As a "casual" gamer, ~8-10 hours a week I am still happy with the game. I'm still on my first character and taking my time with the stories, crafting, quests, PvP, space and all the other various activities. From my point of view there is a lot to do in the game. There seems to be a lot of content that I haven't got through. Haven't found all of the datacrons. Haven't fought the world bosses. Still haven't been on a bunch of planets. Haven't participated in hard mode operations. I guess I'll find out if the game is good enough at endgame when I get there but at the pace that I play the game the cost is justified. The most frustrating thing to me is grouping for Heroic 4's on my low pop server. Thats not a game blocking issue for me as there is a lot of interesting PvE content. I'm also playing D3 cooperatively with friends now, also at a slow pace. Having played D1 and D2 extensively I am enjoying that game as well. Seems to me that in both game people really speed through the games and burnout.

I had no idea SWG even existed back in the day. I probably would have played if I knew it was around. Don't remember seeing any sort of advertising online or in traditional media. So the conclusion is that the vast majority of players like linear leveling?

That sounds like a pretty realistic way to level/progress a character. Why did people not like that?

I'm a casual player. Maybe 6 hours per week. I always figure this wasn't conducive to guild membership. I'll check out if anybody in fleet is recruiting and if any are a fit.

Its a waste of time because the server populations are so low.

I'm at at Tatooine on Lord Praven and I never see more than 20 people on. For the past three days I have no been able to get anybody to do heroics and have been forced to struggle through them myself. As discussed so often on the forum, the population issue is the biggest problem in the game right now.

This is my prefered solution going forward too. However, I have a feeling that most of the established community is going to push for expanded endgame content and general game features rather than early/mid game content.

I agree. Moving around content is bascially making new content because of storylines and all the graphic assets. My post was more of a question and general discussion than a suggestion. I know that its too late now to have such a setup. (WIsh the mods would have left it in Gen Disc). I just wanted to understand why the devs and the MMO world prefer this type of leveling experience.

It's not like the side quests run their own storylines. We have the main one and the companion one. I feel like the game can be more sandbox (not like skyrim) while still having a more linear main quest. The idea of having some side quests having running storylines is another topic which would be interesting in itself.

But the majority of the leveling experience is outside of the main quest. It's the side quests that you have to do on each specific planet in order to be high level enough to continue the main quest that are bothersome. I would prefer to be able to hop between planets while leveling between main class quest missions and then have to return to a specific planet to continue the main quest. That way I have a more diverse experience along the way and don't grind as much at any given time at one planet.

Seems like most people on the forums have played a lot of MMO's where as I haven't. For this reason I'm interested in why this mechanic of leveling has been choosen. SWTOR has more going against it than WoW because these aren't parts of a continent but rather "whole planets". And you cannot justify that one planet is just all ****** compared to another. Whereas its easier to say one region of a continent might have a tougher group of guys than another. I've heard a lot of complaints about the linear nature of the main class quests but I just this aspect of the game much more frustrating with alts and in general. To take the point further perhaps it would have been better to have more diverse planets at the cost of having less of them. Adding on new ones would then be easy to integrate as they would expand the game in general while also providing new content for high lvls. What happens if they add a planet now? Also going to be class specific? 50-55? No new content for low lvl then at least until they level all the way up.

To this point I would say that you would have to make it a reasonable amount of quests per planet. I wouldn't want to switch planets every 30 min but I also don't want to spend days either. Do you find the average number of quests per planet accesptable? I think each planet takes too long. I agree that events on various planets and dalies help the high levels get to the low level planets but the argument is more about the linear nature of the leveling experience aside from the main quest. I would prefer to have the freedom to explore the galaxy outside of the main quest as I level and not be forced to visit the next planet in line. This is particularly annoying with alts.

I would also agree with the person who brought up the issue of the volume of content per planet. There are a lot of quests on most planets. A part of the argument is that they would be better served across multiple planets.

My suggestion do not require more content. Just makes it a more realistic and less linear leveling experience. The total amount of leveleing is the same but you get to choose where it takes place (not in any one place of course) and in what sequence. I'm surprised no MMO has been created this way.

So far the argument against that has caught my attention the most is the PVP issue. Game mechanics would either have to not allow PVP when the levels are too far apart or make it not worthwhile for the high lvl players and not penalizing the losing lower lvl player.