You're at the correct level. At level 54 you should be able to take on anything on Makeb. There are commendation vendors on the fleet as well as on the makeb orbital station (or whatever's it's called). If you want to buy gear with credits, I'm not sure if there are gear vendors on Makeb (there are on most planets, but I can't remember where they are). The GTN should also have plenty of green pieces for 2k-10k each that should be sufficient. You should be able to beat Makeb in level 50 gear. An alternate option is to run Black Hole dailies a few times. This will get you some cash and some gear drops. You can equip the gear drops and use the cash to buy what you need.

I agree with MSchuyler that it's good to go into crafting with a good understanding of what you're going for. That said, I disagree that it will be a long time before you make back your cost. I think the time it will take to make back your costs depend mostly on your time and ability to monitor market fluctuations. One can make a ton of money fast if they're able to identify the current hot item(s). While one may just "happen upon" a hot item, the items can typically be identified through close market watching and seeing where the game is going. For example, during 12xp, mid-level green and blue mods and gear were selling very fast and for high prices because everyone was focusing on leveling up and didn't want to bother with crafting. That market has now crashed. As was said, Lvl 11 materials are now one of the hotter items on the market due to the recent release of SOR. In time, this will cool down and something else will replace it. The important thing is to focus on what people want to buy, not on what you want to sell. This may mean taking a break from crafting if the materials are selling for more than a crafted product it. Don't be fooled by the big prices that you see the top items selling for. You do not have to sell a high quality item to make a good profit. The higher quality items are actually often some of the harder items to sell as the market for them is much smaller. In addition, they require more expensive materials and the price buyers are willing to pay often increases at a slower rate than the cost of materials. Though it requires a little more time, once can often make more money by selling large quantities of lower quality items than by selling a few big items. The key thing to remember is that you need to adapt. The market is constantly changing and you can't just choose one thing to make and expect it to sell. Check out this post. Psandak gives excellent advice on how to craft and make money.

Dulfy.net has guides for each class. They are not all yet updated for 3.0, but the updates are gradually trickling in. Even for the non-updated ACs, the old class guides will still point you in the right general direction, even if they no longer contain the perfect optimization. I'd do some reading on Dulfy to get a feel for how each spec should play as a non-hybrid.

What you found is the best place to go and where most would've pointed you to. Dulfy is the best source for game info, particularly guides for each AC.

The big thing is to save money and not spend it if you don't have to. If you save, it's easy to have 1m+ credits by the time you're getting close to endgame on you first toon. This is helped even more by the recent removal of ability training costs. I realize this is still far off for you. Unfortunately, there is no good, quick way to make the type of credits you need without having a higher level toon. I'd advise caution with crafting. While it can potentially make you a lot of money in the long run, it is very expensive to get into and it takes some time to figure out what sells and how the market behaves. Consider focusing on gathering skills (e.g. Scavenging, Archaeology) or mission skills (Slicing) as these can provide materials to be sold for profit (or in the case of slicing, direct credits).

To get enough reputation, you'll have to buy multiple packs. The individual packs typically cost a few hundred cartel coins on the cartel market or 200k-400k in game credits on the GTN. I don't buy packs that often, so I can't give you an exact estimate, but you'll need at least half a dozen (likely much more) which puts you at about the same amount of in game credits that a couple statues cost from the GTN. That's the best case scenario though. If you have the real life money to spend on packs, a better alternative is to buy the packs and sell them on the GTN. As noted above, you can usually get 200k-400k per individual pack. Selling a few of these on the GTN can get you the money to buy a statue off of the GTN. This is a more reliable route to go as the packs can contain a variety of things and you may have to buy quite a few to get what you want.

Some people don't learn English through classes but merely through speaking it. As a result, they greatly struggle when writing and often defer to trying to spell things out phonetically. This is actually fairly common and there are a lot of people who can speak second languages, but not read/write in them. Native speakers face the same struggle, just much earlier in life. Most native speakers can carry on an effective conversation when they're only a few years old, but it takes them much longer (and often significant study) to be able to write and spell effectively. Your point is valid for those who have formally studied the language, but I don't think one can safely assume that all who speak a language have formally studied it.

The Hutt Cartel expansion has been a subscription perk for at least the past six months (I started playing in the spring and it was given to me for free back then). The expansion cost money for the first few months after release but has been free since. The same thing will likely happen to SOR. After six months or so, it will be given out for free to subscribers.

I believe that the tiers are Orange - Yellow - Green - Gray in order from most points to fewest. I typically only craft the orange recipes as they give the most points per resource invested. As you increase your crafting skill, the orange recipes will become yellow. This normally happens every 20 levels (from 0-400 at least) and also coincides with new recipes being available at the crew skill trainer. Some of the newly available recipes will be orange. Please note that the colors I'm talking to are the difficulty of the recipe and not the quality of them item (green-blue-purple-orange). Also, it's very helpful if you match the gathering skills to the crafting skill. For example, Cybertech recipes use metals from underworld trading and scavenging. Look at the Crew Skills section of the forum and you will find stickied posts with all this information.

Going the route of the old packs will lead to spending either a lot of real life money or large amount of in game money. It will most likely cost you more in game money to buy the packs for a holostatue than to buy one off the GTN. Unless you're a very lucky person, the best place to get one is the GTN. That's where I got mine (a couple months ago). Prices normally fluctuate between 1-2m credits, but will occasionally dip below 1m. I got mine for about 800k each, but I've seen them as low as 500k in the past few months. That said, the 500k price was around the launch of Strongholds and a lot of non-Stronghold GTN items took a large price dip. Unless you're willing to wait for a long time, I'd look to pull the trigger if you see them in the 700k - 900k range. If you've got a toon to level 50, you can start doing the Black Hole dailies. These only take 15 minutes and can earn you about 75k per day. Do these for a couple weeks and you've got your money. As a side note, there is also the Dr. Oggurub (sp?) statue that is no longer obtainable. It was a bonus for pre-ordering the RotHC expansion.

People are much more likely to speak out and act out when they are upset about something rather than when they are pleased with it. We see this very thing where I work. If you have 100 customers and 90 of them are happy with your product or service, only 5 of them will proactively contact you to let you know that. Of the 10 that are unhappy, 9 of them will contact you to inform you of their displeasure. As a result, it seems like a disproportionate number of people are upset (9 unhappy vs 5 happy), when in reality, the ratio is much different.

Great post. I've done similar things when leveling. I agree that there are plenty of things to do in this game and plenty of ways to level. By alternating content, you can keep it fresh. In addition, I second your recommendations to try new things. When I started, I hated GSF. A while later, I decided to give it a second try. I read some online guides, dove in, and have fun with it now. Thanks for the great post, OP.

I completed the story as well after the patch. From talking to my guildies and friends, the general consensus is what Psandak said. There are still some bugs, but nothing that should prevent you from progressing.

This is what I did. [EDIT: I actually did what JediQuaker said in his first post, but both are right on] There are only a few items that I actually want to read, so it's not that hard to increase the scale on these items and leave the rest as is. I found that all I needed was to increase the chat size as well as increasing the tool tip size (I forget the name of this, but it's the help text that by default appears next to the map). The vast majority of UI elements are covered my symbols or images. I size these individually to fit my gameplay. For example, I recently made the debuffs on me huge so I can notice if I'm hit with something. likewise, I made the buffs small, since I'm not as concerned with them in the heat of battle. The UI customization can be intimidating, but I'd encourage everyone to spend some time getting familiar with it as fine tuning each of the UI elements can lead to a huge QOL improvement.

My argument wasn't over which group of people got hosed. It's pretty clear that this change affects early access people. My argument is that any time you rush in and are the first one to try to adopt a product, you take on the risks that you may encounter frustrations and problems that are smoothed out later on down the road and not encountered by those who purchase the product once it is more mature. I agree that it is frustrating, but I'm also not surprised that big tweaks are following a new expansion, nor that those tweaks will have a bigger impact on those who are the first to buy.

Early Access (of which I am part) did not get screwed. We got exactly what was expected. We all expected to pay training costs and we all did. The removal of training costs is not a negative to early access, but a benefit that is equally applied to all. Does it stink to have invested in something that is now cheaper (or in this case free) to obtain. Yes it does, but that's the risk of being an early adopter of any product. Early adopters tend to suffer through higher costs, lower functionality, and additional bugs. After the product is out for a while, the supplier usually offers the same product, but more polished and at a lower price. If I buy the newest phone the day it hits the shelves, then later go back and find out the manufacturer not only lowered the price, but made the frame and glass more rugged, I didn't get screwed. I got exactly what I expected and paid for. If I had held off and waited, I could have gotten the nicer phone, but I also wouldn't have been enjoying the new phone in the interim.

This. You can use the comms right now on the fleet. Also, you can't earn any new ones until you go below the 1000 comm max. If you are planning to play SOR, the questline will give you gear of around the same quality or slightly better quality as what you can buy with comms. I used most of my comms for relics, implants, gearing companions, and stuff like that.

I disagree slightly with this. Some people want to explore every corner, fight every enemy. While I agree with slowing down slightly for newbies and not bugging them to spacebar the cut scenes, I wouldn't make them leader. I think the better thing is to have a veteran lead, but to respect that it's someones first time and treat them accordingly.

This exactly. In order to easily complete the fight on time, a player needs to have the aggro on the boss so that it can be led into the fire. This is the way the fight is designed. The boss can be killed without leading him to the fire, but by doing so, you're making the fight unnecessarily long and difficult.

I assumed that because that's exactly what the poster I was responding to said.

You're correct in what you're stating, but you're also arguing against something I didn't say. I wasn't stating that a lifetime subscription is a better deal. I was contradicting the statement that was made which was: My interpretation of the statement above is that the same fixed amount will be received by the supplier regardless of which option is chosen. In this event, the monthly fee will never earn more than a one-time amount. As for earning the income more quickly, I would argue that the interpretation of these maneuvers depend entirely on the circumstance and that the argument can go both ways. While a supplier can look shaky by asking for money up front, certain customers present high risks of not paying for the services once rendered. In order to protect ones company, a portion, if not the full price of the service is demanded up front. I'm tempted to go on, but I'll leave it. I think that if we sat down and had a full discussion, we'd likely end up agreeing with one another, we're just approaching the conversation from different angles and backgrounds.

Wow. I learned something different in my basic business finance. Assuming the final total is equal, you always want the money as soon as possible. Once you have the money, you can invest it various ways and make more money. I'm not sure how leaving the money in the customer's pocket is better than having it in your own.

Just curious, did you pre-order before or after November 2nd? If you pre-ordered after, you don't get the early access and the system is working as intended. If you're facing a legitimate bug, it seems like it would be something that the devs will have a fix for immediately and shouldn't be something to lose sleep over. If you're still deciding to quit, I would surmise that either: 1) You weren't happy with the game to begin with and likely would have left soon anyways. 2) You were previously happy with the game, but this set-back has ruined it for you. In this case you're overreacting to a minor set-back that will soon be fixed. 3) You're not truly quitting, you just like to troll the forums with qq posts. You're free to do what you want, but I'm surprised you're not sticking it out. With the cost of the pre-order, I can't imagine calling it quits after one day. Worst case scenario is that you play the existing game for a little bit while your access to the expansion is fixed.

You're absolutely right. DPS need Accuracy for endgame stuff. Thanks for correcting my mistake. I don't play much endgame as DPS and should have brushed up before commenting.

Agreed. While technical limitations may stop this, I would love it as well. There is special development put forth for other large constituencies (PVP, OPs, etc...). Why not put the effort in (assuming it's possible) to make a few of the FPs possible with a 4 person party? I don't remember the links off hand, but I thought I read somewhere that non-grouping PVE players make up a very large portion of the playerbase. I know a lot of people who play this game not because they like MMOs, but because they like KOTOR, Bioware (ME & DA), and/or Star Wars. Something like this would be right up their alley and potentially attract more of that type of player to the game.