I think the main issue I have noticed is the story from the first two planets revolves heavily around the class quests and level by level and planet by planet they thin out significantly where you have one fairly thin chain for the entire planet and to progress the story you largely have to finish the bulk of the planet. My main problem with alts around the 20-30 mark was that I was interested in the class story but wasn't interested in the side quests I had done several times, then it felt a bit of a grind. I played my first character to 50 with a friend and found it harder to get into the second which I played solo, I am now playing two other characters with a different friend and I don't notice the grind again. Perhaps find people to level with would alleviate a bit of the grind for you? It may not work but I found being more social distracts you from the more annoying game elements, you can also blow through the mobs very fast with 2 people and 2 companions.

Why do people insist on pugging? It is what the guild system is for, to create communities and groups that can do content together. While we re-created our wow guild here and have about 20-30 people from that guild in the TOR guild we are also inviting local scrubs and you just need to do heroics and flashpoints in a controlled environment to see how capable a person is. People are just lazy, socially lazy. You want these quick one button fixes and you want it to spit a number out. It is a MMO, deal with people.

DA2 is actually newer, this has been in development 5-7 years, stand alone games do not take anywhere near as long to produce. Also, MMO graphics are significantly inferior to stand alone games because they have to be responsive with a lot of players around, typically. With a game like DA they can control how many objects are around.

Smith.

Mythic used technology 10 years ago to handle large number of players with an antiquated mmo engine and ancient video cards. Depend on your settings it would basically draw player models at a distance with low polygon characters which lacked the visual detail you need when you are up close and the models are not in motion. In DAOC you could get a very large number of people in the one area. You can draw hundreds or even thousands of low polygon player models and you don't really need the detail unless you are up close and especially if things aren't moving around quickly. If they implemented the same thing with the current engine they could achieve similar results. 3d engines are fully customisable, the only reason something works one way in one MMO and not for another MMO is because that functionality wasn't added by the developers.

It is ridiculous, not rediculous. Mod stations allow you to remove stuff cheaper than on-the-go. The cost for removing a mod is fairly reasonable. I only remove things I absolutely want otherwise replace them.

WoW has always been like that, once you tiered up a few levels higher then you could pretty much solo the lower end heroics with certain characters, would have been much easier with a deathknight who can solo all the WotLK raids. WoW is all about the current tier, they actually like that people can entertain themselves by messing around with lower tier and older content solo, it keeps people subbed.

On my server there was anywhere from 150-200 on the Imperial Station, was 30-50 on the Republic one. If that is indicative of the population imbalance then it is a significant one. The market on republic side is barren, can hardly find any superior crafted level 49 items while on imperial you have massive choice and the competition keeps prices reasonable.

I don't care for PvP, it is as lame as wow pvp. The problem with the final tier of medpacks is they didn't create the blue level which for ever tier were superior to the re-usable ones. This would allow people to have an advantage over those who had the convenience re-useable bio products.

The other professions are largely obsolete, would have probably been more ideal to make them more useful than the others less useful but nerfing is the easy option developers usually go for.

Happy people are largely playing. Unhappy people are largely posting. It is why you do not get a balanced view on a game from forum posts. However, you can get a pretty good gauge on what the major issues are. I really enjoy the level process. I would have liked more class based quests because after the first two planets the ratio of class quests to normal quests blows out so with each subsequent character you get a lot of repetition and am forced to flip between light and dark options just to get some variety. My major beef is what there is to do at level 50, the story dies a horrible death at level 50 and it is just dailies and repeating the content. I don't see the point of having two games, one while you level and one for the rest of your time, I think a lot of people enjoy the levelling aspect but the more that hit 'end-game', the more are distracted by aspects of the game that didn't get anywhere near the developer attention as the level aspect. The way they designed the game, it should not have had an upper level cap and just slow down level progression and every few weeks throw out new planets with quests and stuff and people could keep going. At present the game feels like it has a finite ending if you do not really care much about gear accumulation. It should be a means to an end, not the entire reason for playing.

My eye sight is crap and i can't tell the difference between low and high quality unless i get uncomfortably close to my monitor so my care factor is low. But, if you advertise a Porsche and deliver a VW Beetle then the consumer has legal cause to be concerned about misleading advertising. They shouldn't have kept putting out high quality gameplay videos if they couldn't deliver on it. While nobody expects games to be of trailer quality, ones showing gameplay are meant to be indicative of what you should expect in game. You should also stop telling other people what they should and should not get upset about, as customers it is their right to complain about any aspect of the product which could jeopardise the business relationship. People need to let go of the concept that games are not big business and consumers shouldn't expect the high standard they expect from any other product they purchase or service they PAY for. If they can't deliver then they should come out and say it and say when the customers can expect features they assumed they were already paying for. To shut off the feature because somone's rig might struggle with the load sounds like BS. Give everyone all the options and if my rig struggles then I can turn things down until i have the performance I am comfortable with. If I were to guess I believe it is a limitation of the graphic engine they are using and because they don't want to cop even more flak for using a third party engine instead of creating their own custom built one for their needs they claim the reasons they have put through the PR machine. Alphas and Betas are really the area where you should test this level of functionality, you shouldn't launch live by hardcoding lower end graphics and claim people's rigs can't handle it. There are much better looking FPS games out there where performance is critical which handle fine by even average rigs. There is more to it then what they are letting on but I don't really care about reasons, you just want to see a developer handle issues well and resolve issues timely because if they struggle with handling problems it is usually not a good sign for the future.

One-on-one an equally geared/played marauder/sentinel will tear a sorcerer to pieces. It is when there is a huge variance in gear and competency level that the sorcerer seems OP. The big difference is you can be a mediocre sorcerer and be solid, it is a lot harder to be a good marauder/sentinel, it is a lot more complex.

SWG was terrible execution and the death knell for Sony and MMOs, they could make an *** kicking mmo in concept and I doubt a lot would buy it after a series of cascading failures in MMOs. SWG was crap, but it had some great concepts. Design-wise it was probably a decade ahead of it's time and Sony couldn't pull it off. The crafting system was the best crafting system in a MMO to date, I have not seen a better one since, even EVE's crafting is mediocre by comparison because everything in EVE that you make is exactly the same, there is no room for experimentation or varying raw material quality. Making perfect weapons, armour and ship components was not just a pass time, it was an art form and you could play day after day on your trade. The beauty of the game is it encouraged player interaction. For crafters, the auction house system was very limited because there was price ceilings on that and it was useful for moving a lot of low quality stock or finding low grade raw materials in small quantities, and low grade materials weren't worthless, they just allowed you to mass produce average level gear which allowed people to find stuff cheaply. But, there were specialists in every field, there were people who dedicated a lot of time to finding the best quality resources and gathering vast quantities of it, these resources which varied in quality had cycles and each pocket had a finite level of resources, as a crafter you spent a lot of time sourcing out the people who got the kind of resources you wanted and you had the opportunity to get into supply agreements or you could spend ages searching the various planets to see which vendors might have some stock of something you were after. You also had rare components that came from mobs and spending time in cantinas and the like you got to know which people ran the missions regularly that sent them out into the areas where you were after things and you talk to them and make some deals for them to supply you with the things you need. What was great about the system was that it wasn't simplistic and there was a massive variance between being a solid crafter and being the best and when you were the best you didn't need to advertise, people sought you out. You could plonk your house and store in a backwater planet in an extreme hostile area and your shop would still be flooded with people. Had SWG had the quest system of SWTOR and had the voice acting and the nice things we like about SWTOR but had the sandbox element of SWG it would have been a ripper of a game. I think something closer to the middle between SWG and SWTOR would have been best. Both games have good concepts.

I would prefer a world where there were more people around, if the game was built around it being desirable to have a lot of people around. The way the game is designed it is better not to have too many people in the same area when you level, you don't really need to do a lot of fighting for spawns and most dungeons you have to go through you need to fight your way in and out of. If there are too many people around you wouldn't experience a lot of the content the way it was intended.

I get flooded with whispers asking me to tank stuff whenever I log on with my PT but I only tank for guild groups. There are too many morons out there to waste time and effort on these mouth breathers who would take loot for a companion ahead of someone who needs it for themselves.

I only have a dual core E8400 with 4gb ram and a crappy gts450 and the game plays fine for me when i play the game in XP SP3 compat mode. It runs like a dog in normal Win7 mode though. I get about 30fps in the station in prime time with a lot of people around the GMKs, it does dip to about 15fps when there are a lot of players moving around and new people coming, but for the most part it hovers around 30fps in high built up areas. Driver is a huge part, Nvidia drivers have been garbage of late and I had to go to the beta driver because the current stable driver is garbage. In fact, some of the older drivers are better than the current stable driver so upgrading to latest drivers for some people is a step in the wrong direction.

The conversations are gated by the Acts, you probably can't go any further until you progress further with your class quests. I had the issue with Mako until after i finished Act 2 I had about 6 conversations in a row.

You make about 150-200k per set of dailies on Ilum and Belsavis, plus what you can make from whatever drops. I was stone broke when I hit 50 and after a few days was up to around a million credits.

You get a lot more exp when you group as you get some exp for the other people in the group who complete non-class quests and bonus quests as well. If you don't have a lot of rest exp and don't pvp or do space missions then you can struggle to get to 50 on normal quests solo so a cut in exp would not be a great thing.

I didn't get any conversations with Mako at 10k affection and i had finished act 3 by then. She will occasionally send me something in the mail though.

The circle is also not indicative of the blast area which makes it a bit of a russian roulette game using it when things are CCed.

Not true. WoW caps your FPS to around 60fps, it wont draw more frames than the eye can realistically notice. My card is producing 110fps in SWTOR so the GPU is constantly running at capacity. If there was an option to cap the frames then the GPU would spend longer periods not operating at it's peak level and produce less heat, draw less power. It is better for the longevity of your GPU, saves you on your power bill and better for the environment. More importantly, you shouldn't notice anything different.

Legolas

I used to pen and paper roleplay, did minatures as well when I was younger. I had two sets of friends, the 'gamers' and the 'norms' and the two groups never mingled and the GF never saw/got involved with the game side. Friends and family in general were kept in the dark. My gamer friends had the social skills of mass murderers and my games where just something I liked to do but found I could be normal and have that interest but got sick and tired of being labelled a freak from a young age because of that interest so I kinda just got used to keeping it from norms. I played football and liked going out with norms but I liked my gaming and I just found it too much of a drag trying to constantly explain to norms that norms can enjoy the various types of gaming. My last GF was a gamer and loved RP games so she was probably the first person in 20 years that knew both sides of my personal life and she had no problem with either side, thought I was silly to keep both separate but when she was constantly mocked by her family I just looked at her and said, "this is why".