Um... Why would it be "awesome" for the Empire to win the war? I've got Imps and Pubs, but the Empire is pretty vile. They're big on things like enslaving the population of entire planets or setting up Nazi-style death camps for nonhumans. I think the ability to have stories within such an Empire is quite fascinating (particularly if you're light-side. Trying to be a decent person who works for Imperial Intelligence is certainly interesting.....), but why would anyone actually want them to win? I mean, they're almost over-the-top with their evil. It's like hoping that Mordor wins, or wishing that the Nazis had won. Am I missing something here?

Sociologists should preserve this thread as a wonderful example of the overpowering feeling of entitlement held by many young gamers today. Future scholars will be fascinated. The levels of narcissism and self-serving non-logic is really quite impressive.

Since when is a mez only useful for Wpvp? I miss Holiday. She was the only thing I liked about Tharan...

*shrug* So says you. Personally, I like 'em being on the market. I just think that the price in comms was way too high; grinding should be a more feasible way to get 'em. (which I'd guess is the "miscommunication". Those comm prices are way out of whack for what you get for 'em and the time it takes to earn 'em) Then again, as I've written already, I also have no problem with them letting us use cartel coins to avoid all sorts of grinding. Some people find the end-game gear grind fun. More do not. A way for those of us who don't care about whether we have the absolute top-tier to quickly gear a toon (particularly an alt, for people who were willing to gear one toon but who don't have the time to do it with a second, even if they wouldn't mind having a geared 50 with a different role or class) enough to at least have a chance at seeing the story-level content in the game we subscribed to wouldn't be the end of the world. Those who want to do the full grind to do all the nightmare modes can still do so and boast of it. Some of y'all are going to object that the grind is the whole point of MMO's. Well, I disagree. I play SWTOR to see the story content while playing with friends, not because I like doing daily missions over and over again so that I can get the gear that will allow met to do story mode ops over and over again in order to get the gear that allows me to do the T1 HM ops over and over again so that I can do the T2 SM ops over and over again...... etc. Don't get me wrong. The endless grind with friends might have been partly fun when I was a lot younger and less busy. But I just don't have time for it. I totally fail to see, therefore, how me paying extra money so that I can have the opportunity to see all the content in the game I've already paid for and subscribed to for a year in any way is unfair to anyone else. Is it "unfair" that other people have more time to play the game than I do? Does that mean that Bioware should figure out how much playtime the average player can dedicate to the game each week and use that as an weekly cap in playtime? Younger folks (those with summer vacations, relatively free undergrad schedules, or no job or kids, etc.) often have an advantage in time. Us busy folks with jobs and kids often have an advantage in money. As long as the money solution can't buy better equipment than you can get through crafting, drops, GTN, etc., then I don't see how P2W is even part of the equation. P2W means that you must pay to win. If you put full Rakata sets (or even Campaign or Dread Guard) on the cartel network that's not P2W. Lots of folks on the server will have already earned all that stuff for free through grinding. Anyway....

Yhea, totally agree. While the new upgrades make the old missions now super-easy, the new missions are all stupid-hard even with all the upgrades. I've completed a couple of them, but overall assaulting a large fleet and space station solo isn't really all that fun. Mostly, it just feels gamey and silly; each faction has hundreds of thousands (if not millions. We're talking galactic scale, here) of ships... They really can't spare a couple more to support you? Sometimes you reach a point where something becomes less ****** and more stupid: "Captain Solo. We suspect that Vader's entire fleet may be hiding behind Endor's moon. Before we attack the Death Star, could you and Chewbacca take the Millennium Falcon and destroy the entire fleet single-handedly? That'd be great. Thanks." Obviously I'd rather space that's not on rails (I miss Tie Fighter soooo much....), but if I do have to be on rails, can you at least try to make the experience something that at least resembles something from the movies? In Episode III you see Jedi pilots in a big battle; their job is NOT to destroy the enemy fleet itself, they go in pairs, and even then they require Clone fighters to watch their back to stay alive. Luke blows up the first Death Star, but not because they sent him and his X-Wing in solo. The best thing about some of the space missions was that they had at least some nod towards you being part of a task force or fleet. Sure, the AI guys really don't kill anything, but it sure does add to the atmosphere to have allied fighters swarming around. I still haven't played all of the new missions, but so far I'd say that they're disappointing, and a missed opportunity. If their goal was to make space missions more popular, making them stupid-hard and designing them so that targets must be destroyed in a particular order or you will fail is not a great way to get more people enthused about space.... The early space missions were often designed around the concept of them being covert ops, as the galaxy wasn't yet at war. The new ones are lvl 50: The galaxy IS at war by that point. If anything, we should have less "one guy vs. a bunch of enemies" missions and more giant fleet battles where you're given a few specific objectives while swerving between giant capitol ships just kicking the crap out of each other.... *sigh*

Since when do you need to "fork over $100+" to do basic stuff? If you're not that into SWTOR (or, like some of my friends, your schedule is such that you never feel like you get your money's worth when you get an MMO subscription, as sometimes you barely get any playtime all month) then you're not likely to be the kind of person to spend a ton of cash on virtual clothing. Either way, why not have the option to only have the basics so that you can play through the class story? If you're really not into the MMO thing, will you really miss crafting, end-game, PvP, etc? Prolly not. I imagine most FtP players will end up spending at least one month's worth of subscription in the little add-ons (hiding head slot, action bars, etc.) If they find that they're spending a ton of time playing SWTOR, maybe they'll sub. If not, then they probably shouldn't. And remember, not everyone is so OCD that they're willing to spend $100 to make their companions outfit match better or whatever. I've got a friend who will be coming back now that the game is FtP (was in the "crazy schedule" category; he always liked the game). I doubt he'll spend more than $10 in cartel add-ons, but he'll get to finally enjoy the story for the game he bought back at launch.

*sigh* What percentage of people complaining that the space gear is P2W have actually beaten all the new space missions? 'Cause I know I can't. Some of those missions are HARD (though I'm handicapped by the fact that I run SWTOR windowed in a multi-monitor setup. That means it's not uncommon for me to accidentally click on another monitor, only for my ship to then fly into an asteroid... I really should start turning off windowed mode for space missions....). I think I tried 4 of 'em and beat maybe 1. One mission I was blown away so quick that I just stopped doing the space missions altogether for a while.... To reignite the semantic debate: Isn't it P2W only if they put out a tier of gear which is only available for $$$? If there was a new ultra-top-tier of PvP gear which was only available on the Cartel Market.... THAT would be P2W, because it puts non-paying players at a disadvantage that no amount of work grinding or luck with drops with ever compensate for. With the space missions, however, you can buy every one of the items on the GTN for amounts that a lot of the "grinding is part of the game, and I like it" people have sitting around in their accounts anyway. It's those of us who HATE grinding (and are therefore usually poor in game) who will buy it from the Cartel. I LOVE this, frankly. I'd love it if they let me buy campaign or dread guard gear for my newer 50's, cause otherwise I'm not gonna do very much with them until we have new story content (there's no way I'm gonna do the end-game gear grind with more than one toon. The very idea just bores me to tears. Those of you who space through the dialogue so you can get to the end-game gear grind faster, grind away. Just count me out.). Be nice, however, to pay a bit of money so that I can try out tanking in a new op (my best-geared toon is DPS). What I'd always reject, however, would be if they introduced a new tier that's slightly better than dread guard and made it Cartel-only. The kids who can barely afford their subscriptions but who do all their ops on multiple toons every week should always have the ability to have the top gear. I just never liked that this also means that old-fogeys like me with kids and work often end up not seeing the content that we payed for (heck, my guild in WoW sucked so bad that I never did a single Raid. Not one. I paid for all those big, plot-ending bosses in various expansions and I saw none of them. Scheduling was always too difficult, and our guild too small to compensate for this. So forgive me if I'm pretty skeptical when the guys who beat the raids/ops the week they came out and then complained about how there was "nothing to do" act like giving the rest of us a chance to see some content without an uber-grind is unfair. 'Cause for some of us, that's the only way we're gonna see it...) My preference would actually be for the game to always have slightly better gear available for the grinders than for the payers, as long as the gear that you can buy is good enough to make making it through content at least feasible (for ops, meaning that you can at least do story mode, but Hard or Nightmare might be impossible). Even more ideal might be to give the paid-for gear a different game or something, so hardcore ops folks know that you didn't "earn" it; that just 'cause you have campaign you're still a noob. *shrug* All I know for sure is that I REALLY like how the Cartel market has made it easier for me to focus on lowbie alts without having to switch to a 50 every few levels in order to grind Black Hole or whatever for cash to buy speeder training, etc. Having done planets like Alderaan so many times, the ability to just throw a bit of my free coins at the market in order to get lvl 3 speeder training for a lvl 32 toon is pretty great. And I know there's zero chance I would have saved up the money for the rocket boots without them being on the market.... Going through corridors you've done 7 times before a little bit faster for the win.

No, but I'll point out that there's another way to get a seat. A better metaphor is that you got to the theatre early and stood in line, and are angry that other people just went online, paid a few bucks extra, and got their tickets at home without having to stand in that long line. You're both seeing the same movie with seats of the exact same quality, they just paid more money for the convenience. If you think they're suckers for paying for for the same ticket, that's your right. That doesn't mean that you should boycott the theatre or try to ban online ticket sales. What makes this even more of a non-issue for me is that if you're one of the small minority who really, really likes the space missions, then you probably have a ton of comms sitting around anyway. I know i have guildies who did enough space missions to earn a Grade 8 box every few days or so, and that's well on the way to purchasing one of these new T7 items (this isn't to say that I don't agree that the price for the T7 space items is too high. I think they should be cut in half or so, but I think they should also be on the cartel and GTN as they are now). For those who stopped doing space missions after they finished the original missions, however, I think the ability to jump straight to the new missions without suddenly grinding a ton is great. After all, when a new Operation launches, they don't require a new tier of gear to run it; they have it DROP the new tier of gear. That wasn't the way the space missions were set up, however. Personally, I think making the Cartel an option was a pretty great solution.

Yup. As for people quitting: I don't want people in general to quit. But the people who have started their 8th "I'm quitting because of what was in the last patch" thread can leave. It's really tiresome. There are people on my server who seem to be in general fleet chat talking about how they're quitting the game nearly every time I'm on the fleet. They've been saying it for months, and they're still here. No wonder they don't like the game: They spend all their time on the forums or on the fleet talking about how they hate it, they hate EA/Bioware, and they're quitting. After a year, it's not surprising to see people saying: "Ok, then quit."

Well, feel free to play the space missions then. You can totally try them out without the gear. If you absolutely refuse to buy 'em (don't you have coins from subscribing?), grind away. Be my guest.

I've got a grad-school paper to procrastinate on. Liked what I saw of the game last night (had taken a break for a month or so due to real-world business), but I know that if I actually start the game up then I won't get my paper done in time. Thanks, whiners, for giving me some SWTOR-related thing to do, though.

In my experience, they usually just ignore your post or just say something about how you don't understand because you're not a hardcore player like they are. 'Cause we really should make it so the game is only fun for people who can spend 12+ hours a day grinding. Heck, maybe that's the root of the issue: The old "grind to get anything" method was great for the unemployed. Asking them to throw an extra $10 at a game that they've been playing for thousands of hours is distinctly unfair, I guess, since they DO have plenty of time, but they DON'T have $10. P2W whiners: Just think of the space missions as DLC that they asked you to pay a couple dollars for, but also gave you the option to grind to get it for free. You apparently like grinding, so get to it. Me, I hate grinding; I'm really not sure why wanting to have a good story in a multiplayer environment supposedly means that I also want to do the Black Hole missions or the late-game space missions 2000 times. I'd MUCH rather spend that time leveling alts, thanks.

As opposed to the rest of the year, when game designers work ridiculously long hours to make games for free. Can we just go ahead and change "General Discussion" to "Entitled Rantings"? I'm quickly remembering why I spend almost zero time in the SWTOR forums....

Run! The sky is falling! They gave the option to spend money so you can try the new missions for the minigame that most people don't even play! SWTOR is doooooooomed!

Nice post. Yhea, as someone who doesn't care that much about endgame (I had one toon I did Ops with, and I got tired of having to do groups every week. It started to feel like a chore. For some folks, that's the only thing they like about MMO's, but me, I can take it or leave it. Nice to see the content at least once, though. Should probably do a bit more soon to see the newer Ops....), but REALLY cares about story, I've been having a lot of fun with SWTOR. My main complaints early on were about how much grinding (or money, which requires grinding) it took to get you and your companions in matching armor sets. Now we can color match, so all is well with the world (hiding head slots for companions also made me very, very happy). I had taken a break, but I'm really liking what I've seen from the Cartel Market. If I don't want to do dailies for a few days to afford legacy unlocks or speeder training for my alts, I shouldn't have to. I'm not buying end-game gear, just stuff which allows me to skip quests I've already done on 3 other toons. Some people seem to never have had problems making the money to buy all those legacy unlocks a long time ago, but I guess I blew my money on matching armor or whatever , so I didn't. I did my BH grinding for money for a few toons, but it was burning me out (planning on completing all 8 stories eventually). The ability to just keep playing a leveling alt instead of having to switch to my 50 to grind for cash is a very, very appealing one to me. Huzzah.