It's kind of a dumb feature, honestly. Let's let people bypass experiencing the story and getting attached to their character so they can start marching up the endgame treadmill. What does it say about your game when part of your incentive to play is to let you skip it?

Because nothing ever ends.

But how hard is it to find a mailbox to send off your stacks of collected materials off to a bank alt? If slicing is your ultimate goal for your crew skills on a character, by all means take it, but otherwise you're going to wind up having to drop it, and re-level some other profession in the meantime. That sunk time has a cost. I think you're far, far better off picking the crew skills you want to have at the level cap, and just use them on your way up. What's profitable from week to week is going to change over the lifetime of your character, and unless you're doing something REALLY crazy with your credits, you'll have enough to reach the level cap and unlock the basic utilities like speeder training, bank and inventory slots, etc.

I don't agree that it's stingy, clicking the button to send your companion out takes a second, and the only opportunity cost is that you can't send them out to do a different mission. Whereas going to Yavin IV means you have to get in your ship and go there (which can cost money if you're on Fleet or something), and then you need to run out and actually find safes to crack, which are often guarded by hostile NPCs which have to be defeated. Bottom line, OF COURSE doing real content is going to be more rewarding than sending a companion out to grab a bag of cash for you. And honestly, that's how you want it to be. If you want a game where all you do is click and wait for rewards to come in, I recommend Farmville.

Thirded. This is complete BS. How hard is it to get the correct number of ticks for a channeled ability?

Play a real PVP game instead of ganking scrubs, that's my advice.

Most are trivial to get, and and the few that aren't can be done in a group in a day. Consider how much effort it will be to upgrade your gear by a comparable amount, and prioritize.

Favorite: I know I'll get a lot of flak for this, but Corellia. It really feels big and sprawling, like a planet. Least favorite: Quesh. I've been in bigger bowling alleys. The whole place just feels perfunctory and unfinished. On the whole, I think SWTOR zone design is pretty good, considering the scope, but I feel like making fewer planets with more zones starting out would have served them better. Look at the first Star Wars movie: It takes place on two planets and space station: Tatooine, Yavin, and the Death Star. That's it! Empire? Hoth, Bespin and Dagobah. Jedi? Tatooine, Endor's moon and the Death Star again. The point is, fewer planets with more content on them would have served just as well as lots of systems with less content, and conveyed much more of a sense of a sprawling scope, in my opinion. Also, FWIW, I hope in future expansions they add new areas to canonical worlds.

Given the travails Blizzard has had getting DX11 stable on WoW, I wouldn't advise clamoring for a DirectX update. You're only asking for trouble. You want more content, not marginally prettier polygons, trust me.

There's no question that ample comparisons can be made between SW:TOR and WoW. SW:TOR derives a LOT of its core gamplay from WoW, much in the same way that WoW took ideas that they liked from EverQuest before it. I played SW:TOR at launch til I had 3 level 50s and had dipped my toe into endgame raiding, but went back to WoW afterward. Now I'm checking SW:TOR out again, and I'm certainly remembering both its strengths and its weaknesses. Fully voiced single-player campaign is great. Having to wait for fully voiced content in multiplayer is kind of nightmarish. Fully voiced daily quests need to die in a fire. The dialogue tree system is interesting as a mechanism for expressing your character, as is the alignment system, but the incentives they put in for currying favor with your companions and maximizing your alignment are in direct opposition to the idea of letting YOU define your character. I routinely find myself choosing dialogue options that don't appeal to me, but they appeal to my companion at the time. I've tried a LOT of MMOs, and SW:TOR is definitely one of the best. Earlier, I would have argued that it's the second best, next to WoW. But the gameplay changes offered in Warlords of Draenor have me re-thinking that valuation. The WoW developers can't seem to help recruiting other games into WoW. Sometimes it works, like the pokemon-style pet-battles. Sometimes, however, it's a disaster. The addition of garrisons, and the crafting, gameplay and economy changes they've put in to make them relevant, have pretty much destroyed my day-to-day enjoyment of the game. I still like raiding, but the decision to put in a personal dole-queue for every character has deleted any reason to play the game in between raid days. Log in, poke garrison chores, log off. So, assuming Bioware can resist the temptation to inject more Farmville mechanics into their game, I'm ready to crown a new personal MMO-king, cumbersome dialogue trees and all.

The fact that slingers/snipers don't bring mandatory, must-have abilities to a raid is a GOOD thing. Must-have classes make for terrible design, and there's enough of that problem when you need to fill tank/healer slots.

You want gritty realism in a game which features psychic ninja wizards wielding laser-glowsticks? You're playing the wrong game, son. Boring desaturated FPS/CQB/BBQ is over here: http://rainbow6.ubi.com/siege/en-us/home/index.aspx

Honestly, the only reason to pick a race is aesthetics, so go for the look you like. I did a Cyborg for my Sith Juggernaut, and I'm not regretting the decision. Chiss do look cool, but their unique emote is meh. As for which class is best for PVE play, DEFINITELY the Juggernaut. Maras are a dime a dozen.

The group finder makes PUGs. If you want people who don't suck, make friends and join a guild.

Look, if you're going to post something about balance, then at least have some data that's pertinent to BALANCE. Class representation has little to do with mechanics, and a lot to do with aesthetics. Marauders sport lightsabers and flashy force powers, Operatives do not.