Why are so many people saying this game is bad?

Quit feeding the trolls.

Me thinks you are romanticizing the effect the "hardcore" crowd has on a game. If it was any thing like your dreaming of PoP would have been a rousing success in EQ and Cataclysm would be hailed as a monumental success.

I agree.

You may want you to define what's basic and what's not but sadly it isn't so. Useful array of guild and social features (including the missing guild bank and chat bubbles) are long(as of years long) considered more then basic.

Every major gaming outlet is waiting for the next exclusive closed beta or pimp swag bag. They never seem to do their due diligence.

Trying to think of a game that has had a plethora of guild based features at inception that this game is lacking, like Gbanks, but i'm drawing a very large blank.

For reference I have played in no particular order, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some:

Ultima Online
EQ
Asheron's Call
Dark age of Camelot
World of Warcraft
City of Heroes
Age of Conan
Warhammer
Aion
Rift
EvE
And this game

True.... even the great and holy RIFT was lacking here. Yet RIFT gets a pass on this and SWTOR gets an ugly red stepchild style beating over it.

Even though I disagree with you very strongly in another thread I think you are completely correct here. Anyone expecting expanded guild features in the inception of a MMORPG is out to lunch. Those are fluff features can come with time.

Two reasons:

1) People have differing tastes and think somehow their tastes define good or bad.
2) People who are disappointed with the game want others to agree with them. Reverse fanboyism, basically. Call them hateboys.

There are people complaining about a specific issue -- that's okay. People complaining about everything, that the game will fail, blah blah blah, are hateboys. They're just complaining to complain. If they can't back up their talk with logic then it's just trolling.

"I think the End-Game is bad because of reasons 1, 2, and 3" is a valid issue.
"The game is dying and sucks, just a WoW clone" is not.

I am by far no supporter of Bioware, but every single argument that begins with living, breathing world I dismiss utterly. Not only was it never promised, but no one can show me or explain to me how such a thing matters in the slightest. Mobs moving around is just AI. It means nothing and it does nothing.

Most people that do complain about specific issues don't hate the game. We disagree strongly with some of the decisions that have been made. The biggest issue with beta is not really that bugs were ignored, per se, but that issues and decisions were made and feedback on them was ignored. I think (and I could be wrong, but someone has to say why) that criticism on decisions that are flat out bad is needed.

Yeah, the game has so much potential but it has some issues that need to be addressed. Not including a LFD tool like WoW is fine, I understood the game wasn't going to launch with one and wasn't jiving with there philosophy of communities. That being said I expected them to put something that worked, instead we have this archaic piece of crap that just frustrates me to no end that i cannot group outside of my guild in a mmorpg in a timely manner. Second one is my own opinion that the quests in this game are too linear and not bountiful enough to divide up like in WoW.