ETA on Advanced Class change?

Your assertion that levelling a character is trivial actually weakens your argument against allowing AC swapping. If it is such a trivial matter why not allow players to bypass it at a small cost of money rather than time?
As it stands 'F-2-P' and 'Preferred' players have enough character slots that they could take the time to level up alts of both ACs with no additional expenditure, the option of AC swapping may be attractive to such players meaning they would also make a financial contribution to the further support of the game.

The time I spend on the forums tends to be the time I can't access the game, commuting, lunch breaks, etc. Oh and I have levelled 2 more Alts to 55 while this thread has been active. I like playing through the class stories, I realise that's not for everyone.

Sometime before never

Really? Let's see:

Quote: Originally Posted by DanielErickson
Inside each one of those, we treated those as a full class



As I said, the devs have stated that they treated each AC within a story line, or base class, as a FULL CLASS.

I keep seeing this topic pop up, and I simply can't resist finally adding my opinion.

No. If you want to play a different class, then play that class from it's humble beginnings. It's that simple, to me. The Advanced Classes are different classes. Take a Jedi Knight for example. The Advanced Class Guardian wears heavy armor, while the Advanced Class Sentinel wears medium armor. The have different weapon types or numbers, wear different armor types, have different skill trees, and play completely differently.

Obviously this is just my opinion, and everyone is entitled to one. There are far too many things I would like to see the developers focus on (more guild functionality, more RP functionality, more content) than to create an Easy Button for people who are unhappy with the class they chose to play.

One of the original quotes was from this Developer blog back in the early days:
http://www.swtor.com/blog/community-qa-feb-10th-2012

I'd argue that the 'Fundamentally different class designs' is flawed, not least because ACs share many core abilities but because there is as much variation in play style within the specialisations of a specific AC as there is between the different ACs themselves.

A Powertech Tank (Shield Tech) is a 'Fundamentally different class design' to a Powertech (Advanced Prototype), but such respecs are considered fine.

Maybe I'm just from a generation that actually earned what they wanted and didn't just put their hand out expecting to have it handed to them. Maybe I just believe that some things should remain in the "have to be earned" category and not the "give it to me and give it to me now because I want it and I don't want to have to work for it" category. Maybe I think that people and companies should stop catering to the lazy, entitled generation.

The cool part about this being OPTIONAL, is that a purist like yourself would have the ability to continue leveling other toons your way.

AC's are not different "Classes", no matter how much you want to pretend they are. The AC's share the EXACT SAME CLASS skills and even share a skill tree. New armor or weapons is no reason not to allow this.

And your point about "unhappy" players is spot on...this would allow those players the opportunity to see if the alternate AC might make them HAPPY players. Where you would like to invest 2-3 months, I would prefer to see them invest $10-20 and ENJOY the game for those 2-3 months.

It's an old style MMO mentality and one that the market has generally deemed unacceptable. Pretty much all of the future MMOs I can see are adopting the Hybrid subscription model that allows players to decide whether they want to spend time or money to advance their character.

And I don't think it's lazy people who would be most likely to use an AC feature -I think the lazy folk are more likely to stop playing altogether- but those with limited time constraints and a desire to play more endgame content than levelling another character.

Does it REALLY take 2-3 months to reach max level and gear out an alt? From what I have seen on these forums, people have managed reach max level AND be raid geared it in under a month, and that is playing very casually.

Even if that player has SOOOOO little time to play that it takes 2-3 months to reach max level, then so be it. Besides, if they have that little time to play, then why be concerned about playing a class you don't like, when you're almost never playing anyway?

Since that generation is going to be their largest group of customers usually they must cater and If you don't like that then stop ******** about it cause it ain't gonna change. With modern technology more people are becoming "lazy" as you put it due to more people wanting instant gratification. They are not truly lazy they are merely impatient. If they were as lazy as you claim they likely wouldn't even complain about it because they simply wouldn't feel like it. Are people who use the skip to max level in wow lazy? No they're impatient cause after you've gone through a leveling process that can take a month or more there is simply less meaning to it.

I play fairly frequently a bit more than the casual gamer and it still takes me at least a month to get to max lvl on an alt and about as long to get raid gear. Many people who nigh consider themselves casual are actually much harder gamers than they think and also there is of course the exaggeration factor in those times.