With all the interesting and original races to pick from in the Star Wars universe, it absolutely FLOORS me that they went with Cathar. I mean it is so unoriginal and uninspiring. WTH is it with the cat people, just about every MMO has them. Star Trek Online, Guild Wars 2, EQ2, Elder Scrolls Online just off the top of my head. I sincerely hope Bioware comes to their damned senses and gives us a real Star Wars race instead of this half assed furry fetish feline fad.

Interpreting the Jedi Code's proscriptions against romance as in some way "inhuman" is completely missing the point. It is simply a case of people who view Jedi as some kind of heroic figure and wish to play their characters similar to the way most heroic figures are envisioned, and always have been envisioned. The problem with this is that the concept of the Jedi is very different from the concepts of most other heroes that have appeared though the ages. The best way to think of what the Jedi code is about is to understand the basic ideas behind Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and other meditative philosophies...because this is very obviously where Lucas got the basic underpinnings of the Jedi ideals from. The basic concept is that there is some achievable state of "perfect being" that can be attained...and to strive towards the goal of attaining that state is the real purpose of existence. The Jedi seek this balance in the same way Buddhists seek enlightenment. The problem is that the world being the way it is, it is very difficult for most people to be able to devote their lives to such a pursuit. Those who are able for one reason or another to pursue these paths would never judge or look down in any way at those who cannot or choose not to for one reason or another. However that does not change the fact that the "rules" of orders of this type exist in an absolute sense...they aren't "made up" on whim, or there to restrict or punish. The rules against romance in the Jedi Order are there simply because if you pursue romance you WILL leave the path of balance that can lead to the ultimate goal of all Jedi activity. There is no modifying this fact, and no way around it. The reasons for this have been gone over many times, the simplest reason is just that it takes all of one's inner dedication and focus simply to bring one's own being to a state of "enlightened" existence...there is no possible way one can do this for others, and so the ties of romantic, and even other interpersonal dedications and relationships, necessarily prohibit reaching states of perfect balance. For someone like a Jedi, not being romantically involved does not make one a "feelingless robot"...in fact one can easily imagine that individuals who have dedicated their lives to attaining such a pure state of balance with nature and the universe must have the deepest and most profound feelings of any being. They simply are not attached to others in the way most of us attach our feelings to other people(and unfortunately to objects as well). They make the choice to pursue their path based on deep wisdom understanding and intuition, and they free themselves from personal relationships solely so that they may care for and dedicate themselves to healing things on a Universal level. Paths like this are not customizable...the inner laws that create them are formed by the core of being and existence, and cannot be altered because someone wants to think themselves a Jedi and attain the wisdom of a Jedi but still take part in things that are not of a true Jedi's world. I totally understand that this is a game, and that the Star Wars movies and franchise being what they are, many people would like their Jedi to be some version of the swashbuckling romantic hero. But it is very clear from whence the Jedi ideology came, and if we really want to understand WHY things like romance are "not allowed" we should look at it from this perspective, as it is the best way to really figure out why Jedi act as they do and what their motivations are.

Because no one gets carried in raids...

I really hope your poorly informed opinion doesn't speak for the majority of the SWTOR community. I am both a PvP, PvE, AND RP "fanatic". I have always loved all of these aspects of the MMO genre. It is never healthy for a game to ignore any of its player bases to the exclusion of another. I think a vast majority of us would agree that this game was hurt seriously by the failure to include the promised ranked PvP content in 1.2. If you want to ignore that, well I wish you well in the future but I don't imagine you will find enough people who hold such a limited and uninformed understanding of modern MMOs that could keep you hanging out in caves and RPing Star Wars lore while everyone else has nothing much to do. Good luck to you though.

I want to make this thread to support the courageous moves Bioware is taking to introduce content way overdue, despite the ill informed flame fest we have seen on these forums in an attempt to perhaps sway uninformed opinions towards a position that can be nothing but detrimental to the future of this game. I will come right out and say that I am someone whose high hopes for this game took a very hard turn for the worst, mostly because Bioware decided to not implement rated warzones, or at the very least the opportunity to queue as an 8 person group. This decision, in addition to the fact that everyone understood that this was a "preseason" and no one was looking for anything but a more structured and genuine PvP experience, decimated my guild and many others. Yet we continue to hear from uninformed parties suggesting that "NOW" is not the time to release even a PRESEASON version of ranked warzones. I say these people are not only wrong but selfish to the point of ignorance. Most of us now have little time to stoke the flames of enthusiasm needed to get many who had high hopes for this game back into resubbing. Please don't let this obvious lack of any PvP support translate from half of my 40 person guild to the last few of us, of many, who have stood by this game long with patience rather than jump to one of the other, valid MMOs that have launched recently or in the near future. PLEASE Bioware, at the very least, give us ranked warzones in some form so that my guild, like many others, can get back to experiencing SWTOR as it was meant to be experienced!

Lolol I seriously laugh at anyone who tries to cop an elitist attitude playing THIS game. Damned right a specced and well geared Guardian will do fine in a raid. Anyone who thinks they are getting a raid-making DPS increase choosing Sentinel over Guardian is a total tool. And I play a Sentinel.

There is something that's been bugging me for quite a while, as I am sure it has been bugging a lot of people. Ok, although it basically broke my guild apart and caused people I enjoy playing with to quit, I get that we won't see ranked warzones for a while. And though I personally don't understand WHY they don't at least put in the 8 man queuing system, I can accept that there may be some genuine reason they can't. But the game has been out for over five months now, and I cannot get over the fact that you can't even queue with the limited four people without having to uncheck the "requeue warzone" box and reinvite everyone AFTER EVERY MATCH. Shouldn't this have been fixed almost immediately? I mean it is clearly broken. The cheesiest, lowest quality games that have group queuing don't suffer from this kind of nonsense. It kinda sends me the message that Bioware just doesn't give a crap.

Please stream your next raid so we can time you.

I'm not quitting...yet. However I agree with much of what has been said in this thread. I was so thrilled to play this game, followed it for several years...and now, I find myself much less excited than I should be. And there are many reasons for this. Absolutely, building up all the hype for the ranked PvP and then dropping the ball was horrendous. Bioware one-shotted a lot of guilds doing this, including my own, and for no reason. There is no way a group of professionals should have EVER, EVER said "THIS WILL BE A MAJOR ASPECT OF PATCH X" if there were ANY doubt that it would go in. A short delay is acceptable and reasonable...but not even going into 1.3? mind-blowingly bad IMO. At least throwing us the crumb of putting in the 8 man queues so people could ACTUALLY PLAY AS A GUILD would have been a gesture that would have kept some people from quitting, but they won't even do that. Actually, they haven't even fixed their system so a group can actually continue to queue without everyone having to drop queue after EVERY STUPID WARZONE and get reinvited and requeued by the group leader. So bad it is almost indescribably bad. Then we have the Legacy system...a nice idea but killed by the incredibly poor racial selections available at launch. No defense for this, and part of what makes me wonder whether anyone at Bioware actually GETS Star Wars. One of the main things people love about Star Wars is all of the alien races...and to present us with this laughable selection of different colored humans is just terrible, terrible, terrible. What I find MOST hilarious about the whole thing is Bioware defending this garbage based on the idea that the races "have to fit the romance arcs"! REALLY??? LOL!!! If they think people who are into Star Wars are more interested in playing out some weird little mini soap opera in a video game than having exciting and interesting races to play, I just don't know what to say, because it takes an astounding lack of comprehension to even misinterpret your playerbase so badly. So now Erickson says new races are coming this year...and who the hell wants to level an alt when that is the case? Not me! IF they came out and said they will give free racial changes to everyone when they introduce the new races, I might put some effort into leveling an alt, but given that that is almost certainly not going to happen(so they can charge a nice sum for race changes) what is the point? Especially since none of the actually USEFUL Legacy bonuses like improved XP etc are even in the game yet! Another thing they REALLY screwed up is killing the world PvP in this game by separating the faction questing areas in such a way that you rarely even run into anyone to PvP against! You have all these great planets in SWTOR, and rarely is there a reason to even visit any of them. At least if there was more world PvP around there would be an excuse to do some planet hopping once in a while, but as it is, the entire SWTOR galaxy just sits there mostly as a linear experience for people going from 1-50. Yuck. That isn't Star Wars. Anyone doing a Star Wars game should have made DESIGN GOAL NUMBER ONE to make every planet offer something for every level range, to not only encourage but practically FORCE people to travel around the galaxy on a regular basis. The linear planet to planet leveling experience in this game is just AWFUL and shows a complete lack of thought and grasp of what people want in a Star Wars game. I can understand what the core issue is...it is the BAD decision to concentrate on story and full voice acting. That was a FAR too expensive, time consuming, and tbh DIFFICULT way to approach an MMO. What makes people excited about MMOs is creating their own content in a sense. Originally the story thing was SUPPOSED to provide that. But when Bioware got timid and continually watered down the results of actually MAKING DECISIONS, we were left with nothing but a tack on, practically narrated story about our characters, that we had virtually no say in. The story aspect of SWTOR SHOULD have been incredibly dynamic, with rewards, outcomes, repercussions, all being important and meaningful...if they had gone that way, things would be a lot better than they are. As is, the story means very little, and when you're done you just go queue for endless warzones in a repetitive gear grind, or grind your gear in raids like every other MMO out there. What a terrific waste of all that voice acting tbh. But I can appreciate how hard implementing something like this is...its just that more time actually making the system meaningful and less time making sure every damn kill X number of mobs quest was fully voiced would have been a better use of time and money. They are going to have to make a serious effort to make changes to this game that make it fun to log on and play, and atm it is not. I did not wait this long to play another version of "sit in Stormwind and queue for dungeons". If they don't change this aspect of the game a LOT, I think a lot more people than just myself will be cancelling in a future that is definitely not far, far away.

Lol what a ridiculous concept...the difficulty in obtaining something should consist of competing with people camping it for profit? o.O Try again.

If Bio/EA used microtransactions, that would be the nail in the coffin for me. I am interested in SWTOR as a premium, subscription only MMO. If that changes, I'm gone.

What I don't understand is, with all the stuff that no one really wants or has asked for that they are adding and have added, why can't they at least let us queue 8 man groups? Even making it so we can queue with 4 without having to uncheck the stupid requeue box and auto queue as a group would be a start...I mean that is just broken. To even LAUNCH with such a bug is ridiculous to begin with. Several people in my guild quit because they are tired of us not being able to PvP together. It isn't so much the ranking system they are interested in, THEY JUST WANT US TO BE ABLE TO PvP AS A GUILD!

I just did the GW2 weekend beta, and I have to say a lot of the time I was thinking "WHY DOESN'T SWTOR HAVE THIS!!!" Not going to go into anything long-winded here, but the WvWvW PvP is insanely good, even just the large maps with multiple siege objectives and an always ongoing, persistent battle with score being kept for all sides is just completely awesome, and something I REALLY wish Bioware would consider developing for SWTOR.

I like my Orokeet prepared cordon bleu with a side of savory Tauntaun tidbits. How do you like to eat your 'keet?

Ya and what mine generally does is sit at about 1/5 progress for 3 minutes then suddenly you hear some background music and the game finishes loading after another 45 seconds or so...

There is no point in posting specs, as if your experience with other players in game and reading this post should tell you, this is in fact a widespread issue that affects many different computer configurations and price points. At least you are trying to be helpful, unlike the many uninformed and unknowledgeables who just spam "your system sucks" whenever someone complains about a performance issue. Given the many widespread issues SWTOR has presented over the months though, I wonder if the realize how dumb they look doing that.

The fact of the matter is it seems that what causes these ridiculous load times is unknown...and not at all related to the quality of one's computer. I know people who have cutting edge systems and still have long loading screens...yet some people with older systems seem to have no problems at all. My system is on the older side, but is far from a dud, and while fleet and some other things load with respectable times, almost all of the planets take LITERALLY 3+ minutes to load...and yes I have timed it. At least if we were given some information about WHAT we can improve that is most likely to bring these loading times even CLOSE to what is normally accepted in the genre, we could start addressing the issue.

I have to agree with the OP 100%...and this as an Eastern timezone player for whom the servers generally go down around 3 AM. I have friends who play from the West Coast, and I have always been struck by the fact that these poor people have the game shut off for them at midnight their time??? That is absolutely ridiculous. The problem with Oceanic zones is of course that they are related to the zones here in the US in the worst possible way, really. I know this from years of having my Australian friends log in JUST as I am logging off...or if I REALLY play late I might be able to play with them for a couple hours at most. I am not sure what a reasonable solution for this issue would be, but I think at least moving the maintenance times a few hours forward would benefit...well everyone in the US who isn't in the eastern zone, at least.

Made some comments in larger font. EDIT: haha I didn't realize how large size 6 text was, guess I created an eyesore my bad.

Idk why they don't simply combine the whole GTN system. I realize the opposing factions aren't likely to directly sell stuff to each other but first off, it is a GALACTIC trading network, and we all know Smugglers and other "entrepreneurial" types are likely to bring goods over from one faction to the other. Oh, and it is just a game, there are plenty of things that don't make sense from an RP standpoint, so why cling to this one when removing it would make things so much easier and help the economy? EDIT: just read the above post where someone said they are in fact merging them. Good job Bioware! Oh and for Iason: Jung Ma, not purchased.

Hey devs, when is the expansion coming out?

I disagree. I personally don't think Sprint should even be in the game. Walking long distances increases immersion...it makes you feel you are actually in a large world rather than playing a game. The normal walk and run are realistic, sprint is ridiculous and smacks you in the face with the reality that you are just "playing a game". Oh...and I wonder what you people would have done if you had played WoW from launch when you couldn't get a mount till level 40 and YES YOU HAD TO WALK EVERYWHERE. The degree to which people want instant gratification and can't be bothered to experience things like an MMO world in all their detail and with all the hard work the developers put in makes me sick tbh.

As with Dark Side Jedi.

If you are that serious about PvE you would join a guild and run everything with them. That's what I do and I have no such problems.

I have to say, I like the color scheme but there is something disorganized about it it is messing with my head. It just feels fragmented and not at all "clean".