The thing is, most of the people still playing the game love the storylines but are just ok with flashpoints and operations. Coming up with 8 new storylines for the classes and new sidequests is gonna take forever and all you got in between is new operations. Alot of people are gonna be disappointed.

The people who attack and defend this game by listing features and bugs are really missing the point in what makes a game successful. Skyrim has a ton of bugs, people expected a ton of bugs because Bethesda always has a lot of bugs but people still play it cause they have fun exploring an open world. SWG may have had a lot of problems but people were hooked on all the freedom you had in that game. WoW took what hooked people in previous MMO's and put it all together and then some. It was exciting to level, get new abilites, get gear and explore. People had so much fun doing that that they played in spite of bugs and missing features. The only hook on SWTOR is the story and it's not enough to get a sizable amount of people to overlook the other things. Also I really don't see how they can possibly add more story content at a fast enough pace. A new planet of quests would take people a few hours to do but would take them 2 months at least to make. The next update is supposed to be in march and it's an operation and flashpoint I think. Plus the legacy system, whatever that will be. An expansion that needs 8 separate storylines with voice actors and sidequests and flashpoints and operations has got to take over a year. A few planets worth of quests, most people will be able to do in under a month. So it would end up being like KOTOR 4 is $75 for the game and 1 month play time.

When I got the game, I was required to activate a subscription to get my free month. I think this accounts for up to the end of the year, when the game was out for 10 days, really don't tell us much more than how it released. As for the difference, there's plenty of people who bought it as christmas presents and the person didn't activate yet, remember it's over a vacation. Or resellers, or people buying multiples. I don't think anybody will know for sure what the long term prospects are for a few months when things have time to settle down.

I think the writing could have been better. The story is great by video game standards but the bar is pretty low. People mention the Empire blowing up a planet to show how evil they are. This game has the opportunity to explore much more of the choices than the movie does. Maybe they blew it up because they wanted to end the rebellion as quickly as possible and lose as few Imperial lives to do it. Sounds like the United States dropping a nuclear bomb on Japan. Yes this is only a game but they could have made complex stories and choices with morally ambiguous motives. Instead they went with you get to chose to a) be nice b)be neutral or c) be a mustache twirling villain in a cartoon that kills people just cause they're there.

I agree too. I just kept thinking how does this society function and grow when everyone is killing each other and corrupt. I understand it's a game and based on Star Wars but it was something I just couldn't help wondering about. Instead of complexity, they went for cartoonish.

While I agree that exploration adds a lot of immersion and fun to an MMO, I think it's a decision by Bioware to limit it. The storyline was always the center and stories have to be linear to get the set ups and payoffs. Making a bigger world to explore would have meant a tradeoff in the story and they weren't gonna make that choice.

Now that I think about it Cata was like this too. Going from hub to hub and because of the phasing, you didn't see as much people around you. People didn't really seem to notice. It just feels kinda extreme in this game. I know there are other issues like the instances for group quests and class stories and sharding but I think this is something that is easier to change in upcoming content additions.

I think the problem is you move through zones so linearly that you don't see others. People who got to the planet first are ahead of you, people starting later are behind you, and you never cross paths. I think this is a big reasons why players don't intersect more often and the worlds feel empty. Bioware really needs to somehow design zones with more crossing over but without feeling like backtracking or wasteful travel time. Not sure how to do that but I'm not a game designer.

No Feels too much like a single player game.

It's not just your screen though. It helps you know when others are taking damage and what the cause was. Not to compare this to sports but going over combat logs after a wipe is like a football team watching videos of their own game figuring out how to improve. It gives them time to go over things that they might have missed in the heat of the moment. Without logs, you either need to make content easier so logs are not necessary or groups will wipe several times without knowing what's going wrong.

Perhaps you didn't see the sentence about if you want difficult boss fights, you need combat logs. Current bosses are easy, hence no need for it now.

Combat logs aren't just dps meters. If your trying to kill a new boss and you all die, it's handy in checking how much damage the boss did and what spells did the damage. Then you can see if people are taking damage they can avoid or maybe you need to pop a cooldown when a certain ability is going on. If you want easy bosses where you stand there dpsing till they die and you don't have to worry about anything, then not having combat logs is fine. If you want varied, complex and difficult boss fights, you really need combat logs.

I never realized there was so much hate for macros there was. I think people misunderstand what you can actually do with them.

Healers have to click on people they're healing. This just show's how little you understand about the mechanics. They problem is a healer has to click on who he wants to heal, then press the number to heal them, then click on the next person and repeat. The laggy UI doesn't help.

The zones weren't designed very well. They're like a golf course, you go from one hub to the next till you reach the end and leave the planet. People starting later than you go along the same path, never crossing yours. That's just poor planning.