Yeah, the PvP sets are messed up as well. Honestly, I pull the mods out of them and sacrifice the set bonuses just to look the way I want to. I might actually wear the pieces that have less visual impact, like gloves and the head slot, which I hide anyway. Generally, though, I find the higher level armor to look preposterous, and I wouldn't be caught dead wearing it.

Pretty sure they tried these in Beta and people didn't like them. Don't assume that because you think something is a good idea that the majority of gamers are on your side.

This is a little limiting, as I believe it should be a combination of creation date and time invested in the character, but I agree with the essence of it. The upcoming server transfers are, to be sure, essentially mandatory, so let's call a spade a spade and call them phase one of a merger. When mergers happen, it's usually on the shoulders of the developers to come up with some sort of priority rule for character names, since they know it's a big deal for people. Ultimately, if I lost a character name I created on day one to somebody who created it even before me and has invested as much or more time in the character, I'd be fine with that. Better to lose it for good cause than simply because I'm being forcibly moved. Anyway, I know there are plenty of people who are going to say "stop whining", and it's really not the end of the world to me to lose a character name here or there. Just saying, I do think BioWare's implementation here is a little lax given that they essentially created this problem of too many servers.

While I can understand why some perquisites make more sense to offer on a character-by-character basis (for example, one might not want all of his characters to benefit from increased experience gain), there are other perks that for the life of me, I can't figure out why anybody wouldn't want them for all of their characters. Mostly, I'm talking about the Convenience features, which are: the field repair droid the field mailbox field respecialization I guess the idea is they can offer these things at a lower cost if they're granted character-by-character, but we all know these costs are more or less completely arbitrary anyway. While it's not a big deal to log in to each character and purchase these convenience features on each one, I still think they should simply be placed under the "Other" section of the "Global Unlocks" category. If you think any of these features is a good idea, you think it's a good idea for all of your characters. Just my two cents on that.

I guess our experiences differ. I've been a part of some pretty smooth mergers. Guilds got moved over and everything.

Guess what? I already did that! Like I said, those of us paying attention pretty much already know how this is going to shake out. If you want to do that, you already can. So what's the harm in making it a certainty?

Yeah, I guess that's my only real disappointment with this announcement. People keep saying that we were all asking for this. I never asked for this. I asked for server mergers, because when that happens, the onus is on the developer to come up with a priority system for character names that's fair and comprehensible. Under a system like that, I could be fine with losing a character name I liked, because I'd figure, "Well, whoever got it probably deserved it just as much as I do, if not more so." But doing it this way, they get to pretend as though the decision was yours, but obviously, when it's a choice between losing your main character's name to a level 5 toon that hasn't been played in five months and staying on a sinking ship (whose sinking BioWare has now expedited), that isn't much of a choice at all.

I understand that. If there are six servers now and we know four of them are origin servers, then that means there are two destination servers. What we don't know is which origin servers are going to get paired with which destination servers. I mean, you almost know now--especially if you play on an RP server--which are going to be which. But it would be nice to just know for a fact that I'm moving, because I'd like to plan accordingly (i.e., start scouting out potential guilds on the new servers, etc.).

Okay, so the more I've talked about this with others, I really think it would be beneficial for BioWare to release--sooner rather than later--a list of servers that don't meet whatever population threshhold they're looking at. Surely, they know which servers are going to be origin servers. They don't have to say what the destination servers will be, because obviously they want to play that by ear as they see how many players elect to transfer. But I'm absolutely certain the list of origin servers isn't going to change between now and next week.

I could live with that. As another poster said, all it has to be is relatively fair and well communicated. If it meant I lost a name to somebody who was just a bit faster and has been more dedicated than I have been, well...fair is fair. I'm actually fairly certain there are a couple of names I likely wouldn't get because I only created them maybe a week or two later. That's okay.

That would have been pretty nice, actually. As it stands, 350k for an extra 3% crit chance just on your crafting profession, and only on stuff that can be augmented, seems a little exorbitant.

I don't know...for every one active duty military personnel who did this, there are going to be 30 guys who bought the game early, hated it, and will never, ever come back to it. I understand it kind of sucks for the one guy out of 30 who does want to come back, but at the same time, I'd rather see name priority go to somebody who is actively using a name and has been using it for a period of time. If your step-son created a character on December 15 and played for a month and somebody else created a character on January 15, but has been actively logging in with that character every day since and is level 50 with legacy level 25, I'm going to say that person deserves to have it a little more than your step-son (who for all we know may have decided he's no longer interested by the time he gets back). Maybe that sounds a little crappy.

That would be logical. I'm not really sure what the benefit is to BioWare to allowing people to stay on ghost town servers that are eventually going to have to be closed down anyway. Seems they should just get the merging over with right now and keep it simple for people.

Well, like I said, they only did it with mergers, since you didn't have a choice about it. Actually, I can't remember how they handled it with transfers, but I think if the name you had was being held by somebody else on an account that hadn't been active in a very long time (say 6 months), your character name would take priority. Could be wrong on that, though. Honestly, that's the only thing that makes sense to me. Screw the player who hasn't played in a long time and will probably never come back. Why does he get to keep an awesome name?

*shrug* That's not the way they ever handled mergers in Age of Conan--and they did a lot of mergers. If you had an active account, your character names took priority over a younger character on the server into which you were merging, or a character on an account that hadn't been active in a while. I'm not saying BioWare should do the same thing with server transfers, but at the same time...they kind of should.

That would have been a pretty good solution. I'm pretty annoyed about that as well, as an early access player who woke up at something like 4 in the morning in order to be there the second the server went online. heh. At this point, I honestly don't have any idea if my server (Sanctum of the Exalted) would be considered an origin server or a destination server or neither. At least however it happens, I have the option not to transfer. My long-term concern is how they'll handle names when mergers almost inevitably happen. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=473286

Not legacy names, but you can check for toon names. Just have to log into that server and try to create the character there. If you have a destination in mind, you may as well do this now in order to function as a place holder until server transfers become available.

Yeah, just saying, I hope they give this its due consideration, because it's a big issue for a lot of people. This is their current policy for characters transfering servers: "If your transferred character’s name conflicts with an existing name on a destination server, you will be asked to rename your character." And I guess I can understand why they decided to do this for transfers, which are (theoretically) voluntary (though I still think that if you've got a six month-old character, then that character should take precedence over a character that was played for all of one day before somebody gave up on it and cancelled his account). But when servers merge, you have no choice.

Well, I disagree a bit with this. I've got a couple of characters that I'm really enjoying leveling the traditional way, and some others where I'm really just leveling them up through warzones. I can see the advantage to having this as a character perk. With that said, I don't plan to actually purchase any of these in the immediate future for the simple reason that I don't think there's any way to disable the increased XP gain. What if, for example, I get to a point in the game where I actually want to slow down a little and smell the roses? I don't want to be in the position where I have to stop doing the warzones I love just because I don't want to outlevel the content I'm doing. But that's just me. I think these will be very attractive perks for a lot of people.

So is this everything? Are there any new legacy-wide perks, or they're all per character in this patch?

That was my thought, as well. The benefit for a single character just isn't worth it, especially if you've got at least one character who's capable of churning out companion gifts cheaply.

Well, I do wish the quick travel to the Black Hole were a little cheaper, but I guess I'm going to buy it anyway. The cost represents about two hours of doing dailies, which is worth noting since it's probably only saving you about five minutes each time you use it. So basically, you'll have to use it 24 times before you break even on what you paid for it. Not ridiculous, but I almost just wish this were something we got for free, since if the rest of you are like me, you just like to get your dailies over with as quickly as possible so that you can move on to things you like to do more.

Yeah, that's what they should have done. I said at the time that what they did was half of an implementation and I still believe that. I understand it was too difficult to change existing armor sets, but what would it have killed them to simply duplicate them and in the new versions put the set bonus on the armoring mod, then allowed you to do a trade-in. I honestly can't understand why they didn't do that.

I think we're all aware that sooner or later, you're going to merge servers. It may not be this summer...it may not even be this year, but it will happen. I'd personally like to see it happen sooner rather than later. But in either case, here's a suggestion (which I'm sure you've already thought about, but it bears stating outright). When server mergers happen, please don't allow me to lose the name of my main character--that I created about two minutes after the server came online at early access--to somebody on another server who has the same character name on a level 8 character that hasn't logged in since January. Please give some sort of priority for names based upon some formula of length of time subscribed + character age + character level + subscription renewal interval (e.g., priority to those of us on 6-month plans rather than somebody on a month-by-month) + last character log-in. I don't know...it's up to you how you work this out. I'm just hoping I won't get punished for the fact that my guild actually took advantage of the guild placement system and wound up on the third most populated East Coast RP-PvE server. (I wanted us to go to Lord Adraas but was overruled! )

Or...make the cost nominal and require legacy level 5. I don't understand why this should be such a big deal to have. I honestly think it should just be a free thing you get when you attain your legacy level. Maybe they can charge something for expanding it in the same way they charge you to expand your personal cargo bay, but that's it.