Let's expand this topic of learning curve. There are videos and guides that have been on the Internet for years. The issue is not solely that people don't bother to read/watch. The Tutorial: You are not shooting at any moving targets. Learning techniques that actually net kills require that you queue in real matches, which take way too long because few people queue. Nothing is shooting at you. Even a sequence that launches a missile and tells the player to hit their missile break at the proper time would help. People assume the abilities behave like defensive cooldowns in the ground game when the timings and durations are so different, that thinking gets you killed making you think they don't work. You can't use the ship of your choice in the tutorial. If I want to practice rail guns, I need to do it in a live game. Same with getting used to the different handling of a bomber. The tutorial uses the fighter every guide in existence tells you to never use. Learning by Doing I can go to Dulfy and read guides for days. I can use legacy gear to gear up my alts. I can parse the dummy to get my rotation in order. I can compare what I'm doing on parsely.io and see what's right and wrong. I can do flashpoints before operations, story mode before hard mode, PvP or even heroics and use any aspects of my class (damage, heals, cc mechanics, tanking). So when I'm told L2P, I can actually do that, from the first minute I logon to the last. In GSF, I can watch videos of people demonstrate their skill, Stock Ship is an entertaining one. I can read guides telling me what to buy, but I can't put it into practice for a significant amount of time. I pulled up my stats and the ratio of time between GSF and the ground game is literally minutes versus hours in a single week. I sit in the queue and if I get bored and queue PvP, I drop from the GSF queue. GSF simply doesn't pop often enough, the tutorial doesn't even let me practice with the ship and weapons I invest 10's of thousands of requisition to use. Cartel Coins to convert ship requisition to fleet requisition really needs to go. The people who play a lot don't need to do this, the people who are new who have 20k+ ship req in a strike fighter they will never ever use because they can read, will not waste the CC. Summary GSF is like asking to join a group for Veteran or Master (NiM) operations when you're undergeared and/or don't know your rotation. This is due to matchmaking and the aforementioned points. Even if the people aren't toxic, the scoreboard is discouraging enough that people won't spend time or cartel coins on something that affects maybe 10% of their total play time in a week.

The most ironic thing about this post is that 1 year ago, in beta, you could queue 8 man teams. The mere concept that this would become a feature for a patch 1 year into the future speaks volumes.

If you think that SWTOR will save face by not providing transfers or a server merge to these customers, you are mistaken. Facebook, Twitter, and blogs indicate customer sentiment quite well. SWTOR like any MMO will attract net new subscriptions in the following ways: 1. They do a free trial. Marketing driven 2. They announce a new major content patch or expansion. Press driven 3. Word of mouth. Player driven Items 1 and 2 cost money and they can't do that at scale. Item 3 scales extremely well and it just makes money. Refer a friend and get perks has been around for decades because it works. Dying games unfortunately don't have item #3 driving new subs, in fact this one blocks some new subs. Who wants to join a dying game? If you are one of those low population servers, as far as you are concerned, the game is in fact dying. It does not matter if Fatman is on a 3hr queue. None of those players will PUG, PvP, chat, or interact with you in any way. On your server, the only population that is relevant is the population on your server. Cross server queues are meant to alleviate this, but we will see how much wisdom Bioware's team has.

This game will be around as long as EA wants to maintain the infrastructure. I would be surprised if the game is shutdown in 5 years. I think SWTOR will be the last of its generation for a number of reasons. The subscription based model will not grant any game the returns that WoW has experienced. It has not happened for any game but WoW. It definitely will not happen for SWTOR. SWTOR's most valuable asset is the Star Wars license. Without that it would be a mediocre space themed MMO with a monumental budget. There is no other license in existence that would afford this.

Actually, no that does not. There are plenty of games where PvP is not broken because everyone of a given class does not look the same. With appearance slots in many modern games, people look however they choose to. Clearly it is not a must. Seeing a character's animation, cast bar, the name of the skill they're using is more useful information than looking at their armor. It will tell you what spec they're using and if you know the game, you'll know a lot about what they can and can't do.

What I believe is missing is not a grind, it's character progression. Progression is what many people who like mainstream MMOs are looking for. Starting another alt is not what many people are looking for when they think about progressing their main. Many of these people want to rack up achievements, pets, mounts, gear and essentially all the prestige they can on a main, especially one that has progressed through content over months and years. SWTOR has a mainstream MMO design without many of the mainstream MMO features. But this was highlighted in months of posts in the beta forums. There was a very long thread about longevity of the game stating many of the things that are being stated now. One could argue that if the game was not designed to have "grinding" or "progression", it is not missing something, it just does not match your taste. I've arrived at that conclusion as have many others.

I have to say, the Inquisitor endgame PvE armor looks ridiculous with the metal hooks. You'd always get hung up against something just by walking around. Especially in a place like your own capital planet, DK with all its vegetation. I will say I like the green and black scheme a lot better than the various orange themed imperial armors. Ah well, to each their own.

This. In 136/140 gear Assassin DPS inferior to a Marauder. Add in mechanics and both of them are well behind ranged DPS. It's not that there is hate for the class, it's just that there are better choices for the slot if the Assassin is not the tank.

If you have a crew skill like Diplomacy, you have to buy every single point, and the missions are long and expensive. I have spent almost 300k on getting Diplomacy to 400 and even now, after all that investment, it does nothing for my biochem because the top items require drops from heroics. I could have and should have skipped the skill entirely.

If you have a crew skill like Diplomacy, you have to buy every single point, and the missions are long and expensive. I have spent almost 300k on getting Diplomacy to 400 and even now, after all that investment, it does nothing for my biochem because the top items require drops from heroics. I could have and should have skipped the skill entirely.

The hoods are always down. I have a Twilek at 50 and I've never had a case where the head tails popped through the back of the hood like rabbit ears. I'm glad they finally fied that. One thing though, your head piece that you choose at chargen no longer be visible. I haven't seen mine since level 8.

I have my Sent at 50 now, and I've had Sent + others at 50 in beta. Sentinels are not garbage, what you see now is a considerable improvement over where they were. However, Commando/Mercenaries and Snipers are superior. I would say a couple other classes are better but not superior. You deal very good damage as a Sentinel with 2 of the 3 builds. Your CC options are almost non-existant (Awe, AoE blind 6 seconds, the rest inhibit your own mobility or have no use in PvP such as Disable Droid). At the end game, you are easy to kite against knockbacks that not only knock you back but snare or immobilize you at the same time, in addition to their stun, knockdown, blind options. You won't notice this one for a little while because most people are not high level yet. I would like Bioware to reduce the ridiculous number of situational buttons to push, especially the ones that have no effect in PvP. This bloat isn't needed on top of the need to stay in melee range and the lack of CC.

The class has Awe, 6 sec blind, Stasis...but that's channeled and I don't count that, same with the brief immobilize on Force Leap and Master Strike. JC/SI have more CC by level 10 than you will have at 50. In any case, a knockdown effect on one of the abilities would be nice, like Force Kick.

For a while they are. End game they are not unless they offer something you can't get any other way. For example Biochem can make resuable stims and medkits that only they can use until you reach level 50. As far as armor and weapons, the PvP equipment eclipses that at 50 but that's at the 2nd tier, it's semi-competitive against the first tier.

It makes no sense for crew members to magically deposit gathered items into your inventory. They are on your ship. They go on a mission and return to the ship. It makes less sense for them to somehow teleport items to you whilst you are deep in an enemy base than for them to put them in the cargo hold of the ship they're standing on. Ranting aside, this is a holdover from beta where your crew couldn't use crafting materials that were in your cargo hold. They were on the ship, the materials were on the ship, but they couldn't put 2 and 2 together. Hopefully logic will prevail again and they change this.

Go into the crew skills and look at the top of the crew list. It will say something like 0/X deployed where X is the maximum. It sounds like you are very early in the game, make sure X is not 0. You eventually will have 6 companions so worry not.

Diplomacy is so far on the opposite end of balance from Slicing it is ridiculous. Slicing: Raises by gathering, no expenditure, massive income, useful items, enhancers. Diplomacy: Raises by mission only. At level 398 missions cost 2250 each and are 35 mins + each. Only 1 mission available for rank 6 crafting components, the rest are companion gifts. So, -2250 cr, no completed items that you can wear/sell, no value whatsover. I have spent over 200k raising this and the return is not even close to 10% of that. But it was this way in beta. I even had a thread entitlted Slicing > All. This is by design, I won't say it's broken but it's a very raw deal. At Light V the dark/light points portion of the reward is completely moot. Avoid this one and go slicing until you have a comfortable sum of cash and useful items. Then you can buy the few blues and purples you need for crafting Biochem. PS: If you are worried about offsetting alignment, you have 5 crew members, just make sure you do more light missions than dark or vice versa based on what you want. When I reached 10k light side, I also had about 1100 dark side points racked up due to missions but it didn't matter.