So why not change the content so it can be used by most possible players. It´s poinless to have those areas which are rarely frequented (and that is already happening and will only get worse once less players level their characters) and it is possible to have the idea of grouping combined with the organizational ease of soloing (auto group, zone scaling).

Potentially having to skip parts of the story in a game which many only play because, unlike most MMORPGS, it has story is not very satisfying and waiting until you are finally able to manually find a group is absolutely no fun at all. Why so old fashioned? Look at other games. Obviously people want to play without wasting their time talking to other players and building a group.

Will content patches for this game only focus on more Dungeons and Raids or will we also get new planets / zones / story-quests ? In most games you only get new tiers of endgame content and a small number of pointless repeatable quests and I wonder if that will be the same with SWTOR. Will those people who don´t care about that the endless hunt for yet another item and would rather like to focus on story and questing have something to do or will our only option be twinking ?

I agree with the heroic part. In some areas the number of Heroics really is too high and as skipping them is no option in a story-driven game things could really be improved here. They should just add public groups for any Heroic area (like in Rift or Warhammer) which are automatically joined when a player enters the area of the quest. This would basically eliminate most group finding outside of Flashpoints and allow people to play instead of either waiting for other players or until the quest is soloable. The number of Flashpoints is ok, actually there can´t be too many of them in my opinion (at least with a group finder; too many could make manual group search difficult).

I do not think it´s intended to waste precious time on finding other people. I want to play and a minute spent finding other players is a minute I could have spent playing. In other games I skipped grouping stuff unless I could either solo it or there was a system in place to auto-group and I am pretty sure other people do the same and will do in SWTOR. However playing a story-driven game skipping too much content just feels very wrong I hope they will not wait too long until they give us an autogrouping easy to use system which will allow us to play instead of finding X random strangers, flying to the station, etc. And while they are at it they should either remove some of the group-quest content or implement public groups. Damn annoying to have a questlog full of stuff you cannot solo yet.

I really wonder why in a recently released MMORPG you are still required to engage in a tedious search for a group via old-fashioned chat channels. I wonder how many players just skip most of the heroic quests or wait until they can solo the content. Please give us public groups. Whenever a single player or a group enters a heroic zone it should easily be able to join the large public group connected to that quest. The way it is currently done is simpy outdated and does not meet todays expectations and possibilities and even smaller scale developers (e.g. Rift) or other EA MMOs (Warhammer) were able to include a working system to adress the flawed way of how to find a group. And while you´re at it include dungeon and raid finder too please...

I think it´s perfectly fine to adapt PVE-difficulty to pickup groups and in general not make the game too challenging. Having a look at WOW and all the stuff they changed over the last years (cross-realm dungeon and raid finder, end of 40-men raids, dramatically decreased number of Group quests, less complex skill system) it seems to be what the majority of players want. As long as they want to make as much money as possible with the game (and hey it´s EA, they sure want that) they will have to cater to the majority. I´m absolutely sure we will see a dungeon and raid finder system and less heroic zones/quests in the future and it is a good thing I can hardly wait for it to happen.

I´d like both. In my opinion a sytem like WOW´s dungeon finder is a must today as it is very annoying spamming chat channels for a potentially long time until the group is set up. Filling up groups with NPC´s (possibly even having only 1 real player in a party) would be very nice but I doubt it will happen, as a lot of people would complain about it turning the game into a solo player game (even though MMOs are not necessarily about grouping but about the "living" world).

I too think the number of Heroics is annoyingly high and the way they are implemented is very old fashioned. I think it would be a lot more fun if Heroics would be handled like public quests, optionally autogrouping all people in a certain proximity. One of the few things which really worked great in Rift. Sure you can skip the quests but you never know if you miss out on an interesting bit of story and being a story-driven game every content should be available to all players. Just imagine what happens when the large mass of players will have gone through the content and play in endgame; it will be very hard if not almost impossible to do the Heroics in an acceptable time frame.