You can buy a wristband from the fleet cantina vendor that allows you into the VIP lounge. It's... one million credits, if I recall.

Yeah it does, actually. And "Star Wars" is fantasy. It makes absolutely no attempt to ground its story in scientific reality, which is kind of required to be "science fiction."

You underestimate the fanatic's capacity to rationalize something as quality, and continue to spend piles of money on it, no matter how awful it may be. The Star Wars Expanded Universe novels are an excellent example of this, as was how Star Trek Online got away with charging $25 for new ships on top of the monthly subscriber charge.

No, it wouldn't and no, it isn't. Five levels does not bring anything new to the table. It's just five more levels of the same thing. By contrast, all of WoW's expansions have introduced new game systems, and sometimes completely overhauled old ones. When somebody buys a WoW expansion, they're getting practically a whole new game. City of Heroes created whole new factions in City of Villains and Going Rogue. Even LotRO introduces new concepts with its expansions, such as legendary weapons, skirmishes and mounted combat. Five levels is just a change in the game's mathematics.

One planet is not a lot of content at all. One planet is the equivalent of one zone in World of Warcraft. Adding another planet is roughly the same (at best) as adding the Isle of Quel'Danas during The Burning Crusade. Definitely not worth paying for like it's a true expansion.

Nothing, and quite frankly people should really stop begging game companies to charge them extra.

Space was being developed for Galaxies effectively from the beginning and was split off to be its own expansion only towards the end of initial development. "It's in development" could range from "It's on the concept board" to "it's almost finished" to "we haven't emptied the rubbish bin where we tossed it yet." And since they're still developing on-rails space missions, apparently, it seems incredibly unlikely that space is getting a 3D off-rails revamp. Making new on-rails missions for something they're planning on scrapping would be a waste of resources, and maintaining both on-rails and free space simultaneously would be a development nightmare - the same reason Sony refused to have pre-NGE servers for Galaxies, or Blizzard refuses to open Vanilla/TBC/WotLK/Cataclysm-capped servers.

Because anybody who would play this game and go to a Star Wars convention already knows about it. It's really not a big deal. Or even a little deal.

The story in TOR being "about you" is what makes the game feel like a single-player game with co-op mode. Think about it. Every single smuggler has their ship stolen - by the same guy - on Ord Mantell; every agent is Cipher Nine; every Inquisitor becomes Lord Zash's apprentice after being forced to go from slavery to Korriban. Making the story "about you" strips the player characters of individuality. Of course, you could choose to ignore the stories, but then that makes the stories irrelevant, even obstructive. Granted, Blizzard has gone too far the other way with World of Warcraft, going so far as to make a special effort to tell you how insignificant and meaningless your character is, but still. At least in that game I don't see another character of the same class and know they have been given the same code designation that I have.

I'd like to know why, if you have to respawn, it forces you out of the instance. I can't think of any other game that doesn't dump you back at the entrance - inside the instance.

Diablo 3 isn't a MMO. I have no idea why people keep lumping it into the category.

That is the point. There is no intrinsic or technical reason AC respeccing cannot be allowed. It would in no way break the game. The decisions to disallow AC respeccing was based on financial concerns, and now the financial circumstances have changed. Therefore it is very possible, and perhaps even probable, that BioWare will reverse itself.

I know what reduction ad absurdum is, and that argument wasn't it. Reductio is only valid when it actually addresses the points made by the argument it is supposed to be reducing; when used poorly, as in this case, it's only a set-up to create a straw man argument. So get off your snotty horse.

It is a false analogy, as respeccing is already in the game; there just happens to be an arbitrarily placed barrier between half of the specs, placed there because BioWare's entire endgame plan to keep people subbed was leveling alts and they only have four classes in the game. There is a difference between removing that barrier, and allowing race or faction changes. And since nobody in this thread is arguing for those, what you're really doing is creating a straw man argument. Fallacies may win debates, but that doesn't make them legitimate arguments. Slippery slope can be an applicable argument only if you can show the progression from point A to point D. You did not do that.

Apparently neither do you. Slippery slope and false analogy arguments don't show anything.