The one month mark has passed for Star Wars: The Old Republic and while there are a lot of reasons to praise the game, but there have also been a lot of problems and controversies. I'd like to start by saying that I think the game is great, but there are way too many annoyances that prevented it from being the best game out there. Yes, hindsight is always with perfect eyesight, but the mistakes of the past will prevent a lot of it happening again in the future.
ILUM: Too Much, and yet, Too Little
Ilum is probably the worst disaster that SWTOR has encountered to date. It's initial incarnation saw little to no PvP for a PvP zone and it's current state is too bland for most time of the day. The promise of world PvP falls flat when there simply is no one there to fight. Picking off stragglers isn't really fun.
Ilum is also way too large to host the current level 50 populace. When we did get organized for some PvP, we ended up chasing the enemy group through half the map before they realized there might be a fight to be had and ran up to meet us.
In my opinion, the zone was a missed opportunity for Bioware. If they had held out and not released Ilum with the game, they would have been able to build anticipation and momentum for the zone. Releasing it when there are a lot of level 50s would have opened the floodgates to some really fun PvP moments. They also would not have released it in it's original incarnation because it would have been tested on the test server. Speaking of which.....
Test Servers Need High Level Testers
The spectre of Ilum raises it's head once again and the post patch version had some glaring problems. Testers were able to find one that resulted in a 1-day delay of the patch, but a few others made it through that simply caused havoc in the zone. The fact that this problem appeared not even an hour into the patch going live means that it would have been easily caught on the test server if there were just more people on it.
At this time, there are no ways to get a level 50 character on the test server other than leveling all over again. Unfortunately, this limits what your average player can really test. Sure, they don't plan to delete characters with every patch, but to level once again? On a server that may or may not delete the character? For the power levelers, this won't be too much of a problem, but for your average player who wants to test the higher end changes, this is just not possible.
This also means high end changes will go live with glaring bugs/problems like Ilum. The more people there are to test the changes being made, the easier it will be to find the problems in the patch. Until character transfers are enabled, future patches will not be as polished as they want it to be before it hits the live servers.
Design Decisions: Who? What?
After a month of playing the game, some design elements of the game still boggles my mind. The auction house is atrocious, as are the lack of real use of most crew skills at 50 (both problems go hand-in-hand though). A dual-spec system, while coming soon, is something that new MMORPGs already have on launch and the current system can be prohibitive for some due to cost.
Granted, SWTOR is a huge game, larger than any MMORPG ever lauched as far as I can remember. Even World of Warcraft did not launch with as many features as SWTOR did. But does that really excuse having the command to split stacked items be the same that links it in chat?
Still, many of the problems encountered in the first month are those that a good number of people would not have even seen yet. If general chat on the fleet is any indication, the average player-base is still at the level 35-40 range so a lot of the end-game issues are a non-factor. Bioware has been very quick so far with bug fixes and patches so it gives me confidence that they will have ironed things out by the time more people get to max level.
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