You do realise there is a solo mode to allow you to do the story aspect of SF right? Kind of makes the rest of your post pointless when you start it off like this ... I know there are solo modes but they are also different then the heroic modes. I lucky completed all the heroic modes over the last few weeks so I got to progress the story to that point. Sadly those who did not will get to enjoy spamming outside the instance entrance for a while and hopefully find folks looking to do it in their limited play window.

I really get the sense that those who claim MMOs are all about grouping and nerfs added to the game that make it almost impossible to not group on core story elements (SFs) tend to highlight a disconnect in the community as a whole. PC Gamers, by a large margin, are aging... younger generations (with a lot more time on their hands) are more involved in consoles and as such the MMO genre as a whole needs to change with it. One option is to abandon the PC environment, and develop for consoles, which will permit you to continue to make grinds that allow those with time to show off their willingness to fall victim to the skinner box. The second option is to understand that your base is aging and with age comes responsibilities outside the game. Understand they like the idea, by a large margin, of logging in for 30 minutes or an hour and accomplishing some tasks before going about the routine of their adult lives. Everyone is always so surprised that WoW is still king of the hill after all these years but one of the chief reasons they are is because they identified the aging of their base. The key is to accept as a firm that someone is going to be mad at you. The 3 or 4% (what it was in WoW) that want everything so hard as to exclude everyone who does not turn the game into a full time job or the remainder who enjoy a challenge that is not designed to be a brick wall. At the end of the day there are many ways to make the majority of the players happy (at least part of the time). The thing is there is only one way to make the top few percent happy and that is to be punitive to those who are not part of their strata. For them the game is about being in the exclusive club and the only way to be in that club is to create it first.

I think new MMOs are running into an issue that WoW never had to deal with. Before WoW and its instanced raids you had world bosses or shared dungeons. No rage timers or scripted encounters... you just ran up with your group, whatever the size, and tried your luck. This dynamic element met that the players were driving the end game more then the developers. I can't count how many times a few friends and I decided to go and see how far we could make it in one of the epic dungeons as a small group when normally those instances where for 30+. We did not need the gear just wanted to try it out for size. Also had the reverse when we had issues with stuff we could throw more people at it (using quanity as a quality). Because of the open design it let us decide how we wanted to handle stuff and made content we had been though before more enjoyable (even when we needed no gear out of it). That also goes for PvP. In DAoC (before Realm Abilities) we would PvP because it met something. You where defending your relics from the other two realms, and those relics gave faction wide bonuses. In both PvP and PvE there was no grind (once you reached max level). All they did was have you finish your epic quest, get your class armor as a reward, and off to doing whatever you wanted to do. There was no more gear grinding or forced raiding. You did as you wanted and never got punished in PvP or PvE for not playing the developers subscribed way (IE not wanting to raid or PvP all day). Before WoW most people did things in MMOs they thought was fun... How many people really log on at raid night and think to themselves: "I don't care if I get something... this is just going to be fun." How many PvPers log in and think "I can't wait to PvP because win or lose it will be a blast." Thats the root issue right now in MMOs (TOR not excluded)... They think moving the carrot is the way to keep people having fun failing to see that people really are not having fun... they are just wasting time until the next best thing comes along promising to offer a bigger carrot.

This game will not disappear anytime soon... That being said I did cancel my sub a few days ago. I will play while I have time but without any meaningful PvP I just can't see sticking around. This is not a Bioware issue so much as it is an industry issue. At some point (right around WoW) the MMO makers decided to treat PvP players like the red headed stepchildren of MMOs. What bugs me the most is how Bioware took a page from Blizzard and turned PvP into a mini-game in a MMO that is about war... really? I still can't understand how the company that took over Mythic's operations decided to go with the WoW minigame PvP yet the company founded by ex-blizzard employees (ArenaNet) decided to go the Mythic route for PvP.

I figured I have 3 months paid up so by then they should have gotten something interesting together or GW2 should have a release date posted. If they can get PvP interesting I will keep my SW sub and play GW2 on the side... if they can't well... like WoW this will be a memory. Bioware hit the ball out of the park in PvE but it has been nothing but fail in PvP.

Well put! While I normally finish matches at ~250K DPS (assuming I am not forced to defend an objective because my team runs off in their greens) it is still depressing to see the next highest pure DPS at 55K... One time I watched form stealth as a team member attacked a 11.5K HP sniper just to die to him without taking more then 10% of his health in the process... same sniper died in 3 hits when I attacked. Even vs equally geared people he could not manage to play...

I was not kidding... a good operative is still something to be concerned about. Between them and Snipers it is the only two classes I really don't want to face. Some tank specs can be a pain (if their CDs are up) but no where near as bad as Agents.

I started WoW when the servers spent more time down then up (day of release, I was even a beta tester before they changed the skill system) Agreed. SW:TOR had a very clean release and it is to their credit it went so well. All games come with their bugs. I am a Software Developer by trade and I have yet to release any application which did not have a bug of some sort... it is just the nature of the profession. You can't plan for everything. He was not complaining about the issues with the game... those were just items he noted after having a more dramatic issue with the games core functionality. If PvP was remotely enjoyable I am sure he would have looked past the majority of the other issues because he was having fun overall. PvP is an issue in this game... It is pointless once you reach valor rank 60... I log on to do my PvP quests for a chance at BM tokens then log out... no real reason continue to PvP because it is pointless (instanced combat that has NO EFFECT at all is not fun). Faction imbalance means that open world PvP (Ilum) is pointless because the people there have reason to not leave the center objective thus they stay as one big zerg which can not be matched. Even if Ilum was more active why do people actually do it? Quests. The issue with PvP is they tried, like WoW, to turn it into a PvE mini-game where they replace NPCs with other people. They failed to note that PvPers don't want to grind... they want to kill people and have a real reason to do it (not for gear but to defend their home/faction). SWTOR spends HOURS of time with class quests... to give you reason to level... beyond just leveling. We all had it happen when we where leveling up; it would get near time to log but you just could not walk away because you really wanted to see what happened next in your class quest. It gave you a reason outside the core aspect to PvE. Yet when it comes to PvP they are happy to settle with 'Win 3 Matches and get a bag.' Fear not if you lose the match it will be reset next time you come in... without any work or penalty for your failure. You end up feeling disconnected from the game as a whole since what you do does not really matter. Somehow BioWare took over Mythic and still decided to go with the WoW version of PvP (a bad copy of it) yet ArenaNet was formed by ex-Blizzard employees and they went with the Mythic version of PvP. I don't look forward to Guild Wars 2 because it is new or flashy... TERA would be my game if that was the case... I look forward to Guild Wars 2 because they are finally trying the DAoC model of PvP again and still keeping the Arena Based model for WoW/SWTOR players who will need time to come to accept a world based PvP system that matters.

^ this

Humans are evil by nature... in every day life we seem nice but it is only because we fear reprisal for our acts... take away the reprisal and our uncultured nature surfaces.

Yet... So when you thought the team lost it was proof how un-OP it was... but when you are corrected it proves nothing... has no value?

Some healing classes are scaling a bit to well with gear based on my experience (again just my observations so don't get all up in arms). Add to that if the BM geared healer has a BM geared tank guarding them that part of the map is dead to you, well unless you have 3 or 4 friends, and for whatever reason all their DPS is absent and won't come running in the next 2 or 3 minutes. Basically it goes like this... you and your friends attack the guarded healer... you get taunted by the tank next to him. 30% of your damage is gone for 6 seconds of battle... during which some classes have their biggest bursts. As you continue to beat on said healer you have a tank, who can also do reasonable damage, being on you. After preventing all the casts you can you quickly learn the lesson that your counter cast ability only locks out the spell and not the school... So he just uses other spells to help keep him and his tank up. After a while you figure out maybe we need to down the tank so we can burst the healer... at which point everyone jumps the tank while one guy keeps the healer busy... this seems to start working but then BOOM everyone has some form of CC on them and both the healer and the tank get a few seconds room to heal up full. tldr: Some healers scale better in gear then others but the real issue is how unkillable geared healers become in groups.

The issue with making them spawn faster, and the quest completion easier, is it will just make the disparity between the factions in PvP that much worse. Imps will end up with an extra champ/bm bag every day with little effort while republic players will more or less be shut out of ilum like they are now.

Think about how many times we saw posts to the effect 'Lord Vivicar keeps one shotting me' and then ask yourself if this is self explanatory.

I love stopping a Tracer Missile... half of them panic and run and the other half just stand there like 'what do I do now.'