Not all the Sith can be evil all the time, or the Empire would collapse in a matter of minutes.

I've pretty much been saying this for the past month. The thing is, it's not even the biggest problem. There's no indication that any of the actual people in a position to make changes has even heard any of what we've been saying. If we've got to wait until Tycho or Gabe are articulating issues on Penny Arcade before anything will ever be done, this game is in a lot of trouble. They need to get some community feedback seriously sorted out. Communication with the payers/players in a game like this is vital.

I would imagine this speaks more about the amount of spare time and cash people that people have to plough into games like this, rather than anything about WOW specifically.

The problem isn't soloing. It's that the game makes it incredibly awkward to group. WOW was a very carefully constructed multiplayer experience: It actually trains it's players to work together. Early on, there are quests that have NPC kills with quite long respawn times. This gives players waiting for the respawn time to talk and group up for the kill so they all recieve credit. Then, a few areas later, some of the quests are simply too difficult to be handled solo. You can hunt and peck at loose enemies, but often they're in a group simply too large to be taken down solo. And then there's a difficulty curve on such encounters, so that the lowest level ones, all you need to do is be present while someone else kills the mob, and the highest level group encounters where every players needs to be on top of their class. Compare this to SWTOR, where the most efficient course is often to simply blitz though an area killing everying and not talking to anyone because even important quest NPC's respawn quickly and ignoring the heroic quests until you've got literally not much else to do.

That's the thing about an MMO. To have the largest possible player base, you literally do have to try and appeal to all of the people all the time.

Ambivalent.

It's a shame they shut it. It would be fascinating to observe the ebb and flow of the player base from one Star Wars MMO to another.

Interestingly, I don't think it "flopped", per-se. The problem with the combat upgrade is that it changed the core nature of the game quite dramatically right underneath many of the player base: The people who'd preordered Trials of Obi-wan where thus able to argue that they had been given a false impression of the game. In Galaxies case, the reason SOE ended it was probably licencing agreements with Lucasarts. It's no coincidence that Galaxies ended at the same time as SWTOR was launching. They didn't want Galaxies leeching players from SWTOR.

I assume that is what Lucasarts always wanted Galaxies, post Combat Upgrade, to be like.

Actually, I think that's a fair request. Especially since the story aspects of the game reinforce the single-player "I am the most important person in the world" mentality.

Had it been a singleplayer game, I'd probably have loved it. As an online RPG, it's just barely "fit for purpose", and to be honest, that's not going to be enough to keep me playing SWTOR when there are many MMO's out there that not only are fit for purpose, but actively enjoyable. I've played on livelier Neverwinter Nights persistent worlds.

They lost me with Mass Effect 2. I don't know, I'm not so bothered about the DLC now, but at the time, the Cerebus Network stuff really irrationally bugged me. And I was really put off by how poorly it performed on the 360, and of course, my Mass Effect 1 saves were on 360... I didn't really want to restart both Mass Effects on PC, and I didn't want to continue trying to play Mass Effect 2 on 360, so my interest in the franchise just kind of petered out.

The Old Republic did survive. Incase you've forgotten, Palpatine became supreme chancellor of it.

Because they're **** and you'd have to be blind, deaf and terminally stupid not to see it.

Luke seemed to be doing a pretty good job of weathering those "powerful" blasts, too.

Depends. Do they come with an in-game title?

What's her face from KOTOR 2?

It turns out that they CAN hide the broadside of a sandcrawler though. Who knew?

Yoda would be a custom class.

To be honest, the idea of a shared social rank sounds like a much more useful way of implementing social points in the first place. I'm willing to group, but I was playing separate characters depending on which of my friends was online, or whether I was solo. Accordingly, the character who is most advanced in rank is the one who has the least social points.

He's not a demigod, he's literally a legend.

Depends on how you consider the Force: It's a fairly common belief among Jedi that light-side use is natural state of the Force (which the Sith disrupt) rather than an equal and opposite reaction to the Sith.

Actually, by horrifically crippling Anakin rather than killing him, Obi-wan sowed the seeds of the dissent between Sidious and Vader that would eventually drive Anakin back to redemption. See, even crippled, Vader was too strong an asset to be ignored. But Sidious wanted a new apprentice who could wield force lightning, which Vader, in his life support suit, no longer could. So it creates the circumstance where neither Sidious not Vader truly want Luke dead. Both want him as their apprentice, and this is what kept Luke alive when many times over he should simply have been dead.

I don't think that class is really a problem. It just means that players can have differing skill-sets. (that said, I do like the way Champions handles it, with Free players being constrained to class archetypes, and subscribers being allowed to free-build from all the skills available). Level though, don't get me started on level. All level serves to do is give some people licence to grief, and lets face it, EVERYONE has a little griefer inside them. If you could look at a player and have no idea how tough they are, players would be a lot more leery about attacking each other. Hell, that's why the consideration mechanic evolved, so you could get a rough idea how much tougher than you someone is, and it's completely undermined if you can see they're 6 levels higher than you. It's a far more interesting mechanic when what you can do is determined by your gear, and gear can be lost and/or destroyed. Because one has to explore and loot for gear. Gear that can be sold and passed on. (I remember once being able to buy a fantastic sword from another player in UO, for an amazing price because it was old and getting fragile: For him, it wasn't worth the risk of continuing to use. For me, it was an amazing weapon and I had a much easier time of life until it finally disintegrated). Bound weapons are a scourge upon the modern MMO. What's the point in playing with other people if you can't share weapons and resources?

This. In many ways, it's an absolute tragedy that something that should be so important is made so irrelevant.