Good news coming out of Austin.

SWTOR was the first MMO I had played, and the only one I liked. All the mechanics like crafting, gathering, and multi-player content were new to me. I had to look up what "aggro" meant in the List of 101 MMO terms, and ask things like: What do you mean, Orange gear? The background or the frame?

I was fortunate to play it during the time when grind was fairly light. It took me 6 months to complete my first two stories I ran in parallel, basically only solo, and then I started to talk to people on the Bio forums, and got in the PvP content, because commendations were 2x at the time and my Smuggler was dying on Corellia on level 50 (cap at the time). A few months after that, the game suddenly went incredibly generous with leveling and gear, and I have also discovered the Light Side of the MMO.

I was incredibly lucky. By now I know just how lucky I was. I started chatting with PvP folks on the forums, and the community embraced me and taught me how to crawl in a MMO. The community was also really mature by then, so I was able to chat with the guys who wrote the guides to classes, and they also explained a lot of things to me that I could not get just from reading. Finally, thanks to my lucky stars I actually met someone who truly mentored me for six months on how to play a MMO, and taught me how to play a healer with a tank, another healer and a DPS. I never git good, but I git passable to be able to play with a nice PvE guild after that and actually experience MMO in the best way possible.

Once I got the basics, and thanks to the "easy gearing/easy levelling" period in SWTOR lifecycle I finished all the other stories, made mirror characters, played on another server with East Coast friends... etc.

I basically was able to experience SWTOR the way each MMO wants the player to experience it. With nice people and accessing a whole bunch of different content, in PvP and PvE.

I had also been to the Dark Side of MMOs as well, so I understand the "MMO crap" comment.