I'm getting pre-launch forum Deja Vu.

You shouldn't have to log in. Your companions should be able to get you to max level with top tier gear while you're offline.

I think the entire practice of giving benefits for preordering should be outlawed. I should not be penalized for being a responsible consumer and waiting until a product is released to see if it is any good prior to buying it. These kind of things are going to overinflate the video game market and eventually cause another video game crash when consumers eventually stop doing it after being burned by preordering crappy products one too many times.

You mean like the loop at 1:47? Or at 2:20? Or at 5:10? Or 5:35? Or everything from 3:57 to 4:30?

I was never a fan of the Space Combat but hey, it's an option for those that do like it so knock yourselves out.

I think GW2 is on to something, however I think the idea needs a lot more development and isn't really ready for prime time yet. Replacing the Trinity with the Cluster**** isn't really an improvement. I'm all for making the hard trinity a little more squishy like CoH did though.

On the early pre-launch forums the devs made all kinds of promises that they would eliminiate the grind, go with a softer trinity, not have boss battles being 4 guys beating up on one big boss but have dynamic events where your group fights hords of enemies and all sorts of other things. But as information was released it seemed apparent that someone was checking off all the checkboxes on the standard MMO design checklist and major innovation would not be tolerated. So yea, we have a lot of little frustrations in the game and yea, those frustrations are common in MMO' (especially older ones). It seems the devs on GW2 were reading the SWTOR pre-launch forums though because they managed to make good on most of BioWare's early promises and make a pretty good go of it. I'm not going to sit here and say GW2 is a perfect game so much as I'm going to say if BioWare stuck to their guns and did a little innovation on the core game elements they may have met their expectations for this game.

No, they had an even better idea of "wait until WoW is past its prime and starts to decline and THEN just copy WoW instead of innovating and creating the next generation of MMO's ourselves".

Just go sleep it off bro.

Some people still need to adjust their watches to "BioWare Time".

And this is the ONLY reason I went with Republic and Sith on the same server and just gambled that they would eventually open up more character slots per server so I could play all the AC's. Now I'll have to buy HK and pay for those extra server character slots.

Did the first page get deleted by mistake? I feel like I I'm coming in at the middle of a discussion when I read the OP.

People are easily fooled when you tell them what they want to hear.

I think when people put "I'm not paying for this garbage" on the comment section of the questionnaire and BioWare spun it as "hey, he said he won't pay for it, that means he'll play it if it's free".

On the pre-launch forums there was a development blurb shortly after all the classes were announced (so that would be sometime in '09 I think) where they stated that they chose to not go with Day/Night cycles to make the game more "cinematic". They figured that having a day/night cycle would ruin the atmosphere that they were trying to create for the planets. So the design choice for no day/might cycle was done pretty early.

I actually found that mistake comforting and making the article even more valid. It's one of those nitpicky points that is easy to overlook by anyone other than a fanboy, which means this guy is probably what he presents himself as being, which is someone questioning BioWare's business methods as opposed to an unsatisfied gamer with their own agenda in attacking BioWare. He seems to be someone coming into this with little interest in the actual game and a lot of interest in the business practices he is writing about and is the focus of this article. The mistake reinforces that this is an unbiased opinion. Also, this mistake doesn't invalidate any of his points he made in his article. His mistake only calls into question his credibility if he is presenting himself as an expert on the KoTOR franchise, which he is not. He is questioning the business practices of BioWare for this game.

Yea, I've noticed that too. Video games are big business now and a magazine like Forbes can't ignore this anymore. It's refreshing to see articles focusing purely on the business end of things. In the ME3 debacle when everyone else was talking about "artistic integrity" Forbes looked at it as a simple customer service issue, which it really was at the end of the day. Where video game industry magazines (who make a good chunk of their their money on advertising for video games yet somehow claim to be unbiased) would just call anyone unsatisfied with a product to be a self entitled whiny brat who is probably a virgin who lives in their parents basement, Forbes is treating the video game fan as a consumer who is very much within their rights to complain about a product they are unsatisfied with. I still can't believe how abusive the video game industry is to its consumers and how we as consumers tolerate it, and in some cases even encourage it. The article itself has pretty much every point I've been thinking about since pre-launch. I simply can't understand how BioWare thought they could have made this game work other than the game development started when BioWare was considered to be the company that could do no wrong and always delivered, even on the imposable. I'm also waiting for the inevitable article that will compare Star Wars Galaxies failure to Star Wars: The Old Republic's Failure. Two MMO's of the same franchise tanking in two completely different ways. Galaxies had poorly executed good ideas where TOR had good execution negated by the fact that they were executing bad ideas.

As a long term CoX player since around Issue 3 I totally agree with this. The sub base has been pretty solid over the years. The game itself predates WoW and has extremely different mechanics. It never gave into the temptation to "be more like WoW" and focused not on attracting another player base but giving their existing player base more of what they wanted. It survived using its unique mechanics in an age where anyone who was not "doing it like WoW" was considered to be doing it wrong and it saw a lot of other games close shop during its time while it kept on keeping on. Hell, it's what I was playing all those months I was on a dead server and couldn't get a group to save my life. For almost 8 years I've never been able to fully walk away from CoX and most of its player base will tell you the same thing. You may leave for a few months, but you always end up coming back. I attribute it to the robust character creator, where more than any other game I considered the characters I created to be uniquely mine and as a result I always wanted to return to my unique creations. Whatever the reason, NCSoft realized people may leave, but they will eventually be back. The F2P model works for them because of that. It makes it that much easier for those returning players to jump back on while giving those suffering from "WoW fatigue" an option to try a completely different MMO experience in a game that has seen close to a decade of post release development. F2P is not a sign of failure of CoX, it's simply the best business model for the game. That all being said, is F2P the best model for TOR? I'm not entirely sure. BioWare is a company that tends to tell its player base what they should want instead of listening to what their player base actually wants. F2P could be a complete disaster if BioWare can't shake that attitude.

TOR is more unlike WoW than World of Tanks?

I remember my Dwarf Warrior was crafting gear and looked like a freaking Ninja Turtle.

I'd like to second this statement.

No sith looks as ****** as my Trooper.

I think that was just a mistake in the developers understanding of management instructions. When the managers said "make fat female toons" the developers interpreted that as "make PHAT female toons".

Go to 00:57 http://www.collegehumor.com/video/3439456/superhero-fashion-emergency

I'm totally singing that in my head right now.... ..and be a SPACE.....BAR......HERO. Got STAAAAARS IN HIS EYYYYESSSS