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.

I would buy all of those. They're awesome. My only concern is that they'll wind up in grab bag packs which I refuse to buy. I prefer direct purchases and not "a chance at what I want". More direct purchase options would be awesome.

Yes please. I would happily buy slots though I think subscribers should get a couple for free.

I'd buy it..provided it's not part of a lockbox/pack/grab bag.

While I agree that merging the servers would be nice from a population standpoint, I remember logging into DCUO after a long break and I was required to change my character's names and by that time all of my names were taken. It wasn't game breaking for me but I was a little sad that my character lost his identity. Cryptic has a better solution where all characters are appended with an @AccountName so that multiple accounts can have the same character names because of this composite key kind of situation. Still this method is imperfect though more elegant than the traditional server shard silos. I'm pretty sure that Bioware could cram all the servers into 1 big cross function farm but they might not feel that it's worth the ROI. It would be cool though.

I tend to agree with your assumption. It isn't like Turbine has anything to gain by fudging numbers or by not doing their due diligence to be sure their statistics are accurate. Their decision is an interesting one and I am wondering how they are going to allocate resources previously dedicated to raids, how that will affect the overall quality of the game, and if any other developers will follow turbine down this path.

I think this would be awesome also. Why not even combine the two ideas? More repeatable-and-not-always-the-same-twice kind of content would be awesome in my opinion. One advantage I can see with by randomly creating missions is that after the initial development, new content for it is created procedurally and therefore doesn't require development time.

Sorry for posting in an old thread but I love this idea. One of the things I loved about Anarchy Online was the mission generator. If you haven't played it, you could curtail the experience to your liking through sliders which included things like: Difficulty, Good<->Evil, Stealth<->Head On, Open<->Hidden, Physical<->Mystical Order<->Chaos Credits<->XP Additionally, several different types of mission were available such as Kill Target, Find Item, Use Item, etc and rewards were completely randomized. After the mission was "pulled", the player was sent to a randomized instance to complete the objective generated by the editor. I loved it and I can see a similar and more elaborate system working very well in a game like this. I'd love to see something like this where the content is scalable from solo to 16 players.

I've played SWTOR since late beta (with breaks in between) but SWTOR will always be my favorite MMO for the story and leveling experience. I find it very appealing visually with a superior story experience and a world my character actually feels a part of. My only complaint is that it's a little too similar to the WoW in it's design structure but that's been changing gradually. Regardless, SWTOR has been my game of choice for a long time now where no other MMO (and I have played a lot of them) has been able to compare. I am very interested to see how the game evolves in the coming years especially when the new Star Wars movies are released. 2015 should be a very exciting year for us!

I'm interested to see what MMO developers do to solve the issues that contribute to the low participation trends as pointed out in these data points. I'd like to see some innovation personally and it's time the genre grew.

I don't think this is true. LOTRO and SWTOR follow roughly the same format as they both are based around the same basic formula (F2P/Subscriotion hybrids modes, Solo/Group quests for leveling, Small Group Dungeons, Raids, Crafting, "mini-games", and Faction Based PvP). Certainly there are variations between the two but the basic structures are more or less the same. This decision by Turbine might be a unique occurrence but it could also indicate a trend in MMOs where more developers may decide that a focus on Raid PvE endgame may not be the most financially secure philosophy. Marvel Heroes is another example. While they've just recently implemented raids, they realize that raiding isn't for everyone and they're implementing alternatives for solo and small group players ways to acquire the raid loot drops. I'm not saying that all MMOs should drop their raid game as there is a community significant enough top warrant allocating resources to this sort of content. However, I don't believe that Raids should be the end all, be all of endgame content either because in many games including this one, non-raiders are left in a state of content drought much sooner since nothing really new or interesting is presented for them beyond what they've already done. I believe Gazillion over at Marvel Heroes has the right idea for long term sustainability since it will keep more players engaged and entertained for far longer at level cap.