Well, I can tell you that, for me anyway, it has always been instant in the past. As in, as soon as I equip or bind something I have always gotten the "item has been added to your collection" message instantly. Until yesterday.

Maybe this is a recently introduced bug? For the first time, I had the same issue today. I used 5 encrypted datacrons that I hadn't unlocked before, and none of them were added to collections until I closed the game completely and re-logged. Same with the Revered Chronicler's armor that you get from completing all the datacrons. I got it as a reward from the last datacron, but it didn't unlock. Strangely, I had 3 of the encrypted datacrons unlocked account-wide already, and when I used them on a new character, I got the message "datacron xx has been added to your collection". But they were obviously already *in* my collection since that's where I got them from in the first place. o.O Typical EAWare QA, right?

Yes, I'm aware that there isn't a level requirement for GSF, and if you read my post a little more closely you'd have noticed that that wasn't what I was getting at. At all. What I was referring to was my suspicion that BioWare will use x2XP to attract players that might be taking a break or whatever. And why do you say "probably not even then"? What are you basing that on? I mean, c'mon dude, you're just making wild stabs like the rest of us. The last x2XP wasn't based around a huge release like the pre-RotHC one was. As far as I could tell, they did it just because the players were asking for another one. Assuming that was the case, they could announce another one at any time. They don't seem to be basing them around holidays. Once doesn't count as a trend.

If I had to guess, I'd say in the lead-up to F2P access to GSF. There's going to be a bunch more ships, some new maps, and the Kuat Driveyards Flashpoint, so I bet they'll use double XP to get as many people as possible playing before the full launch. Just a guess.

I was away for 6 months or so, and I was definitely rusty on my two 55's (slinger and vanguard tank). Like, not-fit-for-Ops-other-than-SM rusty. So what I decided to do was start from scratch with a Sentinel. Since I was starting from the beginning with a class I hadn't played, I was learning the class and rotation as I went. At the same time, I did the occasional HM FP or Op with my existing two 55's just to get back in the swing of things. I'm still not as comfortable with my old chars as I was before my vacation, but it's getting there.

Hah, yeah. While the rest of the Op isn't bad even in NiM, Kephess HM/NiM really punishes mistakes. There are lots of groups who will steamroll TFB or S&V HM and have a lot of trouble with EC. Imo, you either need an experienced group who have all been there multiple times, or a combination of experienced players with a good raid leader who will call all of the phases. To get the Warstalker title (NiM in under 2 hours), you probably need both, along with *two* quality tanks.

Wow, check out the dude with 19 kills and 503 objective points. I assume it was a gunship sniping turrets. Regardless, very impressive. Like a lot of gunship users, probably a little *too* impressive.

Had this happen to me last week as well. Switched instances, and was able to complete it.

What I could see eventually happening is GSF being integrated with FP's/Ops. For instance, a FP like Hammer Station - maybe your first objective could be destroying some turrets or fighters to clear the way for your assault team's shuttle to land. I think something like that has a lot more interesting potential than a full-on GSF FP or Op. Think the opening scene of EpIII.

I went preferred for a few weeks a month or two ago, and bought all account-wide unlocks other than Section X authorization. Including the cost of the 600k escrow unlocks I needed, it cost me around 5mil to buy everything on the GTN. Obviously you could save some creds by buying the unlocks before your sub expires, so you wouldn't need the escrow unlocks. If you mostly play the storyline and dailies with the occasional flashpoint thrown in, you probably won't notice the difference. There were two things I couldn't stand though - not being able to queue crafting, and being limited to one mail attachment. For someone who plays (and outfits) a bunch of alts, they were a serious pain. They made some strange decisions with the pay wall imo - they punish some play styles severely (crafting for instance), and others are almost untouched (people who play a single character). I know people who have been preferred since the f2p launch, and they don't notice it at all other than having to buy Ops/FP passes every week on the GTN. They play single characters and don't craft, so in their case it doesn't make any sense to pay for a sub.

No idea if the mobile ones are different than the desktop version, but I've been playing TOR on my desktop with HD4000 graphics (i5 3570k) for about 6 months now and it runs perfectly fine on medium settings. I briefly had an AMD 7870 LE discreet graphics card installed, and there was very little difference that I could see between the medium settings that I usually use and the highest ones. Sort of a sad statement regarding TOR's graphics imo.

That's a bug. If your group leaves before defeating the Heavy Fabricator, the gate behind where Foreman Crusher is located will be up when you come back and you can't interact with the button to open it. Not sure if this happens every time to all players, but in my experience it has. Nothing you can do about it but start again when the Tuesday reset happens. Awesome, right?

Yes, because that's a perfectly acceptable fix for a bug, right? /sarcasm It never ceases to amaze me how all the BioWare apologists come out of the woodwork to defend every single bug. Are you under the impression that the OP and others who've posted here didn't realize that they could use orange gear on their droid companions? That your post is informing people about a feature that perhaps they didn't know about? Obviously everyone could use orange droid gear, but that's hardly the point. The point is that BioWare QA failed yet again and Cybertechs ended up with craftable droid armour that cannot be RE'd due to dev sloppiness. The secondary point is that they inexplicably included two sets of droid tanking armour rather than one tank and one dps. As things stand, they might as well have just left it out completely.

I might be a bit more forgiving towards BioWare's stance on "lore" gear if it all actually looked like the originals. But the problems with Revan's outfit and the fact that Jolee's set doesn't look much like his suit from Kotor kind of nullifies their idea imo.

Found the Exploiter Chassis in the Dune Sea on Tatooine. I assume the other parts you mentioned can be found there as well - thought I'd mention it since you didn't include Tat as a possible location.

So was he saying that an i7 2600 doesn't have the juice for TOR? He was obviously either drunk or had no idea what he was talking about. With all the cash they're raking in from the cartel market, EA should have a team working on nothing but engine optimizations. Trying to shift the blame to players for their crappy engine is just sad.

I guess it's possible that it's a driver issue. Are you using Catalyst 13.1? Maybe try the 13.3 beta drivers? But I've noticed framerate problems since 2.0 launched when I had never had them before. It's most noticeable on the fleet, and there's even a delay when searching the GTN. In the thread about the quest tracking limitation, one of the devs mentioned that if the engine has to track too many things, it can result in lag. So maybe the huge number of achievements being tracked for every player is causing issues? If that's the case, maybe they should rethink the achievement system. It's essentially useless anyway imo. Regardless, a 7970 should absolutely *destroy* TOR. If a reinstall of the newest drivers doesn't fix things, it's likely that it's the crappy engine at fault.

Core vs core, Intel kicks AMD's behind in performance. There are some newer games that take advantage of more cores (Crysis III iirc), so that in some benchmarks the AMD 8350 (8 core) comes out roughly equal or occasionally slightly ahead of the i5 3570k (quad core), but for most games the i5 would be far better. Generally, two AMD cores aren't as good as a single Intel core. And the Phenom II is a generation behind the 8350. Also, if you're not going to overclock the cpu, there's no need to spend your money on the 3570k. The "K" just means that it's voltage unlocked and can be OC'ed. It's stock clock speeds aren't much higher than a non-K i5, and the better on-board video is irrelevant if you'll be using a graphics card. @Levity: Sorry dude, I guess I was a little abrupt there. I didn't intend to come off as rudely as I did, so my apologies. You're obviously doing other stuff aside from gaming with your rig, so you're right that more RAM would be nice in that situation. My point was that for a strictly gaming rig, 8GB is just fine.

Assuming it was HM Lost Island: 1. You're undergeared 2. You've got no business in the HM if you've never done it on SM People who are just looking to do the Rakghoul weekly as fast as possible likely aren't in the mood to carry someone who probably shouldn't be there in the first place. A new-ish 50 DPS can probably be carried without too much issue so long as you speak up at the beginning and pay attention to the instructions. But an undergeared healer or tank who hasn't done the FP before is just recipe for failure - or at least lots of wipes and frustration. So I'm sure it was nothing personal and the people who kicked you weren't necessarily rude a-holes. They just didn't feel like spending hours in a FP when they could do it in 30 mins with someone who was geared and had been there before. My advice would be to find a guild that has regular FP and Ops runs. It's much easier to learn the skips and fights when you're with people you know and everyone is in Vent or TS or whatever.

You could upgrade to the Phenom II X6 hex-core I guess (same AM3 socket as your current cpu and with 4 more cores), but I'm not sure it'd be worth it. What I'd do is spend the ~$120 on a new Z77 motherboard and grab yourself an i5 whenever you can afford it. Assuming your ram is ddr2 or ddr3 and the graphics card is PCIe, you should be able to re-use them no problem. Then all you'd really need to do is upgrade your graphics and you'd have a kickass gaming system. For a new graphics card, I'd recommend the Powercolor HD7870 Tahiti LE. For about ~$220, you get the same gpu as the top range 7970 (normal 7870's use the Pitcairn gpu, while this one uses the Tahiti). It overclocks like a beast - mine is running at 1200 MHz with no additional voltage - and is a much better value than anything NVidia offers. The 7870 Tahiti LE performs slightly better than the NVidia 660Ti, and is ~$80 or so cheaper. EDIT: 8GB of RAM is perfect for gaming. Anyone who says you need more (at this point) doesn't know what they're talking about.

I had to laugh at the bit about Kotor II being a lot of people's favorite SW game. Sure, it expanded somewhat on the system that BioWare created for the original, and there's no doubt that they had some cool ideas. But aside from the game being a buggy mess, the ending was also probably the worst piece of unfinished crap that I've ever experienced in a AAA title. I also found the whole "wound in the force" storyline to be fairly stupid, and the fact that LS players couldn't give Kreia the boot was preposterous. You know what the best thing about Kotor II was? The Ultimate Saber Mod. Despite the fact that there were some amazingly modeled custom hilts made for the original Kotor by the modding community, Obsidian got lazy and stuck players with the same silver flashlight hilt that the original shipped with. So a group of modders got together and ported their Kotor mods (along with a boatload of new stuff) into the game and also added an RNG script so the modded stuff would drop randomly. Amazing work which added some replayability to a game that didn't have much on its own. tl;dr: I agree with the above poster who mentioned Obsidian's history. They tend to release games in a buggy and unfinished state, and I can't imagine that's all on the publisher. Kinda hard to get overly excited given their track record.

Upgrading with another 4GB of ram might help (for 8GB total). And yeah, I agree with the other poster in that it's a problem with your computer rather than a game server issue. It's not lag, but rather slow-down from poor computer performance.

Even a mild overclock can make a difference depending on the app. Some games are cpu-intensive and would benefit from an overclock, but I don't think TOR qualifies. A decent video card and an SSD drive to reduce load times would make a much bigger difference than a top-end overclocked cpu. Imo anyway. That said, if you can get a 3570k for around the same price as another i5 without the unlocked cores, there's no reason not to grab it. Especially if you have an MSI motherboard that has the one-click overclocking feature (OCGenie), which means that you don't have to mess around with BIOS settings. If you're planning on overclocking manually, make sure you read through a guide first. A member on OC3D.net posted an in-depth Ivy Bridge guide which you can find here: http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=45604

"K" means the cpu is unlocked and able to be overclocked. The i5 3570k also has better on-board graphics than the other i5's. If you're not planning on overclocking and if you have a dedicated graphics card, there's no reason you wouldn't be able to get away with one of the cheaper i5's without the "K". Being able to run TOR on max settings depends on your graphics card more than the processor.

It seems that there are a lot of NVidia loyalists around, but imo it doesn't make much sense to stick with one brand in a market like gpu's which is literally owned by two companies. I think that if you buy based solely on brand loyalty, all you're doing is encouraging stagnation. Why are the NVidia cards priced 25-30% higher than an equivalent AMD? I have no idea, but I certainly wouldn't consider spending that extra cash just because a card happens to have a green logo. Also, NVidia are currently on the way to alienating themselves from enthusiasts - google "NVidia Greenlight" to see what I mean. (tl;dr - they've forced card manufacturing partners to severely limit the voltage (and therefore overclocking) that their cards are capable of - apparently in order to reduce the number of returns (RMA's). At the same time, their cards are more expensive than equivalent AMD models which don't have those limitations. Makes perfect sense right? Maybe if you're an NVidia shareholder I suppose.)