Except that you do not pay twice. There is an update/patch/dlc about every two months. They contain some content that is unlocked through the cartel market. The developers aim to price that unlockable content so that it will cost around 1000 cartel coins. This means that if you subscribe for two months you get the unlockable content for no extra charge. Almost as if you had gotten it as part of your subscription ... You pay 10 dollars for the subscription and get 5 dollars worth of cartel coins to spend as you see fit. They could also have charged you the full 15 dollars and made you accept whatever they decided to add in a patch. Instead if you do not like e.g. the Cathar playable race you can spend your coins on something else. Or you go F2P and spend about 15 dollars a month on the weekly unlocks. I guess if they had added the option to subscribe at a discount without the complementary cartel coins it would have been clearer how the system works. But then no doubt some other people would have found fault with that as well.

Trolling works better if you don't announce your intention.

And then ask actual lesbians about those movies and realise that they are made by men for men and that it has nothing to do with lesbians. Not even in the actresses.

I would not bet against the following whinefest: I wanted to play and the servers are down on european prime time. I will stop playing unless Bioware gives me a double xp weekend (and a pony).

Yeah, well, Jedi are all about helping others. Troopers are all about: if you can not walk you find somebody to carry you (back to the medic) And smugglers are all about: me myself and I (so they shouldn't be in a group to begin with) Or maybe, that was some good advice to stop the OP giving himself an ulcer (I do have to add though that in my experience it is not a teenager thing but a man thing to refuse to read the instruction manual. Women on the other hand tend to find those things too complicated to read... Yay. Done with today's equal opportunity stereotyping )

Or it was somebody having a good time trolling the ops ...

I remember how a year ago today these boards were all filled with: I hate this game, it is going to fail and GW2 is coming out soon and it will be the second coming to end all other MMOs Yeah, did not work out quite that way then either. Makes me wonder though what game we will read about next year that is 'going to cause SW:TOR to fail'. Oh, and I do feel sorry for Bethesda for being saddled with the same impossible to meet expectations of the more rabid players looking for the game to bring back that sense of awe and wonder of their first MMO experience. The backlash of nerd-rage and hatred from jilted lovers (who learned painfully that the subject of their worship was just another game after all) is going to poison their community as well, just as it did with this game, GW2 and in fact every game for the past several years.

On the other hand, no amount of voicing your dislike will change the opinion of people who enjoyed Galaxies in either of its disguises. The point is that game did not give you what you wanted out of a game. And number of subscribers is not a measure of success. Or at least not the only one. I think we can safely say that none of the semi finalists of last years American (or any other country) Idols is as good a singer as, say, Lisa Gerard or Isabel Bayrakdarian yet millions more people listen to them. Galaxies was not a technically good game, and due to a botched launch and a botched attempt to boost subscriber numbers, never gained much popularity. However it was highly innovative for its time (and contrary to popular belief its graphics were at launch beyond cutting edge) and as a result it offered an experience to players that was, and to an extent still is, unique. Most important was that it was a game that was designed with flexibility, open endedness and fostering community in mind. If you read back you will see that most people who laud the game do so because of either the space combat (it was the first MMO to offer a fully 3D combat simulation) or because of the strong community (through player cities, cantinas, large scale PvP battles, RP support). Just as the open-endedness drove many potential players away, it drew others. It does not, in and of itself, make it a bad game, merely a niche one. And yes, the flexibility and open-endedness of the game made for a balance problem of epic proportions. None of the iterations ever got it right, not even after they cut out the classless system and inserted a more traditional class system instead. Part of the reason for that is because of the very nature of the problem of trying to merge a PvP and PvE game, but that is a game design theory issue and not really suited for this particular discussion. And in part it was because the original classes never were meant to be balanced and trying to keep their essential nature intact while bringing them in line with a PvP system proved to be all but impossible. Never mind the non-combat classes in a game that became a lot more PvP focussed all of a sudden. Nobody, well hardly anybody, will claim that Galaxies was technically a good game, for that it had too much issues and baggage dragging it down. But most will argue that it had many good ideas that even if not perfectly executed still gave a wide variety of playing styles a place in that game. Comparing the games is pointless, calling them apples and oranges is misleading as those are still both fruits and the two game do not have even that much in common. But discussions like this do serve a purpose in reminding the players, and suggesting to the developers, that there can, and should, be more to a game than PvP and endgame raids. To pull out the 'Bartle Suits' again, The Old Republic is focussed strongly on Achievers and Killers, but sadly neglects Explorers and Socialisers. Especially the last group is essential for building communities in a game and thus providing reasons for players to stay with a game. Galaxies was much more balanced in its appeal and is therefor remembered more fondly, and retained its niche players who stuck with the game despite the mishandling of it by the various development teams (both original and later).

Jar Jar Binks did it ...

It is because the hutts, bless their wormy bodies and greedy little hearts, have mastered the use of surface to air missiles, anti-air defenese and even set up Low Orbit Air Defense Systems. So should you try to fly they will immediately shoot you down with at least three different defense systems. Also flying allows you to bypass most content and reach places (like the backside of each world) that you are not supposed to reach.

Which version of Galaxies are you refering to? The before or the after? But in truth the three games are all quite different, appealed to different groups of players and each found their own unique ways in failing to quite deliver What Ralph Kosters' game did was providing a lot of (for the time) innovative systems to play around with. The skill system was something we have rarely seen in in MMOs before or after (EVE has an even deeper skill system but it doesn't force a choice on their players, TESO is another example of a game where players decide their role not the game). Similarly the crafting system was far more involved and free (and difficult) than other games had or have, though Vanguard has an interesting take on it as well crafting actually is a challenging minigame. The game had several new ways in which it aimed to build communities, and is as far as I can tell the only game to date where a non-combat profession was not only possible but useful and fun in its own right (for the small percentage of players who enjoy the social role above all else). Where it failed is that Koster overestimated a) the complexity of the many systems, leading to most of them being not quite implemented and tested by the time the game shipped and b) the number of players willing to develop their own goals in the game. The transition from tutorial to involved gameplay was very hard and created a learning curve so steep that only few players were willing to attempt it. The game needed so much more things to get players started into the game, from which they could build their own goals. The Old Republic is in so many ways the polar opposite of Galaxies that comparison is all but impossible and attempts to force the two together will cause both to annihilate each other in an earth destroying explosion matter+antimatter style. It has a lot of content but they are in the form of jobs not of systems. They also have remarkably little -depth- to them, in that they require not a great deal of skill, merely a lot of time and perseverence for the most part. Crafting is 'gather materials, press buttons, wait for identical item #1358421' and as a result while there is something of trading going on there is no -market- where people can offer unique wares and services the way you had with Galaxies. You can jump right into The Old Republic and the game will take you by the hand and lead you on the way (unfortunately it will never let go of your hand and stop leading you either), something that was entirely absent of Galaxies. If you got 'into' the game in the very narrow window you had for it you likely were a convert for life. Otherwise you threw it out in disgust. The Old Republic is very PvP centric, while Galaxies could well be used as a case study of why trying to mix PvE and PvP in the same game rarely works out well for either. Galaxies also was an early case study in a development staff biting off too much to chew and then running out of time and resources to implement it all. Funnily enough the same happened to Bioware as well (and they should have known better), but then again this happens to probably nine out of ten development studios when they try to tackle an even moderately innovative MMO. So the question should not be 'which game is better' but 'which game better fit my prefered playing style'. Prefering one or the other is not a value judgement but a personal preference. Both are valid game designs (though not equally popular).

Except friends, obviously

*shrugs* For the past year every single mmo coming to the market has been hailed on this forum as the game that would cause SW:TOR to fold and die. Yet the game is still here and doing about as well (again) as it did shortly after launch. You do have to wonder though where the incessant need to see this game fail comes from. I can not think of any other game in the past decade that has such a dedicated following of haters that was paying a monthly subscription just to be able to tell the other players how much they hated the game and excpected it to fail 'any moment now'

You are not that far off. Only it was pruning back the fingerbones of all those thousands of jedi skeletons that wouldn't stay burried...

Actually, games that are serious about raiding/ops tend to have besides the heal team and the tank/offtank team and if necessary the splitters and pullers also one or more -main assists- whose role it is to provide guidance by example for the grunt dps (just as the lead healer sets up the heal rotation for any difficult fight). Main assists always work closely together with the tank(s) to maximise dps while minimising pulling aggro and other 'cute' surprises a boss may have in store. It will take a while for SW:TOR to reach that level (or descend to it, depending on how you look at it). Yeah, thankfully it does not work like that here. Many fights in WoW have by now been so automated that you can practically run them unattended through a macro. At least this game still has it so that a careless dps can easily pull aggro from a mob, and the group needs to cooperate at least to a certain degree for success. *shrugs* it is the same starting point that Darth used. Just the bare essentials of the way this game dynamics are set up. Once you get into the actual fights it is time for the immortal words of Emily Pond: "Here is where it gets complicated kids" That is an unwarrented slur. Considering the lack of healers and tanks in this, and pretty much any, game, you can safely say that players who play those two classes do think the role to be more fun and interesting as dps. And no, I certainly do not use it to denigrate the dps. They have a vital role to play and while their difficulties are different, they are not less. The only point I would like to make is that unlike the tank who must create a lot of threat, and the healer who can not avoid doing so, the dps class can control how much and where they generate their threat (which is considerable) and have a responsibility to do so with a certain amount of intelligence. Just jumping in, start laying down the big nukes and then explain that 'it is the role of the healer to keep them alive' is equally something that went out of the window a decade ago. You may feel a tad defensive about how the OP worded his 'rules', but if you look past that at how the mechanics of combat work you can see that he explains the basic interdependency of the various roles. Some players may insist on misreading it, but those are few and far between. Pretty much every healer I know, talked to or played with (including some pretty awe inspiring healers in EQ 1 raids) agrees that you try to keep -everybody- alive, but that underneath that directive there is a triage and that the dps is low on that list. Precisely because they alone have control over their threat generation.