Will anything actually retain customers?

My short term suggestions are simply:

- Fixed hood toggle and companion weapons always being out
- Add hide head slot and unify chest colour options to companions
- Colour wheel for chest pieces for characters and companions
- Single and multiplayer Pazaak
- Separate PvP warzone queues
- At least one place to encourage open world PvP
- Add level 50 items (that look pretty and/or are useful) to each of the planets commendation vendors that require a large amount of commendation grinding to get

I hope your "vison" was just a small disturbance in the voice as I think you feel the same.

It's really the same thing that is harming all new MMOs across the board, TOR has suffered from it from day one. The problem is size, the amount of players that need to play for it to make a profit, for a game to survive it needs to decide who it's clients are and what it is aiming for.

If TOR had picked one single direction, aimed at keeping to a single philosophy and let everyone that that direction and philosophy didn't suit go it would have developed a loyal playerbase and demographic to cater for. The problem is such a playerbase and demographic isn't big enough for what it cost to make so it has to try a cater for more people, a lot more people.

Then what happens is that demographic A wants something that irritates demographic B, who campaign for something that demographic C get annoyed and and all 3 leave.

It's quite that simple, they tried too hard to please everyone and ended up pleasing no one because pleasing a single demographic would not have generated enough funds for the game to survive.

Everyone knows when a games lose the high end players the game is dead shortly after.

The high end are on MMO or some other thing to point out the edgy parts of the game, lose that and boring is the name.

I think it comes down to corporate greed. All these companies see how much money Blizzard has made and want to copy that. Artistic design comes second to that. If they would worry less about making games that will smash the competition and just focus on making fun games, they would do better. Swtor had a fine base to start with but they are really lacking on the small things that make a game fun, all the minor details. More customization of your character, stuff to help roleplaying, diversity of gear, etc.

I think back to playing Skyrim and all the stuff that was great playing it. Weather, exploring, all the little things you can mess with in dungeons, making your character and then think about swtor. The world is dead, nothing never changes as you play, huge areas of nothing as you level, the gear looks like crap, making characters took 2 mins, etc.

When you strip away the story from swtor, what does it have? A big fat nothing, thats what. Even the story has a lot of rough spots on it. A lot of the choices in your character response are the same generic response to a lot of the quests. The light and dark system is total crap, it doesn't do anything to the game expect limit a very small amount of item choices, total waste of time.

I also find it funny that some people think the game is going to chance or get better. Their basic design will remain the same while they add in very small changes. The legacy system being a huge credit sink rather thank turning into something great, gear mods costing a crap load to change, no appearance tab, no way to change the color of gear, crappy textures on most of the armour in the game.

I swear, every mmo EA has put it's hands on has turn to utter crap, every single one.

It's frustrating that from my point of view it wouldn't take much polish to have a good solid core to which more could be added.

A bit of open world PvP, some simple cosmetic enhancements, a couple of mini games and a bit of endgame grind, along with a bit of better communication around what's going on and some actual delivery on them would see the game be far more appealing to the different crowds.

Unfortunately the longer it doesn't change, the more people will be lost forever.

http://www.swtor.com/support/helpcenter/6469 - "Unlimited access to regular Game Updates"
http://www.swtor-life.com/video/the-...nterview/7112/ - " We’re still in discussion about some of the larger content updates that we’re planning".

Content is content. Period.

Shady business, such as trying to dub Makeb an Expansion is just cheap shady business.

Well, yes. Obviously.

However, unless this MMO had a budget that would make Warren Buffet's net worth wobble it'll never come into being. Which is probably closer to making the point you're trying to make.

People will always consume content faster than it is presented. It's the nature of the beast. That said, even Matt Bromberg has admitted that they dropped the ball on putting out new content and stated that they will have a much more aggressive schedule once they switch to F2P. If they live up to his promises I should expect to see new content every 3 to 4 months in 2013, at a minimum.

Wow. I vote for you as the new Lead Developer. I actually agree with every point you made. This game, from the start lacked the touch of people that were familiar with playing MMOs, and had no idea about guilds. If they want to save what is left of the playerbase, they will start listening to feedback like this, and engaging the community in real discussions. I realized in beta, when they only wanted praise, that this was going in a bad direction. They do seem to not care, at all.

Yeah it wouldn't take much, but we've been saying thart since launch, and whilst they progressed stuff like UI greatly other stuff just hasn't been on the adgenda.