To be fair BioWare inherited WAR. And then did everything in their power to kill it and make sure that it didn't come back from the dead.

But they killed classics and the graphics are beyond dated.

Check out Dominus. It's not DAoC 2 but they're trying to make it a sort of spiritual successor. Also it's SciFi.

PvE Only Stat lines. You have the base stats where the gear is balanced with the rest of 50 gear and any excess stats go under the PvE Only Column. You then make crafting 50 gear viable and also provide tokens for people who solely PvP. And you make all that gear balanced, you're just providing different avenues for players to gear up. The problem with that system is you need meaningful PvP because you lose the gear incentive to drive people. And SWTOR's PvP is among the worst in the genre right now.

I played on DC, the servers ran fine for almost everything but Forts and superzergs (hundreds of people on each side). And many of our fort crashes were intentionally generated by Ruin stuffing that pairing with lowbies and banners.

That's funny, because my unbuffed Demo Round (7th Tier 15s CD) reliably crits for 2500-3k. But if I properly setup, ie. hit the target 2-3 times with a Grav Round, it easily crits for over 3k. The spec relies solely on Grav Round for everything, so it's obviously intended. Want to maximize Full Auto damage, spam Grav Round for procs. High Impact Bolt? Better spam Grav Round 5 times if you want it fully buffed. Full Demo Round damage, got to hit the target 3 times with Grav Round so they're fully debuffed. It could be better, or more interesting if we were provided with more tools and relied less on Grav spam. But even sitting there spamming, we drain Ammo relatively fast, especially during attempts to burst a target. On top of that, it is a cast, so you see it coming and can potentially interrupt it or our ability to recast it for several seconds (then we get to sit with our thumbs up our asses unless instas are up or we want to get locked into hammer shot animations). And we're easy to spot due to not being force users, not having stealth, and being slightly more mobile than a turret. Also the class has next to no escape mechanisms, the snares are bad and the knockbacks don't fling people that far away.

0 Can developers please stop thinking that PvP instance grinding is a good idea? Grinding the same 3 instances for 15 minute intervals is terrible and boring by the 5th hour, let alone days or months later. Also, I would sacrifice a goat or a lesser guildie if the lag, FPS, ability delay, and 5 minute load screens could be fixed (don't say hardware, I see plenty of complaints about the same thing from people w/ a top processor/ vid card / 8-16gb of RAM). Ilum may be the most poorly thought out "PvP Zone" I've ever seen. Let's make a map where the entire point is to run around the map and fire missiles at things. There's no real capture or control mechanism, everything is just there to be chain capped over and over. Making dailies about kills or a resource at one point isn't going to change the fact that it's an isolated ghetto that they're trying to hide PvP players in and that there really isn't much to do in there. Then there's the resolve system. If you time it right you can cram 3 full length stuns in before triggering a white bar. The balance of PvP right now is who can bring the most stuns. There isn't any strategy, just chain stun until the target is dead or has a white bar, then wait for the rapid decay on immunity, rinse and repeat. And finally, there's the gear grind. Another game where crafting anything other than pots is useless at 50. Where you're forced to grind the instances to maximize the chances of getting your gear faster. And it's mandatory since the gear has a ridiculous PvP stat (defense and offense). Whatever happened to suiting up once or twice once you hit the level cap and relying on skill. Or having an alternative PvP skill system for as you rank up, rather than a gear grind. But I guess that would require a meaningful and well thought out PvP system, not some mini-game slapped on so you can advertise that the game has PvP. I didn't expect much from the game's PvP, but this has managed to be worse. And the problems are built into the core of the game, so there won't be any major improvements in the near future. Maybe enough to raise it to a 2 or 3. I think BioWare would have been better off not including PvP since it's more of a single player game anyway, or at least they shouldn't have attempted to market the game as being viable for PvP.

Great, another game of endlessly grinding for a crap stat that will be inflated over time in a futile effort to outpace the ridiculous growth of damage/defense/abilities needed for a tiered PvE system. It seems like it would be easier to put PvE only statlines on PvE gear a la DAoC. But I guess that would remove the only goal that instanced PvP grinding has. I was hoping that with orange gear and cypertechs we might finally break that cycle and go back to needing only a couple of suits over the course of the game's life.

The PvP MMO genre isn't dead. Planetside 2 is entering beta, Battle for Prime/Dominus (whatever they're calling it) is in and out of beta, people are swearing by GW2, and there's even that Korean MMO in development, ArcheAge.

1. DAoC 2. Warhammer 3. WoW pre-BGs, roaming WPL/EPL, TM, STV and Gadgetzan For all it's faults, Warhammer was probably the best PvP game out of the current generation of MMOs. The biggest balance issue was when AP bugged out and everyone had a near infinite pool, and the fact that it took over 6 months to fix with Mythic's ridiculously long patch cycle. If they had fixed cities in a timely manner or added any new worthwhile content, I think the game would have aged better. I'm only curious as to whether it was an EA decision to maintenance mode the game after LotD or BioWare just deciding to ignore it after being handed control of Mythic.

No MMO/game will ever get it exactly right, too many varying tastes. Many like meaningful PvP in the form of RvR. Others like arena/instance grinding for ranks and epeen. Still the 2 games I see touted the most as being the pinnacles of PvP are DAoC and Planetside (before they were ruined by expacs). Most hardcore PvPers seem to loathe WoW, and yet MMO after MMO continues to clone the 1v1 faction setup and PvP instance grind. Probably because it's easy to design 3 crappy instances and slap them on then to create a meaningful system with well designed zones (ie not WAR). As a PvPer, I had fairly low expectations for this game. Instead I bought it as a time filler, and have mostly played it like a single player Bioware game. But I've still PvPed because it's there. The current PvP is terrible. They would have been better off to ship the game as a pure PvE game and maybe add PvP later so that no one would care or get their hopes up. First off, the UI is an unresponsive abomination. You can get away with it in PvE for the most part as PvE is usually slower paced. It is near impossible to tell what is actually going on, targeting and tracking is FUBAR, and well good luck trying to get abilities to fire off correctly. And where the hell is my combat log, SCT sucks for anything other than seeing I just got whacked for a mess of points. Lag/FPS/Warzones. I've had some fights out in the open, and they were a little fluid. Still suffered from the UI issues, but some of that could be overlooked. But in warzones the combat feels like fighting in a tar pit. If the near pinnacle of PvP in this game is 3 warzones, the least they could do is make them run more smoothly. Balance? Starting to see the imbalances now that people are hitting 50. Also seeing Bioware made the same pitfall that all new games seem to make of loading up too much damage and survivability on certain classes. I guess the days of glass cannons where classes had real upsides and downsides are gone. But this is also the issue with primarily PvE games where high damage classes need survivability tools for when they pull aggro. Yeah, it's a new game, it has bugs, it has design issues, it can be fixed via patches, so on and so forth. It's a broken record, I hear the same thing at the launch of every MMO. And every time people rise up to defend said game and claim it'll get better, we should **** (leave in an unkindly manner) and the game will be better off without us. How well did each of those MMOs do when players left en masse because of the issues and the perceived indifference of the devs to address those issues?