Put in a tick last night about this. CS got back to me today and said it's a bug, and will need to be fixed in a future update, and cannot be corrected by CS.

I care about the story to an extent. I leveled up my sorc to 50, doing all side quest and such along the way. After the fact I realized that side quest are a waste of time and bring nothing really interesting to the table in terms of story, except a select few ones I found somewhat interesting. Now that I am leveling up a new character, I am ONLY doing the class story, as it's the only interesting thing in the game story wise. I'm also doing warzones, space mission dailies and flash points to get the rest of my xp, and so far so good, and it's a TON more enjoyable. After hearing about 100 "woe is me, I can't do anything for myself" type quest that are pretty much all the same, I can't be bothered with them anymore. Also, I'm a huge RPG fan, it's the reason I wanted to play this game. I love Bioware and their story telling, but I think the side quest in this game are just really poorly done. Class quest though, hats off to the writers. Doing a trooper right now and the story hooked me pretty quickly.

Loot driven game...what did you expect?

They need to work on making republic more attractive. Eventually, things may even out. For example, on my server, Republic is pretty out numbered, but stomps Empire in Warzones. We're already seeing people switch sides in hopes of "easy wins"...which is funny, because those people are generally the the reason why their faction gets stomped. Not sure how some servers are in terms of finding groups and what not, but I could see that as a problem.I started a republic character a few weeks back, and my friend doesn't want to play there because he's afraid he won't be able to find people to do stuff with. Eventually they will merge servers as the populations dwindle down...we can only hope they do so in a reasonable way. The other problem is that you can have different faction characters on the same server. This makes it too easy for people to switch sides, instead of being forced to stay with their faction. For example...if on a server Republic is out numbered and always gets stomped, people can just go make an empire toon and switch. If they enforced that all your characters on a server had to be the same faction, people would think twice about switching sides, as they would need to possibly delete a high level character to do so. Humans want the path of least resistance, and often go with the "can't beat em, join em" mentality.

Your respec cost gets reset after a week of not respecing....so I don't see the need for dual spec yet.

go to about 5:30...my feelings on this problem

The game was designed without world PvP in mind. It was added as an after thought.

While I think it sucks when people drop...I am guilty of it at times however...Bioware needs to ensure it's players have a "good time" while playing. If that means allowing them to drop out to try and find a more "fun" game, then so be. The main problem at the moment is that there is no match making system in place. Often times, you run into a premade and people just give up from the start. Now, I would have no issues sticking it out if the premade made quick work of the pug. However, with the way valor and medals work, more often than not, the premade just holds out to farm medals. Another issue is the lack of being able to choose what warzone we want to play in at the moment. Personally, I hate Huttball, and often drop when I get it, because at that time, I don't feel like playing Huttball and would rather play one of the other two. Until Bioware puts in mechanics like match making or letting us choose what Warzone we want to play in, there should be no punishment. But once these kinds of mechanics are in game, then I think some kind of punishment is valid.

I agree that there isn't much diversity at all. For example, I leveled up my Sorc as light side, and a friend leveled up his Assassin as dark side. We compared our story, and they were pretty much exactly the same, except a few minor details. The endings should have been vastly different if I went 100% light and he went 100% dark. While in the middle of the story, choices made things a bit different, the ending should have reflected our choices...not a give us the same thing with a few different details.

Ya, I was trying to find something to make my Sorc look more Jedi like, as I played mine light side, and don't really like the whole crazy evil look that most of the armor gives. But I haven't seen anything yet. Also, since you can't remove the armor mods from the set armor yet, you're kinda stuck with those looks for now, if you are doing raiding/hard modes or PvP. But I believe they are going to change that soon-ish.

I'm 32. Weekdays I either play for 2 hours or not at all. Weekends, maybe 4 hours or so each day. Usually I just try to log in, do a hard mode and log off. My play time varies depending on how much course work I have going on. Right now I'm working on the initial framework for a game, and writing 3 AI controllers for a pac-man game. Also have a group presentation on Wednesday discussing good and bad UI examples.

I would always love to see it switched back, it was much easier to understand when abilities were on cool down when they were grayed out. Or better yet, give us the option to toggle it!

I think you see both quitting equally. I'm a casual player (now that college has started again) and I'm debating whether or not to re-up. The fact that at end game it becomes a huge gear grind is a turn off. It's hard to find groups when you have a limited amount of time to log in, and this is because they went with a roll based class system. You are forced to find a healer and a tank, and sometimes you just can't. There aren't enough options of things to do if it's the case that you cannot find a group in a timely manner. You can do Warzones, dailies (which mind you, you have to sit through loading screen after loading screen to get to where you want to go), or space combat, which isn't everyones cup of tea. You are already seeing elitist when forming hard mode groups. I have never been for a dungeon finder or dual spec, for various reasons, but my opinion is starting to be swayed.

Thanks for this post! I just started a guardian and while I will level as tank spec to do flashpoints and such, I was wondering if dps spec was viable at end game. Going to bookmark this and come back when I'm 50! Thanks for the effort you put into this post!

The lvl 50 PvP gear has a stat called expertise on it, which increases dmg done, reduced dmg taken, and increases healing done in PvP. So yes, the gear is very important. You seem like me in a sense...I'm a college student who doesn't have a ton of time to play, but I was just on break so I was able to level up to 50. Gear is not too difficult to get. There are two weekly quest, one for Ilum and one for Warzones that grant 3 champion bags each. Then the daily versions of those. So if you can plan it out to do the daily 3 days out of the week, you'd get your weekly quest done as well, and get a total of 12 champion bags. Not to mention your commendations that you can also use to get bags. Now, this will depend on your server, and other things. Get together with a team and you can likely get it done pretty quickly. PvP is decently fun in this game, but the system for obtaining the gear is rather grindy, and you need the gear to be at a competitive level. But even for a busy person, you should be able to obtain the gear over time without too much effort.