This is EXACTLY my point from my previous post. Slippery slope.

Apparently I am not allowed to participate either, as both of my previous posts were deleted. At this point, even though I have only been here since october, I am pretty sure i will just play through the class story arcs and unsub and move on. Dear devs, WoW sucks. The more you copy them, the more you make this game suck.

I put almost everything into the tank tree on my assassin, lvl 32 right now. With some mediocre armor gear, he is actually pretty freegin tough. I mailed him a purple hilt from my alt toon also, so that helps with dmg output, but even without relying totally on backstab, he does good dmg. going up the tank tree adds some emphasis to the shock ability, which is pretty straight forward. I doubt this type of build does pvp all that great, at least compared to using extreme DPS builds, but I dont pvp hardly at all. If nothing else, tanky style makes for a more enjoyable leveling experiance IMO.

You should make a female. All the legs options for light armor are dresses/skirts. I mean damn, all I want is for my assassin to wear some damn pants! lol. really though unless you buy some off the market(adaptive) or get pilot pants from the space ship store on fleet, there arent any pants. Just skirts. If you are making a smallish vile little man sorcerer, it is fine. Women, yeah fine. my 7 foot tall Darth maul look alike tank-y spec assassin wore some armor rating 26 pants until lvl 31 when i bought some adaptives just because i refused to put him in a skirt. But thats just me.

Indeed. However, I have been around gaming from the time it was invented. i will say this: I have not seen a MMO yet come out at launch and remain the same throughout its life except for the ones that totally failed outright. Those simply showed up, and died a short while later for various reasons, usually money related. Of the ones that stick around, pretty well all of them have made a catastrophic blunder(in the eyes of players) at some point in their evolution. many times it is due to feedback from players. Sometimes the dev team changes, a lot, after launch and the new blood thinks it can do better before said new blood has learned the product fully. MOst of the time, the biggest blunders are caused by someone in charge deciding a good ways into the life of the game that the game just isn't what they had imagined it would be. At that point some dramatic alterations are made, and the players get a really really sour taste from it. That taste lingers a long time, and if the game doesnt morph into something really good, it will fail. IMO, this game is on it's way to something good. I do not know all the situations of the past, but i can see the sour taste left behind. Whatever happened here, I highly doubt it reaches the scale of things from other games. two come to mind- Star Wars galaxies, and City of Heroes. SWG i do not think I need to go into here, and actually I may regret opening that can of worms on this thread do to epic derail probability. Suffice to say, in that instance, the dramatic changes made to change the "vision" of the game did not morph into something really good. The other, CoH, I was involved in from almost launch. About 10 months after launch, the lead dev decided the game had not turned out how he wanted. Players were stomping hordes of foes with their super powers, some of the powersets were basically broken (in both directions depending on the set) and players were not playing/building characters as he thought they would. So he changed it. it was not anything totally massive mechanically in the game design, but it 100% fundamentally changed how players could build characters and what could be done with them. that game was on the brink of destruction, and really struggled for over a year, only hanging on with the introduction of essentially a second half of the game with City of Villains. Eventually the lead dev left and someone else took over and used the changes to fit into a new crafting system. At that point, the game morphed into something better then it was before. Recently shut down, it was recording a decent profit. Those are two examples of the extremes of dramatic "poor handled" changes and situations. MMO's, they sure can be a tricky thing. Any time a dev team decides to mess with an existing system, there is backlash. the bigger the scope of the change, the bigger the backlash, and only time can tell if it is a make, or a break. IMO, this new expansion next year, and the other mysterious things in store for us soon before and after will determine if this is just the beginning of the games life, or it's peak and slow decent.

I want to reply to this thread, and I suppose the article it is about- keep in mind I have been playing from middle october- not from launch like some. So I have not seen some of the evolution of the game from it's initial state, though I have inferred a bit from reading the patch note history and anecdotal things from these forums. That said- The developers of this game must pull their hair out reading things like this article, and even the forums in general. As i have lurked here reading player complaints and requests for help etc., I have noticed one overwhelming truth: there is no way the developers could alter this game to make everyone happy. In fact, I would say based on a few months of reading that they have done a fairly good job trying to thread the needle down the middle of what feedback has been left here. For example, the first time I came to this forum, there were two threads, about a half dozen apart on the same page regarding exploration and world size/content. Thread one was griping about speeders, mostly cost, availability, and the biggest chunk was about how slow they moved. it went off on a tangent about world design, how some didnt have nice groupings for quest givers to limit the amount of time out of combat. The other thread 1/4 page down was about how small the game world was, how it took no time to explore, how you were constantly in combat etc. So I shook my head a little as I read those, wondering what the developers must think seeing that. how does one please the crowd when said crowd wants completely opposite things? IMO, they did a reasonable job balancing world giganticness with fight/story progress. It really stems from a base player conflict: huge WoW style grinding MMO play vs KOTOR old school single player story games. A big chunk of the player base wants WoW with lightsabres, because thats what they like. Another big part wants KOTOR III, with a few vocal ones actually mad about the fact they even bothered to make this game online. The dev team has the daunting task of trying to make both at the same time. SOme players want traditional almost turn based MMO control, some want FPS shooter style twitch with lightsabres. The devs are supposed to make it both. Some players want stupid huge immensly detailed sparsely populated world to explore for hours. Some players want a diablo or DDO style where you only interupt fighting briefly to empty your backpack in town and get the next quest from the same 5 contacts. Some players want full fledged, no where is safe PVP, some wouldnt touch it with a 10 foot pole. Some players love gear, some players wish there wasnt any at all. The devs are supposed to do it all, AND tackle all the conflicting things and technical hurdles that go with these conflicts. On top of that stuff, the dev team has that one other thing to deal with, the bane of all dev teams everywhere: marketing dept and corporate over-ride. If marketing says, "this is how much money we need to charge for this catagory of stuff" well, guess what. If corporate big cheese calls down to the lead designer and says "hey, WoW has like ten million players, and I want to buy a new yacht, so you know, WoW with lightsabres" well, guess what. Even the most brilliant development team ever has to bend over backwards for the corporate money investors, no matter what game or genre etc it is. And corporate people, well, you know, WoW does have 10 million players.... So anyway, in general I cant say I disagree with the article, but I will say this: the author can have whatever opinion they want, and voice it, and in the end, they are simply in one of the camps of players they are part of this community. I do not hold that opinion against them. I also do not share it, because I am not in the same camp. Here is what i like- I like the story. I am likely more in the KOTOR camp then in the MMO camp, but, i do enjoy me some teaming for the unpredictability of it and social chats. End game? bah. raiding is for chumps, playing the same story over and over one billion times to get the ub3rst l33t gearz is not for me. but, i will play a story over several times if I enjoy it, which thankfully in this game I pretty much do. not like 50 times, but a half dozen is no issue, especially given I can be serious buisness, or srs bizn3ss because of the multiple reply options. Add some "voting" while playing with my brother and the conversations can be rather amusing. PvP? eh, i wont do it until I have done all the story stuff to satisfaction, and then i will likely partake in rookie fashion and not care if I get pwned or not. As for the subs vs FTP, well, the system does EXACTLY what I thought it would, it allos people to taste the game, and if they like it, even a bit, it encourages them to sub up. And really, it should be that way. If you enjoy the game, you should pay something for it. 50 cents a day is hardly jaw dropping angry fist shaking amounts of money considering you can play 24-7 on an account(minus patch time) for, again, 50 cents a day. The prices on the cartel market are marketing dept issues, not dev team ones. And thing is there, rage all we want about prices there, if they sell enough to call it a success, then they priced it right. Thats what happens when it comes time to sell a product, digital or not, for real money. Look at new cars for a RL example. i couldnt buy a new car if I wanted to for the cost. but somebody is obviously, because the price is what it is. So rage against it all i want, the price point fits the company's financial goals. Anyway, this got really long. Bottom line, the article, and people responding here, well, thats your opinion and you should stand by it. I disagree, and feel the dev team has done well with the balancing act of expectations. If anyone has failed at this game, it is marketing and corporate money grubbers.