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My take on Swtor's success or failure form what I am seeing.
Zecktorin
Member Posts: 231
Is swtor as successful as it was suppose to be? No and anyone who says it is is lieing. However I do beleive that dropping the price of the game has actually increased the amount of players and same and the trial right now. My guild just got 30 new members who are all new to the game and plan to sub even after it goes free 2 play. Not only that there are a lot of new people I've seen running around above the trial cap. I know they are new because of questions asked in general chat. The game is growing again in subs. Even if this number of new people arent the hundeds of thousands it is still good news.
SWTOR was never a bad game and as long as you didnt have unrealistic expectations you should have now what kinda game it wouldve been. They are improving the game. Adding a lv cap increase, new planet, new race, and still talk of guild capital ships coming. Someone even told me they have plan on having expansions still. This could be just a rumor or lie tho.
In my opinion I dont think the F2P was to help the game survive rather than jsut try to make the game more profitable. This is just by the number of returning players and new people i've been seeing. It is not doing nearly as bad as alot of people think it is. Just not as good as Ea/Bioware expected.
You have to remember Rift had this huge drop off as well and went down to like 250k subs and even that has been increasing again. This was before the expansion was announced when I was playing. SWTOR right now still has around 500k subs in my opinion and with the F2P it will probably end up being more not to mention the more money they will bring in with the F2P. However who knows what will happen.
Haters gonna hate and fanboy fanatics gonna praise. What can ya do?
Even tho they did server mergers remember these servers hold MANY MANY more players than the old ones use to. I think this was a smart move since they use phasing anyways. To be honest I want one big server kind of like EvE does especially if they are gonna use phases.
Im kinda neutral on the game. yes it is fun to me, but It could have been so much more.
Comments
Tbe Repopulation will be what SWTOR shouldve been.
The difference is that RIFT is still P2P after about 1-2 years of existence, was a totally brand new IP with no prior brand recognition, managed to help TRION Worlds make a profit, something that is very rare for most MMOs on their initial release, and is having it's first expansion made. It also helps that RIFT was generally inexpensive compared to the likes of SWTOR, and that they pump out content updates pretty damn fast (whether one considers it quality content varies from person to person, but whatever).
On the flipside, you have SWTOR, which had a budget of roughly $200 million, not including advertising, a super popular brand name, a highly acclaimed developer of SPRPGS at the helm, and enough hype from EA about how it was to be their WoW to fill 100 hot air balloons ten times over. Sure the INITIAL sales were good, but the player retention has plummeted like a rock for a wide variety of reasons, and it's going F2P less than a year after release.
It's kinda hard to spin that as anything but a huge faceplant on SWTOR's part.
Pretty sure people exagerate that number more and more every day the number released for dev is 200mil not 300.... you missed my entire point of my thread. Especially the F2P and the server part. Again Rift did the same thing lol. F2P only helps games. Lotro was doing fine and they made it F2P. Its really just a smart marketing move more than anything. Ther server mergers were to just bring in bigger servers. Its easier to mange the 22 they have now that hold more people than the 200 had before. I said from day one they opened too many servers. It also makes more sense if they are gonna use the phasing they use. The bleeding subs your talking about isn't happening on the scale you think it is now. The population has pretty much stablized.
I agree it was no where near successful as it was suppose to be, but as up right now the subs seemed to have stablized and increase slowly. I only expect more. A lot of the faceplanting had to do with the hype that was involved part of it be the players, other part being the devs with CGI trailers.
It really turned out " on noes it wasnt the second coming of jesus like I thought it would be". don't have such high expectations a be a sheep lol... however I don't think this game will die, but grow and im not talking growing on a huge amount I see is at about 1.2 million subs in a year or so. Not to mention all the F2P players that could be spending money. This could be wrong too and it might flop even more tho. I wouldnt really be surprised either way.
SWTOR dropped it's box price in order to unload all the unsold millions of boxes. The game is going Freemium "F2P", there is no need to print more boxes. Analysts predicted this game (2011 and prior) to sell millions, and have millions of subscribers by the end of this year (2012). Whoops.
Any unsold game boxes go the way of ET for the Atari 2600 .. crushed and buried in an undisclosed location in Arizona, US. It's more profitable to just dump the game boxes At Cost to customers, and not lose any further money.
For buying the box you can get some Cartel Points, where you can trade them for a week of unlimited Huttball or something similar.
Want a nice understanding of life? Try Spirit Science: "The Human History"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
Yeah I think this post sums it all up nicely.
Hey OP.
Glad you enjoy the game, but I'm going to have to burst your bubble.
You may be on a decently populated server, but not all the servers are like that.
What's more, there are less servers overall.
The game just lost 20% of it's overall populaton to GW2, thus mergers.
MoP probably won't help things.
As I said, you might be on a decent server, but for example, Jung Ma reports standard since the latest merger, but the pop there is under 100 on fleet for both republic and imperials.
Pops are even lower for the three Asia-Pacific servers.
The caps are being tweaked to disguise the bleeding subs.
What's worse, the few high pop "Mega" serves are hitting full with queues.
That doesn't sound very Mega to me.
I would guess SWTOR's sub number around 250 thousand and dropping.
I pre-ordered the collectors edition. After being invited to the beta weekend the first time, I played it but never really could get into the game. second beta weekend I played it for about 15 mins and just said nah, ill pass. All the bugs and que times really were silly. I just remember thinking to myself : "they know how many people are in the beta since they sent invites to them and they still cant prepare for the load?"
It told me, in my opinion, this game was not going to live up to the hype. So I cancelled my pre-order. I have since tried the game 3x with my son while we were searching for a game we enjoyed together, 3 more strikes. I find it funny they even call this a Star Wars game. It seems like more of a generic sci-fi mess than anything SW related.
Honestly, if I could vote, I would say junk this game and bring back SWG. I bet the people who were hopeful for SWTOR to be more than it is would play SWG again. I know I would.
I guess you dont know what you got till its gone and no matter how much you really really want something to be one way, when it isnt, it sucks.
SWTOR in my eyes is the biggest failure in MMO history to this point. I wont even get in to how bad the space combat is like starfox craptastic.
For those of you who say you enjoy it, is it that you really enjoy it or you are holding on for it to become what you want it to be. Furthermore how many of the supporters are just backing it so they dont have to admit it is a fail-o-rama
If it's not a success then it must be a failure.
That has always been the mindset of the mmorpg.com forums.
if !success == failure
display("Hello mmorpg.com forums!!!");
/compile
/link
/shell
C:>FailureTest.exe
Hello mmorpg.com forums!!!
C:>
it works!
Want a nice understanding of life? Try Spirit Science: "The Human History"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
Ahnog
Hokey religions are no replacement for a good blaster at your side.
When you look at it objectively its biggest failure in MMO history.
When you look at it subjectively its...whatever you want it to be.
+1!
Poor results for the kind of money they poured into it. Still, it's not a bad game. They just thought they'd take a SPG, tack on some features and call it an MMO. That didn't turn out to be the competiion for WoW they told their shareholders it would be. You can still play a pretty decent SPG with this title. Soon it'll be free to play as well.
Well last night I looked at server pops in game for american primetime. 2 were standard and 3 were heavy and the rest were Very heavy pops. each instance on a planet holds around 250 people and the population you currently see are the ones in your instance even tho when you type in general all instances see it. There were 2 full instances on my server on the republic fleet alone and then a third with 230. Where you got your information is 100% wrong and you cant tell me different because I saw the server pops in game as well as the instance pops lol. dunno where all you guys get your info but how about people who actually play the game and seeing player growth. Saw even more new people added to my guild above trial cap and in general chat. over 250 people corcusant there was 150+ on Taris and some other planets had to have multiple phases as well do to being full. Just because you get your info form a second hand site you take its word for it. The game is growing again in subs whether you like it or not. Now if the retention rate will be higher this time around if another question. Bioware and Ea have a very big chane to pull this game into a good era. Again plz receive your pop information from actual players who can actually see in game.
No, its not growing, its called server merges. You know, when you go from 200+ to 20 servers.
They had me sold for awhile, i kept pushing forward hoping the combat would have more depth and improve but it never did,So then i tried every single class up to 20 and it was always the same.
I guess it reminds me a lot of AOC,that game was a lot of fun for a short while,then i got bored of it.SWTOR was a lot of fun until about level 20 give or take a few.
If they had of put more thought and effort into the combat,i would most likely still be there playing.
I believe that developers NEED to take a good long look at rushing games out to meet deadlines.IMO you need to have an entire design and stick to it,you can't dumb things down to meet deadlines.The problem i guess is nobody wants to put their neck out for going over budget and taking too long if the game still fails.
When i looked at the scale of SWTOR it really looks like they had a good game to build,but the actual guts of the game seem rushed,the crafting is a VERY obvious part of that.It is too bad,just like many other aspects in life,developers should figure in a full 6 months plus to whatever deadline they THINK a game will meet.IMO an agressive team shoring up combat and crafting and few tweaks in some zones and the game could have been rock solid with about another 6 months of development.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Again these servers are mega servers... another person who didnt really read. If they are gonna use phasing the way they do they should have had fewer servers in the first place... said this since day one. You cant tell me if its growing or not because i've seen it grow. Qutie a few returning players and new players are coming around and it probably gonna icnrease im sorry if this game will survive. People are starting to complain in game because it starting to crowd back up again as well..... lol you dont even know.
So what you're trying to say is what happen to the Hindenburg was not caused by bad engineering or bad design, it was caused by some guy smoking in his apartment 30 blocks away... Got it!
Wow, you have some really hard evidence there:
Empty phrases of mega servers that fanbois also claimed after 1st server merge
"Ive seen it grow" and my word is everything.
Vanguard survived, AoC survived, DDO survived, WHO survived...and those are still big failures. Not as big as SWTOR though. Not even nearly as big, SWTOR is category of its own.
Too bad theres 2,3 million of those, yes, lets use EA PR: its not the game its the players rofl
Your mommy is probably shocked by that fact now.
Day to day population can be better tracked by means other than your sight. And no, you dont have to be subbed for that. And if someone wants to see it really badly ingame theres unlimited time free trial, so i dont even see reason to sub for that also.
Once you do empirical research like Scorpienne did you might have something to say, otherwise its just your subjective impression without any objective point to it.
Hope its clear to you now, what subjective and objective means.
There is better means to track it, yes. According to http://www.torstatus.net the game has lost .02% of it's population over the last month. Not nearly as bad as people on these forums are making it out to be.
I think the F2P will bring in a good amount of players and it will eventually stabilize at a much higher pop number than it is right now.
A lot of new games have just come out / are coming out (GW2, TL2, WoW Expansion, DOA5). Once the newness of these titles wear off, it will be near the F2p period of TOR and I think a lot of people that were initially hesitant and/or didn't like might give it a chance again.
The hype for the game was unprecedented and whenever this happens it usually takes a good amount of time for peoples' expectations to come back into check. The bigger the hype, the longer it takes for the turnaround.
Please unserstand what it is you are reading.
You are pulling the North American server Overall Change figure.
First off, right off the bat, that is not a percentage. That is the change in aggregate server status for the North American servers over a 2 week period.
The way Tor Status works, approx. 3-2.8=heavy, 2.8-1.8=medium, 1.8-1.1=light 1.1-.98=dead
The .02 number isn't valid because it ic counting the High Population Public test server as a .99 addition to server report status.
So right off the bat, your number is now -1.2.
Also those few incresed (green) server report changes are due to server merges,
As you can see that list you are citing still has the newly closed (origin round 2) servers in the list.
The whole number is out of whack till the new ground base can be set in about a week.
This is the only real useful data from TorStatus at the moment, http://www.torstatus.net/shards/us/trends for the North American Servers. And even that has to take into account the server merges on Sept. 18th. (which is reflected in the chart.)
Hey OP
Again, you seem to be glossing over that SWTOR just underwent another server merger.
All data indicates that SWTOR has continued to lose population.
TorStatus, X-Fire, and even Scorpienne's population survey.
They all indicate that SWTOR has lost 20% of population since GW2 has come out.
Since the server merges didn't redistribute the remaining population evenly, you might be on a high population server, but that doesn't mean everyone else is.
Every day there are threads opened on the SWTOR Forums with people begging for the 3 APAC servers to be merged due to populations measured in the tens. The same goes for North American server Jung MA.
Jung MA is especially telling, because SWTOR consistiently reports it as standard despite it's very low population; indicating that these new Mega-servers still have individual population caps.
Futhermore, several of the new Megaservers have gone form Very Heavy, to full with log-in waiting queues.
This indicates that the new Megaservers aren't really Mega at all.
All empirical data indicates that SWTOR shut down 6 servers, and now has 16 servers with decent populations. The standard servers around 800-1500. The heavy servers with 1500-3000. Also are 1 dead server in Jung Ma, and 3 dead servers in Australia.
Nothing indicates that the population is growing.
Nothing indicates that the servers are Mega.
Calling a server Mega without any explanation to any sort of technolgy that has increased it's cap doesn't make it Mega.
If I had a penny for each time someone on the TOR forum saying "people had unrealistic expectations".
You know, starting nearly ten years later with half the mechanics SWG had is not smart. They should have known TOR will be compared to SWG, and people would expect basic features from SWG to be in TOR.
A kind of modernized, polished SWG2 plus Bioware story.
You call modernization of 10 year old features high expectations?
We got WoW in a Star Wars setting, I don't know exactly who wanted that, but certainly not me.