Me: *Works 60 hours last week, at a job which I love* Office: *Enjoys a 3-day weekend* Me: *Files back into the "virtual" office on Tuesday morning, refreshed and recharged and ready for a 4-day workweek this week* Automated pop-up message from IT: "Due to your excessive hours worked last week, and per recommendation by your colleagues, you are required to take a half-day away from work. Please click 'I understand' to lock your computer." Me: Ok, fine, I guess I'll do something in SWTOR. SWTOR: "We are currently undergoing maintenance". Me: Fine, I'll play my other game. Other game: "We are undergoing patch maintenance." Me: *Insert string of expletives here* ------------------------------ For the record, I knew this mandatory half-day off was coming as early as Saturday. Still, I kinda wish I could play SOMETHING while waiting out my "mandatory rest period."

Well, despite today's...hiccups...I have finished the upgrades to my car and am wrapping up my micromanagement in a separate game now. Your mileage may vary. Maybe I'll start that load of laundry I never started...

Usually, for most MMOs, there's a login (or authentication, depending on the technical lingo used for that game) server and the game servers. If there is a large amount of logins to a certain game (whether naturally or by more...malicious...means like DDoS attacks), the login server will usually crash/have issues. Over at World of Warcraft, almost every weekend, there is almost always an issue with the authentication/login servers, so while players trying to get in to that game would be having issues, players already in-game would not be affected other than maybe zoning in/out would be a little bit slower. That said, considering Star Forge alone was having the issues, I doubt this was a login server issue and more likely an issue specifically limited to the game servers. Though what it ended up being, it seems only God and BioWare will know...

Just as a heads up, looks like they are now restarting the US servers, as now Satele Shan is down alongside Star Forge. Hopefully, these restarts work...

For the record, mine is showing green up arrow as well, even after refreshing a couple times. Read into that what you will... Edit: And only just now it changed to red down arrow. Very strange bug, whatever ended up being the cause...

Y'all can officially blame me for this grand mess. I've got to stop teleporting back to fleet right as companions are about to return with crafting mission results.... Good news, though. I can finally finish upgrades to my car, then do that load of laundry I keep putting off...

Blame me. I had just finished my one repeatable mission (courtesy of Rakghoul Resurgence) I needed to get 100K CQ points for one of my toons this week, then teleported back to fleet while also having 4 crew skill missions about to become due. I take full responsibility for this mess. On the bright side, at least I now can finish the "upgrades" to the car I just bought.

As I prepare to head for bed, here's a Bounty Week meme for y'all, both to give you a laugh and to call attention to a fight that honestly makes me go "What are we thinking here, BioWare"?: DX-3 Troubles Good night, fellow SWTOR forumgoers.

There is plenty of incentives for solo peeps to go through story flashpoints. For one, you don't have to rely on group members to complete it (outside of a few fights which are known to be bugged (e.g. Malgus in the new FP) or suspected to be bugged (e.g. Revan being level 38 in a FP where everything else is level 36, Assembler always being in Repair Mode in Directive 7, etc.)). Also, the blue Isotope Stabilizers that you get for every "main boss" you take down can either be used in crafting, or can sell for a not-insignificant amount of credits on the GTN. The gear, once deconstructed, can also net tech fragments and sometimes other stuff that you can trade in for high value stuff you can either use or sell on GTN (and if you find a Legendary Ember when deconstructing, the GTN value would instantly put a free/preferred account over the credit cap). And also, if you're like me and want to kill everything in sight, a story mode flashpoint is the way to go. Most of the time, vet or master difficulty flashpoints (which require a group) turns into a "stealth run" where the express goal of most players is to stealth your way to each boss, kill the bosses, and only fight mobs/trash if there is no other option (which is why some other MMOs require players to clear a certain amount of mobs/trash in addition to all bosses before awarding completion credit for a particular dungeon/flashpoint...at least for some high level/high difficulty dungeons/flashpoints).

First of all, OP, the name is NOT "offensive", BioWare just copied and pasted too much of a standard Customer Service reply when alerting you about the name change (sadly, a lot of Customer Service replies related to actions taken against accounts/characters are too often copypasta that may or may not answer the question...not just that, appeals of account actions almost always lead to more copypasta and a closed ticket with no way to reopen the issue). HOWEVER, the naming rule you did in fact break was you can't name your character the same name as a celebrity or other real world person with significant weight (Jennifer Lopez falls into this category of "banned names", as a quick Google search will tell you). Which is why, as much as I wish otherwise, BioWare is in the right here. TL;DR You did in fact break naming rules, HOWEVER, BioWare's email didn't do a good job explaining the naming rule broken (most likely a copypasta of a standard forced name change email).

Very much appreciated. Time for my guild to lock horns with those guard droids on Voss/Quesh...sorry in advance to any pub players who may be caught in our "mini-rampage"!

There's a dozen threads up about it already, but I do agree with the OP that BioWare should keep us better updated in regards to this bug. They posted that they were aware of the bug here on forums and on their Twitter, then about 24 hours later they tweeted "We appreciate your patience while a fix is found" or something like that, then...silence. If they simply wrote a post and told us "Any rewards affected by this bug will be awarded to players once fixed", players would feel a lot better about playing the game/completing objectives (and while I'm not a server dev, I would like to believe that if BioWare gave this assurance and players started playing somewhat normally again, BioWare would have a better chance reproducing the bug cos as rewards get "eaten", there would be an erroneous line(s) of code somewhere in all that data sent back to server techs which, ideally, will lead to the "A-HA!" moment.). But without that simple post, players (rightfully) fear that any rewards falling victim to this bug will be gone for good, which is only going to add to the collective bad taste in player's mouths following 7.0 launch. People will only tolerate a bad taste for so long before they move on.

To the OP: First, I understand your frustration, and can sympathize with you in regards to "unfun content". In fact, I felt the exact same way when I tried to do Galactic Starfighter for weekly POs back in the first season (although mine had more to do with people hate-mailing me ugly messages following matches cos I was "disturbing the sanctity of GSF"). Eventually realized the harassment and hate mail was too much headache to be worth it (I think I had a forum thread up about it several months ago) and decided to give up doing GSF just for the Weekly POs and use my overabundance of Cartel Coins to collect all 100 levels of the first season. I will say, though, that not only do you not have to complete every Season Objective every week/day to hit level 100 before Galactic Season 2 ends (especially if you're a subscriber), I will also say that right now is a really good time to take a break from Galactic Seasons for a little bit, considering there is a bug with Galactic Season rewards that is currently resulting in a noticeable drop in subs/number of players online.

Yep, I'm not even going to host a guild event (that I previously planned) to complete certain weekly season objectives without a dev post stating that a fix has been found/in testing, or at the very least, we get reassurance that any galactic seasons rewards falling victim to this bug will be retroactively granted if/when a fix is found. I will admit, I would only be mildly disappointed if I missed out on GS rewards, but I also recognize some folks put more value towards GS rewards than I do.

Sub player chiming in. 10 Underworld Syndicate Plans fell victim to this bug. While I am disappointed that we still have no attempted resolution or even a simple "We will retroactively grant any rewards players missed out on as a result of this bug" post from BioWare, I also can't say I'm surprised that something like this came up, especially after the entire maintenance yesterday concluded over 2 hours ahead of schedule. Am I going to complain about servers being available ahead of schedule when it comes to server/patch maintenance? Absolutely not. However, in my several years playing MMOs like this one, I've found that when scheduled server downtime concludes more than an hour ahead of schedule, there is almost always an ugly surprise waiting for both devs and players within 48 hours of the end of maintenance that requires either immediate troubleshooting or emergency/unscheduled server maintenance. So while I was happy that the servers came back up over 2 hours ahead of schedule yesterday (which allowed me to knock out the Swoop Bike weekly on one of my characters before I had to go to appointments and then be the victim of "helicopter supervisor" at work for the rest of the day), deep down, I had a sinking feeling that something like this was going to pop up. And before you ask, no, this whole situation of "major annoyance popping up shortly after a faster-than-expected maintenance" isn't limited to BioWare, almost every MMO game out there (even MMOs like World of Warcraft!) has dealt with a similar situation at one point or another.