To be honest, a lot of us started off with No Force. Then we went to Neutral or pre-set force powers, and went on from there.
The thing is, once you learned everything you wanted more, until you'd learned all the abilities in the game.
Now I'm not saying I'm the #1 JA player in the world (far from it, I know quite a few people on my server that can beat my ass easily), but you get the idea.
The JK series has a high learning curve.
I think you'd like Siege then, because for the most part you are only given a few force powers or a few items and weapons to use for your class. It's actually quite a good way to learn the game (even though many would see it the other way around... you learn everything first, THEN play Siege with what you've learned).
In Mysteries of the Sith I found the classes an excellent training tool for the same reason. Learn how to survive with a certain set of abilities, then branch out.
So I wouldn't be intimidated by it, but maybe save playing Jedi Master until you are... well, a Jedi Master.
Holocron could be similarly intimidating, unless you're lucky enough to get the cubes of the powers you're good at.
I figure by allowing all powers and weapons, you allow people to develop their playing styles, rather than forcing them to just use one style (as the sabers only, no force servers tend to do).
One thing I insist upon though is that we use default Force Regeneration. That's forceregentime 200. This is the default that Raven (tried to at least) balance the game with. A lot of servers set it to 0, which means that your force regenerates completely in like 5 seconds. This leads to massive spamming of saber moves and certain powers. It essentially makes the Dark Side overpowered as you can spam lightning and drain all day long. You can push people around, pull away all their weapons, etc. And oddly enough spamming is one of the top whiner complaints!
The reason this is so widespread is that mods like JA+ for the longest time set Forceregentime as 0 in their "sample" cfg file. Since this was the default, and most admins are lazy, they all used it. Many in fact complained in the early days (which is probably why he chose 0) because they didn't want to wait for their force to regen. They'd spam powers, run out of force, and then cry about it.
I admit that for testing purposes, having your force all regenerate in 5 seconds is handy... it makes mountain climbing a lot easier. But in combat? That's like having infinite ammo! It's very silly and unbalancing. Now certain parts of the game use faster force regen, like two of the Jedi classes on Siege Korriban (the Dark Jedi Heavy Weapons and the Light Jedi Tech), and the Jedi Master in the JM mode, or someone who grabs a Force Boon in FFA/TFFA. But those elements are ruined by forceregentime 0 when EVERYONE has the ability to regenerate that fast (though apparently the Force Boon still boosts your mana in this mode, so that it all comes back in 1 second, instead of 5!).
Anyway, suffice to say that bad settings ruin a lot of servers.
Another thing we use is SaberDamagescale 2. This means saber blades do 2x the normal damage. Let me explain a little history before anyone freaks out...
When Jedi Outcast was released, in multiplayer the sabers were DEADLY. This was done on purpose. See, in MP you have ranged weapons, and despite the fact that the saber can block a lot of them and you can push away certain projectiles reasonably well, guns are still major advantage against sabers. Why? Because running up to people and slashing them is a SLOW way to get points. In MP you usually win by killing the most people/destroying the most stuff. You can do that way faster with guns than with sabers, and you don't need to be so close to your target to do so. So they have to give the saber some advantage to make up for that imbalance.
Thus the sabers do mega damage. One or two solid hits and your target dies unless something extraordinary is going on like they have shields or Force Protect on. And incidentally, Jedi Knight and Mysteries of the Sith also adopted this philosophy (well, technically you had two swings, one did light to medium damage, the other did heavy damage, capable of killing in one hit).
In Single Player by default the sabers did light damage, unless you used a cvar to change that for "movie realism" but anyway, that's irrelevant to MP.
Then the whining began. The whiners raised a HUGE fuss with Raven Software over the deadly sabers. They complained because they wanted to have "duels" (in the duel game mode or during saber challenges in FFA... remember the "honorz" faction? they were starting up around this time). These guys had played the single player game with its long drawn out saber duels, considered this to be "just like the movies" and wanted the exact same thing in Single Player. The fact is with Deadly sabers, Duels were somewhat short (though I'd argue that if both people are reasonably good the duels will last much longer than if it's just two noobs bashing away at random).
At first Raven Software issued a patch that made the sabers incredibly weak. This pleased the dueling purists, as their duels now lasted at least twice as long as before. Being as this is the only type of game they played, they couldn't be happier.
But the rest of the players, who actually used the saber in other game modes, where other types of weapons were also present, this was a huge problem. As I said above, it takes too long to get kills with your saber, so unless you're role playing being a Jedi for kicks, you're going to lose against skillful gunners. Now I would argue the developers did not intend for the MP player to use the saber exclusively. That's why they provided multiple weapons. There was a secret mode called "Jedi Vs. Merc" added in the last patch that forced you to either use sabers or use guns, but it wasn't anywhere near balanced and unsupported. Anyway...
In the last JK2 patch they made it so you could simply change the saber damage to your liking. The default or any multiple you wanted. So you could make the sabers weak or strong. They specifically recommended if you wanted long duels, use 1, if you want normal damage for non-duels, use 2 (or 3). This is the reason we use 2 in JA MP!
In fact, I actually think it makes duels fun too, because there is that "sudden death" element. And if people are waiting in line to fight anyway, why would they want to wait one second longer for their turn? I mean, unless they're just professional spectators.
In JA they retained the ability to change the damage, and in fact they supposedly made it "auto select" so that in duel mode it was automatically set to 1 and automatically set to 2 for non-duels. But through testing I'm not sure it always works that way. In any case the setting overrides whatever the defaults are in each mode. So you can play every mode with saberdamagescale 999 if you want to.
But I think a lot of servers either used the default or set it specifically to 1, meaning saber usage in non-Duels was discouraged (unless they made it the only weapon). Sabers only CTF was extremely silly unless you upped the saber damage.
Now I want to clarify one final thing before someone raises another common objection. The saberdamagescale cvar does NOT apply to "nicking" somebody with a blade. See, in JA, you can pass your blade (not swinging) through a person's body, through their head, whatever and they take NO DAMAGE. In Jedi Outcast pressing a saber blade against somebody did a "pulse" of damage, 5 hp per second. This was more realistic. In JA the "dangerous blade" was turned off by default, but it actually did continuous damage (1 hp per 1/5 second pressed against somebody). So you can nick somebody, but it will only do 1 hp of damage typically. For comparison, kicking somebody to the floor does 2 hp of damage. This is unaffected by the damage cvar, so you need not worry about touching somebody and melting them.
Likewise Saber Throw is unaffected. Many objected to Saber throw in JA, because it does random damage, vs. JK2's which did I think about 80 damage every time (might have been 60, I forget).
Finally, SaberWallDamageScale is a seperate cvar. So boosting the saber damage won't make it so you can melt through walls too easily in Siege. I keep this on the default, because Jedi are powerful enough (in the hands of a skillful player) as it is!
So don't let all that intimidate you. We aren't biased for or against sabers, we're just giving the saberists a fair chance against gunners, and encouraging people to use the saber to complement the other weapons in your arsenal (the right tool for the job at the right time). And duels aren't absurdly long so everybody gets a chance to fight if they want to. I feel this is in keeping with how the developers originally intended the game to be played, and I think it's pretty fun this way.
