when I got to the patrol druid looking on, all confused seeming, I completely lost it nice job

few bugs here and there. I'm mostly ignoring them though, they are very minor.

I find combat in SWTOR to be pretty smooth. but its certainly more interesting then WoW. at least modern WoW. combat logs are a bonus, not a requirement. content is doable without it, and more often thennot, all they do is fascilitate e-peen waving. I didn't have enormously high framerate in WoW. in fact, my framerate is better in SWTOR. go figure. customizable UI is done by MODDING COMMUNITY. base WoW UI is worse then what we got with SWTOR. modding community for WoW had years to create the vast library of mods, SWTOR was out for 2 qeeks. you are not just c****** on bioware, you are crapping on modders as well, by expecting both to perfomr miracles. standard WoW raid frames are pretty much what you get in SWTOR. coloring is slightly different but the functionality is the same. and it took them YEARS to copy grid's functionality. I find questing in WoW to be terrible, nowadays. everything is super linear and gated. but SWTOR's main story is linear as well, you say? main story only. you have plethora of side quests to chose from that you can chose to complete, or to skip. and those kin 10 fozzles quests? are bonus, not a requirement to progress through the zone. despite also using phasing, you can actually quest with a friend in SWTOR and they can jump in at any moment. unlike WoW where if you are not on exact same leg of the quest chains? you are not even going to be able to see each other half the time, let alone quest together. and there are no choices in how to complete the quests. you start a new character? is 100% same quests all over again. not to mention pace, my god the pace. its way too fast. and one shotting things is not fun. its boring. you never get to learn anything about your abilities until you rapidly hit max level and suddenly everything is super hard, becasue you have no idea how to play your character.

I'm not saying that TOr is perfect. far from it. but neither is WoW. people put WoW on some sort of pedestal when in reality its just a popular game, just like Twilight is a popular book. if you like it, more power to you. I used to before they changed their direction so much I no longer enjoyed any aspect of the game. and I will say it again, you CANNOT count a modding community that had 7 YEARS to develop when you compare WoW to a game that was JUST released. not to mention.. what percentage of WoW players actually plays with mods? not as many as you think. so those players deal with raw UI. and yeah, Blizzard very much "borrows" from well everyone. they just have a great talent for refining raw ideas. though they have been stumbling lately. Warcraft? guess what inspired them, take a wild guess. I'll give you a hint - another strategy game with orcs and humans, that got its start in pen and paper and has a franchise that's still going strong today. Star craft is not particularly original either and WoW? ever heard of Everquest? lastly. when regular people pick a game to play? they pick based on content. they pick based on what interests them, based on the art style they enjoy, the setting, etc. gameplay is secondary. and guess what? not everyone likes cartoon style of WoW. not everyone is into faux medieval with hints of steampunk fantasy. some people prefer more traditional settings like DnD or Lord of the rings. some prefer a whimsical style and look of guild wars. some people like a more hard sci-fi feel of Eve. some prefer the post apocalyptic look and feel of fallen earth. some like super heroes. they don't care how "smooth" WoW is or how many addons it has available. if the game doesn't interest them, they are not going to play it. unlike WoW tourists apparently, you are tired of their addiction but cannot give it up, so they keep looking for replacements, but naturally the only replacement that would work is another WoW. so they rage and complain and then slink back. but WoW is not the only game on the market, just like Twilight is not the only series of vampire books for young adults. its merely the best known. and bioware would be wise to remember that WoW tourists come and go, but core players stay as long as you let them. and experience shows that making games more like WoW? doesn't end well. I'm used to bioware games. I'm used to their feel, how they play. so are plenty of other people who bought this game NOT becasue they wanted a break from WoW, but becasue they like bioware games and becasue they loved KOTOR. but what does it have to do with gameplay and UI, you ask? very little. in other words, the priority is to fix actually bugs and actual issues before refining UI or even thinking about so called "standard features" becasue for a lot of people? the chunkiness of UI or inability to be thrown into group automatically is barely a blip on a radar. don't make mistake of thinking that forum posters represent actual majority of players. they NEVER do. edited. funny story about unclickable nodes. guess what WoW used to have in abundance with Cata launch? take a wild guess. Cata was what.. third expansion? how long was that game out before? how experience Blizzard is. and yet.. there you have it unclickable, invisible nodes, that if you are lucky, are merely stuck in a ground JUST under the surface. took them months to fix.

there are a few ambient dialogues here and there, but your post is the first one on a subject that I can actually nod and say "you know, you have a point" hopefully, they'll borrow a few more animations from Dragon age and Mass Effect collection they have (what? Bioware reuses quite a few animations and I cannot blame them for it) and add them to more npc's not sure how long it may take, but hey - its a good idea and would be worth implementing methinks.

so does Bioware. MORE so then Blizzard actually. just not in this game. not yet. you are expecting everything from this game all at once. and I thought I was impatient... this game at launch? is FUN to me. its enjoyable. there's so much to do and so little time to do it in. I'm ENJOYING the combat, while its not all smooth, I'm ENJOYING UI options provided to me. I'm LOVING healing despite having less efficient UI fr it. its not unplayable. far from it. but you people like to make it sound that it is. if its not the game for you? fine. there's nothing wrong with it. but you are making it sound like just becasue its not for you, it sucks for everyone. NO. you cannot compare the game with 7 year's history, MODDING included, to the game that barely had a chance to spread its wings. you cannot jam pack 7 years of independent modding and refinement and expect it from a game that was just released. you are not just not giving Bioware time. you are not giving modding community any time or chance EITHER. and WoW default UI, DESPITE having a plethora of free development done FOR Blizzard by independent, unpayid coders? even with all those implementations that they didn't even invent? it STILL is no better then what we have with SWTOR. P.S. Blizzard is notorious for stealing other people's ideas and merely refining them. they are KNOWN for it. they are not in any way original. Bioware? while using some of the usual more or less expected tropes.. they actually tried for something new and different. yes. they did.

Wooosh, completely missed my point. compare WoW's RAW UI of today to SWTOR's RAW UI of today. or are you saying that there should be a plethora of stable and refined mods to choose from already? even though the game was officially out for about a week?

/rant I'm so tired of people talking how WoW has this amazing customizable UI. IT DOESN'T. blizzard coasts on the shoulders of independent developers, that hated default UI and developed changes for it. all Blizzard did was open the game enough for the coders to be able to do that. and they did it once the game was relatively stable, becasue you know every change to the game code can and will affect functionality of an addon. and STILL. every patch even now that Blizzard gives developers warnings - STILL breaks at least half of those addons. have you tried playing with default UI blizzard has, and no I'm not talking about old stuff, I'm talking about today? I suggest you try, disable all your addons and try. they have endless free trial now, so you don't even have to buy anything. then come back and tell me how great WoW's UI is and how much SWTOR's sucks. SWTOR's UI is pretty standard. it could definitely use improvements, but its not something to be reviled ESPECIALLY compared to WoW. Bioware so far made it possible to mod pretty much all their games. heck, they released entire toolset for Dragon age Origins, not to mention Neverwinter Nights... I'm pretty sure that they will either figure out how to implement improvements themselves, or open up the game to modding once they deem it safe. what's it been, 2 weeks? counting early access no less. they already patched some of the bugs, they are ACTIVELY working on improvements. if we're going to compare to a certain MMO that's been out on a market for 7 years - those guys even with 7 years of experience behind them STILL cannot get balancing and patching right. do if you are going to compare? compare the raw game. compare it fairly.

WOOOSH! that was the sound of irony flying right past some of the people replying.

no, its not obvious. some actually play this game for the sake of playing it. not everyone here is a WoW tourist, and thank the maker for it. that said, I have thought about it and even if WoW suddenly goes completely free to play, I still won't be playing it. Guild wars 2 however? I've been watching development of that game for a while, will definitely be buying it and playing it along with SWTOR. you can play more then one game at a time, yanno.

I don't know, I like that e-mail showing up. gives me something to look forward to, like opening your presents on christmas.

a Frankenchair!

no, I didn't. I'm just used to this sort of thing. honestly, in every MMO, I've played so far that had some sort of auction house? its basically the same exactly way. there's a waiting period before you get your monies. I THINK, but don't quote me on it, its to bottleneck potential gold sellers.

I'm not sure he has the talent... but he should most certainly try

it takes time to transfer money. even in real life when I get paypal payments, guess what - it takes a bit of time before they are transferred into my bank account. patience young padawan, you will get your credits soon enough.

gotta love armchair developers....

you need to go into your preferences and enable ii though

isn't there a list of unofficial forums, stickied? I know my server has one and hopefully it will keep picking up after holiday season. few other servers have them as well. there are plenty of hosting companies that host forums for free, if someone takes initiative and creates them. I'm guessing bioware is having enough trouble moderating forums already in existence, and I do believe they actually have encouraged players to take their own steps if they so wished

crappy ATI $30 video card and 6 gigs of ram I'm not sure the type of, that came with my prebuild, year old HP that was nowhere near top of the line even a year ago, when I bought it. basic dsl connection that comes bundled with phone and tv at $90 a month for the whole package. and while I have to lower my settings and disable shadows, otherwise game runs fine for me. (to be fair, i was never able to run wow on highest settings either and that game is 7 years old) I think the longest loading screen I had was about a minute. I think. not sure, I tabbed out. even people who live in the boonies and HAVE to get either cell tower based connection or satellite don't pay that much. I think the highest I've seen was $100 a month, to get extra bandwith. so... lying, exaggerating, or trolling?

umm.. mostly untiered battleground is how it works on warhammer and its actually a good thing as it means people in less populated tiers don't have to wait as long for their games, like they do in WoW. what they DO need to fix from what I'm seeing is character scaling. world of warcraft had a horrible impact on genre standards. and it didn't have to be that way. but Blizzard just had to try for one size fits all.

from what I can see, the game is done in style of clone wars (didn't watch the cartoons much, so cannot say with 100% certainty, but what I saw seems to gel) so body types are reminiscent of that. dragon age is also stylized and has no body sliders. Mass effect is supposed to be more realistic looking (and it is for the most part) but it STILL has no body sliders. personally, I thought that they provided a nice selection of both male bodies and male faces. none of them are particularly ugly (its like browsing through selection of models, I swear) and I saw various ethnicities when creating characters. used them too. best part is how the same face changes based on the body type you chose. not sure I will play a character with body 4.. well maybe Jedi Sage... but the other 3... I like them. and I love all the female options. (my cold blooded imperial agent looks like an innocent adolescent.. which only makes her more effective, becasue she's often underestimated and/or overlooked - what I RP a little >_>) P.S> I subscribed to Eve free trial JUST to play with their character creator.. that thing is... daym... especially for a game where you almost never see your character in action.

heh. I played WoW becasue I was a warcraft fan, ever since orcs and humans. it was the first MMO I played for any length of time, but it certainly wasn't the last. EQ sadly didn't impress me, but you know, different strokes for different folks. but when WoW stopped being fun, I played Lotro, DnD, guild wars, a bit of Allods. tried my hand at Champions online but realized that superhero genre is just not my things. still playing guild wars. dipped my toe into Fallen earth, pretty fun game actually. and then of course there are many MANY single player games. my better half is a Warhammer guy, super excited about their upcoming MMO too. WoW is far from be all, end all MMO, let alone game. its merely the most publicized. most people bought SWTOR becasue, surprise! they wanted to play SWTOR. (and some wanted to play KOTOR sequel )

of COURSe they want to make money. but they are also intelligent enough to realize that you make money not by trying to kill off the competition, but rather by providing a product that people might enjoy that. which more often then not involves carving out a niche. WoW has their niche. SWTOR's niche is different. it may overlap in places but they are not targeting exactly the same people. you think CCP (Eve online) doesn't want to make money? or Turbine (DnD unlimited, LOTRO), or any other company out there? @ Meridian59 comment. I'll admit I haven't played it, I didn't discover 3D0 until their might and magic series, in which I distinctly remember using.. wait for it.. wasd and other familiar hotkeys. and that was over a decade ago. granted I don't play every single game out there, I simply have no time, but I play or played some of the more well known titles. and so far vast majority of them that don't involve click moving, both rpgs, and shooters had standard controls and/or variation of a standard UI. even dead space (they just hide it better then other games, but at the core, its pretty much the same thing and thank goodness for it, the game is creepy enough as it is, last thing I want to do is fumble about with my controls while being attacked by a necromoph) lastly - about the addons. they are both blessing and a curse. every patch breaks them. I will not be surprised if bioware decides not to go with addons and instead will implement in game improvements, for stability's and simplicity in implementing patches sake.

standard unmodded UI in WoW is pretty terrible. even 7 years later. I'm pretty sure developers weren't trying to design a "WoW-killer", they were trying to design and MMO that their usual player base as well as Star Wars fans might enjoy. its the players that keep yelling - WOW-KILLER! the only game that I know of that deliberately tried to kill WoW, if one considers their commercials? was RIFT. and yeah, that didn't turn out so well. becasue you design games to kill other games, you design games to succeed on their own merit. and from my playing experience so far? that's exactly what bioware did with SWTOR. similarities to WoW? how many rpg's have you played? I mean MMO or solo? they have pretty much standard UI. its not the lack of creativity. its due to players having developed a certain muscle memory at this point, makes transition between games easier.

happens once in a while with me, I use Logitech G500. very disorienting, but it happened so rarely, I just assumed that I overturned. I'm more concerned with my inability to use abilities bound to my mouse buttons. when I go into bindings options, the game does recognize the buttons I want to be using, but when I actually try to use them... nada. and I'm not even talking mouseover, I'm talking select target->use ability type of functionality. I have no idea if its my mouse issue or game issue. I've been doing fine without, but the major reason I got this mouse in a first place was the ability to bind abilities to side buttons without getting lost in too many of them like with razer naga (that and it fits my hand much better)