Predictions: 1m+ players 3 days out; how about in January 2013?

[Maledict]

They just announced a couple big pvp fixes today.   Several ability responsiveness issues are supposedly identified and due fixed on PTS and they are nerfing scoundrel/operatives.   As long as they keep this stuff up I'm not ready to downgrade my estimates by much.   People will quit but many will come back in 6 months and new people will keep joining.

No they won't. The history of MMOs has shown us one key thing - you get one chance, and that's it. The number of people who will come back to a game further down the road is very small. Only WoW managed to keep people coming back, and surely the utter size of the game and the fact everyone under the sun plays it has something to do with that.

[eldaec]

Worrying about people who blast through content miles above and beyond the regular population should be pitied, not catered to.

They shouldn't be catered to, but they are the trailblazers who tell everyone else what is coming. What BioWare wants is, "You suck BioWare because I've completed the content and it is so damn awesome I hate you for not having more of it". Instead, the message is, "You suck BioWare because the endgame content is badly bugged and completely unbalanced and just boring". A lot of players don't post on forums, but will look up what comes next and if all they are seeing is a constant stream of negativity then it impacts on their desire to actually do those tasks.

I'm sure that it will be fixed in time, but the disappointing thing is that despite all the money poured into SWOR, it's the same old story.

This is another reason EA should just close down the forums and be done with it.

[tmp]

The number of people who will come back to a game further down the road is very small.

[citation needed]

It'd be interesting to know the actual numbers for such recurring customers, but given how people can re-appear when expansion packs and such are released, and all these "please come back and check us out again" offers routinely sent to the old players... i have my doubts if it's really that insignificant.

[tmp]

EA should just close down the forums and be done with it.

Didn't WAR try it?

[Der Helm]

They could of made the "Good Guy" stories far more interesting if they'd used the companions more as well.

I shall do the customary 

Thank you. 

[Kageru]

So in the process of leveling to cap how much game-time is class unique content? rather a lot of variance in the estimates being used on the official forums.

[cironian]

So in the process of leveling to cap how much game-time is class unique content? rather a lot of variance in the estimates being used on the official forums.

I'd say there's perhaps 10% class content at best, counting by amount of time spent on stuff.

But that's why I'm focusing on my smuggler now, since the content on the other faction is 100% new. So the game will still have me for a bit longer.

[Rokal]

The number of people who will come back to a game further down the road is very small.

[citation needed]

Cryptic Interview

One thing I've noticed so far, in reading your interview with Gamespot and reading about the game, [is that] it seems to be very focused. We have five classes, the heroic level set, and Neverwinter which is a huge city and you can do a lot with that. Is Cryptic going for a light content approach, like a lot of base content to start with, enough for a game, but light, and then looking to expand on it from there?

I'd say what we're trying to do, and having learned from Star Trek Online and Champions, let me tell you my philosophy before STO and CO. Coming out of City of Heroes we launched to great acclaim, we got a lot of publicity, everybody loved it, but we didn't have crafting and we didn't have PvP. All there was to do was fight. Over the years everybody pinged us on this. We added PvP and didn't really gain any subscribers. We added crafting and we gained roughly ten thousand subscribers for three months and then it went back down. So in the grand scheme of things, what I learned is, if you didn't have a feature at launch, you might as well never have it. Whatever you're going to have at launch defines you as a game.

Coming into the launch of STO and Champions, I made sure we had something for everyone. Here was the problem. By following that philosophy, nothing was polished. We ended up having lots of half-done features in some quarters. What I forgot was, inasmuch as a consumer or a player, if it isn't there at launch it might as well not be there, well if it's in half-done or half-done well, that's what you get remembered for. The fact that STO and Champions have gotten better since their launch, we've added content, we've fixed bugs, we've responded to players, all that stuff isn't as important or as forceful as that initial interaction with the game. So we have a very different mindset here. Right now, whatever we do, it's got to be the best possible quality we can. One of the ways of doing that is to focus your content. Make sure you understand what we're making. What is the game going to be and what isn't the game going to be? You're seeing that in the interviews. Here are the classes, here's where the game's going to be set, so that the stories, the quest, everything is entirely focused. We know what we're trying to make; we're not trying to make something for everybody.

[eldaec]

tl;dr version:

Dance with the one what brung you.

EA should be focussing on more content, more stories, more capacity for interesting alts.

[Amaron]

No they won't. The history of MMOs has shown us one key thing - you get one chance, and that's it. The number of people who will come back to a game further down the road is very small. Only WoW managed to keep people coming back, and surely the utter size of the game and the fact everyone under the sun plays it has something to do with that.

That's just it.   In the eyes of the average person they have succeeded at their "one chance".   They also have a large enough population to keep people coming back for content updates.

[Thrawn]

In the eyes of the average person they have succeeded at their "one chance".

I guess this depends on your definition of the "average person" or success.  The game will have to hold a large number of subs for a while to be even profitable if the 200mil to make the game numbers are close to correct.

[Nebu]

I can say this: The people that I used to battle (and fear) in pvp are all gone.  I no longer see the names that I once looked for.  Either they have moved on to alts or left entirely.  Either way, the lack of connection with a character at endgame will have a negative impact on the long-term success of this title.

[Maledict]

To be honest with you, I don't think it's the lack of end game that's an issue. The majority of players aren't at 50, and yets its people below 50 I notice no longer playing.

Fundamentally, the UI, the bugs and the poor responsiveness to the game are far more responsible for people quitting in my opinion. There's a reason why Blizzard spent weeks tracking down a single pixel delay in the cursor for Warcraft 3. The UI is your interface to the world, and every single thing you do uses it - and the UI is dreadfully, dreadfully bad. Combine that with the delays, the lag, and the bugs everywhere along with the incredibly stupid running times everywhere and AI think that has more of an effect on people than the end game. Out of my circle of friends,the majority haven't even hit 50 before giving up, and these are not MMo players. (for many it's their first MMo)

[Amaron]

In the eyes of the average person they have succeeded at their "one chance".

I guess this depends on your definition of the "average person" or success.

A lot of people will walk away from the game thinking they had a good time and they got more than their money's worth out of it.   They'll find more content in patches and expansions compelling.    The largest majority of people will quit over missing quality of life features that can easily be added in a patch.

[tmp]

Cryptic Interview

It'd be interesting to hear their thoughts how comes --if the stigma of the launch day attaches to the game forever-- WoW isn't forever remembered as "that game with horrendous login queues, terribad loot lag and nothing to do at endgame because there's only one raid".

[tmp]

I can say this: The people that I used to battle (and fear) in pvp are all gone.  I no longer see the names that I once looked for.  Either they have moved on to alts or left entirely.  Either way, the lack of connection with a character at endgame will have a negative impact on the long-term success of this title.

Maybe they're leveling up the operatives; isn't that the flavour of the month in PvP and the usual modus operandi?

[Threash]

I can say this: The people that I used to battle (and fear) in pvp are all gone.  I no longer see the names that I once looked for.  Either they have moved on to alts or left entirely.  Either way, the lack of connection with a character at endgame will have a negative impact on the long-term success of this title.

Maybe they're leveling up the operatives; isn't that the flavour of the month in PvP and the usual modus operandi?

Yeah i was on hutta last night, 48 people in the zone 37 agents.  Huge nerf for them on the test server though.  My guild is starting to thin out, people are looking at battleground heroic and daily quest grinding and wondering why they are doing it in an inferior game.

[Rokal]

It'd be interesting to hear their thoughts how comes --if the stigma of the launch day attaches to the game forever-- WoW isn't forever remembered as "that game with horrendous login queues, terribad loot lag and nothing to do at endgame because there's only one raid".

The Cryptic interview isn't talking about stability or login queues when they talk about what the game looked like when it launched. I don't believe having rocky launch or login queues actually has as big of an effect on peoples 'first impressions' of an MMO launch as people would have you believe. Nobody really cares that Aion had huge login queues, or that Rift had an almost flawless launch. People ultimately continued to play those games (or not) based on the game content. They're much more likely to remember and form a lasting opinion of a game based on a shitty UI or input lag than a 45 minute login queue.

[Kageru]

It'd be interesting to hear their thoughts how comes --if the stigma of the launch day attaches to the game forever-- WoW isn't forever remembered as "that game with horrendous login queues, terribad loot lag and nothing to do at endgame because there's only one raid".

MC + Onyxia took ages to beat though, including the keying. I doubt any of the SWTOR raids are as lengthy as MC? Also Blizzard got a bit of a break because no one believed there was going to be that much interest.

I'd expect some of the losses are due to single player RPG fans who are finding the game doesn't match their expectations and find a monthly fee fairly alien and odious.

[patience]

Worrying about people who blast through content miles above and beyond the regular population should be pitied, not catered to.

They shouldn't be catered to, but they are the trailblazers who tell everyone else what is coming. What BioWare wants is, "You suck BioWare because I've completed the content and it is so damn awesome I hate you for not having more of it". Instead, the message is, "You suck BioWare because the endgame content is badly bugged and completely unbalanced and just boring". A lot of players don't post on forums, but will look up what comes next and if all they are seeing is a constant stream of negativity then it impacts on their desire to actually do those tasks.

I'm sure that it will be fixed in time, but the disappointing thing is that despite all the money poured into SWOR, it's the same old story.

This is another reason EA should just close down the forums and be done with it.

EA really should just lock their forums to save themselves to save themselves money.

[Rendakor]

Wow. Was that you, or a repost? Either way it's hilarious.

[tmp]

Could see the punchline coming but yes, hillarious. Can't actually tell who got trolled in the end here

[Malakili]

It'd be interesting to hear their thoughts how comes --if the stigma of the launch day attaches to the game forever-- WoW isn't forever remembered as "that game with horrendous login queues, terribad loot lag and nothing to do at endgame because there's only one raid".

The Cryptic interview isn't talking about stability or login queues when they talk about what the game looked like when it launched. I don't believe having rocky launch or login queues actually has as big of an effect on peoples 'first impressions' of an MMO launch as people would have you believe. Nobody really cares that Aion had huge login queues, or that Rift had an almost flawless launch. People ultimately continued to play those games (or not) based on the game content. They're much more likely to remember and form a lasting opinion of a game based on a shitty UI or input lag than a 45 minute login queue.

Its really hard to say.   When I look back at the last few MMO Launches that I bothered to actually try on launch and not some time after, I would say my experience was mostly shaped by how I felt when I *wasn't* playing the game.  It just has that draw or it doesn't.  I've found myself enjoying almost every MMO on launch (including things like Hellgate), just because they are new and shiny and exciting, and unless the game is literally unplayable there is content worth playing in most games that come out.   The games I've stuck with though (MMO or not) are the ones that have for whatever reason made me think about them when I'm NOT playing them.   WoW and EVE (my two longest played MMOs) both did this for me.  On the other hand, Champions Online and WAR are things I played the absolute crap out of for a couple months and then one day just logged out never to log in again.  There was no great angst, no being upset, I just *stopped caring.*  Hell, the games I do get angsty about are the ones I'm likely NOT to stop playing simply because if it evokes that much emotion it means I'm already personally invested.

On the one hand, SWTOR seems like it will definitely have that attachment to your character that makes you want to log iin (at least during the leveling content?).  On the other hand, it may suffer the fate of many of the single player RPGs I play - where I play through it once, "intent" to go for another pass, and then just never load the game up ever again.  The question is whether or not the investment in the character and its development (as opposed to just its "progression") is enough.  I guess in other words I am kind of saying that I think perhaps we've put too much emphasis on the idea of a "good launch" generally speaking.  I can only think of a handful of MMOs at most that have had truly nuclear launches which tanked the game.   Most of the MMOs see drastic drop offs at 3 months, can we really call it a launch problem at that point?

[Venkman]

I'm with ya there. As a single player RPG, it's not as good as Skyrim nor probably Mass Effect 3. And as an MMO, it's still got a long path of polish before it hits WoW.

However, WoW is also freakin' ancient, every person in this genre has played it (or at least discussed it) to death, it's not getting a lot of innovation thrown at it, and everyone realizes that. Even if SWTOR is just three more months of random bug fixes, at least there's a general feeling that it could become something awesome. At this point, any other MMO will only do what all of them only ever did to WoW: syphon off a tiny few.

In terms of just MMOs, it was a good time to launch a wildly-hyped over-budget big-spectacle MMO.

In terms of RPGs, eh, probably not so much.

[fuser]

http://www.mmo-junkies.net/statistics/

It's not a true value of subscriptions but can give an idea on the server loads. They basically assigned a metric to the http://www.swtor.com/server-status status page and have been plotting the status. So when you add more servers the count goes up and as less servers are full/heavy the count goes down.

0 = offline
5 = full

It's all defined on their FAQ page. The only thing is if the servers expand their concurrent connection capacity it would look like a downtick in server population.

[zardoz]

http://www.mmo-junkies.net/statistics/

It's not a true value of subscriptions but can give an idea on the server loads. They basically assigned a metric to the http://www.swtor.com/server-status status page and have been plotting the status. So when you add more servers the count goes up and as less servers are full/heavy the count goes down.

0 = offline
5 = full

It's all defined on their FAQ page. The only thing is if the servers expand their concurrent connection capacity it would look like a downtick in server population.

It will be interesting to see the data in 2 month.

Another snipshot

Hello all,

Out of curiosity of the post-1st month numbers, in terms of balance, I thought 8pm GMT Sunday would be a good time to take a snapshot of the server I play on from both Empire and Republic sides and make a short comparison.

The method I have used for this empirical study was the /who system in combination with level range filters such as 1-9 10-13 14-17 and so on, and then doing a class analysis for level 50 where greater than 100 results were returned - such as 50 gunslinger, 50 juggernaut, and so on. In all cases but one this was sufficient, I will cover the one exception later.

This study was done on Hex Droid EU at around 8pm GMT.

So the raw data:

Total Players Online

Republic: 1007

Empire: 1905

An approximate 2:1 ratio of Empire to Republic players over all.

Interestingly the server population showed as "heavy" at the time, which sort of suggests that the server cap might be around 5000, or perhaps a little more, given that there is "Very Heavy" followed by "Full".

Currently Online Players by Level

Republic:

1-49: 777
50: 230

Empire:

1-49: 805
50: 1100

So we can see that while the numbers below level 50 are very close, there is a huge disparity between factions at level 50, in fact there are almost five times more Empire level 50 players than Republic.

None of this is particularly surprising given the player experience on the Republic side, however the only thing I did find surprising was the class distribution for level 50 characters currently on-line. For every advanced class in the game there were less than 100 results for a specific search combination of class and level 50. In fact the numbers ranged from as little as 13 online (Gunslinger) to as many as 95 online (Mercenary) with one exception: Sith Sorcerer. In fact the only way I could get an accurate number of sorcerers currently online at level 50, was to search by area, through every single area in the game (50 sorcerer belsavis, 50 sorcerer fleet, , 50 sorcerer palace, 50 sorcerer korriban, 50 sorcerer vault, and so on. Due to the nature of people moving around this means that the numbers for Empire side were a bit less accurate as it took a bit longer to gather the data, but the end result was that there were around 400 Sith Sorcerers online at the time of the study.

This was a number that surprised me, it meant that not only were there four times as many sorcerers as the next most populous level 50 class, but in fact there were nearly twice as many sorcerers online at level 50 than the entire combined 8 advanced classes at level 50 on the Republic side.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions on these numbers, I just found it interesting and thought I would share it.

Tl;dr version: Player ratios: Empire 2:1 Republic, Level 50: Empire 5:1 Republic, Sith Sorcerer 4:1 Next Biggest Class, Sith Sorcerer 2:1 Entire Republic Level 50 population

Super Tl;dr: There are a lot more Empire players, and there are a crap lot of Sith Sorcerers compared to every other class in the game.

Well poor republic. 

[Margalis]

I thought SWTOR devs claimed to have some secret awesome method for balancing pop evenly.  

Pretty sure I and roughly 50 other people called this years ago.

[tmp]

This was a number that surprised me, it meant that not only were there four times as many sorcerers as the next most populous level 50 class, but in fact there were nearly twice as many sorcerers online at level 50 than the entire combined 8 advanced classes at level 50 on the Republic side.

Gee, a class widely hailed pre-launch as the one with (un)godly damage and heals turns out wildly popular.

edit: also, relevant:

[Lakov_Sanite]

I would say sith sorc has less to do with being OP and a lot more to do with *evil cackle with lightning fingers!*

[Rendakor]

If it was just characters played I'd agree, but the only way there are so many at 50 is that the catasses rolled the FOTM, as expected.

[Riggswolfe]

They just announced a couple big pvp fixes today.   Several ability responsiveness issues are supposedly identified and due fixed on PTS and they are nerfing scoundrel/operatives.   As long as they keep this stuff up I'm not ready to downgrade my estimates by much.   People will quit but many will come back in 6 months and new people will keep joining.

Yes, let's nerf one of the least played classes in the game while Consulars/Inquistitors and Troopers/BH rape everything in sight.

[Lakov_Sanite]

You just don't get 400 level 50's online at a time by being FOTM this soon after release, hell I doubt there's that many people that know what the FOTM class is.  I'm sure there's a lot of people from beta that know they are good but also bear in mind this is on just one EU server.  The problem inherent with making star wars a two faction system is because people aren't cosplaying as the rebulic at every convention but you'll be surprised if you don't see at least one vader walking around.

[Amaron]

You just don't get 400 level 50's online at a time by being FOTM this soon after release, hell I doubt there's that many people that know what the FOTM class is. 

Why not?  It takes minimal time to make a new 50.  Not to mention you could spend the whole time face rolling by doing low level pvp.   Even a low level Sorc gets to run around having fun.

[Kageru]

It is dangerous to under-estimate the energy of the competitive "pwn" crowd. They will have been looking for the overpowered class during the beta process and rushed to level it come release. They adore MMO PvP precisely because it allows someone with a good understanding of mechanics to imbalance the game in their favor. In addition the current level 50's will tend towards these more achievement oriented players since many of the casuals will still be levelling.

[ajax34i]

I don't think so many play Sorcerer because it's overpowered, though.  IMO they play because:

- Shoot lightning (not pebbles).
- The class storyline is James Bond in Space.
- Ranged DPS is much easier than trying to melee.
- The ship looks decent.

None of these are overpowered abilities.  As added support of this theory, Jedi Sages get the same abilities (technically, if you ignore a few animation delay issues), yet almost nobody plays Sages.  Republic seems to have a drastic shortage of healers (on my server at least), judging by the desperate cries of "healers needed" for the various flashpoints, starting with Esseles.  The random guild that I joined has no Seers; they have a few of all the other classes (with 20 members online typically).

I'm not sure exactly which Sorcerer ability they should nerf the DPS of.  I'm definitely playing a Sorcerer regardless of nerfs for the 4 reasons above, so in a way I imagine that nerfing will do nothing except piss people off.