Using WAR as an argument for anything but what not to do when making an MMO is silly. Why doesn't he compare DAoC and SWG? Or perhaps Vanguard: Saga of Bugs. Because anyone can make deluded comparisons that seem to reaffirm their point while meaning nothing. DAoC was a successful MMO in the pre WoW era, it's number of subscribers is small only compared to recent changes in the genre - if DAoC was released where WAR was, with the core gameplay untouched and graphics/budget considerations added - it would most assuredly be beating SWTOR right now. Does the poster you refer to know what league of legends is? Or perhaps understand that at it's heart an FPS is indeed PvP? Competitive gamers aren't some small minority - we're not a little niche. We simply haven't had a proper game made for us in the MMO genre since the upheaval of the genre that came with WoW, the two PvP focused games that have come out in this genre that weren't low budget disasters like Fury or Darkfall are: Warhammer and Guild Wars. Warhammer failed so badly at PvP that for the vast majority of it's existence (A few months after release) the majority of development was invested into PvE and PvP was largely abandoned. It had not taken important lessons from it's fore-father DAoC, it was a debacle. Two factions, RvR lakes that failed to do anything borderlands did right while having all of it's flaws - utter failure. Guild Wars on the other hand was successful, but it did not aim very high and set itself up for a niche success with a limited scope, it did little more than a simple deathmatch and queuing system. And while it did them well for the genre - an MMO simply doesn't compare favorably to an FPS or MOBA for such a simple system, only when it comes to world PvP does an MMO have any real advantages. GW2 is more successor to DAoC than WAR was. I don't care for GW2 for various reasons, chiefly among them the resetting WvWvW every two weeks. But they did get the three factions, solid combat and fun sieges down quite well. The resetting however ruins the persistence which is the element I'm most interested in for many reasons. But their world PvP will change this industry for the better once they see how well it works out, the game itself might bomb or not for various reasons, but the WvWvW aside from forgetting persistence is king is fantastic.

Not to mention make it actually competitive. BM vs Recruit isn't even a fighting chance unless the BM is afk or mentally handicapped.

That number is horrendously skewed by by games that are pay to win, rather than free to play and a number of other things - I could easily list a dozen free to play games, but I'll go ahead and list just one for brevity, arguably one of the best business models and most successful of free to play games: League of Legends. It sells no power, only cosmetics and things you can reasonably acquire through simply playing the game. You can play league of legends competitively without paying a cent - because there are other people with expendable income willing to buy things that have no direct impact on you as a player. Only ****** games are pay to win, GW2 is no such game if the shop from the beta weekend is any indication, it's all worthless junk for the most part. I don't even like gw2 and won't be playing it, but the free to play model can be just as effective as it can be evil. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

Which is why these bloody amateurs shouldn't have been responsible for the game? I might not have launched an MMO myself but I've participated in almost every major MMO's launch since Ultima Online - Subscribers per server and play time per subscriber drops after the first few weeks and then drops again after the first free month then drops again after the first paid month - without fail excluding special circumstances like this taken to the extreme which exasperates the problem and sends a handful of servers upwards while the rest plummet further downwards. This isn't a matter of being an industry expert or knowing any insider knowledge or even being particularly intelligent - it's about basic patterns. Unless they thought their MMO was somehow going to smash every single precedent in the history of the genre releasing extra servers was a mistake - doing so without having the ability to merge those servers or transfers characters within a short time period once the initial rush wore off and the extra servers became defunct was also a major mistake. Knowing those things doesn't make me smart, it doesn't make me special - Bioware not knowing these things however makes them stupid and amateurish. Hindsight is 20/20, which is all well and good when there isn't precedent. History: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Or more popularly mistaken for "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it" Your statement would be like me putting coke and mentos together, and being surprised by the outcome when the first hit on any search engine is going to tell me what happens, I didn't need to make that mistake to know what would happen if I did it. Nor did Bioware. But either in their arrogance and confidence, or ignorance and foolishness, they dropped the ball.

^5char

Your arrogance and simplicity aren't very surprising, but they are pathetic. Bringing attention to a problem is indeed how you get it fixed - there are plenty of ways to fix it, they've been gone over ad nauseum, repeating ourselves isn't constructive. The problem is that it's not a priority issue compared to other things, so it's not being worked on at the pace it deserves.

WH/BM relic > Campaign relic. Matrix shard / Proc Relic > Second activate relic. Not to mention if you're worried about taking advantage of the 30 second cooldown on second relic you can swap relics out of combat. I average using a relic over once a minute.

I'm not angry, I just don't have a social contract with strangers on the internet, there's no reason for me to be nice to you parasites.

Playing pyro as a merc is dumb - what does a merc get that a powertech doesn't? A single 8 second mez and a knockback. Enjoy having 60% less armor pen on your rail shot, no pull and no aoe stun. Oh and no 15 seconds of 25% more crit chance.

If by off topic you mean succinct and scathing, sure. It was entirely on topic, saying it isn't, won't somehow magically make that the case. Your reading comprehension needs work. It is this exactly "We need to make this game everything to everyone." idiocy that causes the watering down of the genre and indeed other genres. Rather than creating an excellent experience for a targeted audience SWTOR and almost every other triple A title out there waters down the game and tries to appeal to everyone just enough to get them to play and then uses skinnerian mechanics to keep them playing. When you try and make a game have something everyone wants instead of focusing on providing excellence in a targeted audience you end up a sub-standard game, this industry used to be about making a great game, now it's about making a game that can be greatly monetized. Which is irrelevant - if all you want is a sense of accomplishment because your real life lacks any I suggest you either get a better real life, or play a different genre as people like you are killing this one and incentivizes more crappy clones.

And this watering down to the lowest common denominator is why we get gigantic budget failures like SWTOR that try and make a game that's 'good enough' to retain subs from multiple demographics instead of an excellent, targeted game that provides a great experience to any who wish to partake. This type of thinking is what ruins these games. Go play your simpleton angry birds or a grindfest rpg if all you want to do is roll your face over your keyboard and feel like you've accomplished something without having to put in any effort. I remember when games were made to be fun and engaging rather than monotonous and addicting, and it's this cash grab for 'casual' players and trying to hit every demographic that causes it. Trying to make an MMO that does everything leads to an MMO that does everything spectacularly... badly.

31/1/9, try that instead of 31/0/10, 1 point infiltration tactics more than makes up for a point out of upheaval or psychokinesis

Sentinel has better DPS and better CC and better burst. It also has better utility. Trans beats absolutely everything that the shadow can offer. KC is the only build worth playing as a shadow. I've played all three extensively, I've played against people considered the best on the server for their spec on a myriad of 50s - 7 soon to be 8. All ACs but gunslinger/sniper. I would never take a DPS shadow into a premade of mine unless he was a significantly better player than other DPS classes available. Excluding Commando - commando is pretty junk at the moment for DPS.

31/1/9 is significantly better.

Sure a slow grind is nice... if you hate fun AND only have one level 50. I have 7 soon to be 8 50s. I'd like to actually be able to play more than one of them without being a gimp.

.... ITT people who have no idea how to play Civil War

ITT people who don't realize burst class with defensive cooldown got better when everyone's survivability dropped relatively speaking due to global not class-oriented changes. To you people I have a question: What is it like being dumb? Another fine example of someone who does not understand that even if their skill tree was nerfed, the class itself was buffed relatively due to underlying changes to the game. Let me ask you a question: Do you not understand if the time to kill is lower, that things like 5 seconds of 99% DR and 12 seconds of 25% dr and 50% avoidance, and 30 seconds of 20% DR etc. are all stronger? Hint: Their uptime is a larger % of total time fighting the shorter the fights are, meaning their power is exasperated. I play a sentinel, I understand the tree itself is weaker - but the class as a whole is relatively MUCH STRONGER due to things like higher uptime of the four buffs, expertise changes, etc. Whether or not the mara/sent is grossly overpowered, that's a matter of opinion I'll grant - but don't give me the song and dance how your best tree was nerfed, as if it happened in a vaccum - even if annihilation is worse than it would be if they didn't change it, the REST OF THE GAME changed in 1.2, not just marauder trees.

The bottleneck is networking and the server itself, nothing to do with client PCs. Which is why you read about people "Lagging" with top end PCs.

Suggesting PvE requires effort *snicker*. The only way PvE requires effort is finding 7 other non-idiots to play with, this game is easy - the hardest part is just getting around the fact that it's also a dying game. So unless you consider socializing difficult rather than just a nuisance - PvE is not hard.

No, it doesn't, but trying to make this argument does make you an idiot. Nobody should be forced to reroll or pay to transfer their character just because bioware is incompetent and didn't realize playtime is higher for the first month or two and player retention would take a hit after that period as well. You do not release an MMO without basic planning to account for those two simple things. If they had simply not released additional servers there would only be a handful of ghost towns instead of the majority of servers being ghost towns. A server with queues during primetime on launch is a healthy server without queues a month or two down the road - unless every other server is dead and mass exoduses of rerolling occur because of poor planning. Bioware screwed the pooch, you don't get to blame their players for bioware's incompetence.

Tell us how you really feel.

You don't seem to realize that spending the GCD on that cleanse heals for less than crippling throw deals damage, and if you don't have any other dots up it leaves you free to apply them for 4.5 seconds. Crippling throw isn't negated by cleanse, it forced the healer to cleanse. Which in turn gave you another 1.5 seconds for your interrupts to cooldown that they weren't spending healing... It's astonishing how bad and shortsighted most marauders are.

Stealth when he aoe knockbacks, run up to him back into melee don't waste leap, if he drops orbital strike on himself, los him, don't fight him inside of it. Don't fight him when he's entrenched + bubbled, los him. It's really quite easy.

Breathtakingly terrible, perhaps. I top charts on my DPS sage - but I kill way more people on my sentinel with less gear.

What does this have to do with anything? Are you suggesting getting battlemaster or higher somehow makes someone good at that class? gigglesnort. Good one.