I think its reasonable for people, especially those that bought the VIP CE version of the game, to feel betrayed and/or let down by the F2P developments. The game is now going to be $15. Its one thing for BW to do that after releasing an expansion so they don't burden new players with the added cost but to do it this early into the life of a game feels like a bit of a slap in the face to the people that have been playing since beta and pre-purchased the game. You would think that at the very least BW could pay some lip service to the fact.....

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force... as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened. You'd better get on with your exercises." The fact that they are giving CE players 1000 extra coins kinda miffs me, it seems like you should know all of the differences between CE and normal before you buy them...... Regardless; bad sign and I for one am suddenly more than a bit worried about the near-term future of this game. All I can say is Terror from Beyond better be spectacular (and coming soon) or I for one will be permanently unsubbing.

I think its just a perfect example of the way attitudes have changed over the last half decade, mock outrage is all the rage these days. The posts complaining that SWTOR wasn't worth $60 are particularly lol-worthy. Which games are the same people playing instead? Everything else is at least as flawed and far less ambitious. SWTOR may share a lot of similarity with a WoW style MMO but between the story and its unique take on a number of gameplay mechanics I think its more than earned my $s.

I know others will surely disagree with this point but after having played almost every class/spec I honestly find an Annihilation Marauder to be the toughest to play in high-level PVE (lets put pvp into another basket because the difficulty of playing one class if inextricably linked to the potency and difficulty of the other classes). Yes it provides a very high amount of dps and survivability but it requires a level of awareness, dexterity, and knowledge to get the most out of it that no other class I've played commands. Yes my sorc might be a bit squishier to burst and not do as much DPS but he also a hell of a lot easier to play.

Maras actually make pretty decent emergency tanks since our threat is naturally high. When a tank goes down in an OP, its often a mara blowing his CDs that picks up the boss while the tank gets rez'd.

Carnage is fun because you see really big numbers every now and again and its very competitive with Anni damage wise. That said, I find that in regular WZ pvp there is a bit more of a panic effect with Anni, caranage give a huge initial burst followed by a bit of a lull before the next wave of significant damage comes. With Anni, you opponent sees their HP start dropping at a quick, consistent, and non-stop rate. I find the lull gives people time to react. The biggest thing I noticed when I switched from Anni to Carnage (I've now switched back) was how much more collected people were when they reacted to me. For PVE I don't think its even a question, my heals as anni allow me to dps through many mechanics that other classes and carnage maras have to avoid or drain the healers. There is a whole meta-game around trinkets (using a crit trinket is a great alternative to berserk if you need a bit of extra healing, berserk + power trinket can help keep a tank up during damage phases, etc, etc). On top of all of that, its one of the highest dps specs in the game and a ton of survivability once you are decently geared (below average in average gear though)

Pretty much this. Can't play a multiplayer game without multiple people and there's not much point in playing if you've already beat all the content and farmed all the gear. Ranked WZ will help a lot for the PVP crowd (assuming there are enough people to make teams) because high rankings are always desired and you'll have to maintain your ranking.

You do if you reach a point where it costs more to operate that you get back as revenue. A big project that paid the vast majority of itself off before being closed down isn't nearly as much of a failure as one that had a lackluster start and then slowly bled out money for years in order to stay running.

Haven't killed Soa yet I take it? Besides, the number of times of I've been stuck and /stuck didn't do ANYTHING and/or clipping was occuring so couldn't fast travel constitutes a significant enough series of bugs to complain about. I've been kicked out of WZs moments before a victory due to the AFK timer because my character rez'd dead and couldn't get back up.

Sad to see this. I've long thought that SWTOR is a fantastic game thats been executed poorly. I always hoped that they'd be given enough time to iron out the kinks. Almost every MMO made by a major developer has had to endure a period where the game continues to find itself following launch Crew skills being non-competitive, failure to launch ranked pvp, buggy patches and extremely imbalanced servers (and no LFG tools cross server or otherwise) has killed this game for a lot of people even though they enjoy the core game and story itself. I worry about the future of the MMO genre, it seems that in order to produce a game on the kind of scale that could compete with a WoW or even a Rift, you need to sink an absurd quantity of monetary investment and time into it. Since only large public gaming companies can afford the investment we end up with a situation where developers aren't willing to step too far outside the box, be honest about the game they are developing, or have a chance to improve through iteration because they have deliver a winning product or have it labled a failure. Truth be told; neither WoW nor everquest were as polished as swtor at release or had content half as well designed or entertaining. However, both of these games had a long period of time to improve before competition from other games put their playerbase populations at risk. In EQ's case, the game was completely half-baked until mid-way through the second expansion pack and it wasn't really until the 3rd that it fell into own. WoW was similar, it found its footing during its second expansion pack but Blizzard iterated its content much faster. In either case, the year immediately following launch was brutal from a service and quality perspective. In fact, by those standard SWTOR is practically a shining example of how an MMO should launch. That said, I worry that the weight of its initial investment cost (whether financed or simply from the perspective of ROI) and that it might hamstring the game's future development. I mean what if it stabilizes at 600K subs? are they going to stop adding new content? shut the game down? If it were a privately owned company pushing a game that constituted the bulk of their existing capital investment; sure. A public company thats expecting a certain level of ROI and a low tolerance for risk? Not so much. I'd use EVE as a good example, great game published by a great company that makes the occasional GIGANTIC blunder (boot.ini, monacle-gate, etc) yet because of willingness (most of the time) to be honest with their playerbase about problems with the game and listen to feedback in a fashion that actually makes it seems like they are listening to players (something swtor does pretty well, WOW does it horribly) they've always recovered and in many cases grown stronger following a period of major difficulties. In the realm of large publicly traded companies there doesn't seem to be any room for "sticking with it", it seems that the moment the playerbase goes down a bit they fire half of the development team and go into turtle mode producing the minumum amount of content possible to slow subscriber bleed. Even though it seems like SWTOR has great devs that listen to the players (or at least did until these layoffs), they may never get the chance to iterate this game to its full potential.

<3 my Mara. Annihilation is still the top DPS spec in the game as far as I know and our utility and CDs are bad*ss.

What raids have you been doing? Anyone whose done HM or NM raids knows that DPS is usually the problem. There is also a subtle meta-game at play in swtor right now; melee dps do more dps than ranged on average, they also require more healing. There is a balance point where you have maximized dps for the available healing. If you stack melee you will die due to taking too much damage. If you stack ranged you will have a lot harder time making it in under the enrage timers. Right now the game favors ranged as the reduction to dps is not equal to the increase in healing required. Also, there are a few classes that aren't well balanced and are currently outliers to these trends.

The greatest tier of raiding in any MMO to date, anyone who says otherwise either is jealous they weren't there or has no idea what they are talking about. Velious era EQ was raiding done right and despite being the hardest raiding out there; there was no hard cap on the number of players you could bring, the first time we killed the Avatar of War we had a 65 man raid.

1. Large scale server merge, we need more players on all servers not just the light ones. 2. Cross-Server WZs 3. Same server LFG tool (wouldn't need to be cross server if they did a merge)

I nominate this as the official Constitution of the Interwebz