I personally have no desire to play without a sub, but I feel compelled to suggest one major guideline that any F2P mmo needs to follow. F2P should not be used as a model to force players to subscribe in order to enjoy a full experience. It needs to be a model that allows paid access to all features without a sub, as long as you are willing to purchase access to those features. It needs to be viable to play without a sub on the same level as with a subscription, even if playing without a sub would end up costing much more than subscribing. As an example, weekly limits for warzones are fine as long as you can purchase access to more warzones each week without subscribing. If players feel forced to subscribe to feel like the are able to compete with subscribers they will not stick around, and there are quite a few players I've met on other games who are happy to pay to play a game they enjoy, but they do not believe in subscribing to any game.

Maybe I am oversimplifying things, but if you break it down and say both classes are essentially equal if you add up every aspect of each class, it really comes down whether or not you would be willing to fill a tank role on your character or not. If you absolutely never want to tank, I'd say play a sentinel because they do have some more utility and slightly more potential for dps. If you would be willing to tank in a pinch, then guardian gives you that option. You lose a meaningless amount of dps, and you have less options for dpsing as a guardian (less dps trees to spend points on and no centering type abilities)

Remember it's a bit tricky for Bioware to be too straightforward with storyline related fixes because they aren't going to give the plot away. I'm sure you would have liked something more clear from the devs, but that would have meant them revealing too much. I don't think dev patch notes should have any spoilers at all because players would be especially tempted to read them.

I can only hope there was a patch scheduled and the servers were mistakenly brought down due to the patch. It would probably be a much bigger problem if it were anything else.

I actually decided to move off of Jung Ma myself after the server merges. I think if you want a develop and join a good community of players with similar goals you may very well find it on Jung Ma, but if you aren't going to invest into developing friendships and establishing a group to play with, your enjoyment would be improved by being on a more heavily populated server. I personally thought about it, decided I didn't really want to role-play as much as I pretend I want to role-play, and since I was too new to really feel part of a community I might as well reroll to a more populated server. I don't know if that is the best thing for you, you'll have to decide what type of player you are and what type of community you want to be part of. A big group of strangers, or a close knit group of friends. As a family man, I don't really have time to commit myself too much to the game, so I chose the former over the latter.

I see it the opposite of you. If they release a large amount of content and don't charge, it is because the devs are just trying to keep a sinking ship up for a while longer. If they do charge, it means the ship is up and ready to weather the storm (of whining from these types of posts). I'm happy to pay to play a game I enjoy. Honestly, I'd be willing to pay up to like 40 bucks a month for the absolute perfect MMO, of course that mmo doesn't exist, so I end up paying just 15 bucks a month for a game I enjoy despite its flaws.

SWTOR like all MMOs are for-profit endeavors. Sometimes you expect too much from developers. You want them to care about the players, but then you come here on the forums and do nothing but gripe and complain. I have been playing MMOs for too many years to care about DOOOM posts anymore. You like the game, be happy to pay to play it. The more money the game makes the more attention it will receive from developers. It's really as simple as that. These types of threads don't help the devs do their jobs better, they just destroy the playerbase.

Slightly off-topic, but I had a thought the other day that it might be a good idea for them to apply a slight voice changing effect to the voices based on the body type used. I wouldn't want the voice actors changed or anything; I think they did a great job! but some character appearances just do not match the provided actor voices.

This is an ongoing point of interest to every player of every MMO. Game Owners run their games for profit and they make decisions based on both long term and short term goals. New content is constantly being developed and released that requires a lot of extra effort to design. New content on a large scale frequently requires additional purchase to offset the cost of designing that content. This is not new in any game, including MMOs. Other decisions made by game owners such as mechanics and what to focus on in smaller updates are more about sustaining the long term health of the game. Developers want happy players because that means they will continue to pay to play the game, and small fixes and updates tell the players that the game is constantly improving, which keeps them around. The only time new content is released on a large scale for free is when the owners are worried about the long term health of the game, so the short term gains from selling new content is sacrificed to rebuild the long term health of the game. I would actually be a little worried about SWTOR's future if major content is added completely free of charge.

Hmmm... As a new player to the game and without a huge knowledge of lore I'd say..... MOVIE It would have been cool to see Darth Maul beyond EP1. Too bad he died. GAME I'd like an emote to put your hood up or down. Wearing the hood is sometimes not so cool.

You can swap companions easily at will as long as your not in combat, so you can pick the one you like and use it all of the time, or you can swap between them as you feel like the situation requires.

Here's some general thoughts about Sentinels that might help you. My advice will be more conceptual to give you an understanding of how you can figure out your own rotation. I'm not just going to tell you what buttons to push. The key to dpsing when choosing which ability to use is that the sooner you use an ability, the sooner you can reuse that ability. In order to do the most dps with a sentinel you have to manage your cooldowns on your various abilities and make sure you have enough power to use them. Some cooldowns range from 12 seconds up to 3 minutes or so, but really most fights solo are short enough that you won't go much over 30 seconds in a single encounter. Look at the power cost versus the damage amount versus the cooldown on your various abilities. Slash has no cooldown at all, so don't use it unless there are no higher damaging abilities with a cooldown. There are several abilities that I avoid completely unless I need them for a specific reason, specifically this is the snare attack (Leg Slash) and the healing debuff (Crippling Throw). Both of these abilities have a low damage output for their power cost because the debuff counts towards the overal effectiveness of the ability and those debuffs are not very useful for many fights. At low levels, building power is key to being able to use (or reuse) your most damaging abilities as soon as they are available for use. That's why many people suggest you use zealous strike right away, and I definitely agree that zealous strike is important to use early so you can use it again sooner. Of course its damage is quite low, so I sometimes use cauterize before zealous strike because cauterize is great damage for the 2 power it costs. That's the kind of thinking you have to decide for yourself. Just remember to try to keep your power high enough so that when the cooldown refreshes on your good attacks, you have enough power to use them right away. When everything is on cooldown, that's when you use Slash. Every ability has its time and place for use; you definitely can't just push buttons. Later on when you get into groups you'll also have to learn to manage your aggro (you should do what you can to allow the 'tank' to keep targets locked on him rather than attacking you). That means I sometimes start off a bit slower building up power before using my high damage attacks. That way the tank has a little time to establish an aggro lock on your target, but don't worry about this for soloing. EDIT: Also, ignore what somebody else said about Ripposte. Abilities that don't respect the global cooldown are important. Ripposte free additional damage as long as you have enough power to use it, so try to keep 3 power in reserve and use it whenever it comes up. It is not a super high damage attack, but because it doesn't respect the global cooldown it is great for a little burst of unexpected damage.

I use the Razor Naga. Perhaps it takes some practice, but I have no issues using all 17 buttons. Perhaps it came easier to me than others since I am a bit of a musician. Rather than messing with software, I just set the Naga to use the numpad buttons and then I set up hotkeys in boxes on my UI of 3 wide 4 down to match the Naga's keys, and bind the hotkeys to the numpad. I have one hotkey box set just with a button push on the Naga, and another hotkey box holding control on the keyboard and pushing the Naga buttons

Here's what it comes down to in my mind. The basic idea behind Assassin Shadow from the 'average' person who want to play the class is that it should be a kick-butt dps class with a frikkin cool weapon. I don't think most people who roll them really want them to tank, they want to feel like a 'rogue' which means high dps melee. Unfortunately they weren't designed quite like that, so some players are not as happy with the class as they expected.