Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Fairweather Pure »

kyoukan wrote:People don't appreciate the fact that 1.2 million dudes playing an average of probably about 13 bucks a month is serious fucking money though. A lot of AAA games don't come close to the amount of money this game has and will make.
It's my understanding the game cost 200 million to make and server costs are about 550k a month. Take off the free month and that number is really not very big when you take it's huge budget into account. I believe this game holds the record for the most expensive game ever made. I'm sure they'll make their money back, but there is no doubt that the game is greatly under performing and well below expectations.

All of that is neither here nor there. I'm more interested in why it seems to have been more of a passing phase instead of a healthy and growing MMO. Is it too WoW -like? I hear that all the damn time. I admit, it looks like it plays like WoW, but I happen to enjoy that formula and it's a tried and true model. Mix that with Star Wars and I assumed it would be a resounding success. Out of all the post-WoW MMOs, I honestly thought this one was going to flourish. Also, I have heard sever populations voiced several times as a major concern so thanks for a VV opinion on the issues.

Should other MMOs try and be as different as possible from WoW (like EVE)? What can this game do to bring folks back and keep them there? Have they announced expansions or anything like that? Honestly, when no one on VV really talked about it post release, that was my first indication that things might not be going as well as I thought. I heard a couple of tepid reviews as well, but I figured they had not gotten to end game yet and kind of wrote them off.
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Aslanna
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Aslanna »

Can any MMO these days really have great success in terms of having a huge subscriber base? For one thing with so many MMO games out there the actual numbers any one of them could gather can't be that significant in the grand scheme of things. At least not in comparison to something like WoW that had what.. 15 million at one point? I just don't think you'll ever find another game that will have as many subscribers as WoW did during its "glory years".

The market has changed and there's just too much fragmentation out there. People get bored easily and move on to the Next Big Thing regardless of the fact that the base mechanics are pretty much the same usually: Kill stuff, get xp, get gear, level up, repeat.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by miir »

It's my understanding the game cost 200 million to make and server costs are about 550k a month. Take off the free month and that number is really not very big when you take it's huge budget into account.
I won't even bother disputing your numbers (which are considerably incorrect)

But if they are accurate:

+2 million box sales @ $50 = 100 million
The game has been out 5 months and has made nearly 100 million is subscription fees.

Even by your grossly exaggerated figures, SWTOR is a financual success 6 months after release.




PS: WOW never actually had 15 million active players.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Chidoro »

I still play it and it’s pretty good to me. But then I have only about 12 days played between all my characters and my highest is only level 35 so it’s all feels pretty cool and exciting to me. But, the community is a lot like WoW’s in that you get random guild invites, random duel requests, random – i don’t know who you are but NOTICE ME- jackassery. But I think that’s going to be the nature of any high profile game nowadays.
I too am in EQ most of the time these days. The SOE all-access is a great deal for me so go figure
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Fairweather Pure »

miir wrote:
It's my understanding the game cost 200 million to make and server costs are about 550k a month. Take off the free month and that number is really not very big when you take it's huge budget into account.
I won't even bother disputing your numbers (which are considerably incorrect)

But if they are accurate:
So, they are considerably incorrect, but if they are?

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2012/01/ ... gamble/#/0

200 million is in that article. Do you have something that says otherwise? You're numbers do not account for payments for licensing fees, retailer cuts, or any of the other factors that make your 50$ per boxed copy estimate much, much smaller. Put up or shut up. Don't just be an asshole for asshole's sake. Show me I'm wrong with proof. Your backhanded remarks don't bring anything to the conversation. Bleh, I don't want to get into a Miir pissing match. The only time you ever post anymore is to be a complete prick.

I'm with Aslanna in that I do not think monthly fees are really viable anymore. WoW gets off with a pass because people have been doing it for so long. However, new game models have got to be FTP or way cheaper than 15$ a month. People can only justify paying for 1 or 2 games a month, max. How does Guild Wars 2 make it's money? Strictly off of boxed copy sales? I have a feeling that Blizzard's next product may not go with a monthly fee either when it comes out in 2025 or whenever.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Chidoro »

i thought it was $60 per box in the beginning. pretty sure i paid $60 and I didn't start playing until 6 weeks after launch
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Bubba Grizz »

We have a small guild on Canderous Ordu and we have the standard small guild problems. Never enough people on to do the 8 man Ops or we have the people but not the correct people. So we get by with alts and flashpoints. We are going to ally with another guild who is in the same situation in order for us to get some Ops in. It will probably lead to our guild merging with theirs eventually depending on how many we lose to other games like Diablo3 or whatever.

The game is good over all but there are a lot of little things that nag at me. Things you'd thing they would have had in the game at launch. Even though we have guild banks now, they weren't in at the start. They make doing the most obvious thing the most obscure and annoying. Trying to buy a stack of something from a vendor you need to jump through hoops to make it work.

Things that make you think, "do the devs and coders even play this game"? They have to be seeing the same crap that we are. They have to have some mmo background with other games as a player like WoW or Warhammer.

I am a very tolerant person and I will put up with shit longer than I should. So I try to give the benefit of the doubt to them and say that they've only be live for 5-6 months and they will get things right but sometimes it is as if they aren't even trying to make things better. I know they have bigger things to accomplish first but that doesn't do much to stem my disappointment. I hope things get better but I find myself looking forward to GW2.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by kyoukan »

I have heard the $200 million budget as well and it is astonishing that anyone could think that any video game would have a budget like that. That would be five times the budget of the next most expensive game ever made. It simply is not true. TOR's largest expense would be the voice acting. The Hero Engine itself is super cheap and easy to build worlds with. There is nothing in the actual game that would have taken an impressive amount of money to build.

I think EA was definitely expecting much higher subscriptions attached to the game, and they still are expecting some sort of weird rush that will never come. The main problem with the game is that they are trying to compete directly with WOW and pick off all of WOW's user base. The game is a 100% WOW clone there is no question. I lost interest quickly in the game at max level because you hit 50 and then grind dailies for badges so you can get entry level epics so you have enough gear to do hard mode dungeons so you can have enough gear to do entry level raids. Yes, it is that similar. I had to make a choice on whether or not I wanted to commit the time and energy to get back up on that treadmill, or just level a bunch of alts forever, or just stop caring about the game. I do not have the time I used to have to commit to a raid schedule nor do I have the will to spend a billion hours grinding dailies.

Combine that with a development team that never interacts with the community in any meaningful way, ignores overwhelming consensus of requests and sits on content updates and quality of life improvements for months on end and you just have a recipe for mediocrity.

I remember during development when they were bragging about releasing a new planet every month and that they had enough voiceover resources for a years worth of content at that rate. In reality they release a new raid or flashpoint every 3 months or so. And no one even does them because you can't get a fucking group.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by miir »

..
Last edited by miir on May 9, 2012, 4:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by miir »

Come play on The Harbinger
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Boogahz »

Then you can spam duel invites at that Lene person
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

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Boogahz wrote:Then you can spam duel invites at that Lene person
I'll heal you to death!!!
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Fairweather Pure »

kyoukan wrote:I have heard the $200 million budget as well and it is astonishing that anyone could think that any video game would have a budget like that. That would be five times the budget of the next most expensive game ever made. It simply is not true.
GTA IV had a budget of 100 million and that was released in 2008! The article I posted says 200 million and explains why it cost so much. I believe the amount was also mentioned in an EA shareholders meeting too.

So, can this game be fixed with content, patching in things like cross server ques, or is it a lost cause?

My love of instanced content due to all the drama in EQ has kind of come full circle. MoP will have world bosses and my guild is totally stoked about the competitive nature of the encounters. After being without any sort of conflict for so many years, I must admit that I look forward to it in a weird way! Is Star Wars purely instanced, or do they have world bosses as well? I wonder because I don't really know why else Blizzard would include such content unless it was a response to something someone else is doing in the industry.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by masteen »

Merging servers might help in the short term bleeding, because the big servers seem pretty healthy. Sometimes I get roped into groups as an agent healer just bouncing back to fleet to dump a load in the AH.

And fresh quality content can fix anything, we haven't haven't seen it from the devs yet. Took way to fucking long to release the UI modifier, but at least it's good. I'm an altoholic, and I like every class story so far, except the sith inq, so i'm at least going to see the end of the trooper, knight, and sith war now that i finished the agent.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by kyoukan »

Boogahz wrote:Then you can spam duel invites at that Lene person
I'd consider it if they opened server transfers. I won't start again; especially my legacy levels.

What did you say on the post that you deleted? 8)
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Aabidano »

Was bored enough to go make a char on the harbinger this AM, it's weird actually seeing players around after being on Rubat for a while.

Char transfer would be nice, not something I'd pay for though with my high 30s characters.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Canelek »

Rift is actually better, but I liked TOr for being SW. May come back if secret world sucks.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

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Canelek wrote:Rift is actually better...
I agree, also even emptier. Burned through it pretty fast too.

Vanguard turned out to be pretty nice when I played it for a while last summer.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

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Canelek wrote:Rift is actually better...
I agree, also even emptier. Burned through it pretty fast too.

Vanguard turned out to be pretty nice when I played it for a while last summer.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Aslanna »

EQ isn't that bad either...
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

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Considering eq2 again if secret world sucks. Trying to get it not to crash... soot
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Fairweather Pure »

Layoffs hit SWtoR

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthre ... ost4435219

Hey folks, since you’re reading this you may likely have heard that we’ve done some restructuring here on the SWTOR team. Sadly, we are bidding farewell to some talented, passionate and exceptionally hard-working people who helped make SWTOR a reality. Impacting people’s lives this way is always very hard, but we’re ensuring the affected people are treated with dignity, fairness and respect.

Looking back at launch, we all came together and did something historic. We executed one of the largest, most successful and stable launches of any MMO yet in industry history. That is not an easy feat for any development team or company and we are humbled and honored by our fan community’s strong support both at launch and beyond.

Looking forward, the studio remains vibrant and passionate about our many upcoming initiatives for Star Wars: The Old Republic. We still have a very substantial development team working on supporting and growing the game, and we feel we are in a strong position, with your continued involvement and feedback, to continue to build Star Wars: The Old Republic as one of the most compelling and successful online experiences in the world today. There are many strong initiatives planned for cool new content and new features that we’re excited to tell you about in the upcoming weeks and months.

Rest assured that we remain dedicated to delivering a high quality service in SWTOR to you, our fans, and we will continue to support and grow Star Wars: The Old Republic over the weeks, months and years to come.

Thanks,
Greg and Ray
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by miir »

That's pretty much standard practice with MMOs. Once it's released, there's not much need to retain all (or even most) of the developers.
Hell, even WOW has been running on a skeleton crew for a long time.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by kyoukan »

I wonder how many community manager's who's job it is to lock and delete "I quit, bioware sucks" threads got canned. I swear to god there's like 40 of them.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by miir »

A far more interesting story is 38 studios current state.
Kinda sad...I really like KOA and had high hopes for their future projects.

https://www.google.com/search?q=38+stud ... ms&tbm=nws
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Aslanna »

Interesting.. But not really applicable to Star Wars The Old Republic.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Canelek »

The game is fine, aside from some fixable flaws. Problem is with so many MMOs out there, and the OMGGREATESTEVAH!!1 on the horizon annually, folks just don't seem to stick around, servers depopulate and that's basically it.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

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miir wrote:A far more interesting story is 38 studios current state.
Kinda sad...I really like KOA and had high hopes for their future projects.

https://www.google.com/search?q=38+stud ... ms&tbm=nws

More on this:
38 Studios and Big Huge Games have both let go of their entire staffs, a source with knowledge of the situation tells Joystiq. Following reports that 38 Studios stopped paying staff on May 1, and just an hour before a scheduled press conference in Rhode Island addressing the recent 38 Studios financial debacle, both the Providence, RI-based 38 Studios and the Baltimore, MD-based Big Huge Games are no more.
We have not received a paycheck since April 30th.

On May 15th, we found out we were not getting paid when our checks did not hit our accounts.

Our medical insurance runs out tonight at midnight.

We found this out when an employee's pregnant wife was told by her doctor, this was on Tuesday 22nd May this week.

The company has not communicated anything concrete to the team throughout this process, leaving team members to figure out insurance stop-gaps (where people could afford it), etc. on their own.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Aslanna »

Sounds like good info for this thread.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Fairweather Pure »

http://www.shacknews.com/article/73961/ ... 50-players


Although it launched to great fanfare, it's clear that The Old Republic is struggling. Electronic Arts revealed a startling drop of 25 percent of its subscriber base since launch, and has since announced layoffs at BioWare Austin, the team behind the expensive MMO. But, how dire is the situation, really?

One dedicated fan wanted to find out exactly how many people are on The Old Republic's servers. "What is going to happen when server transfers go live," SWTOR user Scorpienne asked. "How many people are on which servers?"


According to Scorpienne's calculations, the "Total Estimated Worldwide Population of all servers" for the past two weeks is 73,693. That figure simply represents the average number of people logged in at a given time, not the total number of players that have logged in over the two week period. "It's probable that not every player is logged in all the time," the report clarifies.

The most populated server on SWTOR appears to be The Fatman, with an average of 2006 players at any given time. This "theoretical average population" is simply an average however, and Scorpienne notes that it "underestimates the peak population and overestimates the off-peak population." However, with 214 servers currently active, the less popular servers are especially empty. In fact, the average server will have only 344 players at any given time (more for RP PvP, less for PvP).

With players so spaced out, it's clear that server consolidations must happen. No wonder one fan of the game jokingly described The Old Republic as "the best single player game on the market."
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Fairweather Pure »

214 servers to WoW's 222 and WoW has 10x more people. Consolidate those severs EA!
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by masteen »

Fairweather Pure wrote:214 servers to WoW's 222 and WoW has 10x more people. Consolidate those severs EA!
For fucking real. This should have happened months ago. Life on Canderous Ordo and the Fatman is fucking orders of magnitude better than the ghost servers.

Fleet on both sides is over 100 during prime time pretty much every day of the week. Almost always able to find a group when I want, heroics when leveling if I care to, active AH.

I cannot believe how reluctant they are to merge servers.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by kyoukan »

The longer they dick around the worse it gets, too.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Aslanna »

214 servers! That's like.. 200 more than EverQuest has.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Fairweather Pure »

masteen wrote:I cannot believe how reluctant they are to merge servers.
You would think it would save a lot of money too. Is it that hard to merge? As in, labor intensive?
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Leonaerd »

If they're running virtual servers on a UCS cluster setup, the only labor required is one or two hundred mouse clicks. Naw, the bottleneck here is probably related to saving face.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Canelek »

It is only complicated if they didn't document their code before the layoffs. :)

They should have known this would happen. Not like they were breaking new ground in the MMO business. Be quick with fixes and highly-requested features or they will indeed move on... silly sausages
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by masteen »

Leonaerd wrote:If they're running virtual servers on a UCS cluster setup, the only labor required is one or two hundred mouse clicks. Naw, the bottleneck here is probably related to saving face.
How does letting the game implode save face?

Maybe we should have one of the guys at Square give them a call and tell them exactly how many subs "saving face" generates. (HINT: It's a negative number)
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Leonaerd »

masteen wrote:
Leonaerd wrote:If they're running virtual servers on a UCS cluster setup, the only labor required is one or two hundred mouse clicks. Naw, the bottleneck here is probably related to saving face.
How does letting the game implode save face?
Short term - The could be worried people will leave the game after a big merge, as it does show weakness that many subscribers would not have considered.

Seriously, what other reason could there be? There isn't a good one, anyway.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Fairweather Pure »

If the game continues to decline significantly, perhaps there is some sort of write off associated with all those servers? I don't know. Just trying to understand why they don't do the obvious solution. The bad press out there has not been doing the game any favors. It would seem like they are hiding secrets from the players and that's never good for relations. At least they got out in front with the layoff news instead of trying to hide that as well. I know it sounds crazy, but I think they should annouce whatever additional content or expansion they may be working on immediately to inject some positive energy into the player base. The vague "We can't wait to keep making the game better and provide more content!" just sounds hollow in the wake of layoffs and ghost servers. Back that statement up with some solid content and acknowledge the low population situation. If people really love your game, they are willing to go through some real bullshit in order to keep playing. Just get the bullshit over asap. You have to give your players hope. Show them a light at the end of the tunnel and they're much more likely to stick it out.

I'm honestly starting to doubt if they have an expansion in active development. Even if they do, I feel it will be scaled back significantly from what they had in mind if the game were to have been a resounding success. I don't even play the game and that disappoints me by proxy!
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Canelek »

With all the voice acting, I tend to agree. Was
a good idea. Now its dead
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Fairweather Pure »

Beginning in July, this game will be free to play up to level 15.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

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Fairweather Pure wrote:Beginning in July, this game will be free to play up to level 15.
Haha! I am sure that will bring a ton of subs back... As for new users, if they weren't interested before, it is not likely a few hours of free gameplay will get them to sign up.

All they needed to do was allow transfers and get some server mergers going, not to mention address some very valid player complaints about AH, PVP, etc...
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Aslanna »

It almost sounds like SOE is running the show over there!

Nah.. SOE is smart enough to know when to merge servers...
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by kyoukan »

The way they are maintaining this game could not be more of a disaster. It is almost like they are purposely sabotaging it. It is too late for the game now. They have lost all but their most hardcore playerbase and it will not be enough to sustain new content at the level and cost that game needs to have content produced at. The servers are just empty and more and more people keep unsubbing rather than starting new characters on one of the couple of heavily populated servers. Bioware/EA is like "yeah maybe one day in the summer we'll think about allowing server moves" They move at such a glacial pace and act like everything is going great while the whole game community collapses.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

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MMO101. Learn from others' mistakes. Bioware had too much ego to have a success here in this most fickle gaming era.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

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it would take any competent company that is fast on their feet about two days to switch gears from "our mmorpg is perfect" mode to "jesus fucking christ we just lost 40% of our player population in one month, maybe we should listen to the very real complaints on our forums" mode. instead of that they spend their resources on some god awful world event that was more inconvenient than anything else and a bunch of vague promises. I mean, they were actually bragging about moving UI elements around as an exciting new feature that took them 5 months to implement.

It's just total arrogance.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by miir »

Blizzard set the bar pretty fucking low for implementing new features and content.
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

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kyoukan wrote:it would take any competent company that is fast on their feet about two days to switch gears from "our mmorpg is perfect" mode to "jesus fucking christ we just lost 40% of our player population in one month, maybe we should listen to the very real complaints on our forums" mode. instead of that they spend their resources on some god awful world event that was more inconvenient than anything else and a bunch of vague promises. I mean, they were actually bragging about moving UI elements around as an exciting new feature that took them 5 months to implement.

It's just total arrogance.
Oh shit I forgot about that retarded world event. And yeah, they fucked up a game based on Star Wars. They were so set up for success and...down the toilet it goes...
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Re: Star Wars The Old Republic Coordination Station

Post by Fairweather Pure »

I think Star Wars is done. Like Kyoukan said, they have their hardcore player base and that's it. Anyone that was curious already tried it out and the bad press surrounding the game will keep the rest away. I do not see it expanding anymore. Even a major announcement like an expansion will only bring back the old players for awhile but I do not think it will attract new players.
miir wrote:Blizzard set the bar pretty fucking low for implementing new features and content.
I know you're trolling, but...

A content patch every 6 months on average and a new expansion every 2 years is pretty good IMO. Would I like it faster? Absolutely, especially expansions. However I think Blizzard does pretty well overall, especially in the quality of life department. They give players a plethora of features, that is why a fresh MMO has such a hard time going up against WoW (among other things). They've been polishing their product slowly but surely over 6 years from features and content to graphics and balance. It's hard for a new MMO to hit all the marks that Blizzard and other companies have already done. I highly doubt Blizzard's new MMO will start out of the gate as polished as WoW. I'm also starting to get the feeling that WoW is becoming a testing grounds of sort for their new MMO. Things like cross-realm phasing feel like a next gen MMO idea being beta tested and perfected in WoW. I'm ok with that.

As far as WoW is concerned, I see a big bump when MoP is released (as usual for an expansion) then the base will contract again in 6 months or so. Par for the course this late into it's life cycle.
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