I've played all of the classes but I'd have to say my favorite is my Sniper. The Agent story line is amazing and worth multiple playthroughs because your choices actually matter to some degree.

I am enjoying this game more than I ever have and I have been playing off and on since beta.

I found Wildstar to be incredibly boring and tedious without anything new, innovative, or redeeming.

I understand this but the current state is not very reasonable since the items on the market are generally expensive to the point of insanity. How about some interesting content designed around acquiring the rare components and schematics with an appropriate time sink? Maybe some randomized missions, dalies, etc? In all honesty, I'd just like to see something different for a change. It doesn't even need to be the same gear. A solo endgame with a focus on Presense would be awesome but I digress, that is not the topic of discussion.

Whatever you say. Marvel heroes is doing just fine. Ever played it? It's a very good game for what it is. If not, give it a try you might be surprised. Take as anecdotal if you like but several games have either stopped producing raids or developed a parallel path along side raid progression in order to include as many players as possible and therefore retain their patronage. After all if more players raided then not, why would these developers cut them at all? Why not focus on that end and cut something else if developing raids was worth the ROI?

This is just an example of a mentality typical amongst some raiders who erroneously and arrogantly believe that raiding is the only activity worthy of being called "effort" while everything else is somehow "welfare", "handing out epics for free", or some other nonsense. Don't be drawn into the regurgitated straw man because nothing you can say or do will change their biased opinion despite the fact that this mindset does more damage to a game's community than anything else. I agree with you though especially since raid participation has been traditionally pretty low in comparison to other activities, a game that provides different alternatives to raiding will be able to retain more players who reach 55 because they've got more options to continue to advance their character beyond the same old, same old. Crafting is one way to achieve this provided there is an appropriate time sink and is relatively consistent. Several MMO developers are realizing this. LOTRO has dropped raiding all together, Marvel Heroes is providing alternatives for solo/small group players to earn the exact same loot found in raids. This is simply the evolution of the genre as developers come to the slow realization that solo play is every bit as valid as group and raid play. Expect to see more and more games adopt this strategy.

In the case of LOTRO, their conclusion was based on their own numbers so they certainly weren't "baseless" or else they wouldn't have made the decision in the first place. From a business perspective, the only relevant statistic is ROI; do enough players regularly participate in the content to justify continuing to invest in it? How they come to that conclusion is up to their Business Analysts to discern.

I have no desire for "Raid" gear as a solo player. I want a different experience with a different loot progression as appropriate to a new kind of content. I would love to see something like the following: * A new "Solo Raid Mode" which is basically a retooling of the instance for solo/duo play. This satisfies the tiers of difficulty and therefore the need for gear progression. * Loot progression is based around Presence Gear for your character AND Companion Gear. There are several benefits to this. The player will be able to see and participate in content the devs have already produced, scaling down the content should be easier than creating something entirely new, and provides a source of content for players who don't like to raid or do tons of group content. Since the gear progression is entirely different, it won't infringe on the raider's ego by "handing out free welfare epics" for "no effort". The content would have a different target audience and the gear would have a different purpose. In the end, we all love this game and want to continue to be entertained by it but have different preferences as to what we enjoy. Currently, solo players at level cap don't have much that is interesting or new within the confines of their playstyle and I think this idea satisfies that.

I don't remember when I made my account but it is #201497

So you don't think "Casuals" or "non-Raiders" should have a gear progression of their own to keep them interested when they hit level cap? I'll tell ya, "mini-games" are not enough to keep me playing my max level characters.

I agree but I would like to add another point; Casual and Non-Raiders need a source of progression at level cap that complies with their play-style (solo and small group) in order to strengthen brand-loyalty amongst that group. Not many MMOs do a very good job of this right now.

Here is a link to some of the lower level technical details of the hero engine: http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Scalability_and_Building_For_Massive_Multiplayer_Audiences According to this, the engine is cluster aware and might actually be capable of the 1 large farm concept. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised of several farms placed regionally and clever database replication schemes could make this 1 large farm concept doable on a "global scale". This is in interesting thought experiment for me since lately, I've been doing a lot of work in regards to SQL Server in the Amazon cloud which I guess is somewhat similar in some respects.

The Legacy Family Tree in general is a wasted feature when it should (in my opinion anyway) actually heavily influence and enhance how you play. It would be great if the Family Tree actually had some functionality to it. Why not allow us to use our alts as companions (heavily scaled down of course)? We already have Heroic Moment skills but how about some further skill customization based on the characters you have in your tree? What about some dynamic missions where you "team-up" with your legacy members or you have to thwart your legacy Rival(s) in some way? I'd love a tactical flashpoint where you and your group must take on one of the rivals of each group member. I'd love some solo content centered around my family tree even without Voice Overs. Randomly Generated Missions? A random "raid" boss chosen from the rivals of someone in your raid groups? I'd love all of this. The family tree has some real potential to really improve how we play SWTOR and could really stand out as a unique feature in this genre. Sadly, it's underutilized.

Yeah it is what it is. If the selection of direct purchase Armor sets were better, Bioware would get a lot more money out of me. I simply wont give in to the lockbox scam. As it is though, they won't get more than my $15 per month.

Too convoluted and the pricing structure fluctuates too much.