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Will SWTOR ever recover?
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You have to remember, there is a core constituency here that isn't happy with simply "voting with their wallet." Everyone else has to agree with them or else they are a fanboy. Happens with every MMO. WOW has had posters predicting its doom for years and yet it is still here.
Back to the OP, the population will never go back to where it was at release. That group has already moved on to the next big thing.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
I wanted this game to work. I missed out on SWG, and since I am a big Star Wars/KOTOR/MMO fan I was really excited to play the game.
That said, it just missed the boat on so many different levels. They released a game that looked like it came out in 2006 that was missing features that were core to the genre since its inception.
I stuck around till 1.3 or 1.4, I don't really remember, but I quit because it became apparent that not only were they incapable of fixing some things (the engine, ability delay, actually getting chat bubbles to work, day/night cycles) but that the remaining community fanboi'd so hard that it wasn't worth the fight. You know, the kind telling you "Server population is fine" when there was 25 people on fleet, or telling you that whatever you wanted in game (no matter how quality the idea was) was stupid and if you wanted that to go play another game that had that feature.
Most of the people wanting to see positive change just got so bogged down by the "Its fine" crowd that they left. Asking for anything got you labeled as entitled.
There is to this day a specific poster that just belittles anyone who is trying to get anything changed for the positive. She just drones on and on and on.
It would be better for Star Wars and the MMO industry if the game just tanked so hard that it had to be shut down, so it would/can serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when you try to release a game with a terrible engine, outdated mechanics and missing features regardless of the IP.
nah,,theyll just keep it in maintenance mode,,just like warhammer online
and now, that they have the rights to all star wars games, expect more of this quality
this is like rolls royce in the 90s,,just an expensive name
Agreed.Some people really do take this whole "gaming" thing way to seriously.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
3945 posts,,look whos talking
heh,,she has convinced her crowd, to believe, that subscription mmos are dead
when this game only 2 players left,,all the others will still be the "loud minority"
seeing, what she has done to this game , and the community,,she might be a viral marketer from the compettion
Frankly this^^^ As long as I remember the differences between TOR & SWG I will not step back into TOR. I was a full time beta tester for TOR dureing the closed beta (not a weekender) I popped in from time to time to help a group of friends to start a guild but left for good. SWG didnt require top end grapics, gave you whole planets to explore, harvest, and have fun on not like the halls that exsist in TOR. SWG let me be the pilot in space with TOR you dont get that pilot feeling because your a bird on a wire. The worst part of this situation is the idiots at Disney inked a long-term contract with EA to develope star wars games. I personaly would have gone with Sony because all EAsy will do is ruin the franchise. Anybody play warhammer online anymore? Remember Earth & Beyond? EA should stick to battlefield and the sims and leave the MMO's alone.
Yep. The subscription model is only dead because no company has released a quality game with a strong IP in a long time.
Regardless, she has to be getting paid.
Without further backtapping, this.
Well it did have a chance for a second life (or possibly half-life), with the change to ftp.
But, as sure as the sun comes up, you just knew they would somehow not get it right.
I mean, restricted to one quickbar? (I know it has subsequently been increased after the mass of complaints), but even to launch ftp with this type of game penalizing restriction shows incredible naivety.
Then we get onto the idea of penalizing ftp xp. This, above everything, shows they simply have not grasped the ftp idea at all.
Their whole ftp ethos is based on trying to get people to sub. Every quest reward throws it in your face that you are being penalized for not subbing. EA - the sub model didn't work first time, in fact it failed utterly.
A good ftp model can do wonders for a game, there are good examples out there. I'll quote Rift as one. But EA, you are rapidly running out of time with yours.
The problem is that I cannot see effective change happening due to the entrenched mindset that appears to be in place.
A ftp model should actually encourage players to the game and retain their ftp status. (There will always be people who continue to sub, these guys are the loyal core - you need to look after them with good expansions and with extra benefits).
But you should also have a ftp model that works by itself and retains people over time. Not as an everything for free basis - that would guarantee a shelf life of a month or so. Instant gratification doesn't work long term.
So you would like income from these players - make cash shop items desirable, not as solutions to enforced game impacting penalties, but as wanted items in their own right.
But there is one thing EA about ftp players which you have just not comprehended - the mmo sector is currently filled with high profile ftp games. If yours is seen as unduly restrictive, it takes only the download time for players to move to one which they see as fairer - and once again you have lost potential income from this game.
A Story Driven MMO will never be a succesful MMO, I really hope this is the last one (although I fear ESO will be next)
No kidding, I almost broke my Space Bar of my new keyboard due to the amount of time I had to skip boring Cinematic dialogues.............
Also they understimated the importance of Space Combat in the game.
They lost the chance of making Space Combat something unique, which alone could have saved this game (they are still in time).
But instead they chose to keep it as if it was an ancient 1980's Atari Shoot'em Up..................
it will recover just fine and it will do it without the following:
SWG nostalgia = this isn't SWG and it isn't meant to be. People looking to reproduce SWG should have learned how to do some research first and they would have seen that it wasn't going to a direct successor.
f2p haters = f2p is the newest form of game "accessibility" and that gets more people into the game than before. while it may not directly increase subs, it does increase revenue and it is good for any game.
EA haters = Every company has had problems, but it is not evident in all games produced by a publisher. Some games are great even when produced by EA.
Storyline haters = Remember this is a mmoRPG and the story driven elements are there to reproduce the standard GM. You know the guy/girl who sat behind the screen rolling hidden dice and describing the NPC actions. Many people LOVE the storyline and are there for just that. I'm sorry that some of you hated it, in which case the game wasn't for you
All in all NOT every game is for everyone. if the game is a failure in your eyes because of one or more aspects then great, you hate the game, shove off and let those who like it enjoy it. Just because I do not like Hot Dogs does not mean that You shouldn't eat them. It doesn't mean that Oscar Meyer should stop producing them because the salt content does not sit right with many people. In addition I'm not going around to the various forums and proclaim how horrible you are because you like Hot Dogs.
SWTOR is going to get along just fine, hate just doesn't win these days.--> http://www.swtor.com/r/nBndbs <--
Several Unlocks and a few days game time to make the F2P considerably easier
Then doesn't it stand to reason that if you are skipping over the main selling point in the game it never was for you?
SWToR's biggest problem (aside from very little to do "end game" except roll another character) was that too many people played it who wanted something else.
They then complained that the game that advertised itself as one thing wasn't the thing it never advertised itself to be.
Once again, players fault.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
An interesting viewpoint, and I agree that some players will have expected one thing and got another. Personally I loved the story lines. Bought the collectors edition at original launch and leveled an Inq. At the time there wasn't much going on end game so it fizzled out for me.
Whilst there would have been a percentage of players who left due to incorrect assumptions about the game, I'm sure this wasn't the only reason.
A previous post assures that the game will be fine. I'm not a hater, in fact I want this to turn around and succeed. My recent post is about relaxing some of the ftp restrictions to attract more people. So in answer to that post - I hope so, I hope EA will change some things and grow the population.
But my recent return has only experienced sparsely populated zones, long waits for Heroics - (I'm currently leveling an operative healer).
At the risk of repeating myself - I suggest they need to adjust the ftp model, (particularly some progression penalizing features), which doesn't fare well compared to their competition. At the moment this appears be solely aimed at getting people to sub, rather than having a standalone ftp model that players can stick with. imho anyway
Why is it player fault?
So nobody play the game and it is player fault? Or maybe it is the developer that didn't meet player expectation.
I don't understand your logic............if a product don't sell that means that it isn't good enough, nothing to do with the customer.
Talking about what I expected from SWTOR, I expected KOTOR Online, not a real MMO, so my expectations weren't so high.
Of course I was expecting to find a beefy story Driven gameplay, but I thought it was on par with KOTOR.
The problem was that not only SWTOR didn't feel like a MMO (as expected) but the Storytelling wasn't as good as predicted.
That's why SWTOR is such a disappointment no matter which way you look at it.
1. The amount of people with SWG nostalgia is grossly overestimated. That game had barely any subs when they game went down and there are multiple EMU's up for them to play. Claiming SWTOR did poorly, or is continuing to do poorly because a small subset of people disliked it (a claim that you have no evidence to back up, btw) is misleading and false.
2. F2P sucks, but the reason why people are complaining about this F2P model is because it is one of the worst around. TERA, RIFT, Planetside2 and several other games that are F2P are far more friendly to non-subscribers. It leaves a bad first impression. F2P's are potential customers, and SWTOR treats them like garbage. (not that they treat the subs much better, but regardless) Further, most of the content they have been releasing was datamined back in Feb of 2012. All that they are doing is slowly releasing pregenerated content while spending the lions share of development time reskinning armor for the CM.
3. EA hate is such a copout. "People hate this game because EA is behind it!" Meanwhile, Madden and other EA titles fly off the shelves. Fact of the matter is, if a game is good people don't care who produces it, they still buy it. 2.4 million people bought this game at launch. Did they decide they suddenly hated EA after the fact? I doubt it.
4. "Storyline Haters" yea, no. People didn't hate the storylines, people hated how you had to repeat 90% of the voiceover content per side to see them. Sorry, I'm not going to trudge through the same planetary quests over and over just to see the class specific quests.
At some point, you and the rest of the people left playing the game need to accept that the game did poorly because at its best, its a rushed, buggy, mediocre co-op game on a crap engine that lacks many fundamental MMO features. You can make excuses all day long, but that doesn't change the fact that the game has one of the best IP's and a huge budget yet tanked so hard that within 6 months of release they lost over 75% of their userbase.
Per their statement, they totally underestimated how fast the customers would devour their content. Given the amount of money spent on voice-overs and cut-scenes, they couldn't make enough content and had to skimp on important stuff like game engine performance. Once you went through the content (didn't take long), you realized that it was sorely lacking in long-term fun. By comparison, look at games like EvE or DAOC that focused a lot of their efforts on end-game action rather than the quests. Those game are/were huge successes relative to their budgets. SWTOR is probably the biggest financial failure ever in MMO gaming because it spent money on things customers didn't want.
So, it's the customer's fault that they didn't like watching cut scenes? Maybe customers knew cut-scenes and story were a major part of the game, but surely they expected other things as well like open-world PvP, a group finder, a space game more than just an arcade version and a game engine that wouldn't crap out at more than 15-20 people on the screen. Seems to me that when a game spends $250 million to create a well known IP such as Star Wars, a few more things should be expected.
The good news is that it took a massive financial failure like SWTOR to have developers re-think what customers wanted. SWTOR will be the last high profile MMO game that devotes most of its resources to a story. Story based RPG games will continue in a single-player mode game, but never again in an MMO.
i dont think more endgame content would have helped that much,,most casuals dont do that stuff
more levelling paths , on the other hand, would have made the actual GAME feel less grindy
but . i guess , its also more expensive , than end game content
I would love to see open world space like in SWG.
If SWTOR ever put in space in their game I think you would see a lot of people come back. But with Star Citizen around the corner and they will have space combat covered. I think SWTOR having space is over.
So no I don't think SWTOR will com back. I think they will hover around the same amount of players for a long time. The people playing SWTOR are all star wars fans. They will not leave to a new game.
Loading screens, why no one mentions LOADING SCREENS!
They take from 30 seconds to 2 minutes from your life everytime the game loads the world. And when you alt+tab? Loading screen for 15-20 seconds. And this is on i7-4770K Haswell with RAID0 SSD in SATAIII, it was worse on i7-860 legacy HD SATAII and I don't even want to know what it is on inferior systems.
I did install the game yesterday, just to see if it had gotten any better. It had, it didn't lag like it used to. But it loaded, it wasn't loaded but it loaded. What does it load anyway?