Didn't see this thread, so made a secondary one (whoops). I agree, there should a bigger penalty for SDing. If I dogfight someone for 30 seconds, get them to <10 health and they take a turn right at an asteroid it's annoying. GIve more points toward the 1000 for a SD (like 5 or 10), give them -1 Kill on their own stats, or bump the respawn time up to like 30 seconds.

Can we please do something about doing a great job dogfighting someone and then when you get them down to <10 health they just fly into a wall on purpose to avoid getting killed? Really discouraging. Needs to be some sort of negative effect to suicides in space PVP. Like -1 to their kill total or +30 seconds to respawn after you take damage from an enemy. Need something to discourage folks from doing it. Hardly see any kills in space because of this.

I don't hate the game. If I did, I wouldn't subscribe. That said there are certainly points about TOR that are utterly frustrating that drive players crazy. - At launch, expectations were too high and everyone touted it as the WoW killer. It came no where close to meeting those expectations. Now expectations seem to be too low as people feel feedback isn't being listened to and it's simply easier to find a new game than deal with disappointment. - Speaking of disappointment - Broken commitments. One example, Collector's Edition players were promised periodic updates exclusive to them. We've received very few (two I think), and they haven't been anything special (yay for pets and some companion customizations?) That feels like a broken commitment, even if they technically added something. As I mentioned above, rather than deal w/ disappointment, many just leave. - Bugs, bugs, bugs. As someone who works in software development and testing, the volume of bugs in this game is simply staggering. I'd be fired in a second if the software I worked on was as unstable as this game. I know many MMOs use there player base as QA, but really, if some basic tests were ran, things like CZ currently being busted/lagtastic or checking that the in game Cartel Coins purchase weren't working should be caught in testing and never go live. - Missing features and content. I'll give them a pass on content. It takes time to build a library of content. Anyone who expected TOR to have as much content at launch as WoW had years into development had unfair expectations. However, there are some key features that this game is still missing. Top of my list is a global character name - MMOs from a decade ago had that. It's insanely useful for finding friends. Instead I have to friend all my friends toons on all my toons. They could have used the Legacy name for it, but chose not to. - Communication to the players hasn't be stellar. I don't understand why issue tickets are closed when they are reported to the dev staff. Seems like it should stay open until it's fixed. Also, if a ticket is submitted and sent to the wrong group (say you send it a mission issue, but it's determined to be a bug) you have to write the ticket a second time, rather than them just fixing the type and forwarding it to where it needs to go. Patches w/o notification - the ROTHC patch wasn't listed on the launcher the day they were adding it (no mention that morning when the downtime started - it was only on the forums, which most players don't read). Came home from work expecting to be able to play for a few hours before the normal patch time and bam, patching. They have gotten better about patch notification though. - Cartel Coins. Too many things in this game push selling Cartel Coins. It's their business, and they are entitled to do what they like, but it not being such an obvious money grab constantly would be nice. It's an OK game if you ask me. They need to make some positive changes to bring players back. I know I've said this before talking w/ my guild, but I really only play TOR because it's Star Wars. If it were any other IP, I'd have left a long time ago.

I too have run into a problem running space missions that I normally have no problems running. Verified that all my stats are correct based on equipping them. Either there's some sort of bug or they made them exponentially more difficult. Surprised no one has called out saying that they did it to discourage folks from running them. Enough folks already think that running them is pointless because you no longer get elite comms.

I know what you're referring to, it normally appears at the top of the launcher (with a yellow or red back highlighting/text color). But it simply wasn't there on my launcher or other guildmates/in game friends as we had a planned event last night. Regardless, I think EA/BW can do a better job on this front (I recall basically zero notification of when the Rakghoul event went live and folks not being happy about missing almost the entire event - albeit that was a year ago and they've done a little better lately...except for this update). A lot of other games provide weeks notice (for events, not updates). Oh well, at least I'm not seeing any problems with the patch.

I could care less about when they went down. I'm annoyed that the launcher didn't give notification that they were going down in advance. Had plans to play last night only to be surprised by the game staring to update....every other update they have done was Tuesday mornings....

Was there a reason the game launcher didn't provide any notification of when the servers were going down for the patch (at least as of Monday morning)? The game has consistently had downtime Tuesday mornings (2 or 3 am-ish CST) for patches and updates. That's your track record. I would venture that most people would have expected the same timing for this one. What I find troubling is not that servers were down during US peak times (you deal w/ that), but that there simply wasn't sufficient notification of when they were going down. A post on the forums isn't sufficient for downtimes (remember, the majority of your player base doesn't consistently [or at all] read these forums) especially when you have a previously posted downtimes on the launcher. Even giving notification this weekend would have been ok. Heck I even logged in yesterday morning to turn in a mission and the launcher still had no notification, so I was a little annoyed to come home from work last night only to find that the servers were down. The majority of your player base get their notifications from the Launcher or email, not from a post on the forums about when the servers are going to go down. In the future, please do a better job providing notification. It's a general courtesy to your players and is really appreciated!! As an aside....why were the forums down for posting while the update was running? Seems like the best time for players to chat up plans for the new content...just an observation.

Maybe people would be less attached to their names if that wasn't the only distinguishing thing about their characters on screen. Let's face it, most everyone wears the same exact equipment so they can participate in end game content. In fact, on my server, you can't even join a Nightmare Pilgrim run unless you're wearing Rakata/Black Hole gear. The character customization on this game is lacking in comparison to other MMOs. Especially when you come from a game like City of Heroes, where your costume and appearance was your defining feature for uniqueness, not your power set. Yes, different system, but point remains regardless. People want to feel unique and their uniqueness just got stomp all over. Were the merges necessary? I think some were for the dead ones, but as far as I could tell servers like Canderous Ordo were doing fine. Not sure why they didn't just merged the dead ones onto existing ones. I guess we'll see in the future if this was a good thing. I'm willing to bet that when F2P hits, if there is an influx of players, people will start to complain about overpopulation again and then we're back to asking for more servers. Maybe folks at BW/EA are assuming that there's going to be a massive number of folks leaving. But if they are assuming that's the case, why aren't they trying to address the problem of people leaving? That seems like what a business would try to do...keep their customer base.

I agree. I don't know why they didn't just do that. That would have also given players a unique global name for all their characters on the server, which would mean I could stop adding all of my friends alts to all of my alts and vice-versa and just add a darn global name to my friends list. City of Heroes (RIP old buddy, you had a great run!) implement that into their game years ago. Why this game didn't have it at launch still baffles me.

I pay attention to this. I'd hope most people who do PVP on a consistent basis would take know of who's competent on the other side (as well as their own).

There are folks though how lost their main's name though. I'm surprised I kept mine to be honest. I don't know the entire "equation" they used for determining who kept what name, but I feel that equation should have included subscription time as well as what package you purchased if they weren't. If have subscribed longer and paid the premium rate for the game, I feel I should get certain additional privileges. God knows they haven't done squat for those who purchased the CE despite saying they would.

It's more than a name. Your character name is your reputation and identity on your server. With having the destination server having the same name as a previous server (in my instance Jedi Covenant), 4 of my characters were just stripped of their reputations so I feel I have a right to be upset about it. That's the only server I used and yes, I wasn't squandering names with level 1 characters, I used all of them. In my opinion, there isn't anything more egregious that BW/EA could have done than take character names away from folks that had them on a server (and yes I know it's a "new server" but they could have at least given it a new name to quell this a bit). I now have 4 characters that seem foreign to me that I've lost my connection to. I haven't a clue what to rename them to. I still don't understand why first names are unique and Legacy names are not going forward....why not make first names non-unique, which all but fixes the current name problem and make Legacy names unique? Everyone can still have their primary name and you get a global name for the server! The Legacy name would be your reputation at that point. Also, the name thing is just another failure to add to the long this of problems the community on this game has had to endure. Kind of a last nail in the coffin for folks. Too often has the community's feedback has been ignored. We want to enjoy the game and have it succeed. Why else would we subscribe? Unfortunately, I don't think the folks who control the decisions about the game care nearly as much as the community does about it.

I don't post much on the forums but I felt compelled to here. As someone who works for a software company doing design, development and testing I'm fully aware that you occasionally need to take back commitments (such as the PVP rankings). I saw that and went "well I'd rather not have it than have it broken." Hell I think most of the folks on the forums that are complaining about that don't have a clue what it's like working at a software company trying to meet a deadline and making what you're about to release works. Too many people had unrealistic expectations for this game out of box and time is needed to flush out the game. I on your side there Bioware. But when I got home from work today and saw this...I'm sorry it's a slap in the face to your casual player base, especially those of us with you from launch/pre-launch (CE myself). Now you have your PVP base and your casual base upset with you. For those folks out there claiming I should have a 50, well I choose to play alts, have a life outside of this game, keep my job, and my wife not furious at me being online all night. If Bioware would have announce a free month for 50s, yeah, I'd have grinded out the the last couple levels. If I didn't make it, my fault. They didn't do that though. The free month should have been based off of subscription time, plain and simple. You have 2 ways to resolve this now. A) Give EVERYONE not 50 a free month right now as well. B) Give EVERYONE not 50 a free month when they hit 50. If you want to see a good system for rewarding long time subscribers, go check out how NCSoft does this for City of Heroes. Their Vet Reward System (it changed last year to some other name) did a great job rewarding players for every 3 month (additional character slots, badges (aka titles), special abilities, costume pieces. Bioware, your choice of words "one of our most valued players" that leaves me with two thoughts. Who's your most valued? and Horrible choice of words. You could have gotten away with it had it be a "congrats on hitting 50!" You dropped the ball there. This is the first time I've considered leaving the game...

Thanks for the quick response everyone! Guess I'll just have to make sure I like my character

I've tried searching these forums in a futile attempt to find a thread (really...where is the thread/post search option on these forums!!!) stating whether or not a character's appearance can change after creating them (not armor or weapons, but hair, eye color, etc.). There are dead thread links found in Google, but searching posts is not worth the effort it appears. Anyone have an answer? Seems like there should be a way to alter your appearance 40 lvls in if you decide you hate the hair your toon has rather than recreating a character. Thanks!