How could SWTOR feel more like a MMO?

Ideas to keep things a bit more dynamic and fresh:

+ more newscast cutscene / announcements stuff about the war, about certain planets, regularly;

+ do 1 big event (multi-planet, or single planet but much bigger in scope than the Rakghoul Plague, maybe "The Battle of ...") every 3 or 4 months;

+ do 1 small event (ie on one single planet, like the Rakghoul Plague) per month;

+ do random, roaming groups of enemy NPCs: it's a war, why shouldn't groups of Republic soldiers randomly attack Imperial cities or just patrol areas, and vice versa? They could have a random level of difficulty, meaning they could be groups of normal soldiers up to bosses who drop great loot and can only be tackled by 4-12 players at once.
This would also promote world PvP, as players could band together with these NPCs to attack enemy cities, giving rewards for both attacking and defending. So, basically, random "micro-events" in random locations, at any time, with any duration.

+ roaming NPCs / stuff happening, the world is very static

+ more ambient music and ambient sounds

+ get rid of some unnecessary instancing

+ single server LFG tool

+ "fix" the population issues - merge servers, and have free transfer programs and paid transfers

I agree with this post completely, I to play with two friends whom I've played mmo's with for years. I agree this is more a co-op than mmo. Sadly I am feeling very jaded right now, the one friend couldn't wait on the other guy and raced his character to 50. So as to not leave the other guy totally alone in game I held back on racing my Bounty Hunter to 50 and stayed to quest with the other guy. Which was fine with my other friend since he had 2 more of our friends to do the high level content with.

So this is why I'm feeling very jaded, the two other 50's have returned to active officer standing in my guild in another mmo. My friend I slowed my progression for to ensure he had someone to play with logs on more infrequently than usual.

So I delayed my progression as to not leave a friend behind and I end up getting stiffed out of 30 days from Bioware and the guild continues to disintegrate further because more and more of my officer base in another mmo are returning to active status in that leaving myself the other 50 friend and the slower leveler buddy in the lurch.

Do I blame Bioware for this yes, honestly they should have had the tools in place for guilds, guild recruiting and yes server only looking for group mechanics. There is things I absolutely love in this game, however; that being said Bioware is making it to tough to remain without tools that will foster growth. My other mmo guild is 628 members and still growing even in my absence; my excellently trained and reliable officers are still growing it. Lack of tools here is dooming our attempt at a sister chapter of the guild here.

You need to review the game specific lore (for this timeline in the SW universe)

It's not a war dude. There is a peace treaty in effect between Imps and Pubs and both factions are rebuilding after the destruction of the recent war.

Hence, the game setting and lore for SWTOR is centered around a classic "cold war" between powers. Which means no actual war. So the game follows a path of limited deliberate skirmish mechanics (warzones, occasional open world PvP between flagged faction parties).

On the larger question of MMO feel, well that is a very subjective discussion topic. Subjective because mose players are basing their assessment of "MMO feel" on their remembered experience of earlier MMOs they played. It's a flawed discussion at best. Besides, "MMO feel" is what a player makes of it. If you play unguilded, have no actual MMO friends in game, do not RP at all (even very casuallyt), and solo or only play via random PUG, then you are denying yourself access to the MMO feel of this game. This by the way, would be true of most MMOs, with the possible exception of those that force grouping (which is passe in today's MMO community). The real issue here is that Bioware gave us so much territory in their Universe that it's very easy for everyone to become very spread out, when in fact WoW accustomed people to congregate in just a few places.

[QUOTE=Kamiosoup;2291459]Get rid of 90% of the unnecessary phasing/instancing.

Add more ambient zone music, or even a loop music button.

Give us a reason to leave the fleet once 50, other than Ilum for daily.

Add in a bunch of extremely basic missing features that other MMOs have.[/QUOTE]

Can you be more specific ? I have played mmo's for a long time, I don't see many thing missing in a new game at this stage, do you mean like not being able to decorate your ship, stuff like that, please explain.. which is fluff and really adds nothing to the overall mmo experience..

I totally disagree, I brought some of my best officers and players with me to this game, we were quote "the vanguard force." arriving to set up shop and get everything set for a sister chapter. That being said it's been a freaking nightmare from start to finish.

First thing that happens we're forced to remake the guild because of a blunder on the server which killed the original set up guild. Then problems with accounts that saw a NEED to remake the account delaying key guild building people in to grow the guild.

Only to find out Bioware has NO guild building tools in place at all, not even macro support for sending out recruitment messages.

My advanced officer's who actually made it in to the game became disillusioned with the lack of social interactive and grouping mechanics and promptly reclaimed their active officer status elsewhere.

So NO it's not what the player makes it entirely, it's what the MMO maker gives the player to be able to build and make his experience flourish.

Sadly in my opinion Swtor is Kotor3 with a multiplayer base and that's a shame because this should have been huge from the get go.

I am sorry Bioware if that hurts your feelings, but it is the truth. I am seriously frustrated with your lack of tools and social functionality in this game. I urge you to

1. Account transfers to allow players to move their characters to larger populated servers.
2. Put in place Social Interaction/Guild building tools.
3. Server based looking for group functional tool.
4. Fix Broken content before introducing new content.

That is if you are really serious about making this game work and grow.

None of which has anything to do with "MMO feel" IMO. What you describe is almost exclusively about "Guild feel" and "WoW feel". You join a brand new MMO and are disillusioned that guild mechanics and features are not fully fleshed out. Name one MMO where this was the case.

Not very good officers IMO if they cannot recognize that new MMOs lack the maturity of features finely tuned in another MMO over one or more years. They lacked clarity of perception coming in, and therefore recoiled when the game did not match their other game in every way. Your officers were poor change agents IMO.

New MMOs are new horizons of experience and they patch and evolve over time to become mature feature sets. That is the nature of MMOs, ALL MMOs. NEXT TIME, don't move a guild into a brand new MMO at launch without your eyes wide open IMO.

Get rid of companions....

What made SWG a social game was the crafting system and the fact that it simply wasn't possible to become a mainstream crafter without other players. The quantity of resources required you to have suppliers who specialized in the raw materials, to make sales you ideally needed to know a player who had vendors or join a guild if you needed to make the more potent items you needed a sub-component made by another player.

TOR has none of that. So the social aspect is weaker. It wouldn't take much to tweak TORs crafting system to copy what SWG did. You'd never truely capture it all, but you can include the interdependance through sub-components, you can throw in surveying rather than resource points (hey look, they did it in ME2 on a planetary mini game) and you can introduce the shifting resource qualities to drive the value of items up or down based upon the materials they are made with.

Cut the number of planets in half.... increase content on planets 100%.

Quite frankly one of my officers said the same thing about Bioware, because even free to play mmo's have most of the features I'm on about.

Quite frankly with all the other mmo's previous to Swtor, Bioware's game should have been jam packed with amentities for social interraction/guild building.

There is NO excuse why Bioware didn't have all this implemented before launch, if it's working in other mmo's don't REINVENT the wheel.

Lastly I told my officers that if they were that disenfranchised that their statuses were still available and waiting in the old mmo, I am a very good guild master and we've been one of the longest running oldest guilds on our server in the other mmo. I am not about to force people to bang their heads against walls when there is no glimmer of light in sight.

So honestly I'll defend my officers because only an idiot sits back and says "everything is fine" as server population's dip, can't find people to complete 4 man heroic quest chains let alone even think about flashpoints and operations.

But that is okay I saw the same response you gave in mmo's like Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer and we all know how well they turned out. cough.