Heh, I know what you mean about GW2 lacking traditional roles. You should have heard my group trying to get their heads around that one, it was pretty hilarious. We're so used to carefully setting up our classes and talents to balance each other and here we have GW2 whose general philosophy seems to be "see it, kill it". I really chose it for the group as a break from micromanaging and heavy thinking. I'm sure it won't last but I hope we have fun for a year or two. I'm still sad about SWTOR not being more group friendly. I really wanted to play just for the stories, they really are well written. I know that no MMO is perfect but it was just becoming too long and frustrating a slog between the excellent writing and voice acting. By the way, as I stated before I am posting all of this less to complain and more in the hopes that someone Bioware side will see it and maybe it can be in some way helpful for improving future titles. A wild hope I know but what can I say, I'm an optimist.

Yes, we were running a balanced team with a good tank (me), an experienced healer and two DPS capable of stepping into those roles in an emergency. Between the four of us we had every crafting skill covered and were keeping up our gear. I'm not surprised that you didn't notice this problem with a solo character because it doesn't happen when you are solo or in a group of two. It only starts to be noticeable in a group of three and then with a group of four it gets out of hand. The problem is that they seem to have tried to enhance the difficulty for full group by dropping in these "magic adds". We actually experimented to check and no, they do not drop in when you are below three players. Thus we found ourselves being actively punished for trying to run instances and class quests in a group. Since we are a dedicated group who want to run together we decided that SWTOR just was not working for our sort of multiplayer, that is playing the game all the way through together. As to the comments about GW2, could you please elaborate? Since we are playing it now I would like to know why you so dislike the game. It will help my group to know if there are bad bits later on in the game.

Actually, my team went to SWTOR becasue we had played WoW to death (and because we all love Star Wars and Bioware). We won't be going back to WoW for another expansion or three just to make sure we have plenty of content to munch. When you play as a dedicated five man every Monday you move pretty steadily through content. Anyway, my crew are all going over to Guild Wars 2 for now. The art style is quite lovely and I'm enjoying the clean simplicity of the combat system.

I just cancelled my subscription but I wanted to post my reasons why here in the hopes that someone may actually read it. Here is what I posted in the "Reasons for canceling your subscription: "Your art, writing and voice acting teams were all superb. A shame that their excellent efforts were tied to a game design that was sub-par at best. Oversize maps, uninteresting gameplay and combat that never flowed or allowed actual strategy all formed a game that was simply not fun to play. Above and beyond all that, however, was the fact that this game did not play well as a multiplayer game. For years my group of friends have gotten together every Monday to play together. We know how to work as a team, how to control the field of battle and cover for each other. But playing as a four man group we found ourselves bombarded with what we came to call "magic adds". Elite enemies dropping out of nowhere with no chance to crowd control or even arrange our positions. We were wiping on content six levels below us due to two elites and three silvers dropping into fights out of nowhere. Out in the general world we found ourselves taking the same amount of time to do quests six levels below us as we did to finish quests at level. At no point did we feel like our efforts and leveling were actually making us any more powerful, simply raising our hit-points so that our deaths could be slower and more painful. Thus I, my family and my group of friends are all leaving your game. You have a good team of artists, writers and actors but please spend some time and money on some decent game designers." TL;DR explanation is that I think that the art of this game was well done but the actual game part was horrible.

It may be fine for younger players but my parents play this game as well. Given that they are in their 60s and wear bifocals it would be nice if they could change the font size. I hope Bioware is paying attention to these sorts of posts. My dad doesn't have much longer before the cancer takes him and games like this really help distract him from the pain. If you're reading this, thank you for making such a good, distracting game.