FYI (since I saw this in a couple of posts) negative posts populated the forums before release with the occasional fan boy intrusions. Even so, people who like the game will continue to play it until they get bored, others will just quit, like I just did. Just canceled my sub as I don't consider this an MMO and worth paying a monthly fee for. It has been like this since launch and even before that, from what I've heard. I'm not going to put a long list of reasons why I'm leaving because they match everyone else' Even if it were F2P I probably wouldn't play it. The game has no feeling to it, just vast emptiness and shallow & meaningless conversations with NPCs. Choices have 0 impact on your game play, on the contrary to what they've advertised (and are still). In conclusion - I'd swap this game for KOTOR sequels any day. And god damn it the engine sucks.

So, there are 25-30 people at 7PM server time on Imperial fleet,a few of them doing pvp and a few others - ops. Last time I visited Ilum there were no more then 3-4 people there. I have not heard of anyone on my server doing a 16 man op and general chat is always silent. There is no competing, my guild has a whole bunch of server firsts in ops, so what? Explosive conflict was cleared hours after it was released and there are no mechanisms which would complicate any encounter and provide better gear/rewards/titles. What I'm talking about is encounters like yogg-saron in ulduar (WoW) where you could leave the last 4 bosses alive which complicates the fight insanely, but it does provide you with a truely unique reward. Why wasn't such an option introduced here? Back during release there were atleast 300 people in the fleet every day and hundreds more on different planets but the game feels just as empty/deadish now as it was back then. I personally interpret the results of this "MMO-story" experiment as a failure (not from an economical point of view, I'm sure they've already made a lot of money)

I couldn't agree more with this. No music. Anywhere. There was an entire dev video where they hyped up the tens of hours of original music they recorded, where is it?

As another poster said, part of the reason why this game feels dead is the lack of attractiveness in the end-game. Specifically, as OP pointed out, raids are not that much of a challenge. If one started playing MMOs from, say, 2010-2011 they will not get to experience the feeling of a real challenge in raiding or organized pvp. Back in molten core and blackwing lair we used to gather 40 people and run it for days. In fact we probably spent a couple of months just to get to the last boss within the same lock-out period. New players in MMOs will never get the sensation of rolling for an item they have worked their *** for and competing against 8-10 people for it, knowing that it has about 5% drop chance. Neither will they have the sense of accomplishment after killing a certain boss. This is because "normal" and "hard" instances were introduced - you get to kill the same boss with much less effort. You don't need to work that hard to experience raid content and this is what destroys the entire charm of raiding and organized pvp. New players just go in and grab loot, kill bosses etc without any real challenge. They will probably never know what it's like for an entire server to grind for mats for a month of 2, both factions working together, so that 1 or 2 people, after a long and epic quest, can open a door leading to the hardest dungeon yet. They won't get the tickle every time someone brags about how his guild killed a certain boss. They will not get the legendary feeling of 40 people working together harmonically for 15 minutes in dynamic conditions in an attempt to get a server first kill or some other type of feat. tl;dr - normal/hard mode raids attracted casual gamers to MMOs and killed the genre.

weather, day/night cycles, and music - that is what's missing. I could also throw in lack of fluid glameplay and from what I've heard - lack of innovative endgame. Personally I don't feel passionate about it in any way. Back in my wow days I was always trying to compete with other people in leveling/pvp/raids and gear. Nothing got my spirits up more than beating a boss before a rival guild (not necessarily opposite faction). Of course that was only up to the point when PuGs could kill bosses and the normal/heroic cancerous ******** was introduced. And when I got tired of the competition I could always just enjoy the beauty of the scenery and the music while doing dailies or leveling an alt. These 2 things made the game a complete, positive experience for me. SWTOR doesn't have the competitive bit due to low populations on most servers and instancing planets only amplifies that. The beautiful bit is there - I like the scenery, but the lack of day/night cycles, weather and music pretty much ruins it. And if perhaps they hadn't revealed that they spent $100+ mil on this I wouldn't be this disappointed overall.

You, sir, are completely and undoubtedly correct in every aspect of your post. More music must be playing in the background indeed

Following your logic - the standard average income for my country is about 5 times lower than the average income of US. But I'm not paying 3$ for subscription, I pay what everyone else pays. So it's not that

Not to worry OP, I've seen at least 3 cases of people who complained to their banks about various problems with the game - all were completely compensated - they initiated a charge-back and received everything they ever spent on this game, including base cost of the game and all subscriptions that they payed. The reasons for these charge-backs were all in the lines of "I didn't get what I payed for". I myself am a good example of this, I ordered the game through amazon because it was "not available for my region", the normal version cost me ~120$ with shipment. It arrived several days late, for which amazon compensated me with the entire shipping cost + a small part of the base cost of the game. The reason I'm pointing this out is that if you don't get an answer as to why you are being charged more than others, you can talk to your bank and receive every cent you ever spent on this game. And then again, on the off chance that you get an answer which seems unreasonable - there's always lawsuits (if you feel discriminated). In any case, be sure to let us know of any answers/actions you are taking (INB4 my post is deleted)

By "dynamic cap" i meant Bioware's manipulation of the server caps. Of course we can't be certain they aren't doing it every single day, but my assumption was that this was done only once - at launch. Given that, we naturally see a steep drop around the time when this "cap shift" you talked about occurred. Beyond that point the graph very very close to the actual trends, of course assuming that Bioware isn't playing around with the server caps anymore

Either through loss of subscriptions or work and school server emptiness is occurring, you missed the point.

We can safely assume there will be no more "huge population increases", what trends we see a little after new years' is , based on the huge sample size, very close to the actual one. There simply aren't spikes of population increase large enough anymore to trigger this "dynamic server cap" system which would otherwise invalidate my point

It is by far the most credible source of information on the population matter in this thread. They clearly state that the data in their graphs comes directly from bioware server status page, there is no guess work involved here. They may not seem trustworthy for a number of reasons, but the sample size is large enough and cannot be far off from reality. This is more credible than anything else presented here - including your eyes, good sir.

And you draw that conclusion from just your server? http://www.swtorarena.com/statistics/ shows a steep decline in server population across all servers in the US and EU, it's a rough estimate but it is the most credible proof to OP's point. You,sir, are the troll

I'm still waiting for something large to be revealed, cause so far I'm not seeing where they put 200 mil

And each in their own instance/shard