I am on tython. I am level 11 but brought down to planet maximum of 10. Jedi temple was where I tried to do it.

Hi, I have a question. I was a subscriber and should be a preferred player still I would think. I recently started playing again and made a new character on a new server and I hit level 10 and I went to my purchased cartel market items and grabbed some adaptive armor, a dualsaber and a crystal. I put the crystal in the saber and the game shows it as an upgrade, but when I equip it instead of the crystal applying my stats go down. I am using a +41 endurance crystal. Everything I am trying to use says requires level 10. I tried looking online but there are so many contradicting answers, seems no one knows how this works. As a preferred player should I be able to use the orange bordered adaptive armor and purple bordered crystals? I bought them with real money seems kinda shady if I was denied access to them so I assume I am doing something wrong. Any help would be appreciated.

I've been in a few MMO EGA's and I agree that queues are the norm. But I've never been in one where they make such a big deal out of staggering EGA access to keep things manageable, and still have such large queues. I've also never been in a guild before at launch so I'm not sure if it's common practice to assign guilds to specific servers again to manage population. With these steps taken I admit I am a bit disappointed in the queues. If they were going to be as bad as any other mmo out there why go through all the extra steps of staggering and guild assignment? I'm not complaining, I understand and have faith that things will get better, but I am a bit disappointed. Perhaps I just hold Bioware to higher standards then other companies IDK. I decided to post when I went to log on today and had to sit in a queue for 15 or so minutes only to get on and see 48 other people and no other instances to switch to. How is 48 people queue worthy? Also I'm guessing the OP didn't play rift. They had by far the smoothest EGA/launch I've ever seen and I never once encountered a queue. Now they didn't make the dent in wow that everyone was thinking they would but I do believe they had 2 million copies sold and have close to if not more then 1m subscribers still which outside of wow is considered successful so it is possible to have a smooth launch.