i've been playing 3 characters now. I managed to avoid monotony easy. With every char i made a little space combat, a little pvp, the main story and about 1/4 to 1/5 of the side quests. Every new char of mine does this, and when it commes to the side quest i always make the ones i didn't before and even if i repeat one i watch out for it to be a completely different class like bounty hunter/sith warrior. In that way the dialog changes make it feal like it's been a long time since i have taken this quest last time. If you explore the planets a little on the side, gathering crafting mats or datacrons you'll see that you can lvl up different chars without it getting boring. ...so it's not like a singleplayer game, to those who say just the first char is interesting to lvl up...

"This are the ideas you are looking for" I used to be better at this, but then i took a forcepush to the knee...

at the fleet outside the cantina

OMG CS:S and WoW Arena. That's a really bad reputation for a reviewer. I myself played CS from 1.5 and must say that i stoped playing CS when CS:S came out, because it was so bad. In MMOs i've played UO, Ragnarok, DAoC, SWG, Lineage (1 and 2), EQ (1 and 2), EVE online, BountyBay, GuildWars, LotRO, WAR, CoH / CoV, WoW, Rift, Aion, AoC, a bunch of free MMOs. Most of them i've played since beta. I've seen the release days, i've been in uncountable hours of queus waiting to play. Skipping Conversations: Seriously ***. I've enjoyed them since the dawn of Games that had cutscenes. I spend hours talking to people in Gothic and i've listaned to every story i could in kotor, dragon age and mass effect. If you skip the cutscenes to lvl faster you're in the wrong MMO. There are a lot of MMOs with a boring story, where you really don't have to care about reading the wall of text and you can only press on "accept quest". I suggest you go review one of those... -TOR- Has a great story for every class. Some are more interesting, some are less, but all of them are better then the storys of most MMOs PvP: Ok first of all, WoW Arena? Comparison of D!kc sizes? You simply cannot talk seriously of a skilled PvP in a Geargrinder like WoW. FFS take a look at my personal two PvP favorites DAoC and Warhammer Online and DO NEVER PUT WOW AND PVP IN THE SAME SENTENCE. -TOR- The PvP is at it's beginning on TOR. You can't really talk a lot about it at this point. But still, knowing the SW universe i think that Huttball is an awesome idea and i love it, even though i play a Sith Marauder, wich under 30 is pretty sh!iiy when it comes to PvP (it rocks on 1vs1 though). Give it time. Quests: You can lasso Dragons all you want, after doing it a few times that becomes boring too. I don't think that bioware is stuck in the 90s with that (And you obviosly haven't played MMOs in the 90s). Bioware is one of the best Devs ever. They gave us Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic. Before you can ever dare to judge such a dev team as Bioware you should add a lot, and i mean A LOT more game experience to your repertoire but WoW Arena and CS:S. -TOR- I think the way most sidequests are done are acceptable. They could be better, but they could have been much worse, judging from other MMOs. The main quests are just awesome in the typical BW way. You could alsomst say this is like a Mass Effect Online (It doesn't have enough dark side light side influence to be a KotOR online^^) All in All: As a reviewer the most important thing to know is that IF you copare two MMOs (wich you shouldn't but thats on you) you can never compare a game after 6 years of releasedevelopment with a just released one, thats just stup!d. Compare it to the game TOR will be in 6 years... -TOR- There are a lot of things the devs couldn't put in the release version, but are currently working on it. Plus, nobody should challenge the potential of Bioware, Electronic Arts and Star Wars combined in one game... Thats all i have to say to such a review p.s. Companions are just pets? I wanna see you romance your felhunter as a warlock...