I think a fair compromise is rather then simply design instanced content for 40 players, design content in the open world that encourages/demands loads of players to charge into to succeed. For example, in Final Fantasy XI they had "Campaign Battles" they were epic war like battles between players vs an evil npc army of monsters that were out to conquer the world. In the "Northern Regions" the enemies were so powerful and the content was so popular it was common to be fighting in groups of 30-50+ players all forming parties, working together, moving together, healing, tanking, buffing & fighting together. It was massive and it didn't require guilds to spend hours organizing. Any player could just log in and teleport to an ongoing Campaign Battle and fight massive war like battles that sometimes went on for hours, complete with Bosses that took 20+ people to down, and sometimes even that wasn't enough, along with Endgame gear. An other example would be "Besieged" some what similar but was less frequent then campaign battles. There it took 100+ people just to stand any chance, sometimes that wasn't even enough. Once I was in a Besiege with 700 players all fighting in the same zone. The Bosses of the enemy could easily take 100+ people to down alone. Most of the "normal" enemies there took like 10+ people to kill each. And it was all accessible to any casual player who just happened to "show up".

Can't help but "LOL" at comparing FF XI's paper thin story and mountain of mindless mob grinding to TOR's hundreds of hours of content. Especially at launch but heck, add in all three nation storylines, Zilart, CoP, Aht Urhgan, And Wings of the goddess and your still left with less content then TOR at launch. Just because BW wasn't lazy/cheap enough to force players to grind off the same mobs for month after month with no story/purpose or any semblance of content, doesn't mean there was more to do in FF XI. And just because gear doesn't take years to gather like XI doesn't mean it had a deeper endgame. Heck XI didn't even have endgame until they released the Zilart expansion one year post launch. And that was just one zone, "Sky". Moral of the story: Mindless cost cutting time sinks /=/ "Things to do."

I don't know about the other servers but on Jung Ma I do see little RP groups going on here and there at random times. Mostly in the cantina's. Always interesting when I pass by one. It's been picking up a lot more lately.

Yeah I was quite surprised to see tanks lvl 40+ who don't even know they can just step to the side and completely dodge enemy AoE's. I mean as early as the lvl 10 flashpoint the boss teaches players to dodge AoE's. How are they STILL not knowing how to play by 50?!

If you really did read the book

Final Fantasy XI had 6 man parties, and I do miss the dedicated "support" classes like Bards, that were even more highly valued then tanks or healers. That being said I think BW was right to reduce the party size. Makes getting people so much easier. Though it came at the cost of more specialization it was worth it in the long run. I do hope maybe they'll release a class committed to "Support" in the future though.

LMAO same here. I hated her for trying to kill me constantly, I mean, sure we're both Sith but she doesn't have to be such a jerk about it. My light side Inquisitor couldn't resist the urge to stab her.

Compared to other MMO's SWTOR's story is in a league of it's own. Compared to RPG's it's o.k.

My typical experience when partying up every week as well. Sounds to me that the OP is just complaining about having a negative experience. Every MMO has them. There's nothing any developer can ever do to "protect" players from bad players. Doesn't matter what MMO or what grouping system it uses, your gonna meet rotten people. It's called the "Internet". Your gonna have plenty more if you insist on staying. Key is to not let it get to you and move on. Not simply complain every time it comes up.

When can we expect full face masks + hoods to be shown at the same time?

I just barely got him. Haven't even landed on Taris yet and I'm already sick of him.

Two major things I miss from beta that got taken out suddenly, fully moddable gear. I mean completely, every gear, green, blue, purple. Fully moddable, you could get away with looking any way you wanted, when ever you wanted and still be effective. It completely destroyed any need or desire for an "appearance tab". Many in beta considered it to be the greatest method for gear/appearance customization ever invented in the MMO genre. Then one day Bioware suddenly decided to take a sledge hammer to it. /cry The other thing is Mask + hoody combo. Hoods are cool, masks are cool, Hood + mask = AWESOME SAUCE during Beta! Once I had it I never wanted to go back. Bioware in their infinite wisdom took a sledge hammer to that too...

I just smiled when my Sith Inquisitor earned light side points for slowly lighting to death an opponent who was helpless and begging for his life. Yeah...that was the light side choice. I enjoy it. Fact of the matter is while it may be extreme it 100 times better then the Republic stories. On the Empire side a side set of missions have you learning the dark ways of the Darth Revan cult...mean while on the republic side players are busy fixing sewer pipes. Yup. Sewer pipes, every Jedi's dream come true. If you don't have the heart to handle the empire story lines there's plenty of non morally upsetting sewers and farms to save for the republic.

Funny thing is that very theory was brought up in the game for the Imperial Agents Story line. * Spoiler Alert *

Yeah the Dev's know fully well when they made a certain method more efficient then players would naturally go for it. Unfortunately actually hooking up with players for a variety of content...is NOT an effective way to earn social points as so many people who are social and tackle group content throughout the lvling curve end up lvl 50 with social rank 1. It's be nice if heroic's on each world gave an equivalent amount of social points automatically. like 30-40+ each based on difficulty, since there's 3-5 heroics per world. That would give a worthwhile amount of social points without pushing everyone towards repeating the first flash points over and over.

In beta they let players keep the hood up while wearing head gear like masks and helmets. The only problem was that you could often see the head gear cliping through the hood but personally I was happy with it. I'll take minor cliping issues over no hood + helm combo like we got now. Revan looked epic when he had his hood + mask on. Now he looks so weird...I hope they fix this soon because the Hood + Mask was the most epic look in the game for characters while it was still in.

Everyone's talking about it on Tython today. I started up Jedi Knight there and there are earthquakes everywhere. In one cutscene an earth quake triggered 4 times. Sometimes I see falling rocks from the sky as well. It's like the world is ending there.

Over a month and 50+ critic reviews and still not a single negative review among them. The worst scores are 7/10. 90%+ of them are 8-9 scores. Pretty much as I expected since early beta. But no it's a "failure" and all the reviews from every corner of the internet were all bought in some massive unprecedented gaming conspiracy to hide the truth. /rolls eyes. The desperate things some people say.

Yeah over lvling is fine. If you get too far ahead you can just focus on your class quests until the world quests catch up with you in their lvls. Bonus series quests are actually nice because if you lvl an alternate class then you can shake things up by doing bonus series and out lvling the next worlds quests that you already did. So your not stuck repeating all the same quests you did with your first class.

When reading the OP it reminded me of this comic http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/16 Your not alone.

Yeah this is pretty much the only reason I ever bother with cover as an operative. Get on one of the ledges in Huttball as the enemy runs towards you and you can put in decent damage before they even notice you. Especially if their caught behind the flame pit and can't advance for precious seconds. Unload on the sucker. It's useful for survivability in PvE since enemy shots that hit your "cover" do 0 dmg to you. So I often jump behind cover when I know I'm in for a tough fight.

The problem with earning social points while lvling is that friends/guild mates/people in general are spread out and can't repeat world quests. So it's much more difficult to get people together and farm social points outside of the flashpoint via normal quests since people are at different points vs simple repeating the same single flashpoint over and over. If they made it somehow possible for higher lvled players to earn social points by helping low lvls with their world quests, that could help a lot. Even repeating heroics doesn't give social points sometimes if the party is formed after people already accepted the quest. And even when they do give points it's a pitiful amount for the time investment.

what possible benefit is there for a bot to just run around and not fight?

You mean besides the multiple Rp-Pvp servers that are already up?

I got the exact same card but unfortunately would only get 15-30 fps even with low settings. Until the latest patch. It seemed to have improved the fps and I was able to raise the settings and get a solid 30 fps 95% of the time. I think the problem is the game itself rather then my set up as I can handle MMO's that are considered to have state of the art obscenely high graphic requirements and games like Battle Field 3 on Ultra settings in 64 player maps with no lag. That MMO I mentioned took a few months post launch before it could be "optimized" properly and got my game running smoothly on high. I'm thinking the same will be for SW:TOR. By March my FPS problems should be resolved I hope.