If it's good enough for Tolkien, it's good enough for me.

The interface can cause some pretty nasty hiccups in performance. Just hold down your forward run key and repeatedly toggle any interface element (inventory, character sheet, ability list, etc) on and off quickly and suddenly you're in a slide show. It's awful. Try it out!

How is there competition for the same objectives? There are so few people running around in the zones; I can go for long stretches of time without ever running into players outside my group. There's usually only between 15-60 people from your faction on a planet depending on the time of day. The only bottlenecks are the bonus quests that culminate in the task to defeat a "tough" mob. At most you're looking at a 5-10 minute wait if you arrive and find someone else ahead of you. Even in those cases I can understand the desire not to group up. There are several reasons this might happen. Some players see these elite and champion mobs as an opportunity to participate in a fight that lasts longer than ten seconds. It's a chance for a bit of a challenge and an opportunity to find out what all those other buttons on your power tray do. Challenging encounters are so rare in this game, and the more people "helping" the less appealing the fight becomes. There are also players/small groups who don't want to share the drop. Upon their request I invited someone to my group for one of these encounters and the mob dropped an orange item that the invited player had no use for beyond selling. He rolled need on it, won it, and took off. Had I came to the forums to complain about it, I would have gotten flamed for expecting integrity in a PUG. Lesson learned. Just be patient and wait your turn. For most people this concept is taught at a very early age. For those that can't and want to turn this into a contest of who can tag the mob first, be prepared to wait a very long time if you can't out-click the other player but manage to tick them off in the process. You may find out that just being patient for a few minutes would have saved you a whole lot of time in the long run.

Well, that's a bit shortsighted. Many times a quest area filled with normal/strong mobs will have an elite or champion tucked away somewhere for players who are willing to take a bigger risk. Of course, the reward is supposed to match the risk, so usually these mobs (which are not guaranteed to drop anything other than credits) will have a chest next to them. I think it's reasonable to expect the spawn timer on those chests to be roughly on par with the spawn timer on the mobs guarding them. The fact that there seems to be a way for players to grab the chest without triggering a reaction from the mob is not a problem with the chest timers, but rather a different failure in design that needs to be corrected. Basically, the wrong problem is being fixed.

Have you tried removing the equipment with augments and reequipping it? It has been my experience that any time a mod, armoring, enhancement, augment, crystal, barrel, etc has been introduced into a piece of equipment, the effects are not represented in the UI until the item is unequipped and then reequipped. This, of course, assumes the change was made while wearing said piece of equipment.

I think you missed the point. The problem with Duke Nukem Forever is that not only was it late, it was also bad. People have an expectation that if you take the extra time to release your game, it'll show positively in the results. If it doesn't, then the fact that it took so long to get garbage out brings even more attention to the development time. Had Duke Nukem Forever been "game of the decade" (which is probably what gamers were expecting after waiting so long), the focus would have been on results and not the development time.

I think at this point all the opportunities to herald an MMO as a WoW-killer have passed, without any being able to make the claim. We've reached a point where the only game that will kill WoW is WoW. It's over 7 years old and people either have or eventually will grow tired of playing it, no matter how good it is. At some point even the most die-hard WoW fans are going to stick there heads up and wonder what else they've been missing all this time. And the next generation of gamers are likely to only see it as a very old looking game that isn't even worth investigating. I think if you've developed a game that has entertained millions of people for 7+ years, it's pretty much "job well done" and "mission accomplished". Poking fun at it while it runs that inevitable course to extinction is just petty and ridiculous. It's like trying to claim victory when your opponent dies of old age.

Were there any other MMOs released in 2011?

This problem doesn't seem to exist on body type 3 characters. Then again, it doesn't exist for body type 2 characters in the preview windows. Seems like a no-brainer that it's a bug that needs fixing, and I'm not sure how it made it through so many patches intact, to be honest. It's not like the artists are working on class balance or fixing crash bugs.

XP-toggle request thread: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=242517

You are sorely mistaken, to the point where I'm starting to think you meant you explored a single inch of Tatooine, minus the "every" part. I think nearly all the quests from Deviad Outpost, Camp Karnori, and even a series from Anchorhead take place in the stretch of desert near the borders of the thin exhaustion zone surrounding Anchorhead. I should know, I've been questing there for the past week. Outpost Salara and the quests in the Dune Sea obviously take place on the far side of Deviad Outpost (the sole connecting speeder to Anchorhead) near where those outposts are located. Being that we're not a lazy bunch, that single forced connection between Deviad Outpost and Anchorhead is the only flightpath my friends and I actually use. Everywhere else we use our mounts to ride to, and if that exhaustion zone weren't in the way we wouldn't be using any flightpaths at all. My point stands, thanks.

I thought I explained this already, but let's just use this easy to follow diagram: FP -------------------------------- Q --- EZ -- A FP = location of flight point Q = Where I am currently questing. EZ = Exhaustion Zone A = Anchorhead ----- = distance between points Any more questions regarding why I would prefer to just drive over the exhaustion zone to Anchorhead rather than backtracking back and forth between flight points?

You maybe, but not everyone. I'm certainly not saving time by backtracking to the nearest flight point every time I want to drive across a 100 yard strip of artificial death zone.

I'm not sure how you can suggest it's hardly noticeable when I have to travel to/pay for a flight-point every time I want to train, buy crafting supplies, use the bank, or turn in a quest that sends you out and back into Anchorhead. I get the PvP concerns, but again, despite there not being an exhaustion zone around the other quest hubs I haven't seen any of them being sacked by players of the opposing faction. Maybe it has something to do with all the level 50 champion level guards standing around. Maybe they should have just surrounded Anchorhead with a knee-high wall, given it a gate packed with said guards, called it done, and let me travel in and out of the town under my own power.

And the reason a similar exhaustion zone is not surrounding every other quest hub in Tatooine is what, again? I've heard this PvP reason before. Meanwhile, all the other quest hubs in this particular shared space appear to be doing just fine without exhaustion areas protecting them. That exhaustion zone around Anchorhead could have been faction specific, effecting only Imperials and not the Republic. It could have even been done in a way that make sense, like a visible Republic cruiser in orbit raining down death on any Imperial that attempted to cross the protected strip of land into Anchorhead. There were plenty of ways to do it that didn't completely isolate Anchorhead for Republic players. They opted for the path of least effort, and it creates an abysmal first impression of Tatooine. *Not* a good decision by the developers, I would say. Nothing quite like hopping on your mount, looking at the open desert ahead of you, thinking "Ahh, finally!", and then running into an exhaustion zone within rock tossing distance of the town. It was at that point my frustrated group started talking about other MMOs that were coming out this year that offer more open-world exploration.