for me praetoria was always the place no one wanted to team in, usually because things were going-on on red or blue side and no one had time for praetoria, this meant that most of us had to slow grind through it, and it had a very dull white concrete jail cell feel to it, like the whole place was on lock down. and it was on lock down, it was a pretty foolish move to separate it from the rest of the active player areas and disallow people to leave until LV20. even worse was their idea to only instate difficult, low level content. they could have done much more to make it workable, again the separated the player base, typically there were only 11 people in praetoria on Protector, everyone else was running TFs, SFs trials and raids or chilling and talking under atlas, or playing it up in crazy AE teams.
Praetoria; No AE, No real focal point for chilling and talking (it was quite far from everything), no TFs, the raids are way too short and way too low level, there was no access to the market etc.. And there was no allowance or instigation for heroes and villains to go there, and even if they did there was nothing to do except walk around, they couldn't pick a side, they couldn't play praetorian missions. they kept talking about making a higher level praetorian zone, and most people effected by the lowbie zone were eagerly awaiting it, then when it was announced that it was going to come in the form of i-trials, a lot of people got mad.
what they could have done; the following would have possibly saved the game.
1: make Praetorian XP able to get you extra powers, such as more powerful attacks to deal with the harder content, and additional inherent archetype powers, like ranged defense for blasters or MM style pet controls for controllers. not just this I'm sure there was a lot more that could be developed and tempting for players of all levels.
2: allow highbies to join the loyalists and or resistance, gaining a toggle self exemplaring power which allows them to enjoy the praetorian missions on their highbies and gain the extra powers and niceties talked about above. this would also help praetorians because suddenly they have well slotted and possibly purple enhanced highbies helping out on missions. and most important of all it would make praetoria seem less isolated and less of a ghost town.
all this would have encouraged more people to buy going rogue, and would have given the "New start" that they were hoping for (just like CoV was a new start that teased players to start over). and it could have formed the outline for future parallel universe/ other planetary starting points and their marketing structure.
cut off, end of lunch break not sure if I typed everything I wanted to say
