Surely I'm not alone in having read any EU material under the privisio that none of it was considered official cannon. Rather it was just people having a stab at what a post ROTJ galaxy would look like with the blessing of George Lucas to do it, knowing that both he and the authors would essentially be able to use it as a license to print Benjamins. So when I read the news that the new triology would be an original story, I naturally assumed it would ignore the current body of expanded universe material. Frankly, I don't have a problem with this. As much as I've loved some of the EU stuff, there's a lot which is simply childish and ill-thought through. It's not like other franchises have played this card and destroyed their popularity. Marvel, DC and the like seem to do it every other week with little problem.

You need to go back and play TIE Fighter. Despite not having shielding, the TIE was more nimble than the majority of opposition fighters it came up against in the early days of the Galactic Civil War. It had an edge over X-Wings and ran circles around Z-95s, Y-Wings and later, the B-Wing. Also it's small shape makes it remarkably difficult to hit. Albeit you only needed a few decent blasts to deal with a TIE Fighter, that in itself was a markably difficult feat to manage. While things changed as the Rebels started to deploy A-Wings in even greater numbers, for your standard patrol duties, the TIE did its job remarkably well.

I've had mixed experiences with Group Finder. Some groups are great fun, with people who are genuinely friendly and don't get upset when times get difficult. Then there's been other times where people have thrown their toys out of the cot because of wipeouts or that they just didn't like someone elses playing style. Ultimately, it's symptamatic of the attitudes of what I hope is a minority in the SWTOR and wider MMO community. They appear to lack any basic social skills or empathy for other people. Now yes, I can understand a bit of frustration if someone isn't the brightest crayon in the box, but that doesn't excuse people being downright nasty towards them. There are perfectly civilized ways to voice your concern/opinion, yet these people seem devoid of any knowledge on how to. I had one incident last night where the Healer was dishing out advice to everyone, which was ironic given that he wasn't actually doing much healing at all. I bit my tongue and politely acknowledged his feedback, but then later he throw a hissy fit at our DPS and stormed off, leaving our group stranded at the last part of the flashpoint. I toyed with the idea of naming and shaming him when I returned to the fleet, but thought better of it, as it wasn't going to achieve anything other than venting my spleen. My personal approach to flashpoints is that I'm more than happy to help anyone complete them. If someone is having difficulty understanding what to do, I give them the benefit of the doubt and grin and bear it until they get the hang of things - which usually isn't too long. On the one occasion when I have had to leave, I made a point of politely apologising to the group and trying to part on reasonable terms, rather than getting nasty and personal about their inabiilty to play the game.

My approach is that as I get them, I'll lfg maybe a couple of times each time when I arrive on that planet and if I'm lucky, I'll stumble on a group, or find someone else is already looking for them. That approach has worked so far, but on Taris is seems to have finally have ground to a halt. I've managed to knock off only one of the Heroic 4 quests, and once I've done the Bonus series, will try to knock of the Heroic 2+ that I have via soloing, but I suspect I'll have to abandon the other Heroics in my queue - purely because there's not enough people interested in doing them. Which is a pity, as I like trying to complete everything on offer, but it just doesn't seem possible at the moment.