I haven’t gotten very far; haven’t even gotten a character to ten despite having created bunches. I’m having loads of fun with the class stories. I am not a Star Wars fan at all. I enjoyed the first trilogy of movies, hated the second, and I did like KOTOR for the story. It’s just another setting to me… now, Star Trek, I have a great deal of fannish devotion to, but I played the MMO in beta and it sucked so bad. And it really was not what I wanted it to be — which is something more like TOR.

I do wish that the game was moddable, and it annoys me that so many games aren’t. Game designers never think of all the functions players want, and although I suppose it’s extra work for the game designers to have to keep an eye on what’s being done so that people don’t trivialize content/cheat (as has happened with WoW mods a good few times), I really think that it adds a lot to the game.
Nonny´s last [type] ..[unfiltered] Signal boosting — happy things for once

Blizzard has set the bar high and perhaps even made it look easy, but fact is that they have a level of technical expertise that is unmatched in the industry, in client and server programming as well as in how they run their systems (SWTOR’s Europe-neglecting global patch times come to mind here). This is particularly evident in their UI API. It’s far from trivial to integrate a scripting language into an MMO client and provide it with a useful API that permits 2D (UI) graphics output, forms and read/write access to gameplay elements that is further complicated by the need to limit what these addons can do to gameplay.

So because it’s hard and takes a lot of time to get right, many games launch without UI mods and opt to add them later (after they’ve fine-tuned other aspects of the game, such as class balancing and fixing the worst post-launch bugs). Developer time is a limited resource, and even if it wasn’t you can only have so many peeps working on a piece of software before you get diminishing returns. But I do think they already have a pretty good idea what kind of mods people want, since all they have to do for that is look at WoW. And based on the talent trees and skills, they’ve clearly spent considerable time looking at WoW (although sadly at an older version of it, as Pewter pointed out).

Of course I’d love to have Power Auras, Vuhdo and Dominos in my SWTOR sooner than later, I do understand why that wasn’t in the box on launch day.

I love the quest dialogue and the intertwined storylines; so far it has been superb. Do I think that I’ll enjoy endgame? No. Since I stopped raiding in Warcraft, I’ve had no desire to raid again. But it doesn’t matter. What the game has now is worth the purchase price, and hopefully the quality will continue in regular content updates. There are a lot of annoying glitches and bugs (not being able to drop certain grey quests, chat bugs, etc., etc.) but overall I think it is a very solid game. I’m loving it.

With the talent trees, I agree they feel old fashioned, but in a way I prefer having less choice than Rift offered. I could make a multitude of Rift mage specs that all seemed fairly similar and with no real way to know which was more effective other than to try all of them or read bboards. And once I had found one I liked, no guarantee that it would be endgame compatible — I liked my DoT mage but no real idea if it would have gotten me drummed out of heroic groups if I’d tried to do them. I find the SWTOR trees easier than that, there must be some middle way where you get the flexibility of Rift but with fewer ‘similar’ options where it’s not clear which one will best fit what you want to do.

I’ve been passing around the White Ribbon website as much as I can, at least.
Matojo (@furiey)´s last [type] ..Inclusion of LGBTQ Characters in World of Warcraft, or: The Audience, Neckbeards pt. 2