1. At the end of the Imperial Agent quest Finding Vengeance, 2. Higher-grade "Mission Discovery: Slicing" items include a typo. The word "mission" is misspelled as "misssion," preventing them from showing up in GTN searches. Grades 8/9/11 are affected, and presumably grade 7 too. There aren't any of those on the GTN right now. 3. In the character creator, the Abilities box (when you click on the word "Abilities" on the bar across the top of the screen) for the Jedi Sentinel says "Watchman Sentinels rely on calculated blows that dismantle their foes overtime..." "Overtime" here should be two words.

And what would those be? I use three full toolbars on my sorceror. I use four for my jedi shadow, with legacy abilities (Legacy Lightning Storm, etc.) filling out the last toolbar. I think Tumult is the only ability I do not have keybound. I consider it useless. I even have the basic melee attack (for the sorceror) and Force Lift (for the shadow) bound; everything except Tumult. - It does not work against any enemies I would ever actually bother to Mind Maze or stun when I am playing solo. - The range requirement makes Tumult impractical for sorcerors and sages. I am not going to run into melee range for the equivalent of one free Shock against a controlled enemy. - When I am tanking for a group, I do not often have the luxury of moving all the way into melee range to break CC and I never run out of energy anyway. I suppose I could imagine a scenario where I was in a flashpoint and the group wanted to take the time to use CC on silver enemies, and that our crowd control abilities would last until we were done fighting and then all the DPS would stand around patiently while I moved into melee range so I could break out one of the enemies with Tumult. Even then the global cooldown would be better spent on Project or Slow Time. Or Force Breach. Or Telekinetic Throw. I guess darkness assassins might have a use for it. That would make it what, like the eighth most-used attack for a portion of the players (not the PvPers) in one of the six talent trees? If you think BioWare should have just left them in the game and allowed most of us to continue ignoring them, that is fine. It is your prerogative. But let's be realistic - these abilities were not anyone's "most valuable asset."

By that logic, it is not gambling if I buy a lottery ticket because I know exactly what I am getting - one ticket with a couple dozen scratch-off boxes. I do not know what you are trying to accomplish here, but I am not going to explain it again because I do not believe you can possibly be this daft.

Gambling or not, cartel packs appear to be designed to appeal to people with compulsive or addictive tendencies. Everything about the system - the price of cartel packs, the increments in which you buy cartel coins (and the complementary cartel coin grant, for that matter), one-click cartel coin purchasing, hyperspace crate discounts, and the new cartel pack reputation, to say nothing of the actual loot in the packs or the experience of buying and opening them - facilitates compulsive gambling-like behavior. Whether it is legally gambling or not, it seems like skeezy, borderline predatory behavior on BioWare's part.

Those aren't odds. Those are the contents of the pack. If they told us the odds, you would know how likely it is that a cartel pack will contain Revan's Mask (or a skiff or whatever you are hoping to get). We know nothing about the odds of getting super-rare items except that some kinds of cartel packs have better odds than others.

I have been away for a while, so I did not get to see all of this firsthand. I got the basic gist from general chat, but I could only take so much before I ignored all of you and asked a friend to explain what was going on. Naturally, we got to discussing why someone would behave in such a way. Spending vast amounts of time to prevent other people from questing, not because it provides you any sort of positive utility (quite the contrary, you found it boring and had to make up a little game to make harassing people more fun) but simply because you get a rise out of knowing that you have made someone else frustrated or angry is pretty much the textbook definition of sociopathic behavior. Sometimes we use the gentler term "bullying," even if the negative behavior is directed at random others, to avoid connotations of psychopathy (a personality disorder, as opposed to an instance of socially destructive behavior characteristic of those so described). It is the MMO equivalent of keying a stranger's car, pushing the kid down the street into mud, or posting conspicuous movie spoilers all over the internet. By your own admission, there is nothing challenging or even engaging about the act of killing people who trek to the pylon alone. My friend and I both came up with different theories about what might be wrong with the lot of you. I suggested that maybe you were young people navigating the emotionally treacherous waters of adolescence where bullying is ubiquitous and positive behavioral role models are scarce. I always like this explanation for socially destructive behavior because it allows me to hope that the perpetrators are simply going through a life phase where negative behaviors are modeled all around them, and that they may yet grow up to be functional, compassionate, emotionally healthy adults. I also suggested that it might be about control - oftentimes people bully others because they relish the ability to control someone else. This is usually a response to feelings of helplessness or a lack of control elsewhere in the bully's life. And preventing everyone on the server from completing one of the new quests would obviously give someone a substantial feeling of control over others. My friend disagreed with me. He suggested that your behavior might be driven by a need for ego recognition, like a child acting out for attention. He said that he thinks that your group behaves in an overtly negative and socially proscribed manner in a bid for attention, validation, and peer recognition. I guess he may have been right about this one. He would probably chastise me for rewarding your negative behavior with attention, but I wanted to let you know that there are people here who are willing to help you. All you have to do is ask (using your words, not your hitting... and probably not on your main characters, since most everyone else has them on ignore). Best of luck to you.

Right, but are you modeling probabilistic events? Confidence intervals are useful when we have a definite hypothesis and definite test results. They allow us to represent things like our level of confidence that our measurements are accurate, and how confident we are that our results point to an actual phenomenon and not just statistical noise. Confidence intervals are also useful when we have definite results from a subset of some larger population and we want to extrapolate from them. We know with complete certainty how people in exit polls voted. Confidence intervals allow us to represent our confidence that these exit polling numbers are an accurate reflection of all the ballots cast. In your case, it sounds like confidence intervals allow you to represent the confidence with which you can say that a rocket landed where your model said it would because the model is right, and not because of measurement error or expected variability or whatever. No, they aren't. I think that is precisely the problem here. There is a very important difference between saying that something has a 20% chance to happen and saying that something will happen 20% of the time. For the sake of illustration, let's say that we are going to reverse engineer five items, each with a 20% chance to teach us a new schematic. A simple probability table gives us the following percentage chances for each of the five possible outcomes: 0/5 Successfullly teach us a new schematic = 32.77% 1/5 Successfully teach us a new schematic = 40.96% 2/5 Successfully teach us a new schematic = 20.54% 3/5 Successfully teach us a new schematic = 5.12% 4/5 Successfully teach us a new schematic = 0.64% 5/5 Successfully teach us a new schematic = 0.032% We don't have a definite hypothesis because our model is probabilistic. Our chance of learning exactly one new schematic from five reverse engineering attempts (a perfect 20% success rate) is less than half. It is the most probable of the five outcome - it should occur with greater frequency than any other individual outcome - but it is substantially less probable than all the other outcomes put together. If your friend said to you "I am going to reverse engineer five items. I bet you I learn exactly one new schematic, no more and no less," you would be smart to bet against him. Your odds of winning are roughly 3:2: If you and your friend made the same bet over and over and over, you ought to win one and a half times as much as you lose. It is not impossible to make an argument about probability by way of confidence intervals, but I think it is kind of a clunky way to do it. Common sense tells us that if we perform four trials, and in each of the four trials we learn five new schematics from five reverse engineering attempts (results that we would expect to occur with a frequency of about 1/3000), we can have a high degree of confidence in our inference that something is probably biasing the results. Things get a lot trickier when the results are less extreme though. How many times do you have to flip heads before you conclude that your coin is not working correctly? Is a 13.4% success rate over 400+ trials evidence enough to conclude that the system is not working as it is supposed to? The answer to that question depends entirely on how much variance normally exists among measurements like this. The 99.7% rule says that 99.7% of all values in a normal distribution fall within three standard deviations of the mean. In other words, any data point which is more than three standard deviations from the mean is an extreme outlier and extremely unlikely to occur by mere chance. But to say that your results are three standard deviations from the mean, you need to know what the standard deviation for tests like this is. I have no idea what that would be, but my intuition suggests that 13.4% is probably within three of them. This is admittedly outside my area of expertise, but if you do not know how much statistical variance normally exists across trials of that size I do not think it is even possible to make a meaningful claim about the significance of your results using a confidence interval calculation.

How did you calculate the standard deviation? Maybe I am misunderstanding you. The three sigma rule says that in a normal distribution approximately 99.7% of the values will fall within three standard deviations (three sigmas) of the mean, so I assume that is what you are talking about. You performed a test involving four-hundred-and-some rolls, and you had a success rate of 13.4%. If you are trying to claim that this is so far outside the parameters of an expected distribution that we should conclude the system is broken, you need to know how much variance we expect there to be in a distribution of trials with four-hundred-and-some rolls to begin with. How did you go about calculating that? By the by, unless I am totally missing the point this kind of confidence interval calculation does not seem to be a very good way to make an argument about probability.

MMO development is an intricate balancing act. If BioWare does not give people the ability to make their geared, max-level characters stronger, players view it as fluff content and they complain. If BioWare does give people the ability to make their geared, max-level characters stronger, players view it as mandatory tedium and they complain. You know how people complain about being "forced" to collect datacrons or do space missions or, well... pretty much anything that can tangibly benefit players in any conceivable way? That is exactly what would happen if people feel that they are being forced to grind reputation to buy slightly better augments or lightsaber crystals or whatever. The safest way for game developers to navigate this sea of potential customer discontent is to carefully limit how often they raise the bar for maximum character power between expansions - say, no more than three to four times a year through content updates that introduce an entirely new tier of gear - and find other kinds of rewards for things like the legacy system or the new reputation system. It also behooves them to be conservative with new content rewards; if they find out that no one seems to care about the new reputation system, they can always go back and add better rewards later. It is much harder to undo the damage they would cause if they were to add a new gating system that players perceive to be mandatory. Maybe they will introduce rewards that allow you to make your dude stronger, but I would not bet on it. I think it is more likely that the rewards will be things like titles, mounts, and cosmetic items such as modifiable gear or color crystals. There may be ways to make your characters stronger while leveling or to help you gear up faster (i.e. ilvl 140 gear), but I would be surprised if they launch the reputation system with rewards that make reputation grinding strictly necessary to get the best possible gear. This all just speculation though. Who knows?

I know this probably strikes a lot of people as a non-starter, but bear with me. When BioWare introduced the Black Hole Crisis, I was pleased to see that all the Black Hole dailies were going to come from a terminal. It was a logical, welcome change from the tedium of the Belsavis and Ilum dailies. No one wants to listen to the same mission dialogue day after day after day for months on end. Shortly thereafter I quit playing. I recently started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic again. I did the Section X dailies once, got bored with my existing level 50 again, and leveled a Sith Warrior. I loved every minute of it... right up until I hit level 50. I finished my class story two days ago, and after just a couple hours I lost all interest in playing that character. I was shocked at how quickly and how abruptly the game ceased to be enjoyable. After reflecting on my experience, I have decided that the lack of voice-acted cutscenes for the repeatable missions that comprise a majority of the solo max-level content makes it feel like a completely different game. Star Wars: The Old Republic is a wonderful, unique game which creates an immersive gameplay experience unrivaled by most other MMORPGs. It is truly a delight to play. Up until level 50, that is. Once you hit level 50, you queue for PvP, spam-click to accept all your daily quests, kill fifteen of these, loot six of those, destroy a couple of boxes. Click on something to summon some guy you can kill so you can loot something from him. Go back to where you got your quests and spam-click to accept all your rewards. Without voice-acted missions or companion interactions, it is pretty much just World of Warcraft with lightsabers and, quite frankly, I would take a game with a battlepet minigame over one with a space shooter minigame any day of the week. Without the voice acting, the developing personal story, and the companion interactions that make the game such an immersive, entertaining experience, I am left wondering what I am even doing dailies for in the first place. I fully understand that BioWare cannot continue to produce endless class story content or companion dialogues. I also understand why the Black Hole and Section X daily areas do not have voice-acted mission dialogues. Believe me, I do. Having said that, and being perfectly clear that I do not think the solution is to simply add voice-acted cutscenes to future daily missions, I will say that I did all the original Belsavis and Ilum dailies for months without losing my love for the game. There were days when it got old, and of course I frequently skipped through dialogue that I had heard so many times I knew it by heart. But even then it felt like an extension of this game I have come to enjoy so much. It wasn't until I was spending my time playing through content without cut scenes or voice acting or conversation choices that I felt like I should just be playing some other game. It is not just the theatrics of the cutscenes. There is something expressive about that kind of personal interaction that you simply cannot convey in three written sentences. With all the normal story missions, I feel like I actually have an idea what it is that I am being sent to do and why. If you asked me, I could tell you about each mission. "So these two are the descendants of Tarisian refugees. They came here to reclaim their ancestral home, but there are these aliens there..." I am a predominantly visual learner. I learn well by reading, and I retain more of what I read than many people do, but I could not begin to tell you what the Black Hole and Section X dailies are about beyond the obvious and what I can infer from other parts of the game. "Well, these guys attack me on sight and I guess those are their weapons... so I guess I have to destroy their weapons so they don't attack me with them... or something." I do not know who Torvix or Kovic are, much less why I would want to kill them. They might as well be named Generic Faction Villain One and Generic Faction Villain Two. Moreover, while it matters much less to me than the immersive feel of the game, it is worth noting that the inability to gain companion affection from any of the Black Hole or Section X dailies is a tad bit irritating as well. So how can you have voice-acted repeatable missions that don't feel like a chore to skip through each day? I have a couple suggestions, and I would love to see others' if anyone actually bothered to read this far: -- Rotating dailies. This could be implemented in any number of ways. Pick five random missions each day from a total pool of twelve. Pick one set of missions from three or four predetermined sets. Offer one daily from each of a number of predetermined pools. Use astromech droids and alien languages liberally if developing a large pool of voice-acted missions is prohibitively costly. -- Voice-acted dailies, with duplicate missions available at a nearby terminal for quick acceptance/completion. -- Missions with a brief introductory exchange and an option to immediately accept the mission and end the conversation: "Oh man, I am so glad you finally arrived. You... you are the backup we requested from high command, right?" 1) That's right. [Accept mission] 2) Slow down, Sergeant. What exactly do you need backup for? 3) That depends. Does your backup get paid? -- It is not exactly an efficient use of resources, but you could potentially keep repeatable content fresh by creating multiple conversations for each mission. On Tuesday the condescending Rodian might ask you to go pick up unused supply crates and bring them to him. On Wednesday the quartermaster, a Cyborg on the other side of the base, might ask you to go do the same thing. On Thursday you get the mission from the Rodian again, then on Friday it is the protocol droid across the room who tasks you with picking up the supply crates.

We have computers that win at Jeopardy! and calculate pi to ten trillion digits. Do you honestly think no one has figured out how to approximate a die roll that is sufficiently random for video game crafting? This is one of those situations where a little bit of knowledge does more harm than good. Unless you are a cryptographer or a mathematician, computer randomization is more than sufficient for your needs. I never played Neverwinter Nights, but single-player games are sometimes designed in ways that appear (and may, in fact, be) not entirely random in order to discourage players from cheating by saving the game and reloading if they don't get the results they want. This is most noticeable in turn-based games like XCOM or Civilization; if you reload a saved game and do the same things you did first time, you will get the same combat results. You can reload your saved game a hundred times, but if you have the same unit move the same way and attack the same enemy unit, the results will be the same each time. It may be that Neverwinter Nights was designed as it was not because of a limitation of computer randomization, but to discourage cheating.

Bracers/belts that compliment the dancer's/loungewear outfits. Something elegant like the Cadet's Cuffs model would be nice, or maybe even hidden bracers/belt. It would be extra super great if you could fix the horrendous clipping of top flaps through robes and skirts. I really like the loungewear top, but it looks stupid paired with my technician's belt and my cardboard tube bracers and I feel constrained having to choose robes based on how effectively they mask the flap clipping.

I agree with some of these ideas, like rebalancing mission skills and crafting skills, but I think you have the problem backward. The real problem with SW:TOR crafting is that it has been reduced to an auxiliary reward system for raiding. A good crafting system rewards players for spending time and effort mastering tradeskills. Luck may play some role in this, but the overall rewards for crafting should be roughly proportional to a player's investment in crafting. The crafting system in SW:TOR is broken because it rewards players for raiding, with no relationship whatsoever to the time or effort they have invested developing their tradeskills. The players selling the best hilts on the GTN should be the ones who invested the most time and effort honing their craft and acquiring materials, not someone who powerleveled artifice a couple days ago because no one else in the operations group could RE hilts. The fact that the riffraff can forgo gear upgrades to buy stim schematics with their hard-earned Black Hole Commendations or gamble several thousand Fleet Commendations to get the Molecular Stabilizers to pay a raider to push a button and craft them new barrels is not a problem; it is one of the only redeeming features of the current system. Contra the OP, the best thing BioWare could do to improve the crafting system is to completely separate crafting from raiding and raid rewards. Whatever its problems, the crafting system at launch provided a meaningful independent path to gear progression with significant depth and time/resource gating. A player who invested enough time and credits to learn tier two recipes and craft augmented versions of these could produce something that was roughly comparable to Tionese gear. Select BoP pieces were best-in-slot when augmented. The players selling the best earpieces of the GTN were the cybertechnicians who invested the most time and Mandalorian Iron crafting and reverse engineering items to produce augmented versions of earpieces with the most highly sought-after tier two affixes. They had no artificial advantage over other cybertechnicians. The introduction of augment kits, the ability to remove mods from endgame gear, free Tionese gear for all level fifty players, and the paucity of new trainer- or schematic-taught recipes to keep up with new raid gear have all conspired to render SW:TOR crafting a reward system for the handful of players who, ironically, don't actually need any of the gear they learn to craft by reverse engineering operation drops (else they would use it instead of reverse engineering it). Do not get me wrong: I fully support each of these developments (except for the part about the lack of new schematics), and I doubt BioWare fully foresaw what they would do to the crafting system. Nevertheless, the current system rewards raiding rather than crafting and it gives those who already have the largest advantages the ability to monopolize realm economies at the expense of everyone else. If you think raiders are not rewarded enough for what they do, tweak operations drops. Do not continue to make endgame crafting contingent on reverse engineering operations gear (or prohibitively expensive crafted gear that someone else learned to make by reverse engineering operations gear). If BioWare wants to develop a functional, compelling crafting system and foster healthy realm economies what they need to do is separate crafting from raiding altogether, not further marginalize and exclude those of us who do not raid by making every aspect of end game crafting the exclusive province of raiders.

Reading through this thread depresses me. I care greatly about this matter because I believe that differential literacy is one of the primary drivers of the class stratification we all see taking place around us. I know that sounds like a really bold claim, but bear with me. I have spent most of my life in an academic environment. After college I went to law school and then graduate school. I taught university classes for couple years. I have been coaching high school debate for around fifteen years, and I coached collegiate debate for a few years in grad school. I have worked with debaters from a variety of different backgrounds at several different types of schools. I have observed three things: 1. It seems that fewer and fewer young people have strong written communication skills. This should come as no surprise to anyone here. 2. The writing skills of my public high school students run the gamut from incredibly strong to pitifully weak. Across the board, my students at competitive private high schools show apt skill in written communication. 3. Without exception, the people I know who achieve the societally-venerated benchmarks of academic/professional success, the ones who I feel certain will do very well for themselves in life, are those with strong written communication skills. Without exception, the students I know who have gone to ivy league schools are those with excellent written communication skills. I have known some bright kids who were not good at communicating in writing, but none of them ever ended up at Dartmouth. I do not know where all my college students ended up, but all those I do know who went off to professional schools had excellent written communication skills. Every single student of mine who I know ended up in law school or business school or medical school had strong written communication skills. The same is true of all my law school classmates, for that matter. I had a student who won a competition for an enormous grant to start her own nonprofit venture. She was easily one of the best writers I have worked with, and I am sure that played a large part in her ability to put together a winning grant proposal. Maybe you do not care about any of this. Maybe you never aspired to go to an ivy league school. Maybe you think that people who correct others' homophone use are snobs. Well, here is why it matters: Whether you aspire to these things or not, they are overwhelmingly seen as good foundations for a life of financial security and success. What I find particularly troubling is the circularity that I see between these two things. I feel increasingly like the socioeconomic stratification in our society mirrors and contributes to our differential levels of literacy. I see kids from well-off families who go to exclusive private schools leaving with skills that will allow them to do whatever they want in life. I also see kids at public high schools who are really bright, but far too few of them develop the skills that will allow them to succeed in life. If your law school admissions essay uses numerals in place of prepositions, the committee is just going to laugh and throw it out. Even the manager at the local Best Buy wants to hire someone literate enough not to use apostrophes to pluralize words, lest they find themselves with a makeshift sign telling customers that "Samsung's are sold out." I envision a society thirty years from now that is significantly more stratified with significantly less room for upward social mobility, where most of the population is borderline illiterate (if you prefer, we could call it something friendlier like "internet literate") and all the doctors and lawyers and investment bankers come from the class of wealthy, fully literate people who went to private schools; a class mostly made up of the children of the literate students I see off to prestigious colleges and professional schools today.

You are missing the point. BioWare chose to develop a game with immersive storytelling. Their vision for this game seems to revolve around the immersive experience that fully voice acted quests facilitate. They obviously had to make decisions about how to prioritize their development resources, and this is what they decided they wanted to invest those resources creating. It was the central innovation of this game and one of its primary selling points. It sounds like you bought this game even though you really wanted a totally different Star Wars game made by people with totally different priorities. It is not BioWare's fault you wanted the game to be something different from the one they developed and advertised. Neither is it BioWare's fault that ex-SWG players wanted this game to be a sandbox despite BioWare's repeated warnings that this is an entirely different type of game. It is not BioWare's fault that they developed an immersive, story-driven game which happens to have player vs. player combat, and hardcore PvPers bought it expecting a level of precision balance befitting an e-sport (which, quite frankly, is simply not compatible with the fundamental design of role-based MMOs). Nor is it BioWare's fault they chose to create an MMO that, by definition, has a semi-static shared world where each player's individual quest choices cannot dynamically alter the world as they might in a single-player game, and people bought it thinking that they were going to be playing Mass Effect in a massively multiplayer Star Wars universe. BioWare more or less succeeded at what they were trying to accomplish. As far as I can tell, the number one reason people are dissatisfied with this game is that they bought it expecting it to be something different from what BioWare created, marketed, and sold.