I thought you guys had all been playing since the beta wtf? how are you talking about pvp being new/athiss/orange gear? maybe i've just played too much since i fucking love the game haha. I'm in a guild but tbh i mostly just use it to find groups for stuff since its a bunch of random people and then a small group which does hm ops/ops/hm's with each other and kinda is sequestered off from everyone else. you do stuff with them sometimes but most of the time they stick together (for example I was going to dps for a hm and had talked to them a bunch but then they found the last member of the group they needed and instead of hitting me back they just had one of their friends take my spot, didn't tell me and went for it and i didn't know until i checked the guild list and saw they were in the hm).
i beat syndicate and it was kinda decent but kinda crappy at the same time. i hear co-op is the shit so i'll have to try that sometime soon, but i'm so engulfed in SWTOR right now I can't really stop (i want to hit battlemaster before I start playing ME3 non stop and i'm at valor 54 so it's a longgg grind haha).
I really do love SWTOR though. there are problems, the graphics blow, a lot of the updates they do bug a lot of stuff, there are a lot of bugs, many things can be a grind etc, but the great moments truly outweigh the shittyness. going through a hm you've never done before with a good group and experiencing the story/team work, some of the great planets and set pieces (i wish more daily quests were on other planets since just ilum and belsavis gets boring as hell), great music for the most part, a lot of funny easter eggs, the class quests (especially the end fuck yeah), the feeling you get when taking on a boss in an ops, the fun and competition of pvp, upgrading gear to get awesome star wars items (getting the purple lightsaber was sooo sick) etc. I'm sure i'll burn out eventually but they keep adding content and i haven't even scratched the surface. it says i've played 14 days when i used the /played function, and i still haven't even hit 4 of the flashpoints (though i'm way over leveled so it'd just be for story), haven't hit battlemaster, need to get all that gear, only have 2 rakata pieces, haven't even done the karagga ops etc.