"Star Wars: The Old Republic set the new bar for EA's pre-order sales according the to the notes for the Q1 Fiscal Earnings Release. The previous bar was set by Battlefield 3, but according to President Frank Gibeau during the investor's conference call today, SWTOR far exceed BF3's pre-order sales. In fact, according to Gibeau the sales exceeded the company's expected sales curve, therefore breaking records no one at the game developing company could have expected."
I think they need some new people working there then.... I dont think anyone who knows anything about the game is suprised that it would sell such massive amounts considering its both Bioware and Star Wars. Not only will it appeal to millions who are familiar with the genre and play MMOs already, but also to millions outside of the genre who will be buying it simply for the fact that its a massive budget Star Wars game, regardless of who the developer is.
Goodbye WoW , it was a nice run! While I am suprised TOR is seeling like hotcakes, I'm really not suprised because it is Star Wars. Lets hope for a good launch.
LOL very premature to say goodbye WoW considering SWTOR is only planned for release in North America & Selected European locations. Thus limiting their potential player pool..... and leaving the wow subscribers in those regions largely unaffected I would expect. Presale could have been bigger too if they didnt do this.
There is currently no word on when or even if other regions will get releases of SWTOR. One of the dumbest moves in MMO history IMHO, I guess Bioware & EA just went Full Retard.
Pity WoW also did this but even more restrictively with only launching in the US initially.
I mean look at the absolute failure of WoW over the past 6 years where it made 'how many MILLIONS' for Blizzard? /sarcasm
TBH I couldnt care less what WoW did, I played it for a month or so during the vanilla days and found it extremely bland.
Warhammer online had a global launch & the launch was fine for the most part other than long server queues (stock control anyone ?) but now apparently they cannot manage that anymore..... its a joke really. Yes warhammer failed ultimately but not due to its launch, it failed because once you hit tier 3 the lack of balance and the fact that one class was severley OP became painfully apparent.
For a game like SWTOR where the constant emphasis is on story and avoiding spoiler by limiting Beta testing...... then you go and give some countries your game & story and they somehow wont spoil ti for everyone else ? lol good plan.
Its not so much what they are doing but how they have gone about it, just dropping a bombshell the day of pre-orders with absolutely no word on when any other regions will have access. Oh well.
Bioware and EA, going full retard since July 2011.
Um.......WAR added way too many servers and after a few months that bit them in the ass.
Goodbye WoW , it was a nice run! While I am suprised TOR is seeling like hotcakes, I'm really not suprised because it is Star Wars. Lets hope for a good launch.
LOL very premature to say goodbye WoW considering SWTOR is only planned for release in North America & Selected European locations. Thus limiting their potential player pool..... and leaving the wow subscribers in those regions largely unaffected I would expect. Presale could have been bigger too if they didnt do this.
There is currently no word on when or even if other regions will get releases of SWTOR. One of the dumbest moves in MMO history IMHO, I guess Bioware & EA just went Full Retard.
Pity WoW also did this but even more restrictively with only launching in the US initially.
I mean look at the absolute failure of WoW over the past 6 years where it made 'how many MILLIONS' for Blizzard? /sarcasm
TBH I couldnt care less what WoW did, I played it for a month or so during the vanilla days and found it extremely bland.
Warhammer online had a global launch & the launch was fine for the most part other than long server queues (stock control anyone ?) but now apparently they cannot manage that anymore..... its a joke really. Yes warhammer failed ultimately but not due to its launch, it failed because once you hit tier 3 the lack of balance and the fact that one class was severley OP became painfully apparent.
For a game like SWTOR where the constant emphasis is on story and avoiding spoiler by limiting Beta testing...... then you go and give some countries your game & story and they somehow wont spoil ti for everyone else ? lol good plan.
Its not so much what they are doing but how they have gone about it, just dropping a bombshell the day of pre-orders with absolutely no word on when any other regions will have access. Oh well.
Bioware and EA, going full retard since July 2011.
Um.......WAR added way too many servers and after a few months that bit them in the ass.
Well it did have quite a few other issues & bugs (anyone else remember sitting there for 3-5 minutes waiting for your mailbox to open after clicking it until like a month after launch when they finally fixed it?), but i agree the amount of servers kind of bit them in the ass because while you had a decent population on each server, a small number of those had the time to outlevel the majority and get into the higher tiers, then when they got there there was nobody else to fight and it appeared extremely boring and dead. Then the QQ ensued, people got bored and left, and it caused a chain reaction since all the people who started making it into those tiers shortly after had less people to fight because they already left the game. And yeah class balance was completely screwed up at first. My god Squig Herder's were terrible at launch. I was so looking forward to playing one, but they were completely useless until they added in some of the bonuses from pets and stuff.
-SNIP- And Bioware came out(or at least replied to email's) and said that no country will have an IP block on them(or credit card block), so if they get the pre-order and their code they will still be able to play with everyone else when the game launches. -SNIP-
Actually that is not what they said. The actual wording from the community managers response was very loose.
Regarding whether the game will block players from some regions by IP address: currently, there is no plan to block players from the game by regional IP blocking.
........ Either way "no plan to" can soon become "oh we had to to provide a better level of service..."
Currently, any payment method supported by EA in a particular country will be accepted for subscription payments for Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Goodbye WoW , it was a nice run! While I am suprised TOR is seeling like hotcakes, I'm really not suprised because it is Star Wars. Lets hope for a good launch.
LOL very premature to say goodbye WoW considering SWTOR is only planned for release in North America & Selected European locations. Thus limiting their potential player pool..... and leaving the wow subscribers in those regions largely unaffected I would expect. Presale could have been bigger too if they didnt do this.
There is currently no word on when or even if other regions will get releases of SWTOR. One of the dumbest moves in MMO history IMHO, I guess Bioware & EA just went Full Retard.
Pity WoW also did this but even more restrictively with only launching in the US initially.
I mean look at the absolute failure of WoW over the past 6 years where it made 'how many MILLIONS' for Blizzard? /sarcasm
TBH I couldnt care less what WoW did, I played it for a month or so during the vanilla days and found it extremely bland.
Warhammer online had a global launch & the launch was fine for the most part other than long server queues (stock control anyone ?) but now apparently they cannot manage that anymore..... its a joke really. Yes warhammer failed ultimately but not due to its launch, it failed because once you hit tier 3 the lack of balance and the fact that one class was severley OP became painfully apparent.
For a game like SWTOR where the constant emphasis is on story and avoiding spoiler by limiting Beta testing...... then you go and give some countries your game & story and they somehow wont spoil ti for everyone else ? lol good plan.
Its not so much what they are doing but how they have gone about it, just dropping a bombshell the day of pre-orders with absolutely no word on when any other regions will have access. Oh well.
Bioware and EA, going full retard since July 2011.
Um.......WAR added way too many servers and after a few months that bit them in the ass.
Did you play WAR ? the launch was quite good other than an often 45 minute wait to get into a server in peak times which was the fault of EA for selling too many copies and was remedied within the first 2 weeks by adding more servers.
WAR died off fast at the 2-3 month mark for several reasons but here are the main ones from a WAR veteran.
1) Probably the most important. Class imbalance became a major issue at Tier 3 in PvP. The fact that one faction's warbands were comprised of 70% one class clearly highlighted this was a problem and it took forever to get fixed. The idiot developers were patching in new content & classes and this major problem remained unfixed which just enraged players further.
2) All magic resistance was broken from launch which made problem 1 even worse and it remained broken for far too long, this meant non magiccharacters were at a huge disadvantage & most armour sets were completely usesless. Magic basically didnt miss & no matter how high a level you were there was no way to resist its effects.... again the idiot developers were patching in new content & classes and this major problem remained unfixed which just enraged players further.
3) When people started to quit it made finding PvP zone combat, war parties and instanced combat harder (the later meant waiting in queues a lot longer). This lead to remaining players needing to do more PvE at which time it became painfully apparent the game's PvE offering was rubbish and less players meant it was hard to complete the much vaunted public quests.
4) For those who stuck around and made it to tier 4 we were grossly dissapointed when we finally took all the territories and raided the enemy city. The system was broken, buggy and upon finally getting there totally dissapointing and most of what we were promised was not available.
So there you go, the number of server was not the issue (though they wasted their time providing far too many RP servers...) and it took people time to reach a point in the game that exposed mot of these problems.
4) For those who stuck around and made it to tier 4 we were grossly dissapointed when we finally took all the territories and raided the enemy city. The system was broken, buggy and upon finally getting there totally dissapointing and most of what we were promised was not available.
So there you go, the number of server was not the issue (though they wasted their time providing far too many RP servers...) and it took people time to reach a point in the game that exposed mot of these problems.
Sounds like a polish issue to me. So if an MMO is being released with a good degree of polish and enough varied content, they should be doing better than former MMO's like WAR or AoC.
I think that we can safely say that WoW has proven that to be a prime requirement.
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
TBH I couldnt care less what WoW did, I played it for a month or so during the vanilla days and found it extremely bland.
Warhammer online had a global launch & the launch was fine for the most part other than long server queues (stock control anyone ?) but now apparently they cannot manage that anymore..... its a joke really. Yes warhammer failed ultimately but not due to its launch, it failed because once you hit tier 3 the lack of balance and the fact that one class was severley OP became painfully apparent.
For a game like SWTOR where the constant emphasis is on story and avoiding spoiler by limiting Beta testing...... then you go and give some countries your game & story and they somehow wont spoil ti for everyone else ? lol good plan.
Its not so much what they are doing but how they have gone about it, just dropping a bombshell the day of pre-orders with absolutely no word on when any other regions will have access. Oh well.
Bioware and EA, going full retard since July 2011.
Not sure if this is a serious post or not.
I'm just pointing out the flaw in your post, 'one of the dumbest moves in MMO history IMHO, I guess Bioware & EA just went Full Retard.'
WoW did it and it is doing fine so how is it the 'dumbest moves' again?
That's some bizzaro logic there.
Gdemami - Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
They also mentioned in the call that they have the capacity to handle multiple millions of initial subscribers at launch and they have the ability to quickly add servers to increase capacity.
Yes on the one hand they say that but then on the other they said no release outside of North America and selected European countries in time for launch so they can "guarantee a smooth launch" lol.
Lol Why the hell are people excited about a WoW clone? 200000 preorders? Lol who cares . Let's see what the game offers then we can say if it's good or not. Besides I hear from testers the game lacks in many ways. We will all see for ourselves soon. For all we know EA ripped off a record amount of people.
Run to make your preorder! They gonna run out of digital copies!
I am pretty sure you are being sarcastic, so I will bite. They actually will run out of digital copies eventually, not because of stock, but because of network stability concerns. They will limit the number of pre-orders digitally in the same way they are planning to limit box sales. The difference is that with digital you will probably be placed in a que to download the game a few days or weeks later.(Depending on when you pre-order) and if you order the box they will just send it when they get more stock.
Seriously you believe that crap? EA puts this lie out to encourage gullible people to buy a very over priced pre order.. "if I don't buy TOR now EA won't sell me a copy". Lol and everyone is wondering why America is dying it's because of the people who buy into this type of BS.
Run to make your preorder! They gonna run out of digital copies!
I am pretty sure you are being sarcastic, so I will bite. They actually will run out of digital copies eventually, not because of stock, but because of network stability concerns. They will limit the number of pre-orders digitally in the same way they are planning to limit box sales. The difference is that with digital you will probably be placed in a que to download the game a few days or weeks later.(Depending on when you pre-order) and if you order the box they will just send it when they get more stock.
Seriously you believe that crap? EA puts this lie out to encourage gullible people to buy a very over priced pre order.. "if I don't buy TOR now EA won't sell me a copy". Lol and everyone is wondering why America is dying it's because of the people who buy into this type of BS.
Yes America is dying because of 'over priced CE boxes'. Not surprising coming from guy who says 'i like boobs.'.
Run to make your preorder! They gonna run out of digital copies!
I am pretty sure you are being sarcastic, so I will bite. They actually will run out of digital copies eventually, not because of stock, but because of network stability concerns. They will limit the number of pre-orders digitally in the same way they are planning to limit box sales. The difference is that with digital you will probably be placed in a que to download the game a few days or weeks later.(Depending on when you pre-order) and if you order the box they will just send it when they get more stock.
Seriously you believe that crap? EA puts this lie out to encourage gullible people to buy a very over priced pre order.. "if I don't buy TOR now EA won't sell me a copy". Lol and everyone is wondering why America is dying it's because of the people who buy into this type of BS.
If you've ever played an MMO at launch before, you can see that there is some truth in it. Even Rift, one of the most stable MMOs to come out, if not the most stable MMO, suffered from first day server crashes, long queue times (sometimes hours worth), etc. Limiting the amount of first day traffic and spreading traffic out over a week long period for pre-access is actually a smart idea. It gives people time to spread out instead of having everyone crammed into one area on the first day.
That's not saying none of it is just for hype though. They are a business afterall, so of course they want to make money on a project they've spent over 100mil on. As for overpriced pre-orders they had pre-orders for standard edition as well. Not just that, but you only need to put like 5 dollars down to pre-order(20 for CE). So if later you decide you don't want it, you can cancel it before you even buy it. But at least if you pre-order it it locks in your slot for early access.
Goodbye WoW , it was a nice run! While I am suprised TOR is seeling like hotcakes, I'm really not suprised because it is Star Wars. Lets hope for a good launch.
I hope so..I am so tired of playing WoW.
Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? ~Ernest Gaines
Comments
I think they need some new people working there then.... I dont think anyone who knows anything about the game is suprised that it would sell such massive amounts considering its both Bioware and Star Wars. Not only will it appeal to millions who are familiar with the genre and play MMOs already, but also to millions outside of the genre who will be buying it simply for the fact that its a massive budget Star Wars game, regardless of who the developer is.
Um.......WAR added way too many servers and after a few months that bit them in the ass.
Well it did have quite a few other issues & bugs (anyone else remember sitting there for 3-5 minutes waiting for your mailbox to open after clicking it until like a month after launch when they finally fixed it?), but i agree the amount of servers kind of bit them in the ass because while you had a decent population on each server, a small number of those had the time to outlevel the majority and get into the higher tiers, then when they got there there was nobody else to fight and it appeared extremely boring and dead. Then the QQ ensued, people got bored and left, and it caused a chain reaction since all the people who started making it into those tiers shortly after had less people to fight because they already left the game. And yeah class balance was completely screwed up at first. My god Squig Herder's were terrible at launch. I was so looking forward to playing one, but they were completely useless until they added in some of the bonuses from pets and stuff.
Actually that is not what they said. The actual wording from the community managers response was very loose.
Regarding whether the game will block players from some regions by IP address: currently, there is no plan to block players from the game by regional IP blocking.
........ Either way "no plan to" can soon become "oh we had to to provide a better level of service..."
Currently, any payment method supported by EA in a particular country will be accepted for subscription payments for Star Wars: The Old Republic.
again very loosely worded.
Did you play WAR ? the launch was quite good other than an often 45 minute wait to get into a server in peak times which was the fault of EA for selling too many copies and was remedied within the first 2 weeks by adding more servers.
WAR died off fast at the 2-3 month mark for several reasons but here are the main ones from a WAR veteran.
1) Probably the most important. Class imbalance became a major issue at Tier 3 in PvP. The fact that one faction's warbands were comprised of 70% one class clearly highlighted this was a problem and it took forever to get fixed. The idiot developers were patching in new content & classes and this major problem remained unfixed which just enraged players further.
2) All magic resistance was broken from launch which made problem 1 even worse and it remained broken for far too long, this meant non magiccharacters were at a huge disadvantage & most armour sets were completely usesless. Magic basically didnt miss & no matter how high a level you were there was no way to resist its effects.... again the idiot developers were patching in new content & classes and this major problem remained unfixed which just enraged players further.
3) When people started to quit it made finding PvP zone combat, war parties and instanced combat harder (the later meant waiting in queues a lot longer). This lead to remaining players needing to do more PvE at which time it became painfully apparent the game's PvE offering was rubbish and less players meant it was hard to complete the much vaunted public quests.
4) For those who stuck around and made it to tier 4 we were grossly dissapointed when we finally took all the territories and raided the enemy city. The system was broken, buggy and upon finally getting there totally dissapointing and most of what we were promised was not available.
So there you go, the number of server was not the issue (though they wasted their time providing far too many RP servers...) and it took people time to reach a point in the game that exposed mot of these problems.
Sounds like a polish issue to me. So if an MMO is being released with a good degree of polish and enough varied content, they should be doing better than former MMO's like WAR or AoC.
I think that we can safely say that WoW has proven that to be a prime requirement.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Record sales eh? I hope the game is as good as it's sales or there will be a WHOLE lotta people disappointed, including me!
Proud MMORPG.com member since March 2004! Make PvE GREAT Again!
Pre-order +1 from me.
Not sure if this is a serious post or not.
I'm just pointing out the flaw in your post, 'one of the dumbest moves in MMO history IMHO, I guess Bioware & EA just went Full Retard.'
WoW did it and it is doing fine so how is it the 'dumbest moves' again?
That's some bizzaro logic there.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Let's hope Star Wars WoW is as good as it looks
.
Yes on the one hand they say that but then on the other they said no release outside of North America and selected European countries in time for launch so they can "guarantee a smooth launch" lol.
bars+girls+no condoms= babies
I am pretty sure you are being sarcastic, so I will bite. They actually will run out of digital copies eventually, not because of stock, but because of network stability concerns. They will limit the number of pre-orders digitally in the same way they are planning to limit box sales. The difference is that with digital you will probably be placed in a que to download the game a few days or weeks later.(Depending on when you pre-order) and if you order the box they will just send it when they get more stock.
Seriously you believe that crap? EA puts this lie out to encourage gullible people to buy a very over priced pre order.. "if I don't buy TOR now EA won't sell me a copy". Lol and everyone is wondering why America is dying it's because of the people who buy into this type of BS.bars+girls+no condoms= babies
Yes America is dying because of 'over priced CE boxes'. Not surprising coming from guy who says 'i like boobs.'.
Star Wa WoW? {mod edit}
If you've ever played an MMO at launch before, you can see that there is some truth in it. Even Rift, one of the most stable MMOs to come out, if not the most stable MMO, suffered from first day server crashes, long queue times (sometimes hours worth), etc. Limiting the amount of first day traffic and spreading traffic out over a week long period for pre-access is actually a smart idea. It gives people time to spread out instead of having everyone crammed into one area on the first day.
That's not saying none of it is just for hype though. They are a business afterall, so of course they want to make money on a project they've spent over 100mil on. As for overpriced pre-orders they had pre-orders for standard edition as well. Not just that, but you only need to put like 5 dollars down to pre-order(20 for CE). So if later you decide you don't want it, you can cancel it before you even buy it. But at least if you pre-order it it locks in your slot for early access.
I hope so..I am so tired of playing WoW.
Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? ~Ernest Gaines