We are talking about two completely different things. One is obviously an essential game mechanic and one is some vanity side game that doesn't effect basic gameplay in anyway. In fact we don't even know if it is an essential game mechanic, all I know is that it gives me a last name. Is it going to be like AA points of EQ or is it simply going to give me vanity items or maybe your coveted dance studio. As much as you hate WoW, remember the opening of AQ. It was a server wide effort and had offline charts for projected opening. It had list for who had turned in the most commendations and stuff like that. It was an epic event, that had the whole server participating. BW give us something like that. Give us something to look forward to.

This is the reason companies continue to release terrible unfinished games.

Dang BW, there is a system in place called a Legacy that you have released no information about. It was obviously suppose to come out with the launch but you wont tell us anything about it to atleast give players something to look forward to. Fix your game already or its going to die.

What you fail to realize is most of these people don't even play WOW anymore. They got bored of WOW after playing it for years. They are trying a new game and finding it quite lacking and are feeling remorse for spending their money on something that obviously wasn't ready for release. All I really have to say is this, THIS GAME LACKS A COMBAT LOG. Let me repeat, this game lacks a basic feature like a COMBAT LOG. I know they are adding it, but how in 2012 does a MMORPG release without something as simple as a combat log. This has been standard since the inception of MMORPGs.

Because WOW was a better game. WOW HAD MUCH BETTER GAMEPLAY. Its really that simple. Wow had a superior combat system. Less ridiculous timesinks. A way to level solo aswell as in groups. It also had infinitely better PVP. Interesting design for classes(rage/energy/combopoints) compared to the old auto attack and whatever special attack that class had. People were playing rangers at high level raids with a video game controller that had turbo on it for christ sake. In fact my friend frequently played his cleric in groups with a Infrared Reciever on his computer, tv-out to his tv and used a universal remote in his recliner. Wow took over because it was quite simply a better game.

There were very little quest in EQ and very hard to find them. Thats another innovation from EQ to WOW. EQs quest involved hailing random people or looking it up in a guide of some sort to figure out what all you needed to do. Most involved camping a random worldspawn with your character or keeping a timer on a daily/weekly spawn. Then praying what you needed dropped. There was no quest log, because there really weren't quest. You leveled in EQ strictly in groups. There really wasn't a progression through dungeons, people had specific camps and in order to 'grind' it out you had to talk to the group and get on a waitlist as a replacement or start your own and find an uncamped spot. It was good in a sense that it promoted community it was bad in a sense that it took forever to do anything.

EQ was not difficult. It was the essential timesinks that WoW removed. PVP was near non existent in EQ. Healing was a complete joke that you could macroquest a heal bot to complete heal you when you hit a button. The only thing I really enjoyed from EQ was class specific roles. WoW homogonized roles to the simple fact that there were no more classes who simple job was to CC. It now became the job of everyone in the group. No more classes who specific design was to Pull there was no such thing as pulling because things became leashed and linked. Im sorry I played EQ for years and EQ did somethings right, but to simply mistate facts is ridiculous. WOW did capitalize off the dying down of EQ. But also it was quite simply a better game. Alot of the difficulty of EQ was simply time investment. Doing an epic class quest in EQ wasn't hard, it was just time consuming waiting for spawns for most classes. Going on a corpse run in EQ wasn't hard it was simply finding a necro to summon your corpses. The reason why I say consulting individuals like Tigole was important to the success of WOW was because the reason EQ started dying down and losing subscribers is because they had obviously broken content and timesinks simply for the fact that it allowed them to produce let content and give people something to grind. It got so bad that people like Tigole even posted a countdown til they unsubbed on their respective websites. They learned from EQs mistakes. Making weekly spawned World bosses the key to getting into other high level non instanced content was a bad idea. If you wanted to keep all the other world spawn bosses to yourself you would make sure you got it so that others couldn't get it. It created a basis for griefing and training other groups trying to do said content. So wow instanced most content like that and so that a wider audience could achieve set content. Wow was innovative in what it did. That is why it was a success. It took many things from other games that were legitimately good ideas and implemented them and left the fail stuff behind.

I'll tell you what kind of quest TOR does lack though. Like epic class quest, that especially teach you fundamentals of your classes. Remember the Hunter weapon quest in vanilla WOW. Getting Rok'delar and Lok'delar bow/staff and doing jump shots, which became essential to learning how to play a hunter specifically in a PVP environment, however weren't essential in the leveling process.

I argue that hiring and consulting people like Tigole was one of the main reasons WOW was as great as it was.

I played EQ for a longtime. WOW was not an EQ clone. Not even close. The way the combat worked in those games were completely COMPLETELY different. In fact there was so much about the game that was different. There mainly was no 'linked' mobs in EQ. EQ had classes whose main job was to pull. There were 'pull teams' and links. Melee attacks in EQ had pushback and properly positioning mobs in alot of situations involved adjusting the melee on certain push them into different spots. The hardest class to play in EQ was a bard, however wow essentially made every class as 'difficult' to play as a bard. I mean jesus healing in EQ amounted to 'Complete Heal' rotations. As much as you hate WOW you have to agree blizzard revolutionized MMOs with the release of WOW. The first time i saw a warrior charge and a mage blink. I thought those were the most interesting mechanics ever. WOW did somethings wrong but they did alot of things right.

Welcome to humanity. People using the best tools for the task at hand. The crazy thing is this evolves and changes on a regular basis. This is called metagame and this is what happens when people are capable of using their resources to adapt to a specific environment. This is the attitude that makes you fail at arenas. Oh that BH is spamming tracer missles should I move behind an object and get out of his line of sight. Or should I stand there and eat it because if I doi would be 'abusing' something.

Here's an idea that blizzard did that was good. Have an arena server where everyone gets access to premade max-level characters and gear. But have this ladder serve for the purposes of a "best of the best" where you get a title on your live server character and a mount and other vanity items.

Guess what I still occasionally play those games and I still watch the competitive streams of those games. Guess what they did to these fighting games? They made them more random. This is because the same type of people complained about the same type of stuff. "He knows better combos than me?" So they made the combos easier. "He plays all the broken characters?" So they make all the characters broken in some way or form. The difference between that community and the MMO community is simply, that community usually says screw it and they deal with it. Players will learn to play cheaper than the next guy. When will you notice really good arena players don't play for the gear, they play because they enjoy it and want to become rank 1. Im going to say it again, ONLY YOU CARE ABOUT THE GEAR. That is because you are playing for the gear. However, if you play to improve and learn, that gear will come. The gear was there just to give you an incentive to play, you took the bait and failed and blamed your failure simply on the gear.

They are bad because they dont understand how arenas work. What type of mistakes they can capitalize on. I don't know how it is now but blizzard specifically introduced a MMR system so that a) people could sell glad as easily and b) to prevent overly geared and way better opponents to run rampant and cause kids to rage in the lower brackets.

Look I don't have a problem with people having the same gear. I do however have a problem with people complaining that they can't get said gear because they are already at a gear deficit. When i stopped playing WOW I believe 2150 got you all your gear, that ranking was not hard to achieve for most people with a basic fundamental knowledge of how to play arenas. The gear was just a carrot on a stick to people who wanted good gear with minimal effort, and suprise when they found out you actually have to put some amount of effort to get that gear they get angry. They find a reason to blame their failures on others despite the fact that they just weren't simply good enough at arenas to get there. The real gear problem with arenas were several PVE peices (glaives in s3) that were really unbalancing.

ANNDDD that is a reason I strayed from PVE, because of individuals such as yourself. I can be respectful and have been for the most part. However, it gets annoying seeing people like yourself say I don't like arenas because a certain personality type gravitates towards arenas. Seeing people say that gear imbalances were the reason they failed at arena is bad. They were bad at arenas because they either didn't put enough effort into them or didn't like the playstyle of arenas and only did them for gear or simply couldn't grasp how to properly play them.

Well make Rated warzones and rated arenas give equal gear there problem solved.

Gear was only there to give baddies like yourself an incentive to play. At 2300+ everyone had the same gear more or less except for PVE peices which were really the problem.

So you don't want typical arenas in a deathmatch style, you want a huttball league? People want smallscale pvp without objectives. They want to setup kills not zerg objectives. What is wrong with that?

Listen guys it wasn't gear that was the reason you were bad in arenas. You were bad in arenas because you were bad in arenas.

Or people like to simply kill other players. I mean you could see this in WOW before arenas you can see this in lots of other PVP situations. People like to kill stuff calling them glorified group duels insure that you dont understand how high level even mid level arenas were played.

How can you not have arenas in a game with a gladiator title. Real talk

This is why alot of people enjoyed arena's . It was like chess. While chess maybe boring to you, it is a game loved by many worldwide and is complete with rankings and whatnot, which is very similar to how wow's arena system does its rankings. Chess is a game where the better player will win a LARGE percentage of the time. There are very few random variables in chess so its hard to blame your losses on 'luck' or 'gear'. Bad players either quit or get better in chess, they cant complain about gear or random variables. The introduction of randomness to games makes them more fun for worse players and keeps them coming back while allowing skill to prove better in the longrun. Maybe we should introduce arenas that aren't mirrored and you flip a coin for sides or something. Or introduce maps that vastly favor certain classes/compositions so that bad players don't quit and skilled players can develop creative strategies.

Sounds like a game design issue to me. To some people that is playing for fun. Lets face it combat logs have been a standard since MMOs came out. This game just isn't complete. Looks like they were quick to try to cash in on that Star Wars branding and forgot the most important part about a game the GAMEPLAY.

You can continue to do that with combat logs. Its apparent that you won't use them either way so why begrudge others who ultimately make your experience in this game better. Combat logs help with a variety of bug fixes and whatnot. This isnt just raider highs. This is the basic psychology of humans. This is what makes good MMOs and this is why they retain their playerbase. When you put time, energy and effort into something and you finally see the reward you get that feeling of satisfaction, relief and joy. You can still get this satisfaction if you want to play your crazy terrible spec. Maybe you get this feeling from topping the meters with your technically worse spec. Maybe you get this feeling from maybe not topping dps/healing meters but the utility that you offer others. So what if your dps is 70% of what the top DPS but you allowed him to maximize his dps through your utility, be it resource regeneration, a buff that boost the raids damage or whatever. If your AC has no things of that sort than thats a design problem with the game. Also there is still trial and error in raiding with combat logs. The only difference is you have a way to review where the errors are. You are complaining about min/maxing in a game that has stats that do NOTHING for certain classes. If I play an OP why would I ever get willpower. In the same respect why can't I just use my rank one spells why should I have to upgrade them. Its an obvious answer because they are simply better. You are playing a game built off of random dice rolls. Why would you expect it to not be heavily based on math. This is like playing roulette and complaining that you are losing. Or playing roulette and thinking you will win in the long term against the house.