I had all but given up on being able to play TOR, at least at first; financially, I just wasn't sure I could swing a monthly subscription.  Well, my best friend is really just the best friend a Star Wars geek could ask for: she's bought me six months of play time.    So, looks like some time in the next week (still gotta scrape together money to buy the game itself, plus free up some time), i'll be logging on for the first time.

A couple questions, my fellow Marines:

1.)  I applied for the guild, I think, back a couple weeks ago, but never got any work from a VEer or the TOR site that I was successful.  What do I need to do to play with you all?

2.)  Help a newb, please.  I've never really gotten into MMORPGs; I don't even have a WoW account.  Take pity on me; gameplay advice would be greatly appreciated (even just to the extent of, "Here are some links to other threads in the Marine Corps forum, silly Trick.").

-Trick

Just log in to the Vulkar Highway server and let me know to get an invite to the guild. The website based guild thing is kinda irrelevant now because we ended up playing on a different server so that we'd be on the server with the CU (FES's guild). The auto-invite feature doesn't work on Vulkar Highway, as a result. Several other people can invite, including all my alts (listed on the player character information thread), Kami, DeepSix, Kad (of course), Jeg and Stormz (if either of them ever log in).

As far as gameplay advice goes, Kad made a thread about some basic tips for TOR in particular, though they apply to MMOs in general as well. You'd need to be more specific for more specific advice. Its pretty easy to get lost for the first little bit, until you get yourself oriented, but if you just follow your quests, you should stay on track.

As far as MMO help in general goes - the most popular titles usually provide their players with a short tutorial of sorts. The starting areas in TOR are great examples for instance. You get pop-up messages every time you discover something new or you lvl up enough to be able to do some new thing. These messages range from the most basic ones like "you move using your arrow keys or you click with the mouse on the world around you" to something like "you press this button here in order to get flagged for PVP or for warzones or for looking for groups to finish certain quests".

As far as TOR's interface goes, if you played KotOR then you can just expect an upgraded version of that. One with a whole bunch of key bindings and shortcuts - some useful almost all the time, others circumstantial and others still pretty much useless as far as your playing styles goes. Most players prefer discovering the usefulness of the skills themselves and subsequently plan their routines as far as regular mobs, elite/champion mobs and other players go. Nothing wrong with researching and exploring what others are stating around the web though - quite the contrary.

I also recall getting a mail form Bioware with some link to a "beginner's guide to lvl 10" - or something along those lines. I think a link to it can be found somewhere on the main site. On the other hand there are plenty of video guides showing how most if not all the classes start out, as well as some of their quests, dialogues, skills. Some of these videos show only the game itself whilst others also come with commentary as well. A few of them are quite good and some also humorous as well, hence the reason why i recommend watching a few if only to get a better idea of what class might better suit you.

Oh, assuming you haven't already done otherwise - make sure you redeem your game code first, then add the 6 months play time otherwise you more or less forfeit the 30 days the game itself comes with.

If you redeem your game code, then add to your game time then you get 30 days (that come with the game) and the amount of time you bought. If you redeem game time codes and then you end up redeeming your game code then the 30 days included in the game overlap with whatever game time you bought, essentially making them worthless. At least that's the case with time cards anyway. Not sure about subscriptions.

BAM.  Forgive the gravedig, but I finally have the game, and several months prepaid.  Let's play!  Y'all still on Vulkar?

Hmmm... I'm pretty sure that's the server my Sith Sorcerer is on!  Will investigate tomorrow!

I'm now playing on an oceanic RP server. I think the biggest issue is the fact that we didn't roll on an RP server to begin with. The majority of gamers on PVE servers generally aren't interested in RP or RP related activities. In comparison, a significant chunk of the guilds on my server make an active effort to incorporate RP elements into the guild (even if they're primarily focused on PVE or PVP objectives).

Some of the problem is, I admit, my fault. Once we were in game we didn't make enough of an active effort to recruit new people. We had a fair number on Vulkar Highway, but a huge chunk of them abruptly quit on us to form their own guild without a word to us before hand.

The characters I've been playing are on Lord Adraas for the most part (I've got a few elsewhere, but not played as much). I've not been around for a few weeks because I had finals and then Diablo consuming my time, though I will make an effort to begin playing more for at least the rest of the summer.

My characters on Lord Adraas are split evenly between the Empire and Republic, and I imagine I'll primarily be playing Kaishin (my Assassin) until such time as he's max level (he's currently about mid way through Hoth). Feel free to friend me. Once we've got a few people on and in game, we can form a new guild on Adraas and look into recruiting - or, alternatively, we could potentially pick a different guild that already exists and join that one.

As far as server moves go, it looks like they're restricting both source and destination servers. Here's the thread that has the (current) list of which servers are open to transfer to/from: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=477706

Of particular note for us are the following:
Vulkar Highway --> Prophecy of the Five  (many/most of us have characters on Vulkar Highway)
Lord Adraas --> The Ebon Hawk

In each case the server type is the same, so Prophecy of the Five is a PVP server and The Ebon Hawk is an RP-PVE server. Lord Adraas is, at last check, one of the highest population servers, and probably the highest population RP server, which is part of why we picked it in the first place. My preference would be to stay there, I think, unless a lot of people are using this chance to head elsewhere, at which point we'd need to evaluate whether it is worth staying.

So, I just logged in to check and Lord Adraas is like a deserted wasteland. It seems that everyone jumped ship and moved to The Ebon Hawk. Given that, when I play an MMO, I'd prefer to play it with other people, it may be a good idea for us to do the same.

When I logged in early (at about 2:30pm, CDT) there were about 35 people on the entire Imperial side of Lord Adraas and about 40 just on Korriban of The Ebon Hawk.

Personally, I think we should move. I'll wait a bit before I do just to get an up/down vote from people, but if we want to ever recruit anyone, it may be in our best interests to join the exodus. Only complication? Possibly losing character names. Yuck.

Sounds good to me. I'll go ahead and move my characters over.

Its a good idea Raziel!  We'll investigate it once we have scoped out the server a bit more!