I'm sorry Musco, but that's possibly one of the most condescending posts I've seen from a CM in a long time. You unilaterally, and without warning, decided to remove an overwhelming number of item appearances (both armor and weapon) from the game. Then, when your playerbase (understandably) freaks out about it, you turn around and effectively tell them to shut up. I'm not every expecting to see any of those items again. At least, not outside of the CM paywall. I may be a huge fan of the story in KotFE, but the manner in which this large scale alteration of the gearing and appearance game has occurred has me reconsidering my sub.

Yet somehow, you managed to read parts of the thread earlier when that font was exactly the same size...

It would also change the way combat rolling functions on a fundamental level. Shield and Crit are opposing outcomes of the same roll if memory serves. By definition they can't occur at the same time. That's not a reason in and of itself not to look at the idea, but it's going to have extremely far reaching consequences.

Time to contribute a few anecdotes of hilarity... Story mode Taral V. Got paired with a Guardian Tank who clearly had no idea what he was doing. No taunts, pretty much only used Slash and Sundering Strike, but had a very regular habit of running out to use Force Leap every time it was on CD. You could set your watch by it. Fortunately I (Vigilance Guardian) was overgeared enough, and the Scoundrel healing us was more than capable, so we powered through it. Cut to the end boss, and the Strength saber drops. It being an actual upgrade for me (mods-wise at least), I needed and won. The tank threw a tantrum about how I "stole it from him" then decided he was going to sit just outside the conversation circle in protest. We asked him to step inside. He refused. We shrugged, vote-kicked and went on our way. Apparently he then went on to keep ranting in Zone chat in the fleet about my saber stealing. I gave it no thought, and kept going. Fast forward a day, Cademimu. I get paired with the same Tank and same DPS (was a Vanguard if memory serves). Tank starts ranting again. I reply with something along the lines of "you needed, I needed. The RNG favored me. Sometimes that happens". That seemed to silence him, and off we went. Again, he had no idea what he was doing, and continued to do his little Force Leap dance while not succeeding in really holding threat on anything. Cut to the platform section prior to the Wookiee boss. Tank does his run out to set himself up for a Force Leap on the last mob in a pull... Cue the Force Push, and over the edge goes the Guardian to his death. Vanguard loses it and starts laughing in group chat, Guardian pouts and quits the group. I swap to Soresu, we finish without any undue fuss. I don't think I've taken that much pleasure in someone else's failing in a long, long time.

These aren't throwaway pets from some other MMO (well maybe C2 is, but his stupidity can get endearing after awhile. Ok so maybe it can't, but I digress). These are developed characters with their own wants, opinions and identities.

Wouldn't be the first time TCW radically contradicted established canon.

Audio was recorded for SGRs for both Ash and Kaidan for ME. The romances were scrapped, but the files remained as part of the ME installation. Ditto for Miranda in ME2 and some FemShep lines regarding Tali in ME3. I doubt they would have been included in the data that shipped, let alone recorded, had they not been in use at some point.

Ash and Miranda were both originally written as SGRs too, but they didn't make the cut either. There's also cut files from ME3 indicating Tali was an SGR at one point.

Quite the contrary, Kaidan (have to correct myself here, it's an A, not an E) was created to be the exclusive male romance character available to FemSheps in Mass Effect. He's the quintessential male character through the first two games, but in ME3 if you set things up correctly, he will make a pass at a Male Shep. You're thinking of Cortez or Traynor (both of which were masterfully done by the way) for characters meant solely as SGRs. As for Austin vs. Edmonton, I don't think it's a manpower issue, it's a time issue. If they're really committed to bringing SGRs in for companions (which Jeff's little snippet makes me considerably more certain of), it's then a question of how long it will take. Mechanically speaking, the reworks they're already going to have to do to accomodate max-level toons is going to dwarf the time needed for specific tweaks and rewrites.

The same could have been said about Kaiden in the ME-Verse, and yet...

Sometimes, a little bit of in-your-face clarity is what's required.

A cheap one-size fits all romance-toy isn't a solution.

Pretty much exactly what I was trying to communicate, except more succint, and color coded.

As I interpreted it (the entire statement): "We realize you guys wanted companion SGRs, but looking at what needed to be done we realized it would be a very involved and time consuming process. Stuff happened (f2p et al), so we started with Makeb SGRs, but we're not turning out back on companion SGRs." Notice he said "will take", not "would take" when talking about the companion SGRs (paragraph 1, sentence 3).

Only if you make the assumption that the first wave (Makeb's content) is going to be the only type of SGR content they're going to do.