My two cents on the whole thing (contains spoilers). Super fanboy or not, you have to at least recognize trends when you see them. The quality of Bioware's products has gone down steadily sense aquisition by EA (that can't be denied). EA continues to be near the bottom of consumer confidence (that is a fact). Given both of those, can either be trusted to deliver a decent F2P game? After all, they have managed to screw up what could have been a decent subscription based game. IMHO, the main problems can't be fixed with subs or F2P. The game is incredibly shallow. Once you get pass the voice overs, there is not much there. The Sith Assassin was fun, but if I want to try the Sorcerer, that means I have to play the same exact quests. In and of itself not a bad thing if it weren't for the fact that all the class quests are basically the same (start as a lowly guy, get betrayed or wronged in some way, seek revenge, take over/save the galaxy). The Republic Soldier line was decent, but early on the concequencies were kind of stupid. I have my character say in a very nice way to a little kid "I really think you should go back to your parents" and I get dark side points. ***? Did any of the writers proof read to see if that made sense? (I'm not listing all of the classes but you get the idea). The game comes off as being a single player game with multiplayer tacked on. There really is not much of a reason to form a community if you can do the bulk of the game by yourself, really only needing to be in a guild to run ops and flashpoints or to go into a warzone together (which aren't that fun to begin with). And when it comes down to it, ops just boil down to "beat the enrage timer." Classes have been nerf to the point where it's nothing but "flavor of the month" DPS builds, which wouldn't be all that bad if everyone didn't look the same. And what is with the armor? It's like the devs said "screw KOTOR" and went with something that looks at home in the Elder Scrolls universe. Ultimately for me, the game just got boring. This revelation came to me as I was finishing up my daily Illum quest of just riding around in a circle for 30 minutes to collect some canisters and maybe help kill the occasional Republic guy that came along. That's really all I had to look foward to, since there was never enough lvl 50 players to get a decent warzone match going. Sure, I could make an alt, but the game as designed isn't really conducive for taking your time. You can breeze through some of the story content then hit wall because some of the bosses seem to not have been playtested/designed with both advanced classess in mind (ala colicoid broodmother), which forces you to grind side quests to point where you are practically over leveled for the next planet, let alone that one boss on your current planet. Rinse and repeat. There are far too many issues in this game for a simple switch to F2P to do any good, and the F2P people will realize this and leave. And if you alienate them by not letting them onto the forums with the subscription players, they aren't going to stay around and pay for their micro transaction. F2P cannot save bad game design, bad gameplay, and bad developer decisions.

I'm sorry, but a nomination of World of Tanks for Best Communty Realtions and SWTOR for innovation make these "awards" full of crap.

Being in the Army for 9 and a half years, I can some this debate up all in one word: Implementaion. Any F2P model has to implemented properly. There are many F2P games that have implementated the model very well, and I do have fun playing STO (heck, the ships that you pay points for are really cosmetic upgrades, and the console "advantage" is minimal at best"). Truth be told, it comes down to trust. After the shortcomings of DA:2, Mass Effect 3, and SW:TOR (and comparing BioWare quality now and 5 years ago), does anyone really trust BioWare to successfully implement a F2P model?

Between this, and the way many of the armors look in general, someone really needs to question the design desicions. It really makes you wonder who looked at all this and said it was good and ship it out? It's like they completely ignored all the excellent aesthetics in KOTOR and tried to do "Star Wars Epsiode 7: Lord of the Rings."

Bump for respect. RIP Ralph McQuarrie

When I started playing the sniper at lvl 10 in PvP, and my first shot ever was a 2.5 crit against a lvl 30 Jedi Knight, I thought the Sniper was a little OP. I'm a casual (read: not ver good of a) player, but I'm averaging abou32 kills and 4 deaths a game. Only three possibilities 1) Sniper is already a bit over powered 2) All that spec and game play info that abound on this forum has sunk in 3) People just underestimate the sniper to the point that snipers can dominate (happened to me a couple times, when 2 snipers and an operative pretty much carried our team).

I must have missed the memo that Marksman was the weakest PvP class. I'll be sure to tell the 4 juggs (including the one I killed 1v1) that it was all a mistake in the Matrix's program and the a reset is imminent to prevent such anti-epeen activity in the future.

IMHO, the OP lost credibility by calling the best story in the game (Inquisitor) a snoozefest. Back on topic: Speaking as a Marksman spec, I find leveling the sniper pretty straight foward. Despite not having as many decent CC skills as others, I can drop everything so fast it doesn't even matter (especially so with high cunning and tech power). Ambush, Laze, and Snipe are your best friends. The only times I have died as a Sniper were due to my own stupidity and nothing else. And in PvP, Marksman sniper is beast, even up close, but that is minly due to how many people understimate a sniper. A decent Sniper can even take on anyone higher level than him and give him a run for his money.

You left left some stuff off of your post and got some things mixed up. Fixed it for you.

Greetings all. I will add my two cents and observations. First, I've never played SWG, so anything here mentioned about that game is based solely on reviews and other's gameplay descriptions. My only real experiences with MMO's are Air Warrior 3 and Star Trek Online. I will not hijack this thread or go off topic to describ them, but needless to a three faction, winner takes all format would seem a perfect thing for a major sci-fi based conflict. Having said that, and taking into acount the intellectual property (people in STO seem to forget, in the process of making their demands, that that game is based on an intellectual property and goverend by the owners and established lore of said property), SWG type gameplay wouldn't fit into this time period. We have a wealth of books based in that time period that greatly detail the days in the life of fairly normal people or the fairly normal people the main characters run into. I wouldn't be surprised to find an interior decorator going about his bussiness, not realy caring about the relatively small insurgency the Empire is trying to squash. It's like today, people going about normalcy while militaries are engaged in operations elesewhere. SWTOR is, for all intents in purposes, WWI/Inter-war/WWII/The Phoney War/Renewed Conquest/Cold War/WWIII in space, and has practically been advertised as such. Set during a time that has little written about it in the grand Star Wars lore, two Super Powers and their proxies trying to undermind or outright destroy the other at the expense of hundreds of worlds and billions of beings. I'm not sure if any developer is going to risk SWG type MMO in a setting like this. Honestly how many of the newer generation would create a Sith Empire interior decorator, or a Republic Bantha hearder? Ultimately, times change. Just like 40 years ago, you could get away with a G rated war movie, or a slow paced adventure flick, or a comedy film without slapstick, gamers change. Many consider SWG post CU/NGE a complete failure (although it did last a while). Many younger gamers (and even some older ones) play Star Wars to have lightsaber battles, dress as Stormtroopers, shoot lighting, do Jedi mind tricks etc. The type of game SWG was really is more of a niche market nowadays. Now, warzones and warfare like AW3 (or what those described in Dark DAoC), is perfect for a setting like this, and Bioware missed the mark with that, and will have to scramble to save Illum and maybe add other planets, maybe even revamp space combat and add space based warzones.