Alot people forget that this game is new...

Try replacing "video game" or "entertainment" with the word "hobby" and consider what that means.

These are not just games, they are hobbies for people. Hobbies that people like to invest in, just like home brewing, carpentry or rebuilding a classic muscle car.

Developers pour far more money into these than most movies, records or any other form of entertainment.

These are not intended to be just games, and players don't want to consume them that way. Hence the passion and expectation for more.

I don't particularly love WOW or think it's such a great game. That's why I haven't really played (or paid) much in the past years.

However, if a company decides to create a WOW-clone with some voice acting as their main sales argument then I at least expect them to create a WOW-clone which is on par with Rift and other WOW-clones.

I really don't see how anyone can defend this game with the argument that they left WOW for something new when this game is actually just a really inferior copy of WOW. Same concept, same ideas for end-game (which are boring in WOW and SWTOR and all other clones IMHO), same class design, same game mechanics (again, badly copied but still a copy) but then not include all the things that WOW does do well (customizable UI, guild bank, combat log for heavens sake... and so on and so on).

How can you be satisfied with this? Do you not have any standards whatsoever?

I would have LOVED SWTOR to be a new and fresh experience. One of the reasons I feel so betrayed by BW is because it's neither new nor fresh... it's vanilla WOW with ST-skin. If I can't get anything fresh and new then I still would settle for old but at least well-developed/designed (such as learning from improvements that other companies added to their games in the past 10 years).

What we got with SWTOR was the quality and "polish" of a totally new game concept while not actually getting a new game concept. Simply a weak copy of WOW.

People claiming that this game is wonderful and BW are great must really want this game to fail and go f2p in a years time.

I on the other hand would hope that sooner or later BW can't ignore the unhappy customers on their forums and will move the games development in a positive direction so it becomes worthwhile to resub sometime in the future (not like most fail-launch MMOs that usually die out fairly fast).

Edit:
but to be quite honest my outrage is quickly turning to indifference (which is actually an even worse omen for SWTOR - outrage at least means that I care and am disappointed whereas indifference just means that I will bring my money to some other game and never look back).

Not saying the game still isn't new, but.....

When does it cease to be 'new'?

This. I want my date to not only know exactly what I want in a mate, but I expect her to be everything I want in a mate after our first night out. She's had her entire life to be perfect for me, so this shouldn't be an issue. I also want the house remodeled, 1.8 cars, 2.3 kids, a nice fluffy retirement and my kids' college educations paid for, and I expect everything hand delivered by next Tuesday. That's the problem with living one's life through MMOs. Reality gets kind of ... skewed.

Good question. I was an Alpha tester in Final Fantasy 14. We complained to SE about loads of problems. We were always shut down by people preaching the game was great and that we should go back to WoW for trying to improve the game.

"It's just Alpha. It'll get better. They will fix it"
"It's just Beta. They'll fix everything"
"It's just pre-launch. It'll be fine"
"The game is new. The next patch will fix things!"
"The big content patch is comming, things will be great!"

FF14 now has less then 14k subs, and they are completely rebuilding the engine in hopes of saving the game.

Constructive criticism is needed for every game to improve it. When it gets shut down by people preaching the game is great and those features are not needed is when things start to fall.

The game is, at its core, fun to play.

All the other features can be added. That is the difference between this and FF14.

And I enjoy the combat system more than WoW. Guess it's just personal preference.

Bit of a failed analogy you got going there friend. I'm not asking for anything impossible - I'm asking for what other games have been delivering for years. I'm also not asking anyone to read my mind - it would be enough to read the patch notes of WOW from 2004 up until recently and see what features were implemented... After all Blizzard is not in the habit of implementing pointless features - they're a company and only do things that will either increase their income or secure future income. If Blizzard thinks it worth investing millions in an API so players can customize their UI and the game has millions of customers then they must be onto something... and they're not doing it to be nice. They're doing it for profit.

You're acting like I want something magical that can't exsist when I actually want one of two things:

Possibility one (the preferable one) is a new and fresh game experience. This may be fairly flawed at release because everything has to be designed from scratch and I can live with those flaws (and I'm not talking about bugs here - bugs are fairly irrelevant to me because they are mistakes made by human - what I have a problem with are dismal design choices - meaning that some BW game designer actually thought the flawed or missing features were acceptable for release). That's the reason why I rarely complain in the EVE Online forums even if the game isn't perfect by a long shot - I can live with the imperfections because I know the devs can't simply go and see how Blizzard solved the problem and "borrow" their solution. They have to come up with everything so I'm also a lot more forgiving.

Possibility two (the less preferable but still acceptable one) is a "re-make" of an existing game with added features that justify a monthly sub and initial investment. This is the route that BW chose for SWTOR. Instead of creating a new and fresh game concept they simply "borrowed" what WOW has been doing successfully for years. So far I could live with this - it's not great and it's definitely not innovative by any stretch of the imagination but if your company can't come up with their own cool game concept then it's better to use an existing one that is proven to satisfy 10 million players enough so they stay subbed for years then coming up with some fail design of your own.

What really does disturb me (and make me rage) is that BW chose the easy way out (copy WOW) but didn't do it well enough to even be on-par with Rift (not to mention their actual primary competition which is still WOW).

So we got an outdated and non-innovative game concept but with all the drawbacks of a newly designed game concept.


I can only guess why... my money would be on BW being pressured by their investors to release before xmas while the game is still half-finished and thus neither on par with WOW-clones such as Rift nor offering enough "innovation" (or any for that matter) to justify its massive shortcomings.


But hey, if you think it's fun then that's great.

Doesn't stop me from calling BW on their crap money-grab tho.


Edit:
also on a special note:
This is far from impossible. You could always move to a country where education is a right and not a privilege reserved for the wealthy. Like most of Europe for example.

It's ok to call off the relationship. Though parading door to door through her neighborhood broadcasting the things other women have that she doesn't loud enough for her folks to hear is a bit over the top. Don't you think?

Well, in the case of my hypothetical (ex-)girlfriend I would have to agree with you. In the case of a paid service I would not agree with you - I would feel compelled to at least try and warn other people away from said service so they don't fall for the same thing. And if the provider of said service had a public forum for people to discuss the service then I'd be sure to vent my anger and frustration there as well (if not as a form of self-therapy then at least to try and get the provider of the service to get their act together instead of publishing press-releases claiming how great their service is).

Edit:

But again, I don't really want to spoil the game for you. If you're satisfied with the game then I'm glad for you. At least then you didn't waste money (like I feel I have by falling for the BW-PR-machine - which was admittedly naive of me).

People who think this isn't a WOW clone are fooling themselves.

It's a WOW clone with half the features and content and voice acted leveling. So if by this game not being a wow clone you mean WoW is actually thorough and this isn't sure.