WOW really made me appreciate SWTOR

I want my SWG back.

Just putting my two cents out there.

I have played WoW for 5 years, starting just after TBC was released. I participated in Endgame PVE, Endgame PVP, and RP across what came to be 7 characters leveled to 85. Some of the most Epic gaming experiences I have had in my 20+ plus years of PC gaming were in Azeroth. I could spend hours (and pages) detailing what WoW has done right and what they have failed miserably at, but to keep things brief, my time in Azeroth has come to an end and I cancelled my sub this week.

This week also marks the start of my playing SWTOR and while my views of MMO gaming are heavily marked by years of WoW, I must remember something as I play across this galaxy.

WoW is not SWTOR, SWTOR is not WoW.

BioWare is just learning what it is to create and manage an MMO. Their single player game design experience is impressive and they know how to tell compelling stories in this medium. To me SWTOR is rather rough in some areas, areas that I expect to see polished through the patch process. I expect the game to see the same balance problems that still plague WoW and any other consistently developed MMOs (especially ones with competitive PVP). To me my biggest gripe is that the game seems to feel more of a single player game with social aspects added on.

No game is perfect, SWTOR is certainly not, but to this seasoned gaming veteran, it is fun, fun enough that I will explore it's nooks and crannies for some months maybe longer depending on the sort of things that the Bioware devs decide to add to it as it grows.

This is something I can get behind. I do think it was a severe oversight to have level 20 PvP gear then 40 then epic 50's. Where's the lvl 30 and the non epic level 50 stuff?

A percentage of players always leave WoW towards the end of every expansion. Nobody is leaving "on mass" from the game. Look at the trends at the end of TBC, WotLK and now Cata - it's the same each time. The expansion is basically over. Blizzard will likely do a minor raid similar to what they did at the end of Wrath to hold people over until the Panda expansion "event" starts.

So yeah, stop reading information about the game from people that hate it and taking it as gospel truth.

Given EA/Bioware's extreme silence over how their subscriptions have been after the end of the "free month" it's hard to say how many people are actually enjoying SWTOR. Looking over the forums and it doesn't look overly positive.

Wrong.

I played wow since vanilla but cancelled about 18 months ago.

I have not once been back to the WoW forums to explain why it is no longer the game for me or to convince anyone still playing that they're playing a broken game. (Which I personally believe they are).

So what i'd love to understand is why people that trash SWTOR in favour of any other game, be it WoW or RIFT etc, are still here doing it?

If you don't like a game move on for heavens sake. Sticking around complaining about the game and trying to convince everyone that is gettign enjoyment from it just isn't normal behaviour.

If I buy a meal in a resaurant and don't enjoy it I wouldn't order it again, I certainly wouldn't go back day after day to hang around the other customers for weeks telling them that the restaurant was going to close down because I didn't like their food.

Its more like they ordered a meal and did not enjoy it and is now trying to tell the chef to stop putting cockroaches in the soup.

It's normal if you still care about the outcome of the game.

These forums are super overly negative because there's a lot of passionate players that are extremely disappointed with how this game turned out.

They're complaining because they're hoping stuff simply gets fixed. A lot of us have canceled our subscriptions but still play occasionally and still look over the forums everyday in the hopes that there's news that something might change.

I call BS. If they did they'd be spending more time in the Suggestions forums making suggestions than only spewing negative stuff about the game with no feedback on what to do to improve it.

This is the place to get feedback from players. The suggestion forum is the place to dump thing nobody will read.

Even if the devs did read them, the ideas in there are too many. When a thread here reaches 1000 posts, then the devs know there is something to talk and think about going on.

Every game I seem to play makes me appreciate TOR.

It just doesn't get any better right now. I'm super pumped for Mass Effect 3 though.