My views: - Its too easy to clear end game raids for a semi compotent group - "Story mode" ops actually dont have much of a story at all - its just a renamed easy mode - Not enough features to truly differentiate TOR from WoW - as much as WoW is a benchmark it shouldnt be a template to copy - As much as i am not the biggest fan of world event festival type things, these keep people interested at higher levels as a diversion from dailies and raiding. The rakghoul plague event was fun - we need more! - For a game that relies heavily on appealing to altoholics, there are too few quality-of-life benefits to support it: > Ability to identify your alts to others in chats - they are supposed to be part of a "legacy" but other than a nameplate they could be a completely different player > No way to view what your alt crewskills are, so you have to keep logging back and forth - The companions idea was great but moderately useless at lvl50 - its just a cash sink and a place to chuck gear once its no longer useful. Try and include more story/use for them, maybe including some sort of challenges in ops that require them to be used. - Space combat is ok as a diversion but needs to be far more interesting - Flashpoints are completely optional and not woven into the story at all - there should at least be some incentive to go there pre level 50 - Dark/Light mechanic becomes useless at 50 - the gear available is easily surpassed by ops gear, and there is little else to gain. - The cantinas need to seem more "alive" - there should be mini games available that are synonymous with star wars - Make the relationships within players legacies mean something - when you add someone as a rival, you should initiate a quest chain to eventually confront them somehow, for example. - Extend legacy to encompass relationships with other players - for example being able to add other players as "rivals" or "allies" and have associated questing or pvp rewards - Vehicular based pvp - use the example of the battle for hoth in empire strikes back - incorporating speeders, walkers etc. - Mount design needs to be more interesting - the mounts that dropped from KP and EV were just obtrusive and huge. - Maybe introduce some sort of gear design mechanic for custom gear - allowing players to create their own "designs" - complexity of design can determine mats to create the gear, and designs can be shared between players - less linear levelling progression - you are fairly well locked in to the quests you have to do to hit 50, while the story is very good, WoW from a levelling standpoint is more interesting due to choices in where you go - again, this harms the replay value. - It was a bit of a mistake to put player counts on the zone indicator. While its obvious when a zone is quiet - its too easy for people to moan about really low server populations when they have a count of players local to them staring them in the face - not suggesting it be removed but its not necessarily something i would have added in the first place. That is not to say this is a bad game, and the above is a wishlist and probably most are pipedreams...

Im basing this on what we "know" of 1.3 at the moment so i could be wrong, but... - The LFG tool is needed, but for people that actively do ops, its only for alts - a couple of KP/EV runs will have you kitted out in gear much faster than grinding FPs. So if you're looking at this as a way to gear up, its not going to help. I cant see myself using my main on it at all, and maybe an alt every so often. If you love the FP content, then its great - but i genuinely cant see too many people hitting 50 just to muck about in FP's all day.... - Not being a bit pvp'er i cant say i have a strong feeling on ranked warzones, but making pvp cross server simply HAS to happen - my server is hideously imbalanced from a pvp perspective in favor of republic, simply because the bigger guilds on their side DONT RAID - you end up with a constant stream of pre-made groups going up against ill organised pugs. I'm not saying cross server warzones will change this, but it will hopefully level the playing field a bit. You'll also get less of the rather crass and stupid comments from people on their daily valor farm: "why do imps suck on this server...blah blah blah" - The augment slot thing i look at as a double edged sword. It is annoying to have to grind up to BM just to get your hands on usable gloves and boots with an augment slot, so im glad thats going away. Relying on the gods of RNG for a crit on gear irks me a bit, but i accept it. The problem with it as i see it is the effect it will have on the GTN - augmented custom gear is really the only thing i ever buy (and maybe crafting mats) - the GTN just doesnt feel "alive" in the same way it does in WoW - the GTN is built on the community that sells on it - if make everyone capable of crafting the same stuff, that dies. At least keeping RNG involved in the crafting of top level gear creates demand, which is essential for a MMO economy which is realistically still in its formative stages. - The legacy unlocks are good in some cases - field respec is definately something i could do with on my powertech dps main, but most of them arent going to revolutionize anything. Faster alt levelling? Do we really want that given the number of people that say they out level a lot of content anyway??? - The lack of any new content scares me. My guild recently cleared EC hard mode, and while its a stretch to say we have it on farm, its fair to say we're close. Whats left for us now? We're all waiting in hope for at least nightmare mode to appear with some more challenging encounters, but until then we're just farming a 4 boss op with a raid team that is slowly losing interest - if we have to go through another x weeks/months before any new content i can see some of the team dissappearing. Id imagine thats not an unfamiliar story. The trouble right now with the game, as i see it, is t doesnt *quite* do either levelling or end-game as well as it should. Levelling is very linear apart from the story missions, as much as you can try and approach things differently (bonus series, pvp levelling etc) its pretty samey at its core. End game despite there being a good 3 hours per day of dailies to do (between space, black hole, ilum and belsavis) and ops and hardmode flashpoints, it still feels like there isnt enough. Story modes are a cakewalk, as are all the flashpoints apart from perhaps Lost island, and you can get a set of raid worthy gear in less than a day. The issues with lvl 50 pvp warzones are well known. To say that 1.3 is going to have to save the game is probably jumping to conclusions but it needs to arrest the slide in subs numbers, and i have to confess i dont think there is enough there to do it.Im sure if you ask 20 players who are thinking of quitting they'll have 20 different reasons - BW need to be listening and making sure the most recurring complaints are being addressed, and as much as 1.3 seems like its an attempt to do that, i dont think its enough. I generally only login to raid nowadays, spending much of the rest of my game time playing D3, and without more content i cant see that changing. The game isnt dead but you need to take an objective look at whats wrong and a lot of posters may have jumped to conclusions a bit. Im not unsubscribing for now, as i still enjoy ops with my guild. But if that dies due to a lack of new content, i might have to.

My guild has recently cleared the Explosive Conflict operation on hard mode, and the story mode version has been "on farm" for some time. I fully understand that there are a lot of priorities for 1.3, and that they relate to game mechanics and features more than playable content, some of which will help alleviate a lot of the grouping issues i think have cropped up as server populations have stabilised. My concern is that without the addition of either new difficulty tiers or new content, how will this help with player retention for those players that look for progression raiding? Are there plans for new content for "top level" guilds who have already cleared available content to keep them interested either between now and 1.3 or when it is released?

Apologies, somewhat naive as to the use of these forums! Many thanks!

The only possible issue i can have with this process is the fact this thread isnt made for the devs only, so we could see the REAL time at which waves take place and not have to wade through miles of rants, complaints and (in some cases) rather silly comments....