I cancelled my subscription to the Old Republic today. The following post is all about why and is filled with what is mainly MY OPINION, so for those who don't care, can't handle other people having an opinion, or can't handle people saying bad things about their favourite game, feel free to tune out now, there may be a summary at the end of the post so check there. Actually this isn't so much a post as a rant. And why I am ranting is also why I am quitting the game. This reason begins before TOR was actually released, even before I was aware that the game was being released anytime soon. It started while I was playing World of Warcraft. I first began playing WoW about a month after it was released. Like TOR, I saw a new game based on a world that I loved, WC2 and WC3 and FT were all favourites of mine, and so I picked it up. Unlike TOR however it managed to hold my interest for 5 or so years before my first 'quit'. I quit for several reasons, some good, some more rationalizations than reasons, but mainly I think I quit because I was bored. I had lost interest in the game. I came back and left a few more times after that, never quitting for more than a month or two. Finally during Cataclysm my honours thesis caused me to spend less time playing and more time working so I stopped playing WoW right before my guild began raiding. After I came back from this break I just couldn't get into the game anymore. It was right around this time that I learned that the new Star Wars MMO by Bioware was nearing release. Like WoW it was an MMO based in a world that I loved, I have a very large number of the extended universe novels and obviously all of the movies (yes I even liked episodes 2 and 3(well parts of them)). So I quit WoW for good and waited for this new game, that I felt was sure to grab me the same way WoW did all those years ago. It was Star Wars, it was an MMO, and it was Bioware. It was sure to be awesome. Now after playing TOR since the first day of early access, I have hit that same place I was in WoW after almost 7 years. I want to play the game, because I love the game, but when I actually play the game, I don't have fun, and almost all of the reasons why I don't have fun are because the game fails to live up to what I expected from an MMO release in 2011. When I started playing, I enjoyed it. It was new, fresh and sure, some of the storylines in the game were interesting and the dialog was fairly good. The gameplay however was nowhere near what I would call good. And after playing enough of the game (level 49 BH, level 33 inq, 3 other level 10-20 alts) and I no longer watched anything but the class cutscenes, the lacking gameplay that I ignored because the story held my attention began to eat at me more and more, to the point that here I am, less than a month after I started playing, quitting. I am now going to try and list the reasons why the gameplay in TOR is not enjoyable. I know that some people will disagree. I also know for a fact however that there are people who feel the same way I do. This is not in question. What is in question is how many people feel the way I do. And in a few months Bioware will find out, because we will be gone and if they have enough players left to call their game a success, we will have been shown to be a minority. The alternative is that the disatisfied players are a majority, and the game we wanted to play fell short. If that happens, and Bioware fixes what I consider to be the things wrong with the game, then I may come back, because I want to play this game. But this is why I don't have fun while doing it. The first thing that bugged me from even when I tested the game during the weekend betas was the feeling that the UI and my abilities weren't responding, that the game and the gameplay felt sluggish. There are already threads on this that can describe what this means in better detail than I, so I direct you there for meaningful details but suffice it to say after playing WoW for 7 years I was used to a game where abilities and the UI and the game in general responded immediately. Every time the game fails to react to me in time, it breaks the immersion. It breaks the fun. It annoys me to no end. And it happens so often that it stops me from having a good time. The next thing that bothered me is the UI itself. Its crap. People like to point out that WoW's UI wasn't any better when it was released and I like to counter in several ways, my favourites are: Vanilla WoW didn't have to compete with current WoW, TOR does, bad argument. Wow also allowed for two things that are painfully absent from TOR, macros and mods. Both of which helped make the crappy UI that WoW work for me, rather than me having to struggle painfully with what the devs thought was good. We obviously disagree on what makes a good UI, sorry Bioware. On the subject of UI, I am reminded of the interface for the galactic trade market, which I shall abreviate as AH, because I can. It boggles my mind how this thing even entered into the minds of the devs. Some people argue that it was to lower the strain on the servers or coding or something else that makes as little sense, I personally like to believe it was negative reinforcement designed to force players to vendor everything they didn't need. Anyway, the AH sucks, for the sake of the people who haven't unsubbed yet, please fix it. The third thing that began bothering me almost as soon as I started playing was Alignment. It bothered me because there were no gray options, just light and dark and if youw anted to be gray, alternate your choices regardless of what the choice actually is. It bothered me because I wanted to play a certain alignment but I ran into choices where the choice that I wanted to make because it was in character was the opposite alignment, while the alignment I wanted was something completely out of what I had envisioned for my character, and making the choice I wanted both went against the alignment I wanted for the character as well as made it more difficult to get the actual alignment points. In essence the alignment system turned into a grind that divorced roleplaying from playing the game. The last thing that I found bothered me occured on maybe my third or fourth playthrough of Balmorra. The game world feels small and disconnected. All the story takes place inside instances that have great honking green entrances, or alternately, great honking red barriers. Which granted is one way to solve being able to have chronologically linear stories in a world that needs to be shared. The rest of the planet feels so small that it doesn't feel like I'm actually on a planet, made worse by the instant travel to well placed bind points around the area. Yes, they're graet and make life easier, but they also make the world feel smaller. And once you're done in that small area of one planet, off to your ship to go to the next small area of another planet. There is no feel of a larger universe or world. Which is compounded by being forced to go back to the fleet to do any of the games flashpoints. I love doing dungeons, they're what I live for. And in TOR its such a massive pain in the *** to do them that I haven't done a lot of them. Stopping questing, and then going to the fleet,and then spending anywhere from five to fifty minutes gathering a group to do it isn't fun. Waiting because there are no healers, or tanks because respeccing is something game devs frown upon for somereason and want players to do it twice and never again, is not fun. Which brings me to point at the solutions made in WoW to these problems. One was phasing, which while buggy at first was a very elegant solution to the problem of telling a story that affected the world in a world that needed to be shared, far more so than incredibly obtuse instance entrances. The solution to my second gripe was more of a process that Blizzard learned and refined over a course of years. It started with an LFG channel, then grew to summoning stones, and then blossomed into the random dungeon finder. The dungeon finder is simultaneously a massive triumph and a massive failure. It is an incredible system for finding groups. You don't have to leave your questing area, you can do something else while you wait for a group and you don't actually have to find the people for the group. Plus you get to meet alllllll kinds of people, which can be fun, exasperating or just plain bizzare depending on who you get. It fell apart when they let it be a part of end game content. They started offering high level rewards for essentially no work. Which sort of made raiding kind of pointless for a lot of people and for the raiders it just ticked them off because now everyone had access to the same gear that they got with none of the 'effort' they put in, but all in all, a good solution to a problem that had plagued the game for years. The third solution Blizzard came up with even later in the game was dual specialization. Like this was waaaay too long in coming. The reasons for limiting players respecializing are, quite frankly, stupid and they make it less fun for people like me, who like to shake things up on a daily or sometimes hourly basis. I now come to the end of this long rambling rant, and conlude with this. You will see that alot of my problems with this game are where I compare it to World of Warcraft. Some of you may argue that you can't compare the two games, that what I considered to be a positive aspect of WoW would be a detriment in TOR, and you are free to do so. I believe that the things in this game that fall short of WoW are a shortcoming. Bioware had two options when it came to gameplay aspects that were similar to WoW. They could copy them, and run the risk of people complaining it was too similar to WoW, and leaving because it was boring, or they could strike out on their own, and run the risk of being inferior to what Blizzard had done with their successful MMO over the years. I feel that the places where they chose to do the latter they lost that gamble. In an attempt to be unique they changed things that were reasons why WoW was such a compelling and easily accessible game, and it is what's driving me and others away. I think that while I can't play WoW for very long without being bored, the fact that it took 7 years to actually get bored enough to quit should say something. The fact that this is true for millions of other players should say something. The game is extremely well polished, and has some excellent solutions to problems players encounter in any MMO. To ignore this isn't being creative, its being stubborn, and its why I'm quitting. So now its time to start examining Bioware. Are we, who feel the game isn't living up to our expectations and leaving the minority? Or is it time to start rethinking some of the core decisions in the gameplay department. I hope this sparks debate. I hope that people criticise my post. I hope that people voice their own opinions. Because remaining silent is the only wrong answer, and that goes for here in the gaming world, and out there in the real world. Peace.

Crap like that already happens to me. Having my character oscillate in place wildly for no apparent reason. Having to recast and ability three or four times and having the animation start and stop every single time isn't jarring? I suspect you just haven't run into the animations breaking yet. Personally I would prefer animation clipping to the bizzare interactions that occur from the current system that both break immersion and break gameplay.

No, the game is not as much story-based as combat-based, since every single story line involves more combat than story. Often hours of combat. If anything the lack of responsiveness breaks immersion its so jarring. Even if end game content is story driven, which is to say the story is why people play at end game, it isn't going to be made enjoyable through hours of cutscenes, but hours of combat. PvP is solely combat based, the story stops when you enter the warzone, and the unresponsive UI/ability/whatever makes the game so jerky to play that the problem is even more glaringly apparent. This isn't a small issue that only a 'vocal minority' is griping about, its a major one and it isn't even a bug, its a design flaw that needs to be dealt with for this game to have any staying power.

Totally agree, both searching for something or trying to price check before posting your own auctions is incredibly tedious. All I want is to shift click an item and have it appear in the search input so I can look it up in seconds, not spend a minute dicking around with dropdown menus only to have to manually type in the name of some random material. The trade network UI DEFINITELY needs to be reworked.