Not at ALL. Hell, I wish that WAS my voice.

COH pretty much set the standard for character customization. It's nice you can change the color of your weapons output but to be able to custom color your armor would really add to the personalization of your character and keep everyone from looking so cookie cutter. Also, a minor quibble - it would be nice if lightsaber color wasn't light and dark restricted. I have a Jedi named Jayhawk and as part of his look, I wanted him to be able to carry dual lightsabers in the school colors - red and blue. Only, as soon as I reached Light 1, I was no longer able to do that.

I agree with what you're saying but I don't see it exactly that way. It's not a matter of choosing to be a strictly amoral neutral character, although players should feel perfectly free to do that. I see it as a mater of not having to feel forced into making 100% light or 100% dark choices. Life is more complex than that. (Also, I guess I side with the two Padawans in love in the Tython training grounds that, love CAN make you stronger, not weaker.) You can be a GOOD person and still fall in love. In fact, if you can't, I'd say that makes you more dark side. My overall point is still the same - that the game mechanics are in opposition to the morality choices. Anyone who chooses to play the game as an actual, complex person, as opposed to a robot always making the same light or dark side choices in any given circumstance, has to sacrifice the good gear in order to do so. That doesn't seem right. Moreover, it seems to nullify all the excellent work Bioware put into setting up system where one HAS to make choices.

1) No, I care very much about the world. But, much as in life, no one is 100% good or 100% evil. Also, this is a MINOR complaint, which is why I prefaced my post by saying how impressed I was with the game overall. 2) Go read my subsequent posts. I'm not talking, AT ALL, about trying to be strictly down the middle. 3) To make good and bad choices is not nothing - it's human. You're simplistic and naive. 4) Perhaps, but I'm only level 20. I have a life and didn't spend the first week of the game obsessively playing to level 50. 5) I'll have to look into diplomacy.

You're making my point. It would be just as difficult to be strictly neutral as it is to be strictly good or strictly evil. Imagine if Han Solo were an actual character in the game - mainly good, we'd all agree, but with a love of money and a bit of a rebellious streak. Where does that get you, gear wise, in this game? Nowhere. There's no top gear for those who are mostly, if not always, good.

Bounty Hunter may be the best example of a need for neutral gear on par with light or dark side gear. Let's take the first few levels as an example. (SPOILER ALERT!) On the mission where I have to decide whether to turn the young Sith protege over to his mother or father, I may decide that the Sith need a good recruit, so I'll chose to shoot the dad and turn the kid over to his mom. But on a mission just a few levels later, I have the option to either kill an imprisoned smuggler and keep the other prisoners slaves or let him live and release the slaves. In that instance I may wish to release the slaves. Can't do it, however, because then those two missions cancel one another out and I don't make progress toward the primo gear. So, really, there's no choice. There's only the illusion of choice. Bioware needs to fix this otherwise, you're not playing out the story in your own way, you're simply slavishly making every dark or light side choice, rendering the story irrelevant.

First off, let me say that I love the game and I plan to play it for a long, long time to come. But here's my one big issue and, to me, it seems like a pretty major one - light side and dark side choices. Bioware went to a great deal of effort to create a story where you have to make good, evil and morally ambiguous choices. AWESOME! Then they wreck the entire concept by making the best gear in the game accessible by making pure light or pure dark choices. So, in essence, they put your character on rails after going to all this effort to make choice a part of the game. They establish choice, then remove the choice for players who don't wish to be gimped. What if I'm a Jedi Knight who is, by and large good, but maybe has a bit of a flirtatious streak? Can't do it because it costs me light side points. Or maybe I'm a bounty hunter who is, mostly, in it for the money. But, if I want access to the really good dark side gear, I have to always make the dark side choice. This seems to me to be a fundamental flaw in the structure of the game. Moral choices aren't moral choices if you gimp your character by deviating from one strict path or the other.

This is good to hear but I wouldn't say that an hour and 40 minutes is reasonable.

THIS. I picked up one last night and it works like an absolute dream. The problem I was running into was that I was so used to my right hand being the hand that activates my attack powers, that trying to switch to the left simply felt too unnatural. But with the Razer Naga, I picked up in 5 minutes. Felt completely natural. Can't imagine now that I'll ever go back to point and click.

Good point. I'll buy 2 and take good care of them.

Well, I spent last night leveling up from 6 all the way to ... 6. Three hours of changing control schemes, desperately trying to find one that worked for me. In the end, I've just been point and clicking for so long that activating my attack powers with hot keys is awkward and unnatural. I can't seem to make it work. But using thumb buttons on a mouse ... THAT seems to work for me. Maybe because it just feels right to me to be activating my powers with my right hand. So I'm going to take the advice of a couple of posters in this thread and hit Best Buy in search of that gaming mouse with the 12 thumb buttons. That seems more my speed.

Well, I can type like nobody's business (I'm a writer) so I like to think my hands are fairly agile.

It still seems to me that that doesn't solve the problem of having to move AND press powers with the same fingers. That's what trips me up. It would seem like, by mapping as many movement powers as you can manage to your mouse, you're freeing your left hand up completely to do everything else.

Fine, snide remark. You obviously think it's a terrible idea. I'm curious as to why.

Why not? Hey, I'm here to learn so could you enlighten me with something other than a sarcastic remark?