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http://www.gamestm.co.uk/discuss/star-w ... -designer/

The Old Republic lead designer discusses the competitive MMO marketplace and how The Old Republic might use a free-to-play model.


BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic has faced some hard times since launching at the tail-end of 2011. Lead designer Emmanuel Lusinchi discusses the affects of losing over 400,000 subscribers earlier in the year and facing off increasingly stiff competition from free-to-play competitors.

“I think it’s more than the free-to-play model – it’s more that there is a lot of competitive offers,” suggests Lusinchi. “If it was just free-to-play games and they weren’t very good it wouldn’t even be a question but there are definitely good games out there and good games coming out, so of course all of this competition impacts your plan with what you want to do.”

Still, the advantages of free-to-play haven’t gone unnoticed by the developer. Asked whether it would be feasible to adapt The Old Republic to a free-to-play model, Lusinchi coyly suggests that the wheels may be in motion for a drastic change.

“The MMO market is very dynamic and we need to be dynamic as well,” he says. “Unless people are happy with what they have, they are constantly demanding updates, new modes and situations. So we are looking at free-to-play but I can’t tell you in much detail. We have to be flexible and adapt to what is going on.”

For this to even be on the table the population must be crashing even harder than I thought. EA is desperate to wring cash out of this game before it dies completely.

Kuja wrote:For this to even be on the table the population must be crashing even harder than I thought. EA is desperate to wring cash out of this game before it dies completely.

To quote the wise man, Nelson: "I already said ha ha."

It's not exactly a large leap to think SWTOR is hemmoraging and likely to bleed out if you've kept up with the forums and population drop. But I didn't think we'd see anything like this until EAs next shareholder meeting. This is likely being played off by fans as "he's just spitballing," conveniently leaving out that a lead dev shouldn't be dumb enough to even mention F2P with the current climate around the game. Meanwhile, purchasers of the collector's edition are shitting themselves but also likely thanking God there wasn't an option for a lifetime pass.

Maybe they could just remove the companion limits, retool some of the operations to be 1+3 pets and rebrand it as KOTOR3, because that's really all they're ever going to have if they go F2P. Under that model, I don't even see a big push to have the engine fixed much less balance PvP/PvE and add new content (especially voice acted content). I can't think of a single push the TOR team has made that wasn't ill-advised or trying to update their game from 2004 to 2008.

God damn it I wanted this game to be good.

EDIT: From Here

Not at all, at most we will have f2p trial upto lvl 15, if any mmo is heading towards f2p its wow, the huge merging of its china/asia servers, its black market selling BIS items and the real money ah going into it. remember that wows biggest playerbase is in asia/china market and raiders arnt going to be happy that you will be able to buy bis and what were raid only items for real money.

So as swtor is expanding into the asia market at the same time wow is declining in it very fast. SWTORS ip is strong enough to keep it subscription game for years, and look at other ea mmos like warhammer, they are still sub games so no, this will stay subs.

How people can be this delusional, I'll never know.

Can someone explain why it leaving a paid subscription model would be a bad thing?

Losonti Tokash wrote:Can someone explain why it leaving a paid subscription model would be a bad thing?

Money is not made off of magic. So they need to massively cut back the team and make up the money elsewhere with micro transactions which... the Old Republic is not really set up to easily monetize unless they start selling us gear or content.

Losonti Tokash wrote:Can someone explain why it leaving a paid subscription model would be a bad thing?

The substantial drop in quality alone makes it bad, the resulting re-tooling of the game to adjust to a new model will be horrendous.
STO went through a 1 year content drought because the fuckers at Cryptic changed from sub to F2P without actually telling the player base. When folks get pissed off Cryptics response was to say, yeah we lied to you but tough shit.

Now STO does everything possible to cash in on EVERY LAST piece of garbage it can from offering Jem Hadar ships, Ferengi Marauders and equally bullshit gimicks that IP fanboys lap up because its the IP. The rest of the game barely sees any content beyond the cash store.

Now do that to TOR which the only defining features were a fully voiced stories. Not likely to be doing more voice work if they go to F2P and if it does... pay to listen to Voice acting... yeah. No thanks.
The only thing TOR needs to do now is introduce the STO equivelent of the foundry. Then Bioware can sit back and let the community make their stories for them.

That said, if they headed more towards the LOTRO F2P style that might at least be less BS than STO. Of course... that requires them to release a massive amount of content centred around raids, guilds and eventually big expansions every year. So far that seems extremely unlikely.

Losonti Tokash wrote:Can someone explain why it leaving a paid subscription model would be a bad thing?

6 months after release and boasting 1.7 million active subs, they're considering F2P models. Predator hit on it better than I can, but we're talking about BW who thought they should get a pat on the back for releasing the "largest free update EVAR, 10,000+ words!" even though 90% of it was bug fixes and other optimizations and shit that was already promised or should have been available at launch.

A good F2P model can work quite well, but what exactly is SWTOR going to offer? $5 for gear that doesn't look moronic? Aliens that look like aliens, rather than humans with makeup on? 10 to 1 they shit on the lore and start releasing X-Wings and Boba Fett armor. Maybe we could pay $5 to get a better name for some abilities because Dark Heal. Dark. Fucking. Heal.

Yeesh. If things are getting so bad, should I be rushing to finish the class quests I want do do before all the servers shut down or something? I've been taking my time with the game, but if it isn't going to be around much longer I'd better pick up the pace.

Darksider wrote:Yeesh. If things are getting so bad, should I be rushing to finish the class quests I want do do before all the servers shut down or something? I've been taking my time with the game, but if it isn't going to be around much longer I'd better pick up the pace.

It is extremely unlikely that the game (instead of individual servers, in which case your character will be transfered to others) will shut down. After all you can still make money with a smaller amount of subscribers or a Free-to-Play model, so shutting the game down would be unprofitable.

Yeah. The game isn't going anywhere any time soon. I wouldn't pay much attention to the sky-is-falling wailing just yet. Wait a few more months and see where it's at before you start biting your nails over the fate of the game.

Really, BioWare is handling the server merges and transfers relatively gracefully. MMOs usually wait until transfers are a "too little, too late" option out of fear that transfers broadcast the idea that the game is tanking. BW is being a little more progressive and doing it before it reaches that point, which is the only intelligent play in the book.

They're offering everyone on my server a free character transfer. It's pretty deserted, so it might be time to move. Is there a deadline for transfers after which characters will be deleted, or do I have time to think about where I want to go? Bioware's announcement didn't say anything about that.

You don't have any options about where to go (this is a good thing, generally) -- you just transfer to the designated server. And no, for the foreseeable future you can transfer whenever you want. Unless you have "roots" on your current server, I'd recommend settling into the new server ASAP.

BW's strategy here seems to be to gracefully deprecate the surplus servers, rather than most prior MMOs' generally ungraceful attempts. So you can keep dinking around on the "deprecated" server for as long as you like, it's just that there's really no point in doing so unless you have a ton of friends who refuse to move or something.

I'm just finding it funny that given my finance based problems over the last six months, I'm now back and I can't get social points to save the life of me, because there is now one on for me to do heroic missions or flashpoints with......

The Yosemite Bear wrote:I'm just finding it funny that given my finance based problems over the last six months, I'm now back and I can't get social points to save the life of me, because there is now one on for me to do heroic missions or flashpoints with......

It's a shame to because there's actually quite a few deviously hard but enjoyable heroics. The flashpoints get kind of "meh" later on as BW switched to loot hallways at higher levels.

So, I was whoring around the SWTOR forums and stumbled upon this thread concerning active logins in SWTOR. It's a long thread, so I'll summarize a bit of what I picked up.

LOGINS BY AREA (% of total pop)
APAC 1,820 (2%)
EUR English 14,867 (20%)
EUR French 5,553 (7%)
EUR German 9,578 (13%)
US East 27,592 (37%)
US West 14,993 (20%)
Total 74,402

So, there's an estimated (at max) 75k people logging into SWTOR at once. This is an increase over last week from what the thread states. Supposedly, MMO devs report about 10% of an active subscriber base is usually logged in at any given time. To support the 1.3 million subscriber number, you'd need double the 75k, but we don't know how many players are staying subbed and hoping for the turn around, but those people couldn't exactly be described as active. BW is still silent about their own numbers, so it's looking like July (when I think the next EA shareholders meeting is taking place) until they're forced to show their subscription numbers.

On an unrelated note: it's a shame these players find the need to spend more time checking population numbers rather than playing the game.

I absolutely hate looking for a group for a flashpoint or heroic. I'd rather be questing than spending hours spamming "LFG" in the chat channel. I just end up returning to some of the flashpoints when I'm at a much higher level, which is kind of pathetic. The 1.3 group finder will be a very welcomed feature indeed. That said, I just finished my Agent class story and I'm about to start my Smuggler.

Smuggler is fun for the story line, love the dialogue.

SWTOR is one of those games that I enjoy, but don't really play much due to other games getting higher priority. I do hope that it doesn't go away entirely, though; there's a hell of a lot of game in there, in terms of story and the like.

Ok, so 1.3 popped and legacy unlocks aren't account/server wide? So, what's the point of calling it "legacy" if you have to pay for speeder piloting across 5 different characters? This game already has incredible money sinks and "roll an alt" is the go to answer for the game lacking endgame. What's the fucking excuse?

There's also a new option to lower the graphics settings for PC with lower specs? Seriously? This game couldn't get any less unimpressive graphically and now we have to lower them more so an i7 and $300 video card can run a game that looks worse than Jedi-Outcast? And I can't even post on the forums to ask if they fixed the "opening your inventory makes your PC hemorrhage it's FPS like a neck wound" issue they've had since the beta. Jesus, they have better looking lightsabers in Skyrim!

We also can't find a middle ground when it comes to server populations? You're either on a super-server with queues (although this is likely due to the mass rush to play 1.3) or you're logging in and saying "50,000 people used to live here...."

I can only mod Skyrim so much and I was hoping this game might show something... anything, that might make me resub. But even if it does, I'm not really keen to transfer and lose PC names, although there's no way anyone would take my legacy name. Damn it, I'm dying for some fucking Star Wars. SWTOR gave me just enough of a taste that I still constantly check the forums for some hope because I'm an idiot. Maybe I should look into that Galaxies revamp project. Until then, I'm installing that damn lightsaber mod.

What is this Galaxies revamp you're talking about. I thought all the SWG servers were shut down, so there's no way to play the game anymore.

Darksider wrote:What is this Galaxies revamp you're talking about. I thought all the SWG servers were shut down, so there's no way to play the game anymore.

Click Here. Some guys/girls built a Pre-CU Galaxies server engine/binaries/whatchamacallit from scratch (so they say) only calling up assets from your (legally owned) Galaxies client. I have no idea about the quality or stability, but it's something I thought about messing with when Skyrim got boring and if SWTOR continued it's downward spiral.

Supposedly, you can also run your own server, but I haven't even taken the time to try and get anything downloaded and running on my 2003 box.

So, what I learned over the weekend is that people will get EXTREMELY angry with you if they find out you use a 360 controller to play. It's pretty funny.

For what possible reason would they object? Heresy?

Pretty much. They think there's no way I could use my quickbars or even select enemies. As it is I can fully access 2 quckbars just from the controller (more if I bother configuring hold fuctions for extra controls) which is perfectly fine for playing a trooper. Guardian/warrior might be tricky but I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.

If nothing else, it's certainly a more comfortable way to play.

Losonti Tokash wrote:Pretty much. They think there's no way I could use my quickbars or even select enemies. As it is I can fully access 2 quckbars just from the controller (more if I bother configuring hold fuctions for extra controls) which is perfectly fine for playing a trooper. Guardian/warrior might be tricky but I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.

I had two toggle buttons for my guardian tank on my n52e and I still had to click medpacks and swap 1-2 abilities depending on the fight. My only beef with trying to use a controller is that tab targeting in SWTOR is shit. I would think the 360 controller would be nice for ranged "Turret" style classes. The big killer for Guardians is going to be using Guardian Leap effectively since, at least since I quit, the game had no macros, meaning you'd have to have another button to target the closest friendly and use the ability, rather then an if then else macro for force leap.

If nothing else, it's certainly a more comfortable way to play.

I'd get bored in STO and cruise around the kerrat system with my 360 controller. Since the game auto-targetted anyone who shot you, I could just fly around waiting for feds to take pot shots at me and dust them while watching netflix. If things got crazy, my build always gave me time to set the controller down and get a hold of my gamepad and mouse.

So last week I found a hunt of well chewed plastic my dog had left me and looked like a USB key I had left somewhere and she had eaten and I never ID which of the half dozen old keys I keep around for not wanting to throw away something I could find useful in loaning to someone. Turns out it was my Old republic authenticator thing, thank bob I had the application on my phone or I'd be boned as average turn around time for re-authorizing that sort of thing is three weeks according to the forums.

Well I'm going to look at 1.3 tonight and either cancel or give it another chance.

Losonti Tokash wrote:So, what I learned over the weekend is that people will get EXTREMELY angry with you if they find out you use a 360 controller to play. It's pretty funny.

Uh oh, someone defiled the Golden Calf of the PC Master Race with a console controller.