New to the game - pessimism all around!

WoW's target, while large, is still a very specific demographic. Trust me, that's how all products works.

If you try and target everyone, you will usually fail.

And I think its been established that WoW itself was a product created at the perfect time when the market was ready for a casual friendly MMO. Subs drive subs. Take wow out of the picture and you can see how hard it is to really bring a product to market.

Everyone seems so pessimistic. Perhaps I missed out on the real fun-time bash that was early Old Republic, but on the whole I am indeed having fun playing the game. There is enough life to not feel like the worlds are completely empty, but also not overcrowded so I don't feel "small". I'm just curious where all the dire vibes are coming from. Personally I'd like to cruise through the story, sidequests, and join a nice RP guild and settle down. What's with all the naysayers?

I dont think people actually know what do they want. They think they want stuff that was in their previous/first game, yet when they got it they get bored and they will blame on the features that are still missing from the game.

Not trying to poke a bear or anything, but I just want to point out the fact that Bioware seems to be the subject of all the hate for things going wrong. People seem to forget that EA is the puppet master......

Not me, of course. Just around me, it feels.

I was watching this game pre-launch a while back under the forum username Kanith, but I noticed a lot of stuff got changed including what seems to be a dump of forum users. Interesting.

Anyway, I took a stroll on the 15-level trial and enjoyed myself so much I bought the game for the standard $15 and have been strutting my stuff around the Jung Ma PvP-RP server. While activity hasn't been exploding (coming from a guy who played WoW for some five years before quitting in 2009) I have enjoyed the small bit of interaction between characters on the server. There is one thing I've noticed, though:

Everyone seems so pessimistic. Perhaps I missed out on the real fun-time bash that was early Old Republic, but on the whole I am indeed having fun playing the game. There is enough life to not feel like the worlds are completely empty, but also not overcrowded so I don't feel "small". I'm just curious where all the dire vibes are coming from. Personally I'd like to cruise through the story, sidequests, and join a nice RP guild and settle down. What's with all the naysayers?

100% agree! It's hilarious to me: people all yelling "We want something different than WoW! Innovate! Give us something new! Something different! We do NOT want WoW! But at the same time you're doing that, you better make darn sure that at LAUNCH you have each and every feature that WoW has right now--even though it took WoW YEARS to build up that many features. So go ahead and innovate, but before you do so, make sure you have EVERYTHING WoW does or we will all go online and universally ridicule you for failing to provide the expected 'standard' features in an MMO--the definition of standard being 'If WoW has it, it is absolutely standard and 100% required'. Oh, and please make sure to do all that AND launch on time without major bugs!"

Developers should absolutely positively not listen to players. Listening to players is completely pointless: you do something that half the crowd loves then the other half will burn you in effigy. Then the half that you did listen to will complain that you didn't listen closely enough. MMO gamers are the whiniest, most self-entitled, and impossible consumers to please. The only good way to develop an MMO is get creative devs, make something cool, and then hope gamers like it. Or at least, love to hate it enough that they'll pay a sub just to bash it. Innovate and hope for the best, I'd say. Don't listen to the players. That is the way of folly--and unimaginable whining.

a very large chunk of MMO players don't give a you-know-what about anything but endgame. All the work Bioware did to make a game that tells a story and all these people want to do is rush to max level as quickly as possible and start the gear grind that is every single other MMO out there. I mean, why bother moving to a new game if you're going to demand to do the same exact thing that you're leaving behind?

Developers should absolutely positively not listen to players. Listening to players is completely pointless: you do something that half the crowd loves then the other half will burn you in effigy. Then the half that you did listen to will complain that you didn't listen closely enough. MMO gamers are the whiniest, most self-entitled, and impossible consumers to please. The only good way to develop an MMO is get creative devs, make something cool, and then hope gamers like it. Or at least, love to hate it enough that they'll pay a sub just to bash it. Innovate and hope for the best, I'd say. Don't listen to the players. That is the way of folly--and unimaginable whining.

It's not about caring about nothing but endgame or rushing to max level asap. People actually care about the story. They enjoy it, they level a number of alts just to see it. But the thing is, no story lasts forever. When you are done with all the story you're interested in, the only thing left is end-game. Which is a weak point of the game. Why do you think you see so many complains about end-game, and very few about leveling on forums? People complain about things they don't like. About things they like people keep silence and just enjoy them.

It's funny how you're asking devs not to listen to players, and then, right after that, you're telling them how to develop their game.