If bugs only affect 95% of the people then 95% of the people aren't logging in. This is how you end up branded as a fanboy, if you are willing to completely ignore all evidence to blindly keep defending your game. Like the game all you want, but let's not pretend there's no significant bugs in it, that's just laughable.

Did you finish your class story? Once you finish it, a droid sends you to Ilum and a quest chain leads to those two flashpoints. You don't need to get the quest chain to that point, but you might need to finish your class story first to "unlock" Ilum.

That's like saying it's not my fault a 5 year old gets hurt because I gave him a loaded gun when he asked for it.

I think you may actually have a better chance when gamespy says your game is terrible. Gamespy highly rated both Age of Conan and Warhammer, and those two certainly went on to become staples of the MMO genre.

Played Minecraft.

He was Sith....He is Jedi.

Leveling already plays an important tutorial role. How many abilities do you have? Odds are, it's something like 30+. How many do you have at level 1? I believe it's 5. By slowly gaining new abilities as you level, you not only get to experience the first kind of character progression (unlocking abilities as you play), but it also means the abilities are introduced to you at a slow pace so you have time to try each of them. By the time the next ability rolls around, you're already familiar with the previous one, and you know how well it performs. You can now compare this to your new ability and decide which one you prefer, or in which order you prefer to use them. Without this kind of pacing, logging in with a ton of abilities would be very overwhelming, and comparing them all with each other would feel like a very boring ordeal.

If they do this and pace the gear a little more slowly (even if that only applies to the harder settings) I have no issue (didn't see their reply on this). It'll be too late for this content, but the next at least. I'm not sure why you equate it to a job. I get that some guilds play it like a job, but that's a very small minority, and I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about people who decided to raid 1-2 nights a week and enjoy trying to overcome challenges together. Even for those, it's easy to have finished clearing all current content and finish gearing. That's the problem, there's just no challenge to be found.

Paragraphs separate individual ideas, mine was all the same idea and at 7 lines, nothing out of the ordinary. Also this has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion. I'm at a loss as to what the point of this is. It has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion. That's my point, they're already doing that, by putting raids in the game. Who are these raids designed for? What group of people? Certainly not the majority who you claim is still 35, it'll be months before they get there. Certainly not the hardcore, who finished all their "progression" in 2 hours. Certainly not the average gamer who can finish all "progression" in 1-2 nights. So who exactly?

The point you're missing is, why did they add raids? Not for the guy who is level 35 2 months in, he'll take half a year before he's 50 and done with HM flashpoints, and he may fancy an alt after that. They certainly didn't add them for the hardcore, those blew through them on the hardest setting in a single night, and finished gearing in another 2 weeks. Maybe guys in the middle? Those blow through it in a single night too, and have probably finished gearing too by now. So what exactly was their target? It almost seems like the pace of raiding is designed in such a way that spending more than 1 hour per week will trivialize it, but anyone who plays that little will have a ways to go before even seeing raids in the first place. I simply cannot think of any group they were aiming for with their raids, and I'm left to assume they simply did a very poor job tuning them (which given the massive amount of bugs in raiding, sounds like a perfectly fair assumption).

I want to address two things. First, so some extend, grinding is necessary in an MMO. It's simply impossible to create content at such a pace that people can keep going through it without seeing any level of repetition. Even if they were simply trying to keep up with casual players this would be impossible. All they can do is make it so that the grinding doesn't feel like something that isn't fun. Whether that's tokens from dailies, PvP ranks, weekly raids, whatever, some form of repetition has to be present in an MMO. Now the best way to encourage you to participate in this repetition is by giving rewards for doing so, which comes in the form of gear. In that sense, grinding will always exist in MMO's. If they simply gave you the gear with minimal effort, people would feel like there are no goals left for them to achieve and move on. Now in regards to raids specifically. My point is that if they choose to go with raiding as their PvE end game, then there's basic formula to keep in mind. Part of this formula is pacing the rate at which people go through it, simply because designing more raids takes time. Now you say, the type of design where you have to go back for weeks on end to collect all your loot really screws casuals, but my point is, I'm not sure raiding was ever designed for people who are very casual. I imagine people like that play whenever they feel like playing (not when a schedule says they should log on). Heck a bunch of them probably aren't 50 yet, enjoying the story. By it's very design, raiding is typically does not hold the greatest appeal to casuals, yet it's paced in such a way that a very limited amount of playtime is enough to completely finish it (meaning both clear it all and finish gearing from it). This leaves me wondering who they even had in mind with raids, especially the harder modes. I have a very hard time imagining that those extremely casual players will be pursuing NMM any time soon, and yet anyone even remotely hardcore has cleared it a long time ago. So who did they have in mind? I don't get that. I actually feel WoW found a fairly good mix for that. LFR for people who do want to try raiding, but without schedule commitments and the ability to say "I'm logging off right this second" without any issues, normal mode for more casual players who can make a schedule commitment but don't care to spend much of their week on it, and heroic modes for the hardcore who want to sink time into raiding.

My friends always called it excel online while I played. That's why I always liked using this picture, it so perfectly sums up EVE.

I'm talking about the Cataclysm version of Ragnaros, and I was specifically talking about the learning process of raiding, not the farm part. Yes, the farm part of raiding can only be extended through trash mobs, since boss fights tend to be fairly short if people could just go from one boss to the next (like the fail that was togc) then it's over really quick. The problem isn't that farming operations in SW:TOR is over too quick. The problem is that in SWTOR going from "We've never done this raid before" to "We've killed everything on the hardest setting possible" can be expressed in hours as opposed to weeks (for the hardcore raiding guilds) to months (for the less hardcore) in WoW. Likewise going from "I just hit 50 and have leveling gear" to "I have full Rakata gear" can be done in a matter of weeks instead of months. When you tune content as to be so easy almost any guild with some raiding experience can 1 shot it even on harder settings and then drop so much gear that people can finish gearing up in weeks, you shouldn't be surprised people complain about being bored a few weeks in. Yes, slowing down gear drops can be a grind because you need to keep going back to kill more bosses for loot, but it works. If you're going with a raiding end game, pacing kills and loot drops is important, and they overlooked this part.

I specifically said heroic Ragnaros, not heroic firelands.

You think the reason it took top guilds weeks to kill heroic Ragnaros despite putting in more hours per week than people put into their jobs because of trash mob grinding?

Leave normal as something for people to mostly just collect free loot on, make hard mode something guilds will spend a little bit of work progressing on but most decent guilds can clear, and NMM the one where the serious challenge begins. This allows pugs to still do operations for gear without too much worry about how good everybody has to be, the need for VOIP, etc, while presenting 2 levels of challenge for guilds who want more.

Well, WoW tried to fix this a little by making 10 man raids and then LFR for on-demand raiding. Since raiding is pretty entrenched as a PvE end game option as this point, I feel those two alternatives were decent steps at attempting to bridge that gap. You mention a 10 man dungeon though, given that you've obviously played WoW, how is a 10 man dungeon different from a 10 man raid? Why a separate classification?

Replies in bold.

Guess you added another example. I'm starting to wonder what your point is. You completely ignore what the challenges of a fight were (and in case of Maloriak, there weren't all that many), and then express it in a very simple form. This can be done to every single thing you do in an MMO, I don't get your point? Heck, name the most skill based game or aspect of a game there is, I promise you, I can write it in a short list like that to make it sound trivial when it isn't.

Funny, you pick a fight where the biggest responsibility falls on one person and then you completely gloss over that by simply saying "kite adds". I'm guessing you have never actually tanked that part. Edit: He's talking about Cata nef. Cata nef was a fairly straightforward fight for dps. Pretty much everybody agreed that how well that fight went depended entirely on how good your add tank was (on normal mode, on heroic mode the raid gets more responsibility).

It was ~1.5 months for the top end guilds to clear everything. At the time the top end guilds killed heroic Sinestra, a ton of casual guilds hadn't even finished normal modes yet and weren't even remotely close to finishing heroic progression. Also relevant in this is that the gearing process took a while longer still. In SW:TOR, every single guild that is capable of getting 8 players together that aren't completely retarded will absolutely steamroll through normal EV/KP in a single night. Same story for hard modes, the bugs are more challenging than most fights (and hard modes already drop the best gear available). On the gear front operations throw such an abundance of loot at you that you can quite literally finish gearing in a few weeks tops. You might consider having to chain run the same place each week for gear a grind, but it undeniably helps stretch content so that developers can realistically design it somewhat at the pace that players go through it. By giving everybody all the gear the game has to offer in weeks, you simply leave all the players wondering "Uh so now what do we do?" Basically, in WoW it's only the top end guilds who spend god knows how many hours a day raiding to clear everything who are left wondering what to do next 1 month in, in SW:TOR it's pretty much everybody who can get enough decently skilled people to get together for one night. WoW at release has 11 raid bosses (10 in MC + Onyxia), even if we ignore Ragnaros who was near impossible for a while that puts us at 10. Progression on some of those bosses also took quite a bit of time, especially Onyxia. In terms of hours to finish everything, WoW at release had way more end game than SW:TOR did. I don't think even the best guilds in WoW at the time learned and killed Onyxia for the first time in one night. I can't imagine the best guilds in SW:TOR not clearing EV and KP both for the first time in one night on HM.

The change I thought they were doing is simply allowing people to remove end game armoring and hilts (and the set bonus for armor attaches to the armoring). That would give appearance customization.

half-done

Uh what? This uses the exact same formula as WoW's raids, they just made it 12 times easier and and mechanics far less interesting. I'd love to know though, what kind of teamwork do you feel is so important in current raids? I really can't think of any besides the typical tanks hold agro, healers heal people, dps make things die and occasionally interrupt or switch targets.

I'd be fine for this on normal mode. The problem is any halfway decent raid can faceroll their way through hard mode just as easily, 1 shotting bosses without even knowing what they do.