Star Wars: The Old Republic (The Thread)

[The Yosemite Bear]

I'm back playing after a very long absense...

[Stofsk]

So. How long til it becomes F2P?

[Vendetta]

I'll say within a year.

[Kuja]

I doubt it, in truth. They'll glue some servers together or shut them down once it becomes inefficient enough to keep them all running and maintain their pay-to-play system.

Warhammer went all the way down to a single server and EA kept the subscription fee in place.

[TheFeniX]

I've not logged in for a full month now, the only things worth doing are the other stories and I can't drag myself to do them since the markets are still so immature because credits are hard to come by and the credit sinks in this game as massive. Unlocking everything on Legacy costs right around 41 million credits and checking the gold farming websites that's 799.99$

Wow, really? I figured there would be some credit dumps involved, but that's just ridiculous. Of all the things to copy from WoW, they had to drag over endless daily grinds. I had 3 guild members who did them almost every day and bitched about them constantly in vent. I just could not understand how you could login to a game and spend 4+ hours doing something you hate so much. The daily area of Belsavis was one huge clusterfuck anyway. The only time I went there was to tank the world boss for the guild and randoms.

Purples are so hit or miss still, at least 1.3 is fixing enhancements but still I've played the gear farming game on two 50s now and did it half way on a third 50 before losing interest in the game.

Are you talking about the horrible stat optimization (like Rakata Tank gear having accuracy and surge on it)? Rumourmill was that BW was basically handing out high-end gear, but making certain mods only drop off certain bosses to ensure you were farming over and over hoping for the stat appropriate mods/enhancements. Of note for me, and I may be misremembering: the best tank enhancement for Guardians only dropped off Gharj and it wasn't guaranteed and I would have needed at least 5 of them. Unless we're talking about the Rakata daily gear which was hilariously bad when compared to an augmented Columi Earpiece/implant.

On the F2P front, SWTOR is in for a rough ride on that idea considering royalties they have to pay to the makers of the Hero Engine and Lucasarts. I've read from "people in the business" (so take it with a grain of salt) that both could easily add up to 50% of their profit going to third parties.

I was thinking about something the other night and it turned out that one of my biggest issues with SWTOR is that there's no entertaining way to spend your downtime. You can't go to a cantina and bullshit with players while helping some dancer level his skill. I used to do all my alchemy on my rogue outside Stormwind and watch people duel constantly. As bad as people knock it, I could do archeology, fish, cook, (and kids can now play pokemon) while waiting for our raid to form. In STO, I could troll the Kerrat Warzone and snipe feds, heal randoms and help them farm their #1, or just cruise around and enjoy the graphics porn. I could hunt down the RPers and laugh at them constantly. SWTOR feels more like the end of WotLK where everyone stands around spamming trade-chat "Need 2 DPS for ICC 7/12. 5800 GS req."

With SWTOR, you sit on the fucking fleet and troll general chat and spam spacebar while on your mount or you do dailies. And if your fleet pass is on CD, you can't even do dailies because your raid group will murder you because it takes 15 fucking minutes to get back to the fleet. There's all of 2 dungeons and 0 raids when I quit that don't start from the fleet (instead they start in faction areas). Like it mattered anyway as we were like 1 of 2 raiding guilds on our faction. As for PvP.... not even worth mentioning.

[Darksider]

Supposedly subscriber numbers have settled at around 1.7 million now.

The 1.7m number is three months out of date, and was suspect even at the time of its publishing. By all accounts I've seen actual logins are far, far below that.

So what do you think a more accurate number might be? Is this game going to fail?

[Kuja]

So what do you think a more accurate number might be? Is this game going to fail?

Well...


To the first question, I can't give more than a vague guess. EA's 4th quarter financial report, the game was holding at 1.3m subscriptions, meaning that between this report and the one previous (which reported the 1.7m figure) they dumped somewhere in the region of 400,000 subscriptions.

Other trends are more vague, but still pretty indicative of a general trend downwards. xfire, a chat engine designed to interface with online games has reported SW:TOR usage dropping steadily. Last I knew it was somewhere in the region of 15% of the WoW usage seen and still trending downwards.

What's really damning, though, is to look at the SW:TOR server list

http://www.swtor.com/server-status

As I'm looking at this right now, I see exactly 1 server in the entire lineup tagged as 'heavy' with 5 reporting as 'standard' and everything else 'light.' That's a bad sign. It means that the game overreached, opening up far too many servers and spreading the population thinner than is wise for an MMO. Then when people began to leave, server populations quickly crashed.

This is largely conjecture, of course, but the point is, none of the trends being shown by SW:TOR display a positive growth for the game. They could be down to 1m subscriptions by now, or far below that if things have accelerated.

Now, second question.

Is this game going to fail?

Well, define 'fail.'

I'm sure that the 2.2 million copies sold, plus the 1 million plus subscriptions they managed to hang onto for several months have netted the game at least some semblance of profit. How much development cost depends on who you ask, with answers ranging between 200million all the way up to 500(!). I lean towards the 200 mark since as far as I know it comes from more official sources. So, monetarily, it will probably break even in at least some fashion.

However, it's undeniable that the game came in drastically below expectations. This was a dream-team combination - the powerhouse of the Star Warse franchise, a hugely popular game designer, and a market that's been looking for fresh blood. EA should have had a massive hit on its hands but it seems like just about everything that could have gone wrong did. The PVP game hit a brick wall, PVE at endgame was roundly decried as boring and repetitive, and the game as whole constantly described as a laggy, buggy mess. The nickname 'TORtanic' really sums up how the online community is looking at this game, and unless EA/Bioware can pull something really impressive out of their hats, SW:TOR is going to be looked back on as an underwhelming fumble of a game.

[Darth Yan]

given that most of the patches are devoted to fixing bugs, they may pull their asses out yet.

[Mr Bean]

Numbers from 1.3 closed testing, unlocking everything from current Legacy and the new Legacy page in 1.3 is going to be... 87 million six hundred thousand credits, where the fuck are we going to get that kind of cash?

[AMT]

Numbers from 1.3 closed testing, unlocking everything from current Legacy and the new Legacy page in 1.3 is going to be... 87 million six hundred thousand credits, where the fuck are we going to get that kind of cash?

Dailies and selling shit?
It's not meant to be an instant gratification.
It's meant to be worked towards.

[TheFeniX]

Dailies and selling shit?
It's not meant to be an instant gratification.
It's meant to be worked towards.

I love how no matter the venue, complaints against endless grinds are met with derision such as "instant gratification." Why don't you just call him entitled? I remember a PvP video where a person who pointed out that without daily wins (which are a real possibility when accounting for faction imbalance in numbers and gear as well as Ilum population imbalance) grinding your main-hand Champion weapon (not even the best at the time) would require something like 20 straight hours of PvP grinding. This is assuming instant queues and 15 minute games. 20 fucking hours of getting smashed in PvP just to get one piece toward evening out the gear gap.

His youtube video and posts on the forums were derided with the same "G2B wow and your welfare epics scrub." Sidenote: anyone else remeber the "pandas are that way <" guy who trolled the shit out of the SWTOR forums for months?

This might seem crazy, but there's something in between endless grinding and free shit. It's call sane developement practices. SWTOR has none considering many of the unlocks also require PvP Valor (and BW nerfed the FUCK out of the WZ credits), legacy levels which crawl unless you roll alts (and accept lower credit amounts from quest turn-ins), and social ranks which require grouping that is impossible on low-pop servers AND drastically slows down questing due to that one fuck who never spams spacebar on the dialog he's heard 1000 times.

And SWTOR has no issue handing out shit in other areas. Look at Operations. When I quit, we could do at least 9/10 hardmode in under 3 hours if everyone had their shit together. Hello welfare Rakata!

Repeatable dailies are likely the easiest and most lazy way to extend end-game content for developers. I can't understand how people defend them. At least Cata condensed the bullshit daily areas and made them easy to access. And it wasn't perfect, but being able to ramp up the difficulty in STO and redo old missions was at least a step somewhere.

[AMT]

So in other words it doesn't go fast enough to suit you therefore it sucks.

[Mr Bean]

Dailies and selling shit?
It's not meant to be an instant gratification.
It's meant to be worked towards.

Dailes take in by themselves between 70k to 190k a character plus whatever drops as your fighting. Running illium, Black hole and Belsavis all dailes takes about an hour and a half with someone to run it with. So in order to make one million a day you need to run dailies... daily with five characters for seven and a half hours of work to make one million a day. So seven and a half hours of work for eighty one days.

Well why not sell shit to people? Simple because even the most expensive stuff on the markets don't sell for more than 150k. And because crafting is not instant but takes time, something like enough medpacks to run a high level instance (a stack of ten) takes twenty minutes a med-pack or three hours of crafting time split between your companions. Problem is you can't sell them for anything since everyone has a biochemists, armor at high levels is useless, there's no profit margin on speeders meaning the only thing... the ONLY thing worth buying on the market are upgrades and implants, as all high level gear is dropped not bought you expect money to pile up but the problem is no one runs dailies except as a money maker for alts meaning.... few people have more than a million credits still which means making money off other people is very very hard. You can't make money in bulk because of crafting time which means the only thing that sells reliably on the market is goods for alts but profit margins unless your doing your own collecting is close to zero.

And you again need to come up with eighty plus million credits and you can do so six hundred and forty man hours of real time or sixteen weeks assuming you played OTR as a full-time job.

Good luck there AMT having the time to do that. And if you did have the time to do that, why not just save the money and buy it from a #$@$# Korean because let me tell you if you have the amount of leisure time to take four months of OTR playing then eight hundred dollars is nothing to you.

Or to put that another way if you play ten hours a week you'll make just over a million assuming you do nothing but dailies during your ten hours of play time each week. At current exchanges that means you'll need seventy two weeks to make the money or over a year and change.

The entire point of Legacy is to make it easier to level alts, the only way to unlock this stuff is to grind... grind... fucking grind high level characters. If you simply ignore Legacy I'm betting you could level one of every class combination before your halfway to unlocking all of legacy.

[TheFeniX]

So in other words it doesn't go fast enough to suit you therefore it sucks.

Are you capable of reading and doing more than just shitposting? Dialies are lazy enough as it is. But what SWTOR offers it customers is endless grinding while they continually narrow aspects of the game. You know, actual content. The dailies don't even offer any shinies directly. You're merely doing them for money to purchase shinies. Oh wait, you can use daily coms to purchase gear with awful stat prioritization. At least firelands dailies in Cata lead to buyable and craftable gear as well as good money. There's no payoff in the end, so why not just bump the cash up for space missions or let people run old content for a better payoff? It's not like anything in the game is difficult either way. If they offered that, I may have actually went back and finished old planet quests.

But I'll bite: "Sucks" doesn't begin to describe this black-hole of bullshit. 1.2 and (from what it's shaping up to) 1.3 are literally either A. shit that should have been in the game from the start (character transfers, group finders) or B. endless grinding bullshit. BW is adding multiple credit dumps for which the only way to acquire said credits is nicely explained by Mr. Bean in the preceding post: pay BW to work a second job. They are releasing new social gear which is likely X and above which is just a huge slap in the face to people on low pop servers because social ranks are a fucker to grind even if you level with 3 other people.

SWTOR has quite literally taken the grind to an entire new level. And BW/EA honestly thinks people are going to hang around for that. PvP has been gutted and the daily/weekly system means nothing but WZ grinds without Ilum being viable anymore. PvE was a joke out the gate. From reading, the first group to down SOA nightmare did it in 7 wipes, even though it's a buggy as fuck fight. Meanwhile, IIRC the first Heroic Rag kill took over 200.

The endless grind isn't really the problem (wait, yes it is), it's that there's nothing else to do but the grind and BW can't seem to find a happy medium anywhere.

[PREDATOR490]

Best way to grind social points - Do Black Talon / Esseles with 4 people.
Beyond boring as shit especially if you always get that one fucker that ALWAYS has to watch every cutscene in full but it yields the most effective amount of social points you in the shortest time.

As for the insane grind... I agree its beyond stupid how Bioware are setting it up. The amount and scale of grind they are putting in vs. how much new actual content they introduce makes it abundantly clear they have no idea what they are doing.
I get the impression Bioware thought they could coast for a year on the current state of the game and had no idea on future content. Now it just feels like they are winging it as they go along and the best way to do that is make anything new they add take ages to get just so they can buy more time for the next trinkets.

Trinkets mean shit in a game designed to be a rollercoaster RPG. If they cant expand the story with more of their famous voice acting EVERYTHING then TOR has already failed. This is what Bioware is famous for and what TOR was touting as it's defining feature. So far no indication they have any ideas to add any expansions to they 8 class story.

[Kuja]

given that most of the patches are devoted to fixing bugs, they may pull their asses out yet.

Bugfixes alone aren't going to save the game at this point. Too many people have left for reasons unrelated to bugs - whether that be the anemic endgame, the badly-handled pvp system, or the one I see most commonly, Bioware's atrocious customer support.

[Darksider]

So are we looking at something like a Total failure/server shutdown at some point, or is it more likely that the game will go free-to-play? IIRC Galaxies was able to limp onwards via the power of the SW brand for years after those "new game enhancements" basically killed it.

[Mr Bean]

So are we looking at something like a Total failure/server shutdown at some point, or is it more likely that the game will go free-to-play? IIRC Galaxies was able to limp onwards via the power of the SW brand for years after those "new game enhancements" basically killed it.

Remember when we talk failure we are talking long term. They only need 80,000 paying subscribers to run ten or so servers and still turn a profit. If they drop below 500,000 I can see them going free to play to some extent. You can already play to 15 without subscribing.

[Kuja]

What we'll probably see will be further attempts by the playerbase to self-consolidate onto some of the heavier servers, until the developers decide it's not cost-effective enough to keep the lightest servers rolling and start shutting them down or doing mergers.

The population downturn will likely continue as long as the major game problems remain in place, though the rate of decrease will itself decrease as the folks who take issue with this or that quit and those who don't keep playing.

Unless the population really bottoms out, fast, I don't think we'll see a full FTP anytime in the near future.

[Lagmonster]

given that most of the patches are devoted to fixing bugs, they may pull their asses out yet.

Bugfixes alone aren't going to save the game at this point. Too many people have left for reasons unrelated to bugs - whether that be the anemic endgame, the badly-handled pvp system, or the one I see most commonly, Bioware's atrocious customer support.

Reading this, along with the litany of complaints, keeps getting distilled in my brain into one sentence: "People who treat it like 8 single player games glued together will be okay with it", which describes the experience me and my wife have had playing together, and we're smack in the middle of the eight-hours-a-week, 35-45 age, casual multiplayer bracket. Knock through the nicely voiced plots with your friends, then unsubscribe and move onto the next game none the more concerned for the greater horde who demands long-term satisfaction from one entertainment product, or deep and layered social/competitive multiplayer gaming.

[PREDATOR490]

Bioware really dug themselves a massive hole by falling back on their RPG mantra in an MMO. You dont get to spend years making the next installment in an MMO and players dont much like paying to re-play the same one over and over. Was rather predictable this would happen in hindsight but the prevailing hope for most was they couldnt fuck something with so much potential up this badly.

Now that TOR is tanking, Guild Wars 2 is on the horizon which is the next big hyped up game. TOR will likely continue on with the fanboy following but without a serious improvement in content updates or service support. Thats all that will be left as people jump ship to the next new thing.

I cant muster the willpower to log back into TOR because all my budding characters are stuck with a journal full of heroics that I cannot get done and empty planets. Coming from a server that had 5 hour wait times when it opened makes it even more sad to be in that kind of situation.

I'm still waiting to see what their big expansion plans are, if I dont see anything by the end of my 3 month sub I will not be renewing. 6 Months and two content patches is uninspiringly shit development time nevermind the actual content being produced in those patches.

I knock Star Trek Online for bringing out shit trinket items you have to pay for while doing fuck all, Bioware doing the same is not going to be immune any less because its Star Wars or their reputation.
Which is already in the shitlist for Mass Effect 3. Double whammy of a bad year for them.

[Vendetta]

given that most of the patches are devoted to fixing bugs, they may pull their asses out yet.

Bugfixes alone aren't going to save the game at this point. Too many people have left for reasons unrelated to bugs - whether that be the anemic endgame, the badly-handled pvp system, or the one I see most commonly, Bioware's atrocious customer support.

Reading this, along with the litany of complaints, keeps getting distilled in my brain into one sentence: "People who treat it like 8 single player games glued together will be okay with it", which describes the experience me and my wife have had playing together, and we're smack in the middle of the eight-hours-a-week, 35-45 age, casual multiplayer bracket. Knock through the nicely voiced plots with your friends, then unsubscribe and move onto the next game none the more concerned for the greater horde who demands long-term satisfaction from one entertainment product, or deep and layered social/competitive multiplayer gaming.

The trouble is that this is a terrible business model for an MMO, wherein profit is generated by keeping people subscribed long term, usually by putting them on a regulated drip feed of bigger numbers and new content.

They now need to do server merges sooner rather than later, because low populations will drive people away from the game, and they need to be dripping out new content every so often to keep the people who have already played one or two stories to the end interested in the endgame.

[Lagmonster]

The trouble is that this is a terrible business model for an MMO, wherein profit is generated by keeping people subscribed long term, usually by putting them on a regulated drip feed of bigger numbers and new content.

This would be where you’d have to take a look at shareholders and find out what they expected, what they got, and what consumer in-out-return trends for MMOs generally look like versus what TOR’s looks like. Consumer expectations don't mean shit if they keep coming back for three months every other three months, or continue to subscribe like idiots while waiting for improvements rather than cancelling until the improvements are delivereed, or if what's happening to TOR now follows the usual pattern for modern successful MMO populations.

[TheFeniX]

So, the select transfers have gone through, this however came back to bite a few people in the butt. Basically, the OP rerolled on the Fatman because his original server was shit and now can't consolidate his character with the ones that were moved to a higher population one. TBH, I'm surprised the thread hasn't been deleted.

Also, you can always find that one post that really summarizes the typical shithead on the forums:

You knew transfers were coming.
You were impatient.
This is the cost (literally) of your impatience. Considering how low that cost will be, you should be happy that your life lesson was so cheap.

I think it actually pisses me off more that it's not choked full of spelling errors and awful grammar. That someone could have a decent grasp of the English language and still be this stupid is even more annoying than "lol stfu scrub, pandas > way >!"

Here's some other info.

EA expects to earn significant revenue from additional features and through micro-transactions by selling in-game based items.

Hahahahahahaha!

[PREDATOR490]

Yup, cancelled sub even if I have 160 days left of gametime, I will not renew without some indication of actual progress on the content front.

No fucking way am I gonna continue subscribing to TOR if EA pushes that idea through. If they want to go the way of LOTRO then fine, but I sure as hell expect them to come out with a lot more expansion content before I touch anything. This is the same kind of stunt STO tried to pull and subscribers ended up footing the bill for Cryptic to make it Free to Play... while getting fuck all in return.
I'll keep my money thanks, and when you do make it Free to play the money I saved subscribing I can use to buy shit rather than be stuck subscribing just so I have to buy that shit ANYWAY.