Does anyone else here still play, and if so do you think it's worth the subscription fee?
No. Even if were f2p I don't think I'd still play. For me, it got stale. End of Burning Crusade through early Wrath was about the peak for WoW, I think. I stopped playing about halfway through Wrath, came back for Cata and it was never really the same. Played Cata for 6 months or so of not really enjoying it and then stopped. Now I hear it has pandas. Never felt the need to resubscribe.
for the pvp - lol
Honestly I really enjoyed WoW's pvp. For a while. For a time. But pretty much all of that time was all pre-Cata. Wow's been on the decline for years. Even during Wrath people knew it was going downhill. It's just been a slow decline.
What exactly is so terrible about World of Warcraft? When I played it last time I had fun, and that was around the release of MoP. It can't have changed that drastically. That said, I never participated in any higher-end raids or PvP so I might be missing something there.
...probably everyone would give you a different answer. For me, raiding was a big part of my gameplay. And the big thing was that I never really found a raiding guild I liked after Cataclysm. A huge part of WoW is the people you play with, and if you have people you like to play with it doiesn't matter as much of the game is only so-so. If you have friends who play Wow, yes it might be fun to go play with them. But without that...meh.
A lot of the "fun" I had in my last year of WoW wasn't any of the new content, but rather was going back and doing
old content and reliving past glories. And the rest was pretty much just grinding achievements, pets, mounts, etc.
How about SWTOR?
It is awful. That said, it is free. Go ahead and try it out. The
game is awful, but some of the cutscenes are entertaining. In particular I recommend playing a Sith Warrior so you can see the Vette storyline. In my opinion, she was absolutely the best thing about SWTOR.
Other than the horrible F2P business model, is there any huge drawback to it?
It's a single player game, with single player quests and a single player story line and single player dialogue...with a multiplayer chat feature.
I exagerate slightly. But not by a lot. The multiplayer features are seriously lacking in comparison to the single player features. But they made it multiplayer, and then balanced the leveling system to assume that you would do a lot of multiplayer content...and then restricted it so that you can only do a limited amount of that multiplayer content without paying for access to it thereby requiring you to either do a lot of grinding or track down each and every single last possible quest in order to just barely keep up with the leveling curve. You're limited to the number of "dungeons" and things you can do...I think something like two per week, unless you pay $5 at a time to unlock them. Which is a nuisance itself, but ultimately that multiplayer content is not a lot of fun. Space combat, for example, is on rails. You don't actually control your ship, it just flies on a pre-programmed path and the gameplay itself is mostly spam clicking on everything. Pvp is not grouped by level or gear, so after waiting in the queue to be placed into a battleground....something you can only do a couple times a week without paying extra...you'll generally spend most of the time running up into a crowd only to be cut down in seconds, then respawn.
It could go on at great length about the problems with SWTOR, but basically...it just wasn't very well thought out and the company that made it didn't know what they were doing. I is an adequate single player game with some good voice acting and likable characters, but you sometimes have to play through 3-5 hours at a time of terribly dull, boring, awful bad gameplay just to get to the next cutscene. After a while it just stops being worthwhile.
Incidentally, if you do decide to give SWTOR a try, consider buying $5 worth of premier tokens on day one, as making even a single purchase unlocks quite a few things, some of which will make the game less obnoxious. I'm not saying the game is worth playing. But if you're going to play...plan to spend the $5 or don't bother.
What other good MMOs are out there?
How about try Eve. Here's a
21 day free trial. We have a bay12 group with about 30 members right now. Here's
the thread.
Eve is very much a case of "some people like it, some people don't" but...free trial. Give it a try.