I included Age of Conan only for Tortage, which was in many ways the precursor of a SWTOR-style experience. Note that it was on the list of "games I wouldn't necessarily defend," not MMOs that I'd consider on the whole good/great.

Thanks -- for finding which cheap orange set I want to buy from the GTN, do you recommend TOR-Fashion.com? Or is there another, better source? I tried just browsing the Cartel Market ingame, but they're actually pretty limited compared to the wide variety of orange armor sets out there.

Thanks -- this is more or less what I was hearing about before, but much better explained than it was by the people I talked to prior to making this post. Just to be clear -- once I've got all 7 pieces on my character, it'll become a collection that I can pay cartel coins to unlock, right? Since I'm doing 8 characters, not having to buy 8 separate sets of armor would be nice. Do you think I'll notice a major drop in stats from orange set + green mods vs just buying random cheap green armor for my level on the GTN? At this point I can go either way, since I now have a sense from the peanut gallery of when to be upgrading my armor.

Excellent, thanks! All questions now answered.

More subscribers doesn't mean a superior game. That's like saying that the movie with the highest box office receipts is inherently the best movie, so why bother reading a Roger Ebert review when you can head over to BoxOfficeMojo? The average MMO player does not have particularly good taste in MMOs. Quel Solaar is the name of the website, not the name of the MMO. And, again: the average MMO player does not have particularly good taste in MMOs. I'm not saying that SWTOR should have followed their example, no -- there's a lot of money in making bad MMOs, and not as much money in making good ones. The topic came up because people were shocked to hear that I liked MMOs while objecting to the game mechanics prevalent in bad MMOs of the EQ/WoW DIKU mold.

FWIW, CSGO does in fact use projectile physics -- and low latency is a requirement of nearly all online gaming, so that simply is what it is. DotA is a whole 'nother genre entirely. It goes both ways -- if people don't want me to tell them I dislike the things they like, they should stop trying to tell me the game isn't 'for' me, when the game just put out a promotion that specifically answers the needs of people like me. I think I'm pretty good on the gear/mechanics at this point from other replies in the thread, but thanks for the thought -- my one remaining question is, where in the UI would I find the option to enable the charge bar above enemies' heads so that I can see when they're doing one of their big attacks and interrupt it? I'm not seeing the option anywhere in the Preferences.

Are you doing missions beyond the class missions? Because I'm getting maybe 2 or 3 planetary comms per planet as class mission rewards.

It only comes off badly to people who actually like SWTOR as an MMO and are invested in it in that light; if you look on other forums of people talking about this promotion, the consensus is all "SWTOR! It was a terrible MMO, but now for $35 it can be a pretty good single player game."

The problems I'm highlighting don't cost any significant resources for BioWare to fix; they're only problems because of BioWare not thinking things through well enough prior to implementation.

I play MMOs that have all the features this one lacks -- advancement that doesn't require repetitive PvE, robust physics and movement engines for PvP that's based on twitch skill instead of dice-rolls, classes that don't adhere to the archaic roles of Tank/DPS/Healer. Proper MMOs, like: -Asheron's Call -Darkfall -ArcheAge -Love -Pre-Trammel UO There are other MMOs that I wouldn't *defend* necessarily as being great all-around, but had enough value for me to work through them at various points when, to be honest, my standards were lower: -Champions Online -City of Heroes -DAOC -A Tale In The Desert -Puzzle Pirates -Age of Conan I do play MMOs -- you just have a sadly myopic vision of what sort of game mechanics an MMO must have. Luckily, some games out there do better.

Except now I'm not having any trouble gearing, because I got the credits through cartel coins --> packs --> selling on GTN, and I'm playing SWTOR like a single player game -- which is far more fun than playing it like an MMO. This game's PvP is *amazingly* rudimentary. If someone shoots a projectile at me, I can't even physically dodge out of the way -- it's simply a dice roll! Asheron's Call had projectile physics in PvP figured out back in 1999, so to have dice-roll combat in a PvP MMO in 2014 is just absolutely primitive. So, no. Looks like I just *made* it the game for me, and people like myself, and there's not much you can do to stop me.

...your point is that you like what you like and it works for you, on a thread where everyone's up in arms because I like what I like and it works for me?

That would be political analysis rather than natsec analysis, a-la the China Leadership Monitor. And yes, nobody except nerds deep in the weeds like myself reads it (though I do love me some CLM). I have a somewhat broader audience in the defense community for my writing, but that's all I would want; it's inside-baseball stuff, not written for a general audience.

....in other words, you don't actually understand how the field works? Do you think people who work at CNAS, CNA, RAND, or other places with open presences that research regional NatSec issues can't be open about the kind of work they do?

Adorable, but no. I work in China-focused NatSec analysis, happy to discuss any relevant professional topics if you so desire. ;p