I had about 400 hours in sm multiplayer. Personally I felt when it all worked right it was a beautiful part of the game. I played mostly as a assault/raptor and I never felt like I had problems getting kills. The only real counter to what I did was the melta gun and you just had to be observant about that. Overall I felt space marines single player was the weaker of the two.

For the detractors of Space Marine's multiplayer gameplay, I'm not certain exactly how much experience you guys have under your belt, but let me say that there is a learning curve to the game; a lot of game mechanics and balancing factors are emergent, and do not become evident until a certain level of understanding has been attained.

I don't mean this in a derogatory manner in any way, but is extremely well designed. It's just that a player needs to play it for a while to "get" what is going on.

The melee weapons are all highly effective and kill extremely quickly (between one full second to two full seconds), yet each with their own drawbacks to balance them.
I don't want to go too far into the details (that would be off topic), but the boltgun with Kraken rounds has a time-to-kill of approximately 2 seconds, and the Power Axe always kills with two hits, except for users of a specific perk (Feel No Pain) who will need three hits. One-hit kills are reserved for the Thunder Hammer, you understand.
A time-to-kill of under two seconds is pretty quick, unless a player prefers Call of Duty's gameplay. If Space Marine's weapons ever seem unsatisfying (or seem that they "do not actually do damage), I put forth the possibility that their effectiveness is entirely reliant on the hands that wield them.

I understand that the game did a good job at balancing as I played it for a long while and rocked the Bolter with the Kraken rounds upgrade, but that doesn't stop the melee from feeling underwhelming against an enemy player in my opinion. The melee was designed with the idea of slaughtering hordes of Orks and heretics like a bulldozer, not other players. The multiplayer was more like a dessert to the main focus of the game, which was the singleplayer.

I beg to differ, the Chainsword and the Thunder Hammer are deadly weapons that many players use to top the scoreboards with. Admittedly the Power Axe is difficult to use, because anything that's slow enough for you to destroy with the axe, is better dealt with using the hammer.
Quite simply, all three melee weapons kill faster than the ranged weapons.

Although I will say this.. the melee weapons are not deadly on their own. Effective and skillful use of the Jump Pack is a requirement to allow the melee weapons to deliver their damage.

On this point, I wonder if melee-oriented classes will be viable in EC for classes that do not have Jump Packs or Warp Jump capabilities?
Say, Slugga Boyz and Slugga Nobz, Striking Scorpions, or even melee-focused Astartes choosing to deploy without Jump Packs?

thats where assault vehicles come in

My foot was always my favorite way to deal with jump pack attackers. Devastator was amazing to play as since I loved my heavy bolter.

Deadly doesn't makeup for it's flaws. It needs to be improved, or redesigned to some extent, with PvP in mind in order to create a smoother melee experience. I would like to state that, once again, this is an opinion not a fact.

This I agree with.

Not sure if I'm in a position to give an answer and I'm sure that others can give a better response than I.
I must say, however, that you have presented an interesting point that I have not thought of before.
Thank you for your input, Cyke.

It is my strong believe, that BE dont want to do just a MMO shooter, just a reskin of PS1, 2, space marine. That would be just stupid and would not take 3 years to publish...EC should feature more options, more depth, more systems, more RPG elements.
This was kinda confirmed in the discussion below this article: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/954/feature/7968

You guys should take the time to watch the recent AMA.

The developers recently played PS2 and told each other, imagine if this was EC, now work out the things about PS2 you don't like and what we should avoid doing and things they think were good ideas etc etc. And so on, I honestly think making statements "before you do anything stupid" and being aggressive in your post isn't the best way to portray your concerns. On other forums, you'd have your topic locked or removed, because frankly it comes off as aggressive or even abusive, but since I assume it's posted out of fear and out of general overriding concern, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt.

My biggest concern, this being my own personal opinion, since we are all on the subject of thrusting forward our personal opinions here... and this really relates to their ideas for classes in the game is that from what they have said, it seems to lean a lot towards how classes are done in PlanetSide 2 and Battlefield. Which no offense to the developers, kind of rubs me the wrong way.

For me being attached to my character and feeling my character has an established history and importance in a game is part of the RPG experience, if they want it to be an RPG, they need to find a way to maintain the semblance of the personalisation of a character, rather than it simply being cosmetic or a nameless skin on a nameless selection from a menu, having skins or cosmetic options don't make up for this. The only way to become attached to your character is to create one from scratch, pick the look of it, have many options to personalize and customise and create a unquie character who is all your own, then launch and pick a class to play that character as. Thing is if they have the option to "unlock" classes as they say, I want my character to seemlessly go between them if they want to go for a Planetside 2/Battlefeild class system or least so I can create a new character for each which I can feel personal attachment to. Because to go otherwise will rub me up the wrong way entirely and would also do the same to a lot of players, Planetside and Battlefield fanbois be damned. They said this will be an RPG, not a FPS!

Honestly saying things like "Do this" or "Do that" is dangerous personally, who are we to judge what everyone wants in a game? We don't represent everyone.

Mine never did. There are a few things you could look for (if you ever play LoL you have a program on your puter that eats bandwidth) anyway, I played a few hours this weekend and my frames stayed well above 60 even in major fights, before they would fall down to the 40's. Definitely not optimal, but not chugging either.

This latest patch has taken care of a lot of performance problems, my issue is; it's still just TDM all over the map.