may not seem much to people outside of IT industry but for one who is running similar shops and is able to deliver a much better service standard (specifically service uptime) without extra-ordinary efforts, the use of 'lacklustre attitude' on these IT people in gaming industry would seem overly polite and an under-statement. Imagine a downtime of 8 hours or more for the entire year will get many IT departments sacked while gaming company continue to entertain a downtime of 6 hours PER maintenance PER week with additional 2 hours maintenance to fix earlier maintenance. This is my point. And I cannot imagine employing these IT people working in gaming industry in my own shop. My business would be placed in a great risk if they habour the attitude that downtime is part and parcel of running an IT shop. That too is my point and that is why I will send their resume straight to the paper shedder if they should attempt to seek employment.

I have been playing MMO since year 2003. Perhaps the MMOs that I have been playing are not real. Pls clarify your definition of 'real' for a more substantial discussion.

Please sir, TheLastWolfman and Diefenbaker, educate me, this stupid crybaby here, on your indepth expertise and knowledge of MMO history and pioneer. I have been ill-informed at the moment. I don't claim and I have never ever in anyway thus far claimed to be an authority in any subject in contention here. If your intelligent has served you well, you would have realized I am just an emotional complainer pouring out my frustration on this matter. It was a surprise that many posters here seem to assume and suggest that I am an expert in any matter under discussion here. I am not and I have not claimed to be one. I may have lot of years of experience in many fields, but that does not qualify me to be a subject expert or authority which I have not claimed to be one. However, not being a subject matter expert, I have an opinion and a strong opinion on some matters which many don't agree. Its good because I am always learning on how others rationale on some issues, such as why there are people supporting downtime. Perhaps they are not paying customers. Perhaps downtime is not in their timezone. So all these don't impact them. But still I am in the process of trying to understand their support for downtime, even if the current downtime has zero impact on them. It is one matter to be neutral on the matter but it is another to be supporting it. There is definitely more to the issue. Back to the point, Sir, TheLastWolfman and Diefenbaker, list me a MMO (and not a gaming company, for e.g. Eveonline is the MMO, CCP is the gaming company, SWTOR is the MMO, Bioware is the gaming company) that is older than EveOnline and which is TODAY doing better than EveOnline as a on-going business concern as well as a superior uptime so as to bring across the point of EveOnline not being a good example of competitive MMO business who thrives due to proactive adoption of advance technology in their businesses. That will serve your point greatly. PS: Perhaps US is much more advance in other countries in terms of engaging the Internet and MMO availability than many of us in the third world country in year 2003. The issue of infancy is in this case a matter of different perspective. But I will concede this point to you.

GW1 is pretty good in their service availability. I read some time ago that they boost 99.5% service availability for one entire year. Eveonline is another company that did not rest on its laurel in terms of technology adoption. They are into their 10th years of MMO business to date. They are older than WoW. They are the pioneer of MMO and probably the sole survivor of practitioners in that era. The reason that they are still surviving today and still able to compete with other MMOs is testamont to their competitivenesss. 10 years ago, when technology are not so advance and when internet is still in its infancy, Eveonline started with an MMO that run on a single server. (Who would in the first place imagine MMO to take off so successfully with million of concurrent players playing at the same time when MMO gaming business is just in its infancy). Yes, every players play on a single server. (None of modern day MMO is able to achieve that scalability of hosting every players on a single server today but Eveonline is able to do it). Do you think Eveonline can still survive today if they still rely on their single physical server to serve all its players? Not possible. From an outsider point of view, I venture a guess that they have drastically changed their backend infrastructure to decouple their software and hardware totally via massive virtualization of their single server instance which now floats on a large array of blade-like hardware servers. Many virtual servers running today to create the illusion of a single server running the game with these servers not tie to any single hardware which means any shutdown of any physical hardware will have no impact to the software. Maintenance does not hence equate to downtime. They are able to deliver their principle of one server for every players via proactive adoption of advance technology and their proactive effort can be shown in their spectacular service ability. They were having a fixed downtime slot of 1 hours per day some years back. They brought that down to half-an-hour per days. Today, they are doing better (average 20 min or less instead of half-an-hour just to have the server reboot to reset the game instances). I believe the total elimination of these daily downtime slot is in their technology roadmap going ahead. We players can see effort put in some gaming company. We know who are the serious guys and who are the lazy one. And I have very low opinion of those who shut their service down for further 2 hours to fixed an earlier 6 hours maintenance less than 24 hours earlier. Signs of lack of proper testing and planning and a lacklustre attitude who probably couldn't care less about customer service and professionalism are written all over the place in the current episode. Why the hell I care so much to type all these in the first place when the people earning the money couldn't care less?

That sir is exactly why gaming industry don't progress in terms of advance technology adoption. Majority of the player condone it because maintenance is done when you are sleeping. There is zero impact to you. And the company continue to not re-invest but choose to milk max profit because they are careful not to step on your tails while you are sleeping. The day when you feel the pain is the day when you realized that there is no benefit to you condoning such acts. The gaming technology will remain in cave-age as long as the customers condone the practitioners' passive attitude. IT is the attitude. If they cannot or have no motivation to get their service availability right, I doubt they will be equipped with advance technology for high system resiliency against outages or cyber/hacking attack. Maintenance downtime may not affect you right now, but potential future outages that crippled their game services for hours or days will come back to haunt you. Think back to what I have just said when that day arrives.

Focus on the issue dude. You are starting to get personal. You have nothing better to say about downtime? What the hell is timezone got to do with downtime?

The point of contention here is one of downtime. The fact that maintenance is brought into this debate is because gaming companies are still habouring the 1980s mindset that maintenance equates to downtime. That you absolutely need to shut down your service in order to do maintenance. And that is not true given today's technology. And to say that you need to shutdown or reboot your physical server equates to shutting down your online services and hence downtime is also not true. This is absolute rubbish and lie. It is clear to me that the question is not a matter of feasibility but a question of whether gaming companies has the will to deliver a better service to its customer. At the root of the issues is one of economics. They are not willing to invest in latest technologyso as to milk max profit out of its customer. The end result is the whole gaming industry is still stuck using 1980s IT technology for its infrastructure while the rest of the industries have moved ahead. IT personnel working in gaming industry are so yesterday and out-of-touch with the latest technology. It may not be their fault that they are using yester-year technology because the CEO has not wanted to re-invest in better infrastructure technology. The end result remains that IT personnel in gaming industry remain uncompetitive in their skillset and hence unemployable in other industries. So many posters have claimed that I have no inking of the IT technology behind the gaming infrastructure. They claimed that I should walk a mile to do some research. I suggest you too walk a mile to do your own research, not from reading from textbook which still teach you 1980s client-server computing model but go read up on some leading research paper and higher end vendor solution.

If I am an investor in any gaming companies, I would have liquidated them immediately upon your statement. When I put money into a gaming company, I expect it to operate like a business, the most competitive it can be in the industry, and to generate the best returns for my investment. My money invested in gaming companies is not for entertainment. Gaming is a multi-billion dollar business and it is a serious and huge enough business that even Microsoft is interested in. With the huge revenue and earnings in the industry, it is a shame that the industry participants did not see it fit to upgrade their service standards to match the best practises. To say that gaming is not serious enough to warrant a mission critical service level standard is just humiliating and place in poor light your creative work, your industry, your products and your customers. You are telling the whole world that you are not doing or interested in doing a SERIOUS work here. Industry leaders like Google, Facebook deliver mission critical level service standard free-of-charge to its customers, while gaming companies, charging a monthly subscription fees, fail to deliver even 98% service availability is .... I am beyond word to describe. I close my case. PS: Since if the company is not SERIOUS about its own gaming product since it is only entertainment and not as important as a business application, perhaps as a customer, I cannot be serious too in committing my monthly subscription. Perhaps I should terminate it and only re-subscribe back when the company starts to get serious with its customer service.

In this age of IT age where online services are required to meet the normal minimal standard of less than 8 hours of downtime for the entire year (24x7), and IT teams in many industries able to competently meet this best practise standard, I have over the last 10 years not witnessed a single gaming company that delivers this standard. IT teams working in these gaming companies would have been sacked many times over in these other industries for their regular downtime maintenance. IT team in gaming companies still live in the cave age when maintenance equates to downtime. In all other industries, maintenance has got nothing to do with downtime. Downtime is grave exception. Period. Downtime is an indication of things gone wrong and IT team failure to prevent it. Period. Downtime is customer dissatisfaction and customer complaints. Period. Downtime is business loss and brand dilution. Period. Downtime is not an entitlement in order to perform maintenance. Period. Downtime equates to people getting the sack in the company. Period. I am embarrassed to even have to comment on how IT team handle downtime in gaming companies, to say the least. I know for sure that all former IT employees working in gaming companies will not find their employment in my business. Period. They are out-of-touch with the competition.

Again, another mind-boggling logic here. The legit agreement mentioned about the rights of the company. I have not in any of my posts demanding the company to reinstate anything as a result of this maintenance. I have made no DEMAND on this company. I am just exercising my rights to express an opinion here. An opinion that places no demand on this company to do any action if it itself does not voluntarily agree or see fit to take up my suggestion. The company is NOT COMPELLED to take any action as a result of my post. The legit issues is totally out of the picture. Somehow, it just magically got linked here. I find it disturbing that instead of debating on the issues, some poster just choose to attempt to 'silence' opinions that they are not agreeable to and which makes them 'uncomfortable'.

I see that you are the one who is assuming a lot in making the above statement.

You are trivializing the cents in your math. If indeed it is an insignificant cost as you have allured to (apparently only 2 cents per day), then the whole mass of f2p players would have taken up the subscription. Apparently, this cost is not insignificant to the mass of f2p players. The only other alternative solution (which would be bad for the company) would be for the subscribers to quit their subscription and go on f2p until they find satisfaction in how the company manage the game downtime. If SWTOR management do not have the will to fix the problem, then the customer will help them. It is such a shame to see the whole Star War content franchise rot to waste in this tie-up. If Lucas see this coming, his legacy would be better served by not going into exclusive tie-up but to let the best competing company deliver and bring the Star War brand to greater height.

I find it mind-boggling that people will pay their hard-earned money to 'enjoy' and support maintenance downtime. The logic seems to be out-of-this-world. If really indeed there are such people, then they should be subscribing to Wow which 'offers' more downtime than SWTOR in order to maximize their downtime 'enjoyment'. Weird world.

The managerial principle that I am alluring to in the above-mentioned is one of accountability. As long as appropriate party are not held directly accountable for their action viz-a-viz the impact to the company customer's satisfaction and goodwill and eventually revenue, the rot will remains and everybody in the company will unfairly have to shoulder the cost brought to fore by the weakest link. Wow is an excellent company to quote. Wow hosted one of the best talents in MMO game design and content development. They created beautiful content which captivates millions of players for years but the company as a whole is let down consistently years on years by the IT technical and customer support team. The goodwill that the game team creates, the IT technical team destroys. It would not be surprising to see 9.9 out of 10 complaints about Wow has got to do with their IT technical and customer support issues. While once in a while we hear complaints about game content (like unbalanced class etc), it is seldom that these which will cause player to leave the game. It is instead the arrogance of WoW IT support team in insisting on their religious weekly maintenance regime (on top of unschedule maintenance) and i-know-better-than-you attitude of their customer support team that drives many customer away from that great game over time. Obviously, Wow Management has failed to hold their IT technical team accountable for their company performance (or they have been blinded by their market leadership to see the rot) and they have let the rot eats away their company competitiveness and market leadership over time.

I understand the difficulty of managerial executives, on one hand not having the expertise and detail knowledge of IT systems and on the other hand, not having the bandwidth to micro-manage the technical details, in order to be able to deliberate substantially with IT technical personnel on improving service uptime and hence availability. There will be a thousand and one reasons why system needs to be brought down (supposedly for the good of the game and hence company). To debate on these reasons is just a futile exercise as there will always be good reasons. The solution to all these is to tie the company's revenue directly to the downtime of the game. Simply put, implement a scheme where downtime is not chargeable on customer's subscription. If the game downtime is one hour in that month, then every subscribers will be reimbursed with one hour of additional playtime in the following month. It may sound like a mess to keep track and implement such scheme but it is precisely the cost that game downtime brought about that it has to be recognized. Tie the company revenue to the game downtime will set the PKI for the IT technical team. With this benchmark, there would be no need to micro-manage the specific and decision of game downtime. If the IT technical team feels it is necessary to bring down the system, let them pay the cost in terms of lower revenue which will feed into their PKI. Lower revenue will impact every people in the company no doubt, but at least it can be attributable to the relevant party and managerial supervision and instrument can be brought to bear on this weak link in the company. It is a short term pain but a long term gain for the whole company. It is only with such self-feedback loop that IT technical team can be motivated to decide whether they want to stay productive and competitive in line with the IT industry best practises for the betterment of the company.

Sorry sir to have to 'correct' you on your apparently out-of-touch comments on the general IT industry, specifically in the area of software development. Perhaps what you have been experiencing is solely contained within the gaming industry where indiscipline and non-competitive IT practise seems to be tolerated years after years. Have you ever experience regular downtime on google, amazon, yahoo or any major International bank IT/web/online service? Or do you have any expectation of IT system running mission critical system (like those in auto-pilot system in commercial airline) to have any hint of a possible glitch and downtime while in operation? The state of today's IT industry is not anything less than capable of a 99.9% high availability and is enabled and supported by the ever cheaper high availability technology offered by many solution providers. If it is not implemented, it cannot be the fault of the technology or availability of solution but one of conscious choice of tolerating a lesser standard of service availability that I believe gaming company like this one owe a responsibility to its paying customer. The intolerable and out-of-touch IT service standard perpetuated by the gaming IT teams carries a cost not only to the business that it supports but also to the image it creates for itself. For one, any resumes seeking employment in my company that carries an IT working experience in any gaming companies will find its way to the paper shedder without a single hint of further consideration. It is a real risk to the company's online service availability to let former gaming industry IT personnel to handle it. It remains a perceived risk until we see some real change in the way IT people handle their work in the gaming industry.

-1 to you sir too for not differentiating the different type of maintenance. I don't complain about yesterday's maintenance if it is necessary (as you have alluded to). However, I am not ok with today's maintenance being just less than 24 hours from the earlier maintenance. This latest maintenance is apparently to fix issues brought about by yesterday's maintenance. It shows lack of proper and comprehensive testing (due to indiscipline or laziness?) before the patch was rolled out yesterday. How do we know if we would have another maintenance less than 24 hours later to fix the current 'maintenance'. Its a vicious cycle whose source is firmly rooted in not having proper and comprehensive testing before patches are delivered to the live system. It can be said that many other games are experiencing the same issues (lack of proper and comprehensive testing before live patch are brought into production) and it is true. It is also true that these same games are losing subscribers by the months. I have played many MMOs over the last 10 years and I can say that the single game that can handle system updates and patching competently is EveOnline. It is no wonder that this game is older than WoW and yet it is still surviving in today's market. Its maintenance regime is only half-an-hour per day (7 days a week) at fixed timeslot with NO SURPRISES. Bottomline is --- they do not pissed off their players with surprise downtime. It is just a plain shame that many gaming companies hosted many good artistic and marketing talents to design good game, create wonderful and enjoyable content, as well as to innovatively market them to the customers (E.g. f2p) only to be let down by the technical team (weakest link) and the customer service team (who will tell you to quit your subscription if you are not happy with such maintenance).