To be fair I don’t think SWTOR is out of date or uncompetitive. It’s a very good game for the cutscene driven questing and no one has ever done that particular thing better.

The other thing is that WoW (since we’re making that comparison) is indeed a mature game, that has had millions of dollars poured into it from revenues on the already published portions. SWTOR, as released, was developed through pure investement with nothing to show for it until copies shipped in December. BioWare had to prioritize limited resources. Also many of the solutions Blizzard came up with are proprietary, copyrighted, information. BioWare can’t simply copy and paste code from WoW into SWTOR, even if that would work. They do have to reinvent many of the bells and whistles we would like to see from other games.

The game has both objective flaws (bugs) and subjective flaws (“missing” features). Improvements will (have) come and quickly. They just put out a video outlining some of those. http://youtu.be/3-TChrg5foo Call me a fanboi if you’d like, I think the game needs improvement. But I am also patient enough to see it done, instead of comparing SWTOR to a game that has gone through four expansions and myriad patches in seven years.

Warcraft wasn’t badly out of date when it launched in 2004. SWTOR shouldn’t be in 2012 either. Other companies paid to innovate, iterate and develop; their experience is available, free to take and learn from. In some places, Bioware definitely did. In others, they failed miserably.

Point totals just give people a couple pieces of gear. That’s not going to ruin the experience for anyone as much as the spawn-camping for the trapped player. We’re not talking about “until the camped player decides to leave Ilum”. There’s no button to quit the planet.

WoW became what it is today through a series of iterations; hundreds of tiny changes (patches) as well as a few big ones (expansions). It didn’t launch with all the bells and whistles that it has today, and it didn’t launch with the content that it has today. It certainly didn’t launch with the PvP experience it has today.

So why do you expect other games to do so? Honestly, how is this reasonable?

I understand why you WANT this. Truly, I do. But I don’t understand why you EXPECT this. I’m not making excuses, and I’m not being a fanboy; I’m just trying to be a rational consumer here, and I don’t understand these complaints.

I suppose it’s possible that this expectation derives from the idea that designing and coding an MMO is a pretty simple matter, and that any problem solved by one person should be considered solved by everyone. The fact is though that each design team has to reinvent the wheel a lot of the time, and more to the point, they don’t always want or need to create carbon copies of each other. But even if we assumed that WoW did it all perfectly, and the SWTOR devs were content to just copy WoW’s successes, they’d still have to reinvent the processes.

I don’t however assume that WoW did it all perfectly, and don’t agree that it’d be wise to simply copy everything from that game. So by extension this means that the devs have to consider every feature individually and try to solve them, instead of treating them as “solved problems”. And so I’d expect to see them make some of the same mistakes, as well as some new mistakes. But then I’d also expect to see them avoid some of the mistakes made by the WoW devs, as well.

The game came out in late 2011, not in 2004, and it launched without a lot of standard features – no UI customization, no combat log, no high res textures, for example. They weren’t trying any daring innovation on MMO front, so why do they keep being surprised by the same problems Blizzard ran into years ago? Haven’t they seen Wintergrasp, Tol Barad, profession perks adjustments, crafting headaches, talent tree re-designs, faction imbalances… it’s like EA locked them up in some dungeon back in 2006 and told them they don’t get to come out until the game ships.