One of the best things I've ever read on these forums. Thank you.

Yes. How long depends on how well they keep up their pace on improving the game, and how well they keep to their promises (SSR, I'm looking at you). But for the forseeable future, I plan to keep playing.

No, I haven't had any interest in the romance plots whatsoever. I have no more interest in participating in a straight romance scenario than I'm sure a lot of (but not all, I know) straight people have in participating in a homosexual romance scenario. If they were going to leave it out, I honestly wish they'd have just left it all out of left me a toggle to turn it off so I'm not dodging flirt responses and having to shoot Corso down when he hits on my character for the umpteenth time. I hope they do it sooner than later, and do it right. Honestly even though I've heard they've given news to the contrary, they need to just add the option into existing companions rather than only in new companions. Doing it all in new companions...to do that right, that would be a minimum of 2 characters per class for a grand total of 16 new companions? With full voice? No, I sincerely doubt that. Instead, they'll do at BEST 2 new companions per side, at worst 2 companions for everyone in the whole game, which will get very stale very fast across multiple characters. It's much less work for a much better product to simply add new voice lines where necessary (and it won't even be necessary for every line of dialog) and simply add ways to opt-into the plot later in the game, which will be a nice bonus for hetero characters who made unwitting mistakes earlier on. I have no stories, and my experiences / stories are "watching my male companions get pissed yet again because I don't want to boink them."

Nnnneh. Really Neh. No, in fact. Just to prevent the inevitable obscene submissions all images would need to be vetted personally by staff members. Furthermore, it would look horribly out of place next to the rest of the textures in the game. This would not magically create a character that looks like a swtor version of you. It would create a character that mostly look like a swtor character except where it has your picture plastered badly across the face.

Are there chests in this game that are really that big a deal? As far as I'm aware all boss chests are completely locked down until the boss is dead, making this rather moot. And if I'm wrong, they could easily make it that way. There's pllllenty of middle ground here.

Pretty much what it says on the tin. Having the entire group's aggro / in combat status all tied together causes a lot of problems and doesn't have any real purpose that I can see. Trying to gather materials when the rest of the group is over-eager to hit the next pull is horribly frustrating, not to mention the occasional grief potential it leaves open. While we're at it, you could also just remove the inability to gather materials in combat. Not allowing it tends to create more ninja opportunities than it removes.

Contract does not trump state and/or federal law. If a contract is found to be in violation of state and / or federal law, the contract is in part or in total void. I'm not saying that SWTOR's EULA does violate any laws (to my knowledge it doesn't), I just hate people spreading the FUD that contradicts this principle. A simple "you agreed to it because you signed the contract" is a silly way to enter any discussion/argument about EULA's and individual rights.

As sad and geeky as I feel for saying this, this is because the rifles and pistols in the game aren't, in fact, lasers. They're "blasters", and they work on a different principle which I'm not sure is any better for physics but here's the basic idea. The cartridge for a blaster rifle or pistol contains a type of gas. A round of gas is pushed into the chamber and ignited when the trigger is pulled, causing it to explode forward out of the barrel (they must have some fantastic material science behind the barrel and chamber) and fire towards the target. It's been many years since I've read this stuff, but that was AFAIK the basic idea. In even more hazy areas of my recollection of star wars lore, it's called tibanna gas, and Bespin was important specifically because of its production of this military-valuable commodity. At any rate, once you get past the physics of blasters, the idea that they'd be a visible bolt travelling through the air is probably more sensible than if they were lasers.

Yes. It's what I've wanted theme-park style MMOs to be since their inception, which is the entertainment value of a single-player RPG with MMO stuck onto it. It has issues, to be sure, and how long I continue to enjoy the game will depend on how well Bioware continues to add to and more importantly improve the game, but they have IMO a very solid foundation to work on.

Sure, I'll bite. Rolling on loot is a meta-action. It doesn't even exist in the world of our characters. When our characters go to loot the body, they don't find it stuck to the corpse with the only way to get it being a mystical set of dice that appear from nowhere. The rolling for items is something that purely exists for us, the players, and not our characters. Therefore whatever action you take on the need/greed window is something YOU, the player, does, and not your character.

It's usually the lucky in these situations that confuse "luck" with "speed". Beating the RNG is not "harder". They're not making it "easier", they're removing some of the RNG and replacing it with grindable but obtainable reward.

I'm sorry, just had to call out this part. I find this funny when people say....well to be more specific... The irony of these statements is that the people who "have a life" (if you define that as having a job and responsibilities and things you like to do outside the game), are the ones MOST likely to be negatively impacted by poorly chosen and frequent downtimes. If I have no other responsibilities, I can simply wait for the downtime to be over and play when the servers happen to be up. If I have other responsibilities, the downtime might be during one of the few times per week I can play.

There needs to be something like this for newcomers to the game. I'd probably suggest the following: Level 20: Free AC Respec. May be used at any time, but is one-use only. Level 40: Same as level 20 Level 50: AC Respecs must be purchased, at an extremely high cost.

I figured on that sort of thing, I just wondered if there's a difference between Light I and Light V for plot purposes, or if Light is Light. And how, if at all, the game figures things out if you're "neutral" (have LS and DS points and neither outweighs the other enough to push you to Light I or Dark I.)

I understand that much, I'm just wondering what effect alignment levels have on the plot. In other words, does it change from Light I to Light V. And does a "neutral" alignment have an effect on the plot at all.