It would be called...an MMO. Which, sadly, SWTOR is not.

Make it an actual MMO instead of a single-player co-op action game mislabeled as one.

Roleplayer.

I concur because this is essentially a single-player game with multi-player options and not an MMO. The only reason to pay a monthly fee is to experience new content, most of which should be in the form of the creativity and input of fellow players. That is sorely lacking in this game as it currently is structured and plays out. This game offers eight separate pve stories for $60 plus $15 a month. Compare with, for example, Dragon Age: Origins, which had six separate stories for about $50 (would likely be $60 today). One of the reasons I unsubscribed. I doubt SWTOR will go B2P, and certainly not F2P, anytime soon. Too much enormous dev investment to recoup.

What I see is a company already making the desperate moves of offering significant free playing time to pad subscription stats. And let's remember another (widely reported if unconfirmed) fact: It's the most expensive MMO of all time. That could mean it has pockets deep enough to wait out its early tribulations; it also means it better pay out soon enough or investors are going to demand major changes or loss-cuttings. The key number is active subscribers maintained over time. This thing needs to make an enormous amount of money to continue, and of course there is a snowball effect if you start losing subscribers and the pvp-ers and rp-ers who remain have no one to play with. The real proof of MMO quality from the player perspective is in the game and how much of the experience comes from the wit and creativity of fellow players (and not merely the sheer amount of them). To get back to the "awesomeness" or lack thereof, this part was always lacking and never awesome. It's the deadest "MMO" I've ever seen and has been since the start. Very little player interaction, and grouping desperately difficult after the first few weeks. I suspect that is due to both the game's single-player favoritism as well as to some preference in the players drawn to this game. In any case, we can have feelings and opinions about it, but it's a serious challenge for the company to handle as people start to see server populations drop. The world event was a step in the right direction and they obviously will have similar strategies over time.

I had a fun Jawa balloon ride on Tatooine as a Sith with a Jedi and a naive little Republic trooper. That was about it. This is an incredibly dead MMO, with both the game and players to blame. I find it be structurally more of a single-player game, with little to facilitate or encourage cross-faction interaction (or even within factions). Congregating places are hard to get to and unadvertised. Maybe something about the material or the broad appeal of a famous brand name draws people with no interest in interaction. Maybe the enormous lore already in place in the Star Wars universe discourages creativity. All I know is, I had good irl friends on the opposite faction and I couldn't do much with them even when I tried.

1) It's a single-player game. Structurally, this is a single-player with multi-player options, not an MMO. I played through it about 1 and 3/4 times. That's pretty good for a single-player. But there is little opportunity or incentive to interact with other players, and it plays out that way. Groups were terribly hard to find after the first few weeks, because the technical function was just not there. Auction house thing was a joke, so forget about crafting and selling. Sterile environments that do not encourage socializing and RP-ing (despite being corralled by rails and walls everywhere). Few cross-faction zones. Pvp by most accounts is an afterthought and its gear system a mess (also another disincentive to crafters and traders). The fundamental reason to pay a monthly fee and play an MMO on a regular basis is the creativity and input of other players, not to keep replaying a single-player pve experience. Like most players, I come and go on MMOs anyway, but this was my shortest stay yet--despite the game being the most inherently polished starting out of the gate. I spent twice as long on my first shot in LOTRO (which had remarkable RP in a similar environment of heavy movie/book-based lore). Probably a quarter of that time was RP-ing. Here, my RP-ing amounted to maybe three hours of out three months of play. 2) It's an unfinished game. Why should I pay while they patch in basic elements such as the Legacy system and a lot of the aforementioned stuff? Especially when.... 3) It's a broken game. Early bugs were fine and to be expected; we're all new to this at first. But I'm sick of the aforementioned patch-a-mania breaking things either accidentally or deliberately. I came back during the free-time offer to see what things looked like. I found my main had its ability tree totally wiped (on purpose) and its headgear not rendering (by accident). Instant disincentive to play. 4) Legacy system disappointment. A matter of personal taste, but I had hopes that Legacy would be more of a guild replacement to connect fellow players into a family (or gang), something like the old Asheron's Call vassal system. In short, I hoped it would be an MMO element. Instead, it's a single-player element. All of that hard work on my main comes down to egging me to start over with yet another toon and grind through the same planets again in my own little bubble. 5) Money. In the end, we vote with our wallets. The game stopped making financial sense to me when the above reasons are factored. Why should I pay $60 to start and then $15 a month for what is essentially a single-player game with eight possible stories? Consider that the single-player Dragon Age: Origins had six separate character stories and cost about $50, period. For those of us who experience this game as a phony or superficial MMO, it's just a rip-off. Especially when this marketplace is increasingly going ftp. I found this game enormously impressive and great fun in many ways. I suspect it will be significantly better in 9 months or a year. But those are the bottom-line places it has lost me, likely for a very long time.

The pvp on the forums seems to be a lot better than the version in the game.

I did not find it to be a well-made MMO. I found it to be a well-made single-player game with a multi-player option. The MMO parts are being patched in now or over upcoming months. When people say the game was released unfinished, they are referring to such things as: no group finder; the core Legacy system non-functional for several months; primitive guild system/finder; primitive trade house; pvp that was infamously unbalanced and in some cases non-functional. Note that most of those features are basic (indeed, essential) MMO features. What played well out of the gate were the pve stories, the voice acting, the animations and all of the KOTOR 3 elements. I had a great deal of fun with it, as far as it went, which for me was max lvl on one toon and upper 30s on another. That's pretty good for a single-player game. I also think that BioWare did a good job of responding to input and bug fixes early on, and communicating clearly about them. (Stuff like those crazy green lasers you mentioned, as one minor example.) Having a responsive company behind the game is crucial to the long-term game experience. I do think it is slipping now as it falls behind and as the many patches attempting to finish off the basic game elements are themselves breaking things (such as the headgear bug). In short, I think it still retains awesomeness as a pve/single-player experience. It was certainly polished and solid out of the gate with those elements.

It's not the forums that the company has to respond to; it's the people canceling subscriptions left and right. And it's not about responding to "naysaying"; it's about recouping a massive investment by making a product that is good enough. In short, you can exchange opinions all you want, but people vote with their wallets and it's clear which way the vote is going at the moment. The game obviously was released unfinished. The core Legacy system only went live recently. No group finder. Auction/sales system that was primitive at best. PvP that was wildly imbalanced and ill-designed. Etc. So they issue patches to finish these elements of the game; but the patches break things, too. On top of this, the game is structurally more like a multi-player action/RPG than an MMO. It has virtually no endgame. It does little to encourage interaction among players (or between factions), and a lot to encourage the single player to start over repeatedly with a new toon. (E.g., the Legacy system.) That is a big challenge to keeping people subscribed. The game is clearly struggling right now, with constant patches and the gimmicks of free playing time and free pets. The question is, how much is the company (and its investors) willing to lose while it finishes the game and waits to see whether enough people will still be around (or attracted back) to play it? They have pretty deep pockets and surely expected to wait a while. But the present situation is clearly turning off a lot of players and this is a highly competitive market (not to mention one increasingly going the ftp route). It's tough for any MMO these days, as people bounce between games and the market leans ftp. My guess would be that this game will look a lot better in 9 months to a year. People may be ready to come back again in significant numbers then after sampling other market offerings. Whether enough of them come back, or stay, to make this product feasible for the company in the long term--time will tell.

Slippery slope is not an inherently faulty argument; just frequently is one. I mean, have you ever been on an actual slippery slope? They're real.

That's true aesthetically, but not financially. The market competition is fierce, and you cannot ignore it as an MMO player because it determines whether you will still have other players to play with, or a game to play at all. SWTOR is not simply artwork; it is a massive investment of $100 million +, and it needs a massive return on that or it will go away. Working well and having a very large base of happy players is crucial for that financial success.

Find another game to play. This thing has no worthwhile endgame content and won't for months at best. Its main new feature is the Legacy system, which just wants you to start over with more alts.

This being theoretically an MMO, I'd like to see the legacy system be an alternative to guilds--an organic way to interconnect other players. I'd like a reason to play my well-developed main in endgame, rather than a gimmick nudging me to create more alts as if this were essentially a single-player.

There's nothing subjective about the fact that pugging died after about the first three weeks of this game. Look at the dev thread and you'll see they're (finally) working on a group finder. So this is not contradictory at all, except perhaps in contradicting fanboy-ism.

Because all of the servers will be low-population eventually, and this is--supposedly--an MMO. Also, as the company reportedly spent $200 million making this game, you better hope the subscriber numbers stay up, or you will not have a game to enjoy for very long. You need to go beyond your circular logic of "enjoy it if you enjoy it" and see how the industry and this particular subgenre work.

They didn't spend $200 million and build a casual-gaming product under one of the biggest brand names in pop culture history to "draw unique players" and let it "find its place." They can't afford to. They clearly intended to take a serious shot at WoW and boasted of 1 million subs, and now they are offering a full month of free time to lure back the many who have fled. It is great you love the game, but merely strongly stating your dreams for its longevity is not evidence; whereas the company's own behavior indicates this one is already getting into significant financial trouble.

A wonderfully improved way to read about how the game is still broken.

Buy an unfinished game for the good of a company's shareholders and then call it a virtuous act of patience. Maybe that makes somebody feel better about being sold a bill of goods. Too bad a huge portion of the subscribers aren't so virutous and are voting with their feet right out the door. Wonder what the shareholders will think of that?

Its existence is more important than its content at this point. It's a basic feature that should have been in the original release. There is still something to be said for organizing a group organically; it makes people actually socialize, which is great in an MMO. But it was really hard to PUG after the first three weeks of this game.

6/10 and falling fast. Lovely production values and episodic storytelling. But it's a single-player masquerading as an MMO. Fun enough as far as it went, which for me was max lvl on one toon and 30-something on another. It's 7/10 if we're talking strictly in "KOTOR 3" terms. It's still early, especially for a game that was clearly released unfinished for Xmas. But the frustrations mount and players are clearly voting with their feet (or mouse fingers), leading to the semi-desperate free-play deal. Endgame and pvp still seriously faulty by many accounts. Looked forward to the Legacy system as a potential reason to socialize, possibly like a lord-and-vassal system. But it's essentially an attempt to get you to start over with another character in the single-player quests. Huge missed opportunity and misunderstanding of what MMOs are about. Lured back by free tauntauns, I found my skill points totally "refunded" (aka dismantled), my headgear broken and invisible, and the Legacy system offering me a prize for a lvl-14 toon if I go make one. Color me underwhelmed.

Great artists = smart artists, to elaborate your point. There is no wholly original work of art; if there was, it wouldn't even make sense to us, as it would lack any cultural context.

This chart should have D&D abilities lined up as well, so you could see how much WoW stole, and how much more directly. "Cleave," for example, is the name of a similar D&D fighter ability. WoW took many spell names, monster designs, etc. directly from D&D. It would be possible to trademark some of these, but it is generally not done and BioWare would have no legal liability here. Virtually every RPG of any type relies heavily on the D&D model. Likewise, D&D was literally sued for ripping off the "Lord of the Rings" books. And so on and so forth. Read "Beowulf" and the "Nibelunglied" and you'll see that storytelling is more about elaboration than innovation. But to argue that SWTOR does nothing innovative because it employs a similar warrior skill tree as most MMOs do... that's myopic, to say the least.

I am having a glitch with the "Assault" ability, where it freezes up and becomes unusable. It is put on a roughly 12-hour cooldown, which is not actually ticking down anyway. Anyone else having this issue? I have been unable to pinpoint what triggers the freeze-up. Relogging usually fixes it, but then it will occur again during play.

It would pure awesomeness if SWTOR included optional subtitles in the style of the infamous "DO NOT WANT" Chinese movie translation. Yes, it's a ridiculous idea, and that's why it would put the game farther into the category of nerdcore coolness. DO WANT!!!