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Bloodbath at EA/BW is undeniable proof this game is severely wounded
noncley
Member UncommonPosts: 718
[mod edit]
In February 2011, Gordon Walton, the General Studio Manager of Bioware Austin, and the man who had directed the developmentt of SWTOR from 2005, left the company six months before the game was launched:
In early 2012, EA CFO Eric Brown 'unexpectedly' left the company. He was only with the company for three years.
In May 2012, at least four hundred of the eight hundred developer staff attached to SWTOR were fired
In July 2012, Lead Combat Designer - and the man many blame for wrenching out the rich features of SWTOR that might have made it a more satisfying game - Georg Zoeller was fired 'to take up a new career in an exciting new industry in Singapore'.
Today John Riccitiello is slated to be summarily removed as Electronic Arts CEO. He has been in charge of EA for five years and overseen a vertiginous drop in the company's share price: from £60 in 2007 to $11.71 in July 2012. While other games brought out under his watch, like DA2 and ME3, have not been as successful as the industry would have liked, I'd say that the commercial disappointment of SWTOR, especially after the extremely expensive investment EA poured into it ($200m plus including marketing) was Riccitiello's last mad gamble to turn the fortunes of the company round.
Next heads on the chopping block: Daniel Erickson and Gabe Amatanegelo.
...Meanwhile, in another part of Austin, a portly, sandy-haired man, his face lined with years of failure and depression, quietly picks up another modest bonus cheque and waddles out of the office to his mid-range American car and his dinner for one alone at a local Applebees. As he pulls out of the mostly empty carlot, John Smedley, CEO of SOE, 'The Man They Couldn't Fire' smiles weakly to himself.
In July CFO
Comments
You paint a vivid picture, but I would like more solid evidence, such as sub numbers, (which I know if they are very low they won't release). Can anyone here provide a calm rebuttle to the OP? I have mixed feelings obout the fate of swtor, as I want more mmos with big budgets and all voice over to be made, nothing wrong with large companies taking large risks. I have issues with the game but then I am impossible to please, would the flaws mmo vets here get annoyed at bother the general public that appear to be leaving the game?
Will SWTORs shutdown be solid enough evidence for you or will you still be saying it is healthy after it is shutdown?
I am playing the game as much as possible now, before it shuts down. I should get everything I want to do to done, way before Dec 15th, unlike SWG. Unless they turn the game around and enhance it.
Voice overs and stuff really do not suit MMOs, as they are mainly for single player experiences. You may enjoy them but others you group with may want to space bar them, especially if done them loads of times before. Games with voice over have been around for ages - in single player games. However they could expand on games like GTA IV, Red Dead Redemption, MAss Effect 3 etc. Single player games with multipleyar functionality, just made a bit more multiplayer in the multiplayer options..
LOTRO also has voice over and cinematics, but only on the main questlines. Side quests are mainly text based. I think LOTRO has the right balance of text and voice over. SWTOR is just too much of it
Star Trek Online - Best Free MMORPG of 2012
Two points:
First, Georg Zoeller was not "fired". He left on his own to pursue other things.
Second, the 300 staff let go at BW were mostly the "pre-production" staffing. That happens with all MMO's shortly after release.
As to the CEO POSSIBLY being let go.....good ridance.
Let's party like it is 1863!
interesting times ahead, plus Neverwinter is ahead too and that's F2P already...
They're already talking about another round of server merges, I guess the ones from a month ago wasn't enough.
23%?
I dont hold what comes from EA/Bioware to be even remotely credible...oh wait, even they said it was higher.
2.4 million in sales and the last thing they said was 1.4 million active accounts...and that was after offering 30 days free play to anyone with a level 50 or what was it level 11 legacy level? Since then even some diehard fanboys started complaining that populations were still dropping a little too fast.
I would be SHOCKED if more than 700,000 were still paying. thats less than 1/3rd of those that bought it. aka 33.3%
Add Ohlen to that list, he should go with the others, he's part of the problems SWTOR has.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
BULL SH*T. The game did not meet expectations and they let staff go. If they had the sub numbers they would ADD staff from devs to customer service etc etc. Dont try and convince me a tin can is a diamond it wont work and you make yourself look silly.
I'm not saying the game is thriving or isn't, but he's actually on point with that one. You don't hire more programmers once the game has released. However, most companies will shift the programmers to work on other titles instead of outright firing them.
Along with Ohlen, add the NGE devs BioWare hired from SOE Austin in early 2006. Dickerson comes to mind right off the bat.
Really, that's about the only way to make this into anything salvagable. They have got to get rid of the egos, who think they're right and every1 else has "tinfoil hats" on. That will pretty much take all of these set in their ways lead developers/producers out of the equation.
With some new blood, some new/old ideas, they just might have 1/2 a chance of turning it all around, but the good Drs. will have to do it rather fast before EA, or worse yet, LA does it for them. Anything else will be maintenance mode circa 2012 until the end of the LA contract, most probably.
Actually he is right, most of the staff thatr was laid off were pre-production staff. You all may love to hate this game, but many people are still playing it and I mean MANY people. One of my friends was laid off who has worked there for a few years on the game, he says it was mostly pre-production staff and nobody was particularly in trouble. One of my friends is still there and there hasn't been anything negative going on at work since the layoffs and things have actually been going great at the job, it's still a MASSIVE team on this game, you really have no idea. A majority of layoffs were quality testers for game development before release, and another bunch were teams that did other in-development projects on the game who's jobs were made irrelevent by it's release, many of these people knew this was coming because of the nature of their job at the studio and had already been looking for other jobs. Things are actually going well at BioWare Austin for the TOR team. Posts like this are entirely based on assumption, and not factual information. The game has seen a pretty significant resurgence in active players since the launch of 1.3. I play the game casually, and I think it's a really good game. Many people do, or nobody would be playing it. People can say "voice overs dont belong in a mmo" and other things like that, but really speak for yourselves. If you don't like a game, don't play it and seriously stop trying to bash a game and a company into the ground when you honestly have no clue what you're talking about and while you're at it stop acting like you know for a fact what "belongs" in a game or not. It may not belong in YOUR preferred game, but it sure as hell belongs in other peoples. Get over yourselves.
You're half right. That is indeed what is normally done, however the SWTOR team specifically stated they were NOT going to do this, and they were planning on keeping the whole team together in order to produce new content faster. To say you are not going to fire people, then turn around and do so when your product begins facing public and monetary scrutiny, sort of begs the question.
As for how much the game has lost in terms of subs, they required severe server mergers and are talking about merging even more servers. This indicates that have indeed lost subs, at the very least far more than 23% of the original box/digital sale number (which is another thing, they lost 23% of...what exactly? 23% of subs AT THE TIME =/= 23% of subs total, yay wording). Then also consider that when server mergers occur, they must allow for more people than are actually, actively playing in order to compensate for unexpected rises in population; this means the server pop is even lower.
However, server pop isn't always indictative of sub numbers. Oddly, people have this habit of paying monthly for a game they're not playing, just in case. I guess it's their crutch. So even if the servers are a ghost town, they could still be making enough money to assume they're not doing as bas as they actually are...in other words, paying a sub for a game you're not playing isn't doing ~anyone~ any good.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
They haven't talked about a 2nd "server merger" as there hasn't been even 1 server merger yet. If you'd pay attention to anything said by BioWare developers, or really any other person that posts sourced information on this game and it's status, you would know that they selected a couple handfulls of servers, have had people migrating to them, and locked the servers that are open to transfers. They have not said ANYTHING ANYWHERE about a 2nd set of mergers, they don't need a 2nd set of mergers when 12 of 16 servers reach full, and the others very heavy almost every day. Also, there's a post by a dev on the forums explaining server populations and what "server status" does and does not represent. Right now, the game servers hold an ENORMOUS amount of players, about 3 times more then they did at launch in some cases, more in other cases. This causes server populations to require a lot more players to reach "full" status then they did before. You can find this post on the forum if you're subscribed to the game and able to use the general forums, if you look up the posts about the Fatman server and others if you want to find the source, I may post it later if enough people care enough to see it and aren't flaming me because I'm defending the game they love to troll.
The OP's post is based on twisted facts to make things seem worse then they are, and most of it is COMPLETE 100% speculation based off his imagination.
"Server merges" coming late summer.
You did not read my post. I didn't say they weren't merging servers, I said they are not doing a second series of mergers to the servers they currently have available.
This again... about shutdown... Why would they shut this down when they've kept WAR up, and P2P mind you, for as long as they have? I believe if they chose to leave it P2P that TOR could always have more players than WAR.
In addition to that, I don't know the nature of this business but I'm curious if LA has any say on whether it can just be shut down, or maybe even passed on to another company...?
How do you know he wasn't fired? I'm not saying he was but I don't see anything saying he wasn't. Assuming he was not fired is no different than assuming he was. That is something not privy to us.
On the layoffs. Where's that quote from EA saying they will NOT be cutting the staff and they plan on keeping EVERYONE working so they can keep pushing out content? I'm too lazy to look it up but that is a FACT that they said long before the layoffs that NOBODY will be layed off. Didn't work out that way obviously and with EA making that statement means that "happens in all MMO's shortly after release" your claiming, does not apply here. The layoffs were because the game is not holding player retention.
you guys seriously are some terrible haters here on this site. This game is far from terrible , its not great and wont hold the mainstream but it has no glaring issues at all. You all wanted a SWG2 we get it , you didnt get your way and now have to come to this site and throw temper tantrums like two year olds? Seriously my daughter whos two and a half cries far less then some of the people on this site. I play TSW and not even star wars, it didnt hold my attention that long yet I do not post crap bashing it every other day. OP get your facts straight before you post this nonsense you know nothing about whats going on except from other forum trolls like yourself. 16 servers left is far better then you guys beloved Rift and EQ2 or AOC is doing. Heck look at TSW right now and see how many shards they have and population and I play that myself. Tera is what 5 servers most light? Name another game besides WOW that has that many active servers? You cant unless your naming wow or F2P garbage from asia.
Hmm, GW2 had 96 servers in the second beta.
my sig is GW2 i will be playing that just saying anything before that as IMO i think GW2 is going to topple wow myself but thats a personal opinion.
SW:TOR hasn't performed up to expectations. I don't think anyone can argue otherwise; however, there seems to be only two lines of thinking with you people. Either SW:TOR retains millions of subscribers before expanding to become the new king of MMORPGs or it nosedives into obscurity as players leave it in droves. Judging by the attitudes of many vocal forum members even prior to the game's release, most people here are clinging to anything they can to prove to themselves that it will be the latter.
I subscribe to a different philosophy. While it's unfortunate that SW:TOR didn't turn out to be the success that fans anticipated, it's still a solid game for those that like this style of MMO that has potential to be great with some added content and features. I think it's very possible that SW:TOR's population will largely stabilize and it will exist as a moderate success not unlike Rift and pre-F2P LotRO and EQ2.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1651869499.png
Sorry I was meant to say to the person above, that it may have been claimed it was a wow killer, but even worse was this game is the reason Star Wars Galaxies never got a patch to make the game how it used to be, and why it shut down just before release of SWTOR. Now SWTOR is a gonner because its not been a success and for us swg fans weve lost our game to a bioware version that isnt as good as swg was.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1651869499.png