SWTOR is just now getting its F2P legs, so I suggest you give it some time for the dust to settle. First, the F2P and Cartel bugs have to be worked out, then the F2P options and Cartel offerings can be improved. F2P is an attempt to garner more players, but clearly EA is an infant at figuring this model out as can be seen by their requiring a Cartel purchase for even Quickbars.

Suggestion: EA, if you would like to have a great deal of player testing time I suggest you adopt a practice similar to Star Trek: Online where a specific weekend is designated as a test weekend and any player that spends X amount of time playing new content is given some kind of cosmetic reward. This may help you to iron out a number of bugs associated with any given large update before it is installed into the live servers.

If I may be so bold as to counter your assessment, the reason that swtor lost so many players has nothing to do with whether or not the game requires a subscription. Going free-to-play will undoubtedly bring in a great many new players, but that will not change the underlying problems that drive away existing players: regardless if they are free or pay. The fact is that everyone has their own opinions on the most important reasons why people leave, but there are also a great many commonalities. When I first stopped my subscription after 6 months, the survey I was presented with about why I unsubscribed only compounded the reasons why I did: the survey itself was so closed-minded that it didn't allow me to convey in any sense the reason I had left. I believe the very first step you need to do is create a web site interface where all subscribed players can vote for or ad-hoc add the things that most need to be fixed, most need to be changed, and most need to be added; being able to have 5 active votes in each category at a time. All free players should be allowed to vote for three of each category, but not allowed to add their own new ones. Each item would have an attached forum thread where players and staff can discuss details. Have this interface heavily monitored with each votable item searchable by keyword to avoid any duplicate entries. EA may want another category specific to EA content that allows players (free and subbed) to vote, but not add anything. The key is to keep such a system clean, easy to find and vote, and actively looked at by EA staff. This is the only way I can think for the community to directly and cleanly be involved in EA's improvement of SWTOR without it becoming a chaotic mess. It will also allow EA staff to get immediate feedback on things without having to sift through mass amounts of forum entries.

There are many reasons why I decided to unsubscribe, but chief among them is the developer's failure to learn. Every major problem has been pointed out since before day 1, but EA failed to listen and instead continued to stack one bad decision on top of another. They alienated the players most loyal to them, and then they made changes to cater to the alienated players, which alienated most others. You know you have a good game when some people love it and some people hate it. Another good example of EA's failure to learn is the unsubscribing survey itself. It's nearly impossible to actually tell them why you unsubscribed using their survey. The way the survey was designed accentuates the root cause of why so many people have left SWTOR. The reason I check back every so often is because I still have hope that this game can one day fulfill its enormous potential (which is much larger than WoW ever had), but it never will until the right decisions start being made.

I unsubscribed yesterday: I held out hope that the EA Bioware group might be able to pull off at least a fraction of what the Bioware company did, but between ME3 and this the future does not look good. Everyone makes mistakes, and most everyone will forgive them; but if EA continues to refuse to admit their mistakes or correct them and keeps making one bad decision after another as they have been, I just don't see SW:TOR being able to live up to its potential. You asked what is bad about the game: Bugs; For how long this game was in development and the duration of and the number of participants in beta testing, this should not have been an issue. Their entire QC and beta testing workflow needs to be examined or perhaps redone. No Worlds; They call them planets or worlds, but they are so incredibly tiny and tunneled it isn't funny. There is nothing to explore because the quests send you down every path there is to follow, and there aren't many. Dead Worlds; I do NOT refer to players here. I refer to the fact that the NPCs are few and far between, lifeless, and little more than extra detail on a wall somewhere. They should take a page from the Elder Scrolls series and make each world full of life and NPC-NPC interaction that the player can also be part of. Story; This is supposed to be a story-centric game... NOT. I really liked the idea of having full voice overs in the game, but you can't simply use that as an excuse to axe everything that RPGs have evolved into over the last few decades. The story isn't just linear, it's a perfectly straight line. Decide to help your master? same conlusion; decide you don't care one way or the other? same conclusion; decide to back-talk your master, same conclusion; decide to spare the innocent, same conclusion; decide to slaughter the ones you're supposed to protect? same conclusion. There is absolutely no point to even caring which dialog choices you make because none of them will lead you any differently than the others. What's more, you never get punished for going against your principals or anything else for that matter. There is no story here, just a movie to watch from beginning to end. Space Combat; We're in the Star Wars universe, we traverse planets and galaxies, but we do so in a way that only Chip & Dale would approve of. (this is a reference to the Disney game series 'Kingdom Hearts'). TIE Fighter was one of the best known space simulators, but instead of having any kind of fun space system like free space, we get the Gummi ship: only with less options. If I had to choose a word, it would be 'travesty'. PvP; they tried, and while they did achieve a few things, for the most part, they failed; enough said. Server Population; this isn't actually a problem with the game; it is more-so a result of the problems with the game. If EA had started making good decisions even after launch, then subscriptions would have continued to grow and they would have instead needed to add more servers. This is not the case, though, and having already lost 20% of their subscriptions since February (link), any remaining subscribing players MUST be able to actually play the game or they will unsubscribe as well. Everything Else; The sad truth is that Star Wars: The Old Republic had (and still has) the potential to be far superior to any other MMO available, but the liklihood of it reaching this potential diminishes daily as the people in charge of the game continue to make bad decisions. I have mentioned a few 'bad' things about the game above, but in reality these are not especially bad, but rather mundane; but when you accumulate so much mundane together you are left with no reason to play anymore, which then makes it 'bad'.

Yes, for now. At the outset, I decided that I would subscribe to the game for one year soas to give it a fair chance. As a short feedback statement, what this MMO has more than anything else is potential, but to be straight without being too detailed, it has disappointed me so far on almost every level and every aspect. That is not to say that its shortcomings will not be addressed within the first year: that is my hope, anyway. I've been working offline on a great many highly detailed feedback posts that I will continue to write and edit until the end of the game's first month, at which point I will post my findings and recommendations on how the shortcomings can be resolved along with a consolidated voting post for the suggested changes.

The whole thing has been in forum stickies for a long time...

What were you thinking!?

*votes 'Epic Fail' and heads to bed*

Just to give everyone an idea, here are the three questions they rejected from me before I closed out from disillusionment:

No, their whole chat system nuked itself twice since 7pm. On top of that, the lag was insane and that is just with 1,400 users. Best Buy should've used IRC like the rest of the world, since it works.

They clearly do not want to say anything in this "interview" that has not already been released. They simply rejected any questions about things like the space changes mentioned by Amber or anything else that has yet to be divulged. They wouldn't even comment about how the first day of Early Access went (even though Stephen Reid has said that it went better/more quickly than expected).

Don't be silly. It took Blizzard nearly 4 months AFTER WoW launched before the majority of their customers could even log in. I was one such customer, but if you remember that this is just a game, then it really isn't so bad. Bioware's SWTOR pre-launch has already gone off far superior to Blizzard's WoW in every possible way: they have even stated that they have been able to proceed with early-access much quicker than they had anticipated. As for the OP, I am sure that they had a vague idea internally which dates they were going to enable in which order, but as to when those dates would be activated... they have already invited more than they had planned for 12/13; so if they had devised a schedule, you would likely not have been able to gain early-access nearly as quickly as you can now.