Gameplay is a wide range of things that make the game fun to play and wants to make you come back time and time again, addicting. This goes from game physics to character progression and what not. Sure there are good things in STOR, aswell as less good things (which has been expressed in other posts by people). To give only a few examples: static foes, no pvp ladder ranking and matchmaking system etc. They all take away from the gaming experience. You mention the gameplay is fine, but it should be more than that imo.

I'll give mine. I'm not a game designer but I've been a professional journalist for the Dutch Magazine PCGameplay. I've tested games for years and wrote articles about them (preview/review) and a few walkthrouhgs. I see flaws in design, I recognise the fun factor or lack off and I tell you the OP hit the nail on top. The tree classic pillars are Gameplay, graphics and sound. Out of my experience if gameplay fails, the game is doomed. It can be the most beautiful game but if the gameplay is not fun, then the game won't be a huge success. Gameplay itself however can carry the other pillars when it's really good aka my example of Minecraft, looks crap, but tons of fun and it's a success. The fourth pillar in TOR (story line with voice overs) can't carry the gameplay , especially not in what's supposed to be an MMO. BW made a product, if the customers aren't happy with the product (not all ofcourse, there's a group of people who enjoy the game), then the makers of the product overestimated their product or didn't do a very good job at market research, competition and all that. The OP is expressing his thoughts on why the product in his experience isn't what it should be as he's been a customer in the industry for many years.

Can be viewed as the glass is half full or half empty. At release I wanted to give a friend a guest pass but I couldn't, so BW clearly wasn't keen on letting people play for free. Now 5 months after release they don't really have a choice but try to get more players in. If this gaming was blooming, this wouldn't be nescessary and people would just subscribe as who wouldn't want to be part of the biggest success since WoW. Unfortunately it never came to that. This won't solve the fundamental flaws in game design to make this a modern long term playable MMO game though. That's the main problem.

Because they know from experience what's a fun game about duh. Something BW clearly lacks vision in at this point. It's not because you can program and code and went to a game designer school that you're a good game designer. It's not because you have a big budget and 450 IT people working on a project that you're gonna succeed. Minecraft was originally made by one guy but the game's a success. Simply because the bloke knew what's fun because he played tons of games, he kept on playing other games even during the creation of minecraft. Over 400 people at BW and nobody thought that people would not like the designs for the armors in the game, that's just ridiculous. @OP: excellent post, I agree with almost everything

To answer the OP's question: Probs with the engine, mediocre game design at best, no mini games, no extensive space combat, bad looking gear, static worlds, not enough sand-box, mediocre crafting system results in a mediocre economy, no long term end game goals,... PvP wise: no world pvp, no ladder, no matchmaking, no real goal for pvp'rs to keep playing in the long run. The fourth pillar (story lines with voice overs) took most of their time and budget away I think, while it can't hold an mmo community together, that's the big thing we learned from this experiment. It came to this as the devs strongly believed in this formula while some beta testers (not the fanbois who wet their pants when a dev says something) warned them there was something fundamentally wrong with this game. To be honest I didn't see it at first when I started playing this game at release. I had a blast for a couple of weeks , the leveling was fun up until I reached mid 30's then things started to sink in bit by bit.

The ignorance is strong in this one.

I have the same feeling. I even felt sorry for BW that they got it so wrong on so many different levels that I wondered if they're actually gamers themselves or just programmers. The lead game designer seems a cool dude, but he just doesn't know what people like or expect from a game like this. It's sad to see them in vids where they announce new stuff and all, while I think they lost all common sense and need a reality check.

When I play an mmo I play a few classes for a little while to select the chosen one lol and from there on it's my only character for years to come. I like putting all my time and effort in one character and most of the time I can find that in an mmo, so I came to realise this game is not for me.

One can only hope the numbers stabalise, but I'm not very optimistic to be honest. Players like me who are still around because of the free month they handed out, will run out of playtime soon (mine within 20 days). I log in a few times a week to hang around on the fleet a bit and then I log off again. This kind of activity can make the numbers look better than they actually are.

I played Guild Wars for 5 years. That game costed me around 200 euros (3 standalones + 1 expansion). It's still superior in so many ways than SWTOR will ever be in my opninion, unless they start over from scratch which will prolly not happen. TOR is supposed to be a modern mmo and I would have no prob paying for that, but I can't justify paying monthly for this game any longer, even if it had a cheaper sub.

I want them to hire a decent team of artists who have skill and a passion for Star Wars so they can create amazing concept art for complete new armors for all classes in the game. More hoods for classes like the marauder etc. No more buttrobes, fix all the glitches. No ridiculous transformers endgear etc. Basically less crap and more Star Wars.

I agree with you OP, the price imo is way too high.

38 days left, because of the free month. I used gamecards since release, because I don't have a credit card. Not planning to get a new 2 months card. Reasons: 1) A lot of ugly armors. Buttrobes, graphical glitches in armour pieces. I'm a level 50 marauder and the one armor that I find ok looking is the elite marauder set, although the headpiece is glitched. Almost no hoods for Marauders, execept for that ugly warhero thingy and columni I think. 2) Static foes. The whole universe seems to be entrenched lol. There are no real dangerous dynamic patrols who can surprise you. 3) No real open world. I feel more limited than in GW1, which is instanced based. 4) Although there are a few places where I do feel like I'm in the star wars universe, most of the game feels empty, as in no soul. 5) Dying servers. It makes trading and playing with other players very difficult. All in all this game has a few interesting things but I can't really justify to myself to pay a monthly fee for it any longer. Bought Diablo 3 as a replacement pve game. If that doesn't do it I'll just spend all of my gaming time playing League of Legends again, which I never left last 2 years anyway.

I think that's part of the problem yes. It's just a detail but what I find a shame is that I hardly ever hear the famous 'Cantina band' tune. I heard it a few times on the fleet when soneone got their robot out and it played for 30 seconds or something.

I looked on the forums to see if this was already posted but couldn't find a post. This piece is glitched since 1.2, the ears come out of the helmet and I can see my characters bald head showing through. (seen from above) If nescessary I'll upload a pic. It would be nice if you guys look into this because it's one of the nicer sets for a marauder. Also, buttrobes are hurting synthweaving Finally I like to add a request to get more hoods for Marauders aswell. Thank you!

I had to lol at all the people who made posts here that there was no population decrease last months. So basically 400k people left and this number might still be optimistic because there are players like me who are playing on the 30 day free gift. I won't pay a monthly sub for this game any longer. It's not a bad game on itself, just way overpriced for what we got.

I'm not participating atm, but I was pleasently surprised we got an event. I just buy some vaccins, end of story. Let people have some fun, even if it's not your cup of tea. No need for drama imo.

I have no idea how many players there are at the moment in ToR, but like so many I noticed a decrease in players on my server last month. However last days there seems to be some more activity again,certainly not at the same level as the first months though. I guess around 600k players in total. The early March numbers are certainly out of date because a lot of players who started during launch with a 60 days pre-paid card like myself, had to buy a new one around the week of the 17th of March. 2 month pre-paid + 30 days free that came with the box. So that must have been a crucial moment. I have no doubt that D3 en GW2 will have an impact. D3 because it's a long awaited Blizzard game and seems very fun. Well I played it at Gamescon in Cologne and it felt great. Ofcourse it's not an mmo so I'm curious to see how long it will keep people's intrest after the first months and playthroughs. GW2 will be a scary oponent simply because Arenanet will deliver when they say they will make an MMO like no other that we have seen before. And it's without a monthly fee, which will attract a lot of players, for better or worse. ToR will not get 12 mil subs and that's not needed to be succesful anyway. However they should have a clear idea where to go with this game and polish it and give people all they can for a monthly sub if they want to keep that business model. Competition will be hard in a few months.

OP it certainly has the 'wow' factor lol.

Is it the same for a marauder? Because I was stacking critical, thinking it would be the best stat for DPS on that character. Talking about a pve setup btw. I mean I gave Power a lower priority than Critical on gear, but apparently it's better to have higher numbers in Power.

Unfortunately I didn't miss the crashes and all the other bad stuff. It's amazing I forgot that stuff and just rememberred the fun part at first. The WoW launch was just terrible. Compared to that, ToR had a near perfect launch, at least for me.

Well, I started playing WoW when it got released to bridge the gap till Guild Wars came out, which was a couple of months (3-5) later if I remember correctly. So I was there the first months and if it wasn't for GW I would have kept on playing but GW was too high on my list. Turned out I would play that game for 5 years lol. However I still remember the WoW days and more people joined the game, week after week. I also remember the queues, which was annoying at times, 45 minutes etc. On my server there weren't queues during the first weeks, but it started after the first month or so. I don't know how the situation was on the other servers. It was a different era back then, and for a lot of people it would become their first mmo experience. During those first months I loved the unexpected attacks in allied country. It was in the open world and was unpredictable. Suddenly some player would appear in the dwarven capital city and shout: Can you level 50's stop showing off your mounts and get your *** over to X, becasue an orc raid clan is ****** faces versus our level 30 guys. I think level 50 was the max level at the time, not sure anymore, might have been 60. So I went to see the battle and saw that orc clan camp a castle rofl. After at least a full hour of battle they were finally driven back, but jeez that was tons of fun even though I died several times during the battle. There must have been at least 100-200 people involved and it was my first real mmo experience on that scale as well.

In the article it says the following: 'Many of those in the initial subscriber count were using 30 day free trial subscriptions. The majority of those trials have probably run their course and the revised 1.7 million count is likely comprised of paying customers only.' Here in th UK, you couldn't just buy the game with a 30 day trial and play, you had to subscribe for one month immediately or pay a 60 day pre-paid card and then you would get the 30 day free trial on top that came with the game. So my 90 days in total (60 from pre-paid card + 30 free trial) ended earlier this week and I had to buy another pre-paid card. So the article is dated March 12th which is just before all those free trials + pre-paid cards ended. This week is a crucial week, because by now all the people that bought the game on release + pre-paid card, will decide to play on or not. Just saying.

I fail to see why it's my fault I am where I am now. Joined Rogue moon server (eu) on release and it was at least medium populated first months. Last couple of weeks I saw the population decrease on that server and it's light now. It's getting difficult to sell and buy stuff in the auction house and people are hardly grouping anymore. I just bought another pre-paid card, mainly because I want to play a pve game with the girlfriend. I don't have the time to level a character to level 40-50 again because I'm heavely involved in League of Legends for almost 2 years now, but the gf doesn't like that game. So the choices you offer me: 1) roll an alt: no can do, nor does she want to. 2) whine: I'm just expressing my thoughts in this post. If nothing gets done soon I'll let my money talk instead. Diablo3 gets released the 15th of May, my pre-paid card ends 2 weeks after. I'll take my money there then. 3) unsub: see above I'm aware we're only two people and nobody will miss us and that's just fine, just giving some customer feedback.

Hi all, I browsed the forums looking for a topic about server merges and I stumbled upon this one. I'm a bit concerned lately as the population on rogue moon server decreased drastically last month. I play with my girlfriend and best friend, but the news of the upcoming update couldn't persuade my best friend to play on, mainly because GW2 and Diablo3 is on the way and he noticed the decrease in people playing ToR. My girlfriend isn't aware of the exodus that much, she's really casual and still playing through the game, she's level 39 now and thinks we'll play a lot of endgame content together later on. I'm a bit shocked to read in this topic there isn't that much endgame content apparently. I hope they start merging servers soon, because low populated servers isn't a fun gaming experience in an mmo.