In all honesty, I played since launch and found my attention waning by around February. I don't think I've picked up the game since the Rakghoul event and there simply isn't anything enticing me back. If I want good PvP I don't play MMORPGS anyway, so that holds no appeal. The crafting is unappealing because I'm self sufficient and sales are utterly faceless so you don't build up any rapore with other players who shop with you frequently. All in all I'd say it is the combat system I've finally got bored of. Tab targetting with hotkeys used to be fun for me but now that I've played MMO where you none of that I have to say I don't think I'll touch an MMO which does that anymore. It is simply too archaic for me. As of next month, I'm cancelling my subscription so Bioware has until then to lure me back in again.

I'm still of the opinion that games like TERA Online and Guild Wars 2 are right by moving the MMO genre closer to its action-adventure genre cousins. Why is it that people are content to play games like Street Fighter or Battlefield over and over despite them essentially doing the same activities in the same environments for hours at a time? It's because the actual combat itself is satisfying and engaging. MMORPGS have been held back from creating engaging combat due to the limitations of tab-targetting, d2d style behind-the-scenes mechanics and the hotkey interface. I've played TERA and it is amazing how actually moving around like in an action game and executing abilities which are context sensitive feels so much more fun than how MMORPGS have done things for years. It will never happen of course, but if they took the action-mmo combat style (as they are being called) and put it into TOR alongside the excellent VO and story telling you'd have a monstrously addictive and satisfying game.

Indeed, they've actually been very vocal about what 1.3 will have. They explained much in the Q&A, you also had a preview of the legacy stuff actually in-game and we've had comments dropped here and there. But as they said, they want to get 1.3 out fast and keep it focussed on expanding existing features. Some might say that 1.3 will be a 'Quality of Life' update since its dealing with the general enjoyment of the game rather than adding new content. They did say they intend to add a new flashpoint every time they do an update however. So that appears to be about the only new content we can expect.

Server merges are questionable solutions to problems like this. Mainly because dumping more people together has the side effect of increasing network traffic and we already know that all but the mightiest computers start chugging when there is 10-20 players on-screen at once. PvP alone shows that either the engine isn't efficient enough or the game is very demanding when you have that many players actively being processed at once. Concentrating players into places will only cause the latter issue to arise since the overall traffic on the server hasn't increased, however a server merge would cause both problems.

It's called burn out. It happens to everyone and every game. It cannot be avoided. The best suggestion? Stop playing. Go find something else to do, come back in a month or so and you'll find that you're enjoying the game again. As an aside you're looking at 7 hours of entertainment a week and roughly 28 hours of entertainment a month. That is 53c per hour. Compare that to other types of entertainment? A good book would be around $8 and would last you around 12 hours. (66c per hour) A DVD of your favourite film? Lets assume you got it cheap at around $5 and it takes you 2 hours to watch it all, that is $2.5 per hour. All in all, an MMO subscription is actually very good value for money even if you only play for an hour a day. The alternative is to simply buy other games with that $15.

The problem is that you have around 1000 players on each server. Spread across 2 factions. Spread further across 13-14 worlds. Minus the 50-100 which are on the fleet most of the time. Then there is the usual spread of players between levels. So lets see what happens to that massive 1000 concurrent players? 2000 / 2 factions = 500 500 - 75 (average of rep and imp fleet pop) = 425 425 / 13 worlds = 32 players per world And oddly enough, to you rarely see the instances indicating much more than 20-30 at any time. So even with these extremely rough figures you can see why it seems so barren. The solution is simple. Put more content into a small group of worlds. Concentrate the players together so the worlds feel less empty. Indeed, some worlds are meant to feel empty (Hoth and Tatooine stand out as good examples) while others should feel busy. So put more content into places like Nar Shadda and Alderaan as a starting point since these worlds are cross-factional, intended to be busy social, economic and political locales and are distinctly different from each other in their visual styles.

Expansion packs are MT bundles. Games have had expansion packs for years and I would say you have purchased them yourself in the past. DLC is a micro-transaction and Bioware already have had that with Mass Effect.

I'm all for the convenience items being MTs. The prestige items are another matter though.

What made SWG a social game was the crafting system and the fact that it simply wasn't possible to become a mainstream crafter without other players. The quantity of resources required you to have suppliers who specialized in the raw materials, to make sales you ideally needed to know a player who had vendors or join a guild if you needed to make the more potent items you needed a sub-component made by another player. TOR has none of that. So the social aspect is weaker. It wouldn't take much to tweak TORs crafting system to copy what SWG did. You'd never truely capture it all, but you can include the interdependance through sub-components, you can throw in surveying rather than resource points (hey look, they did it in ME2 on a planetary mini game) and you can introduce the shifting resource qualities to drive the value of items up or down based upon the materials they are made with.

Two things. First of all, they promised a complete revamp to the space combat system. Secondly, they said that guild ships are a long way off but would be related to other work happening at the moment. You can jump to conclusions a bit but imagine space combat going for the full X-Wing Vs Tie-Fighter approach but with capitol ships owned by guilds. PvP just got interesting, especially if you can exit your craft once docked like a boarding party.

Go play another game. You've clearly reached burn out and need a break. The game is going anywhere so come back for 1.3 in 3 months.

1. More ambient music because it is too quiet at times. 2. Server populations are key to enjoying an MMO and the players are now spread too thinly across many servers. 3. Slow down the speed of leveling. People are hitting 50 too easily and its down to how overpowered rested XP is. 4. World content should not be level gated, have each world cater to the full level 10-50 range. 5. Mentoring and Exemplaring, let players play together regardless of level. Scale stats to match their mentor/exemplar.

...wait until the event runs again perhaps? Obviously they wouldn't take all the effort to do it once and then never reuse it again. I was purchasing peoples left over DNA for 500c last night, I intend to sell it for a profit once the event comes around again.

Don't forget that the White crystal has now been put back into the game. Queen of the Desert I think it was called? The devs said they would keep its unlocking method different to a random drop when it was hacked into the game by a user 6 weeks ago. Everyone seems to have forgotten that they said it would be put into 1.2.

In all fairness to Bioware I've seen performance improvements since 1.2 and even from launch to 1.1. The delay when getting onto and off of my speeder is almost completely gone now for example, most times it is seamless but on rare occasions there is a noticeable stutter. The biggest concern now is still the fleet station, frame rates take a nosedive as it appears to cache all of the various gear people are wearing and all of the player models. Surely the resources needed to be kept in active memory cannot be that demanding since there is so few variations on armour at the moment other than the colour?

I would say the biggest problem with the costumes is down to the sheer lack of understanding what players want. Lets take the newest Smuggler outfit? It makes you look like Robin Hood or William Tell! It's green and has that stupid pointed hat. Now people play Smugglers because they are drawn by the 'street' theme and raw gun fighting gameplay style. The trouble is that Bioware nailed it with the early outfits by having bomber jackets, heavy materials like leather and so on but lost focus as they progressed to higher levels and forced players into being Cowboys. Even the trenchcoats which you see in the mid 40s have that stupid collar that makes you look like you're all set to survive the sinking of the Titanic. Smugglers want to look like more than just cowboys, they want to look casual but cool not exotic and difficult to take seriously. Sith Warriors want to be more than Darth Vader. They want to be back in their robes as well. Inquisitors want to look menacing and exotic, not like wizards with pointy hats and horned helmets that look like they borrowed it from Gengis Khan. In fact the only classes where Bioware has done players proud is with the Bounty Hunter, Trooper and the Agent and that is largely down to them not trying to force a specific theme onto the class. The Agent costumes run the full gamut from casual street clothes to smart imperial uniforms to light-weight combat gear and high-tech assassin bodysuits. Why can't every class have that kind of diversity?

My point is that would someone want a 1% bonus to a PvP specific stat or a greater bonus to endurance, critical or power which is applicable both in PvP and in PvE? Given the rarity of these crystals it seems foolish to waste it on a bonus that is both weaker in its bonus and gives utterly no advantage in PvE compared to the others.

It is impossible to run a server without data base backups, hardware checks and maintenance. Or would you prefer the servers to be falling over for days at a time? Or developing issues that were preventable had there been frequent checks on the hardware?

Of course. Those crystals, despite giving +41 expertise, still translates to only a 1% bonus in total. Hardly worth it.

The thing I wonder is that is going to happen with the NEUTRAL alignment they are adding in 1.3? I mean if you are neutral level 2 but then cross over into dark 1 does that mean you're neutral 1 and dark 1 which shows you slipping towards another alignment or are you neutral 2 and dark 1 still?

Wait so the servers are NOT empty? Amazing.

Realistically though, someone at Bioware's marketing team needs to be fired. How did they NOT realize how unfair and poorly recieved the original version of this promotion would be received by the community? So far 1.2 has been nothing but drama. Features promised but not included. Downtime due to poor delivery of the patch itself. A legacy system where you have a family tree that does absolutely nothing and a promotion that was narrowly aimed at level 50s without forewarning to the customers that a select group would be getting something for nothing. Not to mention that not everyone who plays a lot has level 50 characters hence this revision. 1.2 was a chance for Bioware to show everyone that the fiasco of launch was a one-off. That the game was rushed to the public and that it wasn't typical of what Bioware intends to perform like with SWTOR moving forwards. But so far over Bioware's lack of experience with MMOs, which was a concern before launch, is proving to be all too evident.

I grouped with my wife all the way from level 10 to level 45. Considering that we both only played those characters together we should have hit social 5 a long time ago. Instead I'm still social 3 and a half.

I don't see tab-targetting games going away. People said the same for turn-based combat when tab-targetting first became popular and all that happened is that turn-based games took a back seat. In fact the Final Fantasy series holds firm to using turn-based combat and Square Enix has a F2P MMORPG called Wakfu in open beta at the moment which is very classical turn-based combat. What I suspect will happen is that action style MMOs will rise to be the fore-running style for the genre while tab-targetting goes to join the back seat alongside turn-based strategy MMOs. This change hasn't suddenly happened either. Action games have been dipping into the RPG elements for as long ago as System Shock and the original Deus Ex. It only makes sense that the multiplayer action online genre would start to blend with the MMORPG as well. Just my opinion, but I think that Bioware have been testing the waters for a Mass Effect action MMO with the addition of their Mass Effect 3 multiplayer.

Let's put it this way. It is already successful in the asian market. So it now stands to reason that we'll have to see if the western audience agree. Guild Wars 2 will be the first western created action MMORPG (TERA being asian developed and released this May to the US and EU), early impressions from people who had hands on with them last year alongside TOR said they actually enjoyed Guild Wars 2 more than TOR but felt that the storyline in TOR holds a special appeal. End of the day, the game which combines the action style alongside storyline like in TOR is going to be the winner. Trouble is, Bioware are invested in TOR for the next 4-5 years while Blizzard have Project Titan under a tight lock and key with previews coming this year. Scarier still... Project Titan is a joint Bilizzard / Bungie development. What are Bungie best known for? Action games.....