Design decisions and why the game engine hurts TOR

I think everyone who doesnt like this game is welcome to go back to WoW, and realise why your views were parcial in 1 to 2 weeks of boredom.

Well stated, OP. I hope it gets read and taken to heart where it counts.

I like the game a lot, but two months in, I'm starting to lose interest.

I paid for a 6-month initial I liked it so much, and that's no big deal--hell, I spend that much eating out in a week and a half or so.

But I can foresee myself just logging off and not coming back for a good long while until and unless they get these things straightened out. My position has been changing from "I'll wait and see" to "I don't see why they waited until after release to implement/fix these issues that seem so incredibly obvious".

There's just a bunch of stuff that this game is reasonably missing, and it's at a point for me where they need to either put this stuff in or get ready to lose some subscribers.

To me it's mostly content that they're missing. The 1-50 leveling path is extremely linear, more so than many single-player RPGs. And they've put in about half the content you would have expected for that situation--to level an alt you're doing about 90% of the same content, in the same order.

If you level an alt of the same base class but different advanced class, you're doing about 100% of the same content in the same order. And I'm sorry, but choosing light/dark or different other options on a different playthrough is superficial at best. It's not actually different in any way that makes it feel different enough to justify the time spent on it.

At first I thought the fully voiced content and class story was cool, and it is, but its replayability value has turned out to be low for me. At this point I'd be willing to trade having class stories at all in exchange for double the number of planets/zones and the ability to take whatever path I wanted through them from 10-50.

I don't know enough about game engines to speculate much on where it succeeds, fails or winds up looking like the girl at the party that's passed out drunk under the picnic table by 5:30 PM at a party.

What I do know is that I agree with the gist of many other of the OP's points.

And for those prattling on to the tune of 'haters gonna hate', get over your trailerpark wit; there's a monumental difference between dissatisfaction and hatred.

@ OP ... Bravo! 100% Agree, the Hero has beaten Bioware.

Looks like ALL things in game are constrained and revolve around Hero Engine not being capable so they have to look for alternate ways of achieving them:

1- small shards
2- Instanced planets (ilum1, ilum2, ...) when theres not even enough ppl for a decent fight
3- No open world PvP because 90% computers out there cant handle it, even with ridiculously small number of players on screen

I think the issue is also that fps are spiking too high, and the GPU is trying to do too much while the computer is suddenly overloaded with cpu calculations.

Tell that to Blizzard.

You do realize they focussed on what people didn't like about EQ in an attempt to get more players interested?

I think that BW are doing the same thing, only utilizing their particular area of expertise (story, VO, dialogue). People don't generally like MMOs much, compared to the mass of gamers, even hardcore gamers. Even 11m players is a drop in the ocean of games players in general.

i.e., instead of asking the wrong, the stupid question (why do people like WoW?), BW have asked themselves the correct, the clever question: why DON'T people like WoW? Same as Blizz asked why don't people like EQ.

In this context, the opinion of a bunch of bored MMO bittervets is really quite irrelevant.