As far as I know of, we have never had plans to put these into Toys R Us. We do have another vendor that we will be announcing 'soon'.

I'm asking around about this now. I can say that Paypal should be a viable option.

Current Status: Walmart. Physical cards are available in many Wal*marts. You may want to call ahead, they' apparently sell out very quickly. Best Buy. You need to find a Best Buy with a Pre-order Kiosk. On that Kiosk, search for "Star Wars Old Republic" and you should see a 2400 cartel coin offering. Print a receipt, take it to the register, and they will print out a code for you. There are no physical cards, but I have verified this works personally. Gamestop. Similarly, these are also digital-only (i.e. no physical cards). Go to Gamestop and ask the employee to purchase a 'digital-only' reg code for Star Wars: the Old Republic Cartel Coins. They may have to search for their system to find it, but it should be available. They'll print out a code, which you can redeem directly from our website (they used to have a more complicated process, but we've been working with them to simplify it). I've verified that this all works as well. Target. Not available yet. We'll let you know when there's something to know.

We have no plans at this time to go on the next gen consoles. Simply put, the game was designed with mouse+keyboard in mind, and I think most players would not like the changes in gameplay we would have to make in order to make the experience playable on a console controller. But hey, that could change. Never say never.

As a general rule, we're waiting until we can verify the inventory has made its way through various retailers and gotten onto shelves. We don't want to send y'all to Walmart only for you to discover they aren't there yet. That being said, Walmart reportedly went live this week, and I understand that we should be appearing in Target 'very soon'.

This guy is correct, and is so with delightful flavor I might add. Subscribers who unsubscribe get moved down to 'preferred' status. I believe your cap at that point will be 350K. Every other credit that you have, and that you earn while capped, is put into 'escrow'. You can purchase the ability to withdraw credits from escrow. Also, if you resubscribe, access to these credits are restored. I know this is annoying, but this is actually a design decision that was made primarily to slow down credit farmers using free accounts to abuse the game. We are continually examining things like this to see if we can lessen these sorts of restrictions on players without creating a haven for credit farmers.

This is due to the nature of how skill trees work with level expansions. When you give more skill points to spend to a player, you also make it possible for them to buy more combinations of the lowest level branches of multiple skill trees. They can, for example, buy the lowest level keystone abilities for both a strong DPS character AND a tank, and make characters that are virtually impossible to balance correctly (the classic 'magetank'). We're not thrilled with this, of course. We'd really like for tank classes to be able to tank as quickly as possible. However, some things would need to be rethought before this can be a reality. It's definitely something that will get more thought before we ever raise the level cap again.

My understanding is that the dye packs/color scheme either cannot or looks horrible with textures that glow ('emissives'), and as such, it is unlikely we will allow those to have their colors changed in the near future.

We have a team of programmers who work on optimizing both the client and the server, in order to increase performance and the quality of the play experience, increase visual appeal, and reduce downtime and loading time. They have already made significant strides, but many of the improvements they've made aren't as big and splashy as all-new features, and may not be apparent to people running top-end machines. Our codebase forked from Simutronics codebase quite some time ago - at a certain point, the divergence between code bases is so significant that continuing to merge in updates from a coding partner becomes technically unfeasible.

It's pretty hard to 'enforce' roleplaying because the definition of what is acceptable roleplaying varies wildly from player to player. Some guilds want full-on roleplaying in all chat channels, others prefer just say. Some are okay with anachronisms, whereas others want you to stay strictly within the lore. Some are very picky about names. Others less so. Some people mentioned that most hardcore roleplayers tend to stick with themselves. To be honest, in a large-scale MMO like SWTOR, finding subcommunities like this is the best solution. This allows you to find other players who defines roleplaying the same way that you do. So I heartily recommend that players who have this interest research roleplaying guilds on their server. Be warned, some of them have pretty stringent entry requirements to get in -- I had to write an essay about my character to join one last year...

Hey, guys, let me give a little background on this decision and how it came to be. During development of the Collections system, a couple of problems became apparent in terms of how things are architected on the back end of SWTOR. The short form is that making all items in a collection separate items had a lot of nasty side effects. It increased the amount of data storage per character considerably, it increased login times to handle versioning up your character, and it also quintupled the number of things in the collections GUI, making that GUI an unreadable mess. The team working on this feature looked at these problems and decided that the best possible solution to these issues was to consolidate these items into sets. So, yeah, that's on the design team. I swear, not because we're evil jerk designers, we just kinda failed to fully realize how the feature would end up playing out . We now have a better grasp of the ramifications of this decision, and we're aware of the unhappiness it caused. We're also aware that using Revan's Mask as an example was a pretty poor call on our part. We're in the process of evaluating other options that would allow us to give players the functionality that they want, while at the same time address the very real technical and GUI concerns that we faced with our initial architecture of the system. Unfortunately, no option that we come up with is likely to be doable very quickly -- on top of solving the technical problems, we also need to now deal with ensuring anyone who purchases the collected items with the current system end up being correctly credited if we convert something over. As such, I have no ETA for when we will address this.

Making an alien race fully human playable is a huge amount of work, at least if you want to give players the level of customization options that they have come to expect. It takes a lot of work to make all of the customization options work together and look good, while still ensuring people still can find looks that are unique to each other. The Togruta provide a unique problem in this regard, in regards to the tentacles. Yes, the Twi'leks have tentacles too, but they are typically behind the player, whereas the Togruta's canonically drape across the front of the character. This means that they struggle to work with the existing animations and gear without clipping -- indeed, the first screenshot you see for Ashara if you google her is one with her chin ridiculously clipping through her tentacle. While this may be acceptable for a companion who is frequently offscreen while fighting, or NPCs who we can dress and pose carefully, its much more problematic for player characters who need to be able to wear anything and perform any animation and still look good. (The Twi'leks clip somewhat as well, but much art was tweaked to make this a lot less prevalent than it otherwise would have been) I'm not trying to pour cold water in the species discussion. Quite the opposite - if the Cathar do well, I hope to expand your options even more, and we should know the answer to that 'soonish'. I just don't want anyone to think that just because an alien is currently in the game as an NPC, that it is trivial to turn it into player art -- it's a TON of work to do that, and do it well.

They are still on our list to get in, but we were concerned about their power level and quality/bugginess when we had them on the test level. I'm pretty sure you'll see them in the future, but have no ETA. I love them conceptually.

Do you have a pre-set number of packs and items set up ahead of time for a certain period of time? We develop a set of these packs (we call them a 'Shipment') at one time. Shipment 1 will have 4 packs associated with them (not counting the cheap pack), with one additional pack coming out before Rise of the Hutts. After that, a new shipment will come out, likely with a new name (instead of 'Cartel Packs', they will be 'Contraband Packs', for example). Developing a shipment has a long lead time. Most of the art for shipment 2 is already complete, and we are currently in planning stages for shipment 3. This is not to say that we can't slide things around, or pull something forward or get something in a hurry if we see a great idea or if something on the market really sells. But the capacity for this kind of movement is very limited. We also want these packs to have a reasonable life post-removal. As a result, we philosophically resist actually adjusting the internal math of these packs (i.e. what's in them, at what drop rate) after they've been released, so that the value of the packs is a known quantity. This is not to say we never would do so if there was a serious problem -- but we really don't want to. Short form: there likely will be a time in the future where the GTN is the ONLY place to buy a Skip Tracer's Pack. Are you afraid that greed will corrupt the game? The cartel market funds the ability for players to play for free, which has allowed a huge number of players who couldn't or wouldn't play the game to do so now. This has resulted in more dev resources, and larger, more vibrant communities. And we've done so while still making market transactions mostly optional. I'm pretty much in the camp that we're on the Light Side on this, so far at least. Why do these items currently have a price if they are unsellable? Some game systems require a value for parts of the game to work. As an example, the GTN needs it to know what base price to set things to (and IIRC, doesn't let you put things up for sale that doesn't have a value). These items are currently hardcoded to not be sold to NPC vendors, despite their internal credit value.

There are a few questions raised in this thread. Do items put in the Galactic Trade Network sell? Yes. We have metrics, as well, on what sells, and for what price, which we compare to their drop rates. This gives us a great idea on adjustments we should make for future packs (the drop rates and the pack contents themselves) - which means that our next round of packs will be better, and the ones after that will be better again. Here are some fun stats * The White indestructible crystal Median Buyout price = 1.4 million credits * The Overlord’s Command Throne Median Buyout Price = 1.75 million credits * The Dominator’s Command Throne Median buyout price = 1.50 million credits * The imperial banner Median buyout price = 250 credits * Ruddyscale Kowakian Monkey-Lizard median buyout price = 500,000 credits * Elegant Loungewear Top median buyout price = 22,000 credits This is interesting, in that the thrones are much less rare than the crystal. The metrics we have on what sells and what doesn't are excellent, which means that we should get better and better at pushing our resources towards things that players actually want. Are there any truly absurd prices out there? Absolutely. I can tell you one person bought an Imperial Banner off the GTN for 310000 credits. Are we aware that some items can't be sold on the GTN (i.e. the game won't let you)? Yeah, those are bugs, and in the case of the lightsaber crystals, ones that we should have caught easily, since it's happened multiple times. In every case I can think of off the top of my head, these are unintentional bugs, and should get fixed. It's not our intention that people should be standing around spamming the fleet about these. Are you guys aware that there's a ton of dupe items clogging our inventory? We totally are. This is particularly true of the more common bonus items that are repeated through multiple packs. We are constructing our next round of packs (i.e. the round that will start when Rise of the Hutt Cartel ships) with a definite eye on reducing this level of suck. Why can't I sell some of this junk that is worthless on the GTN? We are examining that possibility, and even if we did so, we would likely make the sale price negligible, to avoid having too harsh an effect on the economy (I don't want buying Cartel Packs to be a particularly effective and reliable way to get credits). That being said, there's a very good chance that some of these items may be retired in the future - an Imperial Banner or Dominator Throne that enjoys a certain value now might find that value greatly increased once the packs that sell these disappear - so you might want to selectively choose some of these to bank, rather than junk. This retirement may be permanent, or a temporary removal from service (like the McRib or the Disney DvD releases) That being said, we are still developing our strategy for how these items are retired and/or cycled into service. Once we have a plan, I will be sure we communicate it to the community at large. It sucks that the Cartel Market/Cartel Packs takes away resources that could be spent on (my pet feature)! It's quite the opposite, actually. The success of the market (and it has been quite successful) has given us the time and resources to do some ambitious things on Makeb, and plan some very ambitious things beyond. The success of the Cartel Market means that there will be more good stuff for ALL players, paying, subscribers, and free.