It would be nice to see that Luke kicked some butt :p

The word is [i]canon[/i], not [i]cannon[/i].

I knew it was canon and not cannon, but then thought, why bring that up, I knew what Project meant and I'll just keep it going, for someone was bound to say something about it :)

There's always one :)

It's not currently canon but there are "legends" where training sabers exist. These were built for "younglings" for the purpose of learning to wield a lightsaber without loping off ones own arm, or head, or whatever appendage have you. Basically these would burn and sting and potentially blister and char but would be useless for cutting open Tauntauns in the middle of the night. And of course some training was done with sticks, but as we see with Yoda and the younglings, in the scene where Obiwan admits to losing a planet, the younglings are quickly transitioned away from sticks to something much more like a lightsaber. It's very possible that many lightsabers come with this "sting" setting as a practical matter. You never know when you're going to have to give your saber to a Gungan so better have a "safety" on it. However, that "art" or practicality may be lost post purge. So while Obiwan's and Anakin's saber still have this feature (allowing Luke to train on his own without losing a limb) Luke may not have been able to figure out that feature or seen the need. Clearly whatever his knowledge of lightsaber construction, it is lost on Kylo.

I'm gonna stop rambling here cause I could literally wax a star destroyer without stopping this train of thought.

Actually, now that I've been thinking about it, all you need is what amounts to a "variable power output circuit" in the design, such that you can vary the intensity of the plasma blade. That way, the blade doesn't need to be running at FULL POWER full time. Instead, it only uses enough power to confine the blade to its intended shape (which in air ought to be relatively low power so you're not igniting the world with megawatts of waste heat) and then it ramps up the power consumption based on what the blade is in contact with (including other lightsabers, hence the sparky noises). If you've got a self-regulating variable output like that, it then becomes (*ahem*) child's play to introduce a limiter in that circuit which will prevent the power levels from getting automatically ramped up into wounding/amputating levels ... basically a "training" setting.

The reason why you'd want that is because the blade of a lightsaber is effectively weightless ... meaning that ALL of the weight is in the tube in your hand, which is a very important thing to learn and grow accustomed to when swinging a weapon like this around. How a weapon is balanced makes a very big difference in how you wind up using it.

Grimfox wrote:

It's not currently canon but there are "legends" where training sabers exist. These were built for "younglings" for the purpose of learning to wield a lightsaber without loping off ones own arm, or head, or whatever appendage have you. Basically these would burn and sting and potentially blister and char but would be useless for cutting open Tauntauns in the middle of the night. And of course some training was done with sticks, but as we see with Yoda and the younglings, in the scene where Obiwan admits to losing a planet, the younglings are quickly transitioned away from sticks to something much more like a lightsaber. It's very possible that many lightsabers come with this "sting" setting as a practical matter. You never know when you're going to have to give your saber to a Gungan so better have a "safety" on it. However, that "art" or practicality may be lost post purge. So while Obiwan's and Anakin's saber still have this feature (allowing Luke to train on his own without losing a limb) Luke may not have been able to figure out that feature or seen the need. Clearly whatever his knowledge of lightsaber construction, it is lost on Kylo.

I'm gonna stop rambling here cause I could literally wax a star destroyer without stopping this train of thought.

Truthfully, I still feel that aspect of his saber (his terribly crafted saber being the explanation of it) is gone. The newest movie made it feel like it was more just a choice to make a more threatening lightsaber versus just poor design imo.

Of course, the simplest training saber is... a stick.

[img]https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--zM4tz_5p--/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/v8admwem3ialhxvdxkeu.gif[/img]

also known as Lumber, Handheld, Improvised, Mk. I

The MMO in that show apparently tends to park characters whose players live close to each other on the same servers.

Maybe we should offer that option? There's plenty of GeoIP tech laying around these days. :P

(P.S. We probably won't because we're a lot more worried about stalking and other antisocial behavior.)

Fireheart wrote:

Also, won't there be just one main server?

In the sense that there's a unified space in which characters exist, so you don't need "server transfers" and the like. And hopefully we'll have a test "server" in this regard.

Practically, there's still going to be a bunch of computer "servers" under this umbrella, and there will be some mapping from that to "shards" or the like that is player-facing. A shard would be able to handle some number of players, and so long as that limit isn't reached, your character should be able to move to that shard if you want.

And I think there's some form of "phases" thing that sits on top of that, where some shards are PvP and some not, and some have limits on alignments present, and so forth.

These are plans, of course, and the details will change as we discover what we can and can't do.