Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
swtor beyond saving...
JudgeUK
Member RarePosts: 1,701
..unless the entire swtor management team gets replaced.
The average-joe developer does what he/she is told to do. It's the management approach that needs changing.
Having re-visited the game to see what the state of play is like I come away just as frustrated as before.
- Not so much at the content availability (which has always been the nail getting hammered into the coffin), but the response to players concerns by the EA team.
Their only action now seems to be the removal of posts that don't give them a glowing thumbs up for the game. They re-open the Q&A forum after it mysteriously disappeared, then proceeed to wipe out player questions that might be a little bit awkward for them to reply to. I've been watching their forum and posts are there, then just get removed.
Talk about head in the sand, fingers in the ears and whistling a happy tune - nothing wrong here guys.
End content can be added, events can be added, new storylines can be added - but only if the EA management team has the will and the wit.
This is just not there at present, consequently their mmo still feels like a depressed titanic colliding from one iceberg to the next.
Comments
For the sake of being fair to the reader, I could care less for SWTOR and borderline hate EA. Having said that, I have many friends who enjoy playing SWTOR, for their sake, I hope SWTOR can be saved so they can continue to enjoy playing their game; however much I may dislike it.
Also, I would never wish anyone to lose their job, unless they deserve it obviously; developing a poorly made game I believe is not worth firing hard working devs who were just doing what they were told by their bosses. Having said that, I think SWTOR and EA management need some serious restructuring (seems like they're starting to do that) and to do some major gaming direction rethinking.
I personally don't think SWTOR can be saved and though I will never play it again, I do somewhat hope that it can be saved for those who do enjoy playing it.
What a lot of people cannot seem to understand is that the entire design, from top to bottom, is broken. There is nothing that will "save" this game except a total rewrite.
A singleplayer game cannot sustain a subscription. Devs cannot churn out meaningful story fast enough to keep people playing. It simply doesn't work.
The game is done. Making it FTP, and breaking it into micropayment storylines is the only viable future because its really not an MMO.
i posted that all 5 weeks ago and got laughed at
nice more people finally see that the whole lead staff needs replaced...... but i think its almost to late to do that
Yup. The #2 subscription-based MMO in the world, which has not even launched in Asia... is beyond saving. It makes sense.
Error: 37. Signature not found. Please connect to my server for signature access.
only #2 because Lineage and Aion both went free to play...
Both of which had far more subs than TOR before they went F2P
I agree with this completely. If they take the Turbine/LOTRO route and sell the adventure packs, they stand to still beable to make a lot of money. I'd even return and PAY MONEY to complete the various story lines. But not if the prices are stupid expensive.
True, but when the OP says that the game is beyond saying, it's still a strange assertion.
OH wait... I think he meant to say that SWTOR was beyond being turned into SWG2. In the minds of many at MMORPG.com, that is the only possible way to save SWTOR. I laugh that that notion though, mostly because I hated SWG.
Error: 37. Signature not found. Please connect to my server for signature access.
This
Did not Realize TOR needed Saving? Dose the OP have inside info?
Many points have been brought up about the game being screwed up from the very core, to which I'd agree.
But I could over look those aspects if the game just had a decent engine running it. Regardless of any 5% improvements they did each major patch since launch, I need to see a 500% increase to put this game on par with other MMORPG's, many of which are F2P and still play better.
Illum is broken and will never EVER be fixed, because the game engine that runs this garbage only does a couple frames per second with a 20 versus 20 fight. Pretty shitty, when WoW did AV in 2005, 40 VS 40 .. and modern games do 100+ vs 100+ without sweating.
SWTOR? 8 vs 8 is pretty much the max, it's been tweaked in their shitty engine. go 10 vs 10, and watch performance tumble.
This game with EA's shitty rendition of the Hero engine is awful. Without a shutdown and a rework of the basics, the game will never recover.
--
Bonus Question, without looking back, how many times did I refer to SWTOR as shitty?
Want a nice understanding of life? Try Spirit Science: "The Human History"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
Didn't it launch in Asia wayyyyy back in March? They have 2 servers right? Am I missing something here?
Lets see current sub numbers to back up that #2 sub based MMO in the world thing. I wouldn't at all be surprised if those other WOW clones are doing better in numbers now and don't leave EVE out.
Ouch! Micropayment storylines is the kind of thing that would make an EA exec's ears prick up - but which would totally turn off players. There is not much a game even with the storylines - to have to pay for the story would make a F2P model useless.
I don't judge a game by it's forum policies. In fact, I would prefer a game to have active moderation of it's official forums. I want the forums to be a place (resource) where I can come to get information about the game, about classes, pvp, quests, etc.
If there are problems with the game, there should be a section for technical issues, support, suggestions, etc. If the suggestions are constructive and useful (meaning do-able with the game's basic design), then I don't think mods would remove them.
Complaining about a product should be done through customer support, maybe by opening a ticket.
Having said all of that, there is nothing wrong with criticizing a game, loving a game, hating a game. I like to read it all as long as it's written by a reasonably intelligent, literate and articulate person. That's why there are websites like mmorpg.com. That's why I don't criticize people for posting anything here. This is the kind of place where hobbyists (and some trolls) gather to do what we do here. This is not an official forum. It's where things can be vented and where people who want to research a game might come to hear of others' experiences with those games and maybe to follow debates or heated discussions about games.
So, yeah, I don't care if they censor their "official" forums. SWTOR may have some problems. I'm not privy to their numbers and I don't play the game. But I don't think their official forums is one of the problems with the health or longevity of that game.
They don't have to answer player questions, if they don't want to. If you have a job, you know how long it can take to deal with your email, sometimes. Then on top of that you have the other parts of your job. Then can you imagine going to the forums and answering a bunch of questions in a thoughtful way that no matter how thoughtfullly you answer them will be parsed to the most micro degree and still misread and misunderstood and used as writ? No. I wouldn't want to do that.
Sigh... Sort of a technically-empty bravdo that fails to acknowledge that any 'current sub base' is a wasting asset and must be replenished by new/returning players. Especially in light of the 1.7 million subs mis-reported as "1.7 million for January" then "1.7 million subs for February" then "1.7 subs for March" bravado and the consequent spamming of the incorrect subscription numbers by fanboys who had not even the slightest clue to why that constantly recycled number was wrong... I mean, seriously, it was wrong and I explained why it was wrong until I was blue in the face. And come April, we got the March 31st number and, boom, there we had it 1.4 million left of the 2.3 million who had bought the game (and a round of the biggest, lamest rationalizations I have ever seen in a fanboy community as to why the bravado was not wrong...).
So, despite another 600K sales in the first quarter of the year, net subs dropped 300K. That is an indisputable fact that slammed the historical "it's doing great/the game is growing" bravado into the ground. And after that failure, I thought people would have learned the lesson of Bravado vs Facts a long time ago. So, let's get back to FACTS. The two biggest problems with SWTOR's future are two-fold and have to do with the technical business side of the equation not the development side of the game.
First, is that they have shown, for quite some time, that they have been losing players faster than they can attract them. They've blown their big marketing budget. They lost 900K of their first 2.3 million customers during the 70 'unsub' days of 1Q2012. They haven't charted sales in months now which means they're pulling in less than 28K new players a month. You can't sustain a large population in an MMO on 28k, or fewer, new players a month. Just ask the people at WoW which has lost 2 million players in the past two years with those kind of sales. (Remembering that WoW is also a much better MMO when it comes to depth and breadth of content.)
That's a problem. If you can't sell your game faster than players quit, it must contract. And businesses don't like to operate at a loss in significant business units, they will take cost-control measures. Therefore, with contractions you get layoffs (currently happening) and server mergers (they're at the voluntary transfer stage). Layoffs means smaller staffs; smaller staffs mean shallower/fewer content pushes. Which gets us to the second point.
Second comes from the layoffs and difficulties in new content. Right now their (BioWare's) best bet is to re-aquire ex-players and re-energize current players (which is how WoW works now, come MOP, you'll see a huge sub increase as people come back, then the game will start shedding players again, like it has with the past two expansions about 6-months to a year down the road). With the huge layoffs they can't keep up with the demands for new content. With the constant failure to deliver any meaningful new material, the die-hards will eventually burn through the entire game and will be left with nothing which means that they'll slow down then quit.
And if you think is bs... Look at all the vocal fanboys that no longer post in this forum. The ones that have slunk away after declaring their undying loyalty in December and January. You know where many of them are now? GW2 forums declaring their undying loyalty and talking crap about SWTOR...
Yeah. I've always thought the 'it has too many subs to go f2p' argument was incredibly strange and illinformed. Aion had 2.5 million subs when it went F2P. Lineage and Lineage II had, between them, close to 2 million subs when they went F2P. Runescape had over a million.
What's weirder, is that even in sub-based Asian MMOs, it's like they don't count. That Aion peaked at 4 million subs and grew faster and larger than SWTOR doesn't ever count. You get these SWTOR fanboys making/repeating all kinds of BS claims because the western gaming press ignores what goes on everywhere but the US and Europe.
For the record, Lineage II (2.2 million subs peak), Lineage (3 million subs peak), Aion (4 million subs peak) were larger as SUBSCRIPTON BASED games than SWTOR at peak. SWTOR isn't nearly as special, in size, as the fanboys like to claim.
It had a very respectable ramp-up... But it's not like it was the #2 MMO in MMO history.
Why do ppl think that TOR needs saving? Trust me it will be around for a very long time to come.
they have more than 2 servers......
4 or 6 if i remember all of them standard to heavy
You going to change this up any, or just post same thing in every TOR thread? Seems interesting to me that you post this so often because of the myriad negative threads. Doesn't that tell you something?
I will cede that the game will be around for a very long time, and I guess you will be one of the ones playing it at that time, but man to me that game is like a super slap in the face perpetuated by people who hate MMOs. It's hard to think of any other explanation for a game as anti-exploration/grouping/rp/etc. as that one.
Add to this their inability to actually add to the game at a decent pace....
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
OK I'll make you a deal if BIO goes bankrupt because of TOR then I will stop saying that TOR will be around for a long time to come. Deal?
lol. ok but I don't care if Bioware goes bankrupt or makes millions. Doesn't affect me either way. Let me just end by saying that you are right about server shut down.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
Ever since EA took Bioware into their hands, Bioware has been going downhill, that particular article by EA Louse floating around these forums hit the nail on the head (and that article is from 2010), couldn't be much scarier than that. And with TSW out, I wouldn't be surprised if EA drives Funcon into the ground, just like they're doing with DICE now.
Of course it will be around for a long time to come...
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes has been around for years now with less than a skeleton player base. Bandwidth and server maintenance are cheap, just reduce the staff for a game to a bunch of guys and even 500 subs are profitable. Let alone free to play, which yields even more revenue by selling a variety of "stuff" (hats, armor, dresses, mounts...)...
Nowadays, there are tons and tons of low quality, near-dead, ripoff games just floating about. Some douche WILL play it for sure.
So the question you really wanna ask is: As a grown-up, experienced and demanding gamer, do you want to keep playing THIS title or is it best to just switch teams...
The answer for SWTOR should be fairly easy...
M
Tor will be like swg, it will linger in obscurity, with a steady base of players. However for most of us we have moved onto other games.
For me it is not worth going back having paid for a 6 month sub and only playing 3 months of the 6 months I had. It was not worth playing.
I can only hope that ea/bioware cans the game and somebody will do the ip justice, but the fact remains it will probably be like warhamer, swg and other games with a small fan base supporting it.
Meanwhile I find there are better things to play, I think it is time that a lot of folks learn to let go and get over the burnt feeling we have in our mouth and realize that there is nothing that ea can do that would make this game work for those of us who had higher expectations.
http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/star-wars-the-old-republic-fake-trailer
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
The problem with this is the same problem that was with SWG. It was estimated, at the time SOE announced the closure, that SWG subs were somewhere around the 30K mark, SOE had announced that the sub count was actualy going up, and they still shut it down. It is the same exact SOE that you state as having Vanguard up and running with that skeleton crew that shut SWG down.
It was that reported 1 mil per/year that had to go to LA. Even tho BioWare seemed a bit smarter and negoiated a 35% to LA, there still is a large cut off the top to LA that these other limping along games just do not have to pay.
However, it was the LA/SOE contract completion date that had to get close to shut SWG down (altho they did shut SWG down a little before the exact date) and I would imagine that whatever completion date is included will be just as important in the shut down of TOR as well. So, I would believe the people that want this type of game still have a few years, anyway.