It is skill based in the 10-49 bracket. Even before they gave 50s their own brackets, I was killing 50 sorcs solo with a early 20s lethality operative with relative ease.

I'm an op and I think this is well deserved. I play lethality and I think its silly to be one trick ponies. That is all I have to say.

The issue is actually developing something like that. All you say is be innovative. Throw out some ideas. It's easy to have great ideas but to actually develop and code them takes a lot of resources which pull from departments working on stuff everyone is already complaining about. This suggestion of a pve/pvp story mix will probably require some special UI stuff. They're going to need people fixing bugs for it. ETC ETC ETC I could keep going. They released the game a little early I think which is why we're seeing so many little issues. It's a pretty good game so far even if the end game is similar to other mmos. It's a brand new MMO and it's BW first mmo. Give them some time and cut them some slack.

The companion/crafting system is also in the f2p mmo Grand fantasia. You get sprites that you can send to gather and then craft. I have a feeling hardcore players will quit playing but if people pace themselves or play alts, I could imagine them keeping an active sub. I think part of the issue is the game was released prematurely, in my opinion, and hasn't had time to iron out the little nuances and subtleties. If the game was to be released in a few months instead of a couple weeks ago, everyone would be furious but they might actually accept the game without too many complaints. I'm usually pretty nit picky when it comes to things like UI and features that are kind of expected as standard. But to be honest, I don't really have any issues with the UI. Yeah, it's clunky and I can't customize it but it gets the job done for now. It's also the first mmo that Bioware has made but I think they've done a pretty admirable job so far.