I doubt it'll happen, the distinction is made to easily recognise which AC you're up against. Dude with two sabers: Sentinel/Marauder Dude in pants & armour with one saber: Guardian/Juggernaut. (As opposed to someone in a robe with one saber who would then be a Sage/Sorcerer)

Well as it stands, it was reported well before launch that TOR could churn a profit even at 500k subs. And we are still well above that. Second, this too is a guess on my end I'll admit, but I would imagine that maintaining and updating an MMO requires less manpower than making one from the ground up. Certain types of programmers and say, concept artists aren't needed anymore as the systems are in place and the look and feel of TOR is well established. And while I'm sure Bioware would've loved to keep everyone on board, I can imagine EA putting pressure on them to run the team as efficiently as possible, IE getting everything done with less people. But again, just my theory.

That is a guess on your end though. Plus it is fairly common for an MMO to lose subs in the first months after release as people come in, check it out, note its qualities and its bugs, and unsub until the first expansion pack or some other major content release to come back to a more polished game. And I can't blame them, this is the first time I bought an MMO at launch myself, typically I wait half a year to a year for the bugs to get ironed out.

Also: In this topic: Scores of people who bought this game expecting it to be SWG2. And people who fail to realise that TOR is still churning a profit for EA/Bioware.

Well, judging from Stephen Reid's LinkedIn page, we've lost him for starters. Because really, what MMO needs a community manager eh?

Well eventually you'll run out of stuff to trade, heh. But at least I'd like to see a reinstatement of Flashpoint commendations so you have a way of getting Flashpoint gear without a random drop. Especially seeing how I've had several runs where for whatever reason all the Blue drops were for one class and one class only. At least with the commendation system you'd feel you were getting any closer to that coveted chestpiece or whathaveyou.

Funnily enough, something like this used to be in beta (along with flashpoint commendations, another thing that I sorely miss), it was possible to convert unused Tython and Esseles commendations into Coruscant commendations (at a ratio of about 3 into 1, if I remember correctly), and to this day I still am not sure at all why this feature was removed.

But that is the thing, those are games dedicated to the space experience. You couldn't get down on the ground in Elite or in any X-Wing game and have adventures or a story there, much less fight. And all those games didn't offer atmospheric flight either. It was purely space. Why? Because that wasn't the focus of the game, the focus of the game was to bring a space combat (in the case of X-Wing) or space exploration (in the case of Elite) experience to the player. Other features would just distract from the efforts to make a great space game. And by now it should be clear to you that the space game is not the focus of The Old Republic. Much like the old Dark Forces and Jedi Knight games (where no one whined for space content) it focuses on delivering a Star Wars experience that happens largely on foot. And I don't see anything wrong with that. If they ever feel like expanding the space content (in a way that is more exciting than drifting through endless, mostly empty space) then they are free to do so as long as it doesn't detract from the core aspects of the game.

And for all we know Bowcasters haven't been invented yet when TOR takes place.

That is because in some MMOs it was revealed that if you spammed /stuck in certain places or even during certain jumps that you could reach places where you weren't supposed to go. So a cooldown is needed, sort of, but it shouldn't be more than ten seconds.

More importantly, why need flying mounts when we have taxis?

Yes, but space flight is not the aspect that TOR needs. Maybe the wide variety of RP tools that SWG had, yeah. But shoehorning sandbox into a theme park MMO will work just as well as shoehorning theme park elements into SWG did. The two subgenres of MMO appeal to vastly different audiences, and require completely design and programming methods so personally I'd much rather have an MMO that is wonderful in one or two aspects rather than only being mediocre in a bunch of them. Plus personally I find there is plenty to explore and discover on the ground, I still haven't mapped out all of Tatooine or Alderaan and only the other day I discovered that you can get on certain buildings and bits of terrain on Ord Mantell that seemed impossible to get on. Sure future expansion packs could have even larger planets that have an on-foot exploration experience that rivals LotRO's, but I don't feel that space exploration is something that TOR desperately needs.

Not to mention it'd make no sense at all from a story perspective. You can't magically become a Twi'lek. I would hope that Bioware has still SOME respect left for the lore, even if it looks unlikely now that I have to stomach the insult that is Republic sided Sith Purebloods.

I also agree with this notion, I've spent more time stuck in place ever since auto/stuck got put into the game than I did in all the months in beta and in-game before it. And that includes the time spent when /stuck would still kill you and you had to revive.

Maybe you kids need to wait for Starlight Inception, a space combat sim that's being made by several ex-Lucasarts folk. That should bring you all that you desire much more expertly than TOR ever could, or should. Honestly, just accept that this game isn't SWG (with good reason) and never will be.

Sure space is full of stuff. But they're still millions of kilometres apart, if not lightyears, you forget, even at the speed of light, the distance from here to the sun is eight minutes. So non hyperspace flight would still have you mostly drifting through seemingly empty space for hours on end. It's not as interesting as you might think. You'd still force World Builders to expand the existing maps considerably for no real purpose other than to give pilots a pasture to run, er, fly around in. And then of course we'd have to redownload every planet to actually get these changes so it'd be a ~HUGE~ patch. And finally, for story purposes we'd probably still have to land at or in a spaceport so you wouldn't land miles from the nearest accessible quest hub. And then we have the risk of mid-air collisions as people would be constantly going there. So all in all, no, atmospheric flight is not something the game requires. Nor space exploration, that is not what this game is about. You didn't ask for on foot segments or lightsaber fights in X-Wing Alliance either. And you don't ask for a tightly scripted narrative to be put into the total sandbox that is EvE Online either.

No, what is even the point of having a build if you can just max out two of the three trees. "Oh yeah, I'm DPS AND healing!" Plus raising a level cap is just lazy game design as you force gamers to last longer with less content as they'll first have to grind to the new level cap before they can start getting the most out of the new content. This seems to be a given, an expansion pack would almost definitely add a chapter or two to the class stories, and as such, allow for about three or four planets to get added per chapter. I certainly wouldn't mind new lightsaber designs, as long as they don't get ~too~ outrageous.

A) Bioware have said even before release that ship customisation, both internal and external, will be coming eventually. B) You CAN invite friends onto your ship, just have them on your party and go to your ship hangar together, you can even give them lifts. The only requirement is that they have a ship of their own so you can't dump level 10s on Ilum. On topic: I'd really rather not see SWG style housing in TOR, as I don't quite want to see Tatooine full of ghost towns for a second time. Maybe LotRO styled where there is a special housing instance off the side of the map (or perhaps even a floor inside an apartment building that you get to by clicking a door somewhere on your faction's capital world) where you can then buy a house/apartment. But SWG style housing, no thank you.

Rule #1 of any decent microtransaction system: Never sell power. And buying credits is the quickest method to being able to afford the most powerful things on the GTN. At least, until so many people start buying credits that the value of the credit sinks like it's nobody's business and even simple mid-level mods will cost millions of credits.

Bioware said they're adding new races before the year is over, so... wait and see?

Plus Grievous his robotic limbs were probably either made or tweaked to facilitate lightsaber use. =p And sorry, no. You can't unbalance the number of classes each faction has, if the Empire gets another class then the Republic requires a mirror class of it. Second, you can't do what you propose, you'd have to remake every (Imperial) planet to allow for class story instances for this new class, which would be a very time consuming undertaking followed by a very large download as we'd have to redownload all those planets, as well. So yeah, no.

I never said taxis had to be faster. =p I like to enjoy the scenery while taking a taxi ride, don't take that away from me.

Sorry, but it ~would~ detract from my experience. You see, if they ever add "freak races", as Daniel Erickson so affectionately called them in an interview with Totalbiscuit last summer, they'd have to be classes all of their own. So they'd need their own starter planet, class stories to take them from 1-50, all new responses from NPCs to these strange new aliens appearing before them, particularly Imperial NPCs, a ship of their own and last but not least both in PvE and PvP there'd have to be a metric ton of testing done to ensure that the new classes either aren't useless or that they don't render another class obsolete, so yes, a whole lot of balancing would have to be done. And last but not least there'd have to be all new gear designs done for them too. As you can tell, this would take an enormous amount of time, effort and resources to make this work as they'd basically have to remake TOR from the ground up, as they'd also have to edit all the existing non-starter planets to accommodate the new class story areas and instances. And all this would keep them from making brand new content that all of us would enjoy. All this effort for races that most of the TOR players will never play at all, since all they make are human characters that look like idealised versions of themselves.

Not to mention, it's not like commendations are a finite source. Sure it can be a bother to grind them out, but you can get commendations through random drops so if you end up falling two commendations short, go out there and fight the nearest enemy population until you have those extra commendations.

Because SWG was a sandbox game, this is a theme park MMO. It follows a tightly scripted story. You can't combine a scripted story with endless exploration as, well, you can't trigger an event to happen in a certain way that will drive the story or in a way that is cool to look at for the viewer if you can be anywhere in the vastness of space, going in any direction. You CAN do that however if the space is on-rails like it is now. It is just as much on-rails as the story is, so again, it works for me.