What the heck is a 'real mmo' supposed to be?

Well yes. Blizzard pulled millions of non-mmo gamers into the MMO market. I wouldn't be surprised if this game pulled a number of RPG players into the MMO market as well. However the 'b.net kiddies' as you call them, are not mindless drones, they do make demands out of the games they play. If you've ever looked at the WoW forums it's not like the place is full of religious pro-Blizzard chanting.

It burrnnnnnns ussssss!

They'd be here if Bioware hadn't blown the entire budget on Voice acting. UI modifications/Macros are on their high priority list based on Developer comments. I'm saying you look bad, really bad, just stop, it's painful to watch you try to defend going through 2 nested submenus only to get a really badly filtered search for what you're interested in with no ability to sort by individual price (rather then stack). You say that fighting the UI is enjoyable, I say that you're a dirty pervert. By definition they do, if they want to get their money back. I'm sure they could do a game for pure artistry and just take the loss, but Bioware isn't that kind of company. And by the way, this is their exact position, notice that it's nothing like yours: I'm not wrong, I'm just acknowledging that your memory is dysfunctional. It was fun, and certainly much better then any other MMO's at the time, but by the standards of Cataclysm the UI, AH and Quests were pathetic. You're hilarious. Though really the hamburger analogy won't take us anywhere useful, the large chains are popular largely due to their good enough taste and the consistency from one chain location to the next, so people know what product they're going to get when they pay for the food rather then gamble on some local place. Twilight is popular because it allows girls to place themselves into a common fantasy, where they're in the middle of a harem of pretty hunks. WoW is however popular because it's a game that's easy to get into, goes out of its way not to punish its players and tries to make it as easy as possible for anyone to enjoy all the content they've put into it while at the same time has spent years refining the endgame PvP and PvE mechanics to make them enjoyable and challenging.

Well, regardless of the exact nature of your customers, some features are just common sense. Like an Auction House that is more fun to use then pulling out your teeth without anaesthetic.

It's sorta funny because all the "This game lacks features on purpose, vanilla wow was the bestest and [developer] clearly agrees with me and did it on purpose and now [game] will be super-successful just because of that!!!!" posts are word-by-word identical from almost all MMO's that have launched past 6 years. Clearly they're not very sincere, or the posters would have stayed with all the countless featureless MMO's that have been launched.

No, I'm pointing out that the reality of the situation is that SWTOR is competing against a well established fully featured game. Consumers are not charity, they will not subscribe based on promises to become fully featured in the future, they subscribe based on their enjoyment in the present. I also pointed out that originality has never been the selling point of Blizzard games, and I'm rather puzzled as to why certain people think pointing out that their unoriginal is some kind of genius debating argument. I'll also take a moment to point out that I'm not playing any Blizzard game at present, the reason for this is quite simple, as I've consumed most of the content that Blizzard has put out, the content of SWTOR wins out over the features of WoW. However once I've consumed SWTOR's content, then the lack of features means I'll have no reason to subscribe. At that point I'll just have to go back to playing League of Legends or whatever until the next featureless MMO is released.

You have a point? Or are you just trying to be hipster cool by hating on the popular? You clearly have no idea how healing works, and healing in WoW hasn't been a 1 button job since Vanilla unless you're a Paladin who I think finally got fixed in Cata. Generally most healers have access to Big expensive heals Small cheap heals Emergency heals AoE Heals Proactive heals What macros do is usually making targeting easier by for instance making the same keybind do different things depending on if you target a friend/enemy or allowing you to cast by clicking raid frames instead of keybinds. The AH in SWTOR is pure crap, and trying to defend it makes you look dimwitted. The game allowing me to do what I want to do, rather then having me fight the UI instead then the actual content, is not 'mindless'. While the 'low priority' stance on LFD is explicit, most of the above issues are simply incompetence or oversight. No one with a functional memory thinks that vanilla wow was anything to remember fondly. Half the classes were literally worthless, rogues could literally solo any other class naked with lvl 1 weapons, the first raid instance took ages to clear, not because the bosses were any hard, because they were all trivial tank and spank fights, but because it had more trash then you could ever imagine. The raid instances were so dull and unimaginative that it was common for people to just afk in the middle of raids and go on /follow, and it would be hard to notice as they'd just blend into the 40 man rampage. In order to get PvP gear you had to literally be on vacation or jobless as you'd have to play for 10-18 hours a day for weeks to grind the correct rank, since only 1 player on each server could have the rank at a time. Can you take a guess at why the other food retailers that sell food at the same price as McDonalds are not nearly as successful? SWTOR is not the 5 star restaurant here, they're the kebab stand at the corner of the slums.

Difference is this yeh, Diablo, Starcraft and WoW sell an order of magnitude better then any other games in their respective genres. That's not opinion, that's fact.

Sure I can. The world isn't fair, if I pay Blizzard $15 bucks I get a certain amount of content and features, if I pay Bioware $15 bucks I get a tiny tiny fraction of the content and features. That's just how the world is. Usually, when the 'tourists' leave, the game is left with sub 100k players which is probably not nearly enough for this game to go around. Honestly, no one that plays Blizzard games care the slightest if something is original or not, Blizzard is not the game company to go to for originality. Blizzard is the company that produces the games with the highest level of polish and gold standard gameplay.

Hilarious thread. A fail satiric troll and bunch of EQ Cryhards taking him seriously, golden.

There's mainly the combination of two issues that make tanking in this game a pain. 1: Everyone and their dog are ranged. 2: The ranged enemies DO NOT FOLLOW THE SAME LINE OF SIGHT RULES THE PLAYERS DO. Point #2 drives me crazy. You try to pull the mobs around some corner, only for them to stop somewhere halfway and start shooting you through the wall, however you can't shoot back because they're out of line of sight. Then there's the fact that once an NPC starts the shooting animation, it gains the ability to literally shoot through walls until the shooting animation ends. In WoW terms, every damn mob seems to be using channelling LoS ignoring spells that can't be interupted.

Releasing your companies most major product, and then sending everyone on a vacation is not the brightest business strategy around.

You can't copyright a design, you can only copyright the actual coding. I can't fathom why anyone would ever design an UI around multiple nested dropdown menus with no text or linked searches.

Rift isn't really doing great either. Largely due to 1) The class design is just horrible, horrible (Hey devs, you're allowed to use different mechanics then instant cast nukes on variable cooldowns, for reals!) 2) Rifts are really really meh Though I have to admit I haven't played it since I dinged max level in it within the first month, and can't remember any of the other issues.

I find it wierd how other games keep trying to copy wow mechanics, only to do it worse.

I'm not a charity, I don't give a rats *** about developers limited time and budget or whatever. I care about if their product is enjoyable enough for me to subscribe to or not. I don't care if they'll potentially be better in the future, I care about how good it is now. If their product is better in the future, then maybe it is in the future they'll convince me that I should give them more money. I don't get why fan-boys keep trying to convince people to donate money in the hopes of maybe, hopefully, potentially, get something enjoyable later down the line.

Why don't you go back to EQ or whatever other dark ancient hole you crawled out from? The reason they're implementing Dual Spec is because it's a massive convenience that makes grouping and PvP more enjoyable for everyone involved.

LOTRO 'died' because people didn't wait for a fix, people generally don't. People get bored and quit when the game isn't enjoyable.

What? No, I don't even... come on... noone can be that... geez... Dual Spec has nothing to do with Casual vs Hardcore. Dual Spec is about the ability to have the same character participate in several sections of the game without paying a huge price and massive inconvenience. So you can do Both PvP AND PvE, or Both Questing AND Raiding. It was one of the most well received changes they ever did. You mean easy, Wrath was pathetically easy. Largely as a reaction to the fact early TBC was extremely hard. Blizzard are good at overshooting their mark when they try to compensate.

You have no idea what Dual-Spec means do you?

This is a pet peeve of mine. I find all the 'I've cancelled my account' posts to be really wierd. This is because from my perspective you can't possibly truly say you've cancelled before your account is actually frozen and at that point you can't really post at the forum either. This is because my account is permanently cancelled, not because I've always quit the game, but because I don't trust game devs with my CC, I simply give them the CC details of a card with exactly enough money to pay the subcription money and my account gets automatically cancelled at the end of the period at which point I hand them new CC details. This means I -could- say that I've cancelled my account for X and Y reason, but it would be a lie since as noted, I'm always cancelled. Meh, it's only like 2-3 trolls, just ignore them. This thread has actually been refreshingly free of 'go back to wow' posts, most people seem to consider this a legitimate issue. It's not like poorly responsive controls are favourable to anyone.

It refers to Talent Specialisations. I'm getting rather annoyed at the entire Advanced Classes concept because it seems it is confusing people terribly, they should have just made people pick their damn class at level 1 >.<.

Indeed it's not a terribly large problem while you're leveling, just a slight annoyance. However it's not something you'll want to deal with in the endgame.

No one is going to force you to heal, however I suspect you'll still be interested in the feature since the PvE and PvP specs are different, and if you want to participate in both game modes with any level of seriousness you'll want to easily be able to switch between those specs.