The ranking system is not going to effect your in game assets in anyway so this is a moot point, we are not adjusting your weapon loadout or adding any more customisation to that loadout as a result of the ranking system.

I'm not sure what conservatism you're talking about inund8, but the reason we don't have Lightsabers in this game has nothing to do with Noobs, it has to do with the fact that the era we are dealing with in First Strike had next to no Jedi around, and we are concentrating on the common grunt on the frontline of the Galactic Civil War.

And as far as appealing to more people by adding more maps and vehicles? What do you think we're going to release with 1.2? Just the ranking system?

Of course 1.2 is going to include various new maps, new vehicles, and even new gameplay types.  As far as the timeline of our maps goes we are concentrating on the Galactic Civil War era, which basically means the original movie timeframe, but we may look at things that happened prior to Yavin or after Endor, but primarily we are talking Rebel vs Empire. Once this already vast playground of source material has been mined, then and only then would we perhaps look at dealing with other eras such as the prequels or the New Jedi Order or whatever, but that is quite a ways off yet.

Hope this helps clear some of this stuff up.