This article misses a substantial part of this entire issue.
Love it or hate it, the initial statements for Old Republic online was that there were not going to be any LGBT relationships in ToR. Indeed I believe they even went so far as to say "gays do not exist in Star Wars" at one point which got a certain amount of attention at the time. There was a huge uprising of a fairly small minority and it's supporters and eventually Bioware consented to doing it some time post launch.
There was never any promise of making "equal time" content similar to what we had for straight romances, or bringing it to the forefront in the same way, merely that it would be given a prescence and some usable companion characters that could potentially go that way. Nor was this ever promised as a major feature, or any kind of development priority, though it was taken that way.
What I think of homosexuals aside, understand that this was one of the stupidist things ever. All arguements about "wanting to be represented" aside, what we got here was political pressure to make a company develop content it didn't want to create under duress. Not a good move, when Bioware was arguably one of the biggest allies so called "Gaymers" had, developing such content without any prodding or duress on their own, which is what the gay rights community actually wants. Once you start forcing people (or trying to) that's when you build resentment and backlash of the sort we got here for a while.
With the game itself in trouble the continued QQing about the "promise" to create this content which the company didn't want to build to begin with, and also created several game balance issues (namely the companions each character gets and the options they present are fairly balanced set vs. set, adding more characters to the mix without creating issues for certain characters can be rough, especially if you don't want them to effectively just function the same as existing companions and bring their own abillities and gimmicks to the table), I don't think the LGBT community won many points here for priorities, or has really understood their actual relationship with Bioware on this. Forcing someone to do something is not the same as them doing it on their own.
At any rate, after all the pressure, Bioware produced some token material, which by all reports is half hearted, despite the massive pressures on them to just keep this game alive. Surprise, surprise, the LGBT community is not happy with it because it isn't their dream "Star Wars Slash MMO", and admittedly less than they were promised, but of course the realities have changed since then, and this was always at best a "nice to have" as opposed to a development priority.
The point here is that regardless of what side of the fence your on with the whole issue of gay rights, this was a rather ham fisted and stupid situation right now that revolved around a sense of entitlement, and forcing a friendly developer to produce content it didn't want to simply based on the fact that it had been friendly to this type of material before. Expecting things to work out perfectly under duress is pretty bloody stupid to begin with (with pressure like this, you can't expect much except for a gesture), but to complain about the results when a game is facing what ToR is... that's kind of beyond the pale.
Honestly while people in the "Gaymer" community touted this as a victory, to be honest I kind of felt it would turn out this way whether ToR faced problems or not. People of course dismissed me because I'm hardly pro-gay, but it should be pretty easy to recognize a dumb move by a movement whether you agree with that movement's goals or not.
Who knows, maybe the LGBT community will get the content they want, but right now I think the priority for actual fans of ToR (of which I am not one) should be on the survival of the game as opposed to content for a minority of people. To be honest I think "Gaymers" are more interested in seeing the content included due to the pressure, than the survival or health of the game because of the statement and victory it represents. It's a trophy, even if it goes down with a sinking ship, and contributes to the weight (via divided development) dragging it down.
To be honest I'm kind of reminded of "Star Wars Galaxies". SoE did indeed get around to developing and releasing the content where you could fly your spaceship around on planets. You could go flying by and see players down on the ground, and even use the ships in city battles apparently though nobody was doing them when this finally launched. An awesome development, equal to everything that was promised, delivered as a gesture when the game was already doomed and going down in flames. At the end of the day if you get a lesbian version of Nadia Grell or whatever it serves no actual purpose if the game itself dies a week or so later.
I don't play ToR myself anymore despite once thinking it was going to be the most awesome thing ever. That said if you want the game to survive and want this content, my advice to you is that instead of making some huge statement of dissatisfaction over the content on on Makeb, you should go and buy a ton of Cartel Coins.
Hell, I'll go one further, for those who read this far. If I was gay and wanted this content badly, I'd work towards saving the game. I'd establish a website, make sure everyone knows it exists, and then collect donations from the LGBT community (if they truely enthusiasticlly support this) and use it to buy Cartel Coins or Code-Cards in bulk (probably the codes for coins would work better). I'd make a huge show over giving these coins away to players in contests and such throughout the game, in doing so making it clear to both the players and Bioware that homo and bi- sexuals were investing a lot of money in saving their game as a community. That would make a powerful statement and encourage Bioware to more enthusiastically create content than demands (equality, they've done it before, etc...). If you could find a trusted leader to collect the money, and the community is as big as implied, even people chipping in a couple of bucks here and there could make a big impact as a group.
That's my advice, like it or not. Become an undeniable positive influance on the game and it's survival in a time of crisis rather than another group of complaining voices.
