now that we have dummies, is there any conclusive evidence that validates turning off a healing companions damage skills to raise their healing? I have been told to turn off all of Quinn's shots for example to force his heals to take precedence, but I am curious how good the companion AI is in regards to this. If I am at high or full health, I don't mind him squeezing off a few rounds instead of spilling green goo.

Rep or Imp? Or are they fairly balanced?

Just wondering what you would recommend as an active RP community

Things to collect. Items Achievements Pets and Gear I can keep and upgrade. I like stuff.

This is a pretty derisive assumption you are making. You have no idea what people find fun. Look at the number of perfectly successful action games that do not require massive skill sets (not to mention every console game) and you will see this is not the case. Number of Buttons =/= Fun Game play is all about balance. These things are based on an individual's preferences and inclinations. If it was that easy to make big blanket statements about what "real gamers" enjoy, then how do you explain the immense popularity of even your own examples: Tetris and Sorcerer, or perhaps Tracer Missile BH? People like to lie and boast about how amazingly skilled they are, but the fact is most players WANT a simple easy playstyle. It is just kids on the internet like to posture about and feel elite about their mad skills.

In SWG I was always fond of Rori, the bamboo jungle moon of Naboo.

Seems like an oversight to have all that gear be useless to any non inq/sage.

No idea then? Or no changes with the patch...

Is all social gear now fixed at "light" or can it compensate for heavy/medium with the appropriate mods/armoring? I really want to put Kaliyo in the elegant wedding dress, goes great with a combat shotgun.

consumers very rarely want true innovation. people actually look for similar experiences. when purchasing. things that are truly new usually frighten and confuse people. there really wasn't any vast landscape in wow. granted the huge load times in TOR really slow the game's pace down, but wow zones are tiny fishbowls. this was true in vanilla and ran true through cata. there was no reward for exploring these little zones aside from filling in the map or farming, which nobody enjoyed anyway. the achievement system (another thing which wow did not innovate at all, but appropriated and watered down) was brilliant because the developers got tons of mileage and gameplay time out of zero extra work. It just tracks all the things in the game and gives a feedback to the players. Wow was a horrendously ugly and poorly written game. The one and only thing it had going for it was tight controls and good playability.

Nobody is cooler than the male agent. He is just all kinds of smooth. Never loses his cool, browbeats, threatens, and insults people in a perfect gentlemanly fashion. Male bounty hunter is so cheesy and over-acted it made me unable to play the class. The guy sounds ridiculous. Loved Kaliyo, Quinn, and Gault. Splendid voice work on those three.

This is a major factor. In a 4 man heroic as a healer I literally wiped the group last night. Why? My cat was being bad and climbing on the aquarium, so I leaned over to shoo him. That was all the time it took to get behind on shielding/healing. I didn't even get up. The combat is paced like an action/fighting game, only it is paced like an endless mmo.

You make the assumption that some people aren't into that. A bold assumption indeed.

And a chiss is a just a blue human. A zabrak is just a horned human. They are all just humans.

I can totally relate OP, except I keep getting my characters to about 32 and rerolling right after act1. I have done a marauder, an assassin, a sniper and a juggernaut. I am really picky about my name so I have to delete the character each time I decide they aren't perfect. Good thing is I have saved up a lot of credits doing this. I just wish I could find "my" character or convince myself one of them is it. None of them seem quite... right. I like aspects of all of them, except bounty hunter which doesn't appeal to me in any way shape or form. I really liked the system Final Fantasy XI had where any one character could class change and even mix classes. So you could take a White Mage all the way to level 70, and if you wanted to dabble with fighting, switch to a warrior or something. You would be a level 1 warrior, but a lot of your spells would still be usable. It was a really nice system for people like us who have to create that one impossible "perfect" character because you didn't have to delete anything and start over to play an alt. This would be pretty impossible in TOR because the voice acting and class plot are so deeply rooted in the gameplay.