Even if its 8 hour downtime I won't care, since it starts at 3AM EDT... as long as its up by noon I'll be happy.
Not to hamper anyones enthusiasm here but I must say it's a very strange decision to launch it the day after WoW expansion launch, just random thought when I noticed the date.
Couldn't care less what MoP is doing, I played WoW for long enough then had a break. I still had my annual pass so logged in last week to do a "scenario" and it was so boring. I decided at that point that I wasn't going to come back. 1/2 my guild also aren't coming back and most of us have been together since Vanilla and early TBC. If I was to come back it would be to hang out with them again, but I really don't have the urge to do so.
Anyway I'm still having too much fun in SWTOR.
I doubt it is more pulling having to level and then go for raids than log in and go for the new operation with your current gear and all. Many people have been waiting for it as they only allowed a limited amount of people to actually test the content. I only heard good responses from any tester so, should be interesting.
I don't underestimate it at all... I've been through this several times and everytime more people than not were only doing it to start raiding, not because they like to level up all of their chars. Old content becomes trivial, only new content is going to be interesting and if the content can't convince, they will all go back from wherever they came from. Only people with no options will go through it just to say after that it was a shitty expansion.
I think you're overestimating the leveling and underestimating the desire to play a different type of toon at max level. You want to think it's the leveling that draws people in? It wasn't with me. Before Cata, I had 6 max level toons. Aside from a couple, I hated leveling all of them. I just wanted to be able to have different experiences when I raided/pvped/ran dungeons, etc. I also wanted all of the professions covered without having to spend tons and tons of gold to get them maxed out (before professions had to equal out to your level.) I know many, many others with that same mentality.
And I know many with the opposite mentality, it's all anecdotal, there is however a reason why behavioral experts claims that leveling up is something we desire, if it's in the form of leveling characters in a MMO, collecting friends on FB, get high like count on your twitters and so on, it doesn't have to be something that we claim to like or strive for but enjoy and do subconsciously.
It beats - in my book - the alternative "try to not compete". I agree with you on the attraction of leveling and new content in general, so it makes sense to throw out as much new stuff as possible, knowing they will have to hold back some developments for the start of f2p.
Whenever there was a new level cap in EQ2, not a single progress player wanted to level their chars, they had to to stay competitive. Casual player also don't enjoy leveling again becaust mostly they are too overwhelmed with the existing content and they prefer to have "some" time to stay at their level, experience everything and maybe after a few years, they really want to level up. They do however like to see new areas.
Anyow this is entirely subjective and I'd like to see any work form your "behavioral experts".
Then from today we have to expect every 4-6 weeks a new content patch, like they said?
Wildstar Black Ops - loved by strangers
Well for us running +/- hours to european time... it's still ok though if it takes much longer we'll also be having issues. Anyhow since the only time they extended the down period extensively was when they moved all servers onto a selected few and not like with SOE where every downtime was expected to crush your evening... I'm still positive.
For the casual claim.. check the official forums regarding level cap raise. For the progress claim... I'm playing mmo's for over 10 years and whenever a new lvl cap hit any game where raiding was some kind of a factor, everyone wanted to just be done with to start the the actual content you subbed for. It wasn't enjoyable because your target is not to hit max cap, your target is to get ww1st kills.
Also thanks to your "evidence"... which says exactly nothing. How did they pinpoint that people enjoy leveling? Because people are going to play MoP?...