Contrary to the rather myopic beliefs of GW2 fanboys everywhere, there is nothing whatsoever new about eliminating the trinity. Fallen Earth doesn't have it, Champions has it but no one uses it, there's a long line of games that have been designed either without a trinity period or such that you really don't need one. And they have all tanked miserably. Just as, in the long run, GW2 will, and for pretty much the same reason. It isn't the trinity people have a problem with, it's the forced interdependence. But without that forced interdependence you have no interdependence and even group content turns into a bunch of single players zerging content -- mindless, strategy-less, pointless. Creating any encounter that requires real strategy becomes impossible because everyone is a group unto themselves and any requirement for anything other than a dps zerg fails because it requires the group have more than one kind of component -- exactly what people are railing against. An MMO doesn't have to have the trinity to succeed, but it does have to have something that fills the role of enforcing player interdependency. To date no one has come up with anything else that works at all, let alone works as well as the trinity. Removing the trinity wholesale without an adequate replacement is a recipe for fail.

Well, firstly the assumption that there's any "you people" or that the same people who said A are the same people who later said B is, frankly, idiotic. Secondly, nerfing the holy crap out of every form of healing they could find is about the laziest possible way there is to make things more difficult. Want to make things harder? How about AI that isn't a joke, mechanics that you actually have to pay attention to, or mobs that are actually hard to kill? Just once I'd like to see an MMO balanced on the backs of DPSers instead of healers. How about letting DPS have to worry about resources for once, if that's so fun? Nah, can't be having that, nerf healing so they can blame healers even more than they already do! Instant hardness, so fun! ...But I'm not bitter, oh no!

Same. BC-Era I alternated between my bear tank and holy priestess, so I didn't really need to keep tanks or healers on my list -- would get swamped the second I logged. My "friends" list was filled with DPSers who didn't stand in fire and were good at CCing -- at the time a more important consideration than actual DPS output. Most of them I knew nothing about, they were just on the list because in my position getting another healer or tank was easy, but getting three DPS who wouldn't turn a run into an un-fun headache could be a nightmare. Post-LFD my friends list was populated by, well, friends. People I did know something about and weren't just useful names to know in-game.

I have one: Why be against the introduction of a tool no one has to use? The answer, of course, is because you bloody well know the vast majority will use it. That's what this always boils down to: control. A pathetic attempt to control what other people do by not allowing them the option of using a tool you don't like. No one has to use a cross server LFG. You're free to form groups however you like. In fact in games that have a cross server LFG that I've played (Rift and WoW) it was still common to have full guild runs or to just use the LFG to fill in a slot or two. Cross server LFG or no, you're free to form groups any way you bloody well like. Of course if either Rift or WoW are at all indicative, the vast majority will simple queue, not giving a rat's arse who or what server anyone is from that they group with. They'll join, do the instance, maybe say 'GG', and drop group. They do that because they want to, not because anyone forces them to. But to a certain very vocal part of the forum warrior population, that's simply not acceptable. Everyone should be doing things their way, for the good of the mythical community. They know bloody well that, given the option, most of the server population would, by their actions, tell them to take their 'community' and place it where the sun doesn't shine, the possibility of people being able to do that terrifies them. They fear the tool because, and only because, they know most people would use it. And that simply isn't acceptable to them. They should not have the right to tell the majority that they can't have a tool they know the majority would use. For reasons I can't fathom, Bioware feels beholden to this stupidity, but I firmly believe that in the end they will either give the majority the tools they want, or they will watch this game fall further into unrecoverable MMO obscurity.

If you think anything is set in stone in an evolving MMO you're being extremely foolish. Bioware is on a crusade to protect those of questionable gaming ability today, doesn't mean they will be tomorrow. Although, to be honest, the lack of even the most basic of tools in this game and the extreme ease of gameplay does seem to go hand-in-hand. I fear those hoping for content difficult enough to warrant said tools, let alone be worthy of being called 'progression', may want to refrain from holding their breath. Faceroll content serves the desires of the same sorts who are terrified of global combat logs, content of any real difficulty would leave them out in the cold.

Rift's planar atonement system is hardly original, it's just a badly designed riff on AA systems that go all the way back to EQ. The Legacy system, for all that I have zero interest in it, is a different beast. Unlike AA systems in games like Rift and, long before it, AoC, it's server-wide and shared between alts. Standard AA systems heavily discourage alting, this will encourage it. Also, at least for now, The Legacy system is fluff, mostly meaningless and nothing you'll particularly feel left out of if you don't pay much attention to it. Rift's AA system, on the other hand, is one of the worst I've ever seen. It has a significant impact on character development and, unless Trion can come up with a way to reset things -- something not built into the system and frankly I don't see a way to do it without vets screaming so loud they rend the heavens -- newbies are going to end up so far behind they can never catch up. Never a good situation to be in, especially not in a themepark MMO.

If a healer can't survive a one-on-one, who in their right mind would ever play a healer? They can't kill you, they can't survive even one person on them, what exactly is the point of even showing up as a healer? Every single game this same thing comes up. For some reason DPS thinks they should be able to glare at healers and they die, otherwise healing is "OP". Just remove healing from PvP entirely and be done with it, at last then the never ending ocean of PvPer tears and whiny demands won't totally FUBAR PvE healing. Assuming it isn't too late already, of course.

"Inertial Dampener" is the usual explanation.

No, sadly. Uninspired play, way too hard to find groups (to the point where it's not worth bothering), lack of basic tools that should be a given in a modern MMO, painfully bad UI, and, worst of all, a faction imbalance that's so bad that if I want to do anything at all I have to re-roll. I hope they can pull it out, there's a good game in there somewhere, but as it stands I've never been as disappointed in a game as I am in ToR.

Oh puhlease, not a chance in hell they'd shut up. Neither side is in the least bit interested in what the other has to say and the notion that you can just "demand proof" and have anyone give enough of a rat's arse to be bothered to play your asinine little game is so absurd as to bugger credulity. There is no "I demand proof, and since no one produced exactly what I want I win!!!11!!", that kind of idiocy doesn't even play well in kindergarten playgrounds. Look, you think the game runs like crap? Unsub, find something else to play, and be done with it. Act like a bloody adult for a change, don't come here thinking anyone who doesn't already agree with you gives a rat's behind about your pathetic little temper tantrum.

More importantly, why didn't Bioware expect it to be and have a plan in place? Sorry, I don't really mean to single out Bioware, it seems to be an industry problem. Trion had the same issue with Rift, their solution was... Creative, if not very honest. At this point the pattern is well established. An MMO launches, servers get buried, new servers are opened up as fast as they can manage (take a look at WAR's history, this isn't new), and then populations start to decline, on some servers more than others, and people are left looking around wondering where everyone went. They can't get groups going, so honestly why bother with the game? Some start chicken littling, not at all without reason, others just flat leave. As with the faction balance issue, server balance is something Bioware should have put a lot more thought into -- especially given how predictable it was. But if they had or have any kind of plan to deal with it they aren't sharing and ultimately that's a bad mistake. This is something any new MMO coming out really needs to plan for. The server inflation/deflation cycle is virtually inevitable and has to be managed or it will hurt the game. People aren't going to continue playing on a server that seems empty to them, and most are going to leave rather than re-roll.

In a thread where multiple people have discussed their experiences with current games that do not use the trinity, that's about the most pathetically weak argument it is possible to make.

Two I've played: Champions Online and Fallen Earth. Champions does have the trinity, after a fashion, but since everyone can take any skill (I would say like GW2, but everyone knows Anet invented the idea and no one has ever tried it before /rollseyes) what you ended up with was everyone having some tanking, healing, and nuking skills. As for Fallen Earth, there's no real classes and over the life of the game what little ability there was to act as a medic has been nerfed away. Again, everyone takes some tanking skills, some healing skills, and a whole lot of DPS skills. The two things both games have in common is that grouping tends to be relatively rare, and when people do group it's a mindless zerg. And I mean that literally. Throw every spell/round you have downrange and if you die (and you likely will, early and often) just run back from the rez point/cloner and re-engage. Removing the trinity without a replacement game system that serves the same functions -- and to date no one has come up with one -- wouldn't just be foolish, it'd be downright suicidal.

No. 1) Getting a group going Republic side on my server is an exercise in futility. Even spending hours in Fleet your chances of getting a group together are slim and none. Being in a guild, between the small group size (which magnifies the typical issue of the same people running content while everyone else twiddles their thumbs, at least with five and six person groups there's usually room for one or two floaters, but not with four) and guilds hemorrhaging members, doesn't even help. 2) The lack of any reasonable chance of doing group content on any kind of a reliable basis makes this essentially a single player game. As that it fails miserably. The Dailies are some of the most boring I've ever seen -- an accomplishment, to be sure, given that dailies are always boring. Not interested in PvP, at least not the joke version of it offered in games like this, so that leaves sitting in Fleet spamming 'LFG'. Not really an activity worth spending my entertainment dollars on. 3) The UI is the worst I've ever seen. Even AoC and Fallen Earth, two games with pretty terrible UIs, have some degree of customizability, but here there's squat. UI elements are in non-standard places with no way to move them. The UI is several times the size it needs to be and includes elements that take screen real estate and serve no useful function (do I need a picture of myself next to my health bar? No, no I don't.). The unit frames blow chunks, especially from a healing perspective -- good luck keeping track of buffs and debuffs (yeah, I know, a half dozen people will respond that they do it all in their heads. Good for you, us mere mortals are used to UIs that don't try and obfuscate as much information as possible). The button bar's fixed location is absurd. 4) While part of the UI, the chat interface deserves special mention as utter fail. The lack of any way of scrolling through people you've recently responded to makes having a private conversation with more than one person darn near impossible. No memory/log, randomly wiping itself, not being visible during space missions, many are the ways in which the chat system utterly and completely blows chunks. 5) Customer service. My guild did EV, killing all but the last boss (ran out of time). We all had the weekly, which required killing the second boss or anything past that. Half of us got credit for it, the rest didn't. Sent in a ticket. Got a "known issue, ticket closed". Never got credit, never got squat in the way of useful response. Completely unacceptable. I could go on, but there's really no point. If I was having enough fun I'd re-roll Empire side, like everyone else, and maybe at least have a chance of running content. Sadly I didn't enjoy leveling the first time and I'm not really interested, nor should I have to be just to play the game reasonably, in re-rolling. Given that, for me at fifty it's a single player game with limited and boring content, a horrible UI, and a total lack of customer support.

Pretty much all of them (starting with the droid that can't be on the list): Qyzen: Dude, I don't care about your silly religion and I'm not a herald of squat, stop with that crap. And, no, those level tens we just killed on our way to a datacron were not a worthy challenge for us. And, oh, your weapon of choice sucks rocks and your lack of a companion gift you love is downright insulting. On the plus side your battle fake-language babble is less annoying than everyone else babbling the same lines over and over and over and god please make it stop!, so you can stay. Theran: You're fond of asking "Why am I here?" during space missions. The answer? Because you're a freeloading tool who refuses to get off my ship!. Your over educated lounge lizard act would be the creepiest thing I've seen in a while, but Holiday easily bests you. Take your oversexed hologram and get off my ship. Zenith: Yeah, yeah, you're big, your bad, and you're pissed. Don't care. Get off my ship, now. Iresso: Mysterious past, how interesting... Oh, wait, it's not. Get off my ship before I decide I want that datacron knowledge in your noggin and do things to you the Sith never even dreamed of. Nadia: Ah, my padawan... Who I never train. But we have "meaningful" conversations... Only after I give you presents. Why are you on my ship? Just begone, that will do nicely. Ah, if only I could boot the whole lot of them off my ship. Okay, so Qyzen can sit down there in the engine bay doing... I dunno, molting? Whatever it is he does. The rest? Don't let the bay door hit you on the way out...

I'm convinced he's there to set us up for an expansion that will consist of nothing but ways to kill C2-N2 (or whatever the Imp equiv is). Force lift anvil, drop on C2's head. Set ship on crash course with planet, jump in escape pod laughing manically as C2 babbles on about how he'll 'of course' go down with the ship. Put C2 in a missile launcher, fire into a star. Tie C2 to a chain off the back of your ship, do one of the many asteroid missions. The possibilities are endless, such an Expac would sell millions.

I was there for the addition of cross-server LFGs in both WoW and Rift and as far as I am concerned it was the best addition to either game there ever was. Frankly I'd go as far as to say that any modern MMO that does not implement a cross-server LFG will not last long. It has, for good reason, become an expected feature, not having it is akin to trying to sell a car without power steering.

Given that it doesn't state what speed it goes at all, why would you "automaticly" assume it was a 60% mount? The fundamental problem here, of course, is that we really weren't told squat about the items before launch and foolishly assumed they'd actually, you know, be fun fluff rather than crap so useless you delete it at level 10 because it's not worth the storage space. But, to answer your question, the reason a lot of people assumed it would scale is because mounts have been scaling in a number of modern MMOs for some time now. As with assuming the fluff stuff would actually be fun, they assumed TOR would have most of the features and amenities that have become common in modern MMOs. Bad assumption, granted, but an understandable one.

Maybe it's just the Jedi Counselor's storyline, but I'm having a really hard time understanding where people are coming from with the "great storyline" stuff. Sadly the way the story was handled reminded me a lot of AoC. Started out interesting enough, and consumed much of your gametime in the beginning, but once you left newbieville (granted, at least here the voice overs continued, not entirely sure still if that's a good or bad thing) it rapidly became background noise you had to deal with every once in a while -- not really interesting or fleshed out enough to be much more than background noise. By the end the only two things I cared about were getting all of those personality-less freeloaders off my ship, and killing the bad guy -- and if you're not brain dead you guessed who it had to be about halfway through the story -- so I could see how mind numbing the dailies were going to be. Over the years I've come to the conclusion that MMOs are simply not a good canvas upon which to paint grand stories. They can do little stories very well -- the immortal Tauren in WoW is one of the best little bits of story lore I've ever seen, but really doesn't effect anything overall -- but the big stories end up being ham fisted and, ultimately -- thanks to the nature of the beast and the fact that the Big Boss needs to still be there for the next group that comes along -- feel pointless, even painful. I had thought that perhaps TOR would prove me wrong. So far, for me, it hasn't.

I've been maxed lighside since I hit thirty or so and now at fifty I find myself getting steamed at not being able to accept quests because half my quest log is filled with grey quests I can't abandon. Honestly I can't imagine who possibly could have thought "mandatory" quests were a good idea, especially when no warning is given when you accept them. It's so far beyond being a bad idea that if someone had told me about it beforehand I would have been certain they had to be trolling.

Here's the problem... I have a water cooled i7-950 with six gigs of fast ram, a 5870 vid card, and the game is sitting on a SATA III SSD -- in other words, close enough to the best system you can make that it doesn't matter. I also have been a huge fan of 3D platformers for basically as long as there have been 3D platformers -- Mario64, DK64, Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, even Voodoo Vince, for god's sake. I've played 3d platformers on every platform from the N64 on up, even the PSP ones. My system is solid, my latency is more than I'd like (my guild decided to go west coast, I'm east coast) but at 135ms it shouldn't be too bad, and I have gigatons of 3D platformer experience. And yet, I still find getting some of the Datacrons an unholy pain in the rectum. Honestly in any MMO 3D platforming really doesn't have a place. It requires timing that is too easily thrown off by lag spikes, a sudden influx of other players that needs to be drawn, what have you. Sadly most MMOs seem to feel the need to include some, either intentionally -- an early cave dungeon in WoW, for instance -- or inadvertently -- some of the "shortcuts" in Rift dungeons. Even those I've never really found problematic, but here...? My god. The controls are... "mushy", is the best term I can think of for them. Unresponsive, inconsistent, and just plain annoying. I mean it's bad enough when I hit a heal and it doesn't go off when I expect it to, but to expect people to do fairly precision jumping? I suspect latency plays a role -- albeit 135ms really shouldn't be that problematic -- as well as configuration. Higher end systems, bizarrely enough, seem to have more problems. But, honestly, while I certainly wouldn't say their impossible, getting Datacrons has not been anything I've found to be fun. Or, really, a good addition to the game. Rift's model, much as it pains me to say this, of cairns and such, things that helped you when leveling but had no lasting effect on gameplay and thus could be found or ignored as you wished, was far, far better. In making Datacrons increase base stats -- and make no mistake, cumulatively they do matter and, if there is ever any actual hard content, will be required for progression -- they've, in my opinion, made a serious mistake.

To be honest it's pretty common to see a lot of healers at the lower levels, chances are most of them won't be healing at endgame -- or anything close to endgame. I have endgame healers in WoW, AoC, WAR, Rift, and a few others, and it's always the same. Early on lots of people want to heal, by endgame you see a bunch of people with names like "TruHeals" DPSing. Nothing wrong with that, of course, it's just a lot of people start out thinking they'll heal or tank and find out it's just not for them.