The trick is to stop thinking of them as alts. If you play one Imperial and one Republic, that's two completely different leveling experiences. And get creative. If you have (and like), say, a sorceror, then don't roll a sage on the other side. Classes can play extremely differently from each other, if you approach them that way. Fool around with different companions, figure out how to finish everything with ones you wouldn't normally even bring out. If you absotively, posilutely have to have a raiding character, then don't get carried away with gearing your other characters with ops gear, because all you're doing is repeating the same crap. Designate a PvP character. Run flashpoints to level on another. You can (literally, because I've done it) skip entire planets if you want, without doing anything but the class quests. Do the world arc if it's a planet you like, skip it if you don't.

There's all kinds of ways to do it...

And the whole point of this game was that it was designed to be the first one not solely dependent on the end game. You can say "the story was nice from 1-50, but nothing to write home about" but the reality is that there isn't really a single "the story". There's 8 different ones. And as much as I've played (an insane amount...) I haven't even finished half of them. At the very least, if you stop with one, you're not seeing the game from the opposing side, which is drastically different and paints an interesting picture of the game world/galaxy.

As far as putting me in some "small minority of MMO players" goes, I wouldn't. I have always done alts, but I raided for years in both WoW and LotRO. I'll raid in TOR eventually, too, probably starting sometime in the fall. Assuming there's still anybody to raid with. The only reason I'm not raiding now is because there are a lot of interesting things to do 0-50 and (primarily) because I don't want to burn myself out on grinding before the game is six months old. Which is also the same reason I haven't gone crazy doing dailies. Because that, to me, is always the inherent problem with the so-called 'endgame': doing the same thing over and over gets very boring very, very quickly. I don't care what game it is, or what you're doing. So I'm in no rush to get to that point.

Anyway, I think in the end the game (and virtually any game) is really what you make it.

One last thing: it took me about 200 hours to finish my class story on my sage. It will eventually (when I do it) take me 200 hours to finish my class story on my assassin or agent, whichever I play first. Assume 20 hours of play a week, and stop with just those two characters, and that's 20 weeks worth of play. 5 months.

The reason I bring this up is because I wonder how much of the burnout/not enough to do issue has to do with the number of people (including myself) playing absolutely ridiculous amounts of time since launch. I think I finished my initial 200 hours on my sage in something around two weeks.

This I think ties in to my instant gratification argument (have to get to 50, have to do/have everything now damnit), and might explain why the so-called "casual" reaction to the game is so different than the so-called majority of mmo players who seem to be in exodus now. As they always are months after the launch of any new game.

Just cancelled mine and my wife's subs. Haven't played in almost a month. I may give it a go again in a year, but there just isn't enough to do. And there is no way I could make another alt to go through that all again.

Hope you guys are still getting a kick out of it.

I'm still clicking along, but a lot of people have left the game. I'm not sure how much of a difference 1.3 is going to make.

I left this for Tera. I'm loving it so far. Like loving it.

My guild keeps growing (maybe because due to left overs from guilds where the players have left, I don't know). There's a bit of a lull in action right now now due to D3, but people are still logging on for raids. We are working on EC HM (which is challenging to say the least).

It's a good diversion every once in a while for me but I'm certainly not overly attached.

I'm the same way and most of the people I play with are as well. I still have days where I'll play a lot, but my days of spending all my time gaming are long over.

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I'm still loving it. All except the part where nobody but me still plays. Made a Sith on "The Fatman" just to have a character on a server with other people.

I was playing until the server shutdown on me a minute ago. I just started my Imperial Agent. I think I'm enjoying the game every bit as much now as I did the first time I played it in September. I also think it helps that I rarely play it as much at a time as I did the first time I played it in September (15 hours/day for 3.5 days during test weekend 1...)

I still haven't done any of the flashpoints above level 30 yet, but I have grouped enough to get my black hole weekly done for a month (I'm good, but soloing Chasing the Shadow? Yeah, not happening.) A few of my friends are in their 40s now, so it's a matter of time before we starting doing the level 50 stuff one or two days a week. A part of me wishes I'd been gear grinding so I wouldn't be a level 50 sage with 15k hp and crafted armor with level 50 purple mods, but a bigger part of me knows I'll probably enjoy the endgame more doing it casually with my friends than ever I would have grinding it, and with strangers. Stuff is going to be fresh to me in July and August that people have been complaining about burning out on since February.

Biggest problem for me and our guild right now is getting 8 people on to do our runs. We were flowing so smoothly right up until D3 came out. /sadeface

I might go back to playing the game once some server transfers/mergers take place. I leveled an Imp Agent to 15 and quickly lost interest, I'd much rather progress my main toon. Oh well.

Server transfers should be a part of 1.3, if not out before. They're testing them on the PTS with the patch (whenever they do that, probably in the next couple of weeks is my guess). I know I signed up for transferring/copying my sage to the PTS a week or two ago (Link).

They're also apparently going to be instituting a superserver structure sometime later in the year, which I would assume is similar to what DCU did. So that will essentially be server mergers.

They do need to get this stuff done quickly - low pops are the biggest issue right now.

When is it going F2P?

Well maybe if you weren't so hard to work with you wouldn't have driven everyone away.