WOW really made me appreciate SWTOR

Enlighten us, please.

And TOR has none of this right?

I cut my MMO teeth on wow starting from vanilla right until a couple months before cata came out. In the end, I left because it really become a purp filled gear competition and I also noticed the 'age' of the server going down. The maturity level and people being jerks when they didn't really have to be was frustrating, and for someone who 40 manned MC, having to spend time to get attuned to a bunch of places and really having to work to progress, WoW is a distant shadow of a memory of the difficulty it once was. Plus, when you play something for 5-7 years, it's really tough to hold attention for that long. WoWCrack did that for me for a while, but bordom struck and it was time to do something else.

Anyways, despite similarities here, I really do enjoy tor. The stories are good, the endgame is fun (even though it's not really challenging) and I like the PvP (clarification: less huttball plox). I also see the potential of what it could be down the road. I'm on the hook at least for now to see what happens over the next 6 months-1 year.

After one patch my latency went from 250ms to 5,000ms minimum. I have even recorded 20,000ms latency. This occurred on Monday to Friday, then on Saturday and Sunday latency was back to normal. I contacted both Blizzard & my ISP concerning the issue and neither could resolve the problem.

Meh, I'm doing the same thing in SWTOR end game that I was doing in WOW end game; grinding BG's(WZ's), Grinding Heroic Instances (Flashpoints), and grinding dailies. Illum CAN be a feather in Biowares cap if they can work it out, but the real difference that WOW has and Bioware doesn't yet is a robust community that can keep your mind off the monotony. Bioware really needs to work on this so that they can hold people even when the content is lackluster.

Also, I think it must be and probably has been said that WOW-vanilla 2 months after launch didn't have remotely the level of end game that SWTOR has 2 months after launch. Now, it was FAR more difficult to level WOW-vanilla back then as well, but even 6+ months after launch you had three things to do; Keep 10 manning Scholomance,UBRS,and Stratholme or if you were truly elite, 40 man The Molten Core. The third was epic crafting and may as well throw in grinding for the epic mount. I'm not even sure if they had BG's by that point and if they did, they were a nightmare.

really wish i could subscribe to this convo

The problem is, this stance never has and never will make sense.

SWTOR isn't competing with 2005 WoW, it's competing with 2011/2012 WoW.

Some of the stuff in here cracks me up.

"Star Wars quests are more interesting than WoW's". Instead of "kill 10 pigs" it's "kill 10 smugglers", oh the intrigue! Now, of course, there's a voice acted story behind it, but there's quest text behind WoW quests as well. Both boil down to the same thing, oh no something has happened and the quest NPC, despite likely being higher level than you/better suited to solve it can't, and he needs you to do it. Sure it's more interesting to talk to people about this than to read text, but when I run into the 50th Imperial officer who has screwed something up and needs me to go fix it I'm starting to question how people can find these sidequests any less run of the mill than a standard MMO's.

Class quests and for the most part the main planet quest line typically are fairly interesting though, I'll give you that.

Then there's the other one "This game is nothing like WoW". This is true on a basic level, but if you dig a little, the games are extremely similar.

Obvious differences are the setting (Star Wars vs Warcraft), the graphical style (realistic vs cartoony), and the quest delivery (voice over vs wall of text). After that though, I mostly just see similarities.

They both use standard might or magic based characters. It's just called force in SW:TOR, and force in SWTOR is twisted completely from the kind of force use we see in the movies to be similar the kind of magic system most MMO's used.

SWTOR classes are pretty routine. It's mostly just hit guys with a stick, shoot them with force or shoot them with guns that you always see. Only one resource system is slightly different from the norm, and that one got copied onto two classes, the bars just move in the other direction. It also follows the standard holy trinity.

Both use straight forward talent point systems. There's been plenty of examples of specialization options that aren't quite as cookie cutter or "Get 31 points in the tree of your choice then grab the best first/second tier talents with the points you have left". Anarchy Online or even Daoc come to mind for older games, and Rift for a modern one.

Both use proc based "rotations". I'm not sure if WoW started this or not, but if you look at games before WoW, like EQ, it was just hit whatever buttons are the best ones constantly. There was no change in combat pace based on specific events happening (like procs). Daoc's styles are probably closest to this for MMO's predating WoW that I can think of atm.

A ton of abilities feel almost like a straight copy/paste from WoW. Charge, shield, lifegrip, intervene, etc.

Now I need to add (although I'm sure some will ignore it anyway), WoW did not invent most of this. Likewise, a lot of these concepts apply to a ton of modern MMO's. It's just that there are examples of MMO's at least trying to break this mold, a lot of them failed, but then, plenty that just tried to copy/paste WoW failed too. AoC tried melee combo attacks, having to aim melee, limited healing, spell weaving (which was a crappy rushed version of their original explanations). Rift tried spreading roles around more and making specializing your character more interesting than "Put 31 points in healing, then put the other 10 in whatever is the best in the other two trees". Guild Wars 2 is trying to break from the Trinity. EVE Online broke pretty much every standard expectation for MMO's. Tera seems to be trying to change things up as well with it's aimed combat and heavy use of reactive abilities. Daoc features some classes behaving rather differently from normal (like the necromancer or warlock) and of course it's heavy RvR focus.

What is SWTOR doing to stand out? Voice over quests and more story driven content, which carries for the first 49 levels. What happens after that? If they keep adding story constantly and make it sort of like KOTOR single player that never ends, sure that could work, if they're up for it (I'm not sure it's realistic to develop this much content though). So far at end game though, we see dungeons, raids, and battlegrounds, the exact same thing as WoW. If they don't want to be unfavorably compared to WoW (ignoring graphics or preferences of universes to play in for a moment, it's hard to argue WoW offers far more features and content than SWTOR does), they should stop making their end game such a clone of WoW. As long as they remain WoW in space, you will see complaints that WoW offers more features/content/etc, and you wouldn't have to keep saying "It's only been 2 months".

Well he was pointing out that development takes time and even though it is competing with a game that has been out for 7-8 years, one must realize that MMOs take time to come into their own. World of Warcraft was not competing with EQ launch but EQ in its current state and yet did not have as much content as EQ.

Also, can you please list all the end game stuff World of Warcraft currently has?

So much e-peen hatered over which game is better.

The truth of the matter is the first MMO that ever "hooked you" will always be your favorite and the game you compare all other games to. Which is very similar to your first girlfriend/boyfriend.

I started in EQ1 in 1999. When I tried WOW for 6 months I thought it was the absolutely most boring game I ever played. To me, nothing will ever be as good as EQ1.

You come to realize later, that not all games (and women for that matter) can be compared and although many have similar features, they will never be your first true love. So stop it, and love them for are, not what they could be/should be/aren't.

You'll save yourself a lot of headaches this way - on both fronts.