My character is a female smuggler Named "ValaMalDoran". Those who get it will lol

That's like saying every level of a game is an instance. That's retarded. An instance is the exact same art assets (NPCs and all) being re-used among different groups of players. In other words, 100 people in 100 different versions/copies of the same cave. Sharding and instancing are practically the same thing, but loading between continents in WoW is neither because you don't have two versions of Kalimdor, only one, and it just takes a minute to load. This ^ But to be fair, a phase and an instance are almost interchangeable also. Phases are just larger versions of instances really.

That's not an instance. That's a zone. Instances would be multiple versions of the same area.

Guild Wars was a complete failure apparently.

People complain on the internet?

Far more powerful and accurate? I think not sir. The fact is and always has been that aggregate sites like metacritic suffer from a phenomenon wherein mostly players with bad things to say show up in order to be overly critical. I would estimate upwards of 90% of the review scores gathered by users are in no way objective and they fail to consider the game as a whole. Usually the story goes that a player has a bad experience with a game and then finds everything in his/her power to destroy said game. This includes going to metacritic and reviewing the entire game based on their one complaint. I'm not saying all of the user reviews are this way but I feel pretty confident in saying that very few of them are actually objective or even have a clue about how to really review something adequately.

Intrigued.

hahaha, talk about being on the same page. I almost hit reply and said "quite the slippery slope" but you beat me to it. Well done.

That's exactly the point. They hired talent from OTHER MMOs. They don't just automatically fit together and sing kumbaya in glorious success. It takes time for all parts of a team to come together and communicate effectively. It doesn't matter if the individual developers are good at what they do. They all have different backgrounds and they all need time to become a unified force.

They were going for the truly authentic star wars experience. Since star wars technology stays basically the same for 3000 years, BioWare decided that MMO engine technology could probably do the same thing.

Which, if you're buying a Ford, is a very plausible scenario. I think the important thing to take away from this discussion is: SWTOR = FORD

That makes no sense. Coordinating a large development team takes time to get used to, especially for an MMO. Which is why I compared it to a contractor. Also, as someone else in this thread said, you don't just go from making bird houses to people houses without a learning curve. Mass Effect = bird house in comparison to SWTOR.

Get an F650. You'll be getting gas every other day.

Yes, quite.

Pretty much this^ Yes, there would be just as much crying. Probably about something even more stupid.