I'd like to thank BW for finally adding something to the story that will allow those of us who prefer PVP to participate. PVEers get practically all the content in this game, and then have the nerve to cry and about the one bone BW finally throws us. What new content did PVP get in this patch again? Zero. PVEers QQ too much. I hope we see much, much more of this.

Ganking is fun! I've been on Bastion for a while and I rarely get ganked on my lowbie toons. If I do, and they are persistent enough to hang around, then I'll switch toons. I really have never understood the whining about being ganked. Most of those people will probably come back at higher levels and do the same thing. It can be entertaining to pick on the lowbies for a bit. It can get annoying when gankers start camping bases for hours, or a stealth player wanders into a base to kill lowbies, but those events are pretty rare. The real fun of a PVP server IMO is on the elder game planets. Everyone is the same-ish level, and the free-for-alls that occasionally break out are really fun. Yavin feels much more exciting when players from each faction are all over the place and can attack each other at any time.

This seems to be a much bigger problem lately than it used to be. In literally every 8 player WZ at least one teammate, and usually 2 or more, are in full or partial PVE gear (usually of the Yavin 186 variety). I stopped trying to politely help out. The player almost always just gets angry and tells me to rudely mind my own business in some variation. I don't care if you want to announce your poor gear choices by being DPS with 50k+ HPs, but it makes my game less fun when you get globaled constantly and our team is always down a player. It has gotten to the point that I can almost always predict if my team will win based on nothing but the HPs of the players on my team. The system needs to be updated for the newer gear levels and level cap. It seems like it would be as easy as changing a couple constants in the code, but I like to think they would have done it already if that were true. In the meantime, there should be some way to inform players how bloster works (maybe via the PVP dailies or the intro to PVP mission?). I feel like the best way to bolster is to scale expertise with the PVE stats, so that you only get full expertise in 186 or better PVE gear and some prorated amount of that if your gear is less (of course this would only work at lvl 60. Maybe it can work the same on the lowbie levels, just instead of 186 it can be whatever the best gear you can wear is at that level). Just throwing out some ideas, but someone should do something. PVP has been a lot less fun lately.

http://www.swtor.com/user/ce/2ias8z

Weird! Back to back. I'm in Vista too (Bastion).

Random. My family is from Brentwood and I'm always shocked when anyone knows it exists, much less lives there.

NO! You really don't need a guide. You REALLY don't. Listen to the posters above. Leveling is cake. Do the missions you can find, use the gear they give you, move on to the next planet when all the missions are done. I don't know if you have a lot of MMO experience, but it isn't like an offline RPG where you'll miss a bunch of stuff you can't go back and get or do. The only stuff I found useful for leveling was guides on crafting. I didn't really find the guides themselves useful, just the info on what gathering and mission skills go with which crafting skills. If you screw that up at the beginning it is a pain to go back and fix it. You can find that info on these forums. If you do have MMO experience, I know that some of my friends had a hard time moving from WOW to SWTOR because there are no add-ons in SWTOR (which is a very, very good thing). They had gotten used to a quest add-on basically doing the leveling for them, but even they found leveling to be easy once they got over it. So just play and have fun! They leveling takes care of itself. If you get stuck (doubtful), join a good guild and your guildies will help out.

I don't play on a RP server, but the reason I'm on a PVP server is that it seemed a little ridiculous to me to have Sith and Jedi wandering around near each other without a brawl breaking out and I actually enjoy the world PVP during the endgame on the level 60 planets. From that perspective, perhaps a RP-PVP would fit more into the role you want to play. Just a little devil's advocacy. That being said, the only difference between PVP and PVE is that you will be flagged for PVP just about everywhere in the galaxy on a PVP server, and with that comes getting ganked by someone 10+ levels above you from time to time while your out minding your own business. It also means that you can do the same thing to someone else, which is what I think a lot of people find fun about it. Unless it is some sort of pre-arranged world battle, world PVP is usually not a fair fight.

I wish I had read through the forum before I farmed those damn packets (which took like 4 hours). Silly me for just assuming the game would work correctly. I hope they fix in 3.2, but do I really want to spend another 4 hours?

LOLOLOLL. ^ is funny. But seriously, stop feeding the trolls.

Sweet! TYVM!

I just respec'd from deception to hatred to see what all this FOTM fuss is about. It is really fun, especially in PVP (being OP usually is). My play style is more suited to deception I think, but I want to give hatred a chance. I've been having trouble keeping track of the DOTs I have up. I've haven't had a DOT class in SWTOR before (last one in any MMO was a warlock in WOW forever ago), so are there some UI options or anything in the preferences to help track DOTs? It's difficult to know which DOTs are mine and how long they have left to tick, especially with another hatred assassin in the group. Something like the timer overlay on the quickbars for CDs would be nice. Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

I disagree. My desktop was recently fried by a 9 year old with wielding a fateful cup of juice. While I'm collecting parts to rebuild it, I've been stuck playing on my old crappy i3 laptop with 4GB of RAM, integrated video, and the standard garbage laptop HDD. Needless to say, the performance was quite awful. The game is playable at the lowest settings outside of the fleet, WZs, or any other high population areas. Inside those areas, or even in a FP it is too hard to maneuver getting 5ish or less FPS, with spikes up to 8 or so. Just for funzies I tried unleashed on the laptop and had a HUGE improvement. I can't remember the config used off the top of my head, but it only took up around 750MB or so. If it took up over 1GB, the launcher would either throw an error or get stuck at the "initializing" step. In fleet it now gets 21ish FPS with dips down to 10 occasionally. The NPCs and vendors no longer take 1+ minutes to load and I no longer have to watch my toon zoom around in an awkward sitting position while the speeder loads 3 min later. FP are also now playable without too much FPS lag. WZ are still out of the question but world PVP isn't an automatic death sentence anymore. So with only 4GB of RAM, the game went from barely playable to totally playable with very little RAM set aside for the RAMdisk. Its not like I can crank up the settings now, but at least I can play. It may not make a huge difference to a decked out gaming rig, but it really had a huge impact on the crappy little laptop. I'm a little surprised at how much of the performance bottleneck is due to the HDD. This game must have a ton of r/w cycles. I really didn't have any expectation that this would help considering the specs I had to work with.