"Advanced Classes = Fundamentally Different Class Designs"

No.. It wasn't a good wrap up of the current issue.. All of the oceans on our planet are filled with salt water.. Why complain about the fact they are filled with salt water?? So why are people complaining about repeating quests over again.. You have to do it in every MMO you play..

First of all, you can't have story and not be linear.. Stories are linear.. Even WOW, with it's minimal story is linear.. All Blood elves have the same exact baby quests to start with.. After Ghostlands you will be taken to Undercity and then Terran Mills.. No matter what class you are..

2nd, there isn't an MMO in existence that has completely new and different quests for each and every class.. Dailies are not different from class to the other.. The entire arguement over doing the same quests is simply ignorning reality, or at the very least forgetting reality.. Do Operations or raids change because someone is a different class??

Aren't all the raids, flashpoints, heroics, and operations all linear?? I could go on and on.. The fact that A Jedi Sentinel shares the story with a Jedi Guardian is irrelevent.. It is in no way a reason to allow AC switching.. If you don't like doing quests over again, then perhaps an MMO isn't right for you.. Any MMO for that matter.. Because there is no MMO that doesn't have you repeating quests at some point while you play the game.. It is just the reality of an MMO..

So it is your view that ever class should have it's own set of quests.. Does this include flashpoints or operations as well??

Can you name a single MMO in which every class has their own set of quests??

Can you name any venue in which story was not linear??

I don't think the developers had anything to do with the frequency of these threads..

I think the only mistake the developers made was allowing us to choose our AC at lvl 10.. The real funny thing is, it doesn't matter when you get your talent trees.. WOW was lvl 10 also and I did see the constant attemp to justify a class change.. For some reason choosing your AC at lvl 10 means it can be changed appearantly.. Had we chose our AC at lvl 0 during creation and there would be no issue.. People would just have to reroll their characters like any other MMO.. I don't see what the big deal is.. You select it during character creation, and you reroll, select it at lvl 10 and you reroll.. You still wouldn't get your AC kits and your talent trees until lvl 10.. What is the problem??

The other issue is, you all just want a character that can both tank and heal.. Bioware purposely made it so that no single class can tank and heal.. What is wrong with rolling another character??

With the legacy system coming up, they should add a feature working as follows: once you have an advanced class to level 50 and then you level the opposite one to 50 too, you can then switch between the two acs on either of those two characters as easily as you can currently change your talent points.

I could live with the tedium of having to just level the second ac to 50 so i can unlock it for my main char, but i don't want to use two different characters all the time just to play different glorified specs.

To make it clearer, if i have a 50 commando and then also level a vanguard to 50, then my commando can respec to vanguard and vice versa at some npc at any time.

But i bet someone in here will just come up and say he wouldn't be fine with that because.... just because. That's what they do.

I'm okay with that. Not sure it would solve any issues but if you have both then swapping them doesn't seem like a major issue. Assuming that, if you deleted one, you'd lose the ability to swap the other.

This is my single biggest issue with the game. In WoW, I could choose where I wanted to go through most of my leveling. When I hit level 10 on my human, I could go to Darkshore, Westfall or Loch Modan. There's a lot of different things to experience as you level. Even towards the end of the 60s I could choose from EPL or Winterspring. This choice was reduced dramatically in expansions, however.

I can legitimately see myself changing my mind one day down the road because of this. For now, however, I'm enjoying the gameplay difference in my alts and exploring different choices despite how similar the storyline is.

You go 50 levels learning how to dps with a certain character. You are good at that role. Suddenly, at 50, you are a healer. You have no idea the best ways to do things. However, as group leader, I see a 50 healer, and we need one. Do you have any idea how many times I have been burned in a group on other games because of this? Or just about any other exchange? I vote no because most people will not research their new skills to find out the best combos. I want to at least believe that the 50 healer I just brought in has a freaking clue how to play the class.

May I ask if all that extra beginning content was available at launch, or was it released later? Most people seem to forget this game has been out 3 months... :-)

Did you not play WoW?

These levels are rough estimations but pretty close to what you can expect.

Human:
1-10 Elwynn Forest
10-20 Westfall
20-30 LAkeshire/Duskwood

Night Elves:
1-10 Teldrassil
10-20 Darkshore
20-30 Ashenvale

Dwarves/Gnomes
1-10 Dun Morogh
10-20 Loch Modan
20-30 Wetlands

You can go to any one of these zones at any point you want to. I can take my level one Night Elf to Elwynn and start there if I had the patience and inclination. I have three different areas to level in.

Beyond this there's still choice about where you level in each bracket. There's at least two, usually three, zones to choose from. And all of this was in game on day one. The more I think about it, the more I realize how appalling the lack of varied content is. One planet to level on at a time is just sad.

It is my view that every class should have its own unique content, yes. And if you’re going to build a game which emphasizes the “4th pillar” as its major selling point, then yes, you’d better deliver the vaunted 4th pillars on all the classes.
I’m sorry, I’m going to have to call that a rhetorical question, as well as nonsensical, but the answer is obviously not. Neither would any other form of shared content.

I believe that you are either being willingly obtuse, or that you're actually unable to understand things that are possible to not be 100% one way or another.

You appear to be representing me as saying that every class should have only their own unique and non-overlapping content. Which I of course didn’t say, which would be a straw man if you were to present it as being my point of view. Which you're not. Right?

In World of Warcraft every class has its own set of quests, as you well know, having flexed your WoW bona fides repeatedly and at length in this very thread.

The content set is not extensive (read: pathetically small), and it’s a design they’ve moved even farther away from since release, eliminating most of what little was originally there, but every class in World of Warcraft has unique content which only that class experiences. It’s yet another reason why you can’t validly compare SWTOR Advanced Classes to WoW classes.

Mass Effect provides an excellent example of nonlinear story structure. The first two more so than the third. They’re all structured around a narrative that’s like assembling pieces in a puzzle, bookended by linear sequences. When in the nonlinear segments, you can do the pieces in virtually any order; once you’ve completed all of them you then pass through a linear episode.

In the third one they’ve gone with a more linear structure where you’re only deciding “when” rather than also “in what order” that you experience the available content. But the nonlinear sidequests have an influence on the linear parts that you see.

I can well imagine a similar structure that might be workable here. It just wasn’t done. I don't really fault them for that, it's far easier to say than do, but I'd have been fine with 16 linear stories instead of just 8 shared.

In other media, try Memento for an example of another way to present a nonlinear narrative. You are of course displayed the frames of the actual film in a linear order, but the narrative you’re presented is not presented in a linear order. Your personal assemblage, of what you think is the correct linear order is, results in different reconstructions and understandings of the narrative from other viewers. Nonlinearity is again the end result.

The design decisions made have everything to do with the frequency of threads praising or complaining about them. This is such an obvious point I am in disbelief that I have to explain it. You can call the entity who makes those decisions “developers” or “designers” or whatever you like. In my professional life “developer” means a guy like me, who specifically writes code that makes it go, and aren’t necessarily the same thing as designers and project decision-makers. I used the word “designers” specifically to convey that nuance.
The problem is the recycling of 100% of the content from 1-50, and having to go through it in the same linear order. As has been stated here by multiple posters in multiple forms.

I seriously question whether or not you’re actually reading the things other people write, or are just cherry-picking, or what it is that you do that could lead to such wild misunderstandings.
I think the real issue is that you think that everyone else in the world has to be thinking what you think they’re thinking. News flash: They’re not.

I think you might want to learn how to read, i would level both acs to 50. And then i'd be able to switch ac as i please on both of them. Nowhere in my post i asked for a free 50.

But i guess this is what you do right? When you have no arguments or anything to reply you pretend to not understand what is being said so you can spawn pointless discussions and going off topic.

How could you come to the conclusion that i want a free 50 is beyond me, what i suggested seemed pretty clear to me, and i even explained it more than once to avoid misunderstandings.

I mean, really, how could you, of all things, assume i was asking for a second free 50 character ANYWHERE at ANY POINT in my suggestion is beyond me.

Reading skills are weak in this one.