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Can SWTOR be saved?
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"Riiiiiiiiiiiight... you know there is a huge difference between F2P and B2P?
So, maybe instead of just tossing out trendy "tags" you should actually consider what business strategy you want to follow, especially if you want to "help" a company save its game."
Im not to feel offended? After reading your post.. i am. i hope you feel better about your life.. the simple fact that you tried to insult my intelligence without even knowing one thing about me is astounding. You are very pretentious to think that you are the "only adult amongst thousands of 12 year olds" who come to this site.. smh..
Nothing about what i said was trendy. I could give two fucks less about MMO trends. I was just bringing up a very viable option for a game that is not doing as well as intended. Hell im a FAN of the game personally.. but there arent many.. the whole purpose of this thread was to give suggestions or ways to help make the game better..
""do MORE for space combat/travel (no rails)"... *rolls eyes* dude, you are making it impossible NOT to become a troll!
Right, do yourself a favor and watch a 6 movies again. Then count the minutes that there is actual space combat.
Now, do yourself another favor and count the minutes that in the movies people are travelling thru space AND are not engaged in something else.
You will see that the SW movies actually - overall - offer very little of it. And when it is there, often focus keeps being shifted to other combat/tense situations (think Ep I Fight to break Siege of Naboo/Capture the Vice Roy/Meet the Natives complex, or Ep VI Attack on Death Star 2/Endor infiltration/Luke, come to the Dark Side complex).
And SWTOR runs with that ball making it obvious that this is NOT a game about space combat! It's a "value added option" (which I used once or twice to get my Flyboy title, but not any further).
So, yeah, IF you want a SW space flight simulator, I'm sure there are loads of options out there, but don't expect SWTOR to make a 180 degree turn just so that it can have everything in there...
Because, if you think about it, given the current player numbers, do you really think it would help if some more players were to hide themselves in their little SWTOR cockpits go off spacehunting (PvE) or off to take their dog for a fight (PvP)?"
I will answer this one..
You havent watched many SW movies if you are telling me that space combat isnt that important.. plus what you are saying is contridicting.. how are some of the biggest moments in SW history (that you are naming) not that important? anyway. whether or not SWTOR can properly INNOVATE and INCLUDE that is another story.. My suggestion wasnt a shot in the dark.. SWTOR should indeed include a pvp system in space.. that would do many things for the game.. the exact opposite of what you are saying.. if BW announced "Space PVP" im sure the pop would jump back up.. in order to keep it up they would need to implement things like custom ships, weapons..things of that nature.. its not something that has to be so deep, but its needs to be a little more free than it is now. I love what cryptic did with STO.. they proved that its possible..PVE/PVP on planets and space..but imagine that sort of idea in SWTOR. Also dont forget when this story takes place either.. its years after the KOTOR story, years before the movies..new conflicts are happening between many factions.. so yeaa.. i dont think its a crime to imagine space combat happening more often than none. YES..we should be able to have custom ships.. shit for all the money spent in this game that could have been done. Yea i want to fly to korriban but i want the option of blowing up 3 smuggler ships on the way if i feel like it too.
thats really all i have to say..im saddened at your failed attempt to insult me.. you should check yourself. this is not a chance for ostentatious people to get their rocks off. Im not even going to entertain the rest of what you said.
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
agreed.. game feels like a console game with online option
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
Player controlled planets and zones would be epic.. i agree with this.. as i said in op pvp needs to be fixed and we need to do more with the space/ships aspect of the game..
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
Basically, SWtOR is just not a good game. Much too linear. No space combat. Poor planet design. Really, the list goes on and on.
They did nothing to step outside of the KotOR model, and that's a shame. The model is above-average for single-player games, but MMOs are a different animal.
Couple all of that with EA, the company notorious for favoring profits over quality products, and the recipe for fail was complete.
Call Blur and make the full length feature film or even do a live action, end the old republic saga and FFD>> straight to NJO series for the game followed by a conversion to a sandbox.
Based on the promo vids, a full feature would decimate. Even Episode III: revenge of the sith almost hit a billion worldwide and that was a shit movie. Matter of fact, they spent less on that movie then they did making this game, and saw much better profit. Have they even seen profit yet?
It's been 5 months and I think they've already given away 2 or 3 free months, so I really don't see how they're managing now, other than having good box sales.
I would shell out 15 a month for space pvp and open world pvp that actually dicates what zones/planets are controlled.. i dont think im alone in that either.. i think those things with a few others would be a great way to start gaining the pop back.. im only talking about pvp though because that was a huge chunk of why people left..pvp is broken = not a mmo
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
The problem is they tried to make kotor3, then at some point decided to add online play and grouping to it. What we wound up with was a game with 3 months of play, and then your done.
There is a reason football players don't go play tennis professionally, they will look like amateurs who have no idea how to play.
This is what you get for using single player devs to develope a MMORPG game. They try to copy the most successful MMO yet, and when they hit roadblocks, they turn to their single player games for solution. They tried to build a single player experience on a MMO framework. It just won't click. They never connected with how MMORPG players plays the game, instead they want MMO players to play a single player game online.
Now, they have a single player story with mundane task of a MMORPG. Why would I want to do mundane task just to find out more of your alright story.
And never listens to a guy who says "World of Warcraft is a touchstone. It has established standards, it's established how you play an MMO. Every MMO that comes out, I play and look at it. And if they break any of the WoW rules, in my book that's pretty dumb"
Guess who's dumb now?
You will never succeed by following rules, if we did, we will still be thinking Earth is the centre of the universe. That is my only advice, change the direction of how you develope your game. Right now it just doesn't work, it doesn't click.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW?
As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
There will always be Star Wars fan, in good times and bad.
Even if the community twiddled down to 250k subscribers, the game will still be around for years to come. Just look at the NGE system SOE made on their SWG title. Thousands upon thosands exiled that game including myself, but still there was a active community that loved that NGE system (which I could never figure out).
If may not be the 10 million subscribers everyone was hoping for, but I don't see this mmo disappearing anytime soon.
Gosh! How did you manage to say so much in only two sentences?
Apparently, from the few things we know about TESO, it will be just another themepark.
"Zenimax Online has done what they feel is a good job at taking the best parts of The Elder Scrolls series and skillfully sewing them together with the best elements of popular MMO titles like World of Warcraft to create a fanciful hybrid.
(...) some elements are unable to make the transition, such as owning a house, but they are doing their best to keep as much as humanly possible."
No, some might say that server mergers and tranfers will save SWTOR, but those things will only cure the sympton, not the disease. Come to think of it: What caused people to leave in the first place?
1st place: Game design failure, the sandboxers who bought TOR because they enjoy the franchise were the first to leave.
2nd place: Narrative orientation of the game: Players who are not capable of watching their stories without playing it were probably the second to unsubscribe.
3rd place: Failure to create an addictive game: Players who take a break don't feel the need to come back. We saw it when ME3 was released, many hardcore gamers stopped playing TOR during a week or two. Once Mass Effect over, they felt absolutely no "burning desire" to return. The ones who did weren't hardcore gamers anymore. They started playing TOR like casuals do.
4th place: Tremendous lack of end-game content: Players who hate doing twice the same thing left there.
5th place: Development flaws, lack of some basic mmo tools (group finder...)
6th: place: Lack of players: Players who don't like feeling alone left at that point. (server transfers is appropriate to retain them. This should be the priority as players above this place are probably gone for good))
/agree. think you nailed it
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
Of course it will be a themepark. A game developer would have to be incredibly brave or incresibly stupid to try a sandbox implementation for a major IP, there is zero evidence in the history of the MMO market that the sandbox approach is capable of leading to significant success. As far as bravery goes, how likely does anyone think that would be in modern game development? And if they are stupid, then the game would probably suck anyway.
Nonsense. Criticize the design approach of the MMO elements all you want, but it simply isn't accurate to say it is a bad game. The only *major* flaw is the presence of the subscription fee. WIthout that, you would have at the very least 8 of the best single player RPGs ever made. Hell, in a lot of ways TOR is the best game BioWare has made in several years. Certainly better than Dragon Age 2 or Mass Effect 3.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
Absolutely not.
You're kidding. You think an RPG in 2012 that involves walking around static environments in a linear fashion, going from quest hub to quest hub - talking to people with little !'s over their head, then going out and killing 10 womprats, coming back... repeating... for 60 levels... is one of the single greatest RPGs ever?
The graphics aren't great. The combat is nothing special. The cutscenes are ponderous. AND choice doesn't matter.
Please tell me what makes TOR this amazing RPG.
Your number one isn't a design failure. The road to potential financial success is one paved by themeparks, not sandboxes, and the developers never so much as hinted that they were making any attempt at providing a sandbox. Though I agree sandboxers were probably among the first to leave.
I agree with your number two. Traditional MMO fans who simply don't enjoy playing RPGs were never likely to stick around long. But again, anyone who paid attention to the game's development knew what we were getting in terms of narrative presentation years before launch.
Your number three; to be fair, I can't think of a single MMO where that hasn't been true for a lot of people. Any time you take a break from a MMO to play a single player game, if it is a well designed single player game, the contrast between the two experiences is unlikely to be favorable to the MMO, which is a genre designed around repetition and grinding. The single player game will take less of your time to "complete," and more of the hours spent completing it will have felt like fun rather than work. That isn't a problem with TOR, it is a problem with every MMO ever made.
Your number four is another one that simply isn't a criticism of TOR. It is a criticism of all MMOs, or at least all of the themepark ones. Does TOR have a little less endgame content than a game like WoW that has been out for almost eight years? Sure, but it's not like WoW has so much that you don't spend 90% of your time repeating content, you just start the repetition a couple of days later than you would in TOR. The biggest problem with endgame in TOR, rather than in MMOs generally, is that unless you are on one of the most active servers and/or in a still highly active guild, you can't participate in it at all, because you don't have anyone to group with.
I agree that some people probably left because of number five, but I disagree with characterize a group finder as a "basic mmo tool." Until fairly recently in MMO history, almost no games had group finders with any real utility, and unless 1.3 takes a couple more months to come out, TOR still has had a better pace of post-launch improvements than any other MMO I can think of. There is a reason a lot of veteran MMO players don't even try a game until it has been out at least six months.
As for players who left for the above five reasons probably being gone for good, I have to call BS on that one. It is perfectly normal for most MMO players to periodically quit games even though they like them, because the pace at which people consume content will always be faster than the pace at which it is produced, and it doesn't make sense to pay a sub when you've done everything. You wait until the expansion, then come back. People who left for your first two reasons are unlikely to come back, because the game wasn't designed for them in the first place, but the other three groups all fall into the category of people who will generally leave an MMO and come back several times over it's lifetime, if they enjoyed it at all in the first place.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
Apparently, from the few things we know about TESO, it will be just another themepark.
"Zenimax Online has done what they feel is a good job at taking the best parts of The Elder Scrolls series and skillfully sewing them together with the best elements of popular MMO titles like World of Warcraft to create a fanciful hybrid.
(...) some elements are unable to make the transition, such as owning a house, but they are doing their best to keep as much as humanly possible."
Of course it will be a themepark. A game developer would have to be incredibly brave or incresibly stupid to try a sandbox implementation for a major IP, there is zero evidence in the history of the MMO market that the sandbox approach is capable of leading to significant success. As far as bravery goes, how likely does anyone think that would be in modern game development? And if they are stupid, then the game would probably suck anyway.
Nonsense. Criticize the design approach of the MMO elements all you want, but it simply isn't accurate to say it is a bad game. The only *major* flaw is the presence of the subscription fee. WIthout that, you would have at the very least 8 of the best single player RPGs ever made. Hell, in a lot of ways TOR is the best game BioWare has made in several years. Certainly better than Dragon Age 2 or Mass Effect 3.
Aaah shit, u said Masss Effect 3. That's like kryptonite in any argument. I just almost wrote an attack post but then I reread what u wrote. Then I thought about it. I still think SWTOR is a shitbox and fhere really isn't a game there to berate. The fact that it is even mentioned beside dragon age 2 says it all. If it was awesome we'd only be taking about it in terms of how it fits beside the best. Think about it, when your eating your favorite food, do you start comparing it to human shit?Lol. I actually enjoyed Dragon Age 2, despite it's flaws. Only once, rather than the multiple times I usually enjoy BioWare games, but I honestly don't think BioWare has ever made an objectively bad game. They've just started a trend of making games that seem bad because they aren't as good as the uniformly excellent standard that BioWare used to represent.
The most important element in an RPG is the ability to make the character your own, to actualy have a degree of choice in the role you play. No other MMO has even really attempted to be an RPG, prior to TOR. The class story content in TOR is, for the most part, excellent. It is as well written, as well presented, and as well acted as any great RPG of recent years that you care to name. (With the possible exception of the Witcher 2, haven't played it yet, so I can't comment there.) The non-class story content, *if* you only had to play it as much as is necessary to fully experience one of the classes per faction, is easily good enough not to detract from the experience provided by the class stories. The only major flaws the game has as an RPG (rather than as a MMO) are the existence of the subscription fee, and the amount of shared content that must repeated in order to access all of the unique class content. If there were a mechanic in place that allowed the player to level alts solely through pursuit of class quests, it would be damn near perfect.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
No way to save this gargbage and no reason 2. Its an EA game and it needs to die. [mod edit]
The more Epicly this game fails the better. I have been rooting for its destruction since E3 when it was first announced all those years ago...
Text in red: Formula for fail
SWTOR tried to take away users from existing games that provided the same thing but better. Even the IP could not pull this one off for BW.
Sandbox peeps left and were vocal about what was missing, giving remaining linear trail sniffers something to think about. Some said "stay in the cave, our torches are the only light," but others still poked their noses around and realized thay have been duped. The inertia of unsubs has grown, with pop decline breeding even more pop decline as players available for grouping diminished.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
Sandbox "peeps" never should have come in the first place. Anyone who thought BioWare would make a sandbox friendly game was either stupid or just not paying attention. And no other game provided the same experience as TOR. TOR is the first true MMORPG. Would it have been better at the MMO without the RPG, or the RPG without the MMO? Probably, but not necessarily.
And the sandbox approach to an online Star Wars game was already tried. Commercially speaking, it failed, miserably, no matter what any particular group may believe it's merits as a game to have been. Compared to SWG, speaking strictly in financial terms, TOR has thus far been a vastly superior product.
As for taking players away from existing games, all games do that. Nobody targets people who don't play games, so by definition your target market for any game will consist of people who have other games they either are or could be playing. Which brings us back to the problem of the subscription. Without the subscription weighing it down, TOR would almost certainly be a lot more active, because nobody would ever have to "quit" the game. Take breaks, sure, but you would never be in the position of feeling like you needed to cancel a sub because you are going to be playing something else for a while. Subscriptions are just a bad model for games. They are bad for player retention, and bad for the quality of content in updates.
The best steps that could be taken to improve the player experience in TOR would be the transition to mega-servers (in combination with a massive increase in the number of characters the player can make per server, so you don't have to level multiple legacies) and the elimination of a monthly subscription in favor of paying for update content as it becomes available, and only if you want that particular content.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
yeah yeah, only CORPG players should have played SWTOR, anyone else was an asshole ... etc etc. People try games all the time, it's not a crime. There's too much hyperbole and even deception on forums to use those as a guide. You basically have to try things for yourself.
The financial success argument did not save this game, so I'm not sure why that drum keeps getting beaten.
"But it should have worked!"
well it didn't. the theory of WoW clone = success is over, real life exceptions have dashed that little gem. The recipe for success didn't perform.
Your definition of attempting to target gamers also invalidates why other types of MMO players were there at launch, which defeats your known quantity argument about the content of the game. My statement was about SWTOR attempting to live off of the WoW user base. The bigger parasite simply defended its territory and now SWTOR is starving. That's what I was talking about. I wasn't saying it was wrong to try, I was simply pointing out how fail it was.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
This is why we end up with bad games...
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Concerning number 1, the themepark market is overcrowded. Gaming companies are incredibly stupid to believe they can produce a mmorpg containing as much content as WoW from day 1. To be honnest, competition is now only possible around the gamedesign and the gameplay. If they try to run away from it, their games will remain doomed to fail. I'm also mentioning the sandboxers as it looks like many of them purchased TOR because they like StarWars. What happened was highly foreseeable. They started the exodus.
Concerning number 2, most people probably didn't follow the game development. The ones who did were more attracted by the IP than the model proposed.
#3: TOR truly succeeded at changing players' perception of what makes a great single player game. Many online players became attracted by single player RPG because they were enjoying this part in TOR. They wanted more! Bioware caused the exodus to ME3 and all others offline games. Their mmorpg was particularly suffering from its lack of addictivity. Players never returned.
#4: Rift delivers content quicker than Bioware. Despite their budget, EA/Bioware is not even close to compete with Trion.
#5: If the game starts to feel empty, a group finder becomes a must have in 2012.
Players who leave a game 6 months after its release generally don't comeback. GW2 and The Secret World won't help them. Sheeps are attracted by what is shiny, hot and new. TOR is designed to capture sheeps.
Bioware lost its herd, only a massive expansion released right after a tremendous marketing campain can get them back. Hardcore players may give TOR a second chance, but it was clearly not designed for them. 
Lol. The game already is a financial success. It could shut down tomorrow, and still be one of the most financially successful MMOs ever. And I'll rephrase my point in regard to sandboxers; they never should have tried the game *with the expectation that it would satisfy their sandbox craving.* Having any such belief would require, as I said before, either stupidity or willful ignorance. By any objective measure of success, TOR is (judging from the point in time of roughly six months after launch) the second most successful MMO ever released (in the US/European markets.)
And, just as all games do, TOR did try to bring players in from other games. But it wasn't just WoW style MMO players, it was BioWare style RPG players, and while the number one thing driving away WoW players may be what they see as an underdeveloped endgame experience, the main thing driving away RPG players is the need to pay fifteen dollars a month just to access day one content that should have been covered by the price of the box.
TOR has three big problems right now; the population is spread across too many servers (the total population numbers are fine, it's the distribution that is the issue) the endgame is at the level which is reasonable to expect from a six month old game when MMO veterans want it at the level reasonable to expect from an eight year old game, and the amount of money people are being expected to pay for the game on a monthly basis is substantially higher than the service/content being provided deserves.
Nothing but time for more development will solve the perceived "lack of endgame content." The population problem is easily solved by the proposed mega-servers, and the lack of value for money invested is easily solved by eliminating the subscription and charging for content directly instead of for access to content.
And none of TOR's problems have anything to do with WoW "defending it's territory." People who have left TOR haven't done so because of any action taken by the WoW development team. I mean seriously, how much crossover audience is there between people who thought they might enjoy TOR, and people who think they will enjoy Poke-World of Pandacraft?
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.