Have to agree with this guy...they have been anything but forthcoming. Been here since closed Beta, and not only did they withhold information from us, but any time the original dev team got valuable input that could've helped this game from its testers, they completely ignored it. Practically every single BW/TOR Fiasco was predicted and constructively criticized before Beta was even opened up, let alone after the game went public. GG, Corporate Greed, GG.

If you're going to insult someone for having different taste than you, at least spell it right. Or not, just seems funny coming from someone telling others they made an *** out of themselves.

It's too bad we can't turn back the clock, so we could see if Ilum could handle a battle involving 700k players.

Totally agree with you about whining not being constructive. Telling someone "I will not pay new content if you try to charge me for it, and you will lose my subscription that you've had since launch" is not whining, or QQ, or whatever you want to call it. The first time I have to pay for content I want to experience (playable game, not cool dress up itamz) while I'm paying a sub, I'm a ghost. You won't have to hear me speak my mind anymore. I've stuck around for the friends, and because I love Star Wars, but I'm not going to sit around and get taken for a fool. I encourage others who feel the same to speak their minds as well. Not to cry about it. The first six months of this game I wasted plenty of time being constructive, trying to start threads to brainstorm ideas on how to save the PVP, and other areas of this game, posting my own organized suggestions for way to make the game feel alive, to try to point out what could be done differently to not alienate as many players as they did; Watching them ruin this game through the course of Beta while ignoring all the constructive criticism of their product has already killed my constructive side, though. I'm not going to sit here and whine, nor am I going to waste any more time giving them ideas; I'll just state my opinion and be off. But telling me I should be a realist, and keep my mouth shut..that's just not helping anything. I was quite a staunch defender of BioWare in the past. Now I'm being a realist, and telling them what they're doing is wrong, and they'll have one less player if they plan to charge an active subscriber for a playable part of the game. Nice talking to you gents. I hope you find the droids you're looking for.

Ah, you showed your true PVE colors then. Funny, I've never seen as much whining on a PVP forum as when a raid boss bugs. One guy whining because he lost a warzone compared to a whole guild of people whining that they waited 4 hours to get the new dress for their digital dolly and the loot was bugged doesn't even come close. Watch the nerd rage when boss encounters don't work how they should, it pales in comparison. What I claimed, was that speaking your mind about something accomplishes a lot more than rolling over and accepting it. Always does. The ONLY way to ensure that the path doesn't change, is to show no interest in its direction. I never said "QQ". I'm not twelve.

A ) If you unsubbed and came back, as most people made clear, little to nothing changed - again why I said that $15 was pilfered from most of the subscribers. UI Improvements and bug fixes were necessary just to make this game playable, they weren't new features worth paying for. I'm not talking about the legalese in the EULA, I'm talking about the reality of MMORPG's. $15 monthly has always paid to keep the servers maintained, the CS paid, and the developers WORKING ON NEW CONTENT. Instead they fired them a few months in and told them to start working on milking the little of their population that remained. B) 2 Warzones in the span of a year is pathetic, given the size and scope of those warzones. Especially considering the one Open-World zone in the game was removed. You're barely breaking even in PVP AFTER the addition of the new warzone. FPSes can put out more detailed maps in larger denominations far more quickly, without stealing my money in advance. Again, pathetic, for a game that was billed to have a team working just on the PVP aspect of the game. I guess if you could call two kids with GEDs and social disorders a "team" they can justify it, because there obviously wasn't a group of real, qualified people that gave a damn developing any of the PVP content for this game. I could have not paid, but then I would have let the guild down that I came to this game with under the promise of real PVP content that was never delivered. Most people did that. I stuck it out because I used to respect the company whose name is on the game, before they were bought out. Obviously, I learned from my mistake. That doesn't mean I don't get to speak up and wonder where my money went, and where it's going in the future. Now they're operating a skeleton crew, and collecting the same fee as before when they actually HAD employees, and planning on charging me for new content? Ridiculous. If you're okay with that, good for you, I'm not, and will continue to remind them.

If "realism" is training yourself to cheerfully accept mediocrity, I am proud to be unrealistic. If you're actually pleased with what you got for your money, I have no problem with that. Some people who play PVE only probably are. For those who aren't happy, they should continue to speak up. Staying silent is the worst way to remind BioWare that players with your interests still exist. The point of these games is that they're not finished until the servers get shut down. Until that day, keep trying to change them if you have an opinion. Complacency just rewards the laziness that got this company in the boat they're in to begin with.

Obviously, there is no legal grounds to demand money back for failing to deliver an MMORPG, and simply charging a $15 monthly fee for an online single player RPG. Losing millions of subscribers for the failure to measure up to the genre's content pacing was their penalty for that. Just a shame to see the people who stuck around get rewarded for their time by getting relieved upon and told it's a warm summer rain. They have a right to complain. MMORPG subscription fees come with a promise of real, substantial content every 3-4 months, and there is serious precedent to support that. Instead we paid to continue Beta testing a game, and got bug fixes and some half finished content for our money. One warzone for PVPers is pathetic over an entire year, considering the diminutive size and scope of those warzones. Before you say, "this has always been a PVE focused game", save your breath. That's a lie. This game was billed as being a game for PVPers for months prior to launch despite plenty of clear warnings from the players testing, who were told to be paitent because it takes time to develop new content. They finally scuttled Ilum, and then they strung the lie along for a couple more months until rated Warzones were half-delivered in a meaningless manner and they lost the rest of their players. Players put both their faith, and their money, in EA/BioWare's hands in this game, and got nothing in return.

I think most people know this game has changed, but still feel the need to voice their opinions at the shameful way they're being treated by EA. The "Everything for 15" model failed for them because they delivered us NOTHING for 15. For almost an entire year, and shamefully, continued to collect many people's $15 despite all their work for months prior to F2P being focused on designed a mechanism for ****** our wallets, and designing it poorly, at that. You can either bend over and take it from them, or you can speak your mind and let them know that if they plan to charge subscribers for content (and I'm not talking the stupid gimmick items in the shop now that are for dress-up junkies), actual playable planets, worlds, and quests, then you're going to be upset and take your money elsewhere. When did customers with spines lose their right to voice their opinion? They pay the same amount as everyone else. Maybe you're accepting that "this is the way it is", but that's the dumbest reason in the world to allow a poor system to continue. That's how you ended up with two-party American Democracy stealing power from the people who were supposed to control the country. If you let people in power abuse it unchecked, of course they continue to abuse it. They have no fear of repercussions.

Basically, this. It's hilarious the OP's complaining about PVP while the PVEers keep getting all the content patches. The PVPers have sat here and waited for months to get one new warzone added and a half-implemented ranking system. If they had added Lost Island and half of a Denova and that's it this year all you PVEers would've run off crying right away. PVE belongs on Consoles where you can all team up and have your little Co-Op PVE games. The entire thrust of PVE is purely greed based and discourages Community Interaction. People only do PVE to get more itamz, and once they've run it a few times, never go back to it. Meanwhile people who have been geared up in PVP for months are still queuing the same couple maps because we love to do it, not because we're chasing shiny things. Why would you want to play against an opponent that always does the same thing? Talk about boring. I hear clueless PVEers complain about how "PVP balancing affects my game" all the time. You want to know why that is? Because the whole stupid game is designed in a flawed manner around your silly interactions with AI. If this game hadn't been a WoW clone of the holy trinity class system, which designs healers and tanks to be near-bottomless reservoirs of hitpoints, PVP would be a thousand times easier to balance. Instead, with your measly 20-30k HP, you're designed to combat enemies with hundreds of thousands of hitpoints, throwing off OUR balance inherently from day one. Yeah, that's right, despite pre-launch promises of PVE not being a bunch of tools standing around a giant boss whacking it mindlessly, and then dancing away from circles, that's exactly what you got. If they had created more Star-Warsy encounters with AI that involved waves and waves of smaller enemies, perhaps PVE would've had a less devastating effect on efforts to balance PVP. Cry me a river.

The only reason the gear gap gets exaggerated so much when these lowbie warlords reach the 50 bracket is that they can't admit the competition and the players are that much better than them. The problem is, not only does the guy have better gear than you, but he's better at his class than you, paid his dues to get there, and plays with a team coordinated by voice. The difference between War Hero gear and Battlemaster gear if both are augmented is practically nothing. It takes a week to get Battlemaster gear. Some people want to play against bad players for all time. Some like a challenge. Doesn't matter what group you fall in. Play the game and enjoy yourself. You can rationalize the "challenge" you feel in the lowbie bracket all you want, because you actually have time to "think" about what move to use against your opponent, but this is a much faster paced game than chess. People who think faster are better. Games are balanced around the best players, unfortunately, not the average player. You see yourself getting globaled by that powertech in what you perceived to be three seconds, but to that powertech, you gave him an eternity...with a healer, with support, when not ramboing, the kill is not so easy, but to all you pre-50 one-man-armies it's just too painful to admit that you might be doing it wrong. It's fine if you want to call it more fun for you, though, that's the fact nobody can argue.

MMORPGs used to be Multifaceted games, Andryah. I get your point, in the sense that I still play this game for the part I enjoy, the combat, which I find to be balanced and enjoyable, for the most part. You can't ignore the fact that this was billed as a game that would have dynamic PVP, large scale PVP, and "the best PVP team in the business" prior to launch. This may be a PVE game because the developers simply gave up on making anything else worthwhile, but PVP wasn't SUPPOSED to be a mini-game. If PVP had been billed as a minigame, about a million people wouldn't have purchased this game and thrown it in the garbage. MMORPGs in general, and very clearly this game, were billed to have PVP as a solid part of the game. The PVP is the only fun part of this game for me, still - but it's repetitive, and the pace at which new warzones have been released is pathetic. Call of Duty maps are ten times more in depth than TOR warzone maps and they manage to release 6 at a time every few months for each game. Good God, I'd pay for the maps just like you do on console, just get someone to work on something other than pointless new operations that are old after the first time you beat them. You're ignoring the huge percentage of the population that want to play the best Star Wars game out there, because they're huge Star Wars fans. Incoherent Operation Storylines and non-iconic enemies, Jedi Knights who can only swing swords or only throw rocks; all sorts of things like this turn off those Star Wars fans. At least in SWG you could hunt rancors, or kill stormtroopers. The Old Republic universe is a great one in the sense that it allows all the people in the world to fight with a glowstick if they want, but it's also foreign and turns off a lot of fans that only know Star Wars by what's released on the silver screen. This game KILLED the alternative Star Wars fans have. I'm not even a SWG lover - they just did a couple aspects of their game so much better than TOR (read - they don't even exist in TOR) that it sadly blows this game away. The simple RVR of flipping planets to your faction's control, the incredibly complex system of crafting, amazing housing/guild systems, are all things that are nonexistent in this game, or simply dwarfed by the quality that was seen in the game this killed. Get this straight - some of us don't want to play WoW, or Fairies, or Elves, or generic Sci-Fi - we want a Star Wars game, one that at least someday might include an approximation of the features enjoyed previously, while retaining the strengths of this game, like the graphics, animations, combat balance, storytelling, etc. There is no alternative for people like that - so they just quit. They're not the "MMO hopping" population. They're people like me who have jobs and families and just said to hell with this, I've beat this game six ways from Sunday, I'm going to go back to waiting for a real Star Wars game to come out, which honestly, has been the majority of time spent as a Star Wars and Video Game fan for most people - Star Wars games are traditionally terrible, outside of the old X-Wing, Tie Fighter, XvT, and Battlefront games. KOTOR was the most brilliant jewel of them all, and then company that made it announced they were making a persistent Star Wars game - for most of us that was an extremely exciting prospect. The implementation, however, turned out to be a one-dimensional WoW clone, with great Pre-50 story being the only stand out part of it. As someone else pointed out, they didn't even get some of the things that made WoW great, and copied some of the worst parts. This game could've been amazing. Don't ask me to go play another game, or accept that this is a PVE game. If it is a PVE game, maybe they should've realized that poor PVP drove away over a million of their customers, and start trying to work on that aspect of it. PVE is the WORST kind of focus for a game, especially in an item-treadmill, theme-park based WoW clone. Why? Because it forces the developers to endlessly churn out content at a completely unsustainable rate - Beating a computer is kiddie stuff - the only thing that makes it hard in an MMO is the heroic act of cat herding known as coordinating 8 or more people over the internet. People inevitably destroy the content, and pound their fists for more. Sandbox content, RvR content, PVP content, is self perpetuating. Throw out a few maps every 3-6 months after you get the real sandbox and RvR systems in place, and the pressure is off the developers, because each time you fight groups of people the content is new and challenging based on who is playing at that given time, their class makeup, and playstyle. Tack on the fact that MMORPGs are about community, and the Guild System, which was so enticing at launch with Allies and Enemies, pre-launch Guild Formation is possibly the biggest let down of all. Aside from giving people a nice guild bank, which many told them should've been in before launch back in the Beta test, there has been NOTHING done to improve being a member of a guild. In fact, Group Finders were introduced to compete with the only real point of being in a guild - finding a group. I can't declare war on enemy guilds (feature that's been in the genre since at least '97) build any lasting structures with my guild - no, in this PVE-based theme park, the only point of doing ANYTHING is to compare your floppy e-peen with the guy standing next to you. Yeah, it's WoW's fault for succeeding more than any other game with that same horrible model of progression - because it made the guys in suits who count the beans want to emulate that - easy to make, and it made Blizzard boatloads of cash - but the truth is, as you said before, the only reason people continue to accept it in WoW is that they've invested 6 or more years in that game, it has some nostalgia factor. For all intents and purposes, the MMORPG crowd has moved on, and demands more. I'm not going to give up, or say this is just a PVE game, and stop asking for what I want. That's the beauty of an MMORPG - it's constantly changing, just like the BioWare staff. Eventually we might get someone in there who wants to make a real game that's unique, and not just WoW with tacked on Voice Acting (which by the way, is a terrible design flaw as pointed out by tons of people during the Beta test). It makes updating the best part of the game, the story, incredibly expensive and time consuming. This probably was too big of an endeavor for BioWare. Those who said they didn't know what industry they were getting into were right. It's not enough to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make a PVE-only game that lacks basic MMORPG features. People expect more. They've gotten so many hundreds of my dollars (counting branded peripherals) that I'm going to sit here waiting for more. That might not ever come, but I'm a Star Wars fan, and a BioWare fan, and I'm giving them a chance to redeem themselves, rather than moving on to the next wizard and elf game. In the meantime, I'm going to keep being critical of the game, in hopes that they add some features that will take pressure off the devs and give them time to truly create something special.

I'll second this. Guild Capital ships being quasi-promised back in Beta and re-mentioned at the Guild Summit were one of the things that kept me playing this game longer than it's probably deserved. I was this game's biggest fanboi pre-launch, have kept the faith that big MMO features would be coming in the pipeline despite all odds, and still sit here today because I enjoy being a Jedi and PVPing, repetitive though it may be. As a member of guild leadership for an active TOR guild that has been active for a year prior to launch, it saddens me greatly that there is little to no point to being in a guild in TOR. Sharing items in a guild bank and having an easy private Chat channel is probably the only benefit. Why did we choose enemies and allies prior to launch to have it mean nothing. That was a great program that died before it took off the ground. Guilds should be able to declare war on each other, ally with each other with a built-in Coalition chat channel (a la CoH). Guilds should be able to make a lasting impact on the world other than jockeying for e-peen in the Warzone/Operation scene. There is little meaning behind your actions in this game, short of having a good time together, and that tends to diminish with each content playthrough (one of the biggest shortcomings of a theme park MMO). Whether we have instanced planets or zones on planets to develop and fight over, or capital ships to upgrade and wage war upon, being a member of a guild needs to have an impact on the game. These are, after all, social games. You will see so much more player enthusiasm when we have something more to take pride in than a RWZ record or a clear of a very accessible difficulty mode in PVE. These kind of changes should be right up there in priorities with new Warzones and Ops (aka, more of the same, which has failed you from the start because of the slow rate you deliver them).

Personally, I like this idea, as you said, let them figure out if it's feasible. Too many armchair developers on these forums. I'd love to see a trainable "ready" pose that reflects a stance of choice, and it'd be a nice thing for the RPers as well as being a cool cosmetic customization. Even moreso, I'd love to see your actual animations change based on what lightsaber stance you're in, though I know that requires more work than the devs are willing to put in. I've always found it stupid I have the exact same animations for moves, in two different forms, ESPECIALLY having moves like Merciless Slash and Blade Rush look the same, that one was just lazy, IMO. Still, there is a valid point that it'd be unfair for glowstick wielding classes to get all those new animations without throwing some sort of similar bone to the gun toting ones. Still, there are a few options for how to hold some of the blaster weapons in TOR, I could see trainable ready poses easily implemented for BH, IA, Smuggler, and Trooper as well, if not necessarily all new combat animations (which makes what I'd really like to see even more of a pipe dream).

After a lot of prodding, one of the CM's was able to get an answer for us on that one a few weeks back - the super secret space project is apparently still under construction. We wouldn't know if we should be excited about it or not, though, because of that CIA information blackout.

ArenaNet was never factored into my equation because they had a F2P game, I'm talking about a real MMO, one that can manage to charge a subscription. Once your game is bad enough to have to go F2P, you're going to get as much substantial communication as the Hello Kitty Adventure Island playerbase. In GW's case, it was designed to be F2P. If you look at City of Heroes/Villains, the subscription game put out by NCSoft, they had some of the most active developers in the history of the industry, many of whom posted on the forums on a regular basis and had active dialogue with the players - there were even devs assigned to each class who explained all class changes in detail and conversed about them on the forums, and even changed their minds in some cases, often posting on a near daily basis. As a result, they had an extremely positive community that maintained a subscription model for many years with a smaller playerbase than TOR. Somehow they managed to come up with regular updates, make improvements to the game at a steady clip, and still discuss with their players on a regular basis. It wasn't a miracle. It was good management, and good business. People wanted to know things, so they took a small part of their time and devoted it to that purpose. It's amazing that a game with a tiny fraction of the budget of this game could manage that much more developer activity, and appeared to have four times as many developers. When you pay regularly for a service specifically because it is designed to grow and evolve, then you expect to have some inkling of how your money is being used, and it has nothing to do with entitlement. As another poster pointed out, that's how capitalism works. You are compared to competitors, and in this case, the developer has often been found wanting in that area.

Contrary to what you and the prophet of Entitlement think, not everyone posts on these forums so they can waste their time arguing with you. I'm done doing that. Some of us post here to communicate with the people who make the game. Unfortunately, General Discussion is one of the only forums out there they seem to pay attention to. That means, in order to get an opinion to someone who matters, we have to go through you. I know, sad day indeed, but we're all entitled to our opinions, no matter how inane or brilliant they are, and I will express mine when I feel the need to. Two quick examples - City of Heroes, and WoW. Developers posted regularly, not just CM's, regular detail about future content all over website and forums. Easy to access. No secrets as to what was being worked on. Future patch notes posted, not just for a three week period while that update was on test server, because in most cases, test servers had regular uptime. I appreciate your opinion, but totally disagree. Anyone who played MMORPG's over the last 15 years and had eyes knows that every other company has been better than this one at communicating - and there is no burden on me to prove that to you, because I don't care one iota how you feel about my argument. Yes, communication has become more important in recent years, all the more reason to step it up slightly instead of falling into the dark ages. I couldn't care less if you read that, though, there's only one group of people out there I'm talking to, and they post in yellow.

Nobody's asking for updates on when the devs are brushing their teeth, spare the hyperbole. Asking for concrete information on a say, monthly basis from the developers, by paying customers invested in the future of this game is not a facebook generation problem, or an entitlement issue, it's a perfectly reasonable request. I don't care about what they're working on today, tomorrow, or this week specifically. What do I care about? Example - In 3 things you'd like to see changed about this game, person X asked for more options to customize your starship. 1) Do the devs like this idea - e.g. let us know you're working on x idea suggested by the players 2) How high of a priority is this idea (can be general), but is it something that will take weeks, months, or years, based on where it is ranked? I don't want to hear "we want to do this someday", too noncommittal. Is there or is there not a resource working on it. 3) What's the rough timetable for the implementation of this idea? Can be tentative, but 3 months, this year, this spring, are all nice things that give us something other than "soon" or "not any time soon" to look forward to. Those are simple bits of information that can be provided about game improvements that aren't going to give away game secrets, require an NDA, and HAVE BEEN PROVIDED by most other developers in this industry. Often, they're provided so regularly they're built into the website, with future patch notes included LONG before the patch ever hits the test server. It gives people a clue that their money is going somewhere. We can debate the whole purpose of your $15 until we're blue in the face, but as far as many of us are concerned, we're NOT paying that as a server access fee - we can play plenty of other games out there without them. We're paying that because an MMORPG brings the promise of new content and improvements. That's not a promise made by BioWare, it's a promise made by deciding to create an entry into this genre. Don't project your low standards on the rest of the world. The game launched lacking a lot, as most MMORPG's do. I'm forgiving of that. I understand that it takes time to produce content. Forgiving of that as well - what I'm not forgiving of is complete silence about what is actually being worked on with the money I've already given them over the last few months. If it's new "content" to charge free to play players for, that's unacceptable. If it's anything of substance, people are likely to be forgiving, and just glad to hear SOMETHING from one of the most silent studios of all time. Let's be honest, software developers are fast typers. If they typed a post half as long as I did right now, everyone would be shocked, and it would take them all of a minute to make a simple gesture of good faith with a massive ROI.

Please, I'm so sick of the entitlement speech. Games in the past have managed to tell people what the developers were working on, in an exponentially greater volume than BioWare has managed to with TOR. It's not about entitlement, it's about looking bad next to your competitors. Nobody had NDA's with the dozens of MMORPGs that came before this one that had developers who actively posted in the forums. I love seeing the community members, and respect the hard job they have to do, but once in a while it would be nice to be thrown a bone that wasn't packed in a "Soon" wrapper. It has happened, and will happen again, the question is, will it ever happen with BioWare? So far, the answer still looks like no.

I agree completely. It's always nice to know that the threads are being watched, but a lot of energy was poured into trying to make some helpful suggestions to make the game better, and I'd love to hear which ideas are be taken more seriously or prioritized higher, or even a rough timetable. Soon, and "no plans for the immediate future" continue to not cut it. Still, it's nice to know maybe there's some hope we'll be listened to this time.

1) At least 10 new races from ones that already have models and speak basic...see other threads for suggestions. 2) Guild Bases of Some Sort, Plus Guild Enemies/Allies - There is little significance of being in a guild right now other than it being a glorified friends list (gamewise) 3) Sandbox instances on planets that are explorable - maybe even randomly generated with some intelligence

Wow, really? A bunch of my posts about constructively speaking out about what we want changed in the game got deleted...what was there even worth censoring in those posts? And you wonder why 3/4 of your players are gone. Even the ones who really care about this game get shot down. Sad, BioWare, sad. I guess I should've been speculating about whether or not your game was failing like everyone else.

I'm curious, where did this idea come from that games had to be EITHER theme park or Sandbox? The MMORPG market has gotten a bit ridiculous, and I still have to point the finger at WoW. Their massive success with the most stripped down theme park game ever made has put a silver bullet in this genre. To the businessmen that run the companies that produce these games, WoW's success is all they'll ever dream of. They'll be dying to copy that model, and it is a terrible model. It is the worst iteration of this genre to date in terms of depth of content and actual purpose in the game, that capitalizes on human greed and their obsession to constantly gather more shiny objects. The bottom line is, people asking for sandbox elements in this game aren't crazy. People asking for more operations content aren't crazy. More PVP. ETC. The list goes on and on. This has ALWAYS been a genre of diversified interests, and most of the games in it gave you something to satisfy every crowd. You're a complete fool for telling the guy he came here for PVP that he's the fool. The guy PVPing, Crafting, Raiding, Soloing, etc. - those are all parts of the market. None of them are the majority. There are simply too many splinter groups anymore. The point you should take from this is that the game has to be complete in the sense of being well rounded. If you like running on your hamster wheel and getting new clothes to dress up your digital doll, more power to you, you probably like this game. But past games in this genre have done ALL the facets of an MMORPG well, and THAT is what disappointed so many of the players in this game. If you're a raider - this is a decent game for you, but the content is too easy. Fun but easy. If you're a PVPer - you'd better be the kind that likes repetitive bouts on the same handful of maps over and over again, and be prepared for the companies to release maps at a slower rate than Call of Duty that are far less in depth. If you're a sandbox lover - go home, there's nothing original interesting, or player generated here. This world is a dead questline on rails. Great story, but it's every bit as over when you get to level 50 as KOTOR was, unless you'd like to stick around for 3 months and wait for one more operation that will take you a week to finish. If you're a soloer - once you finish the story quests, unsub, because there's nothing for soloers at level 50, unless you want to hop on the repetitive warzone train. If you're an RPer - sit here begging for chat bubbles, emotes, and interactive objects, and you still won't have them 9 months later. If you're an alt-a-holic - sure, you have great stories, but the character creator is lackluster, poorly thought out, and limited by that very same story. The story ends after one playthrough. A great character creator gives you infinite playthroughs. Take the CoH and CoV one as an example of the best in the business - people would resub to that game just to roll new characters, even being sick of the gameplay. All these groups are minorities, but also valid parts of the playerbase. To make one of these games, you have to please them all, or at least show them you're making an honest attempt at doing that. This was billed as an MMORPG, not the single player online RPG people were saying it was in Beta. That means these people have the right to expect all of these different features, because 90% of the games in this genre have managed that, except WoW. WoW made it okay to be completely one dimensional and lifeless, because it succeeded more than all of them. The truth is - WoW had the magic to keep a large playerbase, for whatever reason. What the players really validated with their dollars was the fact that a huge community is what makes an MMORPG great, NOT the theme park model. But the executives will never get that, all they see is dollars, so they copied the most successful game in the genre to the point of porting over their abilities and talent trees. I used to be this game's biggest fanboy. I'm still here for the few parts of this game that I do love, namely the combat. I waited for this game to be released before it was announced, from the moment I finished the first KOTOR game. But even I can admit that this was a screwed up, half finished MMORPG, with a remarkably smooth launch that was wasted on a crowd that was outraged to hit level 50 and found out there really was NOTHING else to do but a few warzones and operations. That's why you need the sandbox. Not to be SWG 2.0. To give the playerbase a feeling of impact on the world they choose to roleplay in. This is a dead world with some pretty, but static scenery. That ruins immersion far more than any wookiee with a lightsaber. Sandbox content is self-perpetuating end-game that gives developers TIME to work on the other projects without people feeling like there's nothing to do, even if it's something as stupid as getting items to decorate your ship with or recoloring your speeders and ship. Let the vocal minority of raiders that are actually happy with this game because they're bad enough to not be through the content keep coming in and blaming PVPers, the complainers, the SWG fans, and everyone else for this disappointment that came from this game, but there is a lot lacking. If you have to blame anyone, blame WoW and big business. Before then, this genre was creative, dynamic, and interesting. Didn't always have the best graphics or best esports play (in fact, some of the worst) but it was always the most creative and immersive. BioWare got the creative part right - but implemented it in a way that dies at a certain point - just like a single player RPG (their specialty). That's what disappointed us. The creativity needs to continue, at a steady clip, whether it's enthusiastic GM's dropping mobs on players when they're questing to new continuations to the storyline, to giving us new areas of strange planets filled with strange aliens to explore (the heart of Star Wars, adventure), to putting the war in the galaxy every day rather than waiting months for the next chapter to come out. Some of us managed to do more frequent, more immersive updates to our own campaigns with the NWN engine that BioWare designed for God's sake, and we did it with nobody's help but our own.

I am relaxed, and never called the game a failure. I did call it a pitiful WoW clone, because right now it's the most stripped down theme park implementation ever. There are parts of the game that are done very, very well, like the storylines, the combat, the companions, the item modding system, etc. I play the game because those are fun. I am not wrong for wanting more, and neither is anyone else in this thread, that's where you're wrong. A lot of the things people are asking for, like Player Housing or some kind of base building, are in basically every MMORPG out there, minus WoW, which gives you nothing outside the theme park (and TOR copied, sadly). Most of us didn't expect all of those elements to be in at launch, and are giving BioWare time to develop the game into what it can be. To say "this is all there will ever be" in an MMORPG, the definition of a constantly evolving game where what you see is almost always NOT what you're going to be stuck with in the end, is just foolish. There are ways to develop Sandbox elements without overhauling the game, simply adding on to it. That's one of the few benefits of this heavily instanced set up. The saving grace of this game is going to be that it can change and evolve - seeing F2P after being sworn to that it would never happen is just one great example of that. You don't know the future of this game better than anyone else, so again, stop giving people bad advice who are just trying to give their ideas to make the game better in a constructive way. Your attitude begs the question - with your point of view, what the hell are you doing in a suggestions forum?

Maybe you should stop assuming you know the future of this game any better than anyone else here. Obviously even the people who work for the company either a) Don't know the future. or b) Are liars. As long as the suggestions forum exists, people are right in their desire to post suggestions that they think would make the game better. As a poster a few above me said, if you took everything SWG did right, and everything TOR did right, and blend them, you'd have the best game ever made. Stop assuming games can only cater to one demographic. This game only has to be a pitiful WoW clone if you let it stay that way and never open your mouth. Quit or become complacent is probably the worst advice for any situation that doesn't involve a gun to your head.