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

[Merusk]

2 months in I don't hate this game.. but it makes it hard to for me to love it. 

The # of ability buttons and nonsensical DPS rotations, combined with the power differential between me and mobs really makes me loathe to login on any of my characters these days.    I tried doing the BH class quest a few times over the weekend and kept getting my ass handed to me.  I just can't tank 2x silver mobs that heal themselves AND have a knockback with a cooldown 1/2 of my interrupt cooldown length.

So I flipped over to the Marauder.  Finishing every fight with a sliver of health and being so dependent on random shit is no fun, so I logoff and go do something else.  I'd try yet another alt but every time I do without the Legacy system being implemented feels like I'm shortchanging myself.

Shame, I like the game overall but they've fallen short for me.  I don't think I'll reup and it has nothing to do with DIKU and everything to do with feeling too damn weak.

[Ashamanchill]

I'd have kept playing this if I could have leveled up using just the story quests. The story was that fun. It was the shitty MMO around it that sucked.

[Paelos]

Yeah they really shouldn't have relied so heavily on the same planet quests.

[Nebu]

Yeah they really shouldn't have relied so heavily on the same planet quests.

If you haven't done so already, level up a toon on the opposite faction.  After getting two empire toons to 50, I'm disappointed at the number of mirror quests I'm finding on the Republic side.  Not exact mirrors, but similar enough to give a strong sense of deja vu.  It was pretty disappointing.

[ajax34i]

$15 isn't too expensive for me; I would have stayed subscribed for the 6-9 months it would take me to level a few alts (currently still on the first character, at level 40) were it not for their sucky ticket system that just recently pissed me off.

They've put a lot of things into patch 1.2; it sounds more and more like a miracle patch.

[Nebu]

They've put a lot of things into patch 1.2; it sounds more and more like a miracle patch.

1.2 needs to be a miracle patch or they will lose a decent chunk of the playerbase. 

I'm still dumbstruck that they'd release the game without an appearance tab and solid open world pvp areas.  Both scream Star Wars. 

[Merusk]

Orange gear was supposed to be the appearance tab.. but it failed to meet expectations with the idiocy of being unable to pop certain purple mods.

Yeah they really shouldn't have relied so heavily on the same planet quests.

I can't even get to the cap and I can't be the only one who said "fuck this.. " at some point.

[FieryBalrog]

Arvind Bhatia - Sterne, Agee & Leach, Inc. - Analyst
Then one last one from me, going back to Star Wars for a second. I think the only number in terms of profitability that you guys have talked about that I can rememberis that it takes about 0.5 million subscribers to be profitable on a sustainable basis month to month. Has anything changed in terms of the launch, the interest level, etcetera, that would make you want to update that or we should still work with that assumption?
 
John Riccitiello - Electronic Arts Inc. - CEO
That was me that made the comment a number of different times. What I basically said is 0.5 million subs, we could break even at the margin. 1 million subs would be meaningfully profitable, but nothing to write home about. It certainly would not make us feel good about the investments to date.

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ERTS/1620647435x0x540332/dab48832-e802-4c78-9fe8-91a3bd6180a2/ERTS_Q3FY12_Transcript.pdf

Solid plan there guys .

[Paelos]

Love that transcript, thanks FieryBalrog. They were getting HAMMERED on SWTOR questions in that call.

Brian Pitz - UBS - Analyst
Great. Just one really quick follow-up, can you give us a sense for how many of those 1.7 million active subs we can expect to convert to paying subs after the initial
free month? How should we think about that? Thanks.

Let me -- maybe what I can do is I'll define active subscribers for you, and then give you a little color on that. We're not going to be able to talk too deeply on conversion just because it's so early in the life of the product. We are only 10 days passed our first-month anniversary. But essentially, we're using the industry standard for active subscribers. It's anyone paying a subscription or playing on an active prepaid timecard and those who have registered to play and are still in their trial subscription period. I can tell you that the majority of the 1.7 million are paying subscribers for us currently, which is great considering we're only, like I said, 42 days into the launch and you have a 30-day trial period. So a lot of people are voting that they want to be a part of the service and are engaged, which is great news.

Let me tell you why that answer is terrifying. 1 - He doesn't answer the question at all. 2 - He claims it's "too early" to talk about. 3 - The phrase "industry standard" rears its ugly head. 4 - He says the majority are paying, which just means more than half by nature. Well no shit, obviously you don't shed half your players in a month.

They know. They are dodging and afraid to make any bold statements because they all KNOW exactly how sideways this can go. By the next quarter, they are going to have to answer some really tough questions about their retention rates.

[Malakili]

The interesting thing about that for me (aside from what has already been said here), is how much they focused on launch being great.   Rift had a great launch as well.   I remember there used to be a lot of discussion about bad launches being the cause of lost players.  "People aren't willing to wait around for a game to become good anymore" we said.  I've said it myself.  But given that Rift seems to be a modest success at best, and if SWTOR goes the same way we may have to revise that line of thought.  If good launches and good leveling experiences aren't enough - then where do we turn?  End game? PvP? 

[Ratman_tf]

Welp, like I said in the other thread, I cancelled my TOR account for one reason, that I couldn't group with my friends due to level disparity. And I'm currently waiting to see if they address that to decide if I resub.
So, for me, the leveling game was not fun. All the bugs and UI issues were icing on the cake, but contributed as well.
But yes, I think the days of craptastic launches being the norm are over. There's other things to consider, like the fact that the WoW alike games are a mature design, and in fact getting rather long in the tooth now.

[FieryBalrog]

The "failed launch" stuff was never the root cause. It was just what forum dudes focused on because it was the easiest to blame and the most obvious. "Oh you stupid devs, why didn't you just wait 3/6/9/12 months and work more" has just become a facile answer to why a game isn't meeting expectations.

The general problem I would say is just DIKU burnout and competition for time through F2P games. F2P is the future, subs are not. There is a mature DIKU on the market that is very hard to compete with in terms of polish, content, features, etc. Hence the "3-monther" phenomenon described here. People get excited about launch, play the game, love/hate the first couple of months, and then they've seen the content and are ready for something else. Underneath the voice-acting and story layer (which is excellent) SWTOR is an entirely derivative game, more so than even the other WoW-DIKU clones, and one that's very, very late to the party.

Story is the exact wrong kind of content to keep people subbed long term; tons of development effort and money for several hours of non-repeatable content.  There are some people willing to sit through the hundreds of hours of shared story a second or third time to see a dozen or so hours of class story and new companions, but I wouldn't think that is a huge amount. Most people don't even finish single player games (the completion rate is shockingly low), let alone replay them multiple times.

It's not the dollar amount of the sub that makes the big difference since people will often spend more than that on a F2P game on a month-to-month basis. It's just the psychology of feeling tied to the game, obligated by your sub fee. If you had your fill for a while and want to play something else for a few weeks, or just play the game very infrequently, the sub feels bad and wasted.

It's telling that even WoW is becoming a "3-monther" from Cataclysm on out (same deal, drew in a ton of players to do the leveling and launch content, and then those players left for a while, waiting on some big content launch down the line).

Hence the lost subs and Blizzard saying WoW is moving to a cyclical model based around content launches. I don't think MoP will change that, I think it's the nature of the game from here on out. Blizzard will still do fine due to sheer volume of subs as well as their increased monetization of the pet/mount store. They must have made a ton of bank on character services as well, pretty much every player I know has transferred a character at least once, sometimes many multiple times.

[eldaec]

Aside from how successful they've been or haven't been.

2M+ western subs was an idiotic target when WoW only ever managed between 2 and 3 million western subs.

Welp, like I said in the other thread, I cancelled my TOR account for one reason, that I couldn't group with my friends due to level disparity.

Oh and this - I really don't understand the stupidity of a design like this, or the free ride EA are getting on it.

[FieryBalrog]

Well WoW managed 2-3 million NA subs, between 5-6 million Western subs when you add in the EU (and other smaller areas).

Still an unrealistic target to aim for.

The troubling part is actually the 500k subs being required to maintain profit at the margins. That means if they go below 500k, the game will not be profitable even on a month-to-month basis given their expected levels of ongoing development and LucasArts royalties. Which basically confirms the idea that voice-acting every bit of content, along with a Star Wars license, makes development really expensive.

[Furiously]

I'm predicting a patch to allow you to bring 3 companions into dungeons in the next couple patches.

[Ingmar]

I would find that awesome, personally. (Which is probably not a surprise).

EDIT: What I'd like even better is if we could just bring our companions along in a regular group with 4 players. That would solve our current situation of having 10 level 50 players but only one is a healer, for example.

[FieryBalrog]

I'm predicting a patch to allow you to bring 3 companions into dungeons in the next couple patches.

Would require a significant overhaul of the whole way you interact with and issue orders to companions. I can't imagine they would see it as important enough to be worth that much effort.

[Rokal]

It would be a nice change that would get more people into the flashpoints, but it wouldn't really help the core issue with the flashpoints: they just aren't very interesting. The 'story' pillar barely exists in them, and the gameplay/loot pillars just aren't strong enough in SWTOR to support a dungeon-grind end game on their own. Loot upgrades aren't very interesting in a game where most people will just use customizable armor pieces. Upgrading mods on your gear is not exciting. It would be like loot progression in WoW consisting entirely of getting better gems. There is also little appeal in making your character look cooler, since the low-res armor usually looks shitty and you can barely tell weapons apart from each other.

If the loot isn't appealing and you've already seen the story for a flashpoint (or there isn't really one), why would you run it again? I don't think the thrill of tab-targeting holy trinity group content is very high for anyone who has played WoW in the past 7 years, so I'm guessing most people don't.

The key to making SWTOR's end-game work (short of inventing a time machine and designing a more interesting combat system or removing orange gear from end-game) is finding a way to bring more story into Flashpoints in a way that is interesting to repeat while simultaneously not way more expensive than the current flashpoints. I have some ideas on how they could do this that I might post later.

[Redgiant]

It is not bad as a single-player game. Most of the technical afterthoughts or missing feature issues seem to be around things an MMO would have done better, but aren't as egregious in a single-player light.

But if the few group quests or FPs I did had been aided by NPC mercs instead of other players, I wouldn't have noticed the difference and I could have played the whole game offline.

Paying a monthly sub for a pretty single-player game wasn't going to happen.

[Tannhauser]

Kudos to him, I guess, for being so open about their sub needs.  I do think they will drop to 500k sooner rather than later.  It's just not a sticky game.  It looks and plays like Rift, technically solid but boring.  Story is what you play for, but it sounds like lots of quest repeats.

I cancelled last night, there are much funner single player games out there I don't have to spend $15 a month on. 

[Paelos]

I think you are kidding yourself if you can call SWTOR "technically solid." In comparison to Shadowbane, perhaps, but not in the current market of games.

[Ingmar]

I think you are kidding yourself if you can call SWTOR "technically solid." In comparison to Shadowbane, perhaps, but not in the current market of games.

Scripting bugs in instances and stuff like that doesn't fall under 'technically solid' for me at least. The client/server architecture is pretty strong, better than for example WoW at release (which at the time I would have called technically solid compared to other games that came before it.) The engine doesn't crash, there aren't weird display problems for the most part, there aren't really holes in the world to any great extent, etc. etc.

[FieryBalrog]

There are also massive performance issues in any situation with 20+ players, the inability to get character textures better than 2003 era games without (apparently) crippling the game, the fact that chat bubbles and combat log will also apparently cripple the game until worked around, the weak implementation of anti-aliasing, and some other stuff of that sort.

The graphical quality issues are relevant to me because they make the game look drab and ugly in too many situations, which along with the travel system is the main reason I quit. I don't have a particularly good PC- I play on my "gaming" laptop- but it let me put everything on high and still runs fine, it just looks like ass. There are older games that look a lot better on my computer, even if I can't run the newer stuff at high specs. To be precise it's not just the technical stuff, it's the technical stuff combined with the very limited palette of options allowed them by a Star Wars license.

[Fordel]

Yea the lag in fights once you hit 10-15 people is just silly.

[Ingmar]

Yeah the texture thing is the biggest issue I would call technical. They really need to stop protecting us from ourselves on that front.

[Kageru]

I think you are kidding yourself if you can call SWTOR "technically solid." In comparison to Shadowbane, perhaps, but not in the current market of games.

Scripting bugs in instances and stuff like that doesn't fall under 'technically solid' for me at least. The client/server architecture is pretty strong, better than for example WoW at release (which at the time I would have called technically solid compared to other games that came before it.)

WoW was incredibly solid in the beta and had load issues due to them severely under-estimating demand. Even then it was one or two servers with hardware issues and the database that I remember having issues.

They fixed that. I doubt the engine issues SWTOR is having are nearly as simple.

[Sjofn]

Yeah they really shouldn't have relied so heavily on the same planet quests.

If you haven't done so already, level up a toon on the opposite faction.  After getting two empire toons to 50, I'm disappointed at the number of mirror quests I'm finding on the Republic side.  Not exact mirrors, but similar enough to give a strong sense of deja vu.  It was pretty disappointing.

See, I haven't gotten the sense of "oh god mirror quests" leveling up as Empire that much. I have gotten quests that refer to shit I did as a Republic person all the time, though, which I actually like because it gives me a sense that yes, all this shit is taking place at the same time in the same galaxy, and that the writers actually paid attention to it.

I mean yes, when both factions are vying for some McGuffin on Planet Whatever, their quests are going to be similar, but I don't really consider that a particularly bad thing.

[Paelos]

I think you are kidding yourself if you can call SWTOR "technically solid." In comparison to Shadowbane, perhaps, but not in the current market of games.

Scripting bugs in instances and stuff like that doesn't fall under 'technically solid' for me at least. The client/server architecture is pretty strong, better than for example WoW at release (which at the time I would have called technically solid compared to other games that came before it.) The engine doesn't crash, there aren't weird display problems for the most part, there aren't really holes in the world to any great extent, etc. etc.

I don't know about yall but I got tons of error 9000 drops. That's not what I would call technically solid either.

[Sjofn]

The only time I ever got error 9000 drops is when my internet dropped me, personally.

[Merusk]

Ditto. 

[ajax34i]

Not all players are hardcore (a multiple 50's / 3 month schedule seems to require more than 44 hrs/wk based on my /played time), and actually do we know what percentage of a player base (let's say WoW's) is casual and doesn't stick to the 3-month thing?  There's gotta be a chart somewhere showing post-expansion numbers vs. between-expansions numbers.

Apply that chart to the 1.7 million number.

[Wolf]

2 months in I don't hate this game.. but it makes it hard to for me to love it. 

The # of ability buttons and nonsensical DPS rotations, combined with the power differential between me and mobs really makes me loathe to login on any of my characters these days.    I tried doing the BH class quest a few times over the weekend and kept getting my ass handed to me.  I just can't tank 2x silver mobs that heal themselves AND have a knockback with a cooldown 1/2 of my interrupt cooldown length.

So I flipped over to the Marauder.  Finishing every fight with a sliver of health and being so dependent on random shit is no fun, so I logoff and go do something else.  I'd try yet another alt but every time I do without the Legacy system being implemented feels like I'm shortchanging myself.

Shame, I like the game overall but they've fallen short for me.  I don't think I'll reup and it has nothing to do with DIKU and everything to do with feeling too damn weak.

There's a big big big difference when leveling between having mobs be your level, and be yellow-green on the low end of the scale. There are ways to keep quests on the lower scale - pvp, space missions or plantary bonus series. It takes half as long to go through a planet that's on your level compared to it being green.

I have 5 characters I'm actively playing, plus still being relatively active in wow, it keeps me excited to log in. I'm sure it'll be a completely different story if TOR was my main thing. Also I'm pretty certain the legacy thing will fuck me over, which might lead me to cancel depending on how much it's all connected to creating new characters.

[Threash]

2 months in I don't hate this game.. but it makes it hard to for me to love it. 

The # of ability buttons and nonsensical DPS rotations, combined with the power differential between me and mobs really makes me loathe to login on any of my characters these days.    I tried doing the BH class quest a few times over the weekend and kept getting my ass handed to me.  I just can't tank 2x silver mobs that heal themselves AND have a knockback with a cooldown 1/2 of my interrupt cooldown length.

So I flipped over to the Marauder.  Finishing every fight with a sliver of health and being so dependent on random shit is no fun, so I logoff and go do something else.  I'd try yet another alt but every time I do without the Legacy system being implemented feels like I'm shortchanging myself.

Shame, I like the game overall but they've fallen short for me.  I don't think I'll reup and it has nothing to do with DIKU and everything to do with feeling too damn weak.

Which is the opposite of every other game.  Usually going above your level speeds up your leveling.

There's a big big big difference when leveling between having mobs be your level, and be yellow-green on the low end of the scale. There are ways to keep quests on the lower scale - pvp, space missions or plantary bonus series. It takes half as long to go through a planet that's on your level compared to it being green.

I have 5 characters I'm actively playing, plus still being relatively active in wow, it keeps me excited to log in. I'm sure it'll be a completely different story if TOR was my main thing. Also I'm pretty certain the legacy thing will fuck me over, which might lead me to cancel depending on how much it's all connected to creating new characters.

[Bunk]

Not all players are hardcore (a multiple 50's / 3 month schedule seems to require more than 44 hrs/wk based on my /played time), and actually do we know what percentage of a player base (let's say WoW's) is casual and doesn't stick to the 3-month thing?  There's gotta be a chart somewhere showing post-expansion numbers vs. between-expansions numbers.

Apply that chart to the 1.7 million number.

Exactly, I can't be the only guy out there that plays this game what I would consider "regularly" (as in I play it more than any other game I currently have) and still doesn't have a 50 yet. There are a ton of people out there that only have 5 - 10 hours a week to devote to video games, and for those people, I'm still seeing plenty to do in this game.

[Sky]

I have the one lvl 50, but that's just single-mindedness and a release date just before a bunch of vacation and holiday time. I skipped quite a bit intentionally, just to have some help bankrolling the rest of my crew. Mostly I rushed to 30 for legacy and then just decided to push to 50.

My next highest is 26, and I've all but abandoned him because I decided I want to have more Imperials on Shien (Sky is a SLAPtard). I'm in my normal mmo mode now, slow and methodical; just taking my time and enjoying the ride. It's why the lack of a coherent endgame doesn't bug me - no game has a good endgame.

Rolled a couple repub alts on Temple of the Exalted, bummed that legacy isn't cross-server, though.