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.

Across the entire playerbase, your numbers might even be true. At the high end where competitiveness actually matters, no one is going in with the wrong team comp or suboptimal skill trees. And at that point, it's 100% timing, cooldown use, and (most importantly) positioning.

That sounds more like a description of PvE where the encounter is static. Considering that your opponents are all trying to outdo you at what you're trying to do, your argument that the task is trivial is fairly weak. I mean, fundamentally, all you have to do to win a football game is get some big guys to push other players out of the way so you can run down the field, right?

Because rather than a single faction dropping below the critical level where it starts to lose players out of frustration, the two less populous factions band up and kick the living crap out of the most populous faction, and players start to flock to those winning teams until the alliance is no longer necessary and the process starts anew. Self-correcting instead of self-reinforcing imbalance. That's why it worked.

Nobody has ever made a good world PvP game that consisted of two rival factions, period. The two concepts are irreconcilable. Faction imbalances are self-reinforcing; players flock away from being the underdog until there are too few of one side to engage in meaningful war, and once that happens, players on the populous side start to quit out of boredom. Free-for-all PvP systems don't have this problem, and DAoC is the only game to ever make a successful faction system because they used three factions instead of two. I cannot understand for the life of me why this game chose to have 2 rival factions in an IP that has always emphasized how much of the galaxy could give a rat's *** about the Republic vs. Sith or the Alliance vs. Empire.

Quite the opposite. If you want to see a total meltdown on vent, raid with a group of people that won't use the tools, where instead of the finger being properly pointed, it's pointed everywhere. I've seen it. It's ugly. It's mean. And it's completely unfair to the people playing well who are being wrongfully accused of screwing up by a bunch of people pulling excuses out of their collective holes. In any game with challenging content, there are going to be failed attempts to beat something. Typically lots of them. With every failure, the group has to try to fix what went wrong, and that means asking players to improve. For some reason, you seem to think that it's unfair to use proper tools to call out players who were making mistakes or playing poorly. Personally, I think it's way more unfair to call out players who weren't.

The lack of proper tools to quantify you playing poorly does not rectify you playing poorly; it merely makes it difficult to detect. If you care about flavor or style more than effectiveness, far be it from me to criticize you for your preferences, but what I don't understand is why players of that mindset want to secretly mingle with players who indeed are trying to play the game optimally. The optimization-minded players aren't trying to disguise themselves and mingle amongst the roleplayers. If your playstyle can't withstand inspection, there's a reason for that. A game well played can be quantified. Nobody cares what a baseball player's mustache looks like when he's batting .197 on the season. And if you don't want to have to play with the kind of players that care about inspecting your playstyle, the tools become win/win - you know that you don't want to play with me when I comment on your performance, and I know I don't want to play with you when your performance is poor.

I also have loved other Bioware titles. Typically for about 40 hours each. And then I delete them from my harddrive and never play them again. Unsurprisingly, my main character has about 40 hours /played and I can't seem to get myself to log back in again. Coincidence? Storytelling is a great thing in general. It doesn't follow that longer stories are always better stories, or that more narrative would always be preferable. Movies get edited - content that cost big money to shoot gets left on the cutting room floor. Editors scrap entire chapters from novels. There is a reason for this. Good stories are never longer than they need to be. Yes, this game has lots and lots of story. That some of us don't find it edge-of-the-seat engaging doesn't mean we hate stories. It doesn't mean we have some form of attention deficit disorder. It just might be because some of us find this game badly in need of editing.

Information can be misinterpreted. Missing information can't be interpreted at all.

Requests for disclosure are not opinion. Calling someone ignorant, or willfully ignorant, is not an insult; it's just fact. There is no exception wherein someone can want to be denied information and not be called willfully ignorant, by definition.

And it doesn't matter how diplomatic you try to be, putting one's fingers in one's ears has never constituted an opinion. Disclosure is the natural order of things. An argument against disclosure might as well be an argument against inertia or entropy.