[Gogan]

It's fun for sure, at least for the first 20 or so levels.

From what I hear, the appeal gets lost during the last half of leveling. The end-game is virtually non-existant right now. And it'll run into the same issues WoW had over the last 5 years. Technology-wise, it's about on par with WoW vanilla or TBC. You don't realize what a big difference WoW's phasing made until you suddenly don't have it. Talent trees are bloated and will simply lead to cookie cutter builds. I don't believe there's any kind of in-game macroing. Healing in general feels like an afterthought. My healing-spec'd Commando gets only 3 different healing spells total. Agents/SMugglers seem the same, while Jedi Counselors/Inquisitors get one or two more. Crafting is as boring and tedious as WoW. Some of the quests are super-grindy, e.g. Bonus: kill 135 thugs. And apparently you have to do all the side/bonus quests, or else you'll fall behind the xp/content curve. There's no dungeon finder, and the instances themselves are placed in between planets making it pretty tough to get random groups together. There's also no combat log, and no system for creating in-game mods.

So yeah, it has a lot of problems and it didn't really learn much from previous MMO's mistakes. It has potential though. I had a blast playing it over the weekend. The question is, will they continue to make significant improvements to it over the next few years the way Blizz did with WoW? And are you ok with taking a few steps backwards (compared to WoW) with the hopes that it'll be better down the road?

I think the cold reality is no new MMO at release will ever be able to match WoW today. Wow has effectively been in active development for over a decade. Any other game will be a minimum of 5+ years behind (except Blizz new MMO, of course).