Well, they failed to take on WoW. Now they are trying to take on Second Life. An opponent more evenly matched, most would say.

Very well said OP. While I may agree with some of your points more than others, overall this is a pretty decent description of why I will be moving on to other games. It just doesn't have any draw for me. I like you am a huge fan of the Kotor series and Bioware, but that hasn't been enough to keep my interest piqued for this game. As it is I am disappointed with the game in it's current state, and seeing the move to F2P and the lack of incoming content gives me little faith that this game could possibly change in the ways required to keep me playing it (and it shouldn't, it is a bit outrageous to expect it to be suited to my needs after this long). However that doesn't mean that I should just be patient and hope for the best, when those hopes are absolutely never going to be fulfilled. If you don't like the game now, you're not going to like it in 2 months or 6 or in a year. The basic formula for what this game will deliver has already been laid out and is probably not going to change very much. It is what it is, but what it is isn't enough for me.

The last word on faction imbalance is that there is no faction imbalance. Legacy race unlocks. Same faction Warzones. Cross faction GTN. There are no factions.

Obviously rushed stopgap that lasts for a week and doesn't even benefit half of the classes in the game? No. I call that out of ideas, you can call it what you will.

As most people that have already left this game know, that is because same-server LFG tools don't work well and you still find a group faster by doing both.

Yeah. Things are really looking up from here, I can't blame you for being optimistic, when you've hit rock bottom, the only way to go is up.

It was a poorly designed and implemented stopgap to quiet the 10 people that still care about content down and give the fanboys some ammunition to use when people say "Look, no content coming in August, like promised." It doesn't even benefit half of the classes in the game, why does it need to be here for more than a week? The question should really be: Why the hell did they bother to begin with?

They aren't doing anything for us other than allowing us the option of paying more money over and above our subscription fees for the same content that would have been rolled out in free content updates were the game to stick to a strictly sub model. There is something wrong with asking people to pay beyond their monthly subscription fee for a game that people apparently left because the subscription fee alone was too much to handle. Nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong with increasing price without improving your service, which they continue to be incapable of actually accomplishing. F2P games are basically geared towards gouging a small percentage of the population and allowing the rest to play for free. F2P hybrids are built around gouging a small percentage of the population while still receiving monthly subscription fee dollars and still making cash shop money from subscribers as well. The only model that isn't cornerstoned by some scrub feeding the cash shop money is the strict sub model, but F2P hybrids are far and above the worst for the average gamer's pocket.

Actually, MMOs are about having enough space/mobs/quest items that the players don't have to form lines to get their quests done. But hey, I guess thats why this game isn't cutting it as a MMO, because the people that can tolerate it have little grasp on what a MMO actually is.

My top 5 reasons are: -Complete Lack of difficult and engaging content at end game as well as quality repeatable content. -Unoptimized engine. You can't call a game a MMO when it can't handle 30 people on the same screen without tripping over it's own feet. -Free to play announcement. Little interest in supporting this pricing model, the only way to get that point across is to simply walk away. -Horrible rate of content delivery. Which is still continuing with the announcement of expected August content being pushed back into September. -No pull. I simply don't feel the pull from this game that kept me playing it for months and believing it was going to improve steadily the entire time. That hasn't happened in my eyes, in fact this game's life so far has been a steady regression. I probably wont be looking back, as I can't see anything they could possibly do at this stage to change this situation from my perspective. With most MMOs I've left, I've left intending to check back in 6 months or a year to see what progress has been made. I see no possible way of redeeming this game in my eyes and will not be making that annual check up on ToR.

The thing is that neither of those crowds are being vocal about this, so I don't know what you're hearing them say, but it has absolutely nothing to do with story. "PvE" does not mean "Story". The two are not synonymous. Casuals and single player RPG lovers are upset at a lack of story, people that care about meaningful MMO content are either upset about not having it or have already moved on, but story isn't what they are concerned with.

Man, screw all those trolls, haters, and negative nancies. Always trying to turn everything into a negative, never happy with anything...it seems they've even infiltrated the CMs! As you can tell, Allison here is obviously compromised by these twisted individuals. Burn her, I say! Burn her!!!! Seriously though. You're wrong Andryah, as usual.

Have you completed all 8 of the current class stories? If not, you're not finished with the currently available story content, and should continue your work progressing towards that goal. If you have.... Oh well. Story doesn't make MMOs anyhow. Dunno what to tell ya.

Why not? Why settle, if not beg, for mediocrity everywhere else, but not here?

They don't *want* you to be able to keep up with your monthly allowance. They expect you to be tempted by those monthly points, just shy of being able to afford anything, and to purchase more points to fill in the gaps left by your monthly allowance. You are not expected to get everything for just your monthly sub in a F2P hybrid game. You are encouraged and expected to spend above and beyond your monthly fee to get access to cash shop material. This is not a surprise or a coincidence. All free to play games seek to get more from the average player in a monthly period than what they would normally get from a subscription fee. It's common practice, and anyone leading you to believe otherwise is a liar.

Things the game is lacking that I would like to see added: Fun. Unfortunately I wont be here by the time that happens, if it ever does, but you can thank me when it does. Myself and the rest of the people that are leaving/have left are the catalyst for this game's improvement, if it ever does improve. The fanboys can thank us for lighting a fire under BW's *** if this F2P thing pays off.

Alterac Valley says hi to you. It also said you are wrong.

This game was bad before F2P. It will continue to be bad after F2P. I'm sorry that you are going to be staying here (likely due to lack of any other interesting prospects on the horizon) but I have very little faith that this game will improve, and if it does, it certainly wont be rapidly. I hope for your sake I'm wrong, but I don't think it's likely.

This is an ignorant and inaccurate statement. People refuse to store CC information on this website, but people continue to provide Sony their CC information despite recent successful hacking attacks, as well as, literally, hundreds of online shopping sites. You have to be joking me that you believe people are afraid to store CC info on a niche website like this, but are happy to store it on amazon, a website that millions of people access daily. It has less to do with the price, less to do with the fear of financial loss, and much more to do with the fact that faux gamers have taken over industry, and are now being catered to by every developer in the business for the sake of more profit. The complexity and depth of gaming is dying in order to better milk the 1-2 hour per week casual that wouldn't have even been considered a "gamer" at all 10 years ago. Someone that can't be bothered to value a video game enough to actually pay for it. We have nobody to thank for both the death of the sub model and the trash that developers are calling "quality games" these days other than the populous and extremely vocal crowd of casuals. When games are being built from the ground up for the lowest common denominator to be able to pick up and play for 30 minutes before calling it a day, it's becoming grim to be a *REAL* gamer.

The article basically amounts to: "People can't afford .50 cents per day to play a video game." Thats a pretty pathetic excuse, and as broke as I am, even I don't buy it. 15$ per month is absolutely worth it to enjoy a AAA mmo that will regularly deliver content, but this game is not, and they did not. Please people, if they had had such great foresight, and had known that the sub model was going to fail them, that they weren't going to sustain it, the game would have launched as F2P. It's great and all that captain hindsight can come out of the blue after something has already occured and label it an inevitability, but it simply isn't always the case. In this situation, it obviously wasn't planned for otherwise they would have been working on it in March of 2011 and not March of 2012. This article takes what is an unplanned occurence and attempts to turn it into a foreseen inevitability. You're an idiot if you can't see why this simply isn't the case. The game failed to deliver, stop trying so desperately to excuse mediocrity by allowing them this enormous cop out.

In your opinion. In the opinion of more than 50% of the people that purchased the box for this game, it has failed, on basic merits, and in every other way possible. I'm on their side.

I would gladly trade ToR for Kotor 3. As it is, it's a MMO with a *decent* single player story, thats right, decent. None of the stories are very good, none of them are completely irredeemably bad either, but yes, given the opportunity to focus on the story and single player aspects, Kotor 3 would be a much better game than SWToR. It really isn't a contest. A MMO with a focus on single player aspects, or a single player game with a focus on single player aspects, the decision is fairly clear. Any gamer worth their salt would take Kotor 3 over SWToR.

I'm shocked that people still give a ****.

I'll list some things that I consider to be quality repeatable content from WoW alone, that would also fit into the "mini-game" category in my opinion. The Dark Carnival had several mini-games, a number of vanity rewards, and also was for a time one of the places to get access to some of the game's most useful trinket items. Holiday events such as All Hollow's Eve, The Lunar Festival, etc. Were all enjoyable and some did have rewards that were useful to characters of the current level cap. The Argent Tournament, while also a daily hub, was a fun mini-game of sorts. From my experience with WoW, contrary to what you have stated, participating in the mini-games in that game could definitely be worth your while. Things that would qualify as mini-games in SW:ToR might be: Pazaak, betting/participating in Swoop Races, betting on/spectating Hutt Ball matches, world events, and so on. There are a ton of ideas that have been/will be suggested to expand the repeatable content in this game, but in my opinion, story shouldn't be their first priority.

That is exactly the issue from my perspective. MMOs thrive off of their replay value, which this game doesn't have much of in my opinion. Once I have experienced any given story, that's it, it has mostly lost it's value to me. It just lacks mini-games, and things to do while you're in between doing things, so to say. Hell, even the dumbed down idea of daily quests in this game makes me miss the reputation grinds of WoW, I at least had an option of where to allocate my daily quests and which factions to focus on, etc. Where in this game it's just a matter of going down the daily checklist to make sure I've ridden all the theme park rides for the day.