Dev's underestimated importance of 'worthless' features

No. Being the most unfinished, untested, and incomplete MMO from a major publisher is what killed SWG. It was a half-finished mess of half-thought out concepts from day one and could never recover from that debacle. They aimed high and completely missed the mark.

On the other hand, TOR aimed incredibly low, hit that mark, and the end result will be the same.

worthless isn't the best word to use. perhaps low priority is better which is what it really is. out of the things this game needs to retain and obtain more subscribers this has a very low bang for the buck. right now the focus is on other things that have a larger bang for the resources used.

the devs are in the right for putting this off despite what you may believe about such features.

You know, if they added a feature to make the icon on your toolbar when alt-tabbed out into Windows flash when a WZ/FP popup arrived, I'd not care one bit about sub-games. Alt-tab out and find one to play in any number of places. WZ or FP pops up, the icon flashes, I alt-tab in and accept. Bam.

Otherwise I see no reason for them to work on sub-games. It would be nice if they added them, sure, but not at the cost of longer times between bug fixes and new content.

I'm not a doomsayer... but I certainly would not hold my breath on that.... at all. Nope.

The future of MMO is a Hybird Themepark and Sandbox. Pure theme park end when you max level because other than gear grabs there is nothing to do. Pure Sandbox have a step curve to end game that cause people to get bored and quit. The game needs the themepark run to the top with alot of "Time Sinks" through out to keep people playing.

Things like swoop racing, pazaak and star wars chess would small side dishes that people can break the grind with. We also need something to advance our character after 50 beside re-running a raids dozen of times just to get new armor.

I agree, themepark alone just does not offer enough to keep people playing for along time, scripted conent can only last so long, and no company can pump it out fast enough, pure sandbox alone does not offer enough to keep players for the long term either, the one big thing sandbox games have over thempark is your toon feels like it lives in the world and not just playing through it like a thempark, there needs to be hybrids, with options lots of them, all kinds of things to do outside of combat, just to name a few things, cantina games, swoop, pod racing, being able to decorate our ships if they are our homes, or give us an apartment, the Rift just launched a new way to have a home that gives you your own world instance to build in it is awesome.

Lots of fluff that people like, hair style and body style changes, this is a huge IP and there are many many things they could do,, and open world pvp fluid and dynamic like DAOC, where your faction has benefits, I know people that would take part in pvp there they don't even like pvp but they found the frontiers fun. I am starting to see other companies talk about other forums of play, I think they are starting to come around that the wow model of play is starting to get old, hopefully we will see some new things in the not to far future..

Your welcome to your opinion. But that "incomplete" MMO sold over two million copies before NGE occurred. A game that once had bustling cities died that say - seven years ago. Regardless, it was still a good game, just different.

People need to throw out the inaccurate and misleading terms sandbox and themepark.

Developers need to concentrate on making a game that challenges and entertains its customers from character creation till they are bored of it.

Any MMO with a levelling curve that can be beat in days or weeks is doomed to die a quick death.
Any MMO whose endgame consists of a handfull of repeatable missions is also doomed to a short life.

To thrive an MMO requires, at bare minimum, 6 months of solid and unique content for the average user. Relying on a rapidly rotating customer base is a losing proposition. PC games and console games have a very short window of time to appeal on their 'newness'. Once the game is no longer new, they can't rely on new users to make them viable. MMO's have a slightly longer window of time, they can still attract customers after a solo game is yesterday's news, but when the product is essentially identical to 10 year old competitors at the start, that window shrinks rapidly.

Which was a rip-off from EQII. It's not a limitless as SOE's baby. In fact, an EQII player recreated the stadium from Harry Potter.

Sorry, but you must be new to MMOs. The terms "sandbox" and "themepark" are neither new, misleading, nor inaccurate. Here's a short breakdown:

Content: Activities a player may participate in.
Sandbox: Developers give players the tools to affect the world and create their own content.
Themepark: Players 'ride' the content until the next Game Update.