For a subscription fee, it's going to need better "voice" acting than Redtube.

I just realized that the thing that makes me absolutely crazy about SWTOR is how few mobs wander. Apparently, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away... most guards had jobs standing in groups of four our five all day long, rather than patrolling. I've played SWTOR to level 28 and died four times outside of PvP; twice in Flashpoints, and two times solo trying to pull something way too hard. Slow, methodical, clearing of area after area, 3-5 mobs at a time does not great solo content make. Instead of comparing this to WoW, which did admittedly have only minor danger from wandering mobs, compare it to Everquest, where assuming you were safe while hunting level 15-19 orcs in Northern Ro would almost certainly be interrupted at some point by a visit from a level 34 sand giant. Why did these games get so sterile? They were so much more fun when the entire gaming session was spent on our toes.

I can easily see you didn't play GW1 enough to have formed these opinions in an informed way. This is now the third post in which I have identified you as someone with more opinion than experience. That's a bad habit. GW1 had a class system. It just didn't lock you down beyond that. What the Guild Wars franchise is about is purely cooperative gameplay. It focuses less on world development, persistent gaming worlds, economy, worldbuilding, and the like, and more on group-level PvE and group-level PvP, with a SEVERE de-emphasis on time sinks. In some ways, it is also as story-driven as any game out there, to the extent that you can no longer group with friends once you have passed through world-changing events until they also get onto the other side of the event. It comes in second after SWTOR in terms of number/hours of cutscenes in the history of these games. And it does those as well as anyone, without the monthly fee. It is the MMORPG franchise for people that prefer to lie in bed at night thinking about the amazingly close match they just had against a highly ranked Korean or European team, rather than how proud they are to be the owner of a level 85 raid-geared tanking character who just got a new tanking weapon off Professor Putricide or his ilk after 12 weeks of grinding out the same raid instance.

You can think that, but you'd be wrong. Google the word "telomere." When Dolly the sheep was cloned, all of her clones were technically "born" but they were just as close to the end of their maximum lifespan as Dolly.

WoW is dying because it's old, and old things get tired. I didn't leave EQ for WoW because I was angry at EQ or the game sucked; I left because it felt about time for something new. SWTOR has the most complainers of any game ever, because WoW players tried to come here, there are more of those players than the MMORPG industry has ever had before, they're ready to move on, and many haven't realized yet that it's not the game - they're just done with MMORPGs. I came here for a friend, and I couldn't make it past two weeks, but I'm certain now it's not the game; it's the genre. Some of us have been playing these games too long. We need to go away and leave them fresh and new for the new round of MMORPG gamers, instead of lingering around bitter and jaded.

Lucas will touch it and turn it into the cinematic equivalent of Michael Jackson's face.

This becomes a problem of game tuning, though. If there are significant differences between the DPS of an optimally-spec'd character and one that is sub-optimally-spec'd, the bosses shouldn't be going down to a suboptimally-spec'd group, or else the game is trivially easy for a group all using optimal specs. The reason this becomes an argument is that MMO designers typically have to tune raid bosses to be challenging for optimally-spec'd characters, and then one or two people in the raid group that object and want to play their own spec put a severe onus on the rest of the group to pick up the slack.

If you don't like meters, the answer is not to group with people that care about metrics. Alternatively, the answer is to play a game where optimization of the performance of a group of people is unimportant. But if you're going to play a game with a group of people, and the game is going to have mechanics like hard timers, playing the game blindly is an exercise in futility. In a raid environment, it's got nothing to do with elitism. Often the offending party that is doing something horribly wrong and wasting the time of 9 to 71 other players (depending on the MMO and raid) is no more or less elitist that those whose time they're wasting. I have to wonder if the anti-meter crusade is actually a thinly veiled anti-raid crusade. I have a hard time believing there is anyone out there that spends a good part of their week tackling raid content in MMORPGs that would prefer a lack of accountability and a couple dozen extra wipes per week while everyone tries to guess what is making the group fail.

Your "simple" example isn't simple at all. I can think of real examples right off the bat where 5 "B"s would absolutely obliterate 5 "A"s in different games.

If competitive PvP in GW2 is anywhere near as good as GW1, I think that's where you should be putting your hopes.

There's nothing contradictory about what I said at all. Item disparity only comes into play for newer arena players.

Items had a pretty small impact on the outcome of arena matches in WoW, except for players first starting to play. Two teams meeting with, for example, around a 2200 rating, one slightly below 2200 and one slightly above, would have their gear differ by exactly one piece - the piece it required having a 2200 rating to get.

Untrue, but that is the only place everything else is competely normalized. I believe I just said the same thing on the last page. Any match you draw in a ladder system still has a chance to be a game between similarly geared players each playing compositions that are near equal in effectiveness. At that point the game comes down to skill as well. You as a player can't control that part, so you control what you can: class, gear, and composition, and try to execute and push as near the top as you can, as the effects of disparities in any of those things become narrower and narrower nearer the top. And you hope to play some great matches along the way, which is what competitors want.

So you take a weekend with your teammate and PL out another level 70. Are people still even MMORPG players anymore that play these things? Not ripping on you; it's the overall sentiment. Yes, in MMORPGs, how much effort you're willing to put in often has a large effect on success. That's what these games are about. The consideration of how good someone is at PvP in an MMORPG includes the preparations they've made to make sure the character they're using is going to be properly effective in terms of class, gear, and spec. That's what these games are.

Why don't you have control over your class, spec, and team composition? If any one of those things were holding me back in a particular season, I changed it.