Gamasutra: The Burning of Star Wars - The Old Republic

SWTOR is not "great". It has "potential" but, in it's current incarnation SWTOR is lackluster, middle of the road and far too easy an MMORPG. SWTOR is a good "training" MMORPG for those that have never played. They are strong in teaching you the basics of MMORPG game play. They have an awsome story. They game is very buggy and not all popular video drivers are supported. Is SWTOR saveable? I hope so.

So, I ask you: what has changed? What's been added, and not removed? The only reason any people are going back to re-review the free to play SWTOR version, is so they arn't caught going against the bandwagon of hating SWTOR. Nothing fundamental has changed this game, and most of the categories, SWTOR scores 8's and 9's in.

It's hip to hate. But the facts are: the game is great!

I think it was a very honest article. Bioware seems ignorant of the games faults, the author isn't. There's a reason 2million+ people bought the game, only to quit.

3) The hate parade. This game gets denounced for things that other games have done with little fanfare. The hate this game has directed to it is well out of proportion to its actual faults..

...but there are also some good things that the author completely ignored, like the variety of adaptive armors so that any character can look like almost any other "archetype". That kind of bias in writing really hurts the author's credibility.

This is an opinion, not a fact. Your opinion is that the game is great, which is perfectly valid. But it's not a fact. Carry on.

TOR makes a very good first impression, even to seasoned MMO vets. The problem is it stays the same game throughout. It never gets harder and it never evolves into something different from the first 10 levels.

This is easily observed by following general chat. Newbie zones are filled with people saying how much they love the game. By the time you get to Taris/Balmorra you rarely hear those things anymore and you'll often hear profanity laced rants about how terrible those planets are. Those planets aren't terrible, they just play exactly like the two previous planets and by then the shine has worn off and people have clued into the fact that what you've been doing for 20 levels is exactly what you will be doing for the next 30.

This is partly BioWare's fault. I agree that the hate can be a bit disproportionate, but BioWare exacerbates it by not doing really simple and basic things, like communicating with the players on major things.

For example, the Life Day fiasco. Even though this doesn't really bother me, I do think other players have a legitimate gripe here. How difficult would it have been for a CM or a moderator, or even a dev in a blog post, to simply say something like, "While we truly wanted to have an in-game event for Christmas, we just found it wasn't something we could do in the way that we wanted to do it given the current schedule and workload we have in front of us. We are pleased to offer the Life Day items on the Cartel Market, and we definitely have in-game events planned for the future!"

How hard would that have been?

Now, would that stop the complaints and the flames? No, of course not. But would it have gone a long way in heading some of it off? Absolutely.

Those are the little things that BioWare could do differently that in the long run, would make a HUGE difference. A large part of the frustration here is because the players don't feel like their concerns are being heard. And when they are heard, the solutions BioWare implement often make the problem worse, which just throws gasoline on the fire.

The first thing that devs could do is recalibrate their fractured relationship with the community.

You're missing the entire point, These reviews coming out do not add up. Nothing has fundamentally changed since the game was released, and given that these reviews seem unduly negative in content, only because it's popular to disparage SWTOR. Read the article instead of giving a kneejerk response.