Try to use your speeder bike and move exactly when the cast finishes. Try to use any casted ability and move exactly after it finishes, try to move and then cast right after you stopped moving. That's some easy examples of the client-server sync issue. The animation delay should be in your face obvious.

It affects everyone. Some people just don't care, some people are just very poor at noticing.

Everyone does, it's an engine issue. You might not notice it, but it affects you nonetheless. However there are a handful of abilities that don't have the issue, for instance Rocket Punch, Shoulder Slam, Jet Charge and Flame Sweep are some Bounty Hunter abilities that are actually instant. Meanwhile Missile Blast and Rail Shot are examples of instants very very delayed by their animations and Unload an example of a channelled ability that can easily bug out. Even Speeder Bike itself as shown in videos in the OP is an example of an ability that bugs out if you try to move after the cast is done but before the animation is.

I'd say that DA2 had vastly better combat then DA:O, the only issue was the way that had countless enemies re-spawn from all directions all the time to compensate for their high causality rate which irked anyone that wanted to use tactics. Most complaints against DA2 tend to be more focused about the -EXTREME- amount of content reuse and generally lacking Story compared to DA:O.

No it doesn't. EVE has 350k Subs where on average each Sub represents 0.5 persons. http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/03/02/eve-online-has-over-360000-players-63170-simultaneous-users-in-january/

EVE is a tiny tiny game maintained by a tiny tiny developer that's doing rather poorly financially.

Eh, I think it's more simple then that. Most people already have a life, they're not very interested in getting a second virtual one. Games are meant to be played as entertainment, you log in for a few hours, kill some stuff, steal their loot and just relax.

Leveling 1-85 right now in WoW is AWESOME, well twice. The new 1-60 quests are way way better then they used to be, however as previously noted, it's only fun to do any one quest once, and there's only enough quests to level two characters. It's almost the only thing I did in Cata, I leveled two characters 1-85 and then I quit my sub.

in all of those you almost always have a choice between 2 zones to level in at any one time.

One thing I liked about the Cataclysm leveling revamp, was that it's now possible to level two characters 1-60 without ever doing the same quest. Ofcourse that ends when you get into Outlands of ancient quest design ******ude, and gets better again in Northrend.

If you look at your scale, it should be immediately obvious to you that your scale is completely out of whack. Just look at simple things like the size of the roads of the various games on the various maps. An entire city in WoW is about as big as a single house in your Paradise map.

Huh? Balmorra is about the size of Stranglethorn Vale. If I'm feeling extremely generous I could add in Deathwood.

Is anyone surprised? It takes a while to level if you're not playing 10h a day ; )

He said more, M-O-R-E. He wants 3 windows open at the same time. And being able to equip items without your char window open is something you've been able to do in WoW since vanilla, I'm pretty darn sure all MMO's since have also had the feature. However what you can't do, is equip MODS, M-O-D-S, without having your char window open.

Well, once you're in BETA it's usually to late. It's really up to the Alpha testers and QA department to beat the designers over their heads with sticks when issues like these come up. Beta usually means you're feature complete and just polishing bugs, the source of this is really a core design flaw.

Nah. Count them: 1. Kalimdor 2. Eastern Kingdoms 3. Northrend 4. Maelstrom/Deepholm 5. Vashj'ir (You can get to this place without instancing from Eastern Kingdoms though, so maybe shouldn't count it) 6. Azuremyst Isles/Quel'thalas/South Seas (I'll count them as one, since they're pretty minor) 7. Outlands 8. Pandaria (when it's released) On average each expansion adds one new continent to the mix ^^

you can climb over most of the mountains if you really really want to. People used to find weird hidden content that way back in vanilla (when they didn't fall through the world).

Well, teeeeeeechnically WoW is instanced about 7-10 different 'continents', however they're quite a bit larger then SWTOR's planets. Guild Wars is super instanced though, even more then SWTOR.

Well, this particular thread is about character responsiveness, not buggy behaviour in general.

I think Bioware essentially designed Kotor 3, now with multi-player. However I think this is the first Multi-player game they've ever done so they probably didn't expect a lot of the issues that came up. However you would have thought they would have -someone- on the team with experience making MMO's to tell them these things. Yeh, most likely.

I don't think they based it much on MUDs, as far as I'm aware Blizzard mostly designed WoW with a bunch of ex-EQ players that wanted to make a much much better game then EQ and a whole bunch of people that used to work on Diablo which is an action game.

Quite a few of these developers, notably Bioware and Funcom are staffed by designers that are artists at heart, they want to make beautiful cinematic combat. However that is directly at odds with fast paced, responsive combat. No one will ever tell you that a Street Fighter tournament would make a good movie action scene, however neither does most action scenes make good games. I'm a bit at a loss at why Trion, Turbine and Mythic would make that kind of choice though. In most RPG's cinematic combat is the right choice, because the games tend to be turn based or semi-turn based. However once multiplayer enters the picture you're in a completely different ball game.

Well yeh, the responsiveness is really cheap. These two things are basically 99% of what makes WoW more responsive. 1) Effects take place EXACTLY at the end of their cast duration. Instant means instant, 2.5 sec means 2.5 sec etc 2) If you cancel the cast after the cast duration but before the animation/cast bar is done(This is inevitable due to latency), the effect is still applied since the cast was done serverside. Really, it would bother me a lot less if all the 'instant, but not really lulz' abilities had listed cast times. However that still wouldn't solve the client/server sync problem that makes the abilities with actual cast times so wierd.

I thought the one thing all failed MMO's had in common was that they all underestimated how much time/money it takes to make a fully featured MMO, all being forced to release their product before it was ready and ending up making all the subscribers disappointed shortly after release only to be unable to ever get them back again.

As a rule, the people working on Expansions are not the same people working on maintaining the current game. The Skillsets are rather different too. For maintenance you need mostly programmers and QA. While for new content you need a whole bunch of artists/designers/voice actors etc etc.