Quick thoughts on BioWare's direction with this game.

HOW TO LOVE SWTOR

1) Get in guild
2) Get in Vent
3) Do Ranked warzones / Operations / Flashpoints with Guildies
4) Profit.

HOW TO HATE SWTOR

1) Play alone
2) Try to RP (SWTOR is not for this, try EQ2)
3) Remember SWG (the game you killed before because you hated it but now you love it again)
4) Make forum suggestions over and over to use content from a game that you hated before
5) Quit because you realize that the game wont change just for you.

I would put "looking pretty" ahead of crafting.

GW2 has a different model then ToR does. It cant fail like ToR can really. They dont depend on subscribers to keep the game going. They depend on box sales not subscribers.

PVP in GW2 plain and simply blows ToRs doors off. It is just that much better. It is not gear dependant. It is not stun lock. Its player skill. It has a massive area for WvWvW that holds hundreds of people, in weeks long battles, and lag free. There are constant takeovers of the map. It takes countless people to take areas over, gather resources, buld siege weapons, take over keeps etc.. ToR couldnt even get illum to work. I cant comment on their warzones as I have not played them yet.

Dynamic events can do alot more then just constant spawn mobs across the map. It may seem like that but thats because the begining areas has a ton of players constantly pushing them back. If mobs dont get pushed back then they will take over towns and put up their own fortifications. Ive seen it happen. This actually changes the game world and what you can and cannot do. It makes it not so static and linear. I dont have to got to point a > b > c etc. I go where I want to, within reason.

I agree that some people like to rofl stomp areas after reaching higher levels. However this system also has its perks. It makes all the content, in the game, feasible. It makes it so that when you do play with friends, that are behind the curve, you are actually playing with them... not one shotting mobs while they watch. Some people like getting carried through dungeons, sure... but Im sure alot of people would rather experience the dungeon as it was meant to be.

I think that sums up what most of the people here feel.

I could take your "How to love swtor" and do that in pretty much any mmo (and do, cause I do actually agree with you that that's a really good way to have fun in a mmo). Why did I pick this one? Story.
And I don't believe anyone here mentioned SWG? I could be mistaken, the thread's gotten fairly long. I never played it so I'm not sure what you're referring to.

The problem with that is that it will only last mere days. Think of how long it took them to make the current content. Think of how long it took for people to finish and hit the unsub button. Look how long Makeb is taking. How long do you honestly think Makeb is going to last?

If BW wanted to make a good profit off their story, and it is a good one the first time through, they should have just made an offline story and sold 8 chapters of it. The single player story is great. The biggest problem is that it is only about 10% of the story over all. The other 90% is the same for each faction. Once you played 2 factions then you seen 90% of the story. I never read a book more then once, I rarely watch a movie more then a few times. When I do watch movies again it is a long time between. To sit there day after day or month after month... watching the same story unfold, just isnt fun to me.

Adding new story is great but the reason you dont get it is two fold. Its consumable content and quickly consumed. The second reason is the cost and time of developing it. Its much cheaper to build a flashpoint/op/warzone. It lasts players a heck of a lot longer and it doesnt take near the amount of time to create. EA/BW are not making the money to continue to dump money on something that will last players days at most. Im sure you will get story content but it will be a long time between story updates. Actual chapter updates will be via expansion. It will probably cost about 30 bucks and you probably will see them in the range of 1 to 2 years apart.

GW2 relys on box sales to get its initial development costs back, its going to need sustained cash shop sales to maintain the servers and create new content for the game once the box sales money has run out, guildwars one did it by being a sectional game with alot of phasing and alot of expantions, GW2 doesnt have the luxary of the gw1 server set up so it is going to have to rely on those fluff sales ontop of the sales of patch content.

Illum was never going to work and i doubt that gw2s warzone pvp blows the doors of tors bgs, maybe different but its gonna require the same skills and teamwork.

As for the dynamic events, i know how they work as i was in the beta but have cancled my copy, not because it was bad just because of my investible time. I simply will not have enough of it between swtor, bf3 clan matchs and AC3 coming i will have no spare time unless i want to loose my rankings within clan matchs. But they follow the same paths and after a while you will have done all the paths of attacking and defending and it will become boring.

And dropping back is ok for a while. but really i was quit bored with coru the 3rd time through with alts, i knew the q's like the back of my hand and doing repeatable content at endgame that i did whilst leveling isnt of that much appeal, it maybe good to keep development costs down but there is only so many times you can do something before it stops being a challange.

Also to this warhammer online world pvp had an amaziong system with the entire maps being used but it didnt help warhammer, the world pvp in warhammer was great but the servers could not remain stable ( damn GOA) and content was not fast enough.

So ye GW2 will be good and no denying it, it will be different. But for how long will it be fresh.

WvWvW is objective based. The object is to control the map. The difference is that it takes weeks to win rather then 15 minutes. Its also the size of an entire zone rather then the size of a small 1 room instance. GW2 also has warzones and not just the WvWvW. The last difference is thats there will be hundreds of players rather then 8x8

Sounds like warhammer.

Not only will they give it away for free, but all of the high end content that they expect us to pay for has stories that contradict the repeatable nature of the content. So the folks paying for it get conditioned to ignore the story as it just doesn't matter to the game play.