Swtor is becoming a fashion show

No point in playing an RPG if you can't immerse yourself with the character because he looks like crap.

COH just had unorthodox character progression. You did task forces every 5 levels for skill-building in big teams for the endgame raid Hamidon, to get hamidon enhancements that made a huge impact on your character. You could get similar enhancments from the Shadow Shard TFs too, which were brutally long story arcs that typically had scheduled lunch/bathroom breaks at points & player shifts off on some of the easier intermim missions

After Villains launched, it had a steady stream of progression with higher & higher skill Task Forces on either side, plus the crafting escalated to overshadow Hamidons with an elaborate set system on enhancements, plus the exclusive wings, aura, and costume pieces for running that high level content. That crossed over with the Incarnate system, where you "sort of" levelled past the cap of 50 without actually raising the level cap with absurdly strong new buffs and powers.

Touching on your scaling problem though, There were only 2 missions that consistently bugged in the first year of Villains; they would spawn level 54 capo gangsters and 54 Tempest Elementals for basically no reason, and it took months for those missions to be fixed. They could be saved or sidestepped with a strong player's help eventually, but otherwise all content was scalable with players and there was a difficulty slider ALWAYS in place from 2005 on to customize how hard or easy your missions were. You shouldn't have not been blocked ever in solo play, unless you were a controller or defender with a horrible build.

Exactly. For players, games are about one thing and one thing only: fun.

Actually, I never looked at dressing up characters as casual players thingy. But so much hype about new CM gear coming up is really too much sometimes. Its like world is ending if gear model is not absolutely perfect.

... What?!

If that were true no one would ever buy boxes and everyone would have horribly mismatched armors with the higher rating, but instead people wear armor sets or pieces of armor that fit a particular look.

Appearance is in fact a pretty big consideration in all mmos and rpgs in general, it says "this is *my* character, it is unique".

No one wants to look like crap while saving/conquering the Universe...

Actually, I played WoW for 6 years very actively and I never ever encountered such obssesion with in game looks like in ToR. Noone even talked about it and I had tons of friends and guildmates over the years.

Well...that's cause until about a year ago you didn't have a CHOICE in what you could wear in that game.

What he meant was that it's more than a minor consideration to most players, only to a few is it only a minor consideration. His wording was very awkward.

just shy of 2 years now, it was as TOR launched.

I've never played WoW, but I sort of assumed from this old Penny Arcade strip that people cared about looking halfway decent there, too; it's just that even though they cared, they still looked silly.

It's hard to begrudge BW for wanting to help assuage those cares among their players, even if they don't always do the best of jobs in making that a reality.