Am I spoiled by my previous MMO?

I think the fact you have levelled 30+ characters is possibly some of the reason for your dissapointment. Maybe find a job during the day to keep you occupied?

Equal or better than competition is a subjective evaluation. Your idea of equal or better may not be the same as mine. In addition, equal or better does NOT necessarily mean that it must include every bell and whistle included previously in any model.

As I stated in a previous post, if a better deal is available somewhere else, then by all means, go somewhere else. Don't whine that you're missing out on something if you choose to stay where you are.

I just wanted to write something about what to resonably expect when subbing to an MMO, seeing that there are alot of people who seems to think that coming additions to this game "should have been included from start".

My gaming history spans from EQ and EQ2 to WoW and LOTRO with a few more in between. With EQ there were downloadable content, quest really, that you had to pay for and all major additions to the game came in the form of a full paid expansion. WoW follows the same arch more or less, with major additions being full blown expansions.
LOTRO on the other hand were a totaly different beast, with tons of free content being added each month, and I am talking huge parts of continent and several hundreds of quests, and of course there were also paid expansions, like Mines Of Moria that gave a huge addon, more classes and hundreds of quests, raids and dungeons, as well as totally new gamesystems, f.x. items that levelled with you, and minigames.

I came to SWTOR directly from 5 on and off years of LOTRO, used to how things worked with that game, expecting that the industry had followed what had to be, in my mind, the best way of catering for their paying customers. That is; monthly addons wich actually gave me more that I had paid for when I bought the game, giving me a feeling of having made a great buy when paying my monthly downpayment. It would not really matter if I did not immediately use the addons, but it would feel like the gameworld was actually expanding by knowing that the stuff was out there for me to explore. In 5 months, I have paid roughly the same amount in subs as what I paid for the game in the store so in terms of value, I should be able to expect at least a seriously expanded universe by now - at least if I apply the model LOTRO used at the time of it's release.

Patch 1.2 gave me something that I would count as added value - but that is about it really. I do not count new operations, or even flashpoints or warzones as, frankly, I feel that such things are too simple to be counted. Those things are too...small, too limited and over too quickly, and the game should be absolutely crammed with that kind of stuff anyway. What I count as content is actual explorable places, something that gives me something new to do, something to amaze me, something that actually feels like I have gotten more than I paid for. This has not happened in SWTOR.

What I get is...bugfixes and tweeks and changes. It feels like I am paying for having the honor of Betatesting SWTOR, something I have always done for free with other games (and sometimes actually have gotten paid in the form of free months or free game at the time of release). I do not like this feeling, not one bit!

I want SWTOR to be a perfect game, I want it to succeed, to be viable years from now. I love Star Wars, I have fun with the game - but it has already started to age badly. I reroll from server to server as they empty, and after having levelled 30+ characters, the content starts to feel really small, too repetitive. I swear I could recite whole questlines from memory I would like to have choices while I level, not having to go from Korriban to Dromund K. to Balmorra, Nar Shaddaa, Tatooine, Alderaan, Quesh, Hoth, and so on in the exact same order with the exact same quests over and over. I would like to feel that every character I have is different from the others. Just take the thing that happens when you first land on Coruscant with your Jedi Guardian and goes through customs and that cutscene comes were something deep and characterbuilding is said between you and your companion - you know the one I mean. And you know it because even if you did not play a Jedi, you would go through the exact same thing, just with different dialouge - and that goes for Imperial side too. How hard would it be to expand that with a weekly patch? Not that hard I suspect, given that BW uses the HERO engine wich takes pride in facilitating on-the-fly changes to the gameworld so it should not even be needing a patch - just a little creativity and care for the fanbase, paying customers and The Game as a whole. Bioware have always delivered for me in the past, and I expect, nay Demand! that they continue to do so as long as I feed them with dollars.

OK, sorry for the longwinded text, but I needed to vent a little. You might think that I am one of those who threatens to unsub as soon as I do not get what I want, but I and quite the opposite. I will stay here for a few years, because I have patience, and truth be told it is not that much money even if I pay for both my sons, my own and my boyfriends accounts - but I want things done right - and the first thing for BW to do right now, while working out those bugs, is to give us a feeling that we got this game really cheap and that we would gladly pay double for what we got.

Oh, and LOTRO went F2P and still pumps out new content on a regular basis..... just saying...

I swear I could recite whole questlines from memory I would like to have choices while I level, not having to go from Korriban to Dromund K. to Balmorra, Nar Shaddaa, Tatooine, Alderaan, Quesh, Hoth, and so on in the exact same order with the exact same quests over and over. I would like to feel that every character I have is different from the others. Just take the thing that happens when you first land on Coruscant with your Jedi Guardian and goes through customs and that cutscene comes were something deep and characterbuilding is said between you and your companion - you know the one I mean. And you know it because even if you did not play a Jedi, you would go through the exact same thing, just with different dialouge - and that goes for Imperial side too. How hard would it be to expand that with a weekly patch? Not that hard I suspect, given that BW uses the HERO engine wich takes pride in facilitating on-the-fly changes to the gameworld so it should not even be needing a patch - just a little creativity and care for the fanbase, paying customers and The Game as a whole. Bioware have always delivered for me in the past, and I expect, nay Demand! that they continue to do so as long as I feed them with dollars.

What I want is a Star Wars RPG I can play cooperatively with my wife - no multiple other players - just my wife, perhaps over our home network.

I can't be alone in this. Does nobody else want something like that?

We’re not other games. And none of those 'other games' have the same feature set as each other, anyway. Each of them has had a different design philosophy, a different focus, a different set of problems to deal with, etc. And ours will be different still.

There are a lot of features that these games have that we don’t have. There are a lot of features we have that they don’t have – and likely never will. Features have a substantial cost – not just a cost to develop, in this case, but a cost to design, worldbuild, build art for, QA and support for years to come. The senior design leads spend a lot of time comparing the various features, and figuring out what will make the best package of combined features – i.e. the experience that we call the game.

Because really, no feature exists in a vacuum. It’s all good and well to say “This game must have Baby Seal Clubbing because game XXX had Baby Seal Clubbing 10 years ago and so this game is going to be like one built by primitive cavemen designers who had no idea of the magic of Baby Seal Clubbing!” But the MMO genre is so established now that the possibility space for features is very large, and no, not all of them will make it in. For every feature, there’s a lot more discussion that happens amongst the designers. Does this feature support or fight the other features in the game? Does the feature highlight what we’re trying to do, or elevate the IP, or serve part of the populace that is currently underserved? Put shortly, is this feature right for the game? Or is there a better place we can spend all those resources to make something truly magical?

Because at the end of the day, we’re not trying to make 'just another MMO but with lightsabers'. We don’t want to blindly include features because some of our competitors are doing so. We want SWTOR to be its own experience and its own identity, and this occasionally means doing things differently and taking some chances.

Does this mean that Baby Seal Clubbing will make it in? Well, I fought for it, but no.