Getting Skadge on my BH always makes me laugh (as a matter of fact, any quests on Hoth that mention his species). So he's a Houk, right? And all the quests and stuff talk about this big Houk, blah blah, and the gangs on Hoth are these nasty Houks that need to be dealt with, blah blah. Well, my maiden name is Houk. Spelled and pronounced the exact same way. It's HILAROUS because apparently, my family all live on Hoth and are nasty huge ugly aliens. Oh Lucasfilm, why have you done this to me? LOL I have a tiny soft spot for Skadge just for that reason.

been on vacation and just saw this. I would be interested as well. I have dps that is HM ready, and a tank that just needs a couple set pieces to get there. If you still need a person, my DPS is Diora or Lysaer, my tank is Lirenda. Been playing since beta, but currently have no group to run ops with. Thanks

At first glance,this argument seems legit,but if you look deeper, it's actually not. First,I think you VASTLY underestimate the laziness of players. Pay 10 bucks to get something to sell for 1m credits on the GTN? Sign me up! Second, this would actually BALANCE the economy. People who have credits spend credits. People who have real money but no time/desire to grind credits spend real money. It works like a charm in Rift, a game with a similar but better f2p model. I played that game both before and after they introduced the REX, and the economy actually improved. And NO gold spammers. Heck, even WoW has something like this for game time, so those who have a ton of gold can spend it on a month of game time. As for unlocks, they already let you unlock everything else with credits. stronghold rooms,legacy unlocks,etc. why not collections?

Most of these suggestions are *ahem* borrowed from other games with cash shops. Most of these stem from personal experience. For example, I have a ton of credits, but I'm short on CC, which leads to my first suggestion. First and foremost, we need a way to trade credits for CC and vice versa. This could be done like it is in Rift (and sort of in WoW) with their REX. Basically, how it works is you can buy an item for real money ONLY that will go into your inventory, and is then tradeable to other players, via the trade window or the GTN. This item, when used, will then grant a set number of CC to the player's account. This allows people with tons of credits and/or time to farm (but maybe not a lot of real money) to get CCs to use in the CM, and it also allows people with less time, credits or luck (if they didn't win the pack lotto) to get credits quickly in a TOTALLY LEGIT, SANCTIONED way. Rift does this, and gold spammers have been virtually eliminated from that game. The other way to do this is to set up a credit/CC exchange system, like they have in Neverwinter online or GW2. This is basically a separate market where players trade CCs for credits and vice versa, and it's set up like a rudimentary stock exchange, so the prices might fluctuate. Advantages of this include not having to develop an inventory item, and the ability to buy and sell varying quantities of the currencies. This, unfortunately, seems to do less to eliminate gold spammers than the REX method. If neither of those are feasible, then for goodness sake, add an option to unlock Collections items using credits rather than CC. Everything else has this option... "Instant 550" token for crew skills. I would buy this. i have a ton of unleveled crew skills, and new 60s coming in would definitely buy this. You could even sell a bundle containing the Insta-60 token and 3 of these things, and make a fortune. Unlock additional task slot for crew skills. What I mean is, sell an unlock that will increase the number of companions you can send out on crew skill tasks by one. We have like 34905795712 companions now, more slots would give people an incentive to raise their affection...spending more time in game, etc. Unlock additional crew skill on a character One at a time, of course, but it would certainly be nice to not have to switch around everytime I need slicing parts. This is less important, but might be nice to have. Boost that increases data gem, warzone commendation, reputation, fleet comms, etc acquisition rate for a limited time. Sell me a potion that will give me 10% more reputation gains for 10 minutes, or 25% more comms for an hour. *sigh* basically, just go open Rift's cash shop and copy/paste. they do such a good job.

I really think with SWTOR reaching a point where making credits in game has become trivial, that it's time to seriously look at making an item that is tradeable in game (meaning, you can sell it on the GTN) that will grant a certain number of Cartel Coins upon use. Or at least make it possible to buy CC with credits. to be clear, I am NOT talking about buying in-game money with cartel coins. I am talking about the opposite. I have a ton of credits. I'm a subscriber. I don't really need things from the CM, but I would love to have a way to use my excess credits to by cartel coins so I can buy up those account-wide item unlocks that cost precious CC. Rift has something like this (called REX), and in that game, gold sellers are nearly non-existent, and it works. People buy REX with real money, sell it on the AH for credits, and the economy in that game is relatively healthy. Alternatively, can we have a credit cost for account wide collection unlocks, instead of CC?

I understand why they did this. it is a misguided attempt to let newer players have a chance to get things from discontinued packs. I never bought packs until about 6 months ago, and I've gotten a lot of stuff from the cubes that I didn't have before, including a white color crystal. I love that. However, I'd love it more if I could just buy the old packs, or the individual stuff. Most of the loudest complaints i see are from people who have been buying packs all along, and already have all the old stuff. For those of us who don't, you probably have less pushback for now. However, I still would much rather gamble on a hypercrate of, say, skip tracer packs (really old, that I had no chance of buying when it was out) than a hypercrate of the new pack where I have a chance to get a cube with a chance to get something from the skip tracer pack. So basically, bring back the old packs, let us buy them separately, and fix the new packs so people who have all that stuff already aren't screwed out of the potential for new pack items.

lol, of course we aren't all having ISP problems with our personal ISPs. But ONE provider, that provides the service for one of the routers/hubs that BW uses to send information across the country/world might have an issue, which would then affect everyone. The internet isn't magic

yeesh, so many uninformed people. error 208 is a NETWORK error, probably not even Bioware's fault. some router went down somewhere. It has nothing to do with the patch, even though the stupid error says it does. The best way to help them is to run a traceroute to the server and post it...and no one is doing that. Here's mine: If you don't know how, go here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=498597#67

guys, post your traceroutes...so BW knows it's a routing issue. if you don't know how to do it, instructions are in this post. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=498597#67

Also getting this, after playing this morning just fine. Logged out to change accounts, and boom, Error 208. there is definitely something broken, ran a tracert to east coast server: cox.net is my local provider, and seems fine, error seems to be happening somewhere on the hop across the country (I'm in CA, but play on Jedi Covenant) between LA and Houston

Oh lord, think of the children! we can't have them exposed to GAMBLING! it's a sin! Outlaw it all! So much for the land of the free, right? What really needs to happen to MMOs is some form of parental control on the account. MMO companies need to open their eyes and realize that parents allow their children to play on their accounts because they are their CHILDREN. Rather than trying to force parents into making separate accounts for their children, just accept and work within the idea that kids will be playing on their parents' accounts. Have a parental control option that doesn't even allow in-game or web purchases, that can be toggled on and off with a special password. Look, I was an online poker player. I made decent money at it. Because of idiot "conservatives" and religious nutjobs, a rider to a must-pass bill was forced through Congress which effectively outlawed legal online poker in this country. Now I have the government telling me, a consenting adult, what I can or can't spend my money on. So much for the republicans being all about small government. Land of the free, my butt.

I Liked it too. The Blizz quest is especially funny, as expected. So glad that the rest of the world gets to enjoy the awesomeness that is Blizz. As for Vaylin,

ugh, that requires me to have friends.

This is happening to me too. Both my synthweaver and my armormech have blank crafting windows. They are both old toons (they have been collecting/REing stuff since 1.0 early access), but neither of them had any of the pvp schematics, because i don't pvp. I don't have any insta-60s (because I already had 16 lvl 60s, so whhhhhhyyyy lol). to sum up: old toons have blank armormech and synthweaving windows.

Level 65 item rating mix of 216/220, fully augmented. Merc, Innovative ordnance. I have been playing swtor since beta, and MMOs in general for 10 years, so I'm no noob. Companion: Senya, rank 30, dps/heals. I chose her since rank 30 is easily obtainable my most normal players. I have higher ranked companions, but for the purposes of testing, i chose one in the "middle" rank range. In order to test the changes, I went into H2+ Star Fortress, Voss, since that's considered to be one of the more challenging ones, and also it's the one I got the "One and Only" achievement on before the patch. I used zero alliance buffs, to simulate the achievement. Trash, Senya set to DPS, i had absolutely no issues. First Paladin killed us pretty quickly, they hit hard. I changed her to heals and managed to kill him, but I had to use all my CDs (except heroic moment). Second paladin was easier, probably because i was more wary. the Praetorian was fine, my hp got a little lower than before, but all in all not bad. the rooms around the reactor was where i began to have issues. First, I was hit by the "disappearing Dampers" bug, which is ok for the first two rooms, but the last room proved to be a challenge and we got overwhelmed 3 times before I finally managed to (barely) live through it. Being a merc with no taunt skills, it was challenging to keep mobs off senya while she healed. consequently, I died because she was taking too much damage and healing herself more than me. On to the Exarch. well, on to death. Not sure if the others would be different, but after one attempt, I knew there would be no way to kill him now. even with my shield running, he hit me for 14k a pop, which, as we all know, there's no way a healer companion could keep up with after the patch. Not sure if it's a function of being too soft as a DPS merc, but even avoiding all mechanics, his melee just ate me alive too fast for Senya to heal through. I ran around throwing my dots on him and shooting myself with Kolto Shot and Emergency Scan, to no avail. I thought about speccing arsenal, but that's even less mobile, and i'm sure it would end up the same. Being stubborn, I tried again, this time with Senya set to tank. HA! she died faster than I did. On this same character, as a note, all of the weekly Heroics are fairly easy, even when I use a rank 10 companion. I'm going to say something that might be unpopular, but after reading your goals as articulated in the OP, I think only a very slight buff to companions' healing is needed, along with some bug and AI fixes, especially with the tanking armor/shield issues. I'm sure if I used a rank 50 companion I could have completed the "One and Only" style HSF.