sephirah

The only reason I love any kind of P2W cash shops is that usually keep the game free of the more competitive players that usually are those whining more on the forums ("Nerf that class! Buff my class!") and those that have MMORPG as their only goal in life ("I spent 100 boring hours farming for that item, and that guy bought it for 10$?!?")
Since I likely won't spend a dime in GW2 cash shop, having a community composed of more relaxed people is surely something I must thank Arenanet for.
(Oh, and Funcom for TSW cash shop too)

@(Unverified)

SWTOR is dying too, it's just not old as Rift.
I wonder why people posting here or on other sites expect a game to not lose players: the greatest influx is at game release, after that the average player get bored by doing the same raids again and again or to roll alts and quit.

The majority of posters here will say "It's a MMORPG, you need to group!"
The majority of players (that don't care to post on MMORPG sites) will merrily continue to solo.

Are we talking about this press release
http://www.swtor.com/news/press-release/20120201
more than one month old and already covered in
http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/02/01/ea-reveals-swtor-subscription-and-sales-numbers-beats-financial/
and that seem to refer to numbers at 31st December 2011?

"What players say they do and what they actually do aren't always the same thing."

Sure, especially if feedback is used to tune the cashshop...
"Oh, so you like to do THAT? Well, to be able to have some chance of success from now on you'll have to buy this item in the cashshop!"

Incredible, reading all the negative comments above one could believe that people play MMORPGs for reading long quest descriptions!

@(Unverified)

A similar approach is used by GW (but with less freedom since it uses classes): not everyone uses the same build and of course when some skill or combo goes out of control it's nerfed by devs.
In a skill based game, if you favorite skill is nerfed, you can always take another one, while in a class based game you only can complain and eventually reroll.

Anyway, a single uberbuild is unlikely, you will probably have the best AoE tanking, the best single target CC, the best burst healing, the best DoT dps and so on: if mobs/bosses abilities are sufficiently different, you'll be forced to use many of them.

I don't think I will ever be able to actually play the game.
I would spend all the time testing decks...

Shouldn't they play to something else instead, just to learn what a MMORPG actually is?

@Dunraven

SWTOR got a metacritic score of 85.
AoC got 80 and Warhammer Online 86.
Just saying.