You do realize that the agent you play is just a lap dog to these sith lords who are evil for evils sake? They are your rulers that can do whatever they want without repercussions.

Hello there your smugness, It must be awesome to have the amazing foresight to realize that all the immature kids would pick republic because they wanted to be Luke Skywalker, if only I had realized this

It's only hard on the empire side because most of the time both choices are evil, one slightly less so but you're never given the choice to actually do the right thing. And there's plenty of morally ambigious dialog choices for the republic - Several times it comes down to if you want to help the little guy or if you want to help the war effort against the empire, should you expose the politician that wants to ally with the sith even when it's against the law? Should I kill the mass murderer eventhough he was promised protection after helping the republic?

Eve and SWG both had this as well, it's vital to a good economy which is why theme park mmo's are terrible in this regard. I don't think the best stuff has to come from raids, people will still raid because it is fun! They can drop recipes and cool looking cosmetic stuff, give titles etc. there's lots of things you can give players to show off their amazing skillz at raiding.

Same here, I tried an empire character because I thought it might be interesting to try to play a character that tries to better the empire instead of defecting but it's not possible to not be evil in the sith empire. But since I don't like playing evil characters I left for the republic, which was just as good seeing how overpopulated the empire side is on most servers.

Maybe you need to replay kotor because the choices there are far worse than those in this game, the darkside choices are straightup psychotic every single time, there's no grey in that game. And republic side has plenty of interesting choices, both choices can be seen as good several times in the game, while on the sith side both choices are often just evil, one slightly less than the other.

I think there's plenty of grey in the republic, saving the lives of a few or help the war effort to stop the (evil) empire? Kill the bad guy so he can never commit such atrocities again or capture him and give him a trial? What does the sith have? Kill him or capture him and have him tortured, yeeeah I'd say that's a choice of dark or dark, yet the game pretends one of them is a good choice.

Is it really so hard to make a decent crafting system? You gotta wonder because most MMORPG's fail extremely hard in this regard.

Yeah the lightside choices on the imp side is usually just the lesser evil, you can certainly not play a good imp as far as I could tell when I tried the agent.

If I were president I would make world peace and make sure everyone had a warm meal and only had to work as much as they wanted to.

Yes they have to compete with WoW but they also have to pick their battles because they simply cannot compete in terms of content. Bioware put a lot of their focus on the leveling experience with good story and voice acting, so endgame is a bit behind WoW and so is the polish, just as expected unless you have unreasonable expectations which many people seem to have.

I've been leveling as tank(shield) spec without any problems, maybe the DPS tree is slightly faster but I kill pretty damn fast so it has never bothered me.

It is impossible to launch a game with the content of WoW unless you want your company to go bankrupt. It's leaps and bounds better than WoW was at release and pretty much any other MMORPG out there, yes there's lots of things that needs fixing but that's to be expected in this genre of games. Many topics in the forums are absolutely correct in their complaints but most people are still having a blast in game, bioware will improve the game as time goes.

I dislike WoW a lot yet the OP is absolutely correct in that this is extremely well made in WoW and absolutely horrid in SW:ToR, it really needs to be changed for the better. I actually think WoWs animations looks absolutely ridiculously bad for the most part though so I hope that SW:ToR can keep its decent animations while still fixing this issue. In short, love the game but this is indeed a huge deal and in need of a change/fix.

It's simple logic really, you can tell from the game from the first second you step into it that bioware spent a LOT of effort on making the leveling and questing experience rewarding and fun which probably means that endgame and PvP was the areas that suffered.