The end of the arguement. Is SWTOR in decline? Can it be saved?

....

Something as simple as a LFG tool should have been implemented in beta - not a half a year after the game was released. This alone has brought everything social in the game to a crawl, and I'm not even gonna bring up the low population servers.

Unrealistic expectations much? Name me one MMO that launched with a LFG tool. Not even GW2 is going to launch with a LFG tool...

I don't know what the state of the game is or how many people are playing or if EA is in a poor finicial situation. What I can say is what I have seen which is less people playing and people I know have cancelled so it would be great if the devs take note and see what people are saying.

Firstly and most importantly character creation needs improvement. It is the first thing that players see and more than this no matter your play style you are effected by character creation, even if you don't care you will still be doing character creation. If you don't like raids or pvp or heroics they can be ignored but much like the UI everyone is effected by this fundamental of the game. And so it needs to offer people all the choices they could want so Bioware need to bring in more interesting species. Any lore is out the window with Chiss and Pureblood jedi knights and Mirkula Sith Warriors etc. There then needs to be plenty of choice of what you look like body size and height. I will hopefully be spending the next 10 years looking at this avatar or my 7 alts I need to like the species and like the look.

Secondly there needs to be more of a free form feel to the game and a lot less hand holding through to 50th level. I like theme parks far more than sandboxes but TOR has too much hand holding coupled with too little choice. Now the class stories are amazing but often its level 22 visit x, x gives a quest and its a level 23 quest soyou now have to work through the world stories for 2 hours to get the next level to be right for the quest. Which then leads you to the next area where there is a 15 min area of your class story and back to x and then sent to the next area with a level 24 quest. And often as not leaving the prescibed area and quests leads to wandering into too high a level area and dying or too low a level area and it being boring. There needs to be less hand holding following the yellow brick road to 50th level, there should be some fun of exploring and and just living in the star wars universe.

Third there is Space Combat. From the moment we learnt it was going to be lame the community told the dev team it was lame. And Gordon who is no longer with us held to his guns that Jump to Lightspeed didn't do anything for SWGs subscriptions therefore people didn't want or like or need decent flight sim in an MMO. But he was wrong, as a player I loved JTL and the quests and out fitting my ship. I also knew other people that only subscribed and kept playing because of the Guild and because of JTL. And it is something no fatasy based MMO can offer, be a bit strange having space combat in WOW. But this adds an addition element to the game that a rail button mashing sim doesn't.

Armour, weapons and look. I understand what the TOR team were trying to do with unique looks for each class but it doesn't work. There should be an option through orange gear that I can look however I want my Agent or Sith or Smuggler to look like. Sadly things like boots or head gear or even gloves have been forgotten by the design team or because a certain moddle is heavy armour only you have no chance of your SI to get out of a robe/skirt combo. And thats before we get onto a lot of the armour just looking OTT horrible and the decent stuff requiring 6 weeks of heroic to get one piece or luck on a flashpoint. Top end gear sure it should need to be worked for but to get a look should be possible without forcing people to group or spending months just to look how they want to. Cause weeks of looking at your clown looking Sith becomes annoying.

Finally acknowledging the community and saying yes we are taking this on board. Now when I heard of TOR being developed by Bioware all those years ago I thought this will be the last MMO I ever play. Now I find it less and less appealing to log in and that makes resubbing once this free month is over seem like a waste specially with a few big titles looking to be released this summer.

Game decline? why ?
is simple: a loot of more competitive mmo games on market

Yes this game is declining and will die (because it is a poor game which is far far too linear - even for casual gamers).

The game is declining as can be seen clearly on torstatus. The figure for total volume on the servers has been declining for a few weeks and the speed seems to be picking up.

A decent game is what swtor is. But not good enough to keep people coming back for more. Hence everyone is quitting.