First, you misunderstood her thesis, which was about basic MMO development. It was about the key qualties that make a successful MMO, and how SWTOR lacks many of them, not necessarily about innovation. So GG reading comprehension there. Second, I never mentioned Las Vegas and by "gambling" I didn't necessarily mean traditional games of chance. Rather that the RNG aspect of loot drops contains traditional gambling elements: that you're putting in time and effort, and maybe some skill, without a determined result, and that the traditional "carrot/stick" gear grind of MMOs is often specifically designed to trigger a certain psychological reaction from players. Third, I never said this was the only way to design a game. But the fact that many companies are employing these methods on a large scale should tell you something. You have a tendency to throw around a lot of opinion (about the success of the much vaunted SWTOR "story," about this being a "quality" game) as fact. This is a bad habit in general, but doubly so on Internet forums. The implication in calling anyone an "armchair" anything is that they're amateur hour and you, in rebuttal, know better and operate at some kind of higher level. So, yes, in fact, you did claim to be something you're very obviously not.

On Taris, but only because I spent so much time playing the original KOTOR. Beyond that, no, and quite the opposite (I find Corcuscant to be painfully boring, for instance).

Uh, what? You might want to do some research. The most successful social games, from WoW to FarmVille, have intentionally introduced risk/reward and time/effort scenarios into their games to foster psychological reactions very similar to addictive play/gambling. Some companies employ social scientists & shrinks in order to game human psychology as much as they can. This has little to do with nebulous & subjective concepts like "fun" and everything to do with keeping you paying into their system, either from a subscription or well known f2p models. Saying this makes you sound willfully naive, and if you're going to accuse someone of being an "armchair developer," then you might want to learn a little something about how games are being made these days.

@OP: I agree wholeheartedly with everything in you post except this part here. Problem is, players often don't know what they want & even if they do, they don't see the long term consequences on the game world. Small example: Flying mounts in Warcraft. This was a popular feature when it was originally introduced, but for four years players begged to be able to use these mounts in Azeroth, the game's original zones, and not just in the expansion areas. Blizzard developers & forum reps time & again explained why implementing this change would be a massive technical hurdle, essentially forcing them to redo all of the models and art from the original game. But they did it for the Cataclysm release. They completely revamped the original game & added the ability to fly anywhere. So what happened? Pleas for the change became a stream of complaints that flying mounts completely ruined world PvP. Along with other game changes, the ability to fly anywhere at will made leveling zones feel emptier. Even if there were other players around, you wouldn't see any of them from the ground as you were quest grinding & they flew far above your head. There are other examples (hello, LFR) of players demanding changes which, once implemented, end up killing some favorite aspect of the game. Personally, I want devs to be smarter in their designs & to listen to their players a helluva lot less.

Two big differences: WoW had restrictions on race/ class combos and most races were easy to distinguish from a distance. So when you saw an Orc wearing cloth, you knew he had to be a warlock because the game, at that time, didn't allow them to be priests or mages. WoW also had mods that displayed unit frames by class color. So when you tab targeted and the frame was pink, you knew immediately the opposing player was a paladin. In SWTOR, classes are much harder to distinguish, partially because each race does not have a set, distinct model. Players in WoW raised the same objections to transmog gear (especially in arenas) that you're raising now. Is this really an issue? I can still remember PvPers logging out in their fishing gear so people couldn't check out their "real" gear on the armory when they were offline. To me, that's part of the fun. Ideally, if you're geared and any good, what the other guy may or may not be wearing won't make that much of a difference. It sounds more like you're disappointed you won't be able to gank undergeared fresh 50s at the start of a game. If so, to put it in brusk terms, that's a scrub game and not really PvP.

The dissatisfaction comes from the difference in the way the game was hyped and marketed to the way it actually plays. Repetitive quests aren't the problem. Selling me an experience based on the idea that my in-game actions have consequences when they really don't is a problem. Nevermind the tedious cutscenes where NPCs explain in detail that they need you to collect 10 raptor hides for the Repubic or whatever. Over and over and over again. I can choose random responses to anything they say and it makes no difference. I can choose the most snarky, obnoxious options and then turn around and make a light side choice and the NPC doesn't bat an eyelash. There's also no really follow up. Kill a guy or save him? Who cares? Nobody will ever say a thing to you, either in the next village or the next planet. The only real difference is the mail you get a few hours later. That's hardly immersive storytelling. What Bioware did was take run of the mill questing and graft voiceover on top of it. They didn't do anything else revolutionary or even evolutionary. That is why people are annoyed with the questing in this game.

There is no PvP by design. SWTOR is not a PvP game. It's pretty obvious when leveling (phased zones, sanctuaries, etc) that Bioware wants you to only PvP in a box: warzones or Illum. The system described in your other thread sounds great. Unfortunately, it would require a major shift in design focus and resources. No triple-A game maker will take the kind of risk required to move development resources away from PvE experiences to world PvP. The perception out there right now is that MMO PvPers aren't a large enough market to guarantee any kind of ROI. I love your ideas, but that game will never be this game.

It's not about the content. The content, for the most part, is fine. It's about the hundreds of design decisions that Blizzard did well that Bioware did not. It's about an attention to detail that is evident in almost every element of Warcraft that doesn't exist in SWTOR. Here's three small examples: In Warcraft, players can interact with every NPC to some degree. They'll turn and face you and spout a line of dialogue. There's even a small Easter egg is you continually right click on them. This lends a degree of liveliness (and humor) to the world, no matter where you are and what you're doing. Outside of vendors and quest givers, how many NPCs can you interact with in SWTOR? None of them. In Warcraft, the crafting professions were all reliant on one another. If you wanted to level enchanting past a certain point, you needed items that only a blacksmith could make. This encouraged a level of socialization and promoted a healthy in-game economy. In SWTOR, there are no such dependencies. Which makes it easier for the players, but a much less immersive experience overall. In Warcraft, instances were embedded into zones and had quest lines and stories that took you into them. If you were questing in a zone, it wasn't uncommon for people to recruit party members for instances in that zone's chat. In SWTOR, not only are the flashpoints physically removed from questing zones (requiring a tedious level of travel & funneling every single player through Fleet), they also have nothing at all to do with the current story you're experiencing planetside. (Why isn't there an Endar Spire flashpoint on Taris? This seems like a gimme, an obvious inclusion because of KOTOR. Why are instances bolted onto Fleet?) Worse, if you want to pick up anything for a daily, you're forced to have the same cutscene dialogue again no matter how many times you've run the instance. For Republic, this means listening to Shatele Shan tell you about Hammer Station an innumerable amount of times and spacebar'ing though her dialogue. Not only does this make zero sense from the point of view of your story, it's incredibly poor fundamental game design. These are only a handful of things I've noticed as I progress through Bioware's game. It's a decent experience, but the more I play it, the more admiration I have for Blizzard. They've made a ton of mistakes over the years, but in the small things, where details add up an enrich the experience, they were just brilliant. (I'm talking mostly about pre-Cata Warcraft. With Cata, Blizzard moved its attention away from detail and content toward convenience "quality of life" gameplay features like Guild Perks and LFR, which I think ultimately hurt the game.)

Lesser games didn't spend $200 million on development. This game was also released by a publisher with a history of axing underperforming MMOs. I have no idea how long SWTOR will run (and honestly, neither do you), but it all depends on Bioware's burn rate, how much they're paying Lucas for the license, and what's EA's minimum ROI. This game will not succeed with a Rift size playerbase.

Remember what happened when Boba Fett tried that? That was 30 years ago & I'm pretty sure th sarlaac is still digesting him.

Type /cjoin LFG the next time you log on. This is a player created channel, but it's universal and very active on some servers. I've never had any issue getting groups for any content I've wanted to do. But I also rolled a tank & a healer on a high pop server.

The only things that bothers me are the position & size of the buffs/debuffs & the target's casting bar.

It'd become a de-facto requirement purely out of convenience. Once people can "solo" content & chain run flashpoints without speaking to anyone, small & medium sized guilds will start to wither. Every server will be left with hardcore progression guilds & social guilds, with nothing in between. Recruitment & retention will become a problem. There also won't be much of a need for anyone to maintain a friend's list. This feature is the easiest (and laziest) way to solve population problems. But in the long run, it doesn't solve the problems, it just hides them. I can also guarantee you that the day this goes live, there will be a dozen posts on these forums demanding the same "feature" be implemented for Operations. When that happens, the game is pretty much done.

And that's still the minority. Catering to the minority doesn't make sense, either. This is a maybe 2-3 hour shift, west coast, from when other MMOs do maintenance. It's once a week. It's not a big deal.

Get a good peripheral. I had similar issues to you and years ago I bought a Belkin n52te. Simplifies key bindings and makes controlling your toon & using your abilities much easier.

curiously, this thread is not being closed or moved, despite the fact that it's: - Obviously trolling. - Duplicating a topic that already has LENGTHY discussions elsewhere.

The Lizard is annoying and slow, but I'd rather have a conservative kind of pet AI. In other words, I'm just glad I can jump off a ledge without the pet taking the long way around and aggroing every mob within 200 meters. Or a pet that, when having killed the current targets, takes it upon himself to run to the far side of the room and begin attacking a fresh group. Micro-managing is a p-i-t-a, but preferable to a companion with a will of its own.

KOTOR, a single player Bioware game released in 2003, had one. Not only did it display all damage made and received, it also showed the results of every single d20 roll. So I agree the exclusion here, in this game, is a little weird. I'm ambivalent about combat logs. In WoW, I had mods installed that accessed the log, but I never looked at it much myself, unless I got jacked in PvP and wanted to see how hard I was crit before I died. Given that the content in SWTOR seems faceroll easy for a lot of players, I'm confused why this is a pressing topic. The game is easy. Trash and bosses die. People get loot. I don't really care about anyone's hard DPS numbers or healing throughput. Introduce flashpoints and ops where these things matter, and then I'll care more.

His post and your reply is making me grin like an idiot. I don't feel "old," though ... Just "seasoned" and "experienced."

LOL. Right, and the reason you did that -- despite hunters, enhance shaman, and Boomkins being oh-so-viable -- is really because you enjoyed the play style, right? C'mon, kid, who do you think you're fooling with this stuff?

What amazes me is that every new MMO release is hailed as if it's the Second Coming of Lord British, but almost every single one of these games end up to be disappoints. Some on a more massive scale than others. Gamers never seem to learn.

Uh, what super secret project? Do you honestly believe a developer with zero experience with flight sims and aerial combat systems is going to build this into their MMO?

Bioware has said no to this several times, but apparently that's not good enough for some folks. And they keep asking. And asking. And asking. If you allow people to do this once, they'll ask for it again (which admittedly isn't unreasonable at that point). The biggest downside to the AC design concept is that it punishes new players. People who aren't familiar with class roles in MMOs shouldn't be stuck with a decision they made at level 10 after 4 hours in game.

I think you're right. I rolled on an RP-PvP server and was deeply disappointed to find that world PvP is pretty much made impossible by map design and sanctuaries. I thought about it a bit & see two problems: - PvP is included by developers to try and attract the widest audience possible. No triple-A game is going to launch without it, even when they should, for fear of alienating potential subscribers. It's pretty much a must-have feature. - The players themselves. On one hand I think a true, open world PvP system would be great fun. Problem is, that leads to massive amounts of griefing. I'm not just talking about "PvP happened" and corpse camping. I'm talking about a section of the player base who will repeatedly kill quest NPCs and flight masters for hours and literally make any PvE game unplayable. These people are so persistent that they eventually become a customer service issue, and the producers develop ways to work around them with hard limitations, eg spawning guards that 1 shot players or designing maps so as to make world PvP impossible. You're right that the game can't really serve two masters well. But the demands of the market force it to try, and the reality of the market forces one experience or the other to be gimped.

My memory might be off, but the hat thing was limited until they started giving the game away. But this is a different beast, because TF2 isn't an MMO & never carried a subscription fee for online pay. True, but the tricky thing there is that some of these companies are small & privately held. They don't release quarterly revenue statements. In other words, Turbine can claim LOTR's revenues increased 300% when they went F2P, but that's a meaningless number when we don't know how much money they were making (or losing!) before that. (Nevermind that LOTR still carries premium subscriptions). Lineage 2 went F2P after eight years of live release in Korea. That again seems very different than taking about TOR going this route after two months of limited release.