The guest in the Tested podcast said the main quests scale so any side quests are optional. Is this true? I figured you had to do the side quest stuff to be of adequate level to continue the story. The planets say what level you need to be after all. I'm 99% sure he is wrong, but I ask anyway because only doing the main quest would be so great even if it means I finish the game at lvl 25 or something.

No, it does not.

If it did you would be running through level 40 planets at level 20 and get slaughter by everything as you went from quest to quest.

If you're strictly questing, you'll need to do the main quest and all non-Heroic sidequests to stay the appropriate level. Keep in mind that this is a WoW-styled MMO. There's nothing stopping you from running some dungeons or doing some PVP to boost up your level to counter the need to do sidequests.

I just tried to speed grind with a friend like we did in Titan Quest and Borderlands, but it didn't work. I got almost no XP even from late game enemies. I understand it's because an MMO so they don't want people to "cheat".

The side stuff is alright at first, but doing them for the third or forth time they are just a chore. I guess I can level fairly well doing PvP and space and such.

"You can go to planet A or planet B. FOOLED YOU. You can only go to planet A."

I did notice that the story missions can at times be a tad more challenging but it won't scale.

The story quests don't scale. Whoever said that needs to do more research.

@Funkydupe: I actually was high enough level by the end of Coruscant (10-16) to completely skip Taris (16-20) and go straight to Nar Shaddaa (20-24).

It's too bad, some scaling would have given me a reason to play more then two characters.(One republic, one Imperial) The sidequests are so shitty and boring that I can only tolerate maybe one go around per side.

@Brodehouse said:

The story quests don't scale. Whoever said that needs to do more research.

@Funkydupe: I actually was high enough level by the end of Coruscant (10-16) to completely skip Taris (16-20) and go straight to Nar Shaddaa (20-24).

Yeap Brode is correctamundo. I also skipped Taris too on my first character. You can get plenty of exp from flashpoints, pvp warzones, and space missions to more than make up any level gaps and sometimes even skip side missions. Heck on my first toon I hit 50 shortly after landing on Voss and it only supposed to take you to like 47-48.