Let's compare early WoW with early TOR

This is just plain wrong, in fact the usual path for MMOs has been gradual increase to a peak, slight decline, slight rise (with some "best" major expansion), then gradual fall. UO, EQ, Asheron's Call, DAOC, CoX, WoW itself, Lineage, GW, EVE Online, to name but a few - also less "flashy" MMOs like Dofus, Runescape, etc., have followed this pattern.

It's only certain recent over-hyped MMOs (AoC, TR, Aion, DCUO, Rift, etc.) that have had the sudden peak/sudden fall thing (and Aion, despite its fall, actually is still a very big MMO). And even then, these games are only "failures" if you use the "WoW Killer" metric, but even games like AoC continue to be profitable (if they weren't they'd be shut down).

SWTOR is a different beast. I don't think it's target audience is ex-WoW-ers at all, it's actually people NEW to MMOs who it's trying to attract. This is what Blizzard tried to do too. The mistake of the "fail" MMOs has been, precisely, to try and "compete" with WoW, whereas they should have done what Blizzard (and now BW) did - try and create their own markets.

I suspect SWTOR will continue to have healthy subs for a long time to come, based mainly on attracting players new to MMOs.

If there's any lesson from the past few decades, it's that the market for games is still gigantic and relatively untapped. Games are only just starting to go mainstream, and starting to become a substitute for other, mainstream and well-established forms of entertainment (especially family entertainment - and SWTOR is a good game for a family to play).

And for the unteenth time you simply can not compare a game that had 7+ years of continued development polish and content wise to a game that has come out a month ago.

If you do you will never ever be satisfied with any mmo that will come out ever again.
Developing an mmo is among the most expensive undertakings a gaming company can do atm.

A 10+ year developing cycle to come close to the level of content and polish required by you will not ever ever happen...
So please do yourself a HUGE favor and give up on mmos altogether.

wow had virtually no pvp on release.

On release WoW PvP was... Tarren Mill v. Southshore.

Which actually was awesome. But then they released BG's, which killed world PvP because people just went to the BG's instead.

Alterac Valley was pretty epic. Then they nerfed it and it got stale, because there was no one doing the cool stuff like summoning the raid bosses to fight alongside you.

Oh nostalgia.

Your kind of correct. The starting area for each race is in the same area. but you know, nothing at all prevents you from rolling an orc warlock and going to the undead area to lvl 1-10.

or be a tauren warrior and go to the blood elf (that has no warriors) area to level.

or be a night elf rogue and run to the Draeni starting zone and level 1-11 there.


In Star wars, you can't roll a human jedi and go to the human trooper area to level.
or any other area.

There isn't 3-4 different lvl 10-20 planets, or 3-4 different lvl 25-30 planets, so on and so on.

While your bound to repeat several warcraft quests, you can also change the are you level in so that you don't run in to them.

Yes you can! How about instead of trying the same thing and not even getting it right try something new? I'll be playing ToR until Guild Wars 2 because that looks different from anything Bioware tried so far.

Uhm, being different has nothing to do with the grade of polish or the amount of content available...
and both will not be up to par with long running games, I can pretty much promise you that.

GW2 has some good ideas though I give you that

The Original game was 4 CD's, still have the original discs. the 2nd copy of wow i bought bout 3 months later had 5 CD's. Not sure when they added the 5th CD>

Voice overs for all the quests for wow? you would need WAY more than 80gb.

http://www.wowhead.com/quests?filter=cr=34;crs=1;crv=0
9896 quests found

there are 5545 quests for lvl 1-60 alone.

933 quests found for lvl 1-10 characters.

There probably isn't more than 900 quests in the entirety of swtor.

For TOR there 4267 missions. 304 for 1-10.

You kinda have to because that your options of what to play. No one says, "well iPhone's came out first so I'll buy an Android and give them 2 years to catch up". They say, "What has the features I most want right now."

The only way another game will beat WoW that isn't from Blizzard itself (since Blizzard will easily implement all WoW features into their new game) is to come up with something extraordinary that makes people ignore the lack of *insert features here*

SWTOR has a few things that they tried to go down this road with that stand out to me:

Complete story driven leveling
Companions


And it might work to buy them some time. I've probably got about another 45 days I can happily play this game by leveling another class or two before I get to: "OK, now what?"

In that time they need to raise the bar of content. And really, I'm not totally thrilled with the leveling experience. Orange items should have been level 50 only because I don't upgrade crap, just "mods". And even then a "change item to X look" would have been better then the mods. Orange gear/mods have totally taken away my "ooooh shinies" new loot thrill for me.