Lol, that pretty much sums up my thoughts on it. I never got to read the original article, must've been pulled super fast. All I've seen is snippets (possibly taken out of context? Again, can't see the original...) and immediately everyone is posting about Free to Play all over mainstream gaming websites.

I'm not sure this is the case. When I started moving from LA to Ebon Hawk, the first thing I did was send over my level 7 agent to test it. I then made a brand new Jedi Consular, logged him in, opened up the Legacy tab, set the Legacy name, and it was instantly back to level 18 complete with Legacy nutkick and force sweep unlocked on the legacy panel (despite the two chars that unlocked that being back on LA at the time).

I lost Sgt. Smash. /Mourn He was a novelty character though, so eh, no big loss. Everyone else went off without a hitch... which kinda surprised me given how long Ebon Hawk's been around.

You can start picking up a light model duster as early as the 20s, I think the first one I got was a tan one from Mandalorian Raiders boss 1. Hats are a bit later and dont' show up till the 40s though, and that's when the dusters with the absurdly poofy neck... pillows(?) start to show up. Kinda wish there was a mid-range duster where the collar wasn't quite so ridiculous behind the head. On the downside, if you have long-barrel pistols, they can clip through the cowboy hat, which kinda killed it for me as a gunslinger (not sure if scoundrels have the same issue since they have a different gun-holding posture... it's mostly the off-hand that goes through the hat).

The Balmorra Resistance armor is probably the closest you're going to get, I think. Maybe the Quesh set too, since that also looks kinda bounty hunter-ish. I think you're hosed for the helmet though.

Skavak is hands-down the best nemesis in the entire game. Alas, twice as bright, half as long! None of the others I've seen even come close to being as personal or charismatic, right from the very beginning.

Balmorran Resistance social gear has sort of a darker tone training fatigues/space suit look to it, as another option. Also a crazy face mask if you're trying to go for a Sithy look.

We got some epic necro'ing going on here. Back in January and December it was a bit harder. Now... not so much...

Pff, you don't need to be fit to be a hero! Have you not seen Megas XLR?! For knight I think type 2 makes the mots sense, since it's a youthful "skywalker" kind of a voice. I made a type 3 burly scotsman type and was... taken aback the first time he spoke in this kinda soft, nasally youthful voice.

The video has me kinda disappointed, it's so fast you can barely tell what's going on any more. The old animation was probably my favorite attack animation in the entire game. Kinda sad. The old animation felt much more "epic" with the whole dramatic ripping chunk out of the ground and actually projecting it at someone from afar (...or up close). For the record, I didn't mind the delay a whole lot the way it was before, nor I would I mind terribly if the damage registered before the projectile hit the target (if you kept old animation but new timing for actual number processing). If the new animation sticks Project should probably be renamed to something that's a more accurate description like uh... not even really sure I can describe it in a word. "Collateral Damage?" "Rock Surprise?" Whatever it is, it's hardly a projection and more of a random object bouncing betty kind of thing. I'd have to agree with a post in the closed thread, the new animation is so fast that even keeping the item chucking nature is just stupid, since you can't even see it travel through the air any more. If it's going to be this instantaneous, something more like a super-fast disturbance would make sense and at least look less weird. But really, I'd like the old animation back, more than anything else. Or keeping the old animation but with supersonic projection speed... or something. Anything but this, please. I think the randomness is actually kind of a nice touch, though I liked it a lot more when it was centered around your character. So watching it some more, I think if they kept the speed/randomized location and just kept it's origin by your character, I wouldn't mind as much..

I played this game over dial-up from December to March, so I think mifi would be very playable, as long as you get a stable connection. SWTOR uses very little bandwidth outside of patch. I just made sure my move queue was set to 1.0 seconds so I could have a little wiggle room in queueing up skill combos (dial-up ping averaged around 300ish and was very playable--only really spiked in large warzones and the fleet, but mostly during the initial load). Mifi dodges the bandwidth bullet that hurts dial-up's initial area loads/patching, so I'd expect you could play over it with a ping of 300-600ish, which should be very playable. To give you an idea of how much data SWTOR uses on average, running around questing on a planet typically only takes an average of 4KB/sec or so... that is, it doesn't even tie up the entire bandwidth for a 56k modem with a decent phone line. It spikes to 30-60KB/sec or so when loading areas like the fleet where you've literally got hundreds of players to track, at times, but the game is amazingly lenient and will let you lag like crazy for a bit while everything loads in, after which it's back to normal. Given that bandwidth was a premium while I was on dial-up I used task Manager's Resource Monitor to watch bandwidth use like a hawk and axe anything that wasn't SWTOR. If you're curious and on win7/vista, you can use ctrl-alt-del and go to task manager, then the performance tab and click the resource monitor button at the bottom; the network tab within that will give you a detailed view of just how much bandwidth each application you're running is taking up. It's actually one of the things I really, really like about SWTOR compared to WoW, it's probably one of the friendliest games to low bandwidth connections that's on the market right now. In other words, you'll barely even dent your data limit just by playing; major patches are what you want to watch out for. 5 minutes on youtube is essentially equivalent to an entire night of playing... if not 2-3 nights. I strongly suspect you have more to worry about from incidental stuff like windows update or youtube/music streaming than you do from SWTOR's connection.

This DLC pack would give you 90 free days of game time AND all of its content... for only $10... assuming that google doc is accurate. That would mean it'd be criminally stupid not to buy it, since buying the DLC would actually save you a ton of cash. The pricing/content balance for a lot of those is also completely insane (some too cheap and others way too expensive), so I think it may be a well-written troll attempt. Did this surface before or after the E3 announcements?

I kinda feel 1 and 3, though I do enjoy it even so. I've played smuggler and knight to the end of Act 3 and I felt like knight was much more cohesive since it at least tended to tie in with the war effort. Revan I'm kinda apathetic to. And it made me realize that what I think might actually be good for this game, would be to remove class-centric stories in favor of faction-centric stories that include the planetary arcs. The trouble I have with having class arcs separate from planetary arcs is the complete lack of narrative cohesion. If they flat out just built the story arcs into one cohesive plot linking all the planets together, regardless of whatever your class was, it'd have been 10x better. I'd say in most cases the thing that drives you onward to the next world ends up being something totally irrelevant compared with what the world is about, and there's no attempt whatsoever to link world arcs together in some sort of big picture, which creates a bit of dissonance. If they simply focused on having one really good, compelling overall story that linked everything and threw in some flavor class quests along the way, I think it'd be much more powerful (maybe even go so far as the ME2 route and make class quests all about your companions and some important world/self-saving/destroying side-mission kinda thing that you have). The class arcs tend to be reasonably cohesive, and if you could skip all the world arcs, they may even be fine. This may seem to diminish replay value a bit, but the writing cut from having totally independent stories could instead be focussed on giving different characters/classes radically different ways to respond to the same story that everyone else is experience (or different solutions to scenarios that pop up); you could keep the same amount of writing even, but shuffle it into the same story to put the replay value into how widely differing a scenario can play out with a different character. TLDR: Non-class quest cohesion is weak. Everything you do on planetary arcs feels like you accidentally stumbled on something at best, and at its worst it feels downright inappropriate (which describes what doing about 80% of the quests is like after Tatooine on the Smuggler... and I imagine the Bounty Hunter too). I got to thinking of all this when wondering how they'd handle an expansion, and more so how I would want them to handle an expansions. I think I would honestly prefer it if expansion content had all characters share a unified arc (which would also make it much easier to group with friends to progress through the main story) and the concept of planetary story arcs was dropped in favor of an overall narrative arc that just happened to incorporate planets as parts (which would also make it easier to get away from "Now we're on planet X, then Planet X, etc." and have quests fly you back and forth between planets and revisiting old ones in different regions, etc. as new plot elements unfold that get you to do so). Also, optional space battles at various story moments would be nice (especially if they provided epic scenarios... like say there's SUPER MEGA BATTLE STATION... let me do opt for a mini game attack run to travel there rather than just traveling there!) Anywho, again to re-iterate, if anyone from Bioware reads this, my chief grievance with this game at this point is one thing: Story Cohesiveness. Or lack thereof.

I get mauled by the DF equivalent snipers (though I can't tell if it's because of gear or not), so I'm inclined to guess DF on account that it's a lot more flexible and is great at doing damage on the move (and bleeds/dots aren't resisted/dodged as much as gunshots). I have a really hard time giving up the knockbacks though. I think my current spec is about 20ish in sharpshooter (enough to get the core of Trickshot and it's supporting talents) and the rest in sabotage, so I can throw the electric charge DoT on people to augment the damage a bit more flexibly than just refreshing speedshot more often.

I thinkt here i something to having a face that matches the voice. My Knight still greats on me because they are at complete odds. Playing a smaller Luke Skywalker type is perfect with it... unfortunately for me, my Knight's archetype in my head was "Braveheart IN SPACE" (he's a burly red-headed Scottish space warrior... with a high pitch nasally voice!) The voice gets SUPER gravely on any type 3 dialogue choice (and pretty much every dialogue option has a chance to go this route), but if you aren't consistently going with type 3 options, you can get some hilariously jarring moments when the smuggler starts channeling Christian Bale/Clint Eastwood in the middle of an otherwise innocuous-sounding conversation. The smuggler voice does vary a lot though. My thought is that they basically wrote different characters, essentially. Think of the the 2-3 different voices as different character types: Type 1: Snark with a Heart of Gold Type 2: Greedy Coward Type 3: Dirty Hairy 1 and 2 kinda overlap, though they can sound different. However, Dark Smuggler options are frequently hilarious because you suddenly start talking like Dirty Hairy, no matter what you sounded like the rest of the conversation.

I never got Akaavi geared well enough to find out; getting good tech staffs is a super pain the rear.

I enjoyed it quite a bit; pretty sure the basic story arc is what would have been KOTOR3, in some form or another (though I imagine in Kotor3 the ending significance/divergence would be severely ramped up). I've only played smuggler to 50 so far as well, but it also seems to mesh with the planetary arcs better than any of the other classes I've played too. I went 90% light side through the game, though in the final confrontation at the end I went with the dark choice. After watching the others, it just felt so much more epic (the music also helped vs. the lightside choices)... And I still got named master since I was Light IV at the time.

Because I got it as a legacy perk, I was able to kick in the 'Nads on the final confrontation on my knight. Trying to imagine what that'd have been like in a live action star wars film makes me lol hard.

Well, tweaking alacrity-related stuff would make sense, since at the moment they're kinda counter-productive.

Which is more exciting, playing delivery boy, or an epic get-rich-quick scheme (that involves smuggling artifacts...) Act 1 is actually fairly smuggler-ish... Act 2 and 3... a bit less so; after Act 1 there's this kinda snap turn and you go from smuggler to privateer for the rest of the story, for whatever reason.

Don't bother with the companion reward armor for looks--after her initial set, it all looks like normal republic armor, from what I've seen/taken.

Lol, I remember this vividly. Saw the codex popup, "Oh, nifty!" *Read it* "...I probably wasn't supposed to know that yet." Getting the codex entry moved until AFTER Act 1 is done would be nice. <_< Regarding Act 2, it's definitely the weakest spot in the Smuggler arc, BUT it does end up being important (just unfortunately, you don't find that out while you're doing it, which makes playing through it feel a lot less compelling/like it lacks direction).

I vehemently disagree with this entire statement and will be very sad if they remove the animation, because it's probably my favorite-looking consular ability. I'm inclined to agree too, since they made the Consular Legacy skill a Super Project.

Hybrid can mean either one of those things; this argument is purely a semantic nitpicking. There's lots of ways you can do hybrid specs in this game where you throw roughly equal numbers of points in two different trees--a hybrid between the trees.

Of the one's I've played, Rusk, by a landslide. You get him right on the heals of a far more interesting character and he's followed almost instantly by an even more interesting character. Really, all he has going for him is getting his men killed on Hoth, then later on telling you stories about how he got his men killed (frequently) in the past. Bowdaar's backstory is kinda simplistic, but he gets a lot of great moments if you have him out while questing though (just a shame about melee tanks sucking so bad...)