You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but I have to disagree. WoW always felt alive and the cities always felt like thriving central hubs. I just don't get that from SWTOR. The hubs in TOR feel like shopping malls. There's no atmosphere other than one of sterility. It's not like I haven't been looking for these things. I didn't log in for 30 minutes, look around one planet and proclaim the game is lifeless.

I really can't tolerate themepark MMO's for more than a few months at a time. From a development standpoint, the rate at which developers have to produce content is absurd, and the only company I've seen keep up is Trion. I'm sick of playing MMO's how the developers decide I should play them. Give players the tools to create their own content. However, I realize that a pure sandbox game is not likely to come from any of the big name companies because big name companies are adverse to taking risks, and a sandbox MMO would certainly be a risk. I'd settle for something in between; don't make the whole damn game on-rails (looking at you Bioware.) Archeage looks promising, but I'm not going to get my hopes up just yet.

edit: misread the post

I hadn't played an MMO in about a year before I started playing this game. At first I was very excited to be playing a Star Wars MMO, and even more excited by the fully voiced questing experience; it added a lot to the game IMO. However, after having played for over a month, the environments make me miss WoW, and I didn't think that was possible. I hung out in Stormwind. There was a Cathedral. A spiraling Mage tower. A market district. Pubs, and vendors who had their own shops. A big bay area. A towering castle. An underground jail that doubled as an instance. Critters could be seen scurrying around. All these separate areas had NPC's walking around doing whatever it was that they do. All of the areas had a unique look. Star Wars has none of this. We have a big circle that is more like a shopping mall with zombies for NPC's than a thriving central hub for players. Bioware missed the mark in terms of making environments feel atmospheric and alive IMO. I found the fleet museum the other day and thought it was a really cool addition, but it would have been a lot nicer had there been NPC's walking around from exhibit to exhibit talking amongst themselves. Little things like that set MMO's apart in my eyes. In a year I won't remember flying to the fleet for the first time and being blown away by the enormity and grandeur of it. I still remember walking to Jeuno for the first time in FFXI and being awestruck by the towering city. I remember the gates of Ironforge. I remember the arches of Stormwind. I'll never remember the lifeless circle of the Imperial Fleet. Something is missing in the environments of this game. For a company all about immersion, depth, and story, they blew it in this department.

To each his own, but I always enjoyed the atmosphere of the holiday events in WoW. Goldshire at Haloween was awesome. Brewfest is another I always enjoyed, and I'm a sucker for Christmas decorations, so I really liked Ironforge around that time. It gave me something to log on for other than PVP'ing and raiding. I guess the fleet would look pretty dumb decorated. Honestly, I think it's a pretty lame central hub for players to hang out in anyways. There's no atmosphere. No NPC's walking around talking to one another. It's a giant shopping mall full of zombie NPCs.

Whitebeam Run @ 8:28 p.m. EST Empire Standard Population 1-20: 63 21-30: 47 31-40: 45 41-50: 71 Total: 226 Whitebeam Run @ 8:31 p.m. EST Republic Standard Population 1-20: 98 21-30: 53 31-40: 43 41-50: 50 Total: 244 Total Republic & Empire: 470 Those numbers are awfully low for primetime. It also occurs to me that the threshold for "Standard" must be pretty low.

There's nothing really wrong with the game, but after nearly a decade of playing MMO's of very similar form i.e. themepark MMO's, people are bored to tears by them. How long can leveling via fetch/kill quests then raiding or pvp'ing at the level cap remain fun and engaging? I know I'm certainly becoming burned out by it. TOR is a good game, it just feels far too familiar to me. TOR has offered the best leveling experience I've had in an MMO of this type, but beyond that, I can't think of anything that makes me say, "Wow, TOR does this and it's really awesome!" I've seen this type of game before. I've played it. I don't want to play it again and again.

I made a separate thread that got closed before seeing this one, but on Whitebeam Run, there are 173 players online as of 5:46 p.m. EST. That is abysmally low.

That's awful. It was mentioned above, but Rift got away with merging servers early by calling the servers they weren't going to use trial servers. It did no long term harm to the game.

You're welcome to log onto Whitebeam Run and check via the Who list. Just search by advanced class. It's now at 152. I really have no reason to make up numbers when anyone is capable of checking for themselves.

Yes, I clearly knew when I chose this server that standard meant 160 people online.

Every zone.

I play on Whitebeam Run. At ~5:10 p.m. EST there are 160 people playing on the Empire side. Final Fantasy 14 has higher server populations than this. Please merge some of the low population servers together. I'd understand 160 concurrent users if it were 1:00 a.m. on a weekday, but 160 at 5 p.m. seems extremely low to me.

Rift added some single player dungeons and they were pretty popular. I don't see the harm in it.

I've played on both server types in TOR. I didn't see a member of the opposing faction until Voss. Being a former EVE player, I am overly paranoid and I'm constantly looking for potential gankers/gankees, but I hardly saw anyone from 1-50. There really isn't much difference between the two in TOR. PVP happens in Warzones and (kind of) on Ilum. Personally, I only PVP and I play on a PVE server. There is no world PVP so I'm not missing out on much. I could re-roll on a PVP server, but what's the point?

Even if you're running a hybrid build, you'll be lucky to get a 3k crit heal from a 3 second cast. If the other team lets a Sorc hardcast a 3 second cast then chances are they're just awful.

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, and maybe it will be awesome at some point, but I don't classify three tiny instanced PVP maps as awesome. Ilum certainly isn't awesome. All these games are the same. Make a few instanced PVP maps. Attempt to make a world PVP zone. Expect PVP focused players to be sated by that. It's all just very "meh" to me right now.

Did you guys really come to SW:TOR with hopes of great PVP? It's a themepark MMO. None of them have good PVP.

Level 13 with one level 45 and one level 50. I've been playing for about a month and I spacebar through everything non-class related. How in the world did you get 24?

I get better performance in Crysis than I do in this game though

What core elements of WoW are not in SWTOR? They're not really missing much to be WoW in space at this point. All they need is a LFD tool, add-on support, and rated PVP. WoW did a lot right; it's pretty evident BW thinks so because it's the game they chose to draw inspiration from. Really, without all the great voice acting and storyline dialogue (I say that sincerely) this game would be just another themepark MMO. It cracks me up that people claim they don't want to play WoW, so they decide to play SW:TOR. Most of the ideas and general elements for this game came from WoW.

So "good" players with a 2 minute CD can kill you. Boo hoo. My CC break is always on CD because there's a ridiculous amount of CC in this game. Chances are that 30 seconds into the match I've already used it.

Killing someone in PVP with Thrash is pretty hilarious IMO.

It makes me wonder why OP's were crying so much when they tested this on PTR. I never saw any feedback saying how they had too much control while still doing high damage. I saw OP's saying their class was destroyed.

And playing as an alien race that has tentacles growing out of it's head is so mature. Or having a Wookie companion is so high-brow...