Yeah I think that's standard procedure. I noticed it a couple of weeks ago. They don't bring the servers down until the top of the hours, but 15 minutes before they lock out the login server (or something along those lines -- you can't get in). I thought about staying online this week just to see if they repeated the bug with the last-second flurry of warnings seconds before the server went down. But I gotta get to bed. (lol) Could be worse. They drop EVE Online every single night -- the game really only runs ~23 hours per day. (shudder)

I think an interesting approach to guild housing in this game would be to have it take place in ships, much like the ones that surround the stations in the Republic and Imperial fleet areas. The interiors could be similar to the interiors of those vessals, and they could even connect via a special shuttle much like the Interfleet Transport taxi (arrive at your destination, walk through a green wall). Features I'd like to see in such an arrangement: - A Cantina with a programmable range of song selections and light show - A guild museum, like the fleet museum, with arrangable displays and purchasable equipment to populate the displays - Additional social areas, like meeting and briefing rooms

In a way, the story of Luke, and Anakin's redemption, can be viewed as completing the overthrow of the established Jedi order. They can never go back to the old way of thinking, because it failed to preserve the Republic.

I think the OP offers a fascinating glimpse into how mainstream content gets dumbed-down over time. Television today is mostly LAME -- familiar content completely weighted down by politically-correct writing. Every episode of CSI:Miami or Law & Order: SVU features a terrified woman who has been violently oppressed by a testosterone-driven man. There's nothing mentally challenging here, just judgmental people spouting familiar refrains in the most simplistic manner possible. The reason it is that way is because, over time, people like the original poster, and the similarly-minded special interest groups that have risen over time, have come to hold sway over the television industry. Video game storytelling, along with other new media (e.g. YouTube) has upset the apple cart precisely because it challenges the politically correct establishment. A special interest group can devastate a national network that goofs in a prime time show. But it can do NOTHING about a video game or YouTube story. That's what makes it so powerful. Rue the day when it becomes otherwise.

Thanks for hearing me out. It really is a great thread, man. You've cut right to the heart of an important part of why the Sith story is so incendiary. Absolutely. True. Sure, they clearly are. What's really driving the opposition here is a desire to avoid distasteful analogies that aren't appropriate and dismiss the Sith as, say, cartoon-comical, or otherwise incorrectly motivated. There's a whole thread not far from this one in which a guy is holding court about how the Sith story is inappropriate for modern society. The author claims that the inclusion of ****, murder, and so forth, are insulting and should not have been used in a modern title, and that their use reduces the artistic merit of the game. So he's claiming that the story is politically incorrect. You're claiming that the story is wrong (not correctly matched to existing content). Different arguments, but in both cases I just can't help but think that BioWare should pat itself on the back, if for no other reason than the fact it has generated this much emotion, thought and debate.

That's an interesting concept for light-sided Sith that I hadn't considered. Forgive my naïveté, but if I understand you correctly what you're saying is that "light Sith" are not traitors attempting to support the Republic, but rather loyal Sith who want to see the Empire succeed against the Republic. Perhaps they feel the current leadership has betrayed the Empire and become corrupt. There's definitely a strong hint of this in the Sith Warrior storyline, particularly in the casting of Darth Baras against the Emperor. And really, in the end, you don't know who the corrupt people were, and who the loyal ones were. (chuckle)

Welcome. TrollBerzerker, I'm not bringing the real world into it, I'm just attempting analogies based on familiar examples -- you're absolutely right that it's not the real world. I'd be grateful for a full read of my last post. I'm not attacking you like some folks around here. On the contrary, I think it's a fascinating discussion.

Unfortunately there is no objective arbiter of good and evil in the universe. Societies determine which actions are "good" and which are evil. All human societies throughout history have worked this way, and not all of them have drawn the line at the same point. This is one of the things that irks me about *our* society. We pass judgment on each other like a street vendor handing out dogs at a football stadium. I'm not saying ****, murder and kidnapping are good, I'm saying that as scary as those things are, it's even scarier to pretend that they're objectively evil. Societies that are intransigent about what they believe to be right are doomed to failure, because they will never be able to find middle ground and move forward. Look at Democrats and Republicans today, so determined to win the White House, and for what? Neither side makes any progress because they never quite seem to grasp the fact that Americans don't want either one of them to be completely in charge. They *must* know this, but neither side can stop calling the other evil. Another example: The United States was founded with the institution of slavery intact. Awful? Absolutely. But without that compromise the country doesn't get formed at all. The United States is *better* because of its flaws. Without them its nothing but a bunch of holier-than-thou intellectuals telling other countries what to do. The flaws -- the fact that America is an "experiment" and is always a "work in progress" -- are why we're still here. It's when we forget that we're the land of compromise and slow-progress-over-time that we run into trouble. The Jedi have the same problem -- they are judgmental in the extreme. Everything is decided, and fits neatly into the categories of "good" or "evil". You touch "evil", you're lost. End of story. That's why Yoda *failed*. Blinded by ideology, he ended up losing everything. The Temple. The Order. The order's future (younglings). The very Republic itself. Everything. For all his brilliance and power, he *never even saw it coming*. I digress, but the point is that they failed when they declared the Sith objectively (implying unredeemably) evil. From that point forward, the Republic was doomed. By your definition of "good" that's true. I think of the Sith as like the various fascist/racist/nationalist movements in the 1930s, as contrasted with, say, a stereotypical Bond villain. The Bond villain thinks they're selecting the lesser of two evils, and are therefore good. The fascist, on the other hand, defines good as "we win". To both the Sith and the fascist, that's how thing are *anyway*. Everyone else is just lying about it. The Jedi aren't "good", they just hide behind a *mask* of good. Behind it they're hypocrits. Don't get me wrong, you couldn't pay me to live in the Empire. But IMO calling it objectively evil is a mistake, because it weakens our ability to identify and combat it in the future. My two bits anyway. It's a good debate -- certainly food for thought. Nice thread.

The Sith Warrior storyline is awesome BECAUSE it makes you hate yourself. It's awesome BECAUSE most people in modern society will never understand it. It's awesome BECAUSE polite society finds its content reprehensible, inappropriate, and unsuitable for polite society. It IS. Awesome. Just awesome. I love this game even more now, because of this thread. Thank you, Shampoo, for reminding me what I hate about polite society and its homogenizing influence on storytelling.

What's interesting about this post to me is that it is exactly what the Jedi want everyone to think about the Sith. It's the "politically correct" view, in the social context of the society of the Galactic Republic. Whether it's accurate or not isn't an objective truth, it's a matter of subjective opinion. Very much like the real world, with conservatives and liberals. The real world perhaps isn't as extreme (for most of us who are sane), but the misunderstandings and miscomprehensions between the two groups are similar. It's remarkable to see that captured so well in a video game. And an MMO at that.

M1-4X is the coolest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72JjXyQNmF4

That makes no sense. There are other ways to turn the sound off. By allowing users to leave it on they could, for example, receive crafting alerts from companions while working in the background. Option > no option.

What I have right now is a very sad 2006 Dell Dimension XPS 600 with a Pentium Extreme 950, 2gb RAM and an aging Radeon X1900 XTX (256mb?). It cannot even get out of 1024x768 mode and the RAM is a real bottleneck since I'm running Win7. (sigh) I could upgrade but frankly I haven't had much luck. I think there's something wrong with the motherboard because it doesn't seem to deal well with RAM upgrades.

That does clarify things a bit, thank you. :-)

Thanks for all the replies!