That would be yours truly, and it had nothing to do with how bad the game we were currently playing sucked.

Blizzard is thinking about doing their own vanilla server? I was not aware of that, thank you. Not that I would engage it, but if true then I stand corrected in my discussion with @CKNORTH.

I have to disagree with you on this. Story rewards should be easy because (unless there are grammar or comprehension challenges involved) a story itself has no level of difficulty. Gear rewards on the other hand correlate to overcoming the difficulty level of a combat scenario. The more severe the difficulty, the better the gear rewarded. Gear in a MMO is a right of passage that should be earned imho. Randomly and promiscuously handing competitive equipment out to characters as an "easy button" shortcut is what solo mobile and tablet RPGs do.

Yep. There is no tweak they can do to Galactic Command that will make it anything other than the low-budget solo Facebook RPG RNG booby prize in a box system it is. What sucks even worse is that it will soon be a plague that spreads through the entire game: "CXP for all areas of the game is in review – as some players experienced with the Planetary Daily Areas, increased CXP makes us happier, so that’s our plan for all areas throughout the game and will coincide with A Traitor Among the Chiss update." The game will sink or swim with Galactic Command, its RNG Galactic Crates (they renamed them from Command Crates hoping we couldn't tell the difference ... same pig, different lipstick) and Command XP. We are no longer playing Star Wars The Old Republic. We are playing Star Wars Galactic Command. I wonder how many will leave over it once the name purges have been completed?

Whoever hired that guy to come out here and castigate people should ask for their money back.

Thank you #1,586,218 for setting the record straight. Then try some of this ... http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=172162

Hopefully that would give them direction. Something they haven't had since Dallas Dickinson and Daniel Erickson were shown the door. Fat friggin' chance though. It's all about minimal investment now.

I would buy in (the same $150++ I spent on the pre-order CE) and pay extra (another $100) for the later non-critical QoL improvements like collections sorting and appearance tabs.

So what you're saying is ... my wife and I aren't alone?

My wife and I are playing WoW right now (BABB ... bio and beverage break & so she can marinade the mahi mahi I'll be grilling in a few hours). And as much fun as we are having questing through the expansion together to reach Argus, all we can talk about is how much Bioware ****ed up SWTOR.

Perhaps it's because the feedback they are looking for has nothing to do with the feedback players want them to pay attention to.

My wife and I started our own small WoW guilds (one on each side) with RL family and friends, which makes the game amazingly fun. But even as a solo player it is still fun for gamers who play MMOs on their merits and don't speed level through everything. Unfortunately the newer generation of gamers want everything handed to them yesterday with minimal effort. For them, MMOs (or any game with long and expansive exploration and progression paths) are just too much work. With the emphasis on work. They look at it as a War and Peace-sized novel and go "screw this, where's the 10-page graphic novel version?" Oh, that vanilla WoW server is unsanctioned, and participants are subject to having their Battle.net accounts locked if discovered.

It was a large part of what my wife and I spent 4 years doing together here. That and playing through story together, which neither KotFE nor KotET allows us to do. (If we want to watch each other play it sure as hell wouldn't be in a video game.) So we each have played a character through to Odessen and haven't touched anything else in either expansion other than a couple of star fortresses and Uprisings (which were cookie cutter stupid) leaving us with the original progression game - which no longer exists. We loved the original progression game. Leveling and gearing up through each planet could be played so as to mimick progression through the entire game in microcosm if we wanted to. Class & planet stories were the leveling game, H2s and H4s were the elder game, and flashpoints were the end game. If you couldn't finish something you simply got another level or two and came back with better gear for you and your companion. Planet custom gear and mod vendors were staples, as was boss farming ... and we could do that for every planet. And it wasn't even mandatory. Players who wanted to skip all that and just level through story could use their CC stipends and buy XP boosts, or use the XP boosts they received as mission completion rewards. Level syncing everything, making all planet heroic 2s & 4s solo H2s, turning all planet flashpoints into either solo indestructible jeezus droid facerolls or bolstered and kolto fortified level cap tacticals, as well as removing the game's loot tables and replacing them with Alliance crates and token H2 mission completion blues killed that - literally. Progressing through the MMO game on its merits is no longer possible. One of the most amazing and fun things we used to be able to do was hit 50 then turn the HMs into a 2-player + companions mini-end game to compliment our guild's Ops. It usually took until the end of Makeb and it's elder game to be able to complete them through Lost Island. A player could spend months on a single character and their companions doing it, and the available companion build combinations meant it never got old or boring. A huge benefit to this system was that it taught players ability progression, gear progression and field awareness in complicated scenarios. No part of this game imho was more challenging than 2 players having to both play their character and micro their companion through "don't stand in stupid" in a HM. Which made them assets instead of 'tard liabilities once they reached end game. Our guild had competitions among 2-player + companions groups to see who could complete a leveling flashpoint or HM the fastest. We even had a leveling flashpoint, HM and Ops adult beverage party night once a week for customs farming fun and player mentoring. Sadly with the demise of this system came the demise of our guild. Now the game caters to the players whose idea of a challenge is opening a command crate, deciding on which appearance set to wear, or how fast they can blow through levels just to reach an end game that's been recycled twice, or 16 chapters of solo exclusive story we can't even play through with a friend. "Defenders of the faith" are all too happy to get in the faces of those who would pay extra to be able to do all that again and see it returned to the game as an instanced option. Even though others having that option available to them in separate instances would have zero effect on how they play, complaining mostly about how creating more instances would deplete the amount of players in their instance. Which I find to be rather narcissistic since most of the players who don't want it brought back are "just leave me alone" solo players anyway.

Dallas Dickinson and George Smith too while you're at it. Daniel & Dallas were shown the door for exactly that reason ... they disagreed with EA's desire to turn Star Wars The Old Republic into Star Wars The Cartel Market. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk "retiring" was the end of the individual class story era. Daniel Erickson and Dallas Dickinson "leaving" was the end of the MMO era. All were casualties of myopic vision changes that came from the top. The top of what is anybody's guess.

WoW for some good old fashioned casual leveling dungeon and raid farming ... something we can no longer do in this game.

A hard earned lack of respect one might add.

Similar EA knee jerk reaction to the bad press SWTOR received at launch. Had they stayed the course, not caved in to the Internet water army by adding a gazillion servers coming out of early access, and told their player base straight up what was coming in 1.2, we would be playing a truly amazing Star Wars MMORPG right now. They had over 2M players out the gate ... meaning at $60 to $150 a pop they probably came close to recouping much of the game's outrageous $200M development cost with initial box and DLC purchases alone - even before they started in with the subscription model a month later. EA made their money back long before the Cartel Market was ever introduced. Suits got greedy.

Right next to the plaque that says "**** 'em ... they'll want what we tell them to want and like it because our customer conditioning program is second to none." Blizz never killed off WoW's leveling game or recycled anything that came before an expansion because they were too lazy to add new expansion content. Other than Cataclysm changing the world maps (as well as adding a bunch of new zones along with it), a player can go back and play the entire game the way it has always been played. It's called veteran player retention. If Blizzard had done to WoW what BW has done to SWTOR starting with KotFE then WoW would be nearing death too.

1998 for Bioware with Baldur's Gate. For SWTOR? July 31, 2009. Was a victim of the summer 2011 server hack which saw 18,000 accounts that were carried over from the original Bioware / Neverwinter servers get breached. As a result the original accounts that got breached were disabled and migrated to the new Origin servers in June of 2011, which reset their original SWTOR community member numbers. So June 16, 2011 became my new SWTOR start date.

What's it to you if someone enjoys kicking back, sipping an adult beverage and roflstomping everything? How would a separate non-level-sync'd instance (which is what the poster stated) effect your level-sync instance's game play?

So the few times you guys come out of the closet and mingle with the player base talking about bringing back the good ol' days, you ask us for feedback on bringing back, what ... cosmetics? Is this what the game has come to? The Sims Online in a Star Wars skin? Why don't you guys play fair, come out of the closet and mingle with the player base talking about bringing back the good ol' days of SWTOR the MMORPG and ask us what we want for returning progression and loot systems instead of returning costumes and decorations? Or are our progression and loot system discussion choices limited to the failed Galactic Command tablet solo RPG RNG grind? Speeding a pig up to run faster through the pig pen doesn't change anything ... it's still a pig in a pig pen. Remember last December?

The beauty of this thread? It shows just how many haters there really are, like ... almost none. Which means the masses who are critical of the game aren't haters ... just players who want a better game.

If they can't fully return this game to its MMORPG roots, then any MMO with Bioware's or EA's name on it is dead to me.

They were taken out because Bioware went el cheapo on us ... substituting a single-pipeline one-size-fits-all RNG crate drop system for real game-wide MMO loot tables. That's not a reason, that's a lazy excuse.

Or simply return what was taken away and give us new stuff and new content. I can't figure out, when we are genuinely presented with choices, why so many are compelled to choose a side. Why they limit their "wish list" to what they think Bioware can (will) and can't (won't) do ... or can and can't afford.