Bioware is implementing them exactly as how I proposed they be implemented in other combat log threads, so I vote against any further change. My understanding of the combat log is that they will be visible in-game but that they will also be able to write to a disk for 3rd party apps to process detailed information. LOTRO was known as a "wow clone", and the combat log has never gone beyond seeing only the player's stats. There are no DPS meters or threat meters, and we have no problem raiding without them.

Since every class & faction has access to human, getting a Human char to level 50 will instead provide a Presence buff to all alts. It's not that human is unbalanced, but it does have a different result than other species.

I think it would be nice if some of the Legacy unlocks were cross-server to help encourage players to create more characters. An example of a good cross-server unlock would be the races. Get a level 50 and you unlock that race on any server. The human unlock can remain on the same server for balance reasons. This would free up server slots to have more fun experimenting with races. Since there's no cross-faction trades, I split my alts across 2 servers. One server to hold up to 8 Sith characters and another to hold up to 8 Republic characters.

That's why I included "according to post-Atari interviews". I always felt like Cryptic was trying to have their cake & eat it too with the sub & micro transactions. The thing about how corporations work, because Atari is their owner, they would require Cryptic to put on a united front with Atari, or risk losing their job, so anything they said before can be suspect. Now that Cryptic is out of Atari's grip, anything they do to point the finger at Atari only serves to try and make themselves look better is also suspect. With everything being in doubt, what I can do is look at decide for myself what is most likely. Based on the design of the game, I feel it is very believable that Cryptic designed a F2P game. It is also believable that a decision was made late that they would keep the F2P parts but also charge a subscription based on what they believed was high popularity. As to whether or not that decision came from Atari or from Cyptic seniors, unless confidential documents get leaked, I doubt we'll ever know for sure, but I can see the publisher being the one to force the decision on the developer on issues such as this.

Here's 1 reason to have many servers: It's a lot easier to find a nice char name when you're sharing a server with 50,000 other characters than if you had to share namespace with 10,000,000 characters (there were already 3.8 million characters by Dec 22nd). STO solved the issue by only requiring the account name to be unique and allowing spaces in the char name, but for Bioware to do that would require a massive overhaul of their entire system.

All the missions scaled to the team size. The only content requiring multiple players were the fleet actions, and those didn't require groups. These are multiplayer missions, but not group ones. You could have a bunch of players soloing them. No cooperation required. The player who did the most damage got the best rewards. Very unique concept.

I was there for the STO Launch, and here are things I remember from the early days of STO: 1) Their launch was very smooth & successful. The login queue was smaller than SWTOR's, and the servers were fairly stable. I don't recall any major bugs, aside from some PvE balance issues. 2) I found the space combat in STO incredibly fun. It played like Bridge Commander, which I loved. That style of space combat was perfectly suited for a Star Trek environment and wouldn't feel right with Star Wars. 3) Microtransactions. The online store was built for a F2P game, but charged a subscription. You paid monthly, and then you had to pay extra to get playable races & ships. According to post-Atari interviews, this was because Cryptic intended STO to be F2P at launch and designed it as such, but Atari veto'd it and put the subscription on. 4) There were NO raids at the launch. Not a single one. There was also nothing that required forming a team before entering at any point in the game. The only areas that required multiple people were open zones where people would just enter and participate. 5) Single server w/ instancing made STO look very busy compared to SWTOR. Approaching Earth Spacedock in space, and you would be surrounded by the ships of other players. SWTOR lacks this feel. 6) As fast as SWTOR leveling is, STO's was much faster. Average time to hit level cap at launch was about 80-100 hours. 7) All classes had access to all ships. With only 3 classes to begin with, replayability was dismal. Once players hit the level cap on their first char, there was little point in rolling an alt and even less to do than SWTOR has. 8) My guild spans many MMOs. In STO, about 6-8 of us joined. By the end of the 1st month, every single one of them left and didn't resubscribe. The population drop was dramatic. In SWTOR, dozens of us joined, and not only do we still have active members, we have new recruits and raids being organized. Some leave, but not anything like STO's numbers. 9) Ground combat was horrible. Auto-fire was removed at launch, so most of combat was just hitting the same button every second to spam a small damage auto-attack. 10) The UI for managing 3 companions was excellent. You had more control over STO's 3 companions than SWTOR's single companion 11) As many posters have said, customization is superb. Not only can you customize multiple outfits for social, but you also have almost full control over your personal appearance with each outfit, so you can change your physical dimensions & skin colour between the saved outfits for example. 12) STO only launched with 1 complete faction. Klingon faction was incomplete and primarily PvP only. All of this is mainly looking at what STO had at the launch. Like all other MMOs, things improve with time after launching. STO did have one major post-launch setback. When Atari went to sell off Cryptic, it froze all spending. This lasted about 8 months where there was very little developed. With the new owner, STO development has kicked off at a frantic pace. There are a few things that STO did better than SWTOR, but there are many many things that SWTOR did better than STO.

rotate aggro, kiting, use x/y/z are also tactics that can be used by trinity teams. Everything a non-trinity team can do, a trinity team can do better. That's why so many people go with that type of team, and because it's so effective, devs build their raids around trinity teams. If they built a raid to be handled by any random 4 players, a trinity team will destroy it. LOTRO has bosses which require rotating aggro. Raids bring along 2 tanks to handle the aggro rotations. When a tactic calls for kiting, it's one of the tank classes that handles the actual kiting. Tanks are simply DPS who have traded some damage for defense. I have seen many ideas of replacing the manner in which players fill the classic trinity roles, but the only idea I saw in this thread on replacing the actual trinity system was by giving players access to all 3 roles simultaneously. This takes away the variety and personalization that players like in MMOs. Trinity system: Players who are best able to handle incoming damage take on the role of tank. Their job is to be the primary target. Players who have abilities for the survival of their team (such as heals & CC) take on the role of support. Everyone else focuses on doing damage. This is refined down to the bare minimum of tank, DPS, healer. There are lots of different tactics for taking on encounters, and many of them will work just fine, but the trinity tactic works best; it works better every time than any other team composition, and its the easiest. Even if your boss encounter calls for kiting or rotating aggro, the encounter will still work better with tanks handling the kiting/rotating backed up by healers repairing the damage than if you had nothing but DPS. You could still do it with nothing but DPS, but not as easily as the trinity team.

Ask kids which one they like best. McDonald's has a target audience and they target it very well. Theme park MMOs also have a target audience.

The advantage you have as a GM in D&D is that you can design the encounters specifically for the exact group of people that will run them to give them the challenge they can overcome. You work with the group personally and you not only know their stat based skills, you also know how they think & work together. Since you are also acting as a game engine, you can handle a wider variety of unusual strategies, inputs and environment than a computer can. In how many of your sessions did the players come up with an idea to solve something that you never considered? This is why P&P D&D has survived for so long; it does things that computers haven't been able to replace. I've seen many posts saying "it can be done", but none with any actual examples. I have seen many boss fights that are complicated, but very few where you don't need either someone to tank or someone to heal. On those rare times when there was no healer, the tactic was either a DPS race or kiting. I know one boss fight in LOTRO which involves 4 tanks in a 12-man. 2 of the tanks are the proper melee tank classes which tank the adds. The 2 bosses get tanked by hunters, which are ranged DPS medium armour and wouldn't normally ever tank. They aren't tank classes, but the boss encounter works best if they fill the tank role, so before the battle 2 hunters are named the ranged tanks. The thing about how people are and use words, if it is someone's job to try and be the one getting attacked, they are the tank no matter what class they are playing. When I've been in teams where we didn't have a proper tank, the first thing we'd all discuss is which one of us will fill the role of tank, because someone's going to get hit, and you want it to be the one with the best chance of surviving. I have seen lots of boss fights done without a healer, but none that were easier because they had no healers. I can't think of any boss fights that didn't involve someone filling a tank role.

I'd rather see Flashpoints become capable of scaling up to keep the older content viable, but if we can have both, I'd take Sync too.

Have any tangible ideas on what to replace the holy trinity with? Battles are all about damage. You are doing damage to the boss, while the boss is doing damage to the team. The goal is to kill the boss before the boss kills you. Even if you take away all classes and give players full freedom of choice, they will still choose on their own to split into specialties. Since the goal is to kill the boss, some players will specialize in that to help their team to kill the boss faster. Since the challenge is that the boss is also trying to kill the team, some players will specialize in being the one to take the damage to do it as effectively as possible. Since fights are also an endurance, players will also want their chances to be greatly increased by removing the damage that a boss does through heals. Does Damage; Gets Damaged; Heals Damage; That's the holy trinity of DPS, Tank, and Healer. I can't think of any way of removing those 3 roles from combat without also taking out damage. You can add more support classes, but that only adds additional variety to the holy trinity, which is a good thing. Each AC should have more unique things to bring than they already do. Even if you take away the classes, players will still try to fill the roles. We don't have tank/dps/heal roles in classes because Bioware wants us to fill those roles; We have those roles in classes because that's the roles players have decided are the most efficient for tough encounters. Do we keep the holy trinity because it allows players to specialize to their playstyle and work together in the same way we've been doing for over a decade, or do we turn the fights into a rhythm game where victory is only about standing at the right spot at the right time with the right attack? I have played MMOs with a wide variety of boss fights, and there are many boss fights out there that don't depend on the holy trinity, but those fights are the exception to give players a bit of variety in their holy trinity based games. AO had one boss fight where players worked out that the most efficient method was for only pet classes to participate and to all stand in 1 spot and let the pets do all the fighting. For everyone else, it was a rhythm game. It was a fun break from the usual tank & spank, though AO's golden years involved 100-person raids on bosses (aka the zerg raid). LOTRO has been doing quite a number of different things in the last few years. I did a raid there today where the boss fight involved everyone playing ring-around-the-rosie jumping in a circle every few minutes to avoid taking damage in an acid flood. It's still holy trinity, but with added layers on top. If all you do is try and tank & spank, you'll fail. One 3-man raid requires running to adds and doing the emote /slap. Both of these MMOs required years of evolution to reach the point where they could have a lot of flexibility in boss fights. Both the players & Bioware are still learning the full capabilities of what PCs can do, and new patches are sure to add new abilities to our arsenal which will require new bosses to be taken advantage of with them. My only question: If you are going to replace holy trinity, what would you replace it with? Would your system still have players manually choosing on their own the roles of tank/dps/heal simply because it's a highly successful combination, or do you have an innovative design that renders the entire concept of tank/dps/heal obsolete?

Unless you're talking about companions or visual effects, no sane MMO would have the AI logic on the client side. Anything client side is exploitable.

Anarchy Online (AO) is known for a large number of roaming wildlife out in the wild, with a world that feels larger than SWTOR's. The aggro in AO also worked different. There was no spawn-range timeout or reset. You only lost aggro if you got far enough away or left the zone, and the mob would stay right where it lost you and wander around. If you didn't catch a unique at their spawn point, it could take a while to find them as you looked across the whole region looking for them. There were also faction mobs that wandered around, and there have been reports of players seeing 2 NPCs fighting against each other because they were from opposite factions and spotted each other in the wild. It made for a very lively world where exploring was lots of fun. I think one reason we don't see many wandering mobs is that SWTOR's worlds are relatively tiny, and just about everything there is related to one quest or another.

SWTOR takes place around 21,500 after the founding of the Republic. The movies are 25,000 years after the founding. The technology of ships goes back to the founding of the Republic. We don't even have any cities half as old as the Republic The difference in timespan is more like 1995 vs 2010 for cars. You wouldn't look at pictures of cars made in 1995 and say "Why don't those look like Model Ts? 1995 was so long ago!". You can find some really beautiful cars from the 90s and some really ugly cars from recent (Top Gear recently covered the Chinese Tripod XF150ZK-4). Personal cars have many different styles, but what about business vehicles? 18 wheelers haven't changed very much.