Having such a reward in open world PvP is al well and fine, but there should also be a risk, say that when you get killed you also loose points. If you only gain it will mean trading kills back and forth is a easy way of geting valor, if you also loose valor for dying you suddenly have a risk that means you cannot simply farm eachother and gain on it. World PvP should be about risk vs reward, not just about rewards.

Personally I don't really mind if a game has text based quests rather then voice overs, in a way I would prefer them to spend time and money on making the game as rich of content as possble compared to making it 100% voice over. The talking in SWTOR is a nice feature, it ties the whole game together and make the story feel so much more alive. A large part of the cost to make the game has also been spent on voice overs and that is money that could have been invested in other areas rather then making sure each quest had voice overs. Text based MMO's are far from dead imo. SWTOR did some things right and some things wrong, but they have not killed the MMO market for text based MMO's. I think few games will be released with such a massive amount of voice overs as SWTOR has simply because it is way too expensive production wise.

There is no such thing. I'm a sandbox player myself and I do prefer them, but the big money is in offering "instant satisfaction" over creating something a minority of the playerbase would enjoy. Darkfall online had potential but got ruined because the devs made one really big mistake, no cap on skills. this meant you had hybrid builds that had all skills and was masters on the battlefield. Hopefully that will be fixed in DF2, whenever they release it. Theme park MMO's are for a large part what the majority of players want, they don't want to hspend endless hours on crafting, theyd on't want to have to explore a world, or have to think about where should I go to quest now. They want to be driven by quests to see new areas, find new stuff and experiences rather then spend time looking for themselves. That is the reason theme park MMO's is way more popular then sandbox. They want to be entertained, rather then entertain themselves.

No. Great story, nice touch with the companions, but the whole world feels dead. PvP at endgame is nothing but a grind for gear while PvP pre 50 is a bunch of fun. Might return if the game improves so will keep my eye on the forums and see how the game changes.

PvP implementation in this game is in many ways a joke as they managed to screw up totally with how the expertise works. Expertise means too much compared to normal gear and that causes problems for the freshly 50's that has no expertise stat compared to those who has maxed it. Faction imbalance only adds to the problem and isn't something that is easy fixed. Problems like this with the PvP system simply doesn't have a super easy fix that will please everyone. The fix is there, but it will piss off a bunch of people no matter what approach they choose towards it. The PvP between level 10 to 49 is simply some of the best PvP I have had in a theme park MMO, gear doesn't matter more then player skills and it is a ton of fun. However once you enter 50 bracket the one thing that matters is gear, without gear you will be a punching ball until you manage to get enough bits to compete yourself. And that can take a long time depending on your luck. If they sort out PvP it is one of the elements that would attract me to come back as I have found my assassin and shadow to be by far the most funny class to play in the themepark mmo's I have played so far.

What stops me from fully enjoying the world is the mechanics of the game. PvP in old days were world PvP, these days it's warzones and battlegrounds. Yes you will have maybe 1-2 other that are around, but mostly it will be low levels and they simply do not bring a challenge to the table hence making world PvP pointless. Looking at the mechanics for PvP in SWTOR you have Ilum and you have warzones, when it comes instances most of those are accessible from the imperial or republic fleet so no reason to go out in the world unless you are looking for something specific. Old days all the stuff you wanted to do wasn't at your doorstep, these days it is. And that is what creates the feeling of a static non living world. majority of players will stay at the fleet doing instances or PvP as it has the easiest access to it. That was the beauty with the older games, even WoW had this that you had to travel to areas to enter raids and instances. It did make the world feel alive as you would see players around the world either on their way to a raid or a instance or simply moving from A to B. These days moving from A to B requires no effort in most MMO's.

For me playing MMO's are about playing with other people, and I saw it in AoC, WoW, SWTOR, WAR that the world itself felt lifeless. Specially bad is it in SWTOR where a large part of the game simply feels like a single player game with a online chat box attached. You hardly see other players at times, the enemies are nowehere to be seen and in general the whole feeling of the world around you feels a bit static and dead. For my part it's pretty certain I will stop playing once my sub runs out, the game in itself has some good qualities it just doesn't deliver well enough on other parts that I personally find more important. in most theme park MMO's you end up sitting in the main city asking for groups to do instances rather then go around the world to explore and see what you find. Because if you go away from main city you will miss out on groups as you don't see the chat anymore. In SWG and DFO which are the 2 sandbox MMO's I have enjoyed the most the world did feel alive, it didn't feel static and reason for that is the players where around doing their things. In Bestine you could experience attacks from rebels, and see imperials group up to fight back. It was moments like that that really made the game shine, PvP happened not in warzones or battlegrounds but in the actual world where others would be. Same in DFO, one second you were out mining the next you had to rush back to your guild city as it was under attack. It brings a whole other feeling to the game then what you see in most theme park MMO's. I'm hoping Darkfall 2 will keep what was good with DFO and fix the bad decision they made with no skill cap which kind of ruined the game in the end for many. I won't play a sandbox MMO unless I find it entertaining, just like any other game I choose to play, but if I'm given the choice to play a good sandbox game or a good theme park game I know which one that will get my money. That choice is extremely easy to make for my part atleast.

If they don't manage to sort our the faction imbalance, world PvP will eventually die on most servers. Ilum will be reduced to fight clubs as that is the fastest and easiest way for players to get their quests done. Warzones will be dominated by Battlemasters and new players will struggle getting to a level where they can compete. Faction imbalance once it reaches a critical point and it will if Bioware don't start thinking about fixing it will mean operations, flashpoints etc will be hard to get going due to lack of people. In the end the remaining players on the side with few people will either quit or reroll the other side. If this continues SWTOR will still be around in 1 years time, however you will see a low player base compared to what EA/Bioware had expected. In it's current form there is no way SWTOR will be remotely close to beat the game it was designed to beat. For my part I won't be around much longer to see this happens, I'll check patch updates and forums to see if things changes for the better. Not going to subscribe or play it much longer I guess as 90% of the guild at the moment has quit the game. Sub runs out in 18n days and it feels kinda sad that the one game that could actually be a good theme park MMO so badly fails on some part of the game.I loved the story in the game, I loved leveling my sith to 50 and my Jedi to 41 as it is a really good rpg with regard to story. It just isn't that good in other aspects of the game like PvP. World PvP is close to non existent whilst leveling, there is no reason to PvP, the game doesn't give any reasons why I should attack an empire players. It simply doesn't feel like a war between Empire and the republic. I'm not getting immersed into the world, on Hoth you see people in close to no clothes yet in the movies Hoth was some of the coldest place you could be and being dressed for it was extremely important. Cities and areas look and feel lifeless as NPC's are standing in one spot all the time, no day/night cycles etc. The game lacks things that would make it feel more alive, more immersive. You have a bunch of voiceovers for quests, yet I hardly hear NPC's talk with eachother. And if I do it can be out in the middle of an area where I shouldn't hear them. I really hoped SWTOR would be an MMO that caught me and kept me playing,but it isn't. Seeing how it is I get the feeling SWTOR might be the very last theme park MMO I'm going to bother buying. I will check out GW2 as quite some of my friends is going to play that, but other then GW2 I will wait and hope a decent sandbox MMO is released.

Reading this thread I have come to the following conclusion.. That OP might want to rethink his idea of majprity of people not liking crafting in SWG Crafting in SWG was awesome, quite possibly the best system ever made. However it cannot be compared with SWTOR as SWG pre NGE was a full blown sandbox MMO whilst SWTOR is just another theme park MMO. Crafting in SWTOR is pretty similar to WoW, you buy a recipe, learn it make the item and voila. The one thing that makes SWTOR slightly different is reverse engineering and the critical success. But then again reverse engineering is just another way of buying and learning a recipe. It's not in any way unique, it just replaces buyable recipes.

What he said! Remove force leap, remove force sprint and other abilities that allows a player to move faster and you take away all tactic from huttball. As it is know you can use these abilities to create tactics that doesn't make every huttball game identic to the previous. And thus it will make Huttball incredible boring, the funniest moments in huttball for me is when I play with a friend on Ventrilo and we use these abilities together to score ot to keep others from scoring.

The last thing you would want to do is to give melee too much of a bonus in melee fights, specially when you have skills that can close the gap quite nicely already. As my Shadow is tank spec I have force pull, if a ranged open up on me I can pull him into me and fight on even ground or I could break CC, force cloak and reposition myself. Sure if I get jumped by a enemy player on Tatooine or hoth or wherever I'm not in the best spot due to the advantage the ranged will have with doing damage to me from range, but it goes 2 ways. If I can jump a player without him being aware of me I will also have the advantage over him, that's the thing with being the one who starts a fight no matter from range or melee you will have an advantage. In the beginning I struggled with ranged people myself, but these days ranged people is a challenge, but far from impossible. I know my class way better then I did in the beginning and I also know a lot more about how to use the tools I have available to my benefit. Jedi knights also have means of getting close, but they don't get the luxury of choosing when to ambush back as my Shadow does. However they have the force jump which means they can get close to a target a lot faster then a dps shadow if the target is standing on a ledge or something. My feeling from playing both guardian and shadow is that as a shadow has the better point of the stick in most ambush situations. Simply due to force cloak which gives me a possibility to escape, but I have not had any problems with neither of the classes to get close and personal with a ranged that jumped me and kill him 1v1. I think it more boils down to how well you know the class rather then not having enough interrupts or CC breakers. There is a huge difference in using your CC correct or incorrect, same with CC breakers. If used properly they are extremely effective, if used bad you end up as a easy kill. I noticed on my own performance a huge boost in both damage and survival chance once I started to get the hang of interrupt and cc breakers.

I agree, this problem has existed in most western MMO's that is gear driven and have battlegrounds simply because gear does matter and a lot of people will take any shortcuts to get it. This is one of the things I don't like with games like SWTOR and WoW, for some PvP is all about getting the next item not about simply having fun. There should be some kind of debuff to make sure people don't leave a WZ just because it seems like they ain't winning. This debuff could be 30minutes if not more as it needs to be bad enough for the ones who on purpose leaves the warzone when loosing to discourage them from leaving. 20 minutes is a little bit more then what it takes to complete a warzone. Of course a debuff like that will at times hurt people who has to go afk for various legit reasons, but in the end of the day the benefit for the remaining players is larger then the problem it could cause for these guys. There is a profanity filter you can turn on and you also have the ignore command to your disposal here. You will have people swearing at eachother in games with PvP, people are in general a lot more rude on the internet as they can be totally anonymous. And in PvP you do have a lot of people who will scream and shout if they game doesn't go as they want it to go. Reporting them for profanity when the tools to make the problem dissipear already exists is not a solution. You wouldn't want to create more works for the support people then necessary, and if they also then has to go through a huge number of profanity reports that workload will increase and take time from more important things they could do. A profanity button would work in 2 ways, you have the ones who reports the ones who swear at others and then you have the ones who woul report anyone who says one swear word in general without pointing it at anyone. It would do nothing but generates a huge amount of reports for them to investigate and go through.

I rerolled when I hit 50 on my assassin as the guild rerolled republic. While there are times I ask myself why bother making a new shadow I'm quite pleased with republic side. The amount of complete nutjobs is less then on empire side, you see them less in chat and people are in general a tad more helpful. In a way you can say republic seems to be more mature, th problem on empire side is that quite often the popular side attracts various immature people and they are very vocal... All in all I do like the look of my assassin both gearwise and the ship way better then republic side. But the fact i don't get huttball every pvp fight, I don't have to ignore people from global chat every now and then and on Kai-Kan atleatst the PvP bracket 10-49 is a lot of fun with republic side being able to win a good amount of games. If the few remaining people of the guilds suddenly wanna go back to empire I will follow them I assume as they are the reason I keep playing. But for know it seems like we all have it quite nice on the republic side

I could play my shadow exactly as evil as I played my assassin. The quest dialogues have evil options and if I had chosen to play all of them it would have been the same as my 50 assassin. There is not much difference in playstyle, and if they make it so that faction change is paid, but that you have to go through a short quest line to do the actual change to fix the possible problems with story in the future it would be beneficial for the underdog side and for bioware as they could earn a decent amount on it. Faction change won't destroy story if done properly, however just a faction change where you suddenly becomes a republic shadow and are given the story for the shadow as reference for future expansions would be wrong. If a sith figures out that the best way for him to ensure his power and his benefits is by betraying the empire he has no second thoughts about it. Sith's aren't tied to the empire by some mysterious invisible rope, they are a part of empire as empire is the one place that makes it possible for them to gain the power they want and desire.

You will get some xp and some valor, but few commendations since you don't contrinute. this "loophole" has been there since WoW came. The thing with being afk is that it will not give you a lot of xp, but say if you have a bot program you could set the bot up to join warzones and go stealth whilst you are at work and that way when coming home you would have earned anything from a few valor points up to a lot during a whole day of afk farming. The very same problem was in BG's in WoW also, Alterac Valley you would have x amount of people sitting afk at the starter area doing nothing and getting some xp and honor, the total honor earned through a day like this could be quite insane at times also for doing absolutely nothing.