"work to be done" Do you actually have a job?

Link?

Lots of people paid for 6 months upfront or hope to see it get better. I have unsubbed. You mentioned not playing WOW. If you had you would understand the complaints. This game is WOW but further dumbed down and reskinned. That's precisely the problem. Most of us have played WOW. We wanted something new, not WOW reskinned.

Would have been a lot more interesting if they eliminated leveling or found a new way to do it rather than the classic 1 to max.

I think new mmos can succeed. There are several things developers need to understand about players and the market right now though. 1) The market is saturated. If you overhype and lie we will notice and leave. We have choices. 2) Be realistic about the number of players you plan to attract. WOW is an anomaly and a dying anomaly at that. You will not get 10 million subscribers. You may get 2.5 million. If you do, you are successful. Hugely successful. But also need to understand that a sub fee is not free money. We bought the game and servers have almost no fee for maintenance. I paid 20$ for left for dead 2 on steam and have not paid a penny since and I play online almost every day. Your servers are not worth 15$ a month. That sub fee is for content. Content should be coming out at least every 3 months. Rift figured this out and is still around and doing very well, well enough to have an expansion coming out. 3) Copying another games mechanics can work if you use moderation. If your game is basically an entire copy players will notice and not be happy. They will also likely be bored. WOW may have kept me interested for 2 years but once I burnt out I burnt out, do you really think replacing a sword with a lightsaber will fix that? It won't. The deja vu kicks in quick. In short, think smaller and don't be afraid to try new things. Don't spend 100 million developing a game hoping for 10 milling subscribers. Start smaller with the hopes of building bigger later on. Most companies don't do this though. They want the cash cow wow has been and they want it now.

No, they are not going to segregate F2P players. Precisely how would that help them sucker them into spending more money?

- Devs overhyping. I believe this game would be a lot more successful if the devs were honest. At this point the devs can say anything most players I know won't believe a word of it unless it's bad news. - PVP was kinda terrible. Rateds were too little too late. Ilum was an absolute disaster. I mean, you copy wow in every way, including WOWs failures? Why? When there was the very excellent example of world PVP from the burning crusade in the form of the isle of qael danas. That would have kept a lot of people, instead they copied wintergrasp/tol barad. And finally, resolve. Terrible idea. - Speaking of copying wow... this game just felt like WOW but dropped on it's head as a child. Sure, it looked different. But it really wasn't that different and it wasn't as good either. The WOW design is an excellent design for people newish to MMOs. But you will burn out on the wow design eventually and once you do reskinning everything so it's lighsabers instead of swords doesn't fix it.

I wouldn't say it's a form of endgame. That implies it's complete and stand alone. It could be a piece of endgame if they put more work into and made it less of a credit sink.

I'll be incredibly surprised if there is any big space expansion or if it's any good. At this point I have pretty much zero faith in the SWTOR devs. I fully expect the "secret space project" to just be more poorly done starfox 64 missions.

I guess I can see that. I have not done any of the dungeons but I've heard they are actually pretty hard to. I guess the main concern is going to be if you are farming mostly cosmetic gear or something that's going to help your toon. In TOR at max level I don't see a loot increase actually doing you much good unless you are getting BH/WH ilevel gear from mobs. It's just not going to go very far unless it increases the amount of gear a boss drops. I don't know what the gear scene in GW2 will look like so I can't say whether it will really be relevant or not.

Are you sure it's the same thing? SWTOR is completely gear based. No WH? Get farmed. GW2 is largely about PVP and attracting mostly PVPers and the primary difference here is that gear is irrelevant in PVP. Probably going to be stupid in PVE though. But who is buying GW2 for PVE?

The main difference is player input. It's not like a sandbox won't or can't have WZs and raids, but it's the amount of player input and creation that changes the category. EVE online is considered to be a sand box. There is also the drive behind play. From the moment you join wow/swtor you are promted to do things. Go here do x, go here do y. It's like a planned scavenger hunt with activities. EVE doesn't do this as much. There is no leveling, no classes, you a just dropped into player driven world where if players want they just play the economy through mining/crafting type stuff but they can also create trade routes, cartels, alliances, take over territory, build space stations, it's limited to the sand in the box but with that sand you can build whatever you want.

I have no idea why they picked the hero engine. I think they decided they like it and could adapt it to their needs similar to WOW using the WC3 engine but it didn't work that well for them.

Them park and sand box are ways of categorizing MMOs. Theme park design is based around the idea of creating a digital theme park and players go and ride the rides. The OPs/raids, the WZs, things like that are the rides in the theme park. A sand box can have a lot of what a theme park has but is normally designed to adapt and grow with player input. Things like player made quests and other forms of player made content. Called a sand box because within the box you can make whatever you want.

Terrible idea. Isolate newbs so they can't actually play the game? Terrible idea.

I don't think anyone playing SWTOR has room to take about over hyping.

I already unsubbed. Not because of guild wars, I've just lost the faith and have stopped having fun. I find it much harder to put up with things in game that bother me and I can't help but rage every time the devs speak because it's nothing but lies. Time for me to go. I had orignially planned to play GW2 along with this and rotate as expansions/patches came out but I don't see myself resubbing to this game. At launch I managed to convince myself that this wasn't a WOW clone and would turn out great but I can't keep up that facade any more and while WOW was a lot of fun I've had my time with that game.

I don't really think that argument really holds water. People want stuff for free because they are cheap or don't trust that it will be worth their money. For me it's movies. I pirate movies. I will go see them in person after viewing them. Occasionally I'll just go for it and see something in theaters without prescreening. But most of time I watch it first through piracy than either go or don't go to see it. Because I am not driving to a theater, spending money on a ticket and food, and then sitting through mediocrity or flat out garbage. My 12$ is as good as anyone elses 12$ but that does not mean your movie is as good as anyone elses and worth the same price. As far as the dislike of a subscription goes, I think it's a psychological thing. I've paid 15$ but it's only good for this month, I need to max out my enjoyment and get my moneys worth because i've "rented" this game for a limited period of time. As opposed to paying once and it's always there. Given a companies business practices one or the other will be cheaper but for some people it doesn't matter which is cheaper, they have hang ups about how they spend their money.

You best be trolling. It's an extremely fast an easy tool that works well whether you are in a group of 4 or 40. It's also extremely basic and just plain sad that TOR doesn't have one. This isn't like asking for cross server or a dungeon finder or an appearance tab. It's a ready check. A green or red check mark next to a character portrait. And here you are ragging on players rather than the devs who seem to have forgotten/failed to implement this multiple times. You're an enabler. You enable mediocrity.

Just buy credits from the cash shop.

Intended game mechanics are exploits now?

I actually think that now would be the perfect time for larger sized raids. WOW has implemented a raid finder on top of the dungeon finder. A dungeon finder is pretty much theme park standard these days, with gaming technology moving that way making 40 mans feasible and not take 2 hours of prep time before you start shouldn't be too hard. Perhaps not the gold standard like a normal mode raid as opposed to a heroic/nightmare mode raid but it could be done. It's worth noting that normally a smaller group has a harder fight than a larger group. Fights can be more complex. Rotations can be more complex. Responsibility is greater.

Ilum. Hell, the game can still lag out in in WZs if people are too close together.

I think a 100 mil minimum cost is fairly realistic when you consider the advertising as well. This game is probably the most expensive ever made. Before release and before the NDA was lifted I remember people knocking the game because of it's gigantic cost with the only thing to show for it being voice acting. It was kind of a big thing and was a major criticism that managed to cut through some of the hype going around and it was never once denied by the devs. To this day have the denied they 300 mil assessment?

You expect EA to give up money? If you care enough about the game to even ask for this then they can still squeeze money out of you.