While I have my placed my own subscription to SWTOR aside for the time being, I have been checking up on the forums every couple of days for news on updates, advancements, and repairs.

So far, I have given Bioware the benefit of the doubt that they are doing their best with forum crowd control, and I'm sure that reading many complaints can be discouraging, but I found one in particular a bit --- surprising to say the least.

Reading a few general threads, and responding to one, I came across a couple "Closed Thread" responses from a GM that alarmed me a little.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=148645&page=3

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=1322092#post1322092

Concerning the response, I feel the GM was completely in the right to discourage topics of irrelevancy, but I wouldn't consider this thread to be particularly harmful, or even unrelated.

What concerned me were the specific reasons given - "Please be sure to create topics which encourage specific gameplay discussion and not general MMO discussion." , and

"We ask that threads created in General Discussion be constructive conversation centered around the topic of Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. Since this thread is not constructive discussion and off that topic, we will be closing it."

And the threads were closed.

However, aspiring to be a successful MMO itself, would it be considered unfair to subject SWTOR to compare and contrast discussions? Especially alongside games players have had more opportunity to become more invested and familiar with over the years. I know many people feel 'A' MMO is better than 'B' MMO for list of 'C' reasons, and that's okay, but I fail to understand why the freedom to discuss such interests would be prohibited here?

I'm not saying to make a thread dedicated to discussing World of Warcraft, Rift, Guild Wars, etc ... But bringing them up via relevancy in comparison to SWTOR isn't allowed?

Despite the origin of the thread containing this response, as most of its contents could be discarded, I feel the specific reason for doing so was a bit unjust, and wonder if such a rule will apply to other comparison threads as well?