I would like to start this post by saying thanks to everyone for the long and heartfelt conversations about this hot topic over the past few months. It is an issue that is very passionate to everyone involved. We have been reading the boards, reading email, listening to people who spoke with us and have had many discussions internally.

It has been agreed that the development team should revamp the Jedi system.

This process is going to take some time, so it will happen in several phases. The first phase is to make some changes (where possible) to alleviate some short term discomfort with gameplay. The second phase will be to rebuild the Jedi system to be quest-oriented; and to include the familiar elements of Force Sensitivity, Jedi-oriented quests, as well as many other elements the developers and the community feel should make up the process of becoming a Jedi. (It should also be noted that players who have put in work towards becoming a Jedi will not lose their effort. Some sort of recognition of players' efforts will be included in the new system.)

The first phase is for short term and those changes will appear in Publish 6. They are as follows:

• The permadeath system is being removed and changed to a skill revocation system based on deaths.
• Deaths will decay from the death counter after one week.
• Deaths after a buffer (3 to 5 depending on advancement) will have a skill revocation penalty.
• Skill revocation will be slight at first, but will increase in penalty as the player accumulates more and more non-decayed deaths.
• The skill revocation penalty will increase as a player advances up the skill tree.
• The skill to be revoked will be randomly chosen from the last skill earned in each of the 4 skill branches.
• No more than one skill will be revoked at a time, though players can get to a state where they lose a skill each time they die.

This is all of the information that is available at this time. As additional developments occur, we will post more information.