You're right! This game needs items like Enigma and HOTO from Diablo 2 to make gearing more interesting that just increasing STAT.

They bloom much earlier than the force classes, and are more interesting to play in the early levels because of it.

We simply cannot speak to whether the up and coming MMOs will perform, so stop talking about them. I can say that the Star Wars pedigree has been tarnished very badly by the foolishness of George Lucas, and while there are still innumerable fanboys, it's not what it was in the pre-prequel era.

It is not well stated or well reasoned because it's built on precisely the predominant (and wrong) notion that automated LFG systems break communities down and dumb down the game. You also cannot say that you are not being elitist while simultaneously complaining that anything is being dumbed down in a video game. Anybody who cares that much about notions of status and difficulty in a video game is an elitist. Also, drawing any comparisons between the design of this game and the design of vanilla WoW is just... stupid. There's a reason why that design philosophy has gone out the window: because it caters to elitists like the poster in question and alienates the VAST majority of its playerbase. WoW has taken it another step. Forget dungeon finder, you can now find entire raid groups through that mechanic. You can meet and befriend people ON OTHER SERVERS through this because the raids are complex enough that you will recognize the goodies from the baddies. The battletag system through Battle.net allows full cross server friend functionality as well as the ability to form groups for battlegrounds, dungeons and raids with anybody on any server. This is indisputably a great thing that CANNOT happen in SWTOR. It breaks down barriers between servers by bringing all of the content to anyone who wants to play it with anyone else on the NA server cluster. Your quotee also mentions the notion that LFG removes this "tiny bit of effort" of meeting a group of quality individuals, forming a guild or friendship with them and then grouping consistently with those people. First of all, it isn't always easy to find quality players who are looking to be social. It's in the nature of an MMO that many players are going to be antisocial nerds with their own established cliques not looking to make new friends. Solo players are often garbage can casuals that you would sooner prefer to stab your own eyeballs out than play with again. Second, if the LFG tool is only removing what is a minor inconvenience, then what's the big deal about having it to you? Let's put it this way. While leveling up in WoW before the LFD tool, you would almost never be able to find groups for any low level dungeons. I'm talking in WoW in the last couple years here--there are not many players leveling anymore on a single server, so you simply cannot find a Deadmines group from the selection of people on your own server. Furthermore, maybe you're leveling in Westfall, but you want to see the Wailing Caverns. I actually experienced this myself: I never saw WC until I went there and soloed it at max level because it was in Horde territory and was almost impossible to get a group for and get to as an Alliance player. The cross-server LFG tool remedies both of these issues. They open up content to players in a mature MMO setting where not many people are leveling. They let you break the monotony of questing by efficiently and quickly getting you a group for dungeons that are next to impossible to get groups for without said tool for the reasons I stated above. It incentivizes grouping during a primarily solo leveling experience, even if it is grouping with players off of other servers. It allows players to see fun and interesting content that they would otherwise not see. All complaints against the LFD systems are built upon the unwritten assumption that the players are all maximum level. And every single one I have ever seen is really stupid, your quotees being no exception.

It is curious that, on the one hand, they praise the game for its story-driven, single player leveling experience that literally could not be more anti-community short of removing all in game communication from players, then on the other, they decry any calls for convenient group-forming tools because they would "hurt the community". Yeah, the community that has been carefully cultivated by red and green portals everywhere and a leveling experience that is explicitly designed to encourage and reward soloing.

But when you get right down to it, the choices in this game have little to no effect on gameplay and story direction. Dialog choices almost never matter at all. Light and dark side points mean practically nothing as they have no affect on any of your character's abilities and rarely impact the use of items. On occasion you might make a light/dark choice that causes you to actually feel an emotion, but these are typically reserved for the main questlines and they still tend not to really matter in the long run. Do I kill Tavus or do I take him in? Do I turn Jaesa to the dark side or leave her on the light? These are about as meaningful as they come, but they still don't feel that important as they could be if my trooper or my sith warrior was in a real single player KOTOR 3. The limited scope of choices in this game is a result of the compromise required to make it a functional MMO. You can never make a choice that results in a companion dying or leaving you (like you often could in KOTOR, NWN and BG). It just isn't viable in an MMO. Group play means that choices can't have serious impact in group content because.. how do you handle it if it does? You can't let one ******* make a bad decision with severe, permanent repercussions on the progression of the other players in his party. This compromise between MMO and cRPG leaves the RPGers with blue balls about the story and you begin to realize that it's nowhere near as good as it's often touted to be. The Witcher 2 has two entirely different second acts in the game depending on a single decision you make. That's *********** choice. The sort of choice you are referring to is bonus missions. You can choose whether or not to do the boring, repetitive "kill 30 of these guys, click on 5 glowies, kill world elite du jour, deposit his insignia in the box for 3 planet commendations and an XP bonus". And that is what they always are. Every single one is a variation on that model. Uninspired, uninteresting copy-paste game design that does nothing for the weak facade of motivation you might feel for doing the mission in the first place. The only thing they offer is further loot and XP based incentivization for performing more menial MMO tasks.

Did you read the guy I quoted? He very explicitly says that he has NEVER played WoW and that he will never play it. In the very next sentence, he says in equally explicit terms that he has played F2P MMOs that look, feel and play better than WoW, a game he has never played before and therefore cannot possibly judge whether it is better or worse. In the words of Harry S. Plinkett, it's what we call a CONTRADICTION.

Like which other MMOs with sharded servers, exactly? None? OK then.

How can you possibly speak to WoW's quality or design on any level if you've never played it? You don't understand why people compare SWTOR to it because you don't realize just how similar they are in terms of fundamental gameplay design. Instead you'd rather make stupid, ignorant posts like this one.

Ultimately, what all of these features are moving towards in WoW is the dissolution of server lines dividing players. The game is getting closer and closer to the point that anybody on the NA server cluster can play significant content with anybody else. But we wouldn't want the anti-LFD people to realize that these innovations actually have the potential to vastly EXPAND the community of an MMO, not destroy it. They want to keep living in a fantasy world where Bioware isn't constantly missepping and they aren't willfully ignoring it.

My post has less to do with the loot problem and more with the notion of accountability and social responsibility associated with existing on the same persistent game server as the other people you are grouping with. That's where the vaunted sense of "community" supposedly arises from according to the anti-LFD people.

The complaint is always the same: the person is on another server, so accountability goes out the window. You can't sit in general chat and complain that so-and-so is a ninja looter in order to tarnish his good reputation so that no one will ever group with him again. Yep. That's the crux of the anti-LFD argument in two sentences.

As it turns out, it actually does more damage at maximum rank than tracer missile.

What's funny about that is only unload uses your actual weapons. Railshot and heatseeker fire out of your armor, not your guns.

Yeah, hi. A 20% reduction in armor cannot result in a 4k difference in crit damage taken. The debuff is probably around a 15-20% increase in damage taken, not a 200% increase in damage taken. When people crit you that hard, it's from stacking adrenals/trinkets/red buff, not from the armor reduction.