WoW had no competition at launch. SWTOR is not so lucky. It's ridiculously naive to think that any post-wow MMO will get away with the kind of launch WoW had.

That's because it's irrelevant. Right now we as Gamers can choose between playing the WoW of 2011 with all its features and relative lack of bugs, or the SWTOR of 2011 with its lack of features and relative large amount of bugs. Personally I'm still sticking with SWTOR because I'm tired of WoW, but that doesn't let SWTOR of the hook.

My point was, no one cares if EQ had more features then WoW, because only a handful of people had ever played EQ, and most of them agreed that EQ was about as much fun as peeling your own skin with an orange peeler. However everyone and their dog has played WoW, and most people agree that whatever they may think about the direction Blizzard has been taking the game, the game has extreme levels of polish and a large number of very nice features that are sorely missed when you don't have them anymore.

If Car A costs 10k and Car B costs 10k. Then I'd expect them to have similar level of features. As a consumer I don't really care about how long time it took to manufacture.

You tell me, how is Vanguard doing?

Back then, MMO's were a tiny niche market. WoW singlehandedly made it mainstream, that's the difference that it appears a lot of mentally scarred masochistic 'veterans' seem to wilfully ignore and seem to keep wishing they could turn the clock back to simpler times.

What EQ lacked, was actual gameplay. EQ was a sadistic game designed to punish players over and over and over. WoW was a game designed for people to have fun. That's why WoW got millions of subscribers, because every time the designers could choose between making the gameplay worse for 'immersion' or making the game more fun, they choose to make the game more fun.

2008 UO had around 75k subs, I'd assume a fair bit less now, Asherons Call has less then 10k and City of Heroes appears to be somewhere below 75k as well based on their financials. Huge money there, huuuuuuuuuuuuge!

I'd say its half finished in the sense that the leveling/single player is really well done. The MMO features however are not yet properly implemented.

Look. Before WoW, a great success in the MMO market was 200k subs. WoW went and reached 13 million. What you call the traditional MMO community is -EXTREMELY- niche. All games that have tried to cater to it have crashed and burned, because there is no money there.

It would probably help if the opening cinematic didn't make the Republic look so disgusting. I was considering making my character a Republican Trooper since I thought it seemed like the coolest class, but after watching that cinematic and recovering from trying to gouge my eyes and ears out, I just rolled Empire instead. I get that the Empire is meant to be mostly evil and Republic mostly good, but the republic is just so disgustingly cheesy good.

I used two criteria for picking my Power Tech. 1) I wanted to be able to tank 2) I didn't want to be Lightsaber Clone #3231

Ofcourse we do. If we know other games have done things in a way that's better then how this game currently does them, then obviously we will point at the other games as good sources of 'inspiration' for this game. If you or Bioware can think of something better, then that's great, however meanwhile we know what works. Just off the top of my head, I want: Mouseover Quell Mouseover Neural Dart Energy shield/Determination announcement If they allowed castrandom/fallthrough macros I'd also stuff Rocket Punch/Rail Shot/Rapid Shots into a spam macro.

The thing about the launch of World of Warcraft, was that all other MMO's were crap, no matter what issues WoW suffered from, it was lightyears ahead of EQ1/Anarchy Online etc. World of Warcraft proved that MMO's didn't have to be masochistic crapfests and since then all MMO's have been forced to launch in a competitive environment.

All games are literally spreadsheets with pretty interfaces. How exactly would you expect to avoid it?

So you're saying that the biggest slice of the MMO market, should all quit TOR, and TOR will be better off financially? Ahahahahahahaa!

I could live with an hour. The current one is ridiculous though.

World of Warcraft pulls in more money then most of the rest of the MMO market, COMBINED. I doubt damage meters will impact Biowares profits negatively.

Usually as niche, struggling or disappointing financial failures : p All other games wish they'd do as 'bad' as WoW is doing right now.

If you can't pull your weight, then you have no right to demand that other people should drag your sorry *** through content. That's just how it is and it's not elitist. If you're in a group and you can't progress, then you're faced with the choice of either dropping whomever is under-performing or disbanding the entire group. What you're trying to argue is that your right to be a slacker is more important then the entire group. Are they supposed to cater to you by just making all bosses automatically die if you wipe 5 times so you can play 'casually' or what?

Note that he was talking about Vanilla/Early TBC. The Core UI of World of Warcraft is -lightyears- better now then it was back then. At launch, World of Warcraft DIDN'T HAVE RAID FRAMES!, for real. The only way to actually heal anything in a raid was by using an addon. I don't think it supported having more then 1 visible bar at a time either. The ingame boss-warnings are also very new and while it's sort of possible to kill bosses without them, having the relevant timers visible and automatic announcements/markings makes life a lot nicer.

By definition. Any UI modification implemented by Bioware, would be a part of the base UI, while UI modifications made by others would be what we usually call Mods or Addons. I'm rather confused to as what you're trying to say.

Believe it or not, but other factors are important for enjoyable PvP beyond balance. Like the fact that people enjoy skill being the deciding factor when it comes to who will win, not who lucked out with the ability lag. If all we cared about was that PvP is balanced, we'd just replace all the Warzones with a giant die, and just let them watch it roll for 20 minutes. The side with the best total score would then win! Completely balanced!1!1!1oneone!1

When you can put 4-5 abilities on the same key, the problem isn't the fact you can macro, the problem is that your class design sucks balls. Those macros are functionally EQUIVALLENT with simply putting those 4-5 abilities on keys 1-5 and then pressing all the keys at the same time with your entire hand. Rift had the brilliant design of making certain classes consists of nothing more then a bunch of instant nukes on various cooldowns, obviously people made macros that would shot the nukes in order of highest damage. I'll repeat this again. YOU CAN MIMIC FALL-THROUGH MACROS BY ROLLING YOUR HEAD ON THE KEYBOARD. For a better look at Macros and their gameplay effect, you should look at World of Warcraft. It doesn't allow fallthrough macros even though you can mimic them with /castrandom or just do it externally, either way it doesn't matter since most DPS rotations in WoW are too complex to be macro'd. This is because they all depend heavily on keeping buffs/debuffs up or managing your energy resources, neither of which is macroable. What we want macros for is not really putting all skills on the same key for facerolling, but rather so that we can more easily manage our hotkeys by for instance making the same keybinding do different things depending on if we target a friend or an enemy, keybind certain phrases so we don't have to retype them all the time etc etc

People don't use it because people don't use it. I'd assume most people flag themselves a couple of times only to notice that they never get a group from it, and then they stop. Anyone trying to make a group using it, notices that no one ever flags themselves. All in all it's useless in its current state and a decade backwards in group finding technology/design.