It's not goodwill, it's the same marketing strategy used by the Franklin Mint and the makers of all products sold mainly at 4am. Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on your personal taste.

There is zero flexibility in when they could offer it. It has to be before the 20th or it serves no purpose.

Another game I play did a similar thing in response to the launch of swtor. They have a reward of exclusive in-game items for people who stay subscribed from Dec-March (or somewhere around there). Everyone knows it's because they are worried about swtor hurting the subscriber base - they do something very similar every time a new MMO launches. I guess they figure a little stability to weather the storm for a couple of months can't hurt. BW is obviously doing the same thing. They figure anything they can do to delay the expected 1st month drop off of subs will give them a chance to get a stronger start. The negativity comes from 2 sides. One side notices how pathetic the reward is. The other sees it as entirely too early in the game's life to start falling back on marketing tricks - ie that it's a sign that the game is doing poorly.

There is absolutely no situation where I will be "stuck with it". Your solution to being forced into PVP is to voluntarily engage in PVP. Sorry, man, but that's stupid. The proper way to handle the issue is to petition a GM and bug it every time it happens. Then if you get a negative response, immediately petition again. Harass customer support.

And? Characters are not one dimensional things. That's not even a sentence in the English language. I mean, seriously, what language is that supposed to be?

That works for all healers except IA (and likely the scoundrel mirror). They can only chain mez robots.

If the healer has mobs on him, he's spending more time healing himself that he could spend healing you. The area heals in this game leave a lot to be desired, and the healers take a lot more damage than the tanks. The end results of those two facts is - if the healer will always do better focusing on one main tank than on himself + 1 tank. There's almost no instance where you would want a healer to be tanking anything. If you can't keep up with 4 guys on the tank, then you're really not going to be able to keep up with 3 on the tank and 1 on the healer.

Huh? You know I was agreeing with OP, right? There's an issue because PvP shouldn't affect PvE. The fact that it does is easy to observe, but that doesn't make it right.

That's just not true at all. PvP favors burst damage/healing while PvE favors sustained ability over long periods of time. Just look at the comment about the grenades - they are talking specifically about burst.

No real response needed. PvP adversely affects the rest of the game. Also in the News, sun rises in the east.

Yup, everything you did on the secondary character is effectively lost. I forced myself to level one character to legacy level before dedicating much time to secondary characters, but it represents yet another design choice that reduced my enjoyment of the game. The up side is that you can run repeatables and make up for any loss, but the downside is that legacy XP seems to accumulate faster on lower level characters. Just eyeballing my current advancement, I think you would make more legacy XP by starting a new character at level one and deleting when you're bored than by running FPs on a high level character for the same amount of time.

Champions Online.

Then they should make all the skills worthwhile instead of making them all worthless. I don't have biochem, but I do have cyber, and they're nerfing that too. A moderately useful 4 second mez that is inferior in every way to powers I already have. Yes, they have to set a baseline for how useful trade skills will be and yes they will occasionally need to nerf some powers to keep them in line, but the baseline they have chosen is "pointless and worthless".

Are you a child? In the adult world, when someone attacks you, you call the police. In this case, the police said "we don't care".

Did you not read the entire OP? CS has official said it's not an exploit. It's simply moronic design.