http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN The key to a good conspiracy theory is to know a little bit about what your talking about. STUN is a simple algorithm to help two computers who both may be behind firewalls and/or restricted routers talk to each other. All this server can do is send you back a message telling you what your IP address is as far as the rest of the world is concerned(some network setups will give you a different public IP then the private one your computer receives). using this knowledge you can more easily connect to other peoples computers because you know what IP they need to contact you back on. That's it that is all this does one simple message sent out(hey whats my public IP) and one returned (your public IP is X). I realize there is a bit more to it technically then that but simplified that's whats happening. Take off your tinfoil hat and take a deep breath.

DPS do seem to be a lot less squishy in this game then in others which can influence how you tank. My first reaction to your story is bad dps. It sounds like you had a lot of split damage and your healer was struggling to heal the correct targets without losing anyone. I wouldn't worry to much about it. You may have been trying to hard to get every mob on you but I dont think that that was the cause of your deaths. If your dps isn't going to focus its damage the fight is going to go on to long and a healer will have to pay attention to multiple people, which splits his/her attention and causes more room for error.

This response answers my question but is an unacceptable interim solution. High-res textures where pulled from the in game options menu because of issues with client performance, that's fine, but they should give us the ability to re-add them in the config ini file at least. Wouldn't it be good for helping them debug the issues that as they optimize the engine people can try the high-res textures and tell them if they are able to use them or not. I understand wanting to reduce calls to tech support from people using high-res textures when you know that they will not perform well on a system with the recommended specs in some situations, but I think this has gone to far in removing that option from us completely. You obviously have a way to turn it back on internally since you say you are working on fixing it which means you need to test it. I would be happy if you exposed that ability to us as well. I do agree that the marketing videos and screenshots are now very misleading, and if you don't have optimizations to get hi-res textures back in the game as a high priority item(I understand it wont be a quick fix) then I do think these screenshots need to be removed-changed because it is misleading.

You know what happens on the forums of all these games that do split maintenance. 1) When they do a bad patch and the servers are down for 12 hours instead of 8 the americans complain cause they are the test bed and Europe is only down for 8 cause they fixed the problem by the time they did the Europe maintenance and people demand comp time for the downtime. 2) European players complain because the americans get all the world firsts and get to experience all the new content before them.

picking a specific warzone makes the queueing problem worse and you are spreading your population out. Instead of creating a game and starting you now have 3 different warzones short a person and no one is playing when you could have started a game already. The real solution to this problem is one of two things. 1) population balance. If your server becomes more balanced then you will see less huttball as the other warzones will be possible choices after teams are established. 2) Bioware creates some new same side appropriate battlegrounds so at least if your population is skewed you get some different matches. I think in the short term we are stuck with what we have, but in the long term I think both 1 and 2 will happen. They will do something to draw republic characters over if the population is as unbalanced as it seems, and they will create more new warzones to fight over.

12.15.2011 Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ Early Game Access: Ready to play 12.05.2011 Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ Early Game Access: Ready to patch 12.05.2011 Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ Digital Standard Edition Pre-Order Dec 5th and in. Thanks for the thread its been a good stopgap for me watching the dates come closer and closer.