That's a lot of emperors. :V

Not my fault he uses the same stats as Vette. I'm certainly not going to buy two sets of the same gear... :V Ahahahahaha. No. http://www.eveonline.com/ http://www.mortalonline.com/ http://www.gamersfirst.com/fallenearth/ And so on. Two of the most successful MMOs (lineage 1, ragnarok 1) started out as practically indie developers. But hey, let's bash on the indie scene blindly to make ourselves unsee the sewer that is the current AAA game industry.

And unsub until they get some real news. :V

Yes. It needs to aim for star wars. Where is my space combat? And no, on-rails isn't star wars.

This is the best part. Free items galore. :V

Yes, yes I was. Jawas stole so many people's boot.inis. Ed: Relevant,

This. This is a lot more important than any issue the OP could be talking about.

Indeed, there is never enough drama. Yes. I agree with this not belonging into SW, but (sadly) the game isn't made to handle pvp servers. The core of open world pvp should be risk vs reward, and there is no risk in swtor (you die, you respawn, you play on as if nothing happened), so there's nothing stopping 55s ganking people trying to do quests on tatooine, other than them getting bored of it. And with the amount of players in an MMO, there'll always be someone doing it. Randomly killing people needs to be discouraged for open world PVP to work. See: every single pvp game mmo that didn't die at launch (uo, eve, l2, etc). Like, alternate voice actors? I don't see why not, but do you mean for the whole story? Because that'd likely be pretty expensive. Not very likely to happen, either way. I honestly can't comment on that as I don't notice them (I play on a 30" and after I get used to my cooldowns I no longer use/look at quickbars, just use hotkeys). I'd honestly rather see more advanced class branches. Sith Sorcerer could branch into an alchemst + something else that's basically just sorcerer++. That way, BW avoids massive costs of making a complete new story, and we get 16 new classes, basically. I do agree with combat being clucky. I wouldn't say it needs to be simplified though, just... streamlined for a lack of better word. I came back to the game temporarily after 1.5 years of not playing, and still think the game is amazing, but the whole "ok let's give everyone 3+ bars worth of skills+consumables, then have all except 3-4 skills have 30s+ cooldowns so they can't use them 95% of the time" is, quite frankly, dumb. Skills shouldn't be balanced by cooldowns but by resource usage. See: commando aoe full auto thingy. 0 cooldown, decent aoe damage, but has a high activation cost, and it's up to you to decide whether you'll use it 5 times in a row, then stand there and autoattack because you're out of ammo and something survived. Consoles have two problems with this. One is, MMOs will never run on xbox because microsoft is dumb (their patch policy feels like it was written in the 1970s, and we all know how hotfixes happen in MMOs), WiiU is, computational power wise, comparable to a microwave. A bit above a toaster, but not by a lot. That leaves us with PS4 and PC. Seeing how the PS4 is an AMD x86 PC, I don't see why not. Would likely require a special controller with tons of keys, though.

I'm... not so sure about that. Yes about more MMOs because they tried to jump on the bandwagon. No about features. When WoW released, the MMO market was already saturated in the east, with two epic games. In the west, either due to lack of marketing or general lack of interest in eastern products (I think both), the market was empty though. EQ had what, 1 million subs in it's best days. Maybe it's the culture and asian people just like playing with others better (considering the fact that in most their MMOs, party is required from level 10 to 99 for effective playing, I'd say yes). Then, Warcraft came about, and managed to snare 10mil+ subs in a couple years - suddenly everyone is making games that are nothing more than wow clones (see: rift, swtor), each with some sort of gimmick that has little consequence (swtor: story, voice acting; rift: different skill trees, rifts). I dare say that if wow didn't get the amount of subs it did, we'd have more variation in MMOs. Currently, we have a total of three (yes, just 3) MMOs that allow for heavy customization of characters. One is EVE (though not through character stats, but through ship loadouts), but EVE is primarily a PVP game, so let's leave it out for now. We all know sandboxes are superior anyway. The next game is DDO (dungeons & dragons online, 6+ years old), which is based on 3.5 edition of D&D. It allows for everything D&D allows for. You can build a warforged wizard with 18 str and 12 int, splash some fighter/monk and you have a self-buffing, self-healing melee DPS with evasion. It's not as good DPS as a pure melee, and it's not as good at buffing as a pure arcane (buffs last less time), but it's good enough at both to hold it's own in a fight. The last game is RO (ragnarok online, 11+ years old). It also has a 6-stat system, similar to d&d, but not based on it. You start with 1 in each stat, and put stats in as you level up. It also allows you to build anything. From 5-attacks-per-second, can't-hit-me agility attack speed+dodge knights, to tank rogues that you can't hit very often due to high dodge, to melee/agi wizards/clerics that deal melee and spell damage/heal at the same time. And the best part is, all these builds, in both games, can work well. Can you make a melee sorcerer in swtor that doesn't suck? Nope, you can't. And this is why WoW clones are bad. Because let's face it, we only have one stat that gives everything plus endurance, and the others do nothing whatsoever. With no stat distribution, we can't make a build to our liking. Can you imagine how awesome customization we'd have if: 1) Strength increases all melee damage from all melee attacks, increases knockback/knockdown resistance. 2) Willpower increases force damage and healing, increases resistance to CC effects, mental effects. 3) Cunning improves your dodge, alacrity, and crit chance/damage. 4) Aim increases ranged weapon damage, tech damage and healing, accuracy. 5) Endurance increases HP and damage reduction. Then give us real skill trees, not trees full of stupid passives that increase something or another by 1-3%, and suddenly I can build a strength/cunning melee sorcerer. Or, I can build a melee operative, that hits like a truck with his vibro knife. Or I can build a ranged assassin with insane DPS, but almost no HP/defenses. I can build a willpower/endurance tank that can't get CC'd but lacks ranged or melee dps to hold aggro in pve (this would be awesome in huttball, for example). And so on. Instead, since wow succeeded, we have had _zero_ new games that offer this kind of customization. We just get a class served and can do with it what the developer intended, then if we want to play the class more, but not the same two/three builds all the time, well... crap. TL;DR: wow clones have cut back on "features", because wow is nothing but a badly designed MMO with little customization, and it's only being saved by it's sheer simplicity. There are literally hundreds of thousands of players, maybe even millions, who would love a new, modern MMO that allows proper character building. Instead we are stuck with DDO/RO for PVE and EVE/UO for PVP. Go figure. I guess this is what I was trying to say with my post...

I really hope this changes soon, as it's dumb and unproductive :< For me, players have no gender (characters do, but players don't) until I've met them IRL.

Never played EQ, but lineage 2 was similar afaik and still is an awesome game, and is still massively popular in russia and asia. It never really got going in the west for some reason. Unfortunately, none of my friends ever really played it, so neither have I (I have a level 60 char on the europe server, but that's it). As for not having many subscribers, Ragnarok Online topped at 25 million subs worldwide according to Gravity, with now over 80 million accounts that have played it in the past, and, in it's peak, it barely had any quests worth mentioning apart from class change quests. It was just simply fun to play, even with it's primitive AI and simplistic design (similar to diablo2). It was also fun because it offered highly customizable characters: a proper stat system, somewhat similar to d&d, that allowed much much more freedom than what our silly passives trees and a single primary stat+endurance allow us here. Oh, and, it boasted a 30% female player population, something I've not seen since in any other MMO. Getting to level 99 (max) was a feat in it's own, and not getting there wasn't a big deal either, because there was no stupid automatic stat inflation as you leveled. A skilled and well built level 90 could wipe a group of 99s easily, something not even possible in current western mmos, due to automagic stat inflation (try going naked into black talon with your 55 and you'll see what I'm talking about). Even now, 11 years old, it is still massively popular in the east, sporting some 25 servers in Japan alone, and those servers hold up to 20k players each at peak times. That's the total amount of subs swtor has currently, for example and they get that many concurrent users. And it's still running a subscription based model there (so no, asian does not equal f2p). I'd still be playing it, but after some ~7 years, I kinda grew tired of it. Plus some of the later patches were not very fun, often quite obviously inspired by wow, probably by misguided project managers thinking they can take some of wow's (rather large) niche. Sadly, it's pretty terrible now (old skills/trees got obsoleted, stats made almost irrelevant, etc). If something new came out, that built upon what RO started (and nor RO nor RO2 aren't it, sadly), I'd go play that in a heartbeat. As with L2, I again have no idea why it didn't catch on in the west as much. I guess not enough promotion. It's really too bad,

Yes, of course. Another person also might also seem like a nice fellow most of the time. But when you put them behind the wheel of a car they _literally_ change personality. Also known as road rage. I don't see why we should would blame the internet for internet trolls. Do we blame roads for road rage? Or cars? Nope. Anyway, this is the point I've been trying to make. Internet/anonymity isn't the thing to blame here, just like we don't blame cars for road rage. The people that do these bad talks on the internet should be reported, processed and banned. Unfortunately, EA doesn't seem to be fast enough with banning these people. I'm on red eclipse, and twice already have I seen a random person saying he's gonna kill all swedes, yet he still wasn't banned. In gw2, the general chat is A LOT nicer. In the first couple days of the game, this happened (danger, some nasty language there): http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/yxx3m/suspensions_for_offensive_names_and_inappropriate/. Now, people are acting normally.

Why is getting one-shot a no-fun mechanic? You have 10 bishops standing by that can cast raise faster than you can say heal. You just have to come to the fight committed to the fact that you will lose some gold and xp. Just like adrenals, medpacs and whatever other consumables we might have, xp penalty for dying and gold for pots are consumables. I also played eve for 4 years. While that game had no hard pve to mention at the time (I hear they worked something in now), you quickly learned to not use anything you can't afford to lose. Getting one-shot wasn't a rare occurance, and losing ships often could actually hurt you financially (you didn't get your ship/equipment back on death, they exploded and got looted), but I still had tons of fun. Dying, especially in a game, doesn't have to be an un-fun mechanic.

Ah, but how often do you converse with 500+ people at the same time? Which is exactly what happens on fleet chat/coruscant/DK/etc. I'm sure if you could do that in real life, you'd find the ratio of douche/non-douche to be not too far apart, because the douches are the loudest ones. Yes, I'm sure some people use anonymity as an excuse to be rude. Yes, anonymity plays a role, no doubt about that. But it's still not anonymity that's to blame, it's the people.

Nope, I just know it's impossible to balance a boss in an open world. So you don't balance the boss, you balance the classes instead and let the PVP sort the rest out. You can still keep instances for the PVE people, but for the major bosses, it's just sad to see how they're now being farmed every day (or week, or whatever the developer decides the raid timer is), turning "epic boss" fights that should be epic things that only happen once in a while into a daily grinding chore. Lineage 2 had this right. To kill the hardest bosses, half the server had to cooperate to even begin to hope scratch them, at level. Many people died, many people lost gear, xp or gold but it was still great fun. And it was epic. It was one of the events where it really was an event, where all the players from the server would co-operate. I remember seeing valakas once, after a group tried to down it. They had ~300 people. They all died. There were corpses everywhere. :V For the "easier" bosses, 40 people could do it barely, 60 people could do it with ease, but since 60 people is easily covered by one clan, you had to get an alliance, for other clans to defend you against surprise PVP from enemy clans while you tried to do it. Or, get an alliance to wipe out everyone else, then steamroll the boss with 200 people before they enemy can come back from respawn. In either case, the battles were glorious. In short, I don't have anything against instances, but so-called "end-game" bosses should require more than 10-20 people working together, and the gear they should drop, while mildly better than other gear, should be mostly there for bragging. It's one thing to have the gear every 2nd dude on the server has, because they diligently ground daily hard/nightmare modes and/or raids. It's completely different to have a sword/armor/whatever that you can only get after you herd and lead 500 people to victory over a gigantic dragon that can kill 20 people with a single tail swing and kill it after 2 hours of battle.