Sorry, but I am not and I will probably never return. Very disappointed in the game overall. The marriage of voiced story and MMO didn't work very well for me, neither did the cartoon graphics. The MMO part was lacking in many aspects, the story wasn't up to BioWare standards, due to being pressed into the rigid themepark MMO confines. And the cartoon characters reminded me too much that this was just a story with me along the ride. There are other reasons ( travel times, constant grinding for money, no economy, time-intensive crafting system, too much time/credits investment for appearance customization and so on ), but those above were my main reasons for abandoning this game. <sigh> Three years of anticipation and 150 Euros into the CE down the drain. Oh well.

I'm one who unsubbed and will probably never return. But the problem with the story element for me was that forcing it onto an MMO made the storytelling worse. Much worse than other BioWare games. Recurring NPC's? Your crew and a very few NPC's... but most don't carry between chapters. A cool NPC who you met on a planet quest? Gone forever after leaving that planet. Replaying the game with different classes clearly showed the strings guiding the story. Oh, so by happenstance my Jedi Knight has to visit just the same planets in the same order as my last character? That takes me personally out of the story. These are all things pretty much mandated by MMO design ( although I am unsure about the recurring NPC's ) which then were coupled with the BioWare moral decisions. While BioWare had the guts to pull together all the different possibilities in Mass Effect 3 ( although the ending totally ruined that otherwise excellent game ), they balked on doing so here.

Vanjervalis Chain ( EU ), but I'm not playing actively anymore, so I'll pass. Nonetheless, thanks for the offer.

Matte, I've kinda stopped caring about the whole issue, due to disenchantment with the game. But your point here is not very good from a rhetorical standpoint. "Greater customization" would be making those new augmented orange items widely available. As it stands, the general chance of finding a good-looking customizable item which is endgame-ready just sank exponentially, just from a mathematical standpoint. First, you got to find an item which looks the way you want it to ( already quite difficult, IMO ). Secondly, now you got to wait until a version with an augment is offered on the GTN. Which can take weeks, depending on how prolific the crafter is. And you'll pay through your nose to get it. And, sorry, but that is an idiotic way to make an appearance customization system. It is highly dependent on RNG ( random number generation ) and, IMHO, waaaaaay too much effort to get it. I'm pretty fine with how WoW has set it up, where you need to get the appearance item ( already an undertaking of several days to months, depending on RNG ) and you'll continue investing little sums of money to imprint its look upon the gear you progressively upgrade. This game here already has a stupid amount of time traps. It really didn't need another.

BS like being forced to jump through a million hoops to get a good appearance is one of the reasons I decided to give up SWTOR. At least WoW has a decent time/effort ratio to get a look I want.

Seems like I'll use my free month and then be off again. SWTOR still doesn't manage to capture my imagination like I hoped it would. To be honest, it feels too much like work, not enough like a game. :-/ I'll still hang around, but I mostly will stop posting, since I've internally pretty much given up on the game.

You can get a medium armor vest, called the Aspiring Knight's Vest. Unless you are playing a Guardian tank, the armor loss is no big deal. Even in case you are a tank, it's pretty negligible. It's the same model as the one Master Orgus Din wears or the one you can get for Tython commendations of the vendor. I've been using it since about level 20.

By the way, wasn't there to be an option to turn off companion headgear in this patch? If it is, I must have missed it.

I think you are putting a lot of words in my mouth, Jeramie. I never said that I want to forbid everybody to wear the spiky crap armor. That's their decision. What I want ( and that's not really worth much, since I am just one fan ) is for the developers to go more into a classic Star Wars direction with their next tiers of item sets. You are overreacting and accusing me of things which you entirely made up. Please stop.

As I said, hidden in an incredibly obtuse way. Many thanks to you for the information!

I've gone through all options in preferences three times... either it is hidden in an incredibly obtuse way or it isn't there. Since I had the option turned on before the patch, it may be a bug. In any case, it is incredibly annoying sifting through about a hundred menu points three times in a row and not finding anything related to the problem.

Health values are not shown anymore in the character bars. I can't find any menu points in the preferences menu to restore that from last patch. I'd really like to see which health myself or the opponent has at the moment. It's not fun to have to eyeball when you can use your finisher.

Because I don't like it, personally. Having a few select people running around in zany armor designs makes them stand out. Having the vast majority of Sith running around in them makes them look like a S&M faction. Also, every example you cited was pretty terrible. I own all the KOTOR comics with Zayne Carrick and exaggerated armor designs were notably absent from selfsame. The only spiky armors in the SWTOR comics by BioWare itself were the Dark Council at the end of Blood of the Empire. And they looked like total clowns.

No, you'd need to cite a character which is relevant to the era we are playing in and does not have a specific look because his Yuuzhan Vong bioarmor ( which is fused into his body, btw. ) got cancerous and is eating him from the inside. Krayt is a bad example, because his look is unique and iconic to a completely different era, the Legacy era. Which, as it happens, is some 5000 years beyond the era we are playing in.

The day I get to decide how the internet works will be a glorious one, indeed! But otherwise I am much more prone to make proposals, like I did in the post you quoted. Although I am the new "author" of this thread, I don't think I got any decision power over where it goes... I can just try to gently steer it.