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Can SWTOR be saved?
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You can want EA to fail, TOR to fail epically all you want but wishing the children of EA to starve to death says more about you that it does about EA.
There has been a lot of good ideas in this thread, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't. It's not often that I read 90%+ of the posts in a long thread like this.
I could repeat much of what was written here, but instead, I'll just focus on what the primary issue was for me: Game play.
The story was nice, and at one point I even said that I didn't think that I could go back to the basic pop-up dialogue box structure of MMOs. I meant that at the time, and I do still kind of miss the voice acting; there were some shining moments in the side quests.
The problem for me was that actually playing the game was an incredibly boring experience. Calling SWTOR's design a "dereitive work" is akin to saying that space is "kind of big". The story aspects held me long enough to get my character to level 47, and at sometime around that point I simply lost any desire to sign back into the game.
These days I play Tera, and yes, I skip the vast majority of dialogue boxes. Sometime I read them, though, and find the occasional chuckle. The point is that while everything else about Tera is incredibly dereitive of past MMOs, at least actually playing the game is fun. For now. We'll see about the future when it gets here.
If anything were to "save" SWTOR, it would be... in my opinion:
1: Make combat interesting. How and why was this not done from the beginning? It's the majority of the game. Removing auto attack while changing nothing else about MMO combat doesn't make it more interesting, it makes it more spammy.
2: Ditch the immense amount of instancing. This is supposed to be an MMO. As someone else said, turn them into public quests since they're shared by everyone anyway.
The server populations wouldn't have evaporated if the game had been fun enough to keep the population in the first place. That's pretty much what it boils down to. For me, anyway.
I'm going to come your way a bit and admit that a load of money came their way at launch and the sub income is still currently hefty. The trend is not rosy, however, and if you compare it to big brother, SWTOR is small potatoes.
They don't have to do anything at WoW to steal SWTOR players, they already did it when they made and updated the game. The analogy was about competition, and it's obvious who won.
I also think you have a point with FTP reducing expectations.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
And you're basing this upon what, exactly?
"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.
100-150million %$&!? holy xit the game its a pure piece of crap , and after some minutes on beta i quit for good
http://www.starwarsmmolevelingguide.com/swtor-a-300-million-failure/
i don't know jack..but i know his sister
The only way to save SWTOR is if you can make every "different" game fail and then MMORPG-players realize that SWTOR is as good as anything is ever going to get and start accepting it instead of dreaming of other things.
haha.. good one.. he was right in many ways.. hey im a fan of SWs in general and i was dissapointed like many but i also think the game can rebound..its still a very young game tbh.. one of my issues is that the game tried to compete with wow instead of catering to the people who were gonna play THEIR game..but there is always hope.. i say they start with getting rid of all fees to play base game then merge servers. thats a start to a long list..
"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.
I hope EALouse comes out of hiding and finally reveals himself. That would be amazing.
Math. TOR sold more boxes in it's first couple of months than SWG sold over the entire lifetime of the product. Current subscribers could drop by another million and still be higher than the number of concurrent subscribers SWG had over most of the product's lifetime.
If our standard of success is WoW, then all MMOs not named WoW are automatic failures. Especially if we use the ridiculously inaccurate numbers from Blizzard, which treat Asian players as equal to western players, despite the fundamentally different pay structure. But in terms of subscription MMOs, when discussing amount of total revenue divided by time in operation, TOR may be only in second place, but it is so far ahead of whichever game is in third that they might as well be running in different races. (Just as, to be fair, TOR and WoW are clearly not in the same race.)
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.
If you have the net, I have the snorkel to find his barrel.
I agree with this. People dont seem to get your last point.. TOR is only a "fail" because it didnt reach what it thought it would (wow numbers) .. but even still.. no other game other than WOW is even close when it comes to numbers..its impossible to measure a games sucess by looking at blizzard.. that was a once in a lifetime thing.. its like always comparing every new player that joins the NBA to Jordan.. its just not fair.
"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.
no, the game cannot be saved. Again, bioware developed what they wanted. Story driven mmo by them. MMO's should be story driven by the players. THey could never keep up with the content and they have no clue wtf they're doing.
The mods are now banning accounts that post negative threads. Hence, the decrease in the same topics over and over. The community managers at tor are treating paying customers like garbage and that alone is why i'll never resub. People want swg features because , as bad as swg was, it's better than tor. The game is a lvl to 50 then either re-roll an alt or quit game.
The damage control is getting out of hand, people are leaving the game in ridiculous numbers, if it survives another 3 months i'll be suprised. Expect an announcement soon, from bioware. They should have postponed the game when everyone in beta was screaming in the cbt forums about the bugs , ui, lfg, shards, world sizes.
Don't be so dramatic. Despite it's problems, we need to remember that it is still the second most successful subscription MMO ever released in the American/European markets. That isn't an opinion. That isn't spin. It's just a fact. It has to fall a *lot* farther than it already has before there would be even a chance for that to stop being true. And take off the rose-colored glasses RE: SWG. Which game is better is a matter of opinion, but which was a greater financial success is not. SWG was a commercial flop. TOR has been highly profitable.
The funny thing is, it isn't even a matter of TOR failing to reach the level BioWare thought it should; the only hard number we ever heard from them was that they only needed 500k subscribers to be profitable. They still have 2.5 times that amount. It was a matter of TOR failing to reach the level overly enthusiastic MMO junkies desperate for a "WoW killer" thought that it should.
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.
Do you honestly believe the words that are coming out of your keyboard? It stopped being the 2nd biggest ever anything after the 1st month. Do you honestly believe that 1.3 million subs? None of that number counted the free time?
Mind if I remind you of this post when EA has to release their next report? They are running out of ways to give the game away you know.
We have no actual data that would allow us to conclude the 1.3 million number is false. We have no idea how many of the current subs are six months which simply haven't ended yet, and won't be renewed. But the 1.3 number is the only solid one we currently have. Anything else is just speculation until they release another number. And we have no reason to believe it has stopped being the second biggest anything. Until some other subscription based MMO outsells it, it still has the second highest box sales. As far as current subs go, what other sub based non-WoW MMO has anywhere close to what BioWare claims they still have? You may not like it, but measured against any sub based game that isn't named WoW, TOR is still successful. How long that will remain true is anybody's guess, but as of the last numbers any of us have access to, it was undeniably true.
As far as my personal experience in game goes, are there fewer people online on the servers I play than there were at launch? Certainly. Are there any less now than there were a month after launch? Don't seem to be when I am playing. Most of the dropoff that I noticed happened immediately after the end of the month included with the box. It really doesn't seem, at least on my servers, like many people who actually subscribed to the game have stopped playing.
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.
That's certainly interesting to see at this point.
They better get their act together then, huh?
Ok but if we are doing that, then SWG needs to be out of the equation as well. Fair is fair.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
General Discussion » Can SWTOR be saved?
No
I only bring up SWG in response to ridiculous claims like TOR not being a sandbox being some kind of major flaw, as if sandbox + Star Wars is some kind of magical, guaranteed formula for success. SWG (pre-CU) was quite possibly the best sandbox game ever made. And it still wasn't successful, because the size of the audience willing to pay a subscription for a style of game where the players provide most of the content just isn't that big. If people are going to be shelling out on a monthly basis, they want to be provided content for their money, not basically told to make it themselves. While I now think subscriptions are bad for any game, even back when I thought they were a good idea I could still see that the combination of sub + sandbox was inherently idiotic.
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.
Both themepark and sandbox concepts are failed ones. At least when big numbers are involved.
Devs will have to go back to drawing board and think hard of how to provide just enough content theselves and still leave enough freedom for players to have "their own thing".
At least when big numbers are involved.
For a niche AAA game, be it themepark or sandbox, there is still enough audience to warrant them, but not 200m worth. Good sandbox could easily reach 500k (just look at EvE).
And also, sub model is showing its age, quite a few games prooved that freemium will generally yield better results than sub one. But i guess companies want to "keep" that for "second launch" when game fails with sub model.
Its like pattern: release unfinished, bugged game -> get box+sub money from suckers -> go freemium when you fix the game.
Trouble is that it's not a single-player game. Also, the subscription fee is not a "flaw" at all. The good MMOs have sub fees. The "flaw" is the game itself...
It can't be saved.
And it shouldn't be saved.
Good SPRPG, Bad MMORPG.