Actually, there are tests for common seizure triggers that most video games get tested against -- particular rhythms of flashing lights, particularly red or yellow tones, that are common triggers. But this is one of those half-truths, like the notion that people with migraines can't drink coffee -- if caffeine is a trigger, no you can't -- but if caffeine isn't a migraine trigger, it's actually therapeutic to a lot of migraine sufferers as a remedy for migraine pain. Similarly, immersion in a videogame environment for people with seizure conditions or with chronic pain can actually regularize either chaotic brain activity (similar to meditation) for the seizure folks or ameliorate the pain by distraction or other mechanisms. Virtual world "games for health" have even been specifically created to help kids with severe burns play in arctic environments (hey, just send 'em to Hoth!) because the effect of imagining being in a frigid environment actually keeps their bodies more comfortable and less reactive to the extreme trauma from major burn damage. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/01/31/snowworld_a_experimental_virtual_reality_game_to_distract_burn_victims_from_pain_.html This kind of research is just staggeringly wonderful. But it's amazing how easily "video games make kids violent" will get major press, but a story like this barely gets legs in mainstream media.

Oh, that is so scary -- I got that as a reaction to an anti-convulsant medication and it nearly killed me! But it didn't reach my eyes either. I thought I was going to burn to death and then I thought I was going to itch to death for weeks. You poor thing! And I was in my 50s, so at least I could understand what was going on pretty much... But that's why they can't medicate my seizures fully -- there are whole swaths of drugs they are afraid to try me on because it might kill me, because so many are in the same general family (Stevens-Johnson being an allergic reaction -- you get it once, it will generally nearly kill you and the second time it just does.) A lot of me looks like I have reverse freckles -- places where the skin is white and wrinkly in tiny speckles from no pigment where it was burned. Most people would never notice it unless they really looked closely, or touched the skin -- I'm a redhead, before I went gray, so my skin is pretty pale and what's not white freckles is tan or freckle-freckles, so it's really lizardy, in a way. Maybe Qyzen would like it. But happily, none of the burns were on my face much where it shows, that didn't heal up well. I took much better care of those! But just so you know, you might not have gotten it because they loaded you up with drugs -- people can get SJS just from taking a tab of Ibuprofen. It's not discriminatory about what you get a reaction to, or how many drugs are in your system, or how exotic the drug is. So blaming the doctors or the weirdness of your health issues isn't something to hold onto. It's just a tragic horrible thing no matter why it happens.

Hiya, folks! I have temporal lobe epilepsy and wicked bad migraines, neither of which is fully controlled with meds, both of which stem from a brain injury -- probably shellfish poisoning -- back in 2007. Gaming helps me immerse in the game and sort of forget about my body when the migraines get back (but no grouping for me! omg... I get evil and unreliable alas! Good thing I'm a carebear in part!). So, after a very busy career, I'm writing and caring for my elderly mom (Parkinson's, various -- she's in her early 90s) and gaming a lot of the day. If it weren't for the migraines and all, (well, and the cut in income -- whooosh!) it would seem like a very pleasant early retirement! We live a couple blocks from the bay in a little New England town, all very nice, two aging geek grrls (mom was studying botany at UCLA in the 1930s!). Both of us are probably on the autism spectrum -- I'm diagnosed ADHD, but am probably further along the spectrum than that (they didn't really diagnose Aspie's among boomer girls -- I didn't even get the ADHD diagnosis until I was 40). Mom's likely ADD/inattentive. I'm highly social, used to be a VP/Marketing and worked in international affairs and various, though. An introvert -- it was all roleplaying, lol! My last position I described as a "human rights LARP." I've been working online for over 30 years, and feel rather good that I've spent part of that time advocating for digital divide issues including access for low income/disabled folks. Turns out I would need it.

In our world, a warrior at the top of his game trained in the best academy is able to operate in the world of politics and diplomacy - this is the product that Annapolis or Norwich University would produce in a field officer, and I don't imagine Korriban would demand less, in that culture. Likewise any candidate fi r diplomatic service had better have read Clauswitz and taken enough military history and military science to at least have good relations with his/her counterparts. You don't have an empire based entirely on mad Sith. It isn't consistent with lore or good sense. Trust me, our own colonial history, which inspired much of the empire setting, was Dark enough with exactly this sort of coldly pragmatic thinking. It is the exact basis of most of what is called evil in the world today - not madness, but power plays within selfish contexts, and the rest of the world go hang. Nothing else is required for the world to go to hell. It's fun to play a totally mad Sith, as a player who doesn't get that stretch presumably in real life. But were it my empire, I'd be rooting out the powerful truly mad ones early (and there's also evidence of that in lore - madness overtakes Sith later, and many are ruthless, but only so much waste of resources is tolerated without self-policing). You seem to mistake power for a lack of intelligence or self reflection. They are not exclusive in the extraordinary individual. The warrior can be played as a rugby jock, but the storyline wraps itself around a dark version of Peter Deth Wimsey very nicely -one of the great joys of Bioware games. And I write about my work as an academic reference. It shows where I am drawing information from in a lore based discussion. If that sounds like bragging to you, then maybe you haven't got relevant experience and come from some culture where talking about your work implies you are better, smarter, richer, higher status? That's what you brought to that, my dear. I am just relating my experience in decades in academia and NGOs for the most part - a career that does not make you richer and by dark side interpretation impairs your advancement, probably implying poor things about your intelligence. Your ego has nothing to fear from the likes of me. Shava Nerad

Sometimes I feel like an alien... But part of that is, I spent a good deal of my career working in politics and international relations, and it colors my interpretation of the warrior storyline. My post on the Transponder Station in the Warrior forum here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=5260293&postcount=100 is probably a whole different take than 99.44% of the player population. But I hold to it as more consistent with Sith and storyline reality than the alternatives. Enjoy!

No way I'm going to catch up with this thread...but I suspect that at this point you can kiss the class story SSRs goodbye. Voicing the SSRs would be hugely expensive and SWTOR isn't making the money to do it. As a former marketing VP in the entertainment industry (licensing but I can do this crude a version of the math) they couldn't justify calling back the talent and doing the production. It would be like making a sequel movie. Can't move the money with the beating the game has taken in the game press and on the money it's made. If F2P turned the game around as well or better as happened with LOTRO just *maybe* -- but honestly IMO (and I'm very friendly to the idea of SSRs) I think they'd put the money into fixing issues with the engines and doing expansions to the general class quests on a level cap basis before they caught up with the SSR fanbase. I'm just calling it as I see the odds. I could see Bioware -- the old Canadian company -- doing it if they had funds in the bank. No way in hell can I see Disney/EA/Bioware doing it. le sigh

Honestly it's the behavior as much or more than the names. Like Landroval in LOTRO I come to RP servers as much for the tenor of the culture as to RP myself. I can RP in a guild on any server, but it's the cultural consensus that's most attractive. Enough wtfCHEEEZBRGRlulz types and that goes away.

"Spamming" is used in two connotations. One connotation is commercial speech -- someone trying sell game currency for Euros for example which is against the terms of service and a bannable offense. The other connotation is speaking in channel in a way that makes the window scroll rapidly. People may have the perception that people who speak in a foreign language are spamming because the window is scrolling by without perceived content. Or they may just be expressing it that way out of frustration to be dismissive.

This might have been an adequate response five or so years ago. However, this is 2012, and your customer base is used to a knowledge base approach rather than a list. Please create a section of the knowledge base for known issues and relabel the "known issues" as "hot issues" and refer people to the knowledge base for what are truly "known issues." It will save you and the player base a lot of grief, and retain significant player good will over what you've squandered on this sort of thing in the last year. You don't need to let us into your scrums or bugtracker, but put *something* in a section of the knowledge base in concert with what you describe above, and you'll save in CSR time, forum heat, and retention. Respectfully and with great love for the game, Shava Nerad 30 yrs on the net former indy game CEO probably running CSR groups before you were born still somewhat regretting not getting the game testing/QA position at INFOCOM in '79

Cathar? I have an alt slot reserved...

I have seen a lot of new people rolling characters on The Progenitor with names and attitudes that have nothing to do with the environment of a roleplaying server. Please remember that this is a RP-PVE server, and consider another server if this is not your preferred play style.

There has been a lot of grousing about non-English language chat in General recently, and I have been vocal in my support of the international community. I'd like to clarify several points here. First, in the US, there are no language-specific servers because there is general language diversity. The US has no "official language" and in general, official documents must be made available in a dozen or more languages. So EA/Bioware is accustomed to a polyglot environment and supports it. When they created the language labeled servers in the EU they did so to gravitate various language communities to those servers for the sake of community and to ease their burden of support -- it was not meant as a lock on what was allowable in chat. Ever. And I clarified that with a CS droid yesterday. No one minted and sealed this server as a ghetto for Brits and Anglophones. Sorry. (No, I am not.) General chat is not meant to be English only. It's not in the terms of service and I suspect was never contemplated to be and never will be. It's also not "rude" to speak other languages around you. Get over yourself. General is a commons; it's like walking on a public street. If you are in any big city (and I suspect Coruscant or Corellia, these are big city equivalents) you would hear Basic, Huttese, and a dozen other languages. Guess what? Real life is like that too. If you find that objectionable, that is an issue with *you* not the other person. CS recommends if you don't want to hear Polish or Russian or Spanish or Tologu or whatever it is that is scrolling by, you put that player's name on your ignore list. Problem solved. However, if you harass them for speaking a non-English language two things will happen -- you are liable to go on other people's ignore lists for being a parochial git, and you are liable for being ticketed for harassment. Interfering with another player's enjoyment of the game because of who they are for ethnic or racial identity is harassment, and some of us are logging and ticketing this. Your ignore list is a far better option. You can ignore me too, I won't miss you and you might be on mine already. Also for those who think f2p people should "get a room" and create a channel -- they can't. So thank EA/Bioware for that brilliant decision, perhaps. I do notice that most of the non-English discussion is people trying to find a non-English speaking guild to get away from the hostility. I'm sadly disappointed with my community on this point. There are a lot of issues with F2P but this is a really trog element in the player base from my point of view. The Star Wars saga is about a struggle for freedoms for a diverse people over corruption and narrow mindedness, and on an RP server I'd expect more people to have their brains wrapped around those principles, especially on the Republic side.

I don't understand what the big whoop is. When you start a pug, ask folks, spacebar or cutscenes? And then work it out ahead of time. It's like figuring out who is main tank and who is healing whom and so on, it's just negotiating tactical point of grouping, for the style of the folks involved. Hone those social skils for those *social points* kids!

So, I know most player spacebar half the dialogue. And they don't really care or remember the details of the lore. And probably by level 50 they don't remember what their character was doing at level five. And most people don't play multiple alts, maybe. But I do. In fact, like a number of nutters particularly on the RP servers, I'm running through all eight storylines, largely in parallel, although my smuggler and warrior are ahead on their respective sides. And for those of you who are not aware, the storylines are interwoven in really peculiar ways. In a lot of ways the stories are more intricately and oddly woven than Lost, and with a really surreal sense of humor. The process of storyboarding this game must have been *insane*. I was impressed with it before, but last night, my level 50 Sith Warrior/Juggernaut ran into a reference in a post-Darth quest that was a ROFLMAO reference to an event in the teens in the general Republic sidequests on Coruscant. I nearly fell out of my chair. Total throw away line in the middle of the dialogue, that would mean absolutely *nothing* if you had never played a republic alt. Bioware rocks. Too bad EA has been sucking all the juice out of them... Someone should create a spoiler wiki just to be a concordance for this game. Wookieepedia doesn't really have the right structure.

No, I won't complain about just anything. Only the things I know something about. On the other hand, you are complaining about me. Andryah, I'm the former VP of marketing at an Inc5000/Urban Inc100 entertainment marketing company which was 3rd fastest growing private company in Oregon at the time, and former CEO of an indy game studio (now retired). So this is a place where I think maybe I'm speaking from professional expertise and not as just some random fan. You don't roll out this sort of thing to test the web site incrementally. There are far better ways to do that. You do this to get press. Which they did. Google the whole cartel coin thing and the game press lapped up the press release and regurgitated it like good little lapdogs. *barf* All over the web. But on a community basis, *here* it plays the community for idiots, and I resent that. (You should resent even more that it works so well?) It's a move aimed only at the press -- that's the only logical product and profit for them from the strategem. If they had even shown us the respect of saying, "And look what this will get you!" and publishing a couple examples, it would have shown a consumer facing heart to it, but instead, we see the black Sithy manipulations of EA under the former glory that was Bioware. Either that or maybe there's an entire crew of folks there just too dense to live, I don't know. They are still advertising for a F2P analyst in Austin. Maybe they decided how many coins we get and haven't figured out how much that gets us in value themselves, either? Now *that* would be pretty funny. In a sad sort of way. I like this game, I really do. I'd just so... fallible... If I weren't retired and they weren't EA...and in Texas...(even Austin...) But I think I'd rather play the game and complain upon occasion for as long as the ride lasts, tyvm, and hope they pull out of this. But yes, sometimes I want to say, you know, Palpatine is bare butt nekkid, anyone notice? Just to see if anyone else is awake. *sigh*