First thing first, there's not going to be a solution to this problem. Yeah, if Bioware had allowed non-unique names from the beginning like some games do then it wouldn't be an issue but it's very unlikely to happen. That said, the OP is not the only one with this "problem." Of my five friends that have tried this game only one played it longer than a month. We are now on a completely dead server and he's attached to his character names. I am as well but probably to a lesser extent. /sigh I wish they hadn't launched so many servers. Yes, I know why they did, the complaints about queues, but it was a bad decision in the long run.

The rewards are legacy-wide. Any character you have in the legacy (server) will immediately have it. Check the legacy unlocks for the light/dark side rewards. The light side one is "Unity" I think - you and your companion take 50% less damage for 20 seconds. 10 min cooldown or so. I don't think the unlock is level limited. The only other rewards for light/dark are the items from the light/dark vendor and certain other relics.

Oh, yes. One of the two things (the other being large races sitting in front of doors to banks) that allowed players to be absolute jerks in-games. Yeck.

My point was that you want the rewards from quests when there was nothing like that in EQ. (Aside from the Coldain Prayer Shawls, maybe.) You would have to do the class quests up to the point of getting your ship but after that you are pretty free to go where you want in SWTOR. And you can gear up from drops so much easier in this game that I don't know why you'd need the quest rewards anyway.

This is something that they carried over from Knights of the Old Republic. It's what a lot of players expected for better or worse.

Uh... yeah. But we're talking about playing similar to EQ. You do remember what it was like leveling and getting equipped in EQ, right?

You could actually still do a lot of that in World of Warcraft if you really wanted. You aren't required to pick up quests and there are a lot of zones to choose from when leveling 1-60 at least. Even in this game you could grind up on one particular planet and then skip the next, etc. You would just be stuck without companions without doing the class quests.

It was fixed a couple of weeks ago. Really fixed, not just in the patch notes. It might have broken again, I hadn't checked recently...

My favorite line was: "the play experience of MMOs is on par with roleplaying back in ‘87" So... an RPG is like an RPG? How terrible.

This can't end well.

Note that more RAM will only be useful if you're running a 64-bit OS.

I've been playing WoW since March of '05. You would spend a lot of time getting a group together and guess what? There were "ninja" looters, players terrible at their class, people simply being jerks, arguments about who caused a wipe, people leaving in mid dungeon without a word, etc. No, it certainly didn't happen in every run. But I really haven't seen any increase since the Dungeon Finder was added. There are a few people who make friends through running dungeons but that has never been the majority of players. I've made more friends when trying to find someone to help on a difficult quest than finding someone for a dungeon run. I do feel for the players who have lost the sense of "community" that I never saw but the sheer amount of convenience that such tools provide is hard for me to not want. Hopefully as MMOs develop further separate servers will become less of an issue. WoW is moving in this direction already, being able to create cross-server groups. I expect cross-server guilds to become available at some point in the near future. And being able to ignore someone and never group with them again based on their battletag would be great. If TOR can provide similar tools for cross-server communities then I think a lot of the complaints would be moot.

Sounds like a sloppy fix to the GTN bug. If you searched without a rarity on a category that didn't have subcategories it would come up empty.

Considering it's something that you deal with once per character... I don't really see the problem.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_galactic_history Looks to be around 3653 BBY. That's like the BC calendar though, so what calendar are they supposedly using in the current time?