Why are so many people saying this game is bad?

This. Leveling is great but that's it. Might as well have been a single player game

I think Bioware misjudged the enjoyment of redoing 1-50 in this game. I'm sure their design philosophy was re-roll to enjoy the multiple story arcs instead of end game.

The problem I am having is I'm halfway through my 2nd character and having trouble enjoying the repetition. Yes the dialogue has changed for character story, but the "experience" is a repeat.

A 3rd character is out of the question, so that leaves me with waiting for something else to take my fancy. Whether that be a new MMO or a just a new game in general.

I like the game well enough and I have gotten my moneys worth out of it for sure. However there are a few things I don't like.

1) There are too many jedi and sith. When I play one, I don't feel unique. When I don't, I don't fear them.
2) It doesn't really matter what you answer in the quests except for ds/ls points or not doing the quest.
3) No exploration.

HAHAH OMG I remember that!! I was pissed off because it was my server and i couldn't play. Your post has made me stop lurking and login to post.

It's been quite entertaining reading in this thread, but I wasn't originally going to post anything until I saw this. Since I'm posting I may as well throw in my 2 cents.

My first MMO was WoW and I played that at launch. The thing that amuses me about these threads and I guess why I read them is because there are SO many similarities to the threads back in WoW launch and the ones I'm seeing here. From the "OMG devs suck cos they don't respond to me" to the "They hate my class because my class has been nerfed\needs to be buffed" to the "every single bug is breaking my immersion FIX THEM NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW!!". I know because I was one of them adding his voice (text?) to the chorus in the general forums of WoW. Back then I was a uni kid with way too much time, a hardcore raider if you will...now I'm 7 years older and a lot more laid back. I've fallen into the class of gamer that people like to refer to as 'casual'. The only difference with the forum posts is the "<insert mmo name> has this, TOR doesn't and that's why it sucks" type of post. Although, maybe WoW had those types of posts as well, I'm getting fuzzy in my old age.

Anyway, I see similar posts from people like me who's been playing MMO's for a long time. The majority of posts from gamers like me seem to be of the "give it time\be patient" type. These are the experienced gamers who've been on this merry-go-round before. Even at 2-3 months old, TOR is still a baby and will have its fair share of issues. In time they'll get fixed and things will improve. That's the way it goes and that's the it will always go.

The posts that fascinate me are the ones who claim to have played UO, EQ, EQ2, vanilla WoW (before BC) and whatever else you have there and then go onto a little rant\rage about why TOR sucks. If these guys\gals really did play all those games, they have to at least be in their late 20's\early 30's. To which I have to ask, don't you 'older' gamers have better things to do than rant about a game on a game forum? I can expect the rants\whining\rage from little 16-20 year olds who don't know better, but if you're a grizzled MMO vet, surely you know that these things just take time and patience is the order of the day, right? ....right?

The lack of exploration is a big one for me. That a couple of planets are designed to look like they're literally made of hallways took the Halloween mask off of the simplistic map design for me.

The space combat is actually pretty entertaining to me; it's a fantastic update of Starfox. Its ability to remain entertaining is going to depend on Bioware being able to release new maps at an unrealistic rate, though.

I was extremely surprised at how small the ship interiors turned out to be. They're hyped as being much more luxurious on the official game site's codex.

The laggy user interface and terrible frame rate issues when the screen starts to get crowded don't need to be explained to anyone who has leveled a toon past the first planet and gone to Fleet. No, I don't need an ultra-low graphic setting added, thanks. My hardware is fine. The game engine is not.

Those are the big issues, to me. Those are what I need to see fixed before I'll renew my subscription, but I do intend to resubscribe when they're fixed.

Less crucial, but still annoying, are the reduced number of options when creating a non-human character - who knew that only humans could grow beards? - and the absolutely bizarre decision on Bioware's part to make every class' set of companions a boys' club with just the one (two, for Sith Warriors) token female per ship. The unspoken decree that only one out of five space adventurers can be girls seems at least as backward as the lack of same gender romances, if not more so. I'm surprised by the lack of blowback on that from players.

I agree totally.

I am very impressed with how they managed to make story in an MMO work. Initially I thought it would be like a personal RPG that I'm playing, only in a world with others. But they made it possible to experience story with others with a synergy that makes sense.

They do it by making it possible to hear how other players speak, and chip in with their own decisions in cutscenes. It's really nice to hear how other classes speak, and is a non-rerolling method to experience dialogue of other classes.
One time I did this 4-man quest, and when all 4 of us were standing before the quest giver upon completion, it made us feel like real heroes. It led to someone chipping in "yay we're heroes". It really did feel like it.

They also reward you with social points for grouping up together.

I much prefer this story to operations. I've stated many times that I do want to do operations, but not for the loot. I want to do it because my companion wants to save his friend who was captured by the evil Sith in so-and-so operation. Raiding should never have been about the loot. It should be about the adventure.

I think people like me who like story are a dying breed, and the majority of gamers have been brainwashed by WoW that the only fun you should have is loot, loot and more loot. Grind dungeons and raids for loot. Grind reputation for loot.
They have forgotten the magical experience they had when they played WoW for the first time and level from 1 to 60. You can't blame them, it was so long ago.

I hope that this game survives. I really like it. It has a lot of potential.

It's not that bad, but it's not that good either. Disappointment, frustration, etc. make for bitterness with many folks.

Well said...well said.

I always read these posts and have to ask are they playing the same game. I think your 3 points are invalid. These are just my veiws, you may agree or disagree but another way of looking at it.

1. You have to look at the time frame, the game is set before "Order 66" and the Jedi got wiped out and before the "Rule of 2" so there is a lot of Sith. Maybe read the history it is very interesting :-
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Galactic_Republic

I don't think the Jedi were ever really feared, look at Jaba in the OT, and General Grievous and the amount of light sabres he had. The madalores hunted jedi, respected maybe not feared. It is more like magic versus technology as Han says "give me a good blaster kid......"

2. You forgot, it affects your companions affection, the better your affection with them the quicker their quests open up. There is also a number of conversations you can choose to fight the person or talk your way out of it. If you are a force user you can persuade some of them.

I like the way they are maybe your answers could lead to another different quest, but than I can see that being a lot more work for the programmers. There is a lot of people that play togetther do all the quests together and level together, the programers would have to make sure that the new quest made sense to everyone, and that the new trail didn't take them to far off the main quest. Easier just to have basically the same answer with a few minor differences.

3. Exploration, probably not as much as some other games, but just as fun, have you gone looking for datacroms ? I take my little camera, that came with the CE and go to the unmaped sections after I have finished a planet, and take a look. On Tatooine I got wiped out by the Empire when I went to close to their post. Flying that bird to the datacron on Alderan is pretty cool. I have my screen saver photo gallery linked to the screenshot folder for SWTOR and have taken some great pictures with my little camera.

What I like about this game:

-) Levelling to lvl 50. This is the best experience I've had levelling in an MMO. I've never felt the urge to grind more XP out of my playtime because I was simply enjoying myself.
Only in the last few lvls I grew a bit restless because some of my friends were already lvl 50 and I wanted to do flashpoints with them.

-) Level of difficulty of dungeons. While many may say that this game is too easy in that area, I must say that I like it that way. I'm not the kind of person that likes playing games like "I wanna be the guy" and has fun with them. Those games I try for 15 minutes and after not advancing further than the first screen I trash them I know that many people are different but tastes are different. To me a game should not be frustratingly hard.
However, the balancing of the opponents is somewhat off in this game. E.g.: Kaon HM: The one "boss" where these endless waves of creeps come is a challenging and fun experience. While our gear was too bad to beat the bonus boss which is for sure the hardest boss I've yet encountered in this game, I must say that I was somewhat dissapointed by the endbosses of the instance. There was absolutely nothing to this fight. Any trash-pack in the dungeon was harder. That's something I find odd.

What I don't like about this game:

-) A gear based PVP-System. PVP should be made in a way that everybody has the same gear (e.g. no gear progression in PVP). Only skill and situational factors like being outnumbered or better usage of the surroundings should determine the winner. I hate such PVP-Systems like here were I just see the opponents HP and/or his oddly red glowing lightsabers and immediately know that I won't stand a chance if I don't get help by a few friends. PVP should not be about gear in my opinion.

-) while the time it takes to find a group at lvl 50 is bearable for me (I'm on a server with a healthy population on the empire side and it still takes a considerable amount of time to get a pug going) I certainly feel that a better tool to find groups is needed.
Especially before lvl 50. I haven't done any of the instances after cademimu because I just found it boring that I had to go to the fleet and spam the general chat for an hour and still don't find enough players to team up with. At lvl 50 it's okay for me to spend my time at the fleet looking for a group for some time, but before that I want to quest while I'm looking for a group. A tool that allows you to be wherever you want in the world and still be able to look for a group would be dearly needed

-) levelling to 50 the second time on the same faction
This task proved unsolvable to me yet. While I generally like the story mode (see above), I simply can't bring myself to level another toon of the same faction. My highest alt is lvl 26 or 27. I just can't bring myself to level further because it's basically the same as the first time except the class quests. And even they bring you to exactly the same areas most of the time. There is absolutely no diversity in where I can level (zonewise).
I should probably add that I'm an absolute altoholic in these games. I once hit the overall maximum of characters in WoW per account (49 fyi, that was in vanilla though, so I don't know if that's still true).
Being able to choose in which area you level is very important to me when it comes to replayability.
As it is now Tor has only one replay for me: Factionswitch.
I don't think I'll ever manage to level through the same quests again on the same faction. But maybe I'm too critical of this aspect and remember the zone choice of WoW too rosy. There was repetition too, of course. But here it feels like the rail shooter the space combat is.