Well whoops. Ironic, since they created some of the best and most fun hybrid possibilities of any game I've ever played, and over the last 12 years or so, I've played a lot. Still, if the game is tuned around not-hybrids, then it's better to incorporate some of what hybrids provided into the role trees, rather than have to examine every aspect of the game for this unexpected plot twist. I chalk it up to their dev-noobness 4 years ago; I seem to recall them also being very surprised at how popular their PvP was. As for the rest of your post: yeah, can't argue with any of it, and agree with most of it.

According to whom? You have a very restrictive view of things. Why do you care about the restrictions of others? Overcome your programming, machine. You may enjoy a very narrow focus, and you should be allowed to enjoy it. If it grinds your gears thinking about what other people might be doing, you are not playing the game, you are thinking too much about other people. Exception: Super-effective Here, I could not agree with you more, but the term "hybrid" never meant (in any game I frequented) super effective. A "pure" role should eclipse a hybrid's function in that regard. PvP effectiveness should be monitored, but hybrids are fun. Experimenting is fun. Unkillable death machines are not fun, unless you are on the safe side of an HK, but that doesn't mean hybrids can't have a role to play as well, if they are given vulnerabilities that offset some of the benefits.

YES! Yes yes yes! All those in denial aside, the old system was an exact clone of the boring Vanilla WoW talents - 1% bonus to this, .5 second cast reduction to that - oh pardon me, WoW's went top-down and this went bottom-up . It wasn't exciting to slog thru then, and it wasn't exciting to slog through now. If you're worried about the effects of this change, and you currently like your toon, and you're not sure where this is going - please, take a few minutes and read my dissertation here. You don't need to agree with my wider opinions, but I think you have reason to be optimistic. Even Blizzard got rid of the bloody thing *years* ago when they realized it just wasn't that exciting to level up and go "and in 7 more levels I can get that class-vital skill." They tottered around trying to find a balance between flexibility, "must-have" skills, and avoiding the amusing event of new players innocently skipping those class-vital skills. The devs have levelled up over the last 4 years. At launch, I couldn't shake the feeling that the game was being made by people who liked the idea of an MMO, but had hardly ever played one. (I can support that statement extensively, but that's not why I'm here today). I see some commonalities between this a la carte talent system and the current WoW version - but no more than any two systems of character progression will resemble each other. And they're skipping a lot of the warbling about and drawing, I think, on the lessons hard-won from other games: something else missing from launch. Launch had a lot of issues that other games had already solved, which was boggling. I see in the blog two important things - one, a series of lessons learned, regardless of source. Vital skills skipped, not really being your class until 10-20 levels after you pick it, cookie-cutter designs. The illusion of interactive choices when there was really only one way to go, and very few ways to get there. I see a willingness to take a hard look at a choice they committed to and say, all right, this isn't contributing to a fun experience, and it will take time and resources to redo, and it will contribute nothing direct to our bottom line like more Cartel items would, but we're going to go ahead and do it anyway because we just don't see this fitting into our vision for the future. Two, leading off from that, is: a vision for the future. Investment in expansion beyond what can be immediately monetized. QoL improvements and a search for ways to make more compelling gameplay. In other words, looking for ways to attract and keep people long-term, and not relying on "we will remove some terrible restrictions if you sub" as the sole method of conversion. So, why does this matter if you're worried about the system? One, you're used to what you have now. Everyone is. If you're here, you probably like it at least mostly. It's normal to see a Big Change coming and go, oh crap, is this going to trash my favorite character? When you log in the day after the change, things won't be familiar. You'll have to learn some new stuff. It may not feel as fluid at first, and you may feel clumsy at it. You'll wish you just had all your old buttons back. Don't judge the system on that first-day experience, if it's negative: take the opportunity to try things you hadn't looked at before. Be open to the idea that you may get better at this than you were at the old one. Realize that leveling those old abandoned alts might suddenly seem more appealing, have more to look forward to. Realize, if you have no abandoned alts, that you're going to need a new server to try all the new stuff on.... as someone with a very critical eye towards a lot of the management decisions made here, I say give it a shot. Most of you will find it an upgrade. For those of you who won't, I'm genuinely sorry. I've had things in games I loved get changed in ways I really couldn't stand. Sometimes it happens. I got over it and still play most of them; it wasn't a total barrier to enjoying the game. Two, I see an increasing willingness in BW/EA to reassess decisions they've committed to. So much shorter reason here: if it really sucks they'll redo it. I wouldn't have been confident saying that two years ago. Now, I feel like yeah, there's a good chance that if it goes in and there's decreased player engagement, negative reaction - i don't mean a vocal group of regular doom-sayers on the forums - they'll step back and choose another direction. They don't want to ruin your toons. They like you here. And I see more understanding from Bioware about QoL issues in MMOs. If you got this far, I'm really impressed. Like kind of amazed actually. I hope it provided some interesting points of view for anyone wondering about the new system, and I hope BW feels as confident as it seems like they're getting in striking out on their own path for the game; in mechanics and playability, not just stories. I hope your eyes aren't strained from this wall of text. I hope one day I can express an idea in less than 12 sentences at a time. For now, tho, I hope this system on Dec 2 - my birthday! - is as fun a present as it looks like it could be. Side note. I was really, really not sure about the expansion for $20, given past history of such things hereabouts. And here they're going out on a limb to replace a boring chore in the game with something dynamic, as part of the base game that no one needs to pay for. So to subsidize more of that, I will happily get the expansion, for that reason alone. If the two new planets are really expac-sized spaces with multiple zones and ongoing content, so much the better. You still here? Wow, man. You must be *really* bored.

I see a lot of stuff from a podcast saying "...but not for 3.0," I see lots of stuff about NEW PLANETS! (how large? Multi-zone? Estimated quests in each? Smaller than Quesh? Big as Belsavis?) and lots of glowing descriptions of itself ("filled with intriguing characters!"). What I don't see are details on what, exactly, I'd be pre-ordering. Trinkets worry me. A shiny statue! XP boost! Early access! Preorder now! Preorder WHAT? Is there a plan to release some solid, meaningful info on what we'll be getting, that makes it so much more content than previous expansions that it's worth $20 on top of a subscription? I don't mind paying for such a thing - but I worry when i see a lot of flash and graphics and "order now and get shiny trinkets!" without any actual info on the product.

The idea is to have more of them in pvp gear, not less

Can't see until after work, but i suspect the first note includes the lagfest that was the Dromund Kaas balcony. :D The rain effect is pretty cool, especially from the inside on the windows; that came out really well. Would have been sorry to see it go. Also I have just added "Dromund Kaas" to my phone's dictionary.

Will any of them be after typical work hours in the US? If not, will old streams be viewable for a while?

1) Reach out to everyone who's ever contacted you about being unable to play for technical reasons, and realize that for everyone who says something about it, ten more don't. Acknowledge that the engine and the client have some major issues, as analyzed by about a dozen techies, including myself. Communicate clearly to affected players that, yes, you're going to do something about it, and here's a rough timeline. Otherwise, people who have dropped sub because the game runs terribly just aren't coming back. They can't. We're talking above recommended spec here, let alone minspec. I'm sure some of you will start yelling about being below minspec anyway. 2) Ask yourselves hard questions and answer them without ego. Buy subs to every other MMO and play them. Play them a *lot*. Play pvp in them, play endgame. Craft. Work the market. Customize your interface. Do every "downtime," non-endgame activity those games might have to offer. See what it is that keeps 75% of their playerbase logging in every day; hint 1, it's not raiding. Then look at the QoL issues in ToR and see how they've been solved already in other games. Where are people getting frustrated? Is your religion against macros really more important than people who get annoyed without being able to customize a button to take even a simple action? Are there things to do ingame to break from level grind? Who's doing them? Do they have the support to do them more? How's crafting, really? Are you satisfied with the role it fills? Is it just they players are "doin it wrong" and all their fault if it isn't used more? How many people are doing it? Using the market? What kind of searches are being run on the GTN? Are you satisfied with its current design? If Legacy was a "huge success," how is that quantified exactly, since there's no action required to level it...? What % of the player pop have actually purchased the unlocks from Legacy, and what percent of available-to-them unlocks does the average player buy? I do not want to see this game die a F2P death, but maybe it's too late. The flow of ideas is looking to be extremely one-way and immune to data-driven feedback. Edit: to everyone asking for server merges.... I know the game has pop issues, but you are 99% certain to never see server merges. I'm sorry, but that's the way it goes. Closing servers is an admission of failure in the eyes of upper management, and it will not happen. City of Heroes, which moved to a Freemium model some time ago already, still has every original server open; even though 90% of them are ghost towns. Warhammer Online... there's Mythic again... finally performed a couple in its last months of life, but managed to completely botch them (stuck or missing toons, lack of customer service response, forced moves, "you are in a closed server," all sorts of nonsense). It's a political and ego issue. Someone would have to be very brave, rather forceful, and have a lot of clout to wield, in order to successfully convince his superiors that servers needed to be closed.

Yeah, throwing the hipster insult of the week around totally invalidates everyone's criticisms. Or maybe you just haven't played other games; still, I'm glad it's enjoyable for you. Since, you know, personal enjoyment is what every paying customer is "entitled" to. So, hmmm, i guess your enjoyment is exactly as valid as others dissatisfaction - no more, no less.

I know there was a plan to have items made with a high craft require that you keep that craft; I don't think it's made it into live yet. For that matter I don't know if that plan was scrapped.

Ah i see, I blended his answer incorrectly. He's specifically addressing the low to midlevel market in his answer, as well as expressing the belief that RE removes the glut of unwanted items. You're right, and I think this ties into Gnat's point too: there's just too many easy mods and items while leveling. It's a weird extreme where quest rewards are marginally-useful bad greens, but planet comm vendors sell decent blues. Still, if a few smart crafters are doing well with low to mid-level stuff, maybe I'll join y'all and see how it works on my server.

"Custom-build double bladed saber" has the tooltip 'no research available,' which makes sense since I know the pattern, and also "right click to reverse engineer." But it still fails, gives the red floaty text "This item cannot be reversed engineered." Considering the amount of mats wasted on this nonsense so far, I'm glad I tried this experiment with the level 20 versions. At these crit rates and still no RE possible, the mats cost of generating an augmented level 50 saber would be laughable. On that note, WHY are there level 20 and level 50 versions of the same item..? If all you care about is the aug slot, the level 20 is fine, and neither hilt design really stands out, so why the 50?

o_O I coulda *sworn* I looked at everything Jensen sold after the Rakghoul event. Thanks for the correction. Not sure how I missed that . You should still request a sticky!

You're definitely right about the commendation mods. Not only can you buy a ton of mods yourself with planet comms, they're BoE and can be given to alts, guildies, or sold to anyone! (I still maintain the default GTN prices are far too low to be healthy ). I know I end each planet with several or half a dozen leftover comms I don't ever use, after buying anything I might want, and the next planet will have a new list of stuff. There's little incentive to go check the GTN for basic "replaceables," like mods every few levels. Don't even get me started on the decision to take a prime source of a consumable economy and let permanent reusable versions be made...

Good guide; request a sticky! Of note, you should probably include that the black-blue WZ comms crystal is Pub only, just as the black-green are bought with WZ comms from the Imp vendor. Also note that anyone could get black-green from the Rakghoul event vendor, but AFAIK there is no way for an Imp to get a black-blue. (Hax! )