f13.net

Press Release (http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/726499/star-wars-the-old-republic-will-be-free-to-play-this-fall/)

So what we all thought would happen is going to happen. SWTOR goes F2P. Color me shocked.

Still don't care to play it.

Also a press release on the main site (http://www.swtor.com/info/news/press-release/20120731).

Honestly, I really did hope that this would be the game take me away from WoW, but they tripped up royally on everything that we've previously discussed.  F2P was the next logical step, but I didn't think it would happen this quick.

It certainly defied all expectations.

My guess is they release this F2P thing either right before or right after the end of September, depending on how they want to attack MoP.

Just another shitty unoriginal AAA mmo being tossed into the F2P chum bucket. When will they learn?

Ugh, that "January 2013 predictions" (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=21729.0) thread is almost tragic to read now.  "They won't hurt us, they love us!  Really!"

I wonder how WAR keeps dodging this bullet, though.

According to the earnings call 40% of the people that unsubbed said they would come back if it was f2p.  I bet that was the big driving force for this. 

Me personally, I don't care.  If they keep pushing out content I'll still play and stay subbed.  Between this and MWO I'll be good MMO wise.

F2P isn't really a bullet WAR should be dodging. F2P, like it or not, seems to bring in a crapton of money for flagging games, WAR should be dying to go F2P. Just another way they're doing it wrong, I guess.  :why_so_serious:

I didn't think there was a chance in hell this would go F2P in a year. The numbers just didn't support it, and I think they still don't. However, I think they are out of ideas and they are willing to take one last shot at this thing before they turn out the lights. If they don't see some action on the F2P thing by Q1 of 2013, I think they'll stop supporting the game.

"Since launch we have been adding new content and refining The Old Republic at a breakneck pace "

Yall that content has been mind blowing  :facepalm:

I think they recognize that the game has the potential to do much better as a F2P game based on what they built. It's the model the game should have launched with. Delaying F2P to try to make the sub model work would only cost them more subscribers and momentum.

Ultimately this is good news for EA/Bioware and gamers alike. Eagerly looking forward to the conversion.

They are still over their 500k sub goal and going to f2p is definitely a better way to go now then wait.  Turbine managed to salvage and bring back DDO from the dead with F2P and LOTRO is still going strong after the switch. 

Wonder if they are smart enough to adopt the Turbine model where your main quest is f2p but you need to buy quest packs for the planets. That would do them well if they make a long, grindy way to earn points to spend in the store.

They are adding F2P as an option. Subscriptions will still exist, so it's going to be a hybrid model like how City of Heroes works right now.

Last population count by that Serpentine guy, who puts a lot of effort into it, was in the 200-300k range. Though merging the servers did a lot to recover some population and drastically slow the bleed. Which is why they should have done that ASAP when the decline was staring them in the face.

f2p won't change the fact that the core game design fault of using expensive levelling content with limited replay value as their main investment was not sustainable. The idea that f2p is going to make that model more viable and they'll have regular and substantive content additions is laughable. Still, I don't think they have any other option.

Earnings call says they are over 500k but under 1 mil. 

The pure subscription model (plus box cost!) is pretty much dead moving forward. WoW is the exception for historical reasons and even that has a cash shop of sorts.

SWOR didn't go F2P because of gameplay, it went F2P because it was too expensive, players don't hang around for as long in MMOs as they used to (especially when you can jump to a F2P title for a similar experience) and BioWare spent too long drinking their own Kool-Aid. I firmly believe that SWOR could have been an excellent game, polished in most areas and it would still be in this position.

Instead, it was 'merely' a good game that lacked in a few areas. But it cost too much to get there.

Secret footage from SWTOR offices after announcement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwwMzuiSEH0

Rapid deceleration can break necks.

 :rimshot:

Anyway 500k was never the goal, they told investors that if they only got 500k it would have been a bad investment. And that's 500k a year for FIVE TO TEN years.

I disagree. They invested most of their resources into non-repeatable leveling content that had a definitive ending. Where was the incentive to keep subscribing when the best part of the game and the only thing that set it apart from other MMOs was over?


According to this (http://www.swtor.com/free/features) they are giving away the leveling content and class stories for free. That surprises me because this could have been the center of a very profitable/sustainable model for them. Give away the 1-50 non-class leveling content for free, give away the Act 1 class story content for free, ask people to pay $10 to permanently unlock Act 2 and another $10 for Act 3 for that class. Throw in some cosmetic armor and title and you have a pretty compelling package that actually feels worthwhile.

It would be more sustainable than the sub model because even diehard players that blow through every class story in a month will have shelled out $160 for it rather than the $20-$60 they'd have paid with the subscription model. That's assuming that the diehard player doesn't shell out for anything else either like convenience items, mounts, pets, etc. Under that model I could see myself spending ~$10 a month and feeling completely comfortable doing so.

I am unsure how SWTOR's F2P model will do based on what they've outlined so far, but chances are likely that future updates to the game will be larger and more frequent if the potential audience of paying customers is substantially larger than it was with the sub model. That they have most likely been working on the F2P conversion for a few months based on the Fall release date also helps explain why development speed has been so slow thus far.

This went F2P in less than a year.  In less than 3 Quarters.   Does anyone believe it will be around in the same shape or configuration 12 months after going F2P?  I think LotRO was the outlier for success. And they had DDO as a trial run.  BW/EA has...  EQ2 as a model for F2P?   /cue  :awesome_for_real:

Why not? It has more (and IMO better) content than LotRO did at this age, and certainly better gameplay.

The way they are doing their F2P option could work out well.  I mean if they manage to get new players to try the game and like it, those people may do a full sub. 

We also don't know what the store is going to have in it either.  I find most of my friends that play f2p stuff ended up spending more money then I do on a sub game.

Comes down to whether they can get 20x the number of current players so the 5%* that will pay something will generate more revenue than the apparently-not-enough players paying a subscription fee right now.

* That's on the high side for social networking MTX games, but I honestly don't know if that is conservative or aggressive for the more core-targeted MMO audience. Could be people willing to download 18gb+ of data for a free game have a hire probably of investing more deeply than the casual passerby of a Flash-based in-browser game. Anyone have any data beyond anecdotal Turbine or SOE comments?

Other than the fact that DDO went from a dying game, that had no updates for a year, to a game that got regular updates and a brand new expansion.  It is safe to say that they made some money.

Like I said in the graveyard thread, some of the things I see in the preliminary F2P matrix (specifically the weekly limit on WZs/FPs, as well as "reduced fast travel options" for non-subbers) have the potential to make me smolder with generic rage. Other than that? This may actually make me check out the game again at some point (though playing during the "please come back" weekend 2 weeks back left me with very negative impressions)

e: also, if SWTOR decided to nickel-and-dime people LOTRO-style with having to rebuy class stories / planets from the cash shop even if you originally bought the game, there would be blood. The situation is very different from lotro's, imo, as the main driving force of the game IS in the narrative/story.

This is more a general question on failing MMO's in general, but does anyone have a bead on Experienced Dev-Studios vs. Brand New Dev-Studios vs. Game Success vs. Game Failure?  I wanna say that grabbing some investors and slapping a studio together out of random people, even if they're all individually as competent workers as those at an established studio, is a recipe for disaster.

On F2p, i feel like DDO's structure, with it's questing and instance gameplay style, really worked well as an F2P game and made for a good transition.  I enjoyed playing it a lot for a while, but i left because i was beginning to feel that it was getting too close to pay2win for my tastes.  Most people aren't gunna do that, i think.  I don't know how SWTOR is set up, but i doubt it will work as well or as cleanly.

It will be interesting to see if SWTOR's breadth helps it it's F2P chances.  I think DDO fills a much smaller gameplay niche, and is both helped and hurt in that.

I'm surprised. I predicted it would flop, as it has, but that it wouldn't go F2P based on EA's past behavior with War. It didn't seem to be in the company's character. I'm wondering what will happen now with War and UO.

On F2P or more accurately cash shop games in general. LOTRO (and I assume DDO) are successful as cash shop because you can actually play the game out of the cash shop. Not 50% of the game or 80% of the game, but 100%. Yes, it costs money, and in some cases more money than subscribing, but you can play that way. Nobody else afaik has done that in a "F2P" conversion. We'll see what SWTOR does.

I don't know.. I think this just says that the only reason WAR hasn't gone F2P is more about Gamesworkshop than any reluctance by EA.

UO has no reason to go F2P.  Nobody's going back to the game for free, there's been servers for that for years and what are you going to monetize?  Keeping it P2P keeps current players happy in their isolated little walled garden free of the riffraff.   F2P is a lose-lose with that one.

Still, I didn't expect this to go F2P for another year at least.  I thought they'd try to push-out some ill-conceived x-pack and flop THEN go for the f2p route with nickel-and-diming around classes & new playable races.

That wasn't my experience with either of those games, the pay wall hits hard and early. And their definition of viable is probably a whole heap different from what EA / Bioware would consider worth bothering with. This is purely a desperation move because subs simply aren't a winning option for them.

To be fair, I would pay to be a Jawa...

I'm sure there's a certain set of people who'd pay you to be a Jawa.

Arguably the MMO industry's greatest successes came from slapping a bunch of enthusiastic rookies together. The first attempt has generally been the best from any studio (at least in the AAA space).

F2P Matrix: http://www.swtor.com/free/features

Only way I can see this being good for the game is if it tricks EA into actually spending money on it again.  I expect a true EA style crash and burn here though.  They'll cut development time, charge outrageous prices in the cash shop and then blame it all on WoW when they fail.

This looks like reason enough to uninstall the game.  Sad, because the game did have potential... all apparently wasted.

huh? even free im not gonna play it but their f2p model seems fairly reasonable.

It didn't look reasonable to me.  I read it as "let's make the free experience un-fun". 

Why not make access to Flash Points, character races and other content-based stuff an RMT?  This would fund content, and be an unequivocal way for EA/Bioware to determine what types of content were more popular.  I guess the tech isn't/wont be there for this, cause that seems like a no-brainer.

I don't understand the decision to limit free players participation in PvP at all - isn't more participation in PvP a good thing?

I don't quite get what they're going for either.  It seems like they're just hoping for that the f2p players will buy a sub, it's more like an unending free trial.  They are supposed to be selling stuff like clothing, bag space, char slots, xp potions etc.  Maybe that stuff just isn't ready yet.

It seems to me like the only thing most people would be interested in  (The main story content), is free.  I can see a lot of people installing, playing through, and uninstalling without every considering paying a cent.

Like I posted in the graveyard thread, restricting FP/WZs makes the setup dead to me, unless it's a one-time fee you need to pay (like lifting the gold cap in lotro) or if it doesn't apply to people who bought the box/had a sub previously.

The main reason is that - while the class stories are great - MOST of the levelling content is on the planets which is the exact same for all characters of the same faction. Even when I was just levelling my second character, having to do the same quests all over again made me stabby... so I opted to level through WZs and space missions instead. Now I'd probably try to level through the dungeon finder (if it works well sub-50 with its non-cross-server-ness, that is... LOTRO's didn't).

edit: typing is hard

I love that Game Login priority is listed as a bonus for subscribers. 

This. I think either someone at GW or someone at Bioware Mythic has a serious hate-on for F2P, because that game should have been F2P a year ago. It's been a smoldering wreck since 6 months after release.

The fact that TWO Star Wars MMO's have flopped should really prove that IP matters fuckall if your game isn't solid in the MMO space. It won't, because MMO devs are almost to a man clueless, unoriginal fucktards devoid of the slightest hint of an ability to learn from their mistakes.

When was the last time ANY MMO really felt like a success?  I'm wondering if the demographic just isn't interested in committing long term to a single game like it used to, regardless of quality.

When?  The last time a good one was released.

People may be suckered in for release, but they don't have to continually pay for crap month after month.

After the nut-kick that was taking away my character and legacy names, this actually looks decent. I never did a ton of FPs, any Ops, and the limited GTN isn't a big deal. As long as I can play my pre-existing characters, the queues don't get bad and the whole 'limited travel options' thing isn't retarded, it looks like a winning f2p implementation.

This would get me to take another look.  I played so casually that a lot of the restrictions just won't apply to me. So, win there.   :awesome_for_real:

I have no numbers to back this up, but Secret World feels like a success. That may be just because it didn't crater in the usual Funcom way right out of the gate.

The only MMO model that makes sense financially is to build a small, dynamic world for a small audience and then grow the game slowly.  The financial model of blowing $50-100MM over 5 years then turning on the lights and hoping people show up is just crazy.

Minecraft proves you do not have to invest in cutting edge visuals.  Gameplay will trump visuals. 

Rift felt like a success.

This


and this


I know the second to particularly be true by the fact that my eleven year old son and all his friends (11 year olds not exactly being the most sophisticated gamers out there) aren't playing CoD, or Halo, of NFL/NHL '12 etc....they are playing Minecraft.

IF you're talking about WoW as the industry's greatest success, then i have to clarify.  I do not mean "new to making MMOs."  i mean "new to making ANY video game together."  I think Blizzard is the epitome of "established game dev studio," and was before WoW was anything more than an idea."

Oh dear, looks like the mods don't like me being right.
Again.

Boo hoo.

Nobody likes anybody that constantly spouts the same thing over and over and over, never leaving the forum in question, and always patting themselves on the back at other people's failures.

That makes you a drain on a society, not a video game hero. Politely fuck off with that shit.

The big ugly smiley really killed that post Simond.

Reread her post. She's saying it is possible to play 100% of the game without subscribing, not without paying.

PLAY ME IN BLOOD BOWL!

 :awesome_for_real:

It was a bad game from the beginning, F2P or sub. Just another boring, over-instanced but terribly expensive WoW clone, flaming out like a dozen others before it. Difference is EA dropped what, $400 million into this loser in development + marketing?

Check out EA's share price over the last 9 months for a laugh. Straight up slide from $23 week of SWTOR launch to $11 current.

If they would just cut out all the endless repetition of planet and trash quests (and oh god the running) I would pay some number of dollars to do the story quests and a very occasional flashpoint.

Filthy creatures!

Well, I'm not shocked. TOR turned out to be a 3rd rate WoW clone with a huge voice acting budget. I'm sure the Star Wars IP sold a ton of boxes, but the game had no legs.

<insert bad Bioware 4 pillars joke here>

running?

Simond's greatest triumph is making my snarky remarks pale in comparison?

Seriously though, as someone who thought this game would be lukewarm from the get-go, even I was surprised to see it's doing so poorly so fast.  I think the major lesson to be taken away from all of this is that the public taste in mmo's and I believe video games in general, has become a lot more fickle. They want fun and entertainment and not to pay for grinding or anything that is "in between the fun"

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1217291/Misc/dawson_running.png)

I said a Jawa, not a Mudcrab.

womprat?

Murloc!  :why_so_serious:

It's not like this should be a surprise to anyone. (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=19940.0)

Restricted travel does not sound like any fun at all.

The model is reasonable if they step up their pace.  In fact I'd say it's a damn smart model.  It's totally dependent on increasing their current update performance though.  Doing that would net them good subscriber numbers and nice cash influx from F2P cash shop purchases.

Instead this feels more like a desperate cash grab.  They'll do a cheap transition and lose subs when they fail to put out the goods.   When they lose the subs they won't see any reason to do the kind of content+feature updates the game really deserves.

I don't know what that means. Does it mean I can't own a speeder? Does it mean I can't fly to certain planets without a timer?

It could be less of a PITA with certain restrictions, almost game-breaking with others.

Maybe it means you can only have the basic speeder? Or you have to go through a few more orbital stations every time you move planets  :grin:

I'm actually surprised there's no mention of Legacy stuff in the F2P matrix. I expected them to put some of that behind an unlock fee or something. And still sign of Pay2Gay  :oh_i_see:

That model looks gimped to me.  Wasted opportunity IMO.

I think there's a huge difference between a profitable F2P model, and an extended free trial.  This looks to me like the latter.  If you're trying to get hooks in and turn me into a subscriber, that's not F2P.  It's just a teaser.  Sure it's free to try out a dude and level him up.  But you're restricted from damn near any endgame content, it looks like. (And restricted travel while you do it?  Fuuuuuuuck you.)  Why would I do that if I wanted to play beyond just dicking around with a couple dudes?  It is the proverbial trap, I say.

What EA wants is more players in the game, which means dropping the box cost requirement. The cash shop will mean a group overpay and subsidise the non-payers.


I agree that the AAA model of MMO development doesn't really work (RIFT is the only post-2004 title I can think of that has maintained its relative success after launch; it's too soon to tell with TSW) but the "start small and grow" model doesn't necessarily work either. A Tale in The Desert and Love are two indie MMOs that went this way and, to my knowlege, have remained at the small end of the scale as well. Yes, it worked for CCP, but they also had their publisher basically wipe their development debts (through selling the Eve IP back to CCP at a discounted figure) after they only sold 50k units at Eve's launch. (Or at least that's according to the info I've seen, since what happened when during Eve's launch and rise has generally disappeared from the internet after Eve got successful.)

Also, citing Minecraft as an example of how graphics don't matter is a bit like citing WoW as a model for developing a successful MMO - it's true in that it worked for one company, but it doesn't necessarily mean it is going to work for the next people along who try the same thing.

You can't draw any such conclusions from SWTOR. A bad game failing tells you nothing more than that.

I suspect restricted travel mean less fast-travel, taxis and/or slower speeders.

If it meant you can't go to Ilum or some other super secret subscriber zone I'd have no concerns with it. But it'll probably be the other thing, which is stupid since it will make the game seem horrible to any new players who join for f2p.

That's what LOTRO did when they first went F2P. It was enough to drive me away. They may have lightened up on that by now though.

From memory, LOTRO took horse routes, bag space, and a couple of other subscriber perks and made them one time subscriber perks. But if you were ever subscribed, you got them forever. So if you were an older subscriber, you got them, and advice for new players who wanted to go the non-sub way was to sub for one month to get all the perks, then go to cash shop.

That sounds about right, because I had all those benefits as founder without ever having to pay for it.  The LOTRO model seems a decent way to go in general.  In fact, as long as they don't overly nerf travel, I think I can live with their current suggest model.  I think they will be missing an opportunity if they don't put in some kind of smart cash shop.  Things I wouldn't dream of purchasing in a LOTRO cash shop...I might consider it here, were they cheap enough.  Alas, I imagine they are too greedy to do it the way I would like to see it.

re F2P restrictions: it's not just what you do, it's how you do it. See also here (http://skycandy.org/2011/09/the-monetization-of-middle-earth/).

Because 'Jedi Online' (or more-star-warsy-online if you prefer) was always going to be a bigger hit than sim-beru

No wait it wasn't

Looks like SOE threw in the towel too early, but having said that I'd still refused to play the NGE crap.

Except it WAS.  It just isn't big enough hit for the money spent on it.  Earlier in the thread the earnings call mentioned north of 500k players.  SWG had about 350-400k at its peak, still below TOR's fall numbers.

Even ww2ol is hoping (sic) on the bandwagon:

 ww2ol goes f2p  (http://www.battlegroundeurope.com/index.php/component/content/article/25-promotions-a-offers/12110-replacing-free-trial-with-free-to-play)

Yes, but WW2OL suffers from stagnation ( Game, client, tech. I do not mean player numbers ), something they have been dumping a good deal of time into correcting.

It's funny how we're the exact opposite.  I look at the model and think it'll be perfect because everything that's paid for I'm completely uninterested in.

Not that I really want to get into this discussion at length right now, but there were other factors leading to SWG's low population.  Eventually ToR would fall below SWG's numbers and not have the sandboxiness to help retain the die-hard players.

Different issues, different time periods, and different end-user knowledge and acceptance of MMOs.

Is the account going to be free or will you need to do a purchase?

Any evidence from the dev or EA notes if they will do a Hartsmann-like pass?  It would be terrific when they launch F2P that they claim they've tuned and optimized parts of the play.  It would make F2P a positive announcement and not sort of a capitulation.  QoL changes FTW (e.g. faster travel).

My hunch is that quick travel and emergency fleet passes will be paid items (with very short cooldowns) for non-subscribers. I could also see faster mounts locked behind a paywall, but I don't think they're crazy enough to cut off free players from mounts or taxis entirely given how much travel is in SWTOR. Can you imagine doing Tatooine without a mount?  :uhrr:


Doesn't that mean the model is a wasted opportunity? There should be things that you want to spend money on, preferably that you don't feel bad about purchasing. I don't think cosmetic stuff alone is enough to make a F2P model work.

I'd love to put my money where my mouth was by buying content packs that I could play at my own pace, but with the details we have so far I can't see myself spending much.

Taxis wouldn't be possible given you can't actually get from area to area on some planets without them. I could see restricting tier 2/3 mounts easily. I never bother upgrading past tier 1 until max level, and even then only on characters I intend to keep using for endgame stuff.

You still have to buy the box, which is having its price lowered to $15. That alone is probably going to cut this F2P initiative off at its knees if it isn't nixed.

You're very much wrong.  Cosmetic stuff is huge.

GW had great success with its costumes.  Sparkle Ponies.  Little KT.  Baby Moonkin.  EQ2 heritage armors.  The whole of Free Realms.

(Well, if they're not hideously ugly, which just about everything above mid-level has been in ToR so far...)

The $15 cost is just for pre-F2P. They're lowering the cost of the box later this month for people that might want to start playing before the conversion.


GW had a box cost and didn't really do any content updates. They released paid expansion packs instead. There was a paywall to access the first set of levels/zones (original game) and further paywalls (expansions) if you wanted to progress past that point as the game moved on. Cosmetics can be a nice bump (WoW is a great example) but I don't think it's the bread-and-butter for most F2P MMOs.

I don't know if any F2P devs have released numbers about what sells best in their store, but I believe Turbine at least hinted that content was king back when DDO made it's F2P conversion. Having content available in the store is good for gamers too: it allows us to send a very clear message with our wallets to developers about what we want them to invest resources in for future updates.

That depends entirely on the game being sticky though. This isn't TF2 where the base game is so good that people will just keep playing it forever without new content.  People who are bored will not buy hats.

As far as I'm concerned, GW1 was the only game that did f2p 'right' until now - no obtrusive CASH SHOP BUY BUY BUY stuff (check the article I linked in my previous post for how egregious it is in lotro, f'rex), and you didn't need to buy anything from the store at all (I didn't, and I played through all of the normal+most of the 'hardmode' content). Of course it's not a real f2p game, more like a 'normal' boxed game that happens to be played fully online (I heard something similar was happening in the third installment of a popular ARPG series, too.  :awesome_for_real:). And it probably helps that it was designed for that model from the get-go, instead of a forced design shift after release like... every other 'f2p' AAA mmo out there.

Other than that - eh. I honestly didn't find COH so bad for the most part, but I have a vet account that has IOs permanently unlocked, so yeah. Initially I found LOTRO's model ok, but it's grown to annoy me as time went on.

Giving away the good part of the game for free and charging for the horrible end game is completely ass backwards.

Also worth noting that hats/weapons in TF2 do give gameplay advantages (or at least modifications). It's not just about cosmetics. It works okay because those items can also be unlocked through gameplay, and theoretically they are all balanced with the free items.


I would agree with this. LOTRO's model I was initially fine with but it's gotten more intrusive as time went on. I no longer player the game, mostly because the quest/combat systems were stale after 65 levels, but the Star-lit crystals and lock boxes would have been enough to make me quit even if I still liked the gameplay.

I like GW1's model, but I think DDO's model is my favorite so far because it also supports frequent paid content updates.


This is a good way of putting it.

Except those fucking Tomes

The stat tomes? I've had decent luck getting them from quest rewards or the AH (for important stats). This means my characters usually don't have each stat maxed, but it isn't game-breaking when half of the stats are dump stats for most characters.

I can see why this would bother people though.

I have a CoH/V vet account that would have everything unlocked, but I started a new account to try the newbie experience.

CoH/V has always had terrible free trial restrictions - especially the no access to broadcast chat, only local and team (and help, which is used as the default broadcast by F2Pers) - and that was carried through to the F2P conversion. So that's an immediate turn-off when (unless you and your friends all start playing at exactly the same time) you can't get in contact with people.

I'm not sure if they changed this, but given CoH/V's F2P conversion only saw a short-lived spike in revenue, I'm guessing the conversion hasn't brought back the player numbers they thought it would.

Dat patience and its virtues  :awesome_for_real:

How long ago did you play DDO? I picked it up recently, and I haven't been feeling the paywall in the slightest.

I haven't played DDO since it went free to play, but I reinstalled LOTRO earlier this year and pretty quickly realized I needed to pay - but then again, I was already paying a mid level character.  I don't know what it would have been like to start from scratch.  Of course, I get down with the lord of the rings enough that I ended up just spending 30 bucks on a 3 month subscription/gold membership/whatever its called and felt like I easily got my money's worth at the end.

I actually prefer the optional subscription models, generally if I am willing to spend anything at all on an MMO, I'm willing to spend 10-15, and I'd much prefer to just pay the sub fee instead of trying to pick out the "right" 15 bucks worth out of the cash shop that I am supposed to get to emulate a subscription.

I did the same thing when I played LoTRO last year. But, I had old characters as well. I could easily see it being a lot easier starting new ones if you're going f2p because you can earn a ton of Turbine points just leveling up and doing deeds and it's pretty well free until you hit 30 or so iirc. Unless you don't want to do deeds in which case you're going to be reaching for your wallet but what's wrong with that. With some careful studying you can find which zones you need to pick up to make it to 60 and you might even accumulate enough points to pick up Moria while you're at it. My 3 month sub pretty well covered all the time I could keep interested and the free turbine points paid for the next expansion as well, though I've never gone back to actually play that expansion.

Lone-lands was not originally free; before they changed that you hit the paywall REALLY early, like pre-level 20. Even without it the grind for enough points to buy all the zones as you go involves some pretty extreme deed grinding. Not sure if it still requires you to repeat deed grinds on multiple characters just to get enough points, I am pretty sure at one point it did.

The other thing about LOTRO is they have offered a lot of "buy our new expansion and for ten bucks more, you'll get a clear path of zones to it, a bunch of points, and a sparklepony!"

Ya I forgot they initially rolled out out as total suck. I think to afford the zones you need to take advantage of the rather frequent half off sales. Also you can pick up one of the turbine point sales as well. A friend of mine did it that way and while slower he managed just fine with it.

I'd have been all over SWG if it were SWTOR back in the day. For me, SWTOR just came too late. I don't much care about MMOs anymore. WoW & LOTR (lifetime sub, but don't really play) will probably be my last one(s). I can't even be bothered to try WoT.

I wouldn't call SWOTR "jedi online", it was bioware take on starwars online and nothing more. Static and repetitive content of mild carebear difficulty doesn't make for a game you pay a sub for. Let alone play online with thousands of asshats. SWG would have worked perfectly fine if it wasn't called starwars.

http://www.examiner.com/article/analyst-swtor-move-to-free-to-play-could-attract-up-to-50-million-players

Appropriate avatar is appropriate.

Most internet chat comments track heavily in the 'stupid', 'insane' or 'stupidly insane' demographics, but I found this one insightful;

That's just Michael "The PS3 will rule in 2008!" Pachter being Michael "World of Warcraft will never hit 4 million players" Pachter. Nothing unusual here.

If star wars ever gets to one million active subs it would be a god damned miracle.

Wait, what?  You mean again?  :headscratch:

The only way his statement doesn't seem completely insane is if he meant 10 million monthly active users, not subscribers. Still seems unrealistic, but possible given free to play and the popularity of the brand.

What? Haven't you heard? SWToR never even beat SWG's numbers. It was all smoke and mirrors.  :facepalm:

Yeah the [brackets] there are the journalist filling in what they thought the guy meant, not what he actually said. It had to be users, not subscribers.

And again: Patcher is the industry analyst video games deserves.

He's been such a pollyanna about SWOR I wonder if he / his company has financial interests in EA. And yes, while SWOR now has the "potential" to attract 10m - 50m paying players, it's in the same way that I have the potential to have a threesome with Angelina Jolie and Anne Hathaway.

Did swor break 1mil subs? I knew they did in box sales but that's not the same thing. Either way they are well below one million now and I don't think they will ever surpass that in Paid subscriptions again.

It peaked at 1.7 million subs I believe, but the trajectory was clearly steeply negative. Unlike WoW which grew after launch.

I suspect half the allure of f2p is they can change how they report things. I expect metrics to be delivered in terms of "unique accounts" or something equally meaningless and subscription numbers are never mentioned again.

1.7M subs? Are you sure? Sounds unbelievable to me, I'd love to see some data. I mean, I could believe 1.7M in the first months (so 1.7M "free subs"), but 1.7M paying? I am sure it's true if you say that, but I'd love to see some backup info. Not because I doubt you, I am simply curious about the source.

It was in an older EA earnings call that talked about subscriber numbers. Even if you completely dismiss the 1.7 million subs number for whatever reason, they had 1.3 million or so a few months after release according to another earnings call, which is still over a million.

Considering the server pops they were over 1 million for several months in fact.  They probably lost a very large chunk only recently before the server mergers.  People will quit any game if their server is dead.

Oh man, what a fucking piece of shit game this was. I almost want to go look up which of our shitposters were so busy defending this pile all the way up to launch telling me how it wasn't completely fucking retarded to spend so much time making content that would only be cool once and trying to turn that into a mmo for really no fucking good reason. Except I guess so they could try to charge more than $60 for the game when the only benefit to the players was it had the same boring as shit 1991 called and it wants its combat engine back gameplay as WoW.

/gloat

For real SWTOR had the most annoying f13 fanbois of any release I can think of lately. Fuck this stupid game.

Ok. Most people had that same exact concern going into the game. In fact, before it launched most people were wondering what the hell the endgame would be up to release.

The concern was never whether or not the game's VO thing would work (it did). The concern was if they could produce content at a decent pace (they didn't), and if they could keep the game functionally stable (also no).

Nice revisionist history though.

Maybe he means me!  :awesome_for_real:

I still like the game, am still subscribed, intend to stay subscribed, and the decision to do the leveling content the way they did it totally works for what I want out of the game. And I like the combat too. (I like diku combat in most of its forms, I know, blasphemy.)

I don't attach a lot of my self-esteem to whether or not the game has 500k players or 10 million players though, I just like playing it.

 I am also still subbed and playing with a fairly decent sized guild.

What the hell do you do with a guild in that game right now? Repeat content until your eyes bleed? Make infinite alts (to repeat content until your eyes bleed)? PvP maybe?

EDIT: To clarify, it was launched 8 months ago, and they barely added any content, and all the content they had was unbelievably easy to begin with. What do you really do now?

EDIT after reading your reply: PvP makes sense. It's self-renewing content.

Most of us PvP and do Ops.  Which is more then I used to do in WoW when I hit endgame.

I guess that's a reaction  to the most annoying set of trolls ever eh? BTW WoW was released in 2004, but that's ok we're pretty well inured to hyperbole now.

I saw Hoax trolling the fanbois, and I would like to say that I also experienced first hand this fanboism when I said something on other forums about not wanting to spoil things for myself in beta. I said that I wouldn't pay for a Bioware cutscene fest with multiplayer tacked on per month though, and didn't see myself paying for the game, or seeing worth in a subscription. I was replied to, spelled it out in quite a few posts, and then was told not to post criticisms on that forum, so they could discuss it's awesomeness.

I did predict that they would go Buddy Key/Free Trials early on, and didn't pay for the game because of this. I also still stand by my original assertion that watching a cut scene of an alien that I magically understood made me realize this wasn't the SWTOR I was looking for (which I posted here and lots of places back in December).

Are people really this butthurt about people liking a game that they do not? 

And there are fanboy's for every game, if you think the SWTOR ones are bad the GW2 ones are worse.

I'm still pissed off that we got this instead of KOTOR 3.

You mean the KOTOR 3 that got cancelled and didn't involve Bioware at all?

I mean the kotor 3 they would have used the ip for instead of this shitpile.

You are bitching about something that would never have happened.  It's pretty obvious that Lucasarts wanted an MMO, do you really think they came to Bioware and was all like "Hey you can have the IP back if you make us a new single player game!". 

What's wrong with GW2 fanbois? The game isn't out yet, and while it won't be for everybody it certainly looks pretty good on so many aspects, it's not a WoW reskin and it won't require a monthly fee to play the same DIKU everyone has been playing since 2004.
GW2 fanbois will have the chance to become the worst ever if you want, but at least give the game the time to get released.

I personally don't think what makes a bunch of fanbois atrocious is their love for a game I don't like. It's usually their blindness to obvious issues that they would totally flame in any other game beside the one they are aroused by.

Case in point, the SWTOR fanbois and fangirls.

Fanboys and other types of extremists are annoying both for and against, it's just a game with some good and some bad. And of course it sold over a million. EA budget + bioware + star wars could have sold a million boxes even if they were empty.

However if it's proven failure can be used as evidence that spending most of your time and budget on story content doesn't help you much in terms of retention it's contributed something to the genre.

More annoying than even fanboys are the guys that pontificate endlessly about games they've never played.

The funny thing is even some of the super fanboys who went on and on about how the game was great and how everyone who said otherwise were just "haters" has stopped playing same as everyone else. Which makes them look a bit silly in retrospect.

The Star Wars goggles were strong.

You can call me a troll but basically everything I said about the game turned out to be spot-on. Which really isn't much of an accomplishment given how obvious the problems were. It's kind of hard not to troll a little when something has major conceptual and design problems and defenders are just "but...but Yoda!"

It's fine to enjoy the game, but it never really answered the basic question "why would I play this" with anything other than "laser swords" and "voice acting" - two things that are not really compelling for a long term subscription. In the end it's basically just a game for people who love Star Wars.

I was a constant critic though not as harsh as some but it was/is simply infuriating how people could not or would not see the same basic flaws that crop up in so many other MMO's.  How could this game not have appeared as bland and derivative as it was? To me, it stunk of "half-baked cash-in" from miles away.

Maybe we should change the name from f13.net to Cassandra.net?  Our tag line could be, "Impotently forecasting gaming doom since 2008"

If only we'd listened!

... uh, yeah.  I had two months worth of fun out the game, they did some interesting things, they failed to figure out how to make the same tired old shit more fun (like everyone else).  A good effort, might have been better as a single-player/co-op game.

One of the key moments which signaled the game's upcoming doom happened on January 18th.  The 1.1 "Ilum" patch showed just how clueless their ability to build endgame was.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL0kDP_Cexo

Basically this. I got a trooper to 50 (fun), tried endgame and pvp (not very fun), levelled a consular to 50 (fun, though a bit less due to planet quest repetition), tried endgame and pvp again with both chars (still not fun), levelled an agent to 26ish (fun), then my second month was ending and I decided not to resub.

Really, this game isn't terrible, and the levelling quests' stories are good/interesting just as if I was playing kotor3. Now that I won't have to pay a sub fee, there's no big downside except if they screw the pooch on alternate levelling paths (doing coruscant a second time wasn't nearly as fun as the first except for the Gree quests) and downtime with travel restrictions etc. Going to wait and see...

This game, simply, as plenty of us said BEFORE launch and after trying the game extensively and then even proceeding to buy it and enjoy for a while, was not worth a monthly fee. It isn't a terrible game. It's just utterly bland and rehashed, and basically after you are done with the very easy high end content (couple of months) it becomes a single player game (coop at best) with a monthly fee.

Monthly fees these days are justified by consistent content updates, not by the simple existence of an online service. That shit doesn't fly anymore. Even Smed realized it.

What is being called out as "fanboism" is the fact that plenty here didn't seem to notice such an obvious fact. And it's even more amusing that EA/Bioware caved in and admitted that long before some of the supporters did.

Probably a bad time for office morale =p
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=516560

LOL @ post #6

Since we are on topic, I suggest you all read what ours truly MahrinSkel wrote 8 months ago (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=21760.0), when SWTOR was so brand new and shiny.


Exactly. Which is not worth a monthly fee in the 2012 market. Everyone who tried the beta could eventually enjoy the brief ride and still see this, except the... well, you know.

To someone who likes the game and continues to be subbed (*cough*Ingmar*cough*), you're wrong - it is a good game, it is worth a sub, they are having fun.  They are just fans that aren't bothered by things that annoy you.  Doesn't make them fanbois.  You* of all people calling them fanbois seems hypocritical.

I really disliked my time in TSW, which is bizarre because I really love all things Lovercraft and I usually enjoy deck building.  That you like it doesn't make me think you are a fanboi.  It just makes me scratch my head as to why it didn't click for me (actually it's worse than 'didn't click', I positively dislike the game).

I also think Funcom is smoking crack about how frequently they are going to release new content when they are struggling to fix their chat, but me typing that sentence doesn't make me a prophet worth celebrating.  I'm hoping that my pessimism is unfounded.  This is an important point to focus on because while TSWs model is considerably less complicated than SWTORs (only needing to one side of the voice-overs/cut scenes), it's still more complicated than WoWs (more quests with voice-overs).  We know how slow WoW is in releasing new content, even with a massive budget, and how often Funcom over-promises.  If TSW doesn't retain an acceptable subscriber base, the content teams will be the first to be downsized, and the game will become exactly like SWTOR.

*You are fairly notorious (and self-acknowledged) for getting overly excited** about games that don't pan out.
** I like this about you.  You still love games.  You aren't afraid to be enthusiastic about a game that you hope will be good.  There are more than a few people that post on f13 that I wonder whether they like games at all anymore.  What they do seem to enjoy is returning to a thread to say, "see?! I toldyoubutyouwoudn'tlistenIwassoright!!!!1!".  I find that really old, tired and in no way "usefully cynical".

First of all, everyone thinks I am a fanboi. I don't even try to de-label myself. Who cares? I'm excited about Secret World, I'm excited about Mechwarrior, I'm excited about Guild Wars, I loved Age of Conan and Vanguard. So? A fanboi is not an idiot to me, I have lots of respect for some of the people that in this thread I consider fanbois and fangirls of SWTOR.  A fanboi is a person that has a crush on something and lose some of his/her objectivity in the process. It's really what happens when we have a crush for a person, by the way, usually.

Vanguard sucked. I am pretty sure I qualified as a fanboi of that game. There were many red lights all flashing and screaming "this is gonan suckkkkk!" but I didn't want to see them cause sometimes hoping is believing, and they are both delicious until they last. Lesson learned, hopefully.

Second, I said multiple times The Secret World was NOT worth a monthly fee for the same reasons SWTOR was NOT worth a monthly fee. So your whole argument about it is invalid. Now, Funcom is trying to justify the monthly fee, and we will see if they can do that. We all know they probably won't. The fact that I like the game does not prevent me from seeing why it's not worth a monthly fee without monthly updates. Bioware never justified the monthly fee, and considering they had to develop tons of diffrent content for different classes, it was easy to imagine the outcome of that promise.

Again, my lack of appreciation for SWTOR or my appreciation for The Secret World, or whatever other piece of shit you can find in my gamer resume, have nothing to do with the ability to see (or not see) that SWTOR was going to perform quite bad.

This is all I have to say.


P.S: Just a silly addition. While I agree that the whole "HAAAAA I TOLD YA!" trend is annoying and gets old very fast especially considering how easy it is to say "I told you" when your prediction is right and just fall silently in the background when it turns out you were wrong, I think it wouldn't hurt if from time to time someone made the effort to write a line or two about how wrong they were about something they supported. It's definitely easy and douchy to always try to be "right" and be the I-told-ya kind of asshole, but it's quite easy too to never admit when you were wrong about something. And that has nothing to do with the amount of fun you had with something, since hopefully objective criticism can go a little beyond subjective pleasure.

The thing I loved in SWTOR was when you were grouped with a friend or two and one of you chooses the light option while the other chooses the dark option in a conversation. Those "aww you killed the colonists? I wanted to save them!" moments were the best part of the game.

I also liked that they had a character voiced by Paul Darrow (http://www.ciar.org/ttk/images/kerr/kerr4.jpg) (Overseer Tremel) but sadly they kill him off pretty early on.

I liked SWTOR until the second raid tier turned out to be a buggy, messily-tuned pile of boring shit. Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace had bugs and various issues but they were at least interesting visually and in terms of story. I can't even remember the names of the bosses in Denova.

Between that and no LFD so I could do stuff when I logged that wasn't raiding, and the travel-slog involved in playing alts and I was out. Which is too bad because it's not a terrible game, it's just deficient for a game released in 2012.

I don't remember these people can you link some of their posts?

As I mentioned in the ** part of my last post, I like this about you.  You clearly like/love video games and there is obviously no ulterior motive when you post about a game - you just want to talk about them.

and that is all I have to say about that.   :-)

I'm looking forward to playing through the class storylines, maybe some multiplayer StarFox levels, and then not touching it again, all while not paying a cent for the privilege.

I was reasonably excited about this at first, which had turned to cautious by launch, but it left me very disappointed in the end.

I recognize there are many decent things to say about the game and it has the production value to carry the 'AAA-label', but in the end playing it just felt like such a huge slog.
It has all the drawbacks of trying to marry RPG with MMO and doesn't offer any upside over a decent co-op.
The cutscene/'your choices DO matter' format never felt as stale to me in any game that had the Bioware stamp on it as it did here, possibly because my choices were so utterly superficial.
The multiplayer convo-wheel-roll had a fun novelty to it, but after the 2nd or 3d time in the same instance that had worn off as well.

I'm not over MMO (as my simmering fanboi'ism for GW2 shall attest to) but I am over this kind of MMO; basically cramming as much MMO as they feel necessary to keep the dream of that sweet sweet sub money alive into what could be a good/great single player RPG.
Which is also why for the first time I've not bought a Funcom MMO at launch (just when they've finally learned to launch a decent MMO).

Part of me is actually angry at them (over a game, god help me :oh_i_see:) for pissing away that humongous budget on what I feel now was such a stunted, backwards step in gaming.
This part hopes it all melts down leaving nothing but a huge radiating wasteland as a warning to future generations.

The more sensible part of me however sees there are plenty of people enjoying it so I guess there must be something there I didn't see ... hidden way deep down below all the tripe  :why_so_serious:.

The other important thing about Falconeer (and Nebu, and other people who tried this game and didn't like it) is he forms his own opinions by actually playing the games. So while I might not agree with his tastes, his decisions in avatar design, or even see things he sees as flaws in a game as positives, I'm not going to crawl up his ass for it. Hell I'm not going to cry about anyone's opinion about a released MMO out here in the general forum, whether or not they have any basis for it. (At least not much, I try not to but nobody's perfect...)

Where it truly crosses the line for me, where it stops being someone's opinion and starts being flat out trolling, is when it happens in the game's subforum, which is presumably for people playing the game. I can't stand Eve, but I don't go into the Eve forum and constantly trash it. I'm having a lot of issues with TSW, and if/when I stop playing it, I'll probably stop posting in the subforum because I'm not going to be adding anything to the discussion there. And for the most part that holds true for most posters on f13 and most of the game-specific subforums. I'm just not sure why the same courtesy has in general never been extended to WoW and SWTOR players.

Meh, I don't really want to turn this into some kind of meta-discussion about forum posting either, but I needed to get that out there.

This is pretty much my outlook as well.  If people are having fun with a game, I don't like, more power to them.  Why would I keep spouting out how bad I think the game is or just start shit for no reason.  I usually come to these boards for decent game discussions, but it's slowly heading towards the same shit I try to avoid on official game boards.

Right, deliberately trying to piss on people's parade is bad.  But many of these games have market wide implications that are very troubling. Where can we talk about that?

Well if I might make a suggestion, above my pay grade I know, I think that if a sub-forum is formed for a game then the general thread for that game (like this one http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9959.0 or this one http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15047.0) should stay in "MMOG Discussion" and not get moved to the sub forum. Because the sub-forums seem to be for discussing actually playing the game while MMOG Discussion seems to be a place to debate broader stuff. (The Star Wars thread perhaps needed a new thread because it was so long but that's a different issue)

That makes a lot of sense.

and/or create a "Troubling Gaming Design and/or Business Model trends" thread.

Thing is, in terms of SWTOR, I wasn't wrong. I thought, for me, the game would be a lot of fun and, for me, worth a monthly fee. Given I am still subscribed, still having fun with it, and have no plans to unsubscribe (I'm not done with the game yet, and the monthly fee does not outweigh my desire to "finish," thus the sub is still, again TO ME, worth it), that means that, as far as my predictions FOR ME went, I was right. And those are the only predictions I try to make as far as games go, 'cause while I like when a bunch of people like a game I do because I can chit chat to them about it, ultimately I don't really care if the game I enjoy has a fanbase of three people or three million, so I don't really bother caring about it.


It does get really tiring being told HEY YOU LIKE A SHITTY GAAAAAAAAAAAME when people are all "this is OBJECTIVELY BAD." Buggy-ass bugginess is objectively bad. Design decisions you don't like? Those aren't actually objectively bad, dudes. Every design decision you hate, even the ones that 99% of people loathe, still have that 1% who think it's great. That doesn't make them terrible, wrong people, that just makes them different from you, and an audience you shouldn't design for if you want to make a jillion dollars.

While that's a good idea and I mostly agree with it, it just gives the trolls free reign to be as annoying as they want.  

Here's what can happen if I split/den an annoyingly trolling post or line of posting:

- Nothing:  this is the best result.  People get the hint and dial it down.  

- Original poster bitches and just illustrates they completely don't get it.  

- A few more people bitch.  People continue to bitch.  Conversation centers around the bitching until I split/den the conversation about the bitching.

- Go to top.

- OP sends me a nasty PM(s).  This gets forwarded to Trippy and then he weighs your heart against a feather and metes out appropriate punishment.

- Internet fucking revolution.  I was wrong, and I'm bringing down the entire site with my heavy handed moderating. Someone is being mega-ultra-giga-twat about a game they don't even play by a company they don't like and I'm the bad guy.

And.. if it's out in the general MMO discussion, I probably see it.  So I have to do something.  Usually.  If it's hidden away in a subforum of a game I don't play, I can wait for a PM from someone asking me step in or wait for the spill over into another thread.

Personally, I just don't give a shit anymore about the business side of MMO success.  Success of a MMO for me is "did I have fun".  Everything else is noise. Unfortunately that noise can get a bit loud and makes people angry.

Yeah, but you like Dragon Age.  :why_so_serious:

You're soooo getting denned.

Just as soon as Rasix puts the last touches on his basement shrine to Merrill.

HAH! I don't even have a basement.

It's in the attic crawl space. The candles are proving problematic.

Pretty much the same thing you do with a guild in TSW, except there's 8 class stories to do in TOR instead of 3 faction stories to do in TSW.

Hey, DA:O is generally considered a good game. That's more "HEY YOU LIKE A DECENT GAME WAY TOO FUCKING MUCH WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU."  :why_so_serious:

Business trends of this kind do actually have a profound impact on the fun of the games.  Diablo 3 and SWTOR are at the front and center this.  Faux-multiplayer on singleplayer games and the singleplayer-ification of MMOs are driven in large part by business decisions and not what is fun. I am sure the GW2 Cash shop bothers quite a few people even if it doesn't me.  But as a GW2 fan boy I still don't mind people discussing GW2's pay2win is ruining things and subs are better. It's a perfectly justifiable opinion.

I don't want to ruin anyone's fun, but I would like to talk about the reality of MMOs and everything not peachy keen.

Serious question: Are you really saying that you only want people to post nice things about games and you'll den everything else? Because that's what this reads like, which kind of restricts the whole concept of debate.

I was going to add an edit, but I didn't think I had to be that explicit.  

No, it doesn't have to be all sunshine and butterflies, but it's a far cry from the usual crap that falls out of your mouth.  Do you really consider what you do debating? Seriously?  At least sinij was honest with himself.

Tch, Rasix, to use previous posts to judge new posts is totally cheating.

My thoughts on SWTOR could always be summed up as "It's a ridiculously expensive, overhyped, underfeatured clone of WoW-from-a-few-expansions-back which is trading on a) the Star Wars name and b) the Bioware name, Bioware concentrated on completely the wrong things during development, and it would be free-to-play within a year".

And, well, here we are.

You've shared this opinion 15-20 times now though. At some point you're no longer contributing to discussion, you're just trolling.

I don't know, maybe http://forums.f13.net/index.php?board=15.0?

And you kept repeating it over and over again like some rejected girl friend who just can't drop the issue and move the fuck on.

Bioware didn't concentrate on anything during development, or post launch.

They staggered drunkenly between story content aimed at Sjofn, and bullshit aimed at eq-clone raidtards.

The inability to pick a broad and dance with her doomed the whole thing before anything else could go wrong.

They would still get a few subs months from me each year if they would just cut back on the running and repetition of trash quests. In particular, death to all dailies.

Fuck that, it is  obvious no one gives shit anymore. People just want told their current video infatuation is good and pure not the webcam slut she really is.

And I totally appreciated it!  :why_so_serious:

Or no one wants to read people's shit posts in threads for fans of the game maybe. Why would you say fuck that about posting in a more appropriate place? Do you somehow have the right to drop your pearls of wisdom whereever you see fit, dispite other people thinking you're shitting up their threads?

What this board really needs is an ignore fuction then people can choose for themselves who they want to listen to and who they consider a waste of time.

Because it doesn't start out as treatise about crappy modernization ruining otherwise good games. It starts as "Why is there a subscription fee on what is basically a singleplayer game" in the the one only thread about SWTOR.

And who the fuck said threads are for fans of the games?

I think it's implied when there's a seperate section devoted to the game. My just be me but I dont see that as a free range for trolls.

The normal slightly snarky poster?  Probably not.

You?  Definitely. :-P

SWTOR F2P Thread:What went wrong?

lawl

:heart:

Honestly, it's a good game, and one of the few games I would actually listen to the story in. They just failed terribly with the intended content deployment schedule. Which was crazy aggressive and probably impossible to do without a giant content team in permanent crunch mode anyways.

The biggest failing of SWTOR, in my opinion, was one of project management.

Wow I hope this was directed at me because that would be fucking rich.

I had to actually try and remember why I didn't play this, then I remembered it wasn't sold here.

But yeah, when 200 million bucks of "the next big thing" is smouldering in the ditch it's too much fun not to poke at it and think about why. And the answer to trolls is not biting.

I'll step in with my faboism to say it's ridiculous to act like the game is some huge burning pile of failure.  Still having more than 500k after they've stopped bleeding subs is amazing.  F2P maintenance mode might kill it but the games basic premise sure didn't.

I dunno... I had fun running through each planet once. ONCE.

I think the answer there is a lot of "because it worked for WoW". But BioWare can't do mechanics as well as Blizzard and spent too much to get there.

In the MMO business, failure and success are relative to your development costs and your running costs. By those metrics, including their own stated goals, this is a failure. Full stop.

On the fanboyism thing, repeating yourself doesn't matter. We weren't bitching about restating the obvious when it was WAR or AoC or SWG or any other game we've John Maddened to death over the past ten years. This was the only game I can recall where people who enjoyed it got all huffy and were all WELL I NEVER WHY ARE YOU REPEATING YOURSELVES WE KNOW YOUR OPINION. The only one I can recall. Now, I don't care if you enjoy the game (I can find a thousand videos of naked men having their balls stomped on right now, proving people like terrible things) but that thing, where even mild criticism was chased off after it reached the in-depth discussion phase, with everyone who expressed displeasure in more than a sentence called trolls? Fuck you, that was as annoyed as I've ever been on these forums, at least when it came to a relevant, just released game.

Now, I'll append that just a bit by saying I get that annoyance once it's been out and fallow for awhile. That's why I pissed off. But it was going on right after release and right before. It was highly annoying and it was only because of Star Wars' hypnotic hold over people.

On your C drive?

No, I prefer scat porn.

No the bulk of it was because of Simon's unproductive and unmitigated anything-replated-to-Bioware-Sucks-and-must-be-shit-on trolling.  Everyone else got slapped with the backlash from that, even if there were cogent posts to discuss.

I don't know that the bleeding has stopped. You'd have to wait before a bit for the positive effects of the server merge to wear off. That said if they thought there was significant growth potential they'd probably still be holding to the sub model for a bit longer.

That said the game is a failure. With that budget, IP and development house it was meant to be surpassing WoW not limping along at the boundary of being viable less than a year after release. That doesn't mean it is a bad game, especially not in all aspects, but no one in Bioware is getting pats on the back for this outcome.

I think it was because the game was half-baked.

Sure it looked shiny and all. But the mechanics, systems and gameplay were unresponsive, confusing and downright poorl The thing is; users don't stick around for you storytelling, that bores everyone to tears eventually, no matter if your story is great and you are the best storyteller; it sucks ass the third time around. They stick around for that 30minute cocaine rush or five hour morphine drip. SWTOR provided neither, so why would a user stick around when the guy next door has stuff which is 10 times better? Sure they might have done it before, the effects might be waning, but hey, he's getting a new batch next month!

Really only boils down to a mediocre product chasing the wrong costumer.

Personally I never had my money on this one, and didn't even bother playing past one week. MMOs need a major gameplay and systems change to surpass the pink elephant in the room, not just ape after it and pretend no to see it.

(also the SW IP is so tired that it hardly has any relevance anymore, or you could say it's risen to religion-status YMMV)

I love the ONLY CUZ IT'S STAR WARZ stuff. You know who doesn't give a shit about Star Wars? Me.

Shush, we totally know you have a slave Leia costume you wear on a regular basis.  It's completely your personality.

Curses, my secret is out! I bet Ingmar blabbed.  :heartbreak:

Yes, but I also have a slave Leia costume.

On your body type 4 make Twi'lek?

I agree with your metrics of course but that's really not what I was getting at.  Some people are using the situation to act like: "Look I was right SWTOR failed because <personally disliked design choice>!".  That sort of attitude is pure rubbish vs a game that most PLAYERS are happy with.

EA's super-retarded-budget-dept and stupid expectations are another matter.

The real heartbreak is that he never sent us the pics.

You mean he never sent you the pics... :why_so_serious:

Not everyone who expressed displeasure was called a troll, at least not by most of us. The main people singled out to my recollection - rightly - were the ones trying to tell us all the gameplay decisions were terrible, post release, when they hadn't even played the game. I don't recall anyone ever saying Nebu or Falc were trolling, or Soln or Ratman or Tannhauser (my apologies to anyone if I'm misremembering your opinions of the game) or any of the other people who tried the game and decided they didn't like it. Even Rokal, who for whatever reason sets nearly everyone off all the time was never accused of trolling that I noticed.

Plenty of people were *argued* with, but the only people I remember just being dismissed as trolls, were actually trolls, or were just parroting other people's opinions with no experience of their own to go off of, which amounts to the same thing.

Also anyone who trots out that LOLZ ONLY STAR WARS FANS nonsense deserves what they get, IMO.

It's just as well, people are usually sad to discover that even though my hair is super long, it's still not enough to give me Leia hair.

Posters criticizing the game fell into three camps:

-People who played the game and wanted to vent about their experiences with the game or what they'd like to see change.
-People who didn't play the game, but wanted to talk about what SWTOR meant for the industry overall.
-People who didn't play the game and wanted to tell us why they decided not to.

Only posters in the third camp were dismissed, and only after repeating their opinion multiple times. There was no conversation to have with those posters after a certain point (if they ever actually wanted to have one). The reasons they decided not to buy the game or why they thought it would fail never changed so the only reason they continued to post in the thread was to have their decision validated by saying "I told you so."

Not sure what star wars means to those of us who played the game, but star wars is exactly why it gets posted about so much.

People are still harping on about SWG even in the thread about another unrelated star wars game going f2p.

I'll probably play this game again at some point in the future, mostly because I haven't done more than a couple class stories.

It's a single-player game with an online fee attached, and I don't expect it to ever be more than a single-player game.  The online fee, I cancel when other games catch my attention; no sense paying when I'm not playing.

It's not inconsistent. The retention numbers suggest that many players enjoyed the story, came to the end of the story and stopped playing. So even if they enjoyed the game, and it was good at the story bits, it was a failure as an MMO.

That's exactly the kind of statement that has absolutely no basis.   There are too many other factors going on here.

1)  Complete crap performance on content updates and general patches.
2)  90% of the servers were half empty a week after release.
3)  No LFD.
4)  Broken Ilum.
5)  Very unpopular PvP gearing system.

If you consider all of the above the retention says exactly the opposite of what you're claiming.  Something was keeping people subbed.  Let's not forget the metrics that a ridiculous percentage of the player base was hitting max level.   The VO bit them in the ass there.   Fun leveling means more players at the cap.   Why didn't they quit faster if that's all they enjoyed?

Yes, but that's a combination of being Star Wars, SimBeru, and enough for a few editions of How To Fuck Your MMO Up for Dummies, Advanced Stupid Decisions for MMOs, and So You Want to Piss On Your Customers? all from one game.  While we've seen some spectacular happenings in recent years, I'm not sure any yet compare to the rise and fall of SWG.

If YAY STARWARS is the reason I played one, shouldn't I have forced myself to like the other? I just feel like there's no logic at all here. It's just a way for someone to dress up "you're stupid for liking this game" in slightly less directly insulting words. The end.

What are you even talking about?

Most players aren't happy with it, and the pool of potential and expected players is even less happy with it. Before the game launched EA said they could get WOW numbers. Sure, I guess the people who to this day are super happy with it are super happy with it - but that's a tautological statement. The people still playing FFXIV are happy with it I guess...and? You are doing the same thing Sky does, separating the audience into "haters" and true fans. The fact that subs are nosediving means players are not happy.

Saying that the game is mechanically very conservative is not just an expression of preference - it's a game design analysis. I prefer games with more ambitious mechanics, sure. But even if you don't prefer that you have to admit that mechanically the game is very safe. (To put it charitably)

Mechanics are what drive long-term retention, because mechanics are cheap and content is expensive. Stuff like story and setting are cool, but the novelty of those cannot keep people subbed for long periods of time without a ton of production effort. And you spend 95% of your time in an MMO doing repetitive mechanical stuff, so that stuff better be appealing.

It's absolutely fair to say that the game is failing because emphasis on story is unsustainable and the mechanics are too undercooked to be compelling to a wide audience that is bored of those mechanics and can experience them in better form in another more popular game.

The main selling point of the game was full voice-over and the 19 War and Peaces worth of story on top of a WOW clone. I thought that formula would be very difficult to make work and I think I was right. I personal dislike the design but beyond that I also thought the design would be unsuccessful based on what I know about MMOs. As I've said a billion times, MMO success is about retention and the SWTOR strategy is not a good one for retaining players.

Did you play the game? Anyone who played SWTOR can point to a huge list of things other than what you consider the "main point" as reasons for the game bombing.

There is a major point to be made about the mechanics being a bit stale, so I think Margalis is right about that.  I think that tab targeting and hotbar combat are the primary reasons that I have trouble sticking to any MMO anymore.  The story can be great, the atmosphere great, nice graphics, etc., but in the end...I am just not having as much fun as I once did by tabbing to the next mob and hitting 1,2,3,1,4,2,1,8 ad infinitum.  I played TSW over the weekend during the free event.  I found it to be a pretty cool all things considered, but at the end of the day they are not getting my money for the above reasons.  I still manage through SWTOR because I really like the stories and am a Star Wars dork, but goddamn I want the combat paradigm for MMOs to change.  I am fine with the skills, the levels, the auction houses, the gear, the stats, the mods, the chats, the guilds, the grouping, the soloing, the fetch quests, the pets, the travel, the titles, the achievements and all the other trappings.  But give me some first person type controls, for fuck's sake.

I think a broad discussion of what went right and wrong with SWTOR would be great. As long as people who comment have actually played the game and we keep in mind that not everyone has the same tastes.

I see these as a side effect of their focus and budgeting, not the primary cause. They believed story was enough by itself and skimped every-where else.

Mechanics really weren't the problem with the game.   Seriously, focusing heavily on that just makes it seem even more like you have no idea what you're talking about and just picking a personal bone.   It's like railing against the presence of levels, talent trees, or classes. 

It was badly executed as a MMO.  Too many systems just weren't polished or even implemented to garner enough traction in the market.  Some very poor design decisions were made. 

It still worked for me, but I'm on the extreme end of the solo scale so a lot of the MMO systems don't even factor into my play.  But even as someone that avoided the company of others, you could still feel where they didn't get things right.   Some cool systems were present, but they were over shadowed by the major things they just fell flat on.

The thing is, the folks working on the problematic areas you'd think were outside those that would be a different team than the story ones.  Poor execution?  Lack of available resources?  There are a number of things that could have gone wrong.

I know people disagree with me, but I still don't accept that it was 'impossible' to add story at an acceptable rate.

If you set your game up with appropriate reusable assets and small number of actors on contract it would be perfectly possible.

But you'd have to build game and team around it and not put one foot in raidtard development. Most important you'd need a development plan that supported it.

500k subscriptions is plenty to fund an ex pack size story each month. But not if you also want to build a whole different eq style raid game that starts at level 50.

And of course, the running needs to go, and the xp curve requiring trash quests needs to go.

Right now I can't even consume the existing story quest content because the time sinks prevent me staying interested long enough. Worrying about how quick they add content almost seems like a good problem to have.

Allow me to disagree, they weren't the only problem; The execution of the mechanics was poor, which left me feeling an utter lack of control over my character development.

They put a heavy emphasis on the 'story development' of your character (will you max the red points or the blue?), but mechanically:
- one superstat to rule them all (why not just have 1 stat then: call it 'combat rating' or some other generic shit and be done with it?), which also meant virtually no meaningful
  choices to be made gear-wise.
- the only gear choice was: do you want to look fugly or like a ridiculous clown (granted that's not so much a mechanical as a design problem).
  I want to dress up my dolly, it's why I loved my GI-Joe (let's be honest; it was just a butch looking barbie) and it's important to me in an MMO: I want to show off, in style.
- Even the skill-trees felt bland and ineffective to me; hybridizing was actively discouraged (more and more with every balance patch) and most of the choice was too
  superficial: 'do you want skill A to do 10% more dps or skill B to have a 10% shorter cooldown?'

It left me feeling oddly disconnected from my character in some way, which for an MMO that touts that connection to be one of their main selling points is a problem.
Just another case of them putting all their eggs in the story-basket, but lacking any real insight or inspiration for the mechanics of a (diku) MMO, which is certainly one of the reasons I jumped ship as soon as I did.

It deserves to be said (again  :why_so_serious:) that it wasn't just unpolished in certain areas; it was bland (apart from the story) the blandest MMO I've ever seen.
Perhaps it's not the main reason they didn't reach expectations, but I believe that even if they had launched as polished as they should have AND had content updates every month or 2, they still wouldn't have had long-term success (by their own pre-launch standards) in a market filled with fickle and jaded customers.

I'd agree that mechanics were pretty mediocre. Just don't think that is why it failed.

They didn't put all eggs in the story basket. They talked about it, but lacked follow through.

Trying to launch with half baked PvP, half baked raids, a half baked economy, being too scared to release the time sink crutch, all gave me the impression they just lacked any kind of confidence in their own product. They seem to genuinely believe that straight line development from the eq model is the only way an mmo can work and they needed all that crap rather than spend time focussing on whatever was going to differentiate their game.

Spiff's point about skill trees is another really good example of fear and lack of confidence ruling development.

If this is story based game, why was it so critical that no one built hybrids or that any kind of synergy exists between skills outside of the same tree?

Who gives a shit what they said.  I'm talking about the people who BOUGHT the game.  Most of them were happy with the basic game and only quit over various cockups.  Let's not even get started on losses due to the economy either.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying SWTOR gameplay was great or anything.  I'm just saying you can't point to this as proof for your personal MMO pet peeves.

See, this is the kind of thing I mean. We can't have a meaningful discussion about this game because there's this weird narrow band in which we can talk about it and criticism cannot color outside those lines without someone (multiple people) going HEY WHY IS THIS PERSONAL FOR YOU/WHY ARE YOU TROLLING/WHAT'S UP WITH THE HATE?

The mechanics are fair game. Pointing this out isn't a personal bone; I own the game, played it for two months, had okay fun with it, then I stopped. I don't care what you play. I mean it! I hate geek culture because it internalizes what you consume as your identity. I don't play that game. Played it when I was 17, 18, 19. Not interested. It really IS mechanics. I'm active on other forums (more populated with a better cross-section of players than this one) and in other places and, somewhere between slow content releases and lacking end game, people kept saying: I played this before.

The WoW Clone is dead. Everyone has played this fucking game before for 8 years. It's not because if they'd just executed it a little better, made it MORE like WoW, added in a ton of raids, they'd be sitting on 10mil subs. There was no way, once they put pen to paper on the design documents with red ink saying DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THIS CLASS ABILITY: MAKE IT LIKE WOW, that it was going to be a success. I'll put my e-ass on the line, such as it is: there will never be another successful WoW clone, period. Variations on a theme, hot key combat... that's not what I mean. If you release a game now and your mechanics are mirror images of WoW's with the numbers filed off, if you have a carbon copy endgame (WE HAVE RAIDS), you will fail. It's dead.

Also, at least one person thinks that you need to monetize it differently. 1.5 mil people or so were apparently worried about their subscription fees charging.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/175409/

WoW clone is dead.

Much like the EQ clone is dead.

Much like DIKU is dead.


See, that's the thing. People have been touting that for 10+ years. There's still plenty who enjoy the DIKU mechanics. Just because you want something different now doesn't mean it's dead.  

Ask Raph how much trumpeting about people getting tired of DIKU has gone for his games.   Not much because they aren't.  They're not likely to be for a while. DIKU mechanics are being added to more games because it's simple and people understand them and it gives nice ding-grats feel goodies.  

However, with SWTOR it's not the mechanics, it's the execution.  You don't wind-up feeling stronger as you level.  You suffer extreme ability bloat.  Talents are - as mentioned - pretty dull and uninspired. Even the ones they ripped-off from WOW lack the panache of that game's abilities.

Lum has some wonderful words about that gamasutra article.   He posted them to Facebook, though so I'll share them here.

This particular game's spectacular failure doesn't mean its concept is tired.  It means someone else did it better, why switch? Despite the losses in subs due to stupid decisions on Blizzards part, there's still many millions playing that game.  Not hundreds of thousands... millions.

There's no reason to switch until someone comes along and does it better.  That hasn't happened yet because they're cloning directly.  They're not ripping-in to the systems, finding the flaws of Blizzards model and improving there in the same way Blizzard did with EQ and DAOC. Eventually someone will and we will see another shift.  Of course since it's DIKU more pundits will say "this added nothing! This is just another Clone!" and fail to learn, just like they've failed to learn from Blizzard's original model.

The only thing dying is the subscription-based game.  Which it should because the 'freemium' games make shitloads more money.

The main problem is that breaking into a market in which development time continues after launch means you are ALWAYS going up against something that has been in development longer and has gone through all the problems you are going to face.  MMOs  aren't like televisions, where the newest models are just flat better.   The further problem with MMOs is that they are built around getting people to pay every month, which means if people wait (or buy it, play it a month, and then decide to wait to resub), your income goes bye and bye, and then it is too late.  The idea that some game is going to burst onto the market and just beat WoW is absurd to me, and any game developer or publisher who thinks it is going to happen is delusional as far as I am concerned.  WoW came out nearly 8 years ago now, and although they've been having a few issues in the last couple, they STILL continue to make major revisions to their game.  The amount of iteration done on WoW is insane - no MMO just coming out can possibly hope to be that refined.

That is really TORs problem more than anything.  WoW has made the market insanely difficult to break into.  TOR in 2004-2005 and every single one of us would have shit ourselves the first time we logged in.  In 2012 no one cares.  It isn't that TOR is especially dated even, its just that it simply doesn't have 8 years of post release revisions, iterations on mechanics and content additions on its side, and that is now the standard in the industry.

Outside of MMO titles in development for years - Wildstar, TESO - I can't see any large studios / publishers getting excited about creating another AAA MMORPG. That path leads to a bottomless pit that you throw money down and receive abuse from players as a result. If EA + BioWare + Star Wars can't do it, then good luck with your shot.

Instead the multiplayer focus is moving to F2P FPSs, MOBAs and Diablo-likes. They can be smaller and cheaper to create and new content is paid for directly by players rather than a monthly subscription that goes towards the promise of new content sometime later one.

Plus the rise of F2P / F2P-based hybrids (cue "I don't want to be nickel and dimed; I just want to pay a sub fee and get all the content" sideline) where players will accept less because they are paying less.

The problem I have is not that some (still lots of) people are having fun with it. I respect all forms of fun, including crazy dark weird stuff that it's better to leave out of this conversation.

The problem I have is with those people that are refusing to see why regardless of the fun they are having it IS objectively an outdated DIKU and how that is the reason that led to its relative but undeniable failure. And how that was totally foreseeable from the beta.

That's probably the admission I am looking for. Not the "you were right, I didn't have fun. I lied to myself". Please. More like "you were right, all in all this product was sub-par on so many levels that it was doomed to fail (relatively, given the investment and the producer's expectations)". How can we still be dancing around that?

Unless it's GW2 we're talking about.  :oh_i_see:

See, first you have to convince me that DIKUs are outdated. I don't agree with the fundamental core of your point.

I think he meant that, for a DIKU, it was outdated.

DIKU won't die, it will always have a core following of people who love that style of gameplay. I will say that it's time in the sun is over and the vast majority of people who tried it in the wow era ARE in fact sick of it now. 

I will be surprised if any DIKU ever comes close to 5mil subs.  F2P diku has an appeal to it but F2P seems to work best in more casual games.

The difference between diku then and diku now (and for the record, this isn't my personal preference; I'm pretty okay with diku) is that the development costs have been pushed through the stratosphere. This isn't 2002, when you can crank something out for 5-10mil or whatever, nab your 75-150k subscribers, and be fairly well off moving forward. The ground's shifted. If it costs 50mil, at minimum, to launch a AAA MMO and the ceiling for post-WoW diku, out of the gate before the dust has settled, is 1.5mil subscribers? You can't operate under the old assumptions anymore. That's not a recipe for success.

Also, good takedown on that dumb assed Gamasutra piece by Lum. I told the guy who linked it to me, "You REALLY think people rushed through content in three weeks because the charge was coming?" I usually like Gamasutra but that was just one of the dumbest things ever posted there.

:Love_Letters:

When $200 million is on the line, they won't take any risks.  We knew this back when spending $50 million seemed extravagant.

Same as them deciding to not let players kill off companions, nor let them have interchangeable kits.  "Players may do something they later regret, and get mad at us for it.  PROTECT THEM FROM THEMSELVES!  Put rubber bumpers on everything!"  Well, no, that isn't actually true.  On the whole it may average out that way, but individually we each have areas we tolerate a little more complexity and choice.  Let us decide when that is rather than forcing it on us across the board.  Then no one is happy.

This is Rift. Arguably a better DIKU game than WoW, it certainly felt like a big step forward for the genre with dynamic content, leader-free grouping, lots of mechanical improvements, and fast updates to justify a subscription fee. It didn't trounce WoW because no subscription DIKU game can at this point. If you wanted to play a DIKU game, most people will ultimately play WoW where all of your friends/guild/progress are. Because both games have a subscription you're inclined to only play one long-term.

The arguments in the thread are sort of missing the point. There isn't just one reason why the game failed. It's not stale gameplay vs. expendable content, it's both (with some other reasons also contributing). If the gameplay wasn't stale tab-targeting combat, maybe people would have been more inclined to repeat content or invest in the end-game. If the class stories or end-game were designed with more longevity in mind, maybe people would have ignored the stale combat a bit longer.


Why wouldn't they have? I think it's clear that plenty of people rushed through the content. Whose to say whether they did so because they didn't want to spend $15+, or because they really just felt like playing 10+ hours of SWTOR every day. The point of bringing it up in the article is that, whatever their motivation, allowing people to blow through all of your super-expensive non-repeatable content before subscriptions even began was a bad model.

By any metric SWTOR is a failure. It was a failure for EA/Bioware (based on their expectations) and it was a failure for players (over half of who have now left). I still think the game can be successful with a F2P model but subscription DIKUs will never get to or keep WoW numbers at this point.

From a business standpoint TOR is certainly a failure. The big reason that people got a backlash when they talked about disliking it was stuff like what I bolded in your post. There seemed to be a group of posters who felt like not only was the game not to their liking but it was an utter shitpile and their reaction to "well I enjoy it" was essentially *points and laughs at the stupid people*.

Now, you can play the martyr if you'd like and talk about how agressive people were in defending it but it basically boiled down to the defenders reacting to the attitude of the people against it which in some cases very much felt like an anti-Star Wars, anti-Bioware backlash rather than anything specific about the game. And the reason people got called on restating things was because there were a few posters who came into every thread only to bitch about the game, regardless of the thread context and several of them never even played it.

I happened to like the game while admitting it had faults but like a lot of people I ran out of stuff to do and quite playing it. I worried even before launch that would happen but oh well, lesson learned for me, and hopefully Bioware.

(http://cloudfront.bostinno.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/slapfight1.jpg)

The kililng off companions thing actually was possible in beta; the pushback and noise from testers was what ultimately made them change it. So, for that one feature specifically, we have the system we deserve apparently.

I actually did rush through content to get done with my character's story arc before a credit charge hit.  Then I quit at 49 and didn't even care to look up the ending.  Apathy so immense it blended into disdain was all I could feel for the game by the end.

Mechanics weren't why SWTOR failed for me.  I'm honestly surprised that Margalis is trying to push that angle so hard.  The mechanics weren't worse than WoW, and ToR clearly was going for the added pillar to give it the upper hand.  I actually really enjoyed playing my Marauder on a mechanics level, although I'm kind of a sucker for having lots of abilities that require keyboard dexterity (I play SC2 religiously), and I like fast past characters with lots of movement abilities.  Way better than Rift in this regard for instance.  I would honestly say the mechanics of TOR might have been the best part of the game for me in the end.  I even liked the PvP too.  Perhaps I am not usual in this regard.  

I don't think TOR failed primarily because it's a diku.  It's that it's a timid and unimaginative one.  It failed because it's a soulless clone of WoW at its core, and because the story pillar which covered up this fact eventually stops working to do so.  That I believe is why the game failed for the general population.

Personally, I disliked ToR in the end because of it's fundamental design. The attempt to shove a modern bioware game into WoW and all of the problems that causes.  It's not that story and writing can't necessarily work in an MMO.  I think it possibly can.  It works well in TSW, and I think TSW has a far more sustainable model for producing it in the future as well.  Although I still do doubt the long-term value of TSW, it is at least very effective in the short-term, and moreso than ToR.  The problem here was that Bioware's specific modern single-player RPG formula was haphazardly slapped into a WoW-clone model without a good reason for doing so.  The story elements were still somewhat effective, but by the end the good parts had been spread out so thin that I had lost all investment in it.  The class quests were basically like the first quarter of a single player RPG spread out over 5 days of playtime while you do often boring/tedious planet quests.  The class story was cool, especially at first, and the characters here at least were memorable.  But the pacing is absolutely terrible due to how much filler there is, which really killed it for me.  Combined with the how banal the bulk of the quests you get on the planets are, and the game just slowly sucked away my enjoyment of the better stuff (that came far too rarely).  TSW just crushes ToR in the story pillar for me.  I'll be able to remember almost every character I've encountered in TSW for a long while.  ToR, I can only remember the class mission characters and a select few for planet missions.  That basically sums it up.

But even if you loved the story aspect of ToR, eventually it comes to an end.  And when it does, there's nothing to save it from being exposed as the bland game that it is.  Terrible talent trees.  Boring itemization.  Just...soulless.  Soulless is the only word I can use to describe it.

See, Rift never had any stickiness for me, nor for a bunch of people I've talked to.  I also don't think it pushed *enough* when it came to the innovation.  Whether that was budget or timidity on the devs part I can't say.  Some of the things, like the dynamic grouping, public events and multi-specs were huge quality of life improvements, but they still relied on the same endgame.   Once you got past those bits, who cares it was just the same as WoW.  

So many people forget what a damn big deal instances, per-player raid bosses and solo leveling were now that it's 8 years on.   Then the even bigger deal of saying, with their first expansion,  "No.  This is meant for everyone, so we're not going to force you to run old content just to see new content."  That alone was a HUGE shift in marketplace thinking.  

There's a whole generation who don't remember those scars, and the ones who did were only in that game for 3-4 years.  We're further removed from the "people with lives need not apply" debacle of EQ's endgame than it lasted as a mainstream game and the gold standard of MMO-dom.  Think on that.

It's THAT level of innovation that it will take to really knock WOW a blow, and there will only be limited windows to do so.  As others have pointed out, Blizzard keeps reinventing the game.  EQ stayed the same old game for its entire career, only changing after threats began to arise, but still maintaining the same paradigm.  You must go a to b to c.. maybe when we release "D" you can go b-c-d but we'd 'trivialize' our customers experiences otherwise!  WOW's paradigm is still to reset gear and throw-open the doors to everyone and anyone who wants to get involved in the next cycle of content.

The big shift it will take to outshine that is to do what Sky's been begging for so long that he's given up on it.   Let players solo dungeons. Stop giving a damn about rewarding loot to the segment who wants to raid.  Make the games - essentially - more like D2 where any mob can drop awesome shit.. only the raid bosses are guaranteed drops and drop in greater quantities.

Another part of the problem with modern MMOs is you don't give a rats-ass about the world so you don't follow what's going on.  I dug EQ because it was traditional fantasy and easily accessible.  DAOC, familiar lore we know the stories. AC? Fuck that game I didn't care and couldn't get in to it.   COH; superheroes are easy to bang out and not all that high-level.    WOW; over a decade of background on that game.   Rift; I didn't give a fuck and still don't.  It was some overly-generic good vs bad thing with technology and demons thrown-in.   (I played the good side in beta.)  It couldn't make me care, but perhaps a SP game could have.  

Had 38 studios not been such a shittily run company we'd have seen how well that last scenario might have worked out.

Back on TOR; they failed to account for the innovation and iteration thing.  Yes, your competition will always be evolving.  You need to watch that and plan for what they're doing.  Not as simple as I make it sound, I know, but when they announce major features a year before an X-pac is released you've got some lead time to at least figure out how it's going to be integrated into yours.   Decide what the core features are and focus on those.

LFG was such a hit in WOW that it's inexcusable that TOR didn't have it on their budget. Anyone with an ear to the ground in the marketplace should have known what a hit that would be and been planning for it.  It worked well enough in GW1 and WOW polished it, but TOR said.. "Mmm.. nah. We've got it for PVP why do we need it for PVE."  Whoops.

The problem with Rift for me stickiness-wise was entirely that it was completely soulless. The factions, characters, world, monsters, none of it had any resonance. I may as well have been using an ability called 'ability 1' to kill a monster called 'monster'. Mechanically it was as sound as anything but the entire world was basically built out of cardboard cutouts, I've never played a game with less character, except maybe Champions Online.

And I think Merusk is right, WoW is 90% of the problem for every game like this. Think about this - 2/3 of my guild never even tried SWTOR, not because they thought it was going to be bad or they had no interest, but because they were happy playing WoW so why change?

SWTOR's innovation was all in areas that matter to a relatively small group of players, people like me who always wanted their MMOs to have more RPG aspects to them. I love me some NPC companions (this is why GW2 makes me so irritated, because they did it first and their second try at it, the heroes in GW1, are such a great system). I can't even start to say how great I find the dialogue system and how much more it makes me give a shit about what I'm actually doing in the game. I probably met more memorable characters in the first 20 levels of SWTOR than I did in 8 years of WoW. WoW for me often devolves into a 'make number go up by 2 every week' grinding process. To their credit, most of the time they made the process fun enough to hide it just enough for me to stay involved, but not always. And I suspect that for the 1/3 of my group that did make the jump to SWTOR, they feel roughly similarly to me. I like the gameplay of WoW in general, always have, but putting a Bioware RPG on top, even one with some structural/pacing problems, is just infinitely preferable. SWTOR still ends up with the same endgame, but it is still dressed up better story-wise IMO. And I still have 4 more class quests to finish before I'm really staring that in the face anyway.

The thing is, most of the WoW players I know are the opposite. They want the endgame carrot grind and find the questing/story stuff just gets in the way. Not enough to be like, hardcore endgame raiders, but as soon as the LFR system went in those people were absolutely a total lost cause for me to *ever* get them away from WoW. Blizzard has finally found the ultimate carrot for that type of player and they will be there *for life*.

I'd perform an unholy sacrifice of a few dev teams to get these two things added.  I really don't understand why no one gets it.

What was CoX if not nothing but personal 'dungeons' that would scale depending on how many people were with you?

Of course, the big problem with that game was the game engine itself was way too narrowly focused.  It did get on the things it was designed to do, but it had no flexibility at all which made the content way too repetitive.  Even so, I'll always have positive feelings about that game.

WOW used to have a little bit of this with the random world purple drops (I even got a couple of them ), but it just seemed to go away with all the updates.  I thought that concept was completely cool, that you could get a badass ring from some random little mob if you were lucky. 

If I could make one change to the design, it would be making companions relevant to group content. Instead of having them take a group slot, just balance 4 person content for 4 people + their 4 companions. I really don't like how the companion is crucial for the whole leveling process and then just gets ditched at max level for anything but dailies. Would also be nice if there was some way to use more than one at a time for certain types of content or whatever.

Ideally I would have wanted any content in the game, save raids (I guess), be doable by you and your companions.  People grouping with other people get the benefit of social points and not having to babysit bad AI, while the solo guy gets to use available tools to do a vast majority of the available content. WIN-WIN.

edit: 

Still, even being able to do the raids would be spiffy as well.  Just call them something completely insulting and drop no loot.  I'm totally fine with that.

The companion situation really irked me as well.  I agree with some of the earlier comments to the effect that it was a mistake to not go whole hog on the story.  Having multiple companions AND for the love of god BANTER would of been far better than all the trash quest voice overs.

It really makes no sense.  Bioware built it's glory on companions.  They represented the single feature of this game which let it stand out and they went totally chicken shit with them.  They barely even talk outside of their own personal story bits.

Isn't this how it works (outside of PVP)? The highest level character I had was 32, but me and a friend were able to duo all the Flashpoints up to that point with our companions.

You can't go in alone with 3 of your own companions and do stuff, which is what was being advocated here.

Also later flashpoints become unduoable, you need 4 real characters without massive overleveling/gearing. Colicoid War Game even if you overgear it won't work since you have to have real people sitting in turrets pew pewing things.

I'm fairly certain the companion AI is better than about 60% of the people I grouped with in WoW LFD.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/ChipperJones.gif)

When I said you, I didn't mean YOU.  I meant me.  Solo.   I play at 10pm, I'm lucky if I get someone in chat to bounce snarky one liners off.

I can only assume he read 'doable' as 'duoable'.

Thankfully this is one of the things that got fixed by the mergers.

My mistake, I didn't realize you were requesting the ability to bring more than 1 companion. I thought you were suggesting that some of the non-raid content didn't allow you to use companions, or was balanced in such a way that they were impossible without real players.

Edit: Apparently the second is also the case. Good to know.

Funny, while looking for my "disapproving Chipper" gif, I ran across:

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/lowdps.JPG)


Yah, I was building on Ingmar's previous comment of:


Companions were great, but they were mainly just a prereq for the leveling content while adding flavor.  It didn't really allow soloers a way around the inevitable group content sitting among the solo progression.

Tangentially, why are group quests still around?  Do people that level together or in are in active guilds really get excited for them?  Every guild I've been in has had the same negative opinion of them that I have.  Hell, the only people that ever want will agree to do these quests more than once tend to be real life friends. TSW's approach to this seems to be somewhat of a help (almost every quest is essentially a daily), but even then it's not like people really ever want to redo this content.

Why not try and have the best of both worlds? Scale the quest so it can be solo-able if only one person is in it?

If you have someone with silly-high presence (like, say ... Ingmar. Or me.), the companions start to be pretty good in the high level flashpoints, except for when they have to not stand in fire (I REALLY wish they would teach companions not to stand in fire). Hell, Risha handled the "you have to fight by yourself for a little bit" thing in The False Emperor better than Ingmar's smuggler did.  :oh_i_see:

As for group quests, Ingmar and I will do them as we're ... you know. A group. But I skip the fuck out of them solo and don't give them a second thought. I can only assume they exist because of the loud minority that spazzes about MMOs being too solo-friendly. What I find weird are the people who act like they MUST do the group quests and complain that they can't find people to do them with. Skip 'em, people! Skip them as hard as you can!

I actually kind of like the heroics in SWTOR, but I wouldn't be heartbroken if they were gone. One nice thing about them is if we do them all it puts us ahead of the XP curve and then we can skip content on other planets, which has a nice effect of making leveling up multiple characters a much more varied experience. Pretty much only helps if you're duoing (or more than that.)

It's another part of what has made SWTOR by far the best MMO I've ever played to duo in (beating out previous champion CoX by a good margin). For whatever reason, they just 'get' it in ways that nobody else does. All the clickies and mission objectives advance together (they even have two-stage graphics for glowies which is a nice little touch - I loot something, it opens the lid, Sjofn then loots the same thing and a box sitting inside the container disappears, etc), we never get shut out of each other's story instances, we don't get locked into the one healer companion all the time, etc.

The bad part for me in SWTOR was that I'd listen to some guy's heartened speech about why I needed to save the force sensitive Tauntauns of the eastern plains.   I'd get a little psyched internally and then it'd just show up as [Heroic 4] on my quest tracker.  I really wanted to save those Tauntauns.  It made me a little sad.

Every planet, I'd end up with enough quests that I'd have to drop the now grey group quests that I never did from 1-2 planets ago.   :sad_panda:

Yeah there's no doubt they need to mark the heroics with a different quest symbol so you don't listen to the whole spiel first.

Did anyone save a link to the post from the moron who bitched about the lack of a feeling of character growth while saying he was one of the ones in beta who advocated making the game harder? I kick myself for not saving that gem.

My attitude to group quests that I couldn't do was to out-level them and go back for the story once it was trivial. Bit of a band-aid.

Ya I picked them up just so I didn't get distracted by their quest markers and regularly purged them after I left a planet. A few times I'd join a pickup group and do them and it usually went well but I never could be bothered going out of my way to do them.

I get excited for them, but I only ever play SWTOR in dedicated groups. The co-op experience is just too good to ignore, and the solo experience too stale to bother with. Since I'm always playing in a group, heroic quests are welcome because they're tuned for the way I'm playing. They're a nice break from steam-rolling regular quests, and they ask you to use tactics or abilities that you would otherwise ignore outside of flashpoints. The group 2 quests are fun to solo for the same reason.


My sith warrior/inquis duo was considering letting a companion fill the role of tank but decided against it after watching Khem Val stand in fire at every possible opportunity. I'd love a "move to" ability that gave you a targeting reticule to position your companions.

Yeah, I totally understand that. Like Ingmar said, they really need to mark them differently so you know to ignore them. I'd also like a filter to have grey quests not show up on my damn mini-map.


fake edit: Yeah, Rokal, even just a "move to" command would go a long way for the companions, instead of fiddling with passive/attack and shit.

4X and Vik tanked just fine for our commando/gunslinger duo, but we never tried to have one of them tank a flashpoint. Companion shield/defense chance is just too low for that.

You are seriously expecting people who think they are having fun playing a game to admit that shit? What fucking planet are you from again?
I think you need to look for your validation elsewhere.

In other news, Bioware insider learns that listening to fans is probably a retarded way to design games. http://blogs.bettor.com/Anonymous-Bioware-Insider-blames-fans-for-SWTOR-Video-Games-Update-a173317

:oh_i_see:

 :facepalm:

That dude are dum.

I'm failing to see how it was more like KotOR than WoW in any way, shape, or form.

That's my favorite part! The parts that ARE like KotOR (you know, the story shit) are the parts that most people seem to think were good (if a bit crazy to think was sustainable sub-wise for non-me players once they finish a storyline or two without major content releases in a timely manner).

Umm, am I thinking of the same SWTOR? Because the one I played did everything it could to be more and more like WoW, *espeicially* with regard to post launch stuff.

Did anyone except you finish more than a couple of storylines?

I sure as hell couldn't, because of all the crappy bits that were nothing like Kotor.

Ingmar is only two storylines behind me, I believe. Number-wise, anyway. I've finished everyone except the BH and SW. I think Ingmar has all the Empire classes to do.

EDIT: Wait, I lied, I think he still needs to finish the consular, too. But yes, I know I am way out of the ordinary on this front, which is why I said "non-me players." It helps that I don't hate DIKU stuff (after all, I leveled an ungodly number of alts in WoW too) and am pretty good at bullrushing through parts that are less fun to get to the parts that are. If I like the combat well enough (and I do like SWTOR's combat), repeating content doesn't bug me usually.

Which implies that even if you halved the grind to 50, thereby making all the trash quests optional, this game still would still have enough content for someone married to Sjofn to last a full year.

The Kotor model was totally viable, if they had followed through with it.

I'd be somewhat sad to see group content go, it is meant to be a multi-player game after all and that should be the small group challenge mode. It will be interesting to see if GW2's approach where dungeon completion is entirely optional in terms of gear progression and personal story works.

The test for a post WoW subscription MMO will be whether Blizzard can continue WoW's insane profit generation with Titan.

Really the worst part about SWTOR for me is how it has utterly ruined duoing in other games. TSW is driving me goddamn crazy even though it is no worse than every non-SWTOR game I've duoed in. Well, except for their fucking idiotic insistence on solo instances, that's a very special TSW-only sort of derp.

Well, I guess it also ruined "story" to some degree. My TSW character having precisely zero agency in her "conversations" with quest givers is also driving me crazy. But I'm also aware that's hard to do if you want to churn out the story shit in a timely manner, so I try not to knock it TOO hard for that. Especially since I like that TSW knows story matters and at least puts a good effort into it. Seriously, if TSW came out before SWTOR but after Cataclysm, I probably would've been fapping over it almost as hard as Falconeer does.

They won't. WoW was and still is (whether it's bleeding players at any given time or not) a phenomenon that won't be repeated by another DIKU MMO, if any type of MMO. Not even one of Blizzard's making.
All Titan will do is succeed in poaching players from Blizzard's own subscription base; players who will inevitably crawl back to WoW within a year. Titan will remain profitable, of this I don't doubt - but the facts are Blizzard are considerably better at pinching the pennies when it comes to Titan's budget and don't have the savage IP overhead that SWtOR labour under, and therefore the game won't represent any sort of loss. But it will never break WoW. I highly doubt it will get even half of WoW's peak subs numbers - and it certainly won't maintain them.

EA's biggest mistake, and one they have continually made over and over since 2005 or so, is imagining WoW's success is replicatable. And so they make unholy, unreasonable demands of the small team Dev teams they buy out to bring in numbers that are simply unfeasible, instead of being happy with an easily maintained pre-WoW subscription base. You know, back when UO, DAoC, EQ and the like were considered a license for printing money with player bases significantly less than half a million. That EA are so slow on the uptake when it comes to a new era of MMO monetising is entirely unsurprising. I wonder if Blizzard have a contingency plan on releasing Titan as F2P straight out of the gates...?

If TSW was out before TOR I'd be in the same boat.  Really, the whole standing mute while the NPC monologues thing is the only really irritating part of how Funcom did the story.  I mean, at least have my character be involved with some gestures or facial expressions instead of just standing there like a manikin.  

On the other hand, TSW's skill system really drew me in with its flexibility.  It pretty much drove a stake into any remaining thought of playing GW2 anytime in the near future, because it really crystallizes how much I hate what Arenanet did with their skills.

My original TSW character, for some reason, had her mouth slightly open all the time in those cutscenes. It's hard for me to be attached to a slack-jawed, glassy-eyed mute, I tell you what.

I agree that TSW's skill system is pretty neat once you start to get a handle on it. The thing I love most about it, though, is something I rather liked about GW1: Lots of skills, only X number of slots to use them. Button bloat is my #1 gameplay peeve in MMOs.  :why_so_serious:

If EA / BioWare listened to the fans heavily when making SWOR, it's their own fault.

The fans will have some valid points, but unless the title is 90% finished and they've been able to play through the whole game, how applicable those points are to the scheme of things is questionable.

That "Bioware insider" is an anonymous poster calling themselves auto34058432 in the comments section of this news story: http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/07/17/swtor-executive-producer-leaves-bioware-new-layoffs-rumored/

The "story" was picked up by Gamertech (http://www.gamertechtv.com/2012/bioware-insider-blames-fans-for-swtors-woes/#comments), and spread from there, including to the blog linked earlier to in this thread (http://blogs.bettor.com/Anonymous-Bioware-Insider-blames-fans-for-SWTOR-Video-Games-Update-a173317).

This guy may be a brilliant coder but he's a stranger to the English language, or any other language which uses capital letters at the beginning of sentences.


I also don't much care if anyone believes him or not but fuck me, gaming journalism is shit.

We (wrongly) believed before WoW was released that the highest numbers a MMO could expect would be in the hundreds of thousands. There are billions of people on this planet who are becoming more connected every year. I don't think it's impossible to believe that 20M of them could play the next big thing.

Never say never.

I think he meant to say that a bunch of whiney tards asked for stupid stuff so they had to waste time instead of polishing the WoW bits.

I'd also point out that we know next to nothing about Titan. Making predictions about how well it can do at this stage is a waste of time. For all we know it won't be a DIKU MMO or even a subscription game.

I have no doubt that Diablo 3's RMAH is part of them testing the waters.

The most amusing thing in those comments was this:


If that's true, then talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Arguable, especially since we have no idea what Titan is. I would expect it's pretty mature but with no real challengers and WoW still printing money-hats they can just sit on it until they declare wow "done" and Titan the successor. We'll find out for sure only when it releases.

I would have thought it a safe bet before I saw Diablo 3 and the questionable design decisions.

Blaming the users for SWTOR failing is amazingly ridiculous when it is such a bioware game. I can imagine the fans complaining where the story elements, like companion death, conflict with the MMO aspects but that's not the cause of the problem.

If that's true, then why gun for the already all-but-dead SWG and not the much newer and more financially successful (I assume?) Clone Wars Adventures, also from SOE?

I think a much more likely scenario is that the powers that be at SOE knew that SWG wasn't going to ever really improve without some serious cash thrown its way and essentially a re- re-launch, opting instead to just let its piddling revenue stream die off and keep on with the product that's actually pulling in money. Not to mention Sony and SOE was undergoing a bit of a restructuring around that time, which would have just made the decision to cut out the dead weight just that more palatable.

I can still picture them doing it.  They were having delusions of grandeur.  It's not a big leap for them to imagine SOE polishing up SWG if SWTOR took off.

 :awesome_for_real:


The main problem I had with TOR was that, as I leveled, I felt like I was actually getting weaker, rather than more powerful.  It was much more pronounced with my Sorcerer than my BH, but by the time I hit the mid-30's fighting mobs had just become a chore.

Once it goes F2P, I might pick it back up again to finish the class stories, but the thought that I'd have to slog my way through the planetary stuff to keep myself at, or above, the level requirements for the class stories is a big turn off.

Maybe because the CWA license isn't subject to renegotiations at the moment? Or maybe the fees went up and you don't know it? How would you as there is no subscription?

But they didn't do that.

The only thing they developed from mid beta onward was the wow crap. There has been no post launch addition to the kotoresque stuff at all.

It was.  I'd have made it through all eight characters if I didn't have to put up with the WoW bullshit and extraneous non-story quests.  I only made it through 2.75 characters, and that's because I had a duo for half of that.

Illuminati.  She was under the influence.  Of a few things. ;D

I would agree with this, though it was the name ganking that ended my run prematurely.

I liked SWTOR well enough. Thought it was a well put together game, with a great setting. Awesome artwork.

I'm just burned out personally on this kind of game. Tab target, 11billion "skills" that are just numbers, no utility. and Quest hub after quest hub.

But that's me, and that's personally. The only thing that REALLY broke my heart about the title, is when I found out that flash points beyond the Black Talon, were not like the Black Talon. BT was a step ahead of other games. They dropped that ball. That was really the point where I hovered, and then clicked, the unsubscribe button.

EDIT: Oh, and Spacefox. I mean, Space combat.

There are quite a few FPs later on that are like Black Talon. I do wish they were all story-driven in the same way, but at least it's not an anomaly for dungeon content in the game.

To many "Not BT" in between for me to care. I know where to go if I want Mobs standing around in a dungeon. But I do not want that.

Why do you say mid-beta?  He said from the day they opened the forums.  Pretty sure they opened the normal forums way before alpha even.

I'm saying the guy is talking out of his backside.

Ok?  That has nothing to do with what you said before though.   The forums probably went up the day the game was announced.

"they opened the official forums on September 12, 2011 where as the game came out three months later on December 20, 2011."

Apparently not?

Totally not.

Anyone that uninformed doesn't have a clue what was going on in the company he was working for.   The forums were up before the 'reserve your guild name' promo which was March 2011.

At best he means they lifted the NDA, but even then he'd be wrong.  That was November 18th.

Wasn't there a general Bioware board that fans posted on before the official boards went up?

I made my ToR Forum account in 6/09. 

It was the reporter who made the statement about when the forums came out.


I'd guess he's talking about specific forums independent of the normal Bioware forums.  People have been bitching about Kotor as an MMO on the Kotor forums before Bioware even had the license.

He is also 'revising history to a remarkable extent' when he implies EA orginally made this awesome WoW beater but had to retrofit a load of story bullshit. Earlier versions were more Kotor-online, every patch moved it closer to being a weak-sauce oh-shit-add-more-raiding.

And the Kotor bits were the only good bits. If that is what the customer base was screaming for, hey, maybe you should have listened. Hero.

(incidentally, the forum feedback was actually pretty mixed)

Blame the betatesters and blame Bioware for caving. A very vocal subset of Betatesters bitched and whined that the game was too easy and needed to be harder. In beta combat was fun as hell because you felt like a bad ass. You felt like a jedi, or like Han Solo or Bob Fett. You knew when you got into combat you were going to treat the mobs like your bitches. Now, it was probably a bit too easy since most fights ended with you losing about a 1/3-1/4 of your health but after months of whining Bioware massively jacked up the difficulty towards the end of beta, especially for later levels and the betatesters who said it was too much and made you feel less powerful at later levels were largely ignored.

Beta testers tend to be the hardcore.  Designers really need to realize that when considering their feedback.  Also that they're often rabid and not thinking so much as spouting deeply held dogma.

 :why_so_serious:

When WoW was announced I pretty much said it would be the biggest MMO ever made. This isn't exactly a brag because let's face it, anyone who'd been paying attention to Blizzard at the time could have predicted that - the developer of two of the biggest selling RTS franchises and two of the most inordinately successful dungeon crawlers of all time suddenly dipping their wick into MMO territory sounded like mana from heaven; all things put into consideration.

Had SWtOR come out around the same time, it would have stood a fair chance at competing, I think. What's really crazy is how close EA came with UO2 to then shelve the whole game and all its assets (although I think some ended up being hamfistedly rammed into a UO 3D expansion at one point, I'm not sure). I can't begin to imagine how much money was effectively squandered on that project, but someone had to have made the decision. Was it based on the game being awful/unfinishable or based on fears of dying publically in comparison to WoW's juggernauting?
But we're talking points in time, here. 2005 was the right moment, and Blizzard hit it guns blazing with a ridiculously solid DIKU game that took many of the best parts of the games that came before, wrapped it up in an immensely appealing IP and shipped it in a manner that meant pretty much anyone with a beige box running windows could play it. WoW is pure zeitgeist. Titan's only hope of achieving the same level of success hinges on Blizzard keeping it under wraps till exactly the right time; by which point whatever game model they've gone for might be out of date. We've seen Bioware fall dramatically from grace in the last 5 years; Blizzard have already lost their footing with the general malaise around Diablo III.

I agree you should never say never but I think the market for the MMO is vastly different to what a lot of the old guard believe it to be still and that it'll change far faster than some can keep up with. In the last year alone we've had several major MMOs appear that seek to change the genre in different ways that all matter to a certain degree. As Penny Arcade put it a few months ago, though - you do kind of wish they'd all just team up and make one that brings the best of each team together.

I think Eldaec's right. Sure there were tons of hardcore MMO players in beta but there were also quite a few single player RPG fans and casuals. It was up to Bioware who's feedback they listened to.

People don't know what they want.  It's better to look at results.  I don't buy his argument that it was the fans fault anyways though.  The push for no LFD seemed to be fairly internal for instance.  Every time someone brought it up they had a plethora of their own reasons that sounded fairly specific.

I was sure there was a post shortly after the game released where someone said this exact thing then said they were one of the testers telling Bioware to make it harder. That wasn't you was it?

The suggestion that a dev team is blindly following fan suggestions as their design document is a damning indictment and not an excuse.

I don't think they are, though, which is fine of course, but sort of funny, since the part he's blaming the fans for is the part that makes this particular MMO interesting. I am perfectly fine with the combat and shit, but I sure as hell don't play it for that.

Assuming that the original poster actually works for BioWare AND has some knowledge from the inside, blaming the fans is a weak argument. The fans can't know what is going in the background, what the design goals are, how certain systems interlock, which systems are coming next etc.

Beta testers can only provide feedback based on the info they know and usually the devs don't provide the full design documents to tell them what should be happening.

Tester feedback is a useful resource, but I doubt for a second that BioWare was a slave to fan decisions. Blaming the fans, however, passes the buck outside of BioWare / the devs responsible for the decisions.

Basically there were forum posters saying 'make it more like WoW'.

Then there were other forum posters saying 'shut the fuck up you nutless assmunchers, make it fun instead'.

As demonstrated by actual development direction EA decided to listen to the former. There was enough forum noise to justify whatever action they wanted, but in reality I suspect they turned it into an EQ knockoff because the failed-previous-mmo contingent of bioware austin won the internal pissing contest.

The part that makes this guy offensively revisionist is that he is claiming that the ongoing development of the game was headed in exactly the opposite direction to where it actually went. They simply were not developing the story experience kotoresque elements, they were left to rot while the dev team pissed budget away polishing out any original or novel elements of the game that didn't follow precisely the same path that WoW had chosen.

The difficulty curve is a great example. Notice what doesn't happen at the end of Kotor or any other bioware game? You don't suddenly become less powerful than the average grunt, instead you sweep them away six at a time with the merest nod from your awesomeness. If the game was flat out too easy they needed to put in more mobs, not more HPs.

The game was like WoW from day 1.

I don't even understand this conversation. It was clear that the game was WoW mechanics with story and a Star Wars skin, the devs even said so. There were quotes from them about blah blah best of breed combat, no need to re-invent the wheel, go with tried and true mechanics while adding the story pillar.

The game was always intended to be like WoW. The idea that that was a reaction to fan feedback seems absurd. I mean, you can find posts of mine from like 2 or 3 years ago bemoaning that it was a WoW clone.

He's saying they failed to clone WoW properly because of the Kotor bits.  In other words the logic is if they'd cloned it better they'd have millions of customers.

I don't read it that way, but if that what he means then I accept that he is a a fucking idiot rather than a disingenuous pillock.

That article was stupid, it really doesn't matter when the forums went live, and it doesn't matter if the guy worked at BW. Anyone who wasn't completely offline before SWTOR launched knew the game was the actual Everquest with Wookiees that so many wrongly thought SWG was going to be. That means they were hoping the vast majority of players were ignorant first timers, whether it was their first MMO or their first rebound MMO (roughly the same niave optimism).

Can a AAA MMO hit 20mm subscribers worldwide? Sure. But none from any Western developer is ever likely to. Nobody's going to invest that much anymore. Most got smart after LoTRO. I've long felt SWTOR was going to be the last gasp of the "perfect storm" MMO of household name IP, unlimited budget, and renowned studio, with the industry collectively (and finally) recognizing that WoW was it. The only time we'll see "20mm" will be "registered accounts" or "log ins" or "avatars created" or even more esoteric "eyeballs" or "impressions".

And Titan. Heh. That has more of a chance of getting canned than ever launching. But even if it does launch, by that point, it'll probably be played on a Smart TV through Netflix  :awesome_for_real:

Never go full retard.

Huh? :headscratch:

I believe he's questioning your logic of saying that Blizzard's main R&D project is more likely to die stillborn than see the light of day.

That said, his choice of one of the least funny offensive lines in movie history is questionable as well.

Ah. Thought it was a rip on the idea going Smart TV.

Until we know something more than the name, I've got Titan in my Starcraft: Ghost category.

Blizzard saying they're not going to have a successor to WoW would have Upper management coming around with a baseball bat looking for limbs to break. They're going to want the money train to keep rolling.

Though after Diablo 3 the possibility of Blizzard screwing up the transition actually looks possible.

To say nothing of the Cata aftermath.

You could look at Cata, D3 and SC2 all in the same light. None of these decade plus well established high affinity brands were enough to make their recent iterations perform to gamer expectations, and therefore not to industry (and notably with D3, not to Blizzard) expectations. Granted, all of these were successful in ways any other company would do all sorts of illegal things to achieve. But historial Blizzard standards are different.

A brand new big budget IP looks a lot better before 2010 for them. And thus, my skepticism they're placing the entire hope of their company on Titan :-)

They aren't.  Blizzard's war chest is an above ground swimming pool made of laminated money and filled with only the most exquisitely cut diamonds.

My thoughts about Titan have been pretty much the same since they discussed it in 2010:

- We know it's not related to a previous IP
- We know they don't want it to immediately compete with WoW
- We know they are pulling in tons of developers and dollars to the project
- We know the Blizzard model is to take existing ideas and "improve/polish" them

That basically leaves me thinking they are going to try to go into the FPS arena, likely to compete with an MMO like Planetside 2.

From what I've heard development of Titan is pretty troubled, though I don't know why that is or how much worse it is than recent Blizzard typical flailing.

Someone really needs to try and persuade Bobby Kotick to move into politics or ambulance-chasing or running rigged card games on a street corner or something - they'd all suit his personality and skill-set much better than "running Blactivizzard (into the ground)".

I'll play SWTOR when it goes FTP.  If they do it right, the game could rebound and start making them a decent amount of income.  I really like the Turbine model and would love to see that implemented.  Just wish they'd add this monthly content they keep going on about. 

I don't even know what people mean when they say WoW anymore. Do they mean the original game with world and level design that included BRD, Strath, etc? Do they mean the recent expansions?

Very often it seems they mean "make it like WoW now!" with no detailed examination. But what WoW is now is much more than the current incarnation - if you cloned it exactly there is no way it would be as successful as the original. In my view what WoW originally was (UI developments and other 'obvious' changes aside) is just as significant in why it is as successful as it is in its current incarnation.

There's no suggestion the SWTOR developers really thought too hard about it either.

I think MMO developers have lost view of the fact that (at least in my opinion) the reason people play MMOs over the long term is the other players.   Maybe it isn't what gets them into the game, and maybe it isn't what gets them lots of pre-release press, but any MMO I've played for more than a few months, I stayed for the people at least as much as, and usually more than, the game.  So, when something like TOR comes out, it can be a perfectly fun game to play, but that isn't enough by itself to stay with an MMO.   Obviously you have to get that right too, but being a good game just plain isn't enough in the MMO space.  I don't really have a solution for this, but if I'm playing MMO A, and MMO B comes out and I like it slightly more, but I've already invested 2000 hours in MMO A and have a huge base of friends to play with in it, I'm not switching to what I acknowledge is a better game.  Every new MMO release is pretty hamstrung by this.


In other words, I think we can argue all day about this and that which mechanics work in WoW and don't work in WoW, or SWTOR, or whatever release, but I don't think there is a formula that exists that is actually going to lead to a sure fire success, you'll need some luck and circumstance that you just can't build into the development process.

Maybe, but there is something that keeps those original players too, the ones that don't move and thus make their friends move to them.

I remember playing GW and WoW before they came out. I far far enjoyed GW pre-release more than WoW. I bought them both and ended up playing WoW much much more in the end though. As a persistent game it was just much more interesting. You can put this down to whatever factors you want (instancing decisions, level and equipment systems, world and dungeon design, opaque areas of the world - other factions, raids, etc) but WoW felt like a world and had a large number of players that treated it as such. This gave the whole thing energy and excitement, and persistent social interactions - direct and indirect - that kept people playing and getting others they knew to join in.

I always use it as an example, but there's a reason that WoW - the most successful MMO by far, made Black Rock Depths, a 'failed' dungeon that most never visited, let alone finished, let alone visited every part of.

When all is said and done people would realize how much better it would been if SWTOR was released as single player game and SWG was not killed on the altar in the process


Ohh there is a formula. I knew WoW would be run away success world has never seen before shortly after I seen the beta. And I also new no one would follow that success because there can be only one such game on market" and no one could outpolish blizzard back in 2004 (btw turned out no one could so far)

It really was all one the surface. - Make diku MMO  (e.g. with progression addiction play) which was actually fun to play and had low barrier for entry, -you will capture entirely new market .  WoW did exactly that and made itself "first MMO" for tens of millions

This. A thousand times.

Playing swtor story shit with a friend was pretty damn good.

Problem was the process to find strangers to play with was designed by a sociopath, group content had absurdly restrictive level ranges and side kicking was pvp-only because EA hate fun.

Yea that always made me boggle.  Add uninspiring loot rewards to that list.  Throwing in all those heroics and having them all be mediocre was a massive waste of money.

Daily quests with token currencies to buy shit based on the assumption of 43578 run throughs can eat a dick.

Best I don't even start on the subject of bind-on-equip.

I think this whole thread can be summed up by something many of us have been saying for a while now.

We need NEW forms of MMO's, rehashing the same thing, even if done better, is old hat. We have games that excel at that type of MMO. Its time for something new.  New combat like the action type cropping up, or the FPS type. Less text, and more Voice overs. Less guided experiences. I think we have reached the end of the Gamey worlds. Its time to go back to the worldly worlds.

It was actually Caldeverine you quoted there, not me. And I was one of the voices in the beta forums telling them to stop jacking up the difficulty because it was losing the Star Wars feel I wanted. I wanted to be a Jedi, not a youngling.

You already suggested the answer to the problem.  1) Make a good game.  It doesn't have to be perfect, but it is important.  2) Understand you are making a social game.  Grouping, Guilds, Activites, etc.

These need to be intuitive and easy to use.  Anything you do that restricts two or more people from interacting in an activity needs to be questioned as to why.  Do whatever you can to let them do things together.

SWToR got the feel of duos and dueling conversation choices right.  GW2 gets the dealing with others in the world and (mostly) auto-leveling right.  TSW gets dungeon runs right.  WoW got the Group Finder right.  SWG got the cantinas (until hologrinding; forced mind healing questionable), housing, and cities (mostly) right.

Why can't anyone put these all together?  They're making an MMO.  Dealing with other people should have as much attention paid to it as the entirety of the Game portions of its design.

Odd as this sounds, I kinda miss housing. SWTOR had a little feel of it, but it felt completely isolated from others. I loved EQ2's housing concept. And I was of the ilk that thought housing was pointless a few short years ago.

I agree with everything you've said,  I just think that is possible that someone could nail every one of those bullet points, and still not be a sure fire success.  You still need to break that barrier of "Is this game *enough* better than what I am playing to start over from scratch socially and in terms of the actual game"  People who are parts of big gaming communities who will adopt entire new games as a community probably have an advantage here and might switch easier, but I suspect that isn't the majority of people.

I would happily rate CoX's base/lair system high above any other MMO's efforts at housing, even when it wasn't actually housing at all. Creating a base was an amazing metagame in and of itself when you invested yourself in it.
I never experienced SWG but the housing (from what I'd seen) reminded me of DAoC's which was pretty good but implemented poorly.

In case you're still subbed but not checking the other subforum and care about such things, there's apparently a new world event starting today. Scavenger hunt something something.

And yeah CoH bases were pretty sweet even if ours looked like an episode of Hoarders.

SWG's housing was superior, but  CoX was pretty good.  Other than the grinding required to really outfit a base.  And that there was no personal housing.

SWG's system required every item to have a ( mostly )unique model and texture, and that was fine, as the INV was also 3D.  Many Current MMO's just rely on shared icons, as the items do not have a physical model.

But that's how/why you could place every item in the "world".

It was impressive.

SWG housing was great, especially once they made it easier to move things around. This was greatly improved by the city building. However, both were better ideas than they were implementations, acceptable to the players at the time for the same reason so many broken things were acceptable: If you could figure things out, figure out ways around the broken bits, and were into the idea of a virtual lifestyle investment, SWG was your game.

That's something SOE completely miscalculated later in the life of the game.

The genre needs to keep dabbling in "new", and maybe it will if TSW turns out successful in the old EQ1/UO/AC1 model of slow growth over a long haul.

If I could just decorate my SWTOR ship, I'd be pretty content. I found the CoX base thing a little too overwhelming and didn't play with it much. I liked having my own house in DAoC but I understand that all the sprawl made it sort of blah.

Never did get around to buying a house in LotRO.

LOTRO houses are basically the exact same thing as DAOC houses, but without the merchants.

EDIT:

Don't think this got linked yet, the Q&A on Friday was all about F2P stuff, so putting it here instead of the subforum thread:

http://www.swtor.com/blog/community-qa-free-play-edition

If I could just have flown my ship, that'd have been a big start. The minigames were fun, and it allowed them to check off the "we have space <something>" box for launch features. But it was by no means "space flight".

But in terms of housing, SWTOR has no more need for it than WoW does, so I didn't miss it.

Yeah, I'm still hoping that's something they'll consider in the not-too-distant future (read: a future where I'm still interested in playing). The trouble is at the moment, your ship in SWtOR is simply an instance; same as any other area in the game, which is why you occasionally see messages in /s or /1 and there's usually a number of players 'in' your ship.

The other thing I find that stops it from feeling like home is having to share it with certain Companions (or housepests like in the Consular storyline). I know there's a deep level of dislike for some; Skadge from the Bounty Hunter roster is a common complaint. Most people seem to want to show him the airlock.

I am nearly certain that at some point they said they were planning on adding ship customization. No idea if those plans have had to change with all the other changes, of course.

What I would love to see re: companions and ships is some Skyrim-type wandering around and doing stuff. Would help it feel more lived in.

The companions on my ship don't bug me, 'cause they're theoretically traveling with me. I'd kick Corso off if I could, but he doesn't make the ship feel less like "mine." I'd like it if they'd roam around more though, yeah, like how they do in ME3. That is totally never going to happen though. :P

I notice in the "what new content we're bringing out" parts, nothing is ever mentioned about new actual story stuff. You know, the stuff the majority of people actually bought the game for.

 :|

I would think it would be more likely than ever, now that they can monetize decorations or the amount of stuff you can have etc. It's no longer about whether the feature is sticky enough to keep people subscribed. If people are willing to spend money on something in the store, it's worth making.

Yeah I noticed that too. Makes me wonder if that part of the team is in disarray after the layoffs.

Yes, which makes me a bit irritated, because they're missing the damn reason anyone is playing their game. I'm sure they think of flashpoints and operations as story shit, of course, but that's not the main focus for most of them, and I SUSPECT most new ones are going to be light on story since they're something we're supposed to repeat. That's not bad, really, because I'm sure people prefer their flashpoints be that way after the first or second time through, but it does leave a gaping story-shaped hole in their content updates.

That's the main thing I feared going into this thing, alas.

All those fans wanting the game to be more KotOR-like are what ruined it, doncha know?  Story is the first thing to go!

Oh, and apparently that Friday Q&A is also the last Friday Q&A they're doing; they're discontinuing the weekly thing so they can focus more on being open and communicative with greater red name presence on the forums in general instead of just one blog post a week. I'll believe that  when I see it, considering Bioware's communication has been awful-to-nonexistent since beta.

Ugh, I prefered the Q&A thing because I don't like looking for dev posts when I am sure a bunch of them are full of nothing. I like all my nothing in one easy-to-read, easy-to-skim post.  :heartbreak:

They're going to have enough work on their hands converting the thing to run using a f2p cash-shop. I don't imagine you'll see new story content until that's done, working and attracting enough revenue to fund another big chunk of story content.

Story stuff is the most expensive, even more so than TSW due to the branching. If they ever actually can afford new real stories, expect it to be all droids and wookiees who don't have SAG rate cards :-)

I dunno, when Costume Packs first came on the scene in CoX, the developers were pretty open about it essentially helping to fund the next chapter/update. I know running/development costs on CoX were/are probably a fraction of SWtOR's if they're still keeping the voice talent around, but it was both great to see as an act of transparency and as a player of the game that you were literally keeping it going in that way.

I don't mind cash-shops so long as I don't feel like I'm being ripped off for my fluff or just being used for cheap bux (like EVERYTHING EVER in WoW).

Coming soon to SWOR: Silentus, planet of the deaf-mutes.  :grin:

I actually think MMORPGs have finished their golden age - there have been too many failed projects and the audience looks to be moving on to titles where they can drop in for a while, play a game or two, achieve something, chat in the lobby and then quit.

Regardless of GW2's quality, one of its key advantages is that it isn't reliant on sub fees to measure its success. And, that said, I'm sure GW2's player numbers will dive after launch too.

The 'branching' is actually mostly smoke and mirrors.  Smoke and mirrors I enjoy mind you, but still just an illusion.  The story itself doesn't really diverge other than at the end you'll get different emails to give you an indication of whatever consequences there were for your choice.  Also, you'll notice a lot of response dialogs are reused.

Decorating the ship would be fairly cool and would have been cheap to implement from a coding standpoint.  Not to mention having cutscenes there would make decorating worthwhile even if nobody ever saw it.  They could have done a lot of stuff with the ships without even getting into flight sim territory.

Yea, most of the story branching / choices that I remember were fake bioware-choice stuff. There were MAYBE a handful of choices in the storylines I played through (trooper, consular and each planet) that I remember having any significant impact beyond companion influence / ls/ds points. If anything, keeping the same 16 voice actors on retainer to record player voices is going to be a big deal compared to TSW and its mute protagonist.

Besides, didn't they lay off a lot of their team recently? That's also why their "we'll crank out content EVEN FASTER" promise in the f2p announcement struck me as odd.

Having gone through planets multiple times, there are actually more spots where choosing A/B or dark/light actually changes parts of missions. Not hugely, but there's a number of spots where you pick between "kill all these guys or gather these items" and such. More than I thought there were after one playthrough, and it crops up in the story missions as well as the main planetary missions. The random side missions, not so much.

Also the voice actor thing is worse than you think - they have to have a set of them for every language they translate the game into! Didn't really occur to me until I ran across the French version of the world event trailer that came out today.

Having gone through the Republic and Sith almost sixteen times with my kids, there are actually a lot ofdifferences in the choice, most minor, some pretty major. The one thing that stays constant is that none of the choices fuck you at the end. mostly they're just changes to the cutscenes at the break points before fighting. And yes, my kids love the shit out of this game and it's literally all we've done since classes ended back the first week of May.

Yea, I remember a few, typically the end mission of each planet (ie. dealing with the superweapon du jour) had a choice where you could destroy the thing or take control of it, but the missions still played out in the same areas - only you had to click things instead of kill things, like you said. But still, choices boiled down to 'accept this mission' / 'accept this mission while rolling eyes' / 'screw you, quest giver' for the bulk of the content, and 'light side choice where you probably have to fight more stuff' / 'dark side choice which probably makes it easy for you' for pivotal moments. There was one exception that stood out for me, the sith sorcerer dude you can save (as two consequent LS actions) and will help you against one of the planet big bads.

Same with FPs, there is typically one 'choice' in each non-Esseles/BT FP that gives light/dark side points and keeps alive / kills an enemy group... and sometimes there are shortcuts you can take if you have a high level in a craft skill (though that's not really a story choice per se)

I don't really see why they have to do that.  You don't have to understand voice acting to enjoy it.  The reason simple text suffers is stuff like emotion/tone/etc in the first place.  That sort of thing is easy to pick up from a foreign language with subtitles.  Not to mention a cheap localization with poor acting is a far worse choice.

This principle, repeated ad nauseum on thousands of design decisions, is why nobody will dethrone WoW until it dies of its own (whether that is of old age, neglect, or incompetence remains to be seen).

People like a place to put Trophies. Even if that Trophy is a Ewok toenail, or not even a Trophy.

I ran a small museum of oddities in SWG.

Were a poll taken on the matter, I highly doubt the number of WoW players who didn't want some form of housing or guildhall would outnumber those who did.

I have never met a version of housing I found even remotely compelling.  At the end of the day, I'm not visiting your 'house.'  And if you want to visit mine, I think you're kind of weird.

EQ2's housing worked because there was a gameplay mechanic tied to housing; if you wanted to buy something from a player (assuming that player had a house set up properly) you could go to their house and purchase it directly to avoid a 10-40% broker fee. For cheap mats or low level stuff you would just use the broker, but if you were buying a Master or a couple end-tier rare harvests, it was worth the walk to save a bunch of plat. And because of that, you had an incentive to decorate your house because other people would actually see it.

Your funny looking!

I'm not decorating it for you.

I mean shit, I decorated all my houses in Skyrim.

I just filled my EQ2 house randomly with all the random crap I found.  It ended up like some weird fantasy zoo.

I don't find housing compelling unless its in the real world. I still think it's possible to manage that with pre-set plots. AC did and it was nice to be wandering about and find a little settlement.

I missed this before but:

I don't need housing. In fact, I prefer the game not need housing. I just like a space to call mine that I get to decorate however I feel like.

Housing is one of the few mechanisms that can both provide something to do other than quest/combat grind AND gives the player something they can make uniquely theirs. It makes the game more worldy, and makes the gameworld more interactive and even sticky for those even remotely involved with it. ANY online RPG hoping to collect subscriptions should have it (and appearance slots) and WoW's lack of it might be its biggest weak spot.

This is what I was getting at. Housing had a purpose or better yet a function. Shopping around by zoning into people's rooms was cool.

Had girl on our SWG server who made her money by being an interior decorator. She'd fly from planet to planet buying crap from other people and bring it back to your house and set it up. I have to admit, I tossed her some credits and was very happy to do so. I certainly didn't have the attention span for it.

SWTOR could easily solve that though.  Simply put in a flashpoint where you start on someone's ship.  They could create a whole mechanic of group content involving ship travel.

This sort of thing is what I imagined the MMO genre was going to be all about.  Emergent stuff based on the world just being.  But instead in turned into a loot treadmill genre  :oh_i_see:

Part of the problem is that the developers of these "successful" MMOs are of the hardcore raiding ilk. A lot of the WoW developers are cut from that mold. That's why it took them so long to understand that people REALLY wanted appearance tabs.

They simply don't see value in cosmetic items, and the playerbase suffers for it until they get bitchslapped with facts or start losing cash. They only cared about the grind, the raids, the gear, and the "challenge" of the game. That's what they do, so that's what they assume all people do.

You know who likes to play house?  My two year old niece.  That's who.  Just sayin'.

DIKU is a game.  It's set in a world, sure.  But you do not need to fuck it up with your sandbox worldiness in order to play.  If you want that, it's fine.  I really don't have a problem.  There are programs you can execute on your computer that will transport you to such a place.  But you're not playing a game.  You're participating in a social experiment.  There's nothing inherently wrong with that.  But I'm not going to apologize for not wanting to participate. 

Now you can say all you want about how DIKU games reward narcissism, schadenfreude, and general asshattery.  But it's a separate argument from why you've got to foist your sandbox into it.

So why are we so hell bent on co-mingling these two obviously separate objectives?  Honest question.  I really don't get why that is in any way advantageous.  We're talking about two general demographics that pretty much don't even like or care  about each other.

TL;DR:  When Sandbox meets DIKU we get half-baked housing, and nobody wins.  Every goddamn time.

What the hell dude? It's housing. It isn't turning shit into a sandbox any more than cosmetic gear is. I don't even like sandbox MMOs.

What do I win with housing?

I dunno, it's like turning up to someone complaining about not being able to jump in GW1 and saying KEEP YOUR PLATFORMING OUT OF MY GAME.

Your preferred method of play (which is also my preferred method of play or at least pretty close, I infer here) is not threatened by having some extra stickiness for people who are so inclined to mess around with in their downtime between normal DIKU achiever events. I mean if we were talking about turning this into SWG 2 and suddenly I have to RP with skanky club dancers to heal my character or whatever else people hold up as examples of what was "good" about SWG, then I'd be right there with you, but we're talking about a subsystem that is already halfway in the game (we have the 'house', just not the modularity) and wouldn't affect you in any way that I can see.

I'm about as fan-girl as one can get (PS - Raph, where are you hiding!?!) for SWG and sandboxes, and I don't advocate that extreme, either.  There's room for both.

No I'm with you.  It doesn't hurt me directly.  But indirectly, the time spent developing such things is wasted time, at least for players of games like me (and you).  It's not that I object to their existence.  It's just that I seriously wonder why we're so sure that these two things should go together.  And I'm talking about emergent sandbox world shaping on one extreme or the other, and a game of any type.  Of course they CAN go together.  But why?  For all practical purposes they don't go together WELL no matter what extremes we're talking about in either case.  Hell, a guy on this very page is insistent that ALL mmo's should have housing because why not?  Because you can't just shit out a housing system for an MMO in an afternoon.

So if you've decided to make a world, then sure you need things like housing.  But if you've decided to make a game, then you'd be best served by relegating things like that.  Because they don't contribute to stickiness by definition.  They don't make the game better just for existing.  And for the majority of players who don't troll game forums like this, I suggest they're - how do you say - 'doo doo.'

They just need to give dungeon end bosses housing decoration drops that we can sell! Boom, everyone's happy.

I'm still not going to your house, damnit!

 :drill:

He really wants you in his house...  I bet the offers of candy or ice cream are coming up next.   :why_so_serious:

I have a protocol droid that is programmed to serve you, as it likes to say every time I walk past it.

Housing was first and best with UO.  Oh and boats too.  My house was part of the world, not cordoned off into a dead zone.   I ran a successful shovel selling business.  I had to kill griefers to keep my customers safe.  I even had a pet giant trapped in my guildhouse.

Put housing in the 'real world'.  Let each account have a plot.  Let better/larger plots be boss drops, AH purchases, even real world cash. Let a guild buy several adjacent plots to make a guild town.  Spread them out and  weave them into the world.  You could have housing in Elwynn, Westfall and other 'civilized' zones and not in end of game zones.  This would keep the leveling zones somewhat populated at least with home owners.

Put some in pvp zones, maybe at a discount.  Let us buy and sell to our neighbors.  Let us craft items in our home and sell them at our door.  Make a lived in world again.   The MMO amusement park ride era is played out.  Time for some good old fashioned housing and lag!

Housing does something that all MMOG creators want people to do. Waste time on bullshit that has nothing to do with the standard treadmill.

People have to have something "to do" when they log into these games. Achievements are just as stupid as housing trophies, but they exist, and they feed a certain percentage of players who enjoy killing things on one leg when the moon is full because it's on the list.

But it only does that for the very small fraction of the player-base who care to fiddle with it.  In games of yore, that percentage was higher by virtue of being smaller and wholly populated by a different demographic.

In modern AAA terms that logic has no foothold outside of the few nostalgic fanboys/girls left here on this forum and others like it.

Or to put it in your terms, though fiddling with housing by your standards is very much something to do when you log in, by most people's standards it is not even worth logging in for.  It's just a relic from a distant time when we thought that immersion translated to more meaningful gameplay.  It does not, sir.  Gameplay still has to be meaningful on its own merits, and we can all agree that is a very hard thing to accomplish.  So if you're making a game, I say focus on the game.

If I want to jerk off to my own awesomeness, I can do it on the Armory.  Otherwise give me something to log in and do that contributes to the game in a meaningful way.  If that means that the game falls on a less worldly location on the continuum, then them's the brakes.

Plenty of EQ2 players enjoyed fiddling with their houses in my experience, even though the game is very much diku and not sandbox. A lot of the coolest house items are rewards from quests or items you collect in dungeons and you'd place them in your house as status symbols. Simply owning a large house was also a status symbol. This seems to matter to people even when nobody else sees the house.

A lot of the same players also cared a lot about owning rare and cool mounts or clothes, even when these made no difference to their stats. I'm talking about hardcore raiders, not roleplayers.

Players also seemed to care a lot about owning a massive guild hall, decorated with trophies from stuff they had done in the outside world. Far from being an alternative to the game of killing and looting, it's seen as a sign that the guild is good at that game.

Letting players have visible evidence of their achievements, whether it's a statue of a demon they've killed or a flaming sword, doesn't seem to detract from the game in my experience. And it seems to be popular.

Based on what metric exactly? I'll save you the trouble of trying to guess, you don't know anymore than we do.

Right now people in WoW are collecting pets en masse to get pet battles going. That's a completely ancillary part of the game that has nothing to do with anything, and yet it's coming across as a pretty huge factor in the economy. Just like people clamoring for transmogrification, and the fact they are putting in Challenge Mode gear models just for people to show off.

Imagine them adding housing and achievments/trophies like that. People love visual representations of their achievements. Housing can provide that in addition to filling a social/decorator niche.

MMOs: Trying to cater to a fan base with a wide variety of different likes and dislikes is hard.

A better player housing system wouldn't have prevented what is happening to SWOR.

I love fiddling with houses, and I am all about farming billions of hours for cosmetic crap.  On the other hand, I like having lots of people around in cities rather than hiding away in little instances.  Housing was great in UO but I don't think it'll ever work nearly that well in a group-pve-oriented mmo.

The point I'm making is that if WoW had, say, EQ2's level of polish and game-play, then nobody cares.  It's not chicken and egg, man.  The game parts come first.  WoW's mechanics are polished to the point that they've gotten boring and been revamped like three times.  It's not even an argument that WoW, of all games, has some cash lying around to throw at ancillary shit.  Of course they do.  But as far as I'm concerned that only furthers the point that you shouldn't even be thinking about that shit if you're making a game and not a sandbox.

Let's take it away from MMOs, since apparently taking the worldy bits out of them is touching people in a bad place.

Who's still playing Spore?  Anyone?  I would describe the emergent innovation of that game as a word like, oh i donno, mind-blowing.  But when I played the actual game, it sucked.  Total crap.  I haven't had it even installed since like a month after it came out.

Will I fiddle with bullshit if the game is great?  Sure, for a few minutes.  I admit that others may be more inclined.  But I am not the exception, here.  Us being the squeaky wheel clamoring for more muddying of the game-play waters makes me cross-eyed.  It just does not compute.

I don't think anyone here was arguing housing or whatever makes a shitty game not shitty. That's some bizarre conclusion you drew on your own, dude.

It's not a zero sum game either. It can add to retention of a game that's actually a game. Sure, you don't just toss a turd out there and say BUT WE HAVE HOUSING. That's insane.

I mean shit, Skryim has housing and it's a single player game. Have you not seen the crazy amounts of You Tube videos people post on how they've decorated their Skyrim houses with shit?

You're projecting an awful lot of your own preferences into a very large number of people.  Just because you don't like something doesn't mean the majority of people don't like it, nor does it mean it's a waste of resources to develop something just because it's not your own personal cup of tea.

Musashi did you by chance think Vanguard was a great idea but housing shitted on it or something?  :why_so_serious: 

And they did it to the tune of 10 million subs.  I have a feeling they'd do it again.  Wanna bet Titan doesn't give two shits about housing?  Same guys working on it.

Horse crap.  I defend WoW and games like it plenty but you are putting on the blinkers big time.  The market has spoken multiple times on this issue now.  The raider crowd is not supplying the monthly subs and that's all there is to it.  You can bitch all you want but here come the pokemon. 

The days where WoW devs could get away with total bullshit because suits didn't want to rock the boat are over.

Uh.  Wut?  The market has spoken multiple times on this now.  It's said "MEH!" to anything that wasn't WoW.  WoW isn't just "the raider crowd."  It's everyone who's willing to pay a monthly subscription for an MMO.  And they're decidedly NOT paying for worldy games.  I'm not making this shit up.  I don't need a chart.  We've all seen it.

Look, I'm not saying you can't have your games with housing bullshit.  Just that you shouldn't complain that you're not the majority of the market, and you never will be.  It would be great if the worlds of explorers and achievers could somehow magically meet in the middle.  But I think at this point we're delving into politics.  Aaaand I cease to care.

What multiple people are saying is that housing works well and is popular among achievers in diku games when it`s been tried.

Also, you have some kind of obsession with shit.

The WoW market has said MEH to focusing on the raider crowd which views other game features as stuff for second class citizens.   That's decidedly the attitude you're taking and your reason for doing so is "WoW got away with that for years!".

You're other problem is you have housing tied to worldy in your brain for some reason.  The two have nothing to do with each other.  A sandbox element is not the same thing as a sandbox game.  EQ2 housing (which is what people keep bringing up) is not "worldy" in any way shape or fashion.

It's simply an appearance tab with more slots.

Non functional, private only, appearance tab. The only use I've had for housing is storing the housing drops the game (EQ2. Lotro, Aion) thinks I care about before I start just vendoring them. Maybe it would make sense in a crafting oriented game...

That's a solved problem as has been pointed out NUMEROUS times already.

You are right on one part, and then you're trying to springboard from that into a completely bizarre and contrary opinion. The world has not been impressed with anything but WoW on a large scale. That is your correct assertion. However, the world isn't even that impressed with WoW anymore.

Wow isn't just the raider crowd - Exactly, and that's part of the reason the Cataclysm numbers went into the toilet. The developers thought they could focus entirely on the DIKU treadmill portion of the game (leveling fixes, new zones, more raids, harder content) and look what happened. People bailed in record numbers. More people left the game than SWTOR had continued subs on average. They were looking for more from WoW than just the raiding and dungeons shit after 7 years.

They are decidedly NOT paying for worldy games - And they are decidedly NOT paying for a standalone dungeon treadmill either. That's why WoW is trying to combine both. They are realizing there is a significant portion of their customer base that wants more diversion stuff.

So you're advocating getting rid of all raiding then?

Don't be ridiculous, the only reason people play multiplayer games is for <feature> that <sperging poster> likes.

It does ring a bit of "we can't be all things to all people" doesn't it. Except in this case, the suggestion is "fuck all the people, then."

Apparently most were looking for more raids and dungeons (and other traditional DIKU content), they just wanted raids or dungeons that were more accessible. 4.3 wasn't some revelation of innovative content. It was just easy/fast dungeons and raids, which became very popular to run and stopped the subscription bleed.

I don't think you can look at Cata and say "See, here is an argument against just making traditional grindy end-game content like raids and dungeons". The majority of development time was spent on revamping the 1-60 leveling experience, which should have been the sort of thing that appealed to solo players or explorers and other players that don't care for raids or dungeons. Instead the new 1-60 was met with a collective "meh" by players, who blazed through it if they played it at all and then quickly ran out of content they could do or wanted to do at level cap. It's not too much unlike SWTOR when you think about it. Both releases placed a large emphasis on leveling content to the detriment of end-game content. It's easy to praise SWTOR for having leveling content that is actually entertaining and tries to do some things different, but I'm guessing EA/Bioware wish they invested more in end-game content so that more people would have subbed longer at 50.

The lesson from both games is clear: innovation is fine, but not at the expense of content that will keep people subscribed. I'm happy SWTOR allocated their development resources where they did now that it's going F2P, but why their subscription model failed seems pretty obvious.

I think its important to realize what end game content really is.  Frankly, when I think of raiding, I impulsively think of WoW 40mans, or even old school EQ stuff, but that isn't raiding anymore and sometimes I forget that.  So when I hear "most people want raiding" my impulsive response is "no they don't"  But frankly, I think that  what most people seem to want is content they can beat, get cool stuff, and feel powerful.  People don't like losing.  For all the fact that Wrath became boring as hell to me when it was just blast through heroics in 20 minutes and farm badges, I believe that was the height of WoW's sub numbers.  People want to feel awesome, even when they aren't, and that made them feel awesome.

You make a key point there. People just want accessible content across all levels. I think a good gameplan for Blizzard is to give a player a chance to always be upgrading. Whether that means more achievments, pets, collections, houses, raids, dungeons, gear, displays, pvp, etc. Always be upgrading. That's what keeps people playing.

I think that was why the revamp wasn't as awesome as they wanted. One, they admit it took entirely too many resources to finish that revamp, and two, new leveling content was poorly tuned in terms of xp gain over the zone.

This is very, very true.  It's amazing how quickly some zones progress (I'm looking at you, all of Northrend) and how slow others are (Tanaris and Un'Goro).

I'm guessing the "leveling experience" will become trivialized over the next few years, though.

I'm okay with everything Rokal said, as he probably said it better than I would have.  I think that sometimes what the average MMO gamer thinks he or she wants isn't really what they want.  I think sometimes sperging posters like me or others point to a feature and say this x, y, z is why it failed.  But when I think about game-play mechanics in a game, I kind of feel like they're really not just a feature.  It's the whole shebang.  Without a compelling risk/reward dopamine delivery system (ie game), you have nothing that any other feature will help.  On the other hand if you do have a game that's accessible across a given spectrum demographic, you can then start adding in all the ancillary crap I don't care about that your little heart desires.

Well, to bring it back to SWTOR, though, that's kind of the problem - ancillary stuff to do when you're not doing leveling content, battlegrounds, or dungeons/raiding. They have the basic features, and are adding more things in those categories as they go, there's just not a lot of other things to do other than some basic dailies. Systems like housing would fill out the in between bits, and they need to find something that would leverage the companions more at max level too. (Stealing skirmishes from LOTRO comes to mind.)

I thought Blizzard just posted another huge loss of subs?  Not that I disagree with your point.  People just want crap to do at 85 or whatever max level is.  In a way Cata failed because it took more stuff away (Wrath content) than it gave.

My understanding, though I haven't played all the way to endgame, is that endgame content is somewhat lackluster be it raid content or what have you.  I think whether that content interests you or not, it's better for everyone when there is a healthy endgame with content that is accessible to everyone should they care to play it.  THAT's what pays the bills.  Having something to do in between game-play sessions presupposes people are motivated to play at all.

The endgame dungeons are a little thin in number, although they've added a couple since release and more are apparently coming. The lack of a dungeon finder until fairly recently didn't help with that. AFAIK the actual raiding part of the community is pretty healthy.

Well, 4.3 was released in December of last year. It might have been popular content, but not for over 8 months.

It's only lacking on the casual end is the problem.  Stuff like raiding/dungeons etc are all quite fine and healthy.  They should probably adjust their reward formula concerning dungeons but that's just fiddling with numbers.  What they lack is all that ancillary stuff you can do in WoW just to fill a day.

Now this is true. But you can build that reward cycle around any feature or features you want, then market to the fuckers who want that.

And imho that is what SWTOR didn't do. They never really committed to the kotor style story+dress up, nor did they fully commit to EQ style raiding.

They needed to pick a fucking horse. Personally I think they'd be idiots to be doubling down on a space WoW already has - but that would have been smarter than this half in half out bullshit.

Make your starship your house.  Let you customize it and add lots more space content.  That would be 'Star Warsy' and would differentiate themselves in a fantasy-choked MMO field.

-Smuggling missions for smugglers
-Diplomacy/Intimidation missions for Jedi/Sith
-Ambush/assassination/spying missions for Agents

etc.

Jesus, yes - skirmishes with companions would be fucking awesome. :drill:

Be sure to understand your market though, and not just the hyped-up yokels who early register on the forums you shouldn't have put up in the first place*. Otherwise you end up spending cycles on game mechanics a small subset of players say they want but don't actually bother with.

* Oboards should be one of the Laws: don't have them, but if you must, don't trust them.

To be fair a lot of the time it's dev's crippling the new feature on day 1.   See Rated Battlegrounds in WoW.

Pretty sure all of those are already in. Except smuggling ofc.

I never understand why star wars games always have a smuggler class. Han solo was other things as well.

If you want to smuggle, play eve.

Would they really implement a douche class? 

Watch Star Wars again and think about how douchey he is.  His only redeeming moment is when he's like, "naw, just playin' guys, I'm not like that."

The smuggler does a fair amount of smuggling in its class storyline. That said it isn't like, a stealth mission type thing which is what I assume people are asking for whenever they bring up the smuggling.

He (she?) can also be a real douche. So there's that.

And let's not forget the shag-em-and-leave-em approach he has to diplomacy.  :grin:

Yeah the smuggler storyline is just  :grin: all the way around. I go back and forth between that and JK as my favorite, but there's no doubt smuggler is the funniest.

It also has Corso.  So it balances out.

Wait.  No it doesn't.  I knew something ruined my favorite class.

Yes, everything you said. I loath raiding, and even grouping with people I don't know IRL. Wrath was perfect in my opinion. There was raids and stuff for people who wanted that, but at the same time there was more stuff for me to do than I could get done in an average playing day. Hell, Wintergraps was just fun regardless of how your team was doing because it was awesome - and always full. Cataclysm was like I giant wet blanket that beat you over the head that unless you were willing to do whatever the fuck they designed it to be, you could eat a bag of dicks. It was like a throwback to EQ1 and The Vision. MoP had better be a casual playland of lolipops and blowjobs for everyone if they ever want to get their subscribers back. especially me. Also, Pandarans a fucking decade too late.

Having played a smuggler as both genders (YES I AM BROKEN I KNOW OKAY), the Corso factor as a dude is much, much lower. He's only sort of annoying as a dude smuggler. As a lady smuggler, he is the worst thing in the universe. I am pretty sure if I had just played a dude one from the outset, my white-hot hate for Corso would not have manifested. I just would've thought he was a pathetic dork and ignored him as soon as possible.

This white hot hate you mention included stringing him along until almost married. The lady dost protest....

I quoted this posted mainly because from reading threads like this over the past decade I felt like I'm not the typical gamer nor is there a game being made for people like me. I really love most of the storylines (especially the agent) I just wish I didn't have to wade through all the other crap to get to it, or that most of the cool stuff is in cinematics and not the game proper, if you understand my meaning. (although I really do love shooting dudes in the face when they mouth off, cinematics or no  :drill: )

Man, I told him no so many times. SO MANY TIMES. I am positive he was this close to locking my smuggler in his love dungeon.

Get a room.   :why_so_serious:

She would have.  With restraints and everything.

seriouslyheissoloathesome

Why? It's possible to have never played the game, be an interested observer and not be a douche. I'm interested in giving it a try out when it goes F2P. It wasn't sold here on release, and after the clusterfuck that was WAR I'm not jumping on any MMO in the first 6 months. From what I've read here, it appears that my concerns were pretty well justified. I almost bought it on sale a few months ago, but worked out I could get it cheaper online, and so held off. Now I see it's going F2P and the levelling experience is the best part, I'm interested in giving it a duoing runthrough, then probably dropping it when I get to the end.

Not usually. It may be possible, but it usually ends up with people patting themselves on the back about how they were "right" for not buying the game.

I dunno, I'm sharing his concern.  The whole "circle the wagons" mentality is rarely good for open discussion.  Trolling is annoying, yeah, but you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Dissenting opinions are good, and shutting out all feedback from people who haven't dropped money on a game is going to mute a lot of that.

There's plenty of topics related to the game you can discuss without having bought it, and if I'm talking out of my ass about a topic that does require knowledge (like, class balance or something) for a game I haven't played, it should be fairly easy to call me out on it.

It just always gets under my skin when people start looking for ways to dismiss arguments without looking at the argument itself.  If you don't feel like responding to something, then ignore it, but enacting rules about who's allowed to say what about which games seems only a half step away from outright quashing dissent.

I think a discussion about why people didn't try it would be worthwhile.  As long as nobody acts like those opinions were the reason a bunch of people who did try it quit.

Just going to repost this:


Criticism of the game is fine. Telling everyone why you didn't buy the game is fine too. Periodically dropping by to remind us why you didn't buy the game, and gloat about your decision, is less fine.

I didn't mean that because you didn't play the game you can't comment. It was more about people commenting on things that would be very hard to know without playing the game.

I'm one of those who has never played the "game". I only beta tested it and I think the journey SWTOR has taken is worth discussing. The problem is that people are going to try and ruin that discussion for whatever reason.

One really egregious thing is when people who haven't experienced particular bits of gameplay harp on how the execution of those bits was bad or whatever. The parade of people saying "oh it's just a worse WoW" without having actually played the combat, run a dungeon, experienced the questing flow/style, area design, etc., to know how it compares with/differs from WoW, for example.

If you can somehow manage to avoid being one of those people, by all means contribute.

There is also a large difference between voicing concerns early about a game and what might be turning you off, versus showing up after the fact and gloating over a corpse.

Alganon?

Comparing it to WoW is pretty confusing in the first place.  Half the people who want to bash WoW clones haven't played WoW since Vanilla or TBC.  The combat has really changed over the years.   The core parts of the game are drastically altered at this point.

We should have a committee that can agree on detailed standards of whether you are entitled to have an opinion.

If you see an error of fact and know better you get to be useful and correct it or ignore it if that's :effort:

I thought the above was what we did here - voice early concerns AND gloat over the corpse.

Is that what it is?  I thought it was just bitching.......   :why_so_serious:

When the developers basically say that mechanically the game is like WoW it's a little hard to avoid that comparison. IIRC they didn't just imply it was like WoW, they actually mentioned WoW specifically, although my memory of that is a bit fuzzy now. The game mechanics were very much pitched as "go with what works in other games" at the least, where "other games" clearly meant WoW.

No that's something different than what I meant.  Calling it a WoW clone is fine.  The problem is people who don't even know what WoW is now and haven't played SWTOR either.   They pop up and rag on some flaw Vanilla WoW had like "the combat is too slow!" and nobody really knows which version of WoW's combat they are calling slow in the first place.

I think WoW's cash shop is brilliant. No advantage or Pay2Win, just purely-optional shineys.

Exactly.  Nobody *needs* a $25 sparkle pony, but it's there if you really like it and its of value to *you*. 

The purchasable pets aren't even set to dominate in Pokemon.  You can overcome them with the proper pets from in-game finds, so no reason other than pure collection to buy them.

I just think they charge about twice as much as they should because they can. This is a distinction of value, nothing more. Charging nearly two month's subscription for a sparklepony is ludicrous, and they know full well that people will lap it up anyway. I feel responsible for being the curmudgeonly, pennypinching antithesis to that. Fuck your sparklepony, and for $25, you really ought to be able to.

I feel obliged to post because I bought a heart of the aspects for my girlfriend for valentine's day (I was saving up for a ring, so sue me).  How does anything purchased through any shop negatively affect you in any way?  It's one of those just don't buy it kind of things, like a goofy collector's edition. 

I for one am usually a sucker for CEs because I like the swag that comes with them.  I still have my EQ2 swag because I thought it was neat.  But, for example, the MoP expansion CE seems a little overpriced, so I'll pass.

Although, I'm sure people would pay $250 for a sparklepony you could fuck in game.  I bet they could fashion so many moneyhats with a fuckable sparkle pony.  Look out redtube, here comes night elf/blood elf sparkleponyporn.

That's where you should have stopped, because the second half of the statement is the total summation of what it is.  I think they could have sold sparkle ponies at $10 more and still sold nearly the same amount and made much more money.

I've bought nothing because I feel they're all overpriced at more than a buck or two.  Doesn't stop me from dropping $50 on a tank in World of Tanks, though.  The value is subjective to the buyer.  After that it's just economics about price point and customers lost vs revenues gained.

The rest of it was supposed to be a Hicks style rant but I guess it doesn't come through so much in text.

It does become a problem when a company just suddenly decides to put all of the nice appearance content in the shop.  That's a potential carrot that some people enjoy working for.  WoW is good about avoiding this so the Sparkle Pony actually feels optional.

This may shock you, but the idea behind these MMOs is to make money.   :oh_i_see:

Which is why they should keep doing subs instead of shitty F2P.

And if they could make more money with subs then they would be.

Subs work well for the one or two top MMOs, or those that have carved out a historical niche.

F2P allows a lot more titles to survive if they can cultivate a small-yet-dedicated audience. Or even a large casual audience. There have been a number of F2P titles dying off this year, so it isn't foolproof, but not forcing players to buy the box and then pay a sub fee means a title has a much bigger audience which in turn has a flow-on effect within a massively multiplayer game.

Which is why a lot of MMOs offer hybrid payment models. They want that regular sub revenue, but also want a large active player base.

Subs are done. They're just taking a while to die completely because we are awash in some really old ass games that still eke by on the monthly fees. The benefits of subs have been obvious since newspapers and then magazines did it. After the first year or two, whoever's left is pure profit because they either love what's there so much they aren't ever going to leave, or they've forgotten they're paying for it.

But new games can't rely on that because f2p is far too lucrative in a much shorter period of time (months versus years), and you can get both kinds of players: the pay-nothing eyeballs you can throw ads at and use for "registered accounts" PR, and the beautiful snowflakes willing to pay through the nose to look unique in a sea of sameness. Plus, games built as f2p generally cost less. That doesn't include the almost-dead games built on AAA budgets with expected sustainable subs converted to f2p as a last gasp chance to keep it alive. You don't spend $100-250mm on a f2p title. But the lower risk of f2p is important for another reason.

Gamers are fickle, and MMOs have evolved to incorporate them. Multi-month subscriptions are no longer assumed. Companies can no more rely a gamer to stay in an MMO any longer than they can expect the masses to stay in an FPS or a sports title or any other 1-2 month genre. This is partly where sequelization came from. And it's hit MMOs now.

Which really just means we caught up to where the Eastern markets were 8 years ago  :oh_i_see:

It's all degrees of perspective. I've bought a ton of the $10 pets and $25 mounts in WoW for my wife and myself, and even as gifts for friends - and in LotRO, I used Turbine points to buy one of the P2W max-speed mount for one of my (and the wife's) main characters. Despite my other opinions on aspects of LotRO - there's a huge gap in perceived value between a $20 sparkle horse that you get on one character versus a $25 sparkle horse that you get on every character on the goddamned account, across all servers. F2P or not, the value for the LotRO mounts is shit. And I say this as someone willing to spend money on useless shit.

It's one of the big things that is keeping me umming and ahhing about getting into The Secret World. I like my characters to look good. I agonize over it (especially in SWtOR, where finding good looking gear is a metagame itself). The fact that TSW has a RM store for buying clothing for your characters is already a bitter pill to swallow because I know I could probably spend a lot of money on it. The bitterest part is the aftertaste of knowing that whatever you buy, it will only be available on one character per transaction. That's just downright mean.

As for the difference between LotRO's fluff and WoW's fluff, I guess while LotRO is doing the same thing as TSW in making you repurchase the same item for other characters, LotRO literally survives on that. WoW has been self-perpetuating for a few years now.

The sort of annoying thing about the TSW implementation is that subbing doesn't get you a store point allowance. It's all on top of having a sub, and there are a lot of options involved that are store-only. You can buy an entire, nice-looking business suit with in-game money... except the dress shirt. They're all RMT-only (for male characters). You get the top half of the Bruce Lee Game of Death outfit as an achievement reward... but if you want the pants, RMT. Stuff like that is kind of irritating. If it was just one or the other it would bother me a lot less - make the whole yellow tracksuit thing a store purchase, or the whole suit, and it at least makes some kind of sense to me.

Yea, I didn't much go for the all-hands-in-all-pockets approach TSW currently have. It'll clean up when they inevitably go F2P. But for now, the sub is just so you can continue to log in while the MTX is for stuff you can't get any other way in a game you're already paying for.

Was a minor quibble I had, becuase luckily, I couldn't care any less what my character looks like  :grin:

I do, but in mmo, that doesn't count for much. In the 'traditional' model, I'm cockblocked by raid requirements, I've had zero ability to get the really cool stuff in any mmo since UO (eat my katana of vanq, bitches). Under f2p, mtx, whatever, I won't drop real money just to look cool in a video game.

For sub-less games, as long as its not intrusive to my playstyle (and TOR's looks decent), I'm getting kind of excited for it. I could easily see jumping between TOR and GW2, and eventually finishing up stuff in TSW when they jump onboard. If not...there are always other things to do, no loss for me.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1143749/LFR.jpg)

That assumes your barrier is 'getting into a raid group' and not 'actually having time to raid'.

Because I play so much WoW.

Also, you may misunderstand what I mean by raid requirements. Time and inclination to do synchronized dancing with strangers are also requirements.

Yeah, the thing about raiding is that it requires chunks of times were are unrealistic for a lot of people.  A well oiled raid guild is probably only spending 15 hours a week raiding at most unless they are chewing class (and then it is a lot more). Throw in another 30% for prep (5 hoursish) and we're looking at 20 hours a week.  That isn't absolutely absurd if it is the only game you play.  But even then,  the problem for "casual" players is that they can't get the same rewards over 20 hours of play unless they can spend it in 4-5 3 hour uninterrupted blocks.  Whether or not that is 20 hours in one week spread out into hour chunks here and there for 20 hours over a month, that seems to be the disconnect.    

I guess it comes down to the question of whether or not MMOs should reward you playing a lot of hours consistently, or if it just pure /played that matters.  In other words, should a guy who plays 5 hours a day and I guy who plays 1 hour a day be at the same amount of progression after 20 hours /played over any amount of real time.  A raider will say they play more, so they should be rewarded more, a "casual" player will say that it isn't right that a raiders 20 hours are worth "more" than their 20 hours.

For me it's the intimidation of not knowing what to do: don't step in the fire.  How am I supposed to know if I've never run the instance before?  

The time to run a raid should also included the forced prep time every raider assumes us casuals have to do.

And I still assume gear is still a necessity for any PUG raid?  I've never ever tried to use the LFR tool because of gear and not knowing what to do.

This is something I've noticed in both WoW and SWToR; it's rare that anyone ever communicates; most people just seem to assume everyone has already done it several times already.

WoW added the Dungeon Guide to try and smooth some of the Mechanics unknowns.   There's also YouTube vids if you don't want to read that, don't understand or don't want to ask questions of your group for fear of looking silly.   You're not on the cutting edge, or even the bloody edge so make use of the mistakes of other people who've paid the "idiot tax" to learn the harsh lessons.

LFR raids require no prep time.  Flasks, food, etc.  Totally unnecessary and nobody bitches until wipes happen.   Fuck, you can even sneak on  as a DPS in DPS gear and take a healer slot and until you wipe or suck ass almost nobody will call you on it. (Not that I've done that...  :awesome_for_real:)

1. Who's fault is that?
2. You don't have an hour and a half?
3. I want to do raid things without doing raid things.  Chances are you're sitting out the next generation of MMO's as well.

There is almost no reason to have more than one character in TSW.

Raiding is and will always be niche, because of all the things mentioned here and always:

• The level of coordination before and during. This is the funnest part of raids. But it's also for a much smaller set of players than the ones who are hanging around duoing with their spouse or getting together with their buddies once or twice a weak. Anyone can join a random pickup raid. But how many of those are ever successful?
• The time investment (both to prep and partake). Slightly more than 90 minutes there.
• Being blamed for making few mistakes causing the dozens of hours of collective time loss. This is probably one of the harder things to handle for people who can even invest the time. The horror stories non-raiders tell other non-raiders about raiding...
• Gentrification itself. The average age of videos gamers in general is not going down nor is it staying steady. Maybe we'll all have time again for raids when we're retired  :grin:
• Oh and, well, the sheer desire to make all of that investment just for the chance that something of meaningful value will not only drop, but that you'll win the role.
  
  

Raiding being the thing most talked about a few years into the life of an MMO does not make raiding the foundation by which all MMOs launch. It is fun. I've enjoyed many of the ones I've been in. But Molten Core why WoW was initially successfully.

You can keep calling raiding niche, but 90% of the players in the largest pay-to-participate MMO take part.  If they added the LFR tool to the F2P games I suspect you'd see the same there.

Single player antisocial online.. that's niche.   Games are social experiences now, the anti-social need not apply.

Wat

Raiding stopped being niche when it became the only endgame option.  Back in EQ casuals were busy taking years to level to bother with raiding, now it takes three months tops and you gotta give 100% of your players something to do at max level.

Well, I'm not anti-social, I'm ADHD. I can't sit and concentrate on doing one thing for that long, especially coordinated with a bunch of people. It's one reason I like GW2 a lot, it's a very meandering experience and it both keeps me from getting bored and allows me to drop what I'm doing and walk away for a few minutes to do something else. I don't think it's antisocial to play guitar, do the laundry, play with my cat, talk on the phone, go say hi to the neighbor, have a snack, etc ad nauseum reasons why I don't sit for an hour and a half at a computer.

But it is kind of funny you say that games are social experiences when the last several mmo releases have caught shit (mostly from wow players) that they're single player experiences. Just because wow is popular doesn't mean it's good. It's there, doing what it does. If you like that, go do that. Don't put tackling into baseball.

But as I said, it doesn't really bug me much anymore. I get my money's worth out of the few mmo I play because I'm a slow content consumer (level 15 in GW2!), even TOR would offer me another year or so. And gaming is probably my third or fourth hobby at this point. So whatevs :)

As a DPS or healer, you can figure everything you need to know out by downloading Deadly Boss Mods and following the rest of the group. Trying to tank is a little bit more difficult, but if that's what you want to do, go in as a DPS the first couple times and watch what the tanks are doing, or just go do research somewhere else: YouTube vids, wowhead comments, etc. The gear requirement on DS LFR is pretty low too, 372 IIRC? Easily obtainable from the DS 5 mans.

I do find humor in the accepted 'mainstream' gameplay is to go watch a video and then try to copy what they did.

Strictly my own opinion, of course, but that sounds like a wretched game.

Why wouldn't you?  If I want to learn how to play guitar (an example i'm choosing because you mentioned it), I'm not going to just pick up a guitar and try from scratch without help to figure it out.

The LFR design allows you to drop in and out at your whim, the only extended stretch of time is the waiting on queue to open-up.  Sure, you'll wind-up running the same bosses more often than not but it's not designed folks who don't have large chunks of time for wasting - like most games.

I didn't say popular = good, but I tire of the tightly-held idea by my generation and hipsters that popular = crap.   Those games aren't catching shit for being single player just from WOW players.. it's all players.  The generation raised on social media and multiplayer games being the norm, not the exception.  The ones who don't think twice about foolishly sharing every facet of their lives and wonder what you're trying to hide because you don't do the same.   Times & market changed and so have games.

As such a slow content consumer.. why care at all then? At that point you're the one asking for tackling in baseball.  The amount of additonal content by the time you hit the cap means none of this is ever a concern for you.   There were plenty of 'cool looking' models in the leveling portion of the last few games I played - which was your initial gripe.

Post LFR that's probably about right.

Wait as sec there. There's a stat out there somewhere that says over 8 million* of WoW's subscribers are raiding? If LFR has really resulted in that then fuckyea it should be build into the basic requirements alongside minimaps and bank boxes.

And I'm not saying raiding vs single player antisocial. There's a lot of ways people play these games that don't require 25+ person coordinated raids.

* Based on their posted 9mm subscribers from yesterday

No. Just no. Significantly less than 90% of total WoW players ever hit max level let alone raid. And that's after LFR made things even simpler. 90% is beyond a crazy estimation. I'd struggle to imagine much over 40% of WoW players ever make it to raids, be it regular or casual attempts.

You honestly think there's a large number of currently-subbed WoW players that never hit max level?  :uhrr:

Depends on what you mean by "a large number".  When I was playing, six months ago, there were still a fair number of newbies in the newbie zones.  People quit every day, for the game to be holding relatively steady, there's got to be new players taking their places.

10% seems a bit iffy, but without any solid numbers from Blizzard on either side (and if there are any, I wouldn't mind seeing them), it doesn't seem any more or less believable than "90% of everyone has seen a raid".

Maybe some people just want to dive in and play Raid Hero™.  I'm not sure what you'd call the rock band derivative.  The Guild is already taken.

There's a number of sites that breakdown various stats from players who use mods. I haven't played in years so no idea if these mods/sites are still accurate. But back in the day theyt indicated that a good chunk of players did have a character hit the level cap, even if the vast majority of reported characters were spread across all levels.

Eight years in, I'd say there's a good chance most current active players have hit the cap at some point or another.

The earlier question is whether the vast majority of them have been raiding in a way that we'd now say that Raiding is no longer a niche activity for a dedicated minority. I think it is because of all that is required to be the kind of dedicated raider a developer would design a game around. But I'm happy to be proven wrong.

The thing with WoW today is that you don't need to be dedicated to be a raider. LFR requires very little effort to get into; get your ilvl to the minimum and wait in a queue. No farming mats/resist gear/food/flasks, no need to learn strats, coordinate with guildies, make 9-39 friends, get keyed, travel to a distant zone, etc. If you are inclined toward raiding at all, you're probably doing at least LFR.

Even if they haven't reached max level, the vast majority of eq clone players believe the reason they are playing is to hit max level so they can raid with their friends.

If developers stopped actively working to prevent non-max players cooperating with other players in a cooperative multiplayer game, then perhaps they wouldn't have to spend all their time getting migraine worrying about end game raids.

Hey look CoX is shutting down, wonder if they have any ideas to steal....

Was reading the SWTOR forums, to see how things are going, and the chatter their seems to feel numbers are still trending downwards even after the merges.

To be fair, that's probably the case for the official forums of every MMO released, ever. Every game is terrible, people are quitting all of them in droves because of (change / design element I disagree with) including the poster's 500-person guild and everyone on their friends list, etc.

At least at launch, SWTOR's forums were extra "special" since they seemed to include the worst from the SWG forums, WOW forums, and even DAOC vnboards...

They haven't done any content in a while.  Every MMO trends downward like that.  I doubt it's anything like it was before the merges when people were quitting due to dead servers.  You can't expect them to have growth when the game is about to become free for anyone with the patience to wait either.

I am not currently at max level and am subscribed...but then I don't really like WoW because of the unrelenting focus on Raiding...so yes.

Then again, I did hit Max in Vanilla, and TBC, and Cataclysm...so depending what you mean by "never" I might not qualify.

WotLK 5-mans was about the most group content I'd ever want... the constant push to get me to raid (and the ultimate abandonment of "world" "character" or any other aspect of the RPG part) is what basically killed WoW for me.  The absence of any sort of reliable alternative effectively made me give them money to validate a game design I increasingly hate. (Oh, and curses to you D3 for perpetuating that lie even further).

As Sky mentions above, GW2 has the _potential_ to get the balance back in line with where I want it to be... we'll see.

There are, yes.  Blizzard said as much a while back which I found when trying to research my 90% number - which I also remember seeing from Blizz.  (and now can't find.) 

I'll admit I meant 90% of max-level characters and used 90% as hyperbole because I couldn't remember the exact %.  It's probably fairly lower than that but it was definitely over the minority and beyond the 'niche' level people love to throw-about of 3%.   Hell, more than 3% of players have completed hardcore modes of raids so raiding in general has to be greater than that.

Just by using WoW Progress, which is an Armory parser, you can get a general idea of what encounters look like and who is raiding.

Almost 62,000 groups have done the normal versions of the T13 raids, about 5,000 of those in 25 mans. So that's about 700,000 characters that have completed stuff, with some obvious overlap in those people that raid on more than 2 characters. Even if we say it's actually 500,000 people, that's 5.5% who still raid normally.

I don't think it's unrealistic to assume that LFR is dramatically more popular. Maybe 5-10x as much.

I'm the first to admit that I'm so old school it's hard for me to imagine concepts introduced for a few hundred thousand players 12 years ago can actually be popular for many millions now. Raiding certainly has gotten more approachable in the last decade. But none of the core concepts I bullet'd above have changed.

So has the actual percentage of max-level players in MMOs who raid gone up? Or is the percentage the same but the raw numbers up because more actual players have hit the endgame?

Would love to see real numbers, but I'm not sure there's anything public, nor anyone willing to break NDAs  :-)

The % of raiders in my experience is HUGELY higher than when I started playing MMOs. No comparison to be made.

EDIT: And I should add, the core concepts that you bulleted above HAVE changed. LFR in WoW does not require a ton of coordination, or prep time. And that blame thing has never been universal.

Never experienced LFR so I'll guess it's all that. But question: someone who hits max level in WoW can go right into raiding and make a meaningful contribution? I  assume there's still the "tier"ing sequence of dungeons?

For the moment there are some obligatory dungeons you have to gear up in.  LFR only came with the last patch, with a minimum item level requirement just under what you obtain in the heroics that came in the same patch.  So it's gearing up through heroics and justice point vendors for a short while depending on how hardcore you are at running dungeons.

Next expansion it might be a possibility to finish off the 85 -> 90 level grind, grab some quest blues and rep gear, and go straight into casual mode raiding; it really depends on what Blizzard sets as the minimum gear level and what's easily obtainable.

I'm guessing when you said you hit max level in Cata, you meant WotLK; otherwise, you're max level for another few weeks since MoP isn't out yet. And when I said never, I meant never as in never at the max level at the time. People who were level 60 in vanilla have hit max level, people who hit 60 in WotLK have not.

The concept for the few hundred was in the days when the games were worlds and engulfed life and required many, many, many hours.  Sandboxes are dead, the masses are involved and want something simple and entertaining and raiding fits that bill better.  As I've said for the last decade, I've got a job I don't need my game to tell me I have to do a second to enjoy myself.

Raiding these days is probably one of the most casual things you can do and is more like any other hobby than it was when EQ was king and you had to be online 24/7 or else someone else would snipe the kill.  It's scheduled, it's instanced (so no sniping) and it takes as long as your group of friends decides to do it. 

With the LFR tool it's even more accessible.  You decide to hop on, hit the tool, wait a little while and then hop in.  If it's not working for you or you have to leave, you hop out.  It's as seamless as any other matchmaking game and therefore accessible to anyone who put their time in to gear-up.  Which is  the same process on a smaller-group scale.

So when your game is fundamentally the same thing for two portions, you're going to wind-up with a larger percentage.

Actual numbers? Nobody's telling us outside of blurbs once in a while so you've got to get lucky or parse data.  Which Blizzard makes pretty freely available, just not at the account level, only on the character level.

I only raided through BC so things could have changed. But from what I remember, raiding required a bit of the pre-raiding prep and a guild if you wanted any chance of success. Neither is out of reach if you're willing to put in the time. That I could raid at all was an indication of how not-EQ1 things had become. Shit, that I hit the max level at all was an important distinction. During the one brief moment in my life where I could have excluded the world after hours and put in a respectable amount of time to make the upper tiers of the earlier games, I wasn't yet even a gamer. As my wife likes to remind me :-)

I'm curious about modern WoW and whether Raids have just become another set of dungeons, with differences being subtle. How do random player groups take to instruction, and are things structured enough for a modicum of success? I still remember early MC raids that were disasters for a well organized guilds first figuring it out, and pickup raids going all clownshoes on the first two guards. But even WoW stopped being "new" seven years ago, so maybe that much has changed?

Heroic raids are about the same difficulty as the old Vanilla/harder TBC raids, normal raids are doable with PUGs if the players know what they are doing (and therefore very doable with a half-way decent guild), and LFR raids are about on a par with late WotLK Heroics i.e. if you can grasp "don't stand in the fire" it helps...but isn't strictly necessary.

The later heroics in WotlK weren't that simple really.  People just learned the mechanics and did them for the most part.  The dps was fairly forgiving, but you still needed one good dps to understand the fight.

Nice. I enjoyed the bit of raiding I did, though my guild was generally so far ahead of me I'm kinda just the sympathy case they let tag along. Hard to imagine things have gotten better since moar dots. But it's been years since I've raided, so I'll just shut up about what used to be. As soon as ya'all get off my lawn!

The first expansion pack has been announced - one new planet and a level cap increase of five levels. Doesn't sound like a lot but it's fairly cheap, at $9.99 for subscribers and $19.99 for f2p players (that's the pre-order price anyway).

There is a video advertising the expansion, but it doesn't tell you much:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbNzUwBIbNU

I haven't found a release date but they say they will release more information "over the next few months" (http://www.swtor.com/rothc). But pre-orders are open so you can hand over your money right now if you want to:)

Yeah, we've been talking about it down in the gaming graveyard section.  Already pre-ordered.  Five new levels with full voice over story quests.  The storylines and crafting are what's important to me.  Oh and you can have same-sex imperial entanglements.  Pubs too I guess.

I ordered, started playing again since I hit the wall pretty hard in GW2.  As enjoyable as that game was I just got home one day and thought "I just cant be bothered" so I fired TOR back up.  Servers are busy enough and I still get a kick out of the PvP...also appears they softened the PvP gear grind which makes me want to get some alts geared.  Wll see how long TOR can hold my attention again but they havent released a date for this "expansion" as far as I am aware and site says spring :(  I am interested to see what they do for WvW style PvP, Im guessing instanced WvW sort of like GW2 which I would be ok with if its fun enough.  I can see me switching between TOR and GW2 alot this year. 

Yo. :oh_i_see:
http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22841.0

There might be people interested in this who would never go near the SWTOR gaming graveyard forum (or maybe I'm the only one :shrug: )