Part of the reason space combat is complained about so often is that for many of us, it's the last straw that broke the camel's back. All the other disappointments in the game could be overlooked if the space combat had been really good. But it's not even close to really good; general consensus is that it's "sort of okay, sometimes, for now, maybe". But space combat was the most anticipated feature for a LOT of people, and as such it was by far the biggest (and final) let-down. In the current system it's dumbed-down to the point of being comical, the system is so immersion breaking it makes me cringe, and it's the only part of the game that reminds me that the prequels exist (it just feels like you're Anakin accidentally piloting his Naboo starfighter into the blockade and saying: "Now THIS is Pod-racing!". It made me retch a little to write that just now.). It's like "Baby's first space flight". All the hand-holding and ridiculous maneuvers and bizarre angles of fire and suspension of disbelief that are take place are just too much. Coupled with that is a bit of a feeling of betrayal. I was in beta for a long time before they implemented space combat, and there was ALWAYS a thread on the first page of every relevant forum asking them to change the way they planned on implementing it. And once it was introduced we kept telling them that it was extremely disappointing and that they needed to change it. But apparently they felt that we were being unreasonable or cynical or something, and ignored us. We heard rumors now and then that they were working on a REAL space system and we should just relax and bear with them. Then open beta hit, and there were hundreds of new threads from new players complaining about being disappointed in space combat, which again were ignored. We all decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. We're now nearly a month past the one year anniversary, the game is regarded as a joke by the MMO community at large, and the developers are reduced almost to Perfect World levels of money milking in order to maintain the game. And now we hear that they might make PvP space missions that work the way we've been asking for this entire time, probably, but to not get our hopes up for a new PvE system yet... That's why many of us are so critical of space combat. I mean, those of us that have yet to abandon all hope of it being "fixed". You'll never hear from the others, they're not coming back. Space combat is still one of the most fun things to do in the game. But rather than saying something good about space combat, that actually says something bad about the "fun" level of the rest of the game. As an aside, I've always felt that this game has some extremely talented people working on it (writers, developers, directors, artists, voice actors, and a few others), people with great ideas and integrity, both of which are extremely rare in game development nowadays. That was the reason I bought their connector's edition; I love to support games by people that I believe in. But ever since release I've seen more and more that it's being driven at the top levels by someone who is completely clueless and keeps ruining everything. I don't know who, probably some board of directors somewhere... Whoever they are, they seem to hate fun. It had HUGE potential, massive resources at its disposal, several great franchises to draw from, a great staff, and some actually innovative and interesting ideas to shake up the MMO genre, yet somehow all of those things were implemented wrong and the entire thing is an embarrassing disappointment. It's still okay; it's not awful. There's just no reason to play it besides the fact that it's Star Wars. And evidently that's just not enough to compete on.