Its unfair to compare the 2, they aren't the same type of MMO. Sandbox games have inherently lower populations because they are more like... life. Theme Park games are all about preventing content from becoming stale, ie. there is always a new ride to ride, or at least the old rides haven't gotten boring yet. Early in this thread someone was calling this a wow clone with fancy voice overs and that in the end the quests are all the same. This is true to an extent. However, I'm not sure what it is the sandbox crowd wants. RPGs are immersion games, they are about inserting yourself into a character and playing out the story that character is involved in. This is accomplished by swtor better then any MMO to date. Yes, ultimately the tasks boil down to similar actions, but that is true of anything... including life and guess what, the most immersion sandbox mmo would be a near replica of real life in another environment. If you are looking for a sandbox game, it doesn't take 5 mins of review of this game to KNOW THAT IT ISN'T ONE.

I'm not sure I've read all the posts to date, but you all sound like elitist nostalgics. I'd advise you watch Penn&Teller's ******** episode on nostalgia, I believe its called the good old days. Then you should read this article http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm. Then you should read this, which I think is more accurate then bartle's theories. http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/pdf/3-2.pdf Then you should consider that perhaps you don't know as much as you think you do, and your opinions and ideas are perhaps as skewed, bias and incorrect as the "console" immediate gratification crowd that you are bashing. In the end, everyone plays GAMES (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/game) to have fun, and what is fun for you isn't fun for everyone else, and thus your definition of MMOS going down hill... is in fact just an opinion, yours, and very likely incorrect considering that all these "superior" mmos aren't being played, or if have very small communities left, there is a reason for that. Warhammer is a popular one to claim was so great. Warhammer was developed by mythic. The developers of DAOC. Doesn't seem they learned much considering how great of a success Warhammer was. In the end if you think you can create the perfect mmo with all your vast knowledge and experience... go do it. I'm sure I'll play it if its great, sadly I expect it will never happen.

I'd like to know what the general community thinks "deep pvp" is. Since I've seen "elite" pvpers say pvp is shallow in this game, and specifically since someone made an absurdly long list of basically everything that is part of pvp in this game, makes pvp shallow... /sarcasm on PvP in swtor is so shallow because the game exists, elephant in the room I know but someone had to say it /sarcasm off Lets talk about CC. A big complaint is that there is too much cc. So less cc makes the combat have more depth? because being able to do less, and have less options available to you equates to MORE DEPTH? Its a sad, but common trend that most the forum community participants are a bunch of narcissistic elitists who seem to want to make war with the game designers and developers in order to create a game that IS SHALLOW and as complex as operating a squeegee, and its this same community that claims the community is so important to the success of the game.... yet a large portion of us seem to be just a bunch of childish ******es. I would like to specifically point out this one, which really had me shaking my head in bewilderment. What exactly is your idea of unique healing? You basically named all types of healing that can be done, minus vampiric, which does exists in swtor as well. What do you want that is more in depth? More conditional healing? Like, first you have to get stacks of cool factor by doing the /dance emote, then you can consume those stacks to heal (which by the way, can't be slow, Hot,instant,fast or aoe, else it fall into the "Nothing unique or interesting" category). Which leaves what? Oh, I know, lets call it reverse healing and rather then healing your team it causes damage to the other team? That will really add depth to this VERY SHALLOW game.

/signed A lot of the social outfits look completely silly with a belt and braces.

The separation of gear was a mistake, it was a bandaid solution that WoW started that became a "good design" idea for every game that followed. Its a solution that creates more problems then it solves. In another thread I mentioned this. Gear is a gateway mechanism. MMOs use gear to control content access. Hence, the term PvE progression. PvP progression is counter productive to encouraging pvp participation. The simple solution is pvp stat capping , no matter what gear you are wearing there is is a cap (which is published and known, for all classes and all attributes). This cap should be easily achievable within the first couple of days of reaching 50. PvP should not be about gear. If MMOs want to create a more balanced experience for "bad" players, the solution is a rating system that ensures players of a similiar skill level are generally matched against each other. Adding gear imbalances simple makes this harder. However, in the end MMOs focus, is to make money and addict players to their game. It seems the easiest way to do this is to associate worth with time played. IE the more you grind in the game the better gear you get, giving you the advantage. Therefore players play more and longer to be the best. This solution has proven easier and more reliable then creating a game that has addictive GAMEPLAY.

based on the fact that you called it the "immunity bubble" instead of its proper name undying rage or Guarded by the Force, this leads me to believe you do not have a lvl 50 marauder/sentinel and therefore you opinion on whether this ability is OP is uneducated. Undying rage also takes 50% of your health, which means if you use the ability above 30% you've made a mistake. Its pretty easy to recognize, and thus counter. It sounds like you want to be able to COUNTER 100% of the time. Which just isn't realistic. IF the marauder doesn't have a full resolve bar, then a stun is an appropriate counter. If he does, then kiting is an appropriate solution. If you can't do either of these things, then you were not prepared to fight a marauder in the first place. If your primary complaint is that it makes him a super ball carrier, well thats just stupid. Huttball is a ranged dps dream, should we nerf ranged dps damage because of that? no.

I would disagree, in GROUP play its easy to be useful and effective as a scoundrel/operative. Define group play. Is being able to score group play? Team work requires that both your team and yourself recognize the team composition and how each player can work within the constraints of that composition to achieve success. If you aren't operating with premade, then you have absolutely no position from which to claim that operatives/scoundrels aren't well suited for GROUP play. They very much are. If you do operate in premades, then... I'm sorry I don't know what to tell you. Either your premade buddies don't recognize how they can work with you, or you don't recognize how you can work with them. If you aren't operating as a premade, then yes it is very difficult if your team is bad for you to ALL by yourself make a difference in winning or losing the war front. But that is true of all the classes. Arguable one of the best huttball runners is a marauder, and if you don't have at least 1 or 2 team mates working with you , it is still hard to run the ball yourself all in for a score. I love good operatives, they are a pleasure to work with. Actually I think its absolute absurd that you suggest a scoundrel can't be a huge asset in hutball. Anecdotal evidence to follow. Last week I was in a hutball with 3 operatives. One said at the start he would go cloak up on the enemy goal line. The other operative grabed the ball from the middle, he made it to the enemy pit where he was being accosted by 3 other players. He flashed banged them as I came up, they all used their break. I HS one, then flash bang the others, then root the one I hsed, the ball runner makes it close enough to throw the ball up to our cloaker who runs it in. I remember another game where I and another operative scored 4 times. I cloaked on the upper ramp. He ran to the middle got the ball and came and passed it to me, rinse and repeat.

DR is a much worse system. Rift used DR and in my opinion was much worse then the resolve system. Resolve is predictable and another aspect of combat you need to manage. If you don't like the resolve system, it tells me you don't understand it. If you find yourself popping your trinket before your resolve bar is white(unless you do , and you did it for a good reason, for example popping it on a marauder after he blew his aoe stun), then you don't understand resolve. If your resolve bar isn't white and you are stunned and you die before you come out of the stun, then you were being attacked by multiple opponents and therefore it is completely legitimate that they can kill you within the stun time frame. I'd much rather be knocked around like a pinball then combat be just a dps race. I feel like people who complain about resolve really just want to be able to do one of the following. a) mash buttons constantly without ever being attacked, stunned , rooted, snared or otherwise effected by other players. b) always be able to escape any other player if they are attacked and return to their mindless mashing once the enemy has been distracted by a new target. c)believe that combat should be a choreographed experience in which they never lose but achieve the illusion of a challenge with a guaranteed success at the end.

gear grinding is all a tool that mmos use to keep people paying for a subscription. Its a tiered gateway model. In pve its irrelevant on the player side because there isn't a competitive advantage for having played longer. You need to have completed the previous tier of content sufficient number of times to be properly geared for the next tier. This ensures that players must play for a certain amount of time prior to experiencing the next tier. This is a good model for pve because it doesn't matter where you are in your progression or when you started as long as there sufficient number of other players at a similar place in their progression. Consequently, stats continue to grow, and then when players with the top tier of pve content engage in pvp their stats were so far ahead of those who hadn't completed the content they had a significant advantage. The result, was a band-aid fix that has turned into a permanent and accepted solution. Access to gear through a pvp grind. This was a poorly thoughtout solution. Its actually a bit funny to me that its "gear" people are after. The carrot really does seem to drive a lot of players. As opposed to enjoying the new and expected to be harder content. In a game like swtor, with the great effort bw has made at story telling I would honestly hope they get completely away from the gear grind in both pve and pvp, and that it become about creating dynamic story telling events. On the pvp side of things, gear should cap and you should be done. All the gear should ALWAYS have had the modifications slots and gear should all be about asthetics and choosing to stack the right stats for your build, it should never be about a competitive advantage, since that will completely ruin the possibility of an esport like pvp experience.

Illum isn't open wold pvp, as has been said before. btw, neither is RvRvR in daoc. Open wold pvp is, as the phrase suggest, Player vs Player combat/competition within the structure of the Open world environment. The open world environment usually being defined as the location where you participate in questing and other PVE activities. Open world pvp should be engineered by creating natural conflict zones based on the general activities that players would participate in at both end game and during leveling. In a themepark game, manufacturing OPVP is bad because the players only engage in the activity till they reach their end goal (which generally gives them an advantage over other players). Take rift for example, it was common for groups of players to camp the questing areas and "grief", kill over and over questing players, until they hit the DR cap, because they were grinding to p6. Once the DR cap was hit, they let the player go about there business. And once they hit p6, they stopped opvp grinding and only engaged in opvp when they wanted too, which turned out to be not that often. OPVP should be a consequence without reward system, thus ensuring that only players who wish to be criminals will engage in it, and then only because they enjoy it. The easiest solution in the current development of swtor for OPVP is to make all zones "free for all" combat zones. I mean, let us fight our own faction, every where we go, whenever we want. I would attach a notoriety element to your actions. If you attack someone without provocation and you kill them you receive 10*(level difference)*-1 notoriety. If your notoriety is below -500 you are attacked on sight by ALL npcs EVERYWHERE. To accommodate this it would also make sense to add alternate landing locations to planets. You could further complicate it by adding notoriety by planet. So while you might be wanted on tatooine you can operate normally on Taris. To raise your notoriety you have to do notoriety specific missions for the faction who you want to raise it with. Or, if you kill a player with -500 notoriety you get +10 notoriety. These are not new concepts, they just need to be applied. These types of changes will of course make a more brutal world, where griefing occurs more commonly and more players complain about the nature of OPVP. Now, players have 2 choices, be a criminal or don't. OPVP will occur, because inevitable some players enjoy being criminals, so they will openly seek out and destroy other players. Non-criminals, much like in RL, then have to band together and punish criminals. If I'm getting griefed by a group of criminals, my only real option is to get friends of mine and grief them back till they quit, since that is the only current in game form of punishment. Of course BW could implement a prison planet and create an incarceration and lawman system(along with a bounty system). Players could be deputized and if you catch and defeat a criminal player you can choose to incarcerate them, at which point they spend a designated amout of time with only access to fleet and the prison planet. Of course criminals would whine up a storm about that. But the only way a game is meaningful is if there are consequences to your actions.

You should start the game at 50 with all the best gear and the leveling process should work backwards. That is after all more realistic. You don't get better at stuff as you get older, you get worse!

All open world pvp zones need to be free for all. That would make for some interesting leveling

What even qualifies as good PvE end game? Name a game that has good PvE end game, I see this complaint in every MMO I've ever played. TORS PvE end game is on par with all current mmo pve end game out there. FP in HM and operations (raiding). Standard. This isn't what makes TOR different and they never claimed it to be. TOR stands out because its a story driven MMO and again... they have a crap ton of story. The problem is, none of you seem interested in enjoying it all.

so you have 8 level 50s and did it all in 2-3 weeks? You've also played through all the republic side planet quests and the imperial side planet quests, at least once? That is of course much easier to achieve, but I've been playing since early access and I've only finished 1 class story line completely and I skipped planets when I outleveled them so I haven't even played all the available story on each planet. I play daily, I haven't even played all the flashpoints yet and none of the operations. Not that I'm very interested in them, but in terms of pve content you are just wrong. There is lots and lots of it. If you don't find it engaging that is your opinion, but there is a lot of it available to those who do enjoy it. If you are a lover of story driven rpgs this game provides you with ALOT of hours of story, the first time through on each faction is best since everything is new. That means that you've got at least 1 full republic play through and 1 full empire play through that if you actually take the time to enjoy the story and the planet quests will take you at a min 2 weeks each. The remaining 6 possible class storylines may require you spend more time pvping or doing space missions to fill the level gap in between if you aren't interested in replaying all the planet missions. If the remaining 6 have comparable play times (albeit more time grinding), that would mean at a minimum to get through ALL 8 of the advanced classes would take 16 weeks, in hard core mode. I have 3 other family members playing this game, of those, I'm the only one who has a lvl 50. I am by far more of a hard core gamer then any of them. They have been playing since December as well. I expect that your average gamer could play the PvE in this game for at least a year and still not have completed all of the the stories. So, if you are going to suggest it isn't a pvp game, that I can agree with. However, it most definatley qualifies as a PvE game with ALOT of content. Perhaps it isn't content you enjoy, but it is definatley there.

pve has limited replability. TOR pve is AWESOME once, maybe twice. The story driven nature of it is really fun to play through, much more engaging then any MMO to date, but its all basically single player till you hit 50 , then post 50 the stories aren't new, at least the flash points aren't. Playing the pve 1-50 with a group is fun, the planet stories are much more enjoyable, but there is a conflict since you can't participate in the single player story line. I think TOR could be a pvp game, but right now it isn't. Its a great set of SP stories in a persistent world with excellent co-op options.

World PvP hasn't exsited since daoc and vanilla wow. I'm not one to wax nostalgic about either of those games daoc had its flaws, and well.. wow is wow. However, in the early days of both games the in game rewards for pvp didn't exist. You pvped because it was fun to pit yourself against a more challenging opponent then some scripted AI that re-spawns after 2 mins, or because it was fun to go pick on people you knew you could dominate, or because you enjoyed manipulating the environment to create an unexpected victory (grapple into acid in hutball for example, no matter how many times I do it its still fun). I think tatooine is the place to go for world pvp, I just think its so out of the way, and not very well advertised that no one realizes its there. Group FFA, perfect place for world pvp. Put a Control Point in the middle, allow 4 man groups to give their selves a team name and you've got an ffa king of the hill. World pvp is pvping where ever you want, and making due with whatever you have. It isn't crying that there is no reward or purpose to it. It isn't crying that you are outnumbered, because in the end world pvp will always end as a numbers game, that is just the reality of the system. If you aren't good enough to kill me why would you keep trying? isn't the smart thing to get a friend and kill me 2v1? Then I get a friend , then you get another etc etc , it happens in real life, why would you think you could artificially create a "world pvp" scenario that could also ALWAYS be fair and balanced and in the end rely only on PLAYER SKILL.

1) Increase the range of vicious throw and deadly throw to 30m 2) Make our channels usable while moving. Catching my target with force choke at 9m and being able to close the gap while choking is very appropriate and it would make ravage not lame. Any major changes to the class are not needed. There may be a case for some skill consolidation, but I'd argue you are likely to cause more problems then you'll fix.

he is easy to pull down the stairs, you just put your companion on passive and flash bang him and run down to the second flight of stairs. Once he is off the platform you won't experience the targeting issues. The first round is pretty simple, just let Kaliyo tank and keep her alive while you squeeze in damage. Rest up between rounds and make sure FB is off CD to start the next round. I found the remaining rounds to be easiest by fighting among the computers to the right of the platform if you are facing the platform. For these rounds I used Vector. Since Jadus is constantly stunning your companion I didn't think there was much value in using Kaliyo, I was also 2 or 3 levels below the quest so he was hitting pretty hard. But if you fight among the comps, its easy to just los him when he starts his attacks as he doesn't seem to have any instant damage of any significance. Hit him a few times, then los before the cast ends and he won't hurt you, if you miss one just stun him and heal.

When I first hit 50 I was carnage. I played carnage for a while and found it lacking (even after i geared up). EasymodeX makes a good write up in another thread about what makes Carnage worse then anni or rage and I agree with him. Time on target is essential to carnage and with the nature of pvp Carnage is in the worst position to be effective. I think the solution is to make gore work like deadly sabers (100 armor pen for you next 3 attacks). I think giving all marauders a pull would make anni and rage too powerful, but if there was a force pull in the carnage tree I think that would bring carnage into a more competitive state with rage and carnage. After carnage I played rage. Early on rage was all the rage . I liked rage. Rage is, as others have said is very predictable, this can be bad and good. Its good because of all the marauders specs its the easiest to play. Its bad, because just like other "easy" classes it doesn't take long to figure out how to counter it. I also found it frustrating at times. The real burst of rage comes in having the final damage of force crush, which can crit for 2000+ to hit at the same time as Osmash. Again, because of the nature of pvp , at times it can be difficult to be on target to achieve this, but because rages burst is more cyclic, it is less harmful to the spec then how carnage is effected. I now play anni.

This , imo , is terrible assessment of the current state of pvp. I'm not sure how you would even come to these conclusions. You are suggesting that because every class has 2+ forms of cc that each player working as an individual produces the same result as players working in a coordinated team? There is no theoretically about it, it is true, a marauder can put pressure on healers and casters while maintaining los to their own healers. I'd say that the marauder(anni spec) is the best choice for healer pressuring. A guarded healer can mostly ignore 1 ranged dps, but the damage aspect of the pressure isn't what makes the marauder the best at it, its the intelligent use of CC+ interrupts, Which means that a coordinated effort is MORE important in order to ensure that you can keep the healer from healing without your team throwing cc on him while you are trying to keep him from healing.

This is just another 2v1 , not fair I can't win argument. A tank guarding another player means that player has to stay within 15 m of the tank, the tank then taunting you when you are attacking the guarded player means you are fighting 2 v 1. A tank can't guard himself, and if he taunts you while you are attacking him, its a wasted gcd. So I cannot , in the slightest agree with this argument. in the 2v2 scenario where its a tank+healer vs dps+dps if you put 1 dps on the healer (who can keep the healer mostly interrupted) and 1 on the tank, you will likely break the chain before the tank and healer can kill either of you.

yes, its very irritating honestly. usually the root applies part of the way through or at the moment of the charge as well, if the player immediately KBs they can knock you back before you even know it.

CC is short for Crowd Control. Impairing movement is a form of crowd control. There are 2 flavors of cc hard and soft. soft are ccs that don't fully impair something or that break on damage (snares, soft stuns, slows) Hard cc is something that complete incapacitates the target even while taking damage. At least that is usually how the terms are used in discussion, I'm sure there isn't a manual on it anywhere.

I'm sorry but go read the other class forums you'll see people in those forums complaining about not being able to win 4v1,3v1,2v1 as well. This is an argument for UNBALANCING marauders in the FAVOR of MARAUDERS. Not an argument for creating balance. I disagree that other classes have more utility for survive-ability. The marauder is deceiving. Its a low health operator, what I mean by that is that you are often times operating at less the 50% health and this should generally not concern you. I don't know how many times in the first 5-10 secs of a fight I'm below 50% health and my target is still above 70% and they lose. That makes pulling people of to remote corners of the map very easy btw. If you are part of an organized group who is really playing as a team then when you get targeted by 2 or more players from the other team your tank SHOULD guard you and your healer SHOULD heal you. If it so happens that all of the following are on cool down , Undying Rage, Saber Ward, CoP, Force Camo and your healer is too far away or otherwise occupied, or you are part of a PUG and you cannot count on your team actually assisting you. Then yes you might die in under 10 secs, but I don't see how you could claim this is unbalanced. again more anecdotal evidence. in my experience a large portion of the time, when fighting 3v1 if one of those 3 isn't a healer I can kill my target and escape. in my experience 4 v 1 (or more) I can survive and escape at least 50% of the time. in my experience a vast majority of the time 2v1 I can kill my target and escape (even if he has a healer), and if one of them isn't a healer, at least 50% of the time I can kill both of them. in my experience, my preferred target is DPS BH/Commandos, they are by far the easiest kill a marauder can make, its a joke when you fight a bad one, and only a small challenge when you fight a good one. Heal specced you can force them to turtle and if you're lucky kill them, but they can't hurt you for the most part. in my experience, sorcs/consulars are my second easiest kill. A good one is a challenge (which is fun) a bad one is only slightly less challenging then a BH/Commando. Heal specced they will probably just cc and try to run away, its generally pretty drawn out but you can kill them with out help if they continue to try and run instead of just heal through it. This is all within the context of WZ pvp. When fighting a premade or a group of players who recognize how to play the WZ of choice and that team work usually results in a win, the only choice you have AS ANY PLAYER is to work with your team OR try and isolate a player on the other team. I bring up sorcs/consulars and bh/commandos because there is so much QQ about how easy they are to play and how much more damage they do then us.

But you aren't making a fair comparison either. Its 8v8, not 8v1. If you are working as a team then your team SHOULD be protecting you and they can do so very easily. What am about to present anecdotal evidence, so take that for what it is worth. Yesterday while on civil war, myself and another marauder went to the right node. We happened to be in the same group in the wz so he preded first, then when his ran out I did. We hit the node at the same time as 4 republic, 2 sages, a sent , and a commando. We killed all 4 of them. Yesterday while in hut ball in the enemies pit, I was fighting 2 inquisitors and an operative. I was near death, popped undying and a team mate (inq) showed up and started healing me. I killed all 3 of them.