116: Hyperdrives are actually just large speakers. If they turn on one of John William's scores, the ship reaches FTL immediately.

.... I did -not- say Gosh Darn.

Maintenance is terrible, though. Devs just about break the game in that window. Sure, all the bads are smoothed out in a few days, but... Goddamn. Whenever GF goes down for maintenance, it's prolly best to go hide until everything's fixed.

My queen happens to enjoy watching me play - primarily due to her derived enjoyment of frustrating the hell out of me with peanut gallery comments during dialogue sequences. Once she gets her desktop set up in here we'll both be playing together within arm's reach. That said - neither of us neglect each other. If anything I get into trouble because I'll forget about how early I have to get up in the morning, and I'll end up with naught but a few hours of sleep. I tend to gain an insane amount of IRL darkside points when I only get a few hours of sleep.

The odd thing for me is that there are a surprising few differences between the Republic and Empire that solidifies my allegiance to the Republic. They both war, they both kill mercilessly, and they both have a faction of force-users justifying their own means of slaughter through some kind of ideal. However, the Empire sanctions slavery - I rabidly oppose it. The Empire is xenophobic to the point of it being hilarious. The Empire also liberally supresses freedom in exchange for security. No-no in my book. The Sith have no qualms with killing innocents, eating babies, or pursuing power for the sake of power. Lots of moral deprivation and emo kids up in there. The Republic's ideals of democracy and freedom present a challenge to their government that will never perfect itself, but they've kept trying after tens of thousands of years. The Republic welcomes all aliens, save for the hostile ones. The Republic does not sanction slavery. The Jedi kill, and war, but for different reasons. Whereas a sith will war for the sake of conflict, as per their cultural encouragement, a Jedi will war to keep said Sith from affecting the peaceful lives of the civilian populace. I align myself more with the Republic, even though there are quite a bit of things I'd change in it. My char is a considerably altruistic Dark Jedi. Objectively a bit of a fusion between Spawn and The Punisher in terms of his operational "boundaries" (a.k.a. few). As such I find myself raking in a great deal of Dark Side points when the option of killing someone who'd just be imprisoned and have needed resources wasted on is available. I have also gotten quite a bit of flak for it. TL;DR bottom line: Play your character the way -you- want; ****-all to the lot of them. If you want courtesy and kindness, avoid the Empire. They'll talk down on your kindness, and try to act as antisocial as existentially possible. (From an RP standpoint, of course. I'm certain quite a few of you Imperial players are nice people.)

If you're playing Republic, then I'm mildly surprised. If you're playing Empire, then here's the clarification: Empire vastly outnumbers the Republic players on just about every server I checked out. Grotesquely. This not only means there's a higher chance of bumping into a cocksocket, but there's the factor of "Empire is teh darkz and badazzes," so you'll get quite a few wannabe-stoic-awesomeness emo morons who fuel their desire to slash their wrists by talking down to newbies. Regarding the Republic, however, I'm yet to run into a douchebag of any sort thus far, and I've played on my server since EGA. There's the occasional illiterate shrew, but no degenerate little *****.

As I'm sure has been mentioned before, a great deal of Jedi players are going after an ROTJ Luke Skywalker look, with the sleek black robes and whatnot. I'm on mostly the same boat, only I'd like the wardrobe to be significantly more broad in terms of the color palette. A great deal of the robes I see in-game for Jedi Knights and Consulars look great for the standard Jedi or Consular who prefer the earthy browns, and tans, and burnt oranges and stuff. The only issue is that the standard Jedi character isn't all of us. Some of us prefer to wear all white, and I've seen several all-white robes for the Jedi, but no all-black. I've stumbled upon the Warbringer's Body Armor, which has a nice black outer robe, but a sandy tunic that turns me off. When I heard about the Guardian's Maelstrom Chestplate? I **** myself. Ran Taral V until I got the pants and the top. The latter is easily one of the better "black" robes (moreso just robes with black on it), but still carries those disconcerting.. actually, no - it's not even brown. It's a sickly green color. Then comes along the glorious morning and I find a Jedi Myrmidon's chestpiece on the GTM, and I gobbled it up. All-black, with buckle-wrapped chestplates and robe-fit pauldrons, with cool little gunmetal accents on the back of the robe and hood. The issue here, is that the lower half of its' texture is completely garbled and distorted to the point of it being hilarious. It also happens to be one of the only pieces of clothing in the game I'm interested in that I can find absolutely no information on. Suffice it to say, there are the occasional bits of gratuitous black in the game, yes - but I don't feel there's enough. Yes, we're Jedi Knights, not Sith. Yes, we're the good guys (Most of us, anyway), not evil, sadistic, morally-deprived tentacle-faces; but having black robes/armor wouldn't make us look like Sith. We'd look like Jedi in black robes, which is what quite a few of us want. I don't want to look like Darth Vader with the unwieldy cyborg tank-suit, or the Inquisitor with his giant spikey Warlock armor. Just a few palette swaps on pieces of armor. Black fabric on the mandalorian-esque Jedi Knight armored robes? I'd be a happy camper. Solid-black tunic and outer robe? Chuffed to bits. As it stands, however, such items are horrifyingly few and far between. That, and I'm quite curious as to whether or not Dark Alignment gear exists beyond relics, boots, and gloves -- and if so, where any of it is. If there is none, then at least put some black stuff for that madness in. While I apologize for the WOT, this is something that has been on my mind for quite some time, as it's greatly hindered bringing the vision of my character to life. Black is the color of Purity, after all.

Happy Holidays to all of you epic folk at Bioware! The staggering amount of love and effort y'all have put into The Old Republic never ceases to show. Thank you for creating an amazing pocket dimension to dive into. Job well done!

Watching that vid warmed my heart. From what I've played through EGA, y'all've done an excellent job bringing this vision to life, Bioware. May the Force be with you all.

Pre-ordered/Registered October 9th, and I'm in.

Whenever I see a fat sith lord, I can't help but think of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Needs more Hoveralls.

Hmm. I'd imagine the Trooper's PvP is justified. Our soldiers during the Iraq war were forced to do similar due to the suicide bombers and such. People ran up to one of the vehicles? They shot them. Ugly, but necessary in times of such madness. And thusly the case here seems.

For what purpose did Puberty grace us if not to bestow upon a man his true source of power? THE BEARD.

5'7", 147lbs, 18-21 age range. I'm sufficiently comfortable with all aspects of myself as to be considered a narcissist-lite. I'd have it no other way.

This vessel has served me for eighteen of your "years."