Live From the Nar Shaddaa Lounge, Episode XXIII! 7 PM Pacific/10 PM Eastern, 6/12/2012 HEY KIDS! We're back for another two hours of live talk, news and commentary about SWTOR and other gaming topics. Podcasts? Pfft. We do it LIVE, every week on Shoutcast, for you! Tune in at Split Infinity Radio! Join your hosts this week- myself as Cyclometh, SirPsyko, Gandolfini and special guest host Dashl as we explore the light side and the dark side of SW:TOR This week we've got something fun we'll be doing at the beginning of the show, so be sure to be there! What's up this week? Read on! TOR Report The weekly TOR Report- what's hot, what's not, or just the things we think are the most interesting! Server Transfers are here! What's the aftermath? Full F2P coming? Community Q&A for June 15 New Patches- 1.2.7a and 1.2.7b. The Gaming Bin In which we venture into other areas outside of SWTOR... topics vary but they're always going to be relevant to your interests! This week, topics include what Rockstar does to cheaters in Max Payne 3, South Korea banning trade of virtual items, our review of The Secret World as it stands from the latest Beta Weekend, and MOAR! Technobabble! Our new segment! Technology and fun, it's all fair game. This week we talk about supercomputers, the new Micrcosoft Surface tablet, and China sending its first female astronaut into space, and whatever else we want to babble about. Dood’s Drink of the Week Our weekly silliness- cocktails and plugging our friends, stuff we like and cool things all around. May or may not be SWTOR-related. At the very least, you'll hear another great cocktail recipe from The Nar Shaddaa Lounge's very own Matt "RumDood" Robold. What Is It? The Nar Shaddaa Lounge is a weekly live broadcast on Split Infinity Radio- the station that's By Gamers, For Gamers (http://siradio.fm). The show is supported by TOR guild The Church of Alvis, the home of the drunken and vengeful. You can tune in with any Shoutcast-compatible client, whether Winamp, VLC or Windows Media Player or a ton of others. You can tune in on your iPad, Droid, iPhone, or other mobile device too! Remember to tune in at 7 PM Pacific time on Tuesday nights at http://siradio.fm! Connect With The Nar Shaddaa Lounge Website: http://alvisradio.thechurchofalvis.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Live-from-the-Nar-Shaddaa-Lounge/192006720890465 Twitter: Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/1/103062700276220449095 Email: alvisradio (at) gmail. Thanks for listening and we look forward to your feedback! Also, we want to hear your ideas for topics to cover. Let us know what you'd like to hear about. NOTE: The Nar Shaddaa Lounge is not strictly an adult broadcast, although there is content that is for adults, such as cocktail recipes and there will be some occassional off-color language or music played. Listener discretion is advised. The Nar Shaddaa Lounge and Split Infinity Radio do not encourage underage or irresponsible drinking, and if you do, we'll send Holy Alvis to crap your buffet and kick your ***.

It should not be necessary to point out that it is possible to be on a server but not be on the fleet (and there are two of those, and maybe multiple instances of both).

You missed the point. There is no possible discussion with you. Your original post does not allow for it. One can either agree with your opinion, or disagree with it, in which case, you will respond as you did to me; defensively and reflexively insulting. I don't care if you like or dislike something- that's your prerogative. But I will point out that you're not interested in changing it, only in complaining about it. I stand by what I said- you're not here to discuss, you're here to vent and jump on anyone who fails to agree with your opinion. When you state your opinion in such terms as you did starting this thread, you leave no room for a conversation, only an argument. Looking at this thread, you got your wish. Congratulations, I guess.

Saying anything useful to you is useless because your original post invites only two possible responses (with some variants): 1. "I agree totally, this sucks" 2. "You're wrong." When one posts like this, you're not actually inviting any discussion. All you want is for someone to disagree with you so you can accuse them of being a white knight or fanboy, then rant some more. We're not here to cater to your infantile whims, my friend. My advice to you: If you do not like the product you are receiving, then cease paying for it. Good day.

Nah. I'm just making fun of the hypocrisy and whining. But do carry on with your outrage.

Servers are too empty! *transfers allowed* Servers are too full! You people would whine if you were hung with a new rope.

I'm not sure why there's so many people claiming they don't let you know if you're eligible for a transfer. This came in my email at 3:17 Pacific Time June 12, 2012: So, for what it's worth, they ARE in fact informing people via email when their accounts are eligible for a transfer.

Live From the Nar Shaddaa Lounge, Episode XXII! 7 PM Pacific/10 PM Eastern, 6/12/2012 HEY KIDS! We're back for another two hours of live talk, news and commentary about SWTOR and other gaming topics. Podcasts? Pfft. We do it LIVE, every week on Shoutcast, for you! Tune in at Split Infinity Radio! Join your hosts this week- myself as Cyclometh, SirPsyko and Gandolfini as we explore the light side and the dark side of SW:TOR This week we've got something fun we'll be doing at the beginning of the show, so be sure to be there! What's up this week? Read on! TOR Report The weekly TOR Report- what's hot, what's not, or just the things we think are the most interesting! Character transfers are here! Well, for some servers. Class changes and balance in 1.3 Community Q&A for June 8 Patch 1.2.7 The Gaming Bin In which we venture into other areas outside of SWTOR... topics vary but they're always going to be relevant to your interests! This week, topics include the upcoming Star Wars: 1313- the first M-rated Star Wars game! Also Crytek, the Unreal Graphics Engine, and whatever else we think is fun to talk about. Technobabble! Our new segment! Technology and fun, it's all fair game. This week we talk about the new MacBook Pro- complete with Retina Display- and much more techno geekery. Dood’s Drink of the Week Our weekly silliness- cocktails and plugging our friends, stuff we like and cool things all around. May or may not be SWTOR-related. At the very least, you'll hear another great cocktail recipe from The Nar Shaddaa Lounge's very own Matt "RumDood" Robold. What Is It? The Nar Shaddaa Lounge is a weekly live broadcast on Split Infinity Radio- the station that's By Gamers, For Gamers (http://siradio.fm). The show is supported by TOR guild The Church of Alvis, the home of the drunken and vengeful. You can tune in with any Shoutcast-compatible client, whether Winamp, VLC or Windows Media Player or a ton of others. You can tune in on your iPad, Droid, iPhone, or other mobile device too! Remember to tune in at 7 PM Pacific time on Tuesday nights at http://siradio.fm! Connect With The Nar Shaddaa Lounge Website: http://alvisradio.thechurchofalvis.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Live-from-the-Nar-Shaddaa-Lounge/192006720890465 Twitter: Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/1/103062700276220449095 Email: alvisradio (at) gmail. Thanks for listening and we look forward to your feedback! Also, we want to hear your ideas for topics to cover. Let us know what you'd like to hear about. NOTE: The Nar Shaddaa Lounge is not strictly an adult broadcast, although there is content that is for adults, such as cocktail recipes and there will be some occassional off-color language or music played. Listener discretion is advised. The Nar Shaddaa Lounge and Split Infinity Radio do not encourage underage or irresponsible drinking, and if you do, we'll send Holy Alvis to crap your buffet and kick your ***.

Having to reform guilds and potentially losing your name is going to be a gamebreaker for many.

Live From the Nar Shaddaa Lounge, Episode XXI! 7 PM Pacific/10 PM Eastern, 6/5/2012 HEY KIDS! We're back for another two hours of live talk, news and commentary about SWTOR and other gaming topics. Podcasts? Pfft. We do it LIVE, every week on Shoutcast, for you! Tune in at Split Infinity Radio! Join your hosts this week- myself as Cyclometh, SirPsyko and Gandolfini as we explore the light side and the dark side of SW:TOR What's up this week? Read on! TOR Top Four The top four stories as we see them this week- or just the top four things we think are the most interesting! ToR goes F2P! (Not really), new content and a new planet! Community Q&A: June 1 Patch Notes: 1.2.5 (5/30), 1.2.5 Addendum, and 1.2.6 (6/5) We has a new community team! Who are they, and why did we need them? The Gaming Bin In which we venture into other areas outside of SWTOR... topics vary but they're always going to be relevant to your interests! This week, topics include 38 Studios, Nintendo's Wii U and more Diablo 3 problems among much more! Technobabble! Our new segment! Technology and fun, it's all fair game. This week we talk about the Dragon Capsule, the advent of private space exploration, and the new Windows 8 preview! Dood’s Drink of the Week Our weekly silliness- cocktails and plugging our friends, stuff we like and cool things all around. May or may not be SWTOR-related. At the very least, you'll hear another great cocktail recipe from The Nar Shaddaa Lounge's very own Matt "RumDood" Robold. What Is It? The Nar Shaddaa Lounge is a weekly live broadcast on Split Infinity Radio- the station that's By Gamers, For Gamers (http://siradio.fm). The show is supported by TOR guild The Church of Alvis, the home of the drunken and vengeful. You can tune in with any Shoutcast-compatible client, whether Winamp, VLC or Windows Media Player or a ton of others. You can tune in on your iPad, Droid, iPhone, or other mobile device too! Remember to tune in at 7 PM Pacific time on Tuesday nights at http://siradio.fm! Connect With The Nar Shaddaa Lounge Website: http://alvisradio.thechurchofalvis.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Live-from-the-Nar-Shaddaa-Lounge/192006720890465 Twitter: Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/1/103062700276220449095 Email: alvisradio (at) gmail. Thanks for listening and we look forward to your feedback! Also, we want to hear your ideas for topics to cover. Let us know what you'd like to hear about. NOTE: The Nar Shaddaa Lounge is not strictly an adult broadcast, although there is content that is for adults, such as cocktail recipes and there will be some occassional off-color language or music played. Listener discretion is advised. The Nar Shaddaa Lounge and Split Infinity Radio do not encourage underage or irresponsible drinking, and if you do, we'll send Holy Alvis to crap your buffet and kick your ***.

Sure. A lot of people were waiting for a SW MMO to replace SWG since the NGE. YMMV.

Someone above pointed it out- this game never really had a community because BioWare worked from day one to prevent the formation of one- not, I think with malevolent intent but just because they did not (and do not) understand that MMOs live and die by their community. If people don't feel like they're part of a community, they don't feel any loyalty. I don't know anyone on my server but my guildmates and a small set of others- I can count the number of people I have seen more than once by encountering them in the game world on one hand. Everyone you meet is a generic cipher; there's no sense of context. We might as well not be visible to each other in the game. No server forums. No ability to talk cross-faction. No ability to promote an in-game event by linking a URL. Dead community forum- BioWare has no concept of how to make a successful MMO last. I said it before, MMOs are terrible games to play as standalone single-player games. There's so many better options for gameplay, features, etc. We play MMOs for the people we play with. BioWare keeps erecting barriers between us and wonders why we don't feel like playing as much? It's asinine.

Players DO create the community, but it is totally impossible to do without the right tools. It's not a question of getting off your ***- there's plenty of motivated people trying to create community in the game, or were. BioWare has actively worked against providing those tools- whether it's server forums or in-game tools- and have even gone so far as to censure people who attempt to conduct in-game events. I do a weekly talk show about SWTOR and for a long time did a weekly event called "Flashpoint Friday" on Juyo. We'd go to the fleet and I'd play matchmaker for Flashpoint groups- it really worked incredibly well, people had a really good time, you could actually see player counts significantly higher on Fridays during my shows. However, someone apparently didn't like that I linked the URL to the SHOUTcast stream in chat every ten minutes or so telling people about the show. It wasn't spamming and there was a lot of great chatter on the fleet during the shows. When someone reported me (I assume), BioWare simply sent a warning and didn't even look into what was going on. It took weeks of back and forth to finally get someone to at the very least acknowledge that no, I didn't actually break the rules and that the warning was incorrecly given. But I haven't done the show since- because I can't talk about it in-game. I could have in theory tried to build up a following for it on the Community forums, but nobody reads those, and at the time they were a single forum for all servers. The "server group forums" are utterly dead. Without a way to reach the audience, there simply is no point to the show. BioWare made sure it was impossible for me to reach an audience legitimately, and I can only assume they did it deliberately. Still, we do our weekly talk show because it's fun and it's not server-specific. Also we cover other gaming topics and have other channels to reach gamers. But in the end it's very sad that BioWare prevents this kind of thing from being possible because it's what really forms the backbone of a community. So, if you want to talk to someone who got off his *** and did something- my first show was launch day. You can see how effective the tools we have to make community connections are.

Live From the Nar Shaddaa Lounge, Episode XIX! 7 PM Pacific/10 PM Eastern, 5/29/2012 HEY KIDS! We're back for another two hours of live talk, news and commentary about SWTOR and other gaming topics. Podcasts? Pfft. We do it LIVE, every week on Shoutcast, for you! Tune in at Split Infinity Radio! Join your hosts this week- myself as Cyclometh, SirPsyko and Gandolfini as we explore the light side and the dark side of SW:TOR We're not sure if Gando will make it or not, because he's stuck in traffic! You'll have to tune in to find out if he did. What's up this week? Read on! TOR Top Four The top four stories as we see them this week- or just the top four things we think are the most interesting! Signups to play test Patch 1.3 on the test server “Mega Servers” replacing current structure? Community Q&A for May 25th - 1.3 Special Edition New SWTOR Book, “Annihilation”, Cover revealed and a bit of an overview The Gaming Bin In which we venture into other areas outside of SWTOR... topics vary but they're always going to be relevant to your interests! When Game Developers Die... 38 Studios (and their subsidiary BigHugeGames) laid off their entire staff and the blame game goes on. What will happen to their IP given their situation with Rhode Island? Are game publishers on the way out? With Kickstarter and “indie game developers” favoring the direct distribution model, will we see a trend that way over big companies like EA and Activision/Blizzard? Minecraft has taken simple play and displaced Call of Duty on XBoxLive and the most played game, and with the PC version there’s more than 30 million players registered. Up and coming games... MechWarrior Online is in closed Beta and Founder’s Program... Elder Scrolls Online goes into a bit more depth on their single player MMO, and more! Dood’s Drink of the Week Our weekly silliness- cocktails and plugging our friends, stuff we like and cool things all around. May or may not be SWTOR-related. At the very least, you'll hear another great cocktail recipe from The Nar Shaddaa Lounge's very own Matt "RumDood" Robold. What Is It? The Nar Shaddaa Lounge is a weekly live broadcast on Split Infinity Radio- the station that's By Gamers, For Gamers (http://siradio.fm). The show is supported by TOR guild The Church of Alvis, the home of the drunken and vengeful. You can tune in with any Shoutcast-compatible client, whether Winamp, VLC or Windows Media Player or a ton of others. You can tune in on your iPad, Droid, iPhone, or other mobile device too! Remember to tune in at 7 PM Pacific time on Tuesday nights at http://siradio.fm! Connect With The Nar Shaddaa Lounge Website: http://alvisradio.thechurchofalvis.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Live-from-the-Nar-Shaddaa-Lounge/192006720890465 Twitter: Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/1/103062700276220449095 Email: alvisradio (at) gmail. Thanks for listening and we look forward to your feedback! Also, we want to hear your ideas for topics to cover. Let us know what you'd like to hear about. NOTE: The Nar Shaddaa Lounge is not strictly an adult broadcast, although there is content that is for adults, such as cocktail recipes and there will be some occassional off-color language or music played. Listener discretion is advised. The Nar Shaddaa Lounge and Split Infinity Radio do not encourage underage or irresponsible drinking, and if you do, we'll send Holy Alvis to crap your buffet and kick your ***.

I've harped on this since day one- BioWare has made it crystal clear that they either do not understand or do not want a real community. The OP has it spot-on. Without the community, there is no game. MMOs are generally suck rocks in terms of straight gameplay; they really aren't much fun- there are always more engaging and interesting options if you only look at the game itself. It's the people you play with that bring people back over and over, and that critical component is something BioWare ignored and actively worked against since the earliest days of this game. Communities need consistency, a way to communicate (forums), they need personalities to rally around- heroes and villains. How many of you could tell an epic story involving a person or group in a game you played that other people would recognize? If you played EVE, you know of m00, BoB and GHSC, if you were on the Scylla server of SWG you knew who GTF and The Church of Alvis were, and so on... without the framework in which you can have those personalities take the fore, you have essentially nothing but a pretty bad singleplayer game. Unfortunately, even if BioWare had a "Come to $DIETY" moment right now (or even a month ago), I'm afraid it would be too late. The damage has been done and the passionate community members are largely gone or leaving.