Personally I agree with the OP, a system where players just earned legacy "commendations" or whatever every time they gained a legacy level and then could use them to buy things they wanted would make far more sense to me.

EQ raiding evolved a lot from the initial dragon raids as well, they were incorporating stages, adds, terrain issues etc within a few years. Personally I don't agree that modern raids are more complex than the sort of stuff that EQ was doing in Planes of Power/Gates of Discord raids - which were all still released before WoW was, and were all done still without in game dps/threat meters etc.

Maybe the fact it's no different to what people are doing in WoW is exactly the problem. Personally I hated grinding dailies and redoing dungeons in WoW, so I never did it - I quit the game. So I've no interest in doing the same thing in another game. But for those that did spend years grinding dailies and redoing dungeons in WoW, the fact that they are now playing SWTOR might mean that they got bored of it and so again, have no particular interest in doing it again in another game. People quit WoW and started playing SWTOR for a reason, after all.

Some of this stuff is cool enough, but none of it adds anything to multiplayer gameplay, which is where swtor is really lacking as a MMO. But yeah, the single player aspect got cooler, that's gonna make all the difference long term.

Exactly, plus - the solo levelling game is already fine, it works, it doesnt need more stuff adding to it.

Yep, the mirror classes don't actually have identical abilities. Differences in things like ability delays due to different animations which can make quite a big difference and give one factions version of a class an advantage over the others.

RIFT actually implemented server "mergers"/character transfers less than 4 months after release. But don't let minor details like that stand in the way of why it's clearly completely unrealistic for SWTOR to do the same.

Thanks for this, biggest surprise for me is that taunt does increase threat even if the taunter is the mobs current target. Which is incredibly useful information to have (slightly surprised that other posters can't seem to see why this is useful to know but there ya go.)

It's unfortunate that this has been your first MMO experience. Please try not to be put off, they're not all this bad - some can actually keep players interested for more than 3 months.

Over the last few days I've noticed there are no "heavy" or better EU servers any more when I've been logging in at around 7pm GMT. Which is pretty much peak time. Only "light" or "standard" population servers now.

Are those "other factors" really relevant in PvE though? All the examples being cited relate to PvP, not PvE.

Personally I think the focus on single player game elements is a step backwards for the genre, not a step forwards. It's moving further and further away from what sold me on MMOs in the first place, which was the emphasis on interaction with other players.

I'd also second Red Eclipse as a lively, well populated PvE server, I rerolled there a few weeks back from a quieter server and it's been great so far.

I've found the same, am now in my 3rd guild on my 2nd server and its the same story every time - I find what looks like a fairly active guild, plenty of people online, yet within a couple of weeks hardly anyone is logging in.

Trouble is the drama etc that non-instanced raid content led to is probably one of the main reasons why all raid content is now instanced. Too many players didn't like the idea of competing for PvE content. I can't see games going back to that approach now however entertaining it was at the time.