Flamethrower (as a PT) and Ravage (as a Jugg) were two of my favorite abilities because they looked and felt powerful to use. I don't play either of those classes anymore, everything else just feels like I'm dancing around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbTyTyizz1s

You might want to keep an eye on The Repopulation. It's supposed to have a crafting system heavily influenced by Star Wars Galaxies, which, for all it's other flaws, had the deepest, most immersive crafting system of any MMO that I've ever seen, even beyond that of EVE Online.

Agreed, this is a big problem for me. I think the game is having to iterate through all of your schematics for some reason, perhaps multiple times, as it seems to be noticeably worse on my characters with more schematics. At the very least, whatever scripts are run when switching characters is now doing more than it should and doing it very inefficiently.

It goes for all of the custom Trimantium gear in armormech as well. They crit with MK-7 augment slots. The orange Shock-Dispersing level 54 schematics likewise crit with MK-7 augment slots, while blue versions of the Farium Shock-Dispersing armor crit with MK-10.

You act as if every other multiplayer game out there has this option. Very few do, and fewer still MMOs. The reason being is that MMOs require people to type other names often, compared to other games. If I see someone in the world, I'm only going to see their character name. How can I send them a message? They haven't typed into chat or anything where I can link directly, nor do I know their hidden character ID. This is why MMOs generally stick with unique names.

They didn't say every possible thing everywhere in the game would be completely 100% unique. An MMO is going to have some sort of timesink. That's simply the way it is. It's good for the game and it's good for the players. If you could blow through the whole game in 40-60 hours like you can most single-player RPGs, then you would be left with absolutely nothing to do until the next content update. Players eat up content like little kids in an ice cream store. The game needs something that can be repeated to provide continuous rewards so that there is something for the players to do. If those rewards are too big, then players get everything they want too quickly and become bored. There will always be something repetitive in MMOs.

Long term buffs are a design to make characters more powerful when grouped. Without the legacy perk, you only have your own buff, but when running around with other people, you are stronger. Sure, there are other ways to accomplish this, such as passive group auras, but buffs are commonly understood and have been around a long time. The out-of-combat heal, while yes it could be automatic, still requires that you remain still and channel for a few moments so that you're not just instantly healed the moment combat ends. This avoids scenarios where, most notably in PvP where combat is not maintained by NPCs, a character could break combat by kiting and just passively heal to full very easily.

First off, no MMO will ever be as popular for WoW. A big part of WoW's success was timing and the fact that it was based on an already incredibly popular franchise. At the time, MMOs were just starting to become well-known and video games in general were becoming played by a larger audience. A generation of people that had grown up with video games were in or coming out of college and just entering the workplace and there were new generations of people starting to play. The stage was set, with a large audience receptive to video games available. The time was perfect for a blockbuster hit. The key factor was a game that would appeal to everyone and Blizzard used their video game line to deliver just that. It continued to become more popular and increase in subscriptions because after the initial hit, it was simply the game to play. The number one key business decision in World of Warcraft was appeal to the masses. However, by now the video game market has grown immensely, and there is a lot of variety in games available. The video game audience simply is no longer aligned to the point where a single hit will attract everyone. Now, to comment on your bullets: 1. Sharding or separation of servers is simply a performance thing. There is no way to support, from either the server-side, or the client-side, a scenario with hundreds and hundreds of people in the same place at the same time. The number of objects that need to be processed and textures to be rendered is simply massive in games these days. Dark Age of Camelot could potentially have a lot of people in the same place on relic raids, but I don't know anyone who had a PC that could run one smoothly. And DAoC even had separate servers themselves. Add on to that all of today's graphics and textures and additional objects and components and it simply isn't feasible for the client to do. You mention EVE online, but even their servers can barely support 2000 people in the same system, much less on the same grid. The recent burning of Jita event put that to the test, and they had to specifically tweak the servers to allow more horsepower to allow it. 2. The trinity is all about game design. You have no idea what you're asking for when you say to make everyone DPS. If everyone is DPS, then the variety of fight mechanics becomes very much limited. You can no longer have mobs that hit super hard because the DPS need to be able to accomodate for that. If some DPS have more healing capability than others, then they will have an easier job of handling themselves, and balance becomes far more difficult. 3. Factions are also about game design and lore. There is nothing inherently bad to having more or less factions, static or dynamic. One way or another, players are going to form their own groups. Having those groups built into the game from the start does not fracture the playerbase any more than not. 4. Leveling is all about putting time into a character and developing them and watching their progress. There's nothing bad about levels; it's simply a measure of a character's relative power. Granted, levels mean less and less in games with a level cap, but continue with equipment progression, but there it is not hurting the playerbase like you're suggesting. An RPG is about developing a character. If all characters enter the game at a point relatively equal to others, then it's no longer an RPG.

It may sound crass, but personally I don't see a problem. In the past, DPS have almost always had the capability to deal more DPS than the tank could compensate for with TPS. To deal with this, the DPS learned how to judge their damage and throttle as necessary. If you're having to throttle to the point where your overall DPS is comparatively low, then it could be a problem, but just the fact that you can't unload with 100% isn't necessarily a problem in-and-of itself.

So you're playing a burst spec and you're front-loading all damage buffs and cooldowns and then complaining about pulling threat?

Unfortunately, this isn't an open RPG where you play the role of a character that you create, but rather one which follows the story of a character that has already been defined in the world. And that character uses blasters.

Advanced Prototype, on the other hand, is just the opposite. Heat management is minimal and I can almost fully use Flame Burst as my filler without concern for heat with the seldom Rapid Shots thrown in. However, AP doesn't have as much mobility or that burst capability to really go into a burn mode when they need to like Pyrotech does. I think they did a good job with the PT DPS trees. The playstyles are very different and have their own feel and benefits to them.

Do you also have a level 40ish+ Inquisitor character on that server?

Sorry bud, you're trying to mislead people with what you're saying about FFXI. While you could technically change your class in FFXI, you still had to level up each class on its own. If you were a level 30 WAR (Warrior) and wanted to play a BLM (Black Mage) instead, then yes, you could go to your Mog House and simply change your class (BLM was available at the start, but many classes had somewhat involved quest chains to unlock them). However, if you had never played BLM before, then you would not be changing to a level 30 BLM, but rather a level 1 BLM. In effect, FFXI was no different than TOR. While you could technically change classes, each different class still had to be leveled independently. Therefore, the only difference from the FFXI system is that you kept the same character (name, race, inventory, etc.) between classes, where on TOR you use a separate one.

Do not speak about what you do not understand. While the other poster was incorrect in that some FFXI jobs are able to solo their way to high level, it is completely moot in the grand scheme of the game. Only a few jobs are able to do it, BST, RDM, DNC, PUP, and maybe one or two others, and of those, you still need subjobs available. FFXI is not a game where you pick a job and then level to max. If you want to play a job, you have to level up that job. It doesn't matter that my WAR is 75, if I want to play BLM in a group, I'm going to have to level it up from level 1. You don't just level up once and then respec. You level up every single job separately. And going back to those that can solo? Yeah, only one of those is really of any use in a group, RDM. Of the others, DNC is ok, but the rest are generally outclassed by other jobs in a group situation. Soloing is simply what they do. Of the older generation of games, there has always been a very small subset of classes that have the capability of soloing. In DAoC, Necromancers and Bone-dancers could solo level, but few others could at any reasonable rate. That doesn't mean that you can just login and take whatever you want to go solo. You always had to setup a character specifically to do so.

Of my MMO experience: SWG, DAoC, FFXI, WAR. None of those are gear grinds at all. In SWG and DAoC, a lot of the best gear (at least until later expansions in DAoC) was made by crafters which was purchased and put to use in PvP. In FFXI, some of the best gear was crafted while others were dropped from various bosses or dynamis or other large group dungeons. One goal of the game was to get the best gear, but there were a lot of other things to do which required better gear to participate in, so the goal alone wasn't the goal. In WAR, gear was sold by vendors or won from lottery rolls as you participated in PvP, so it was essentially given to you as you participated in the focus of the game. The problem, as I see it, is that in themeparks games such as this, having the best gear is the ultimate goal in the game, therefore everything that you do to reach that goal is a grind. In other games, the gear was simply a means to allow you to participate in the ultimate goal of the game, which was other content (FFXI) or PvP (SWG, DAoC, WAR). The gear rewarded by the current top raids in WoW, SWTOR, Rift, and other similar games has no purpose whatsoever until the next level of content is released and even then, it's not necessary to have collected the gear from the previous content. This was not always true for WoW. During Classic and BC, simply beating a raid was a real accomplishment on its own merit and the gear obtained from a raid was often needed in order to be able to beat the next boss in the same raid all the way up to the final boss. This gave something for players to work toward as they progressed, but it is not the case anymore as there are fewer steps between gear levels, so it's easy to get the gear that is one step below the best, which is plenty good enough to kill all of the bosses in the top raid.

You're going to have to go a lot farther back than that. The ability to reduce your level to certain point was one of the defining, key features of FFXI and was a central component in a huge amount of the game.

It may have been about a year in, but WoW certainly did have transfers available while still in classic. I used them.

A Pandaren was in WC3:TFT. They're not a brand new idea.

You understand what these articles do, right? The editor asks the author to write an article about SWTOR or some such. So the author finds the forums, reads a bunch of threads so that he's in touch with the general opinion, and then writes an article about what he read. Then, to complete the vicious circle, people find the article and post it on the forums as truth that whatever they think is actually happening, which other authors then find and cite as sources for their own, similar, articles. It's exactly like the XKCD wikipedia strip: http://xkcd.com/978/

Actually, 80% of high-sec PvP is RvB, which is very active small-gang and fleet PvP. Most of everything they use is T1 frigates. Go look it up. Not to mention tackling will almost always be done in a T1, and you can get a T2 scanner pilot very quickly afterward if you want to go down that path, or work on more weapon skills and move into cruisers. The problem with new players and EVE is that the ones who complain are the people that want to be told what to do and how to do it, rather than being given the opportunity to do whatever they can.

I think WoW took the questing note from mission terminals in SWG. Those didn't give experience, but they gave you a static camp of enemies to go kill to improve your combat skills and were pretty much the standard means of leveling combat skills. Those missions were very generic NPC "bounties" that were assigned from a mission terminal. WoW simply took that idea to the next stage, providing a bit of story along with them and disassociating them from terminals. DAoC did have quests, but they were few and far between and could not be used as the primary means of leveling, at least not until Catacombs.

Sorry, but that argument fails. No, you can't fly a Titan in your first month, but it doesn't take years before a character can be a very effective tech 1 frigate flyer. That encompasses 80% of high-sec PvP and you can run many level 3 missions in a frigate, so you just unlocked a huge chunk of the game right there. The older a character is in Eve, the more different things they can do, but it doesn't take long at all to do a handful of things well. That being said, this game is not Eve. Stop asking for it to be Eve and just go play Eve instead; I still do and I enjoy both.

Hear hear. Exactly my thoughts as well.