Anyone else annoyed by crowded planets?

Not at all, I love it in fact.

It's a good sign that low level areas are packed.

It's a bad sign that the level 25+ areas are mostly empty. It tells me they are getting new people, but they (still) aren't staying.

Can some of you people find a happy place and at least enjoy that without complaining?[/QUOTE]

no it works like this
group a doen't like something and complains group b is happy and stays silent.
they change it group a in now happy, group b complains why did you change it.

hell no, glad to see higher populations

I see your logic and it makes sense but... I'm not sure that is always true. It seems to me that outside of lowbie planets the population levels correlate to the "popularity" of the planet. What I mean is that planets that are more of a grind are less populated as opposed to planets that are more enjoyable. Taris on the Imp side and Balmorra on the pub side are good examples. I see lower populations there but mainly it is because, in my experience, people just want to get off those planets as fast as they can. Bonus series be damned. Alderann on the other hand is much more populated and maybe it is because people come back for the Bonus series and do not opt to skip it.

Huge generalizations to be sure, but my point is that even at higher levels it seems certain planets are player favorites while others are simply pass throughs.

My thoughts exactly.

Neither.

Zones not designed for 100-200 people in them.

That is the problem.


.

And worlds where ten different people work independently to arrest the same criminal, have to compete against each other on who gets to arrest him first, and yet all of them get the criminal at the end do not break immersion? Or saving a world from a civil war, and two minutes after you leave, you see the next guy come in to save it again, because obviously they couldn't hold the peace?

Story-based open-world MMORPGs invariably strain immersion to a breaking point, because there's no way to write an interesting storyline that can accommodate an arbitrary number of players over an arbitrary period of time without any changes to the story itself. If the story is to be self-consistent over any number of repetitions, the player's actions must necessarily be insignificant, or at least easily reversible, and that makes it uninteresting.

It doesn't help that in many quests players have to compete over a finite number of resources, and the amount available is only slightly higher than the amount needed. That other guy just broke the thingamabob you were supposed to break? No problem, just wait over there for a minute until the auto-repair systems kick in, because it totally makes sense not to break that too, and one minute of downtime surely is enough to give an important tactical advantage to our side.

I find SW:TOR's storylines very good - the best I've seen in any MMORPG - but only as long as I completely ignore all other players. A possible exception are people grouped with me, if they are playing different classes. I don't mind the mere presence of other chosen ones too disturbing, but the competition for clicks is annoying.

I wish there were more people in the other areas, not only the Fleet. I like my MMO's bustling.

This isn't entirely true.. some zones, like the Black Hole, are set to shard at way too high a population. The Black Hole area won't shard until 85 people. Let's say that every one of those people was in a 4 man group. That's 21 groups all going for 4 each of 11 boxes, 5 each of 18 scientists, 4 leaks each of around 12 nodes that spawn. Its gotten slightly better since they somewhat improved the respawn timers, but you can still be standing there waiting for a while, particularly if there are ninjas who don't care if they steal the node you've been patiently waiting for.

Before they retooled the timers, that area was pure hell after the server merges. Before the merges, I had it down to an art where I could complete all the missions except for the heroic in less than 20 min, before the reworking of timers after the merge, I had runs taking 1-2.5 HOURS, JUST for the Black Hole. For someone like me who maybe only has 2-3 hours of playing time a night.. it was extremely frustrating.