A couple of meters tall, a meter wide. Around at least in the Rep Fleet in the Combat, Crew Skills, Galactic Market etc sections where you go from higher, inner sections to the lower one.

So far I haven't been able to get a single group with it on my new, mainly Standard, server to which I transferred. That said, I was on it with less than two hours with two different characters seeking a Rep group to Athiss with a dps and an Imp groups mainly to do dailies with a tank.

More like devastating...

The cutscenes were supposed to be in the launch version the same as they are in beta. They were even praised better than SWTOR's cinematicals by Forbes magazine... Their simplicity being a homage to Guild Wars' roots of Asian RPGs and serving gameplay by not being up to much, so that you wouldn't spend much time with them. Has ArenaNet got cold feet or are the enhanced cutscene claims just speculation by desperate GW2 fans?

Of course they didn't announce that. In reality, it's the "solo MMO" that people claimed SWTOR would be for the main PvE story, but it's that to draw in the Elder Scrolls fans. It has PvP to draw in others and so on. A mix of existing MMO features, with some attempt to resurrect largely forgotten features, like public dungeos. It will have something of SWTOR, some of Elder Scrolls, and much from previous MMOs. The fact is that even when all contenders to WoW have sadly failed - including SWTOR, which frankly, depresses me - some game will eventually make the big breakthrough. The game which will be the "next WoW" might not be the most innovative or even the best one around according to hardcores and game media. Amalur and DMO having fallen from the competition, Elder Scrolls Online might not have to be truly great to do well or even achieve that breakthrough, which each year makes more likely as WoW ages.

No, just a credit card and a few dozen euros ready to be used to the game every month or even every week.

GW2 "cult" is driven by a fanatic fanbase figuratively whipped into a frenzy by the developer; the fans of Elder Scrolls series seem to approach Elder Scrolls Online with apprehension and even dislike (it's largely a version of the "I don't want SWTOR, I want KOTOR 3" with less defenders of MMO installment for the series, with added complaint about losing the first-person view in effect if not necessarily in theory etc). It's unlikely to be hyped to heavens, although some hype will naturally appear. I think the expectations for it both among media and gamers will be relatively modest when it comes out.

The article is just a fantasy written by an apparent GW2 superfan to an audience GW2 fans. It's a ridiculously piece of partisanship and just a sermon preached to GW2 believers, who fill the comment section. It's an example, both the article and the comments, of the GW2 superhype campaign that goes far beyond what has been seen for any MMO before - or is likely to be seen ever for any other MMO.

It won't. The basic way the planets have been made works against that. A partial cure would be to just put taxi points and some quests in "enemy territory" on the planets where the areas of the planet have been divided, but not by physical barriers. It would lead to more encounters between the different sides. Another possible cure would be to create level 50 zones on the most important lower planets, like the capital planets. I for example would think that PvP zones on both capital planets would be great successes. Fight the enemy in your capital, with an NPC invasion occurring in the PvE parts of the capital as a result of a loss, for example. But... I think that most of the planets are too big and there are too many of them considering how much people are passing through them even at the best of times on the most crowded servers. The planets that work best are the smaller ones. I think that either all the planets should have been at most the size of the capital planets or that we would have been given let's say just half of the current planets and with more of the action concentrated on them to create larger populations.

GW2 is not a PvP game. Everybody who thinks so is deluding themselves. GW2's core is PvE, with attached, optional PvP. WAR is a PvP game. What comes to "lifeless", there is some truth to that, but no more than in most other MMOs (I took part in TSW's latest beta weekend, and what I saw there was at least as lifeless as in SWTOR). Personally I don't think that BW has made the best use of the many detailed, big planets they have made, using them to too large an extent as mere backgrounds. In this I see the solo-RPG heritage of BW showing through; SWTOR planets have a bit more life to them as the worlds of BW's solo-RPG games, but not by much, and yet nobody really complains about the lifelessness in let's say in the ME series. None of the SWTOR planets would draw complaints if we would have met them in KOTOR 3. But they are something that BW should work on.

Of course it has: The official SWTOR forums where GW2 fans come to troll and hawk their game.

I don't think this game can actually handle cross-server instances the way it has been built.

the media and web barrage against it from the assorted trolls and GW2 fans has been constant for the last five months. Sites like Gamespy - and even Forbes! - are attacking SWTOR in behalf of ArenaNet claiming that everything that would be otherwise better in SWTOR actually make it worse, because it's otherwise better features supposedly hamper "gameplay" - like better cinematicals... About 98 % of comments to the latest Gamespy "GW2 is better than SWTOR in everything" article were from rabid GW2 fans and when a couple of people dared to protest, they were declared to be "Biodrones" and the GW2 trolls wondered why their posts were even allowed to be seen... NCSoft and ArenaNet must have spent a fortune in these kind of "viral" campaigns to up their game and discredit SWTOR. Personally, I have grown to loath everything in GW2, it's maker, publisher and fans.

Because they get constantly beaten in GW2's "fabled" PvP to people who have bought their equipment with real money when they themselves wear stuff earned through gameplay?

That fact will be silenced both in the media and the internet by the ArenaNet fanboys.