And now for a bit of philosophy....
Have any of you guys read
Designing Virtual Worlds by
Richard Bartle (that's Richard Bartle of Bartle Test fame and one of the fathers of the MMO genre)? If not, I'd recommend you give it a go. It's a bit old now and most of the examples are from text MUDs but a lot of the concepts still apply.
One of the central concepts presented in the book is that a player of an MMO is on a
Hero's Journey (note this is the player, not the character the player is playing although they generally have one too!). In order for a journey to do its job, it must have a conclusion. An ever expanding MMO that continually raises the level cap, prevents this conclusion from occurring and so ultimately becomes unsatisfactory.
[/philosophy]
The way I saw the design of SWTOR, the idea was that you can progress purely by doing the class missions and, as such, the XP generation is geared towards that. If you try to do everything, explore everything and do all the missions, by the very nature of the game, you're going to be overleveling. If you want a continuous challenge from 0-50, just do the class quests. There's nothing wrong with maxing out a character, deleting that character and starting again to gain a different experience.
For my part, I like overleveling. It gives me the ability to explore on my own terms without being continually frustrated by dying. I completed just the class quests on Coruscant so that I could get my ship as quick as possible. The boss fight at the end was really difficult. I died several times and I found it really frustrating. I hated it! I'm more interesting in the story part than watching myself being respawned multiple times. Now I've got my ship, I've gone back and I'm exploring all the content in Coruscant, taking all the missions. I fully intend to be 4-5 levels higher than I need to be when I start Taris.
With the loot gear being underleveled. To a certain extent, I think that's intentional. If you only needed to use looted gear, there would be no market for player crafting. Sure, it may need a bit of balance but this game has only been out a month. And, quite frankly, it's in a far, far better state after that one month than any other MMO has been at this stage, that I'm aware of. WoW has had nearly 10 years to get to the state that it's currently in. That's an awfully high bar, for a new MMO to be compared with.
I also think we've been under-valuing the social aspects of the game. In SWG, we wasted away many hours just sitting around in cantinas, chatting. In SWTOR, I've wasted away many hours exploring all aspects of the map. On Tython, in particular, I went off the beaten track all over the place just to see what's there and to look at the scenery.
Lastly, there is a LOT of potential here. If it's this good to start with, think how great it will be in a year's time. Don't write it off just yet!
This post may have been a little disjointed. There were a few points I wanted to make but haven't had too much time to think about how to say them. Hopefully you've got the gist of what I'm trying to say! Plus, Bartles book is over an inch thick. Trying to summarise it is nigh impossible!