Let's compare early WoW with early TOR

EQ2 looked better but wow still looked good. it is possible for two games to look good but one look better you know.

Yes, but I never thought WoW was visually pleasant. It worked, because it was Warcraft and Warcraft was always cartoony, but I would never say Warcraft looked better than Age of Empires.

The fellow you quoted before said WoW looks better than SWTOR. That would be like comparing Final Fantasy 4 to Skyrim.

no its not ff4 and skyrim were made in different years. i think you missed my point completely. unless skyim and ff4 were made in the same year of course....

Assuming your day even got started

Some WoW servers were down; 4 out of 7 days at launch.

I get what you were saying. For it's time, it didn't look bad. That's fine. What I'm saying is that I wouldn't compare it to SWTOR at all.

-The argument, "the game is competing with 2012 WoW, not 2004 WoW" actually holds very little merit in terms of bugs/stability. WoW has, indeed, had 7+ years to refine its engine, to iron out every conceivable bug since its release. So far it has done exactly that -- if you observe WoW's latest patch notes, from even as far back as one year, or even two, you will notice how very few "bug fixes" make it in. Since WoW's conception, however, the bugs were numerous. Remember falling through the world? Remember the fabled "character with that name already exists" error that wasn't fixed until several years down the line?
However, the stability issues that were present were but a small smear on the pages of the game's long history. Once they were fixed, no one really noticed. The "status quo" mentality that comes from bugs in video games is exactly what's happening with SW:ToR now -- whatever is wrong receives the most attention, while everything that runs smooth is taken as a given. Several months, or even years down the line, the minor quibbles today will be long-forgotten.

-The fact is, many of SW:ToR's shortcomings come from one simple thing: coding a new engine. No amount of "standards" and "ideas" or any jump in technology can magically fix the complex creation that is coding a brand new engine. Human error and logistical problems will always exist, and there is no way around this. You cannot craft something as complex as a MMORPG and NOT have any sort of bug or stability issue. Some have the patience to deal with this, while others, unfortunately, do not.

+1

Everyone focuses on the handful of things that have major errors and not the massive amount of things that it got right. SW:TOR isn't perfect now and definitely needs some love, but give it a few months and it will definitely get that love and then some.

In 2019 a new shiny MMO will be out and people will be moaning and groaning about how buggy it is compared to SW:TOR which will have 7+ years of patches and bug fixes at that point. The cycle will be true for every MMO ever released.

Um, when WoW launched they had tons of bugs, the servers crashed alot, there were tons of falling through the world situations, they even had to shut down the dungeon system for a week to fix the mass amounts of bugs with that. They got their crap together, dealt with it, and turned into the mega success that it is.

SW:TOR has it's bugs, and some of them are surprising that they even exist I will admit; but very few of them were ever game breaking, the ones that were are now fixed, and the ones that remain are minor inconveniences at best. They're getting their crap together, the success of SW:TOR compared to WOW will be comparing apples to oranges. Different era, different market.

It was due to server overload, and that's something that's impossible to beta test. Demand for the game skyrocketed after the initial reviews of the games were out, and what was initially a rather stable gaming experience (how do you think the initial reviewers were able to play the game?) turned into the lag out fest coupled with 1 - 2 hour queues.

But that speaks volume of how popular the game was, and how people couldn't wait to try it for themselves. And here's another thing - through the crashes, through the loot lag, through the servers queues and roll backs, people stuck through. WoW subscription kept on increasing at a rapid rate all the way to middle of wrath (the oft sited 12 mill concurrent subscription).

Here's another thing I don't think people mention when comparing wow to swtor - if you took just the outline of the characters, could you tell what race they are in swtor? If you saw just the skeletal animation, would you say it was a sith, or the human, or the twilek? Answer is 'No', btw. But in wow, not only is each race visually distinct, just looking at the animation you can differentiate between the races.

Fault wow for getting stale, of going more for profit then gameplay, of not fixing population imbalance, and dying servers (all legitimate problems). No need to make outlandish claims to make swtor look better. Let the game speak for itself. If it becomes a huge success, that's vindication. If it fails, then well, life goes on. GW2, Diablo 3, tons of other game on the horizon.