What BW is doing is not phasing, they call them "phases" and are just a small instance in the open world. Phasing is making select parts of the world visible or invisible and interactable depending on what code is transmitted back and forth between client and server and it's one thing Blizzard themselves have created from scratch. It was something a programmer suggested to fix a bug with a quest in Burning Crusade and was used as a gameplay element from WotLK and onwards when a tester said it was frustrating that things he had supposedly wiped out was still in the world. Just a bit of story and perspective. The phases as they are used in TOR are perfect for houses since it's just a seperate instance you can enjoy alone, though having anyone enter the same door and end up different places might just be another immersion breaker.

Center for disease control in the US actually asked Blizzard if they could that code and is now using it to calculate the spreading of deadly diseases. That is kinda awesome.

Because they obviously only looked at what the other games were doing instead of asking themselves why they were doing it so they could change it to suit their own needs. Which is why this game is sadly WoW in space, with lightsabers and not a unique experience. E.i. not what people wanted. When you see people complain that this or that is lacking compared to WoW, it's not because they want it to be WoW, it's because they want it to have the same functionalities, only developed for a and fit into the Star Wars Universe. I'm more and more beginning to think that the people who say other people want WoW2 with lightsabers are just projecting their own feelings onto other people because yelling at themselves for not seeing it would destroy the illusions they have set up about this game not being WoW in space with lightsabers.

WoW is a great game and if you ask me it has never been better in terms of gameplay and storytelling. You should try the free download just to see some of the things people at talking about when they say "dead world" and unresponsive combat. The requirements for WoW in terms of computer is low so they can't fill the game to the brim with bells and whistles instead they put a lot the "feel" of races and zones into the gameworld itself as shown trough the phasing mechanics and little things that happens, like a predator suddently going for a rodent critter and killing it before your very eyes or an npc vanishing because he died or had a reason to move along his own storyline. If you download it I can recommend trying both a human and a night elf as you can get some pretty emotionally engaging questlines there before you reach lvl 20. Don't spend too long in Goldshire though. it's a cesspit that makes Mos Eisly look respectable.

At the end of the day story will only get you that far wheb you try to tell an interactive story because the means of which you explore the story has to be consistant with how the story is told. For example the theme and mood in Resident Evil would be nowhere the same if you replaced the zombies with bunnies and changed nothing else. That is also where I feel that storywise TOR is lacking a lot because what the story tells have very little effect on what happens in the gameplay field both visually and gamemechanics. For example does the tropper have a pistol that only appears and is used in cutscenes and it's bloody annoying I can't use it in game. That way it creates a dissonance.

It's the best part of the game and the only part that truely feels like Star Wars, I wish they had used that as the basis for the combat system rather than what they have now, it doesn't fit blasters at all. Curving, targetseeking blastershots my foot!

Read what she wrote, she wrote that in one of the days where she can play, in the evenings, there is maintenance time because she's european, she didn't write that she didn't want maintenance at all. Putting maintenance on the EU servers in the afternoon and evening is a horrible horrible idea.

You do realise that people in order to use the month supplied with the game you had to create a recurring su scription. The numbers means nothing because they weren't made out of want but out of necessity to even try the game they bougth. What will matter ultimately in the end is how many remains once the month is over and they have to cancel their subscriptions again.

Why is a publication that runs on add revenue a better and more reliable source than people who have played the game and made post after post with constructive criticism and infornation about what they want to see of even the most basic features and world design or lack thereoff. What is even worse is that a long and well thougth post will either be ignored completely or met with "why don't you suggest something instead?" or "go back to WoW" as if people are completely blind to what their eyes see. I see so many people praising this game for being nothing like WoW when the undisputed fact remains that the very BASIC and CORE of the game engine IS a clone of WoW. To ignore something lile that is blind arrogance

Untill you realise that AA raises the entrybar for new late in the game to completely unrealistic if it gives any kind ingame advantage. Give it a little time and I bet that having all holocrons will become mandatory for joining serious guilds.

Then it will just be a new round of people who have become disillusioned as the illusions of this game are quite easy to break and who knows, in the end it might be you who will voice the very same things we are. In that case will you enjoy being flamed or met with the same kind of replies you are giving out here? Or will you start your post with the ironic "I'm not a hater, please hear me out" as I've observed a few people doing? This complete lack of empathy for other peoples situation is what will ruin any kind of community because in the end when you have noone to attack against you will devour each other.

You are right in that people want to play something other than WoW so they came to TOR and then gets disappointed when its nothing except WoW with voices and a lot worse on a gameplay and world design. The next good mmo will be a game whose mechanics progress from the standard instead of copying them adverbatim and has a world design and gameplay features that feels as smooth if not smoother.

Completely optional so far, however it is the only part of the game I find fun and Star Wars like.

And on that note, I shouldn't enjoy the game because I like it, I should like it because I enjoy it, that's how it is with everything else in life.

I have interest in the Star Wars lore, I have seen all the movies and I want a game with a storyline and even then I bought the game with no expectations at all and still got disappointed because I don't think that the game delivers any of the 3. TOR delivers KoTOR lore, I came here for Old Republic Lore, it delivers designs on everything that I have seen in the movies, appearently the galaxy stood still for 3700 years before A New Hope and the storyline is just frosting to cover a barely average game.

You didn't actually read the entire post, did you, because if you did, you'd had realised that he just trolled you.

I hear this alot from people who are defending this game and now I simply need to know: WHY is it better and WHAT makes it better? Because gameplay wise it's exactly the same as WoW only worse. Story is not gameplay unless told trough ingame mechanics or the environmental design. Story in TOR is tucked away in cutscenes, you have a marginal influence on what is said and in the overall narative it matters nothing. It's not gameplay, it's not even a Choose Your Own Adventure book, it's simply story as told by someone else over moving images. A good example of this is Fez Burba, you run into him on Coruscant and he believes that the Imperial bombings have somehow damaged the planet's core and it's in danger of exploding. He needs to you to go and get his results because he can't fight trough the renegade droids in the area. You do so, and find out that there's nothing wrong, you can then hand it to him as is or falsify them so it looks like he's right. I did the former and pretty much ruined his career because he had put everything into it. Then I run into him on Tatooine and he's got a quest and I think, great, now he's going to curse me out and guilt me into doing whatever it is he wants done. Boy, was I wrong, he acts as if he's never seen you, and if you choose the "You seem familiar" dialogue he tells you who he is. I was so furious and pretty much any kind of faith I had in the narrative being part of the game died there on the spot. The cutscenes is nothing except frosting to cover an unbaked cake of WoW features and make it look new and fresh.

The utter lack of character animations is even worse than the lack of bubbles. It feels like telepathy and not conversation when you do anything in /s. Then again, BW do seem happy for the "tell, don't show" approach

That's not what it is. Read it again, it's the system where any given population controls itself trough what thier peers thinks of them. E.i. like/dislike.

Except it did, in Tales of the Jedi: The Old Republic the starships and space stations has a very different design. In TOR every design of anything from cities, to buildings to starships and to droids, is something that has been transplanted straight up from the trilogies with minor changes to make it not so obvious. The Star Destroyers used to be an innovative design back when Palpatine commisioned them from Sinai Fleet Systems, the same with the Tie series of spacefighters. Now it seems like it's just something that was made before and then rediscovered. The Interceptors you fight as republic in space combat is the Tie-Interceptor with it's wings flipped and the Imperials are fighting Z-95 Headhunters as they appeared in Tie-Fighter with slightly angled wings. The Z-95 was the predecessor to the X-wing.

And has less basic gameplay features than a game that's 7 years old, which is my problem.

Major overhaul is another way of saying "We need to work on this thing for at least another month before it's something we feel we can present to the public."

No, you got 7 minor variables to play trough, the rest of the game, the side quests, the planets, ect, will still be done in the same order and then you'll see than 90% of the choices you make for conversation doesn't have any effect on the overall outcome. Urgh, just thinking about Darrowshire gives me an emotional punch trough the heart Poor Pamela. None of the quests in TOR have even come close to giving me that feeling.

From WoW: Phasing since it does an amazing job of telling a story, it's basically the very idea of "show, don't tell."

I'm not the OP, but it's an easy answer: I want quests like the ones that are in the revamped Cataclysm zones, where I use gimmicks and gadgets to spice things up, where I instead of frying enemies from above with a dragon, I'm flying in a small fighter engaging groundtargets, bombing and blasting them to bits. I want nets or stunguns to capture people alive in the field, in the game, playing it instead of just killing or capturing via cutscene. I want to reunite lost lovers, I want to do something out of the hardest I can do only for the person I'm doing it for to die anyway, either with a smile on his lips because I chose light or with a curse in the air if I chose dark. I want quests that actually evoke an emotional response other than "oh gods, if you had to breathe manually you'd be too incompetent to do so!" I want quests where I'm controlling a platoon of extra npcs, each with 1 unique ability to set them out from the rest. I want to drive a tank and flatten imperial/republic resistance, I want to use some of the technology there IS in the Star Wars universe instead of just hearing about it or seeing other people do it. And most of all, I want my actions to have an actual physical presence in the game world via phasing and not just John Doe the farmer/official/govener/officer telling me I've done it. I want to blow up an enemy base so hard it leaves a 100 meter crater and STAYS that way for everyone in the same phase and not hidden away by some red forcefield I'll never be able to enter again. I want bonus quests to be other things than just Step 1: Kill 10. Step 2: Kill 20. Step 3: kill boss. Alderaan have a republic one that's a class example of how to do. Step 1: kill mobs Step 2: get turret override code Step 3: use override code on turrets Step 4: gather explosives Step 5: use explosives to blow up spaceship Step 6: kill angry sith who is unhappy about you blowing up his spaceship Sadly they don't do things like that untill Aldaraan and abandons it again on Quesh and returns to the old Kill KILL KILL!!!! formula. I assume it's because they ran out of time to be creative.