Although the idea of someone needing a laser sight on a weapon with a maximum range of 30 meters (35 for Snipers/Gunslinger) is a little ludicrous on the face of it. I would be happier if Force users got an increased chance to deflect incoming fire as the shooter's range-to-target increased (more time to react) and blasters got more 'realistic' ranges; it feels silly to have a 'sniper' who can't shoot anything further away than she can hit with a thrown baseball, when our lower-tech world has snipers making shots 70x as far out, and normal engagement ranges for rifles are 10x a trooper's maximum range.

Well, blueside, you would normally recover all the datacrons you found and turn them over to the Republic government or the Jedi, who would set up a 'museum' of sorts where everyone could go and experience the wisdom of the datacrons (and get all the bonuses). Redside, you'd probably snag it and cart it off for yourself, doing your best to keep it hidden from your master/superiors, farming out access to your friends and lackeys as a boon to show that you value them. Once a datacron was found, it would disappear into some vault and never be seen again.

I believe the canonical response to this particular outburst is "Can I have your stuff?"

Having weapon ranges sacrificed on the altar of Game Balance is depressing; my Sniper, with the extended range he gets, can shoot people a whole 35 meters away... a whopping six steps further than other shooters... while Corporal of Horse Craig Harrison, using technology light-years more archaic, made a shot at more than 70x that range, and effective maximum range for modern rifles is more than 10x the SWTOR ranges. I understand the reason for it, but I don't have to like the 'arcade' feel it gives to the shooter classes.

Well, then, you won't want this shirt.

Dropping loot to the individual players and changing the bind mechanics to 'bind on exit' rather than 'bind on pickup' for the high-quality gear, so that as long as you were still in the flashpoint you could pass around drops freely, but as soon as you exited they were bound to the current holder, would IMO improve the loot-drop system; unfortunately, this still gives problems with open-world heroics and World Bosses. Area missions, though, have a defined border that controls your getting the mission that could be used as an 'in mission' divider, and if you gave a five-minute window after the defeat of a WB for members of the group that took it down to freely pass quick-bind drops, that would address the problem as well. Unfortunately, that would require a significant coding change in the way loot gets handled, and I don't see Bioware making the effort, because that's the way WoW does it, and if a game as successful as WoW does it, it must be the right way...

It's also mired in slavish adherence to the Holy Trinity of 'tank', 'dps', and 'heal' that WoW's success made into the One True Way of MMO combat roles, too, and this Procrustean bed ensures that anyone who doesn't want to specialize in one role will come off second-best compared to someone who does. It's annoying to see people building teams to a particular balance of roles, coming from City of Heroes, where -- the people who came over from Trinity-based MMOs notwithstanding, building a group for Task Forces or harder missions was 'whoever wants to join; it will work'; the more buffs and debuffs and control you had, the less damage you needed, and there was rarely a need for someone in a dedicated 'healer' role. Still, that's the way Bioware chose to make the game, because it's easy to pigeonhole characters into roles like that, and it makes mission and mob design easier, because the devs don't have to worry about the players finding an odd combination of powersets that let them steamroll a particular type of mob.

There are very few TV stations that show the movie without interrupting it every twelve minutes for three minutes of advertising, too, so even if you have a huge TV to get a 'theatre' experience, it's not the same as being able to watch it straight through without interruptions.

Or, better yet, make that idiot whooping sound audible only to the rider, since the only utility it seems to have is in pulling the attention of other characters away from what they're doing, just like any other 'alarm-like' sound.

Antibacterial soap would only work against 'midichlorians' on your skin; it might be possible, depending on the technical sophistication of Republic/Imperial medical technology, to create tailored anti-midichlorian treatments that would destroy them inside a body... but as with bacteria acquiring resistance to antibiotics, unless you kill them _all_, they'd grow back resistant.

This. I think the potential for abuse far outweighs the utility. In specific cases, such as the OP's above, I can see having the capability to do it on a one-off basis requiring the direct intervention of customer support, but allowing players to move characters between accounts without having Bioware oversee the process to verify that it's not being abused opens too many holes.

Just walk up, pay your tailor fee, and then pick the primary and secondary colors you want for each of your pieces of gear.

I really don't see what the allure of all-white or all-black is; the color of your gear doesn't make any difference in-game, and if someone wants to make their Sith unique by having them run around in black-on-black gear (just like the other 50,000 Sith on the server), then I see no reason to put a barrier in the way of their doing it. I'd be much happier with a system where you went to a customization kiosk, paid your tailor fee, and then were allowed to pick the primary and secondary colors you wanted for each of your (or your companion's, if you were recoloring them) equipped items. Sure, we'll get a lot of "Darth Imsobroodyanddark #32323" clones, but when push comes to shove, which is better for the game -- having the players *****, moan, and whine about how they can't get the dyes to color their gear the way they want to, or letting them pick any colors they want, even if all it does is show off a lack of imagination?

/signed

This is one of the things that makes me a little homesick for City of Heroes, whose 'loot' system -- drops of inspirations, enhancements, invention salvage, recipes, incarnate shards/threads -- didn't have any contention about who 'needed' any particular drop; each team member participating in a fight got their own set of rolls by the RNG to determine what they got, and it went straight into each characters' inventory -- each defeated enemy could theoretically drop something from each drop category to every character on the team. You didn't have play come to a halt as everyone decided to need/greed/whatever on each item, thereby keeping the action going. And it eliminated little immersion-straining quirks like your Jedi scavenging pocket change off the Imperial troopers he's just killed.

...with nothing but the tightness of your grip to prevent an opponent from hitting your lightstick hilt so that it rotates in your hand to cut you in half. Great design. Better to have them mounted sort of like Bloodrayne's blades, so that they can't be knocked away from you

City of Heroes had 'friends' and 'global friends'. Friends worked the same way as they do in SWTOR; adding someone as a global friend required the acceptance of the other person, and linked their account as a friend to your account, so they would appear in your global friends list as whichever character attached to their account that you happened to be logged in on. And if you created a new character, all of your global friends would already be connected account-to-account, and you wouldn't need to add them individually. This allowed you to maintain friends of a specific character and people you wanted to stay in contact with all across your and their accounts. Perhaps Bioware could implement something similar.

Make an individual's housing space -- whether open terrain, a Coruscant/Dromund Kaas tower, or whatever -- an instance. Make "Your home" a starship destination, so you can fly home. Give the home a fleet transport rapid access contact just like the ones at various locations on the planets. Now you have no issue with 'masses of people at once', because you're off in your own instance with whomever you brought on your ship.

I don't think that it went downhill the moment the Ewoks appeared... or even when they started beating the Imperials. After all, asymmetric warfare works. Where it went downhill is when the Imperials -- with what had to be orders of magnitude more experience in putting down rebellious indigenes than the Ewoks had in conducting a rebellion, couldn't shift tactics and steamroller them. The scene where Han and Leia are accosted by the Imperial forces should have been the Imperials returning after having decimated and run off the Ewoks, and after Leia got off her one futile shot, the two of them should have been either captured or cut down. Although it's possible that the Empire had fallen into enough of a "For winning the battle, you will receive the Croix de Guerre. For disobeying orders, you will be shot" calcification that the underlings were unwilling to change the tactical plan even when it clearly wasn't working.

Although being a fan of the universe can help you overlook the warts in the game and concentrate on enjoying the play.

If you look closely, the Jedi Order is more centered on fear than the Sith Order is. "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." With the example of the darkest Sith -- and the Jedi who fell to the Dark Side -- as examples, it's perhaps understandable that the Jedi Order has fixated on strong emotion being a path to the Dark Side. What is reprehensible, however, is that they have latched onto repression as their sole tool for preventing members of the Order from being controlled by those emotions, because by doing so, they have prevented them from learning about them -- to understand what these emotions are and how to control them, rather than letting them control you. The Sith Order is unconcerned about control of these emotions -- the more powerful they are, the more power they can tap. But the Jedi also never learn to control these emotions; all they learn is how to repress them, so that when they are put in situations where they can't repress them, those emotions are more likely to overwhelm them and carry them over to the Dark Side. Emotions are a part of all living things, and an integral part of the Force -- if they were not, the Force would not respond so readily to the Sith. And people will fight harder, and muster more resolve and determination, for something or someone that they care about than for someone or something that they have no emotional attachment to; the Jedi Order, by repressing all emotional attachments, is limiting the full effectiveness of their members. Which isn't to say that the Sith aren't handicapping themselves; letting yourself be ruled by your emotions leads you to make decisions based on what will feed those emotions in the short term, not based on what is best in the long term. Kel'eth Ur was right; fear and anger are good short-term and immediate sources of power, but the feedback involved in feeding those emotions makes the Sith Order as a whole inherently less capable of planning and carrying out long-term plans. While individual Sith may achieve enough control over their emotions to be able to sacrifice immediate gains for long-term benefit, they still have to deal with the assassination-based jockeying for position that is a constant undercurrent in the Order -- and which carries over to the Empire as a whole. The Jedi may be less powerful individually, but they can cooperate better and work more effectively toward long-range goals. Unfortunately, there's no visible organization for those who would take a middle ground -- accepting their emotions as part of themselves, learning how to control them and use them to expand their control of the Force, rather than either cutting themselves off from their emotions or letting their emotions rule them. And the motivation behind some of the decisions don't always fit with whether a choice is light or dark. For example, one quest on Korriban has you recovering the body of an acolyte who failed a test in one of the tombs and bringing it back to his father, a guard for the Dark Council. My first run through the conversation, I chose lying to him and telling him that his son died bravely and well, figuring that by feeding his ego that his son wasn't an utter failure, it might leave him more favorably disposed toward me, which could be useful in the future -- a selfish decision aimed at furthering my own goals, being willing to lie my head off for my own benefit. This, however, was the light decision (and, at the time, you didn't get the little light or dark icons on the choices); telling him flat out that his son died a complete failure was the dark side choice, apparently because helping to crush his self-respect was more 'dark' than lying to him for a potential future benefit.

It's off-topic for the thread, but if you actually research the causes, the South seceded because the Washington government was maintaining high import duties in an attempt to keep the relatively unindustrialized South as a captive market for Northern industries (the issue of slavery was divisive, and helped push the southern states to secession, but it was not the most important reason), and the war began because the Federal government held the position that, having joined the United States, the southern states had forever given up their right to break away again. In a letter to Horace Greely, Lincoln wrote "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that." And the Union soldiers were not fighting to end slavery; in fact, after the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union Army suffered large numbers of desertions by soldiers who had been willing to fight to preserve the Union, but not to end slavery.

The problem goes all the way back to the start, where Smugglers and Agents get shafted for fifteen levels -- look at the level-15 cubes; there are two End/Str cubes, an End/Aim cube, and an End/Wil cube... but no End/Cun cube. Not only that, but the level-24 End/Cun cube requires two yellow crystal shards, and the yellow shard on Nar Shaddaa is in a level 30+ area. At the point where you would be going after the yellow shard on Nar Shaddaa, you might as well hold off until you can make the level-32 cube, and save yourself 8k on another disassembler.

This seems to be a new variation on the bug that causes hologram communication closeups to fail to display the hologram when you have anti-aliasing and bloom mixed (i.e., one off, the other on), instead of matching. I had the hologram bug, and would see headless characters, but since I corrected my graphics settings, I haven't seen any more headless mobs.

Building a game where you go out and kill things is easy. But in SWTOR, you've got two classes where the purported goal of the class archetype is to defuse conflict, and one whose occupation revolves around moving goods from place to place without anyone noticing, and 90% or more of their advancement comes from... killing things. Yes, Smugglers have to get Skavek off their back, and follow through on Risha's deals if they don't decide to just dump her out in some spaceport to fend for herself, but it's still not free to swan around the galaxy in your starship; unlike the Jedi, Sith, Agents, and Troopers, they need to earn a living. And there's none of the shady back-alley pickups and deliveries far from any customs oversight , much less shipping legitimate cargo, for a Smuggler to make a living from. And Bounty Hunters are similarly short of any actual bounty hunting, while the Bounty Brokers Association addition coming in August is going to be opening up their target list to anyone, taking credits out of the hands of hard-working bounty hunters everywhere. Because it's so much easier to make character advancement dependent on going out and killing things; that's enormously easier to quantify and measure.