I've spent a shameful amount of my life playing EQ and WoW (yay raiding! right?), and I'm looking forward to playing something fresh. Star Wars: The Old Republic is the first MMO since WoW launched that I've had the slightest interest in playing (ignoring that brief stint where Giant Bomb made me think I needed Star Trek Online). This weekend I was invited to their weekend beta stress-test, so I spent a good chunk of my weekend playing a Sith Warrior up to level 18 (edit: 20!). I'd guess I probably sank somewhere close to 30 hours into it.

Things I liked!

• Right off the bat, the most obvious ace up BioWare's sleeve here is that all the quests are voice acted. I hardly ever read quest text in WoW. It's impressive how much BioWare can elevate the experience of "go there, grab that, come back" when the time it taken to make a show of it.
• The presentation of quests incorporates BioWare's signature dialogue wheel. Listening to what NPCs have to say and choosing a response appropriate for your character is classic BioWare RPG fun. The Light and Dark alignment system is back from KOTOR too, and you're frequently presented with those kinds of choices during dialogue sequences.
• There's a ton to do with companion characters. Companions have their own equipment, they can be sent off to a vendor to sell junk items Torchlight-style, they react to your dialogue choices, and you can send them on mini-missions to collect trade skill stuff. If I take a 10 minute break to eat, my companion can be off leveling up my Archeology skill. There's absolutely nothing like companions in WoW. 
• Star Fox!  The game has on-rails space battles like those in Star Fox.  Your ship has equipment slots that you can upgrade too.  It's a fun diversion from the standard, on-foot questing.
  
• While questing through a zone, you'll sometimes find "(Zone Name) Commendation" items that act like a kind of currency. In town there's a special vendor that sells high quality items in exchange for those commendations. I bought a few great items that way. It beats the piss out of finding "Silk Trousers of the Whale".
• Every quest rewards you with items you can use. Even if the items offered aren't upgrades, there's frequently also the choice of taking a commendation token instead. Sometimes you're rewarded with gear specifically for your companion, and it's fun to gear them up too.
• Each class has its own unique story thread that goes from the beginning of the game till the level cap (I assume). Class-specific quests in WoW are extremely rare, but SWTOR embraces them. This has incredible potential to keep the game fresh for people who love rolling alts.
• There's no downtime. Maybe this is the classic EQ'er in me who used to have to sit around staring at his spellbook, but I think it's worth noting. My Sith Warrior had an ability called "Focus Rage" that simply would quickly heal me to full when out of combat. I could get in a fight that would take me to the brink of death, Focus Rage, then be right back in it.
• Lots of trash creatures out in the open world are in small groups. It's a ton of fun to leap into a pack of them, smash the ground with an AoE attack, and generally wipe the floor with them. That's something I should be able to do being a goddamned Sith Warrior.
  

Things I didn't like:

• There's a learning curve to the trade skill system that I haven't even come close to hurdling yet. I was prompted around level 10 to pick up some trade skills and so picked up three random ones not knowing really what they were for. I picked "Bioanalysis", "Archeology" and "Underworld Trading". I collected a ton of stuff for these and never did anything with them, I still don't know what they're for. I'll have to spend some time reading things outside the game to figure it out.
• On that note, there's a lot of stuff the game has that isn't adequately explained. I spent too much time tinkering around with the interface trying to figure out where everything was. Can I change my character's Advanced Class choice? What do I do with these commendations?
• The graphics are terrible. WoW covers its modest engine with an excellent artistic style. SWTOR just looks like The Sims. I understand their desire to have the game be compatible with as wide a range of PCs as possible, but they gave up too much in the process. For a game being released in the last few weeks of 2011, SWTOR completely fails graphically.
• I heard a rumor that it might make the launch, but the beta did not have any kind of automated LFG tool. Spamming General chat looking for group members is terrible. Having a group member quit mid-instance and being SOL is worse.
• Group members will quit mid-instance because some of the bosses we encountered were way too complicated for new, casual players. I know there's a demographic of gamers who love a challenge, but there's more people who will quit at the first sign of failure. Small group content, especially low level small group content, should be easy.
• I hated threat management in WoW, and it's back in SWTOR.
• I'm tired of talent trees. SWTOR has huge talent trees full of small, incremental choices. I don't want to spend my time analyzing what the best talent build for my character is.

I could probably think of more bullets, but I'm getting tired. Overall I enjoyed it, if nothing other than as a simple, single-player, Star Wars RPG.

Heya, Floppy, just thought I'd try to share some pointers on crafting.

Essentially, your character doesn't craft. He/She (as your avatar) makes the decisions and pays the bills, but the companions do the actual crafting. After you've picked up the 3 crafting/gathering skills of your choice, you'll get 3 buttons in the "Crew" menu for each companion. Click one, and you'll either get a list of gathering quests you can send them on (like the AC:Brotherhood quests) or for a crafting skill a menu of known recipes. You can open this menu and send the companion to do a quest or craft at just about any time, but they'll be unable to quest with you during the mission. Companions (and your character) can loot crafting materials as you play, which by your comments you discovered.

The "Eureka" moment I had was when I dove into the in-game codex and found that the Crafting skills have recommended gathering skills. Scavenging, for example, gets you metal from robot bodies and various things which can be used to craft heavy armor. I think the gathering missions also have a chance to proc a recipe instead of just materials, but that didn't happen for me. At any rate, it made crafting click for me as I was gathering the right materials, and it gave me a place to send my companion when I was in a 4-man group or getting from A to B slowly.

There is also a "reverse engineer" mechanic, where you can break down things in your inventory for materials and a chance to proc a recipe. Around level 15 I started to do this a lot since I had way more money than I was spending and didn't have anything to save up for. A couple recipes proc'ed, including a superior version.

On the positive side, it's a neat system when you figure it out and it beats the everloving spoo out of swinging a hammer in the vicinity of an anvil for hours on end.

On the negative side, almost none of this is adequately explained in-game and I never found a simple vendor for better recipes (though I wasn't trying that hard and I think vendors were light overall in the beta weekend). The gathering also has a very random element compared to say "mine silver vein" in other RPGs, never really know what you're about to get could be exciting or REALLY FRUSTRATING depending on your mentality.

And it still took me to Level 16 to get a Helmet.

It has a lot of potential. I'd really like to see Bioware put up a video about it and show something of what it looks like when done right and at higher levels, but in the worst case it still looks like a good place to get money in the low-mid levels.