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

[waylander]

I think that EA claiming to have 2 million subs sometime this summer is way over the top compared to what is really going to happen. If they expand into new markets they can mask things for a while, but the North American numbers are going to fall off a cliff shortly after the 6 month time period  The servers are ghost towns, the forums are clustered together so there is no sense of server specific community, and the absolute lack of tools that most gamers take for granted are killing social grouping as well as guilds.

No guild content, no in game guild support features such as guild finder, calendars, etc
No forums for each server so several servers have to compete for post/thread visibility for all things
No group finder and no dungeon finder is downright disgusting, and it makes leveling alts suck 10x worse. Who wants to spam fleet all dam day LFG? No one!
No server clusters or gamewide PVP queuing system means PVPr's sit around more than they fight
---CC and immunity timers are so out of whack in this game that you spend 85% of your fight doing nothing
---PVP rewards are grindy to get, and BM comm's are luck of the draw or 45 matches to buy
---Open world PVP was a huge disappointment,with no goals, and no vision. Not to mention the game client cannot support large PVP crowds.
---Rated PVP took too long to be implemented, and it may not be enough to keep people around at this point
The daily quests are boring, repetitive, and not very rewarding
Solo players sit around more than anything else at 50 while spamming LFG for <insert HM FP or Operation name here>
Guilds sit around because of operations lockout timers and because there is not enough raid content
When you do go on operations the loot drops are too random, and too many people get nothing but  useless columi tokens
Crafting is a joke because of Biochem, and because characters are limited to 2 gathering/1 crafting option
Ships were cool for about 15 minutes, but they all look the same
Travel to you ship is horrible because it feels cumbersome, and waiting until level 25 for a speeder makes world travel feel like a chore
Class balance is all over the place and gear itemization is generally bad
Who in their right mind wants to keep rolling ALT characters to deal with all this PITA stuff above?


I think SWTOR can stay above 1 million subs the first 6 months, assuming market expansions don't hide the core geographical decline, but I think that from Patch 1.2 onward that they are going to be fighting to keep that 1 million subs.  Publishers and Developers simply still do not get how fast an MMO population can tank, and they get blinded by good preorder or 1-3 month sub figures.  Most people sign up for 3-6 months when they get the game, and others will generally give the game 3-6 months to improve from the retail launch day.  However the big sign to worry about is barren zones, barren social areas, guilds losing 90% of their active members, and the decline in account level login times.

Right now they have a ton of people not logging on or logging on very sparingly until Patch 1.2, and after that patch they are going to see Warhammer or AOC level declines if the player base decides that the features were not good enough or the class nerfs were too severe.  Any story the first year that makes it look like SWTOR is not growing, such as server mergers, will have a negative impact.

A strategy of expecting people to reroll ALT's for fun in the game only works when a lot of the thngs mentioned above are actually there for the players to enjoy.  In SWTOR they are not there, and this game really feels like something that came out 8 years ago.  Other than the voice acting, this MMO is inferior becuse it lacks so many standard MMO features found in games today.  Lightsabers and Jedi classes can only hold that at bay for so long.

I think it will take them more than 12 months to fall closer to the 500k sub mark, but it is very possible if they don't ramp up the fun factor, social factor, give guilds a reason to exist, and put in modern mmo game features.

[ajax34i]

I don't think that people stay subscribed for months, waiting for stuff, nowadays.  If you guys are noticing server or guild population drops, I would guess those people are unsubscribed.  Like me.  They'll probably come back for patch 1.2 (in a month?) or they may not; it depends on whether patch 1.2 actually delivers what they're looking for.

Personally, I'm waiting for bug fixes (and specifically the stuck quests bug to be fixed - it's not in the patch notes for 1.2 btw), and judging by their performance with patching so far, I rate them at about the same level as CCP, so I am going to wait for a couple weeks AFTER 1.2 to reactivate.  If they announce they've fixed the stuck quests issue, that is.

The game is fine as a single-player game, and for someone who's casual and only has one character at 40 I could easily spend 6 months - a year going through a few choice classes.  But, their customer support sucks, so, per their instructions in just about every damn ticket I've opened, I'm going to wait for a patch to fix the bugs I'm affected by.

EDIT:  Regarding 6 months...  They released the game and in about 3 months it looks like they're losing their playerbase.  So it's a 3-month cycle.  I do believe that they can bring quite a few players back if their miracle patch delivers, but it's a 3-month cycle not 6 months.  Not sure where 6 months came from.

[Spiff]

The game is fine as a single-player game, and for someone who's casual and only has one character at 40 I could easily spend 6 months - a year going through a few choice classes.

That was perhaps the criticism levelled most against it pre-launch (or the most reasonable one anyhow) and however obvious, that's what almost all of the issues I have boil down to as well:
they made a decent and in some ways great RPG, but a crappy MMO.
I buy good games (also bad ones all too often unfortunately), but I don't sub to them (at least not for more than a few months  ).

I think it was Sky that said Rift is a bigger failure?
I disagree; Rift may have disappointed me more, but technically and as an MMO it was far more accomplished imo.
Plus they experimented with the genre, instead of doing little to nothing but try and add polish and another IP.

I hope Trion has the gumption to launch another MMO someday and I'll most likely get sucked into the hype all over again.
I hope Bioware just makes KOTOR 4, 5, 6 & 7 with a solid co-op next time, it's what they should have done this time as well.

[apocrypha]

I hope Bioware just makes KOTOR 4, 5, 6 & 7 with a solid co-op next time, it's what they should have done this time as well.

Problem is that even as a poorly executed MMO this will make more money for EA/BW than it would have done as a single player game. Even if subs tail off to ~300k it's still a continuing revenue stream, and they just cut back development & CS staff until their subs generate a net profit.

Sure, it might take 3+ years to recoup the $150-200m development cost but at least with a subs model they can look beyond the initial box sales & DLC.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, I agree with all the points made about things done wrong in SWTOR, but hey, profit >> sense. 

[Kageru]

Making back the money is not the goal. Having the raw material to make money hats is.

If SWTOR takes 3 years of continued support and development to recoup the development costs that would count as a massive failure and resources that could better have been used elsewhere. For example on 3-5 single player titles.

Out of interest I looked up WoW numbers and it steadily grew from launch. It certainly does not sound like SWTOR is coming close to following that trajectory.

[Numtini]

An outsiders view as someone who didn't like WoW or SWTOR. I remember feeling really left out by not playing WoW. All my friends were playing and they were all really excited about it. People posted when they hit max level or killed some boss or whatever. It's why I eventually gave in and played. Nothing like that for SWTOR. If I didn't come to this board, I would not even know SWTOR existed.

[Margalis]

Much of the criticism leveled at SWTOR back then (not saying you - I can't remember specifics of what you said) was on how it was a terrible game.

My criticism from day 1 was that it was so ambitionless in terms of mechanics that there was no selling point beyond the IP and the voice acting / story stuff.

Which I think was basically correct.

[Falconeer]

What Margalis said. And Waylander for a more detailed criticism.
A couple of weeks before launch I made my bullet point list with things I disliked but mostly it was pretty much about how bland the gameplay was, how irrelevant the whole thing was outside of story quests (which I praised), how many "quality of life" tools were missing,  and how the whole "oldness" was inevitably going to show as soon as you completed a couple of class stories. I said many times that I could not see any longevity in it, that I could hardly see why they were charging a monthly fee for it. Again, even if we all agree that we had about 3 months of fun and the box has pretty much paid itself, I still can't understand how could so many fail to see those issues. Starting with Bioware.

[Margalis]

I wrote this in August of 2009:

Other than that it just looks totally inside the box. Like so inside the box that just being inside the box wasn't enough, so they built a smaller box inside that box and snuggled up inside it. It's like the design document was something like:

UI: Typical MMO UI
Combat: Typical MMO combat

Again, this seems basically right to me, and to me that's not something that is fixable with any number of tweaks. They can fix all the issues on waylander's list and still not have an answer for "why would I play this?" You can get by with a polished, unambitious game, but not if your competitors are more polished and no less ambitious. (And are established) Blizzard kind of owns the super polished, mechanically conservative space.

Sanding off rough edges is enough to push some games over that magic threshold but I can't see that happening here.

Edit: I don't want to pile on so I won't say more on this particular topic.

[Nebu]

People will forgive polish (to a degree) if they are given something else in exchange.  SWTOR offers a decent story that's voice acted.  While that's novel in an MMO, I'm not sure it's enough to make up for what the game is lacking in other areas.  Rift suffered a similar fate by offering some new things (soul system, Rift mechanic, etc) without offering others.  

I guess the bottom line is that making a successful MMO is hard.  Expensive and hard.  (obvious things are obvious)

[Lantyssa]

Again, even if we all agree that we had about 3 months of fun and the box has pretty much paid itself, I still can't understand how could so many fail to see those issues. Starting with Bioware.

Because they looked at where WoW was at the time they started designing it, and never really looked again.  This would have been considered an awesome game five to six years ago.  Unfortunately, most of us have moved on, even from the game it's most trying to copy.

[Falconeer]

This would have been considered an awesome game five to six years ago.  Unfortunately, most of us have moved on, even from the game it's most trying to copy.

Exactly my point. I always explain SWTOR to all my non-playing friends asking if they should get it by saying "It's an awesome 2007 Diku MMORPG. Up to you".

How many other MMORPGs you played in that 2007-2012 window, in my opinion, matters a lot.

[Lakov_Sanite]

The story was fun and interesting but and this is bolded for importance I could not be paid to slog past level 30, doing a metric fuckton of bullshit kill/collect quests to get BACK to the awesome story ones.  That's really what killed swtor off for me, it had interesting parts but they just couldn't get rid of this shitty diku blueprint.

Why...why?! I get that they wanted to go with something tried and true but couldn't they innovate a little? I'm gonna argue that voice acting, class storylines and companions are NOT innovation.  These things are high, HIGH levels of polish on mechanics like questing, pets and quest flavor but they dont really introduce anything other games don't have.  Voice acting is nice but lets face it, people skip quest text, acted or not.  The companions are pets, vastly superior pets but still pets all the same, they are integral to your characters and you won't be soloing without them.  Class storylines are fun, ak anyone whose done a wow legendary quest, makes you feel like a special snowflake but filling a whole game with them is apparently 'too hard' so no matter what you're still back to the bullshit.

I forgot space combat, which is something I rather liked and to me, was very new. The problem of course is that with it being on rails, by the tenth time or so doing the same mission they really started feeling like a chore if you wanted to do them as dailies. I think I could literally play the pace game all day if I had free-flying in it.

[Fabricated]

Has there ever been an MMO (ignoring F2P transitions) that has managed to hit new records for active subs (its own records I mean) after its initial momentum stopped?

[bhodi]

Eve is it, I think. And obviously, WoW.

[Lantyssa]

EQ and probably a few other early MMOs.

Not much in recent history though.

[Falconeer]

You know what? I think that sooner or later Blizzard will make the Starcraft MMORPG, and that will totally be received as "SWTOR done right". If anything, I feel that Bioware has created that Space Diku itch that people need Blizzard to find new ways to scratch. Hell, I'd buy it.

[Threash]

Pvp ranks achieved through battleground style grinding for pvp gear
Regular dungeons --> heroic dungeons --> raids --> heroic raids
Daily quests
Tacked on world pvp that goes nowhere, but you must include it because a small segment of the population demands it and if you are making a game costing hundreds of millions EVERYONE must love it
Tacked on crafting that is mostly completely useless or done by people who give absolutely zero shits about crafting only because it offers a must have advantage in other areas

I am done playing MMOs until a game comes out that includes absolutely NONE of the things i wrote up there.  If you are making a game and that is the end game you have in mind you are truly wasting your time.  It's been done before, better, and the people who are going to buy your game are already sick of it.  It doesn't matter how polished it is or how great your dev house is at addressing concerns (Rift) or what new gimmick it brings to the table, that kind of game is not going to take off like WoW did and isn't worth sinking hundreds of millions into. 

[Ingmar]

So what do you actually want in a game?

[Threash]

I'd be quite happy with a mount and blade mmo.

[Falconeer]

So what do you actually want in a game?

If that is referred to me, no I don't really want or care about Starcraft (Diku) MMORPG. Just saying, this obviously could have been done so much better, with so much more polish, tools, content and shiny, that it feels like a wasted opportunity. What I want in an MMORPG? A sandbox, and a meaningful PvP. Basically EvE in non-space.

[Ingmar]

I was more asking Threash, who has a very long list of what he doesn't want - personally I tend to look and see if a game has the things I *do* want and just ignore the parts I don't like.

But since you mention it, if what you want is a sandbox with "meaningful" PVP why would you have even tried SWTOR in the first place? I mean, that strikes me as me going out and trying out Darkfall or something.

[fuser]

What I still cannot get over is how bad the engine ran. The whole texture issues, tearing issues, general performance was downright shocking. I'm not running stellar hardware but people having to copy the game to ramcache/disk/drive to get fluid performance is insane. Switching at the time to a Mac contributed to the problem making it not worth while switching over to bootcamp (on SSD) to play.

It's the main factor in me not playing, the UI was the final nail in the coffin.

[Threash]

I was more asking Threash, who has a very long list of what he doesn't want - personally I tend to look and see if a game has the things I *do* want and just ignore the parts I don't like.

But since you mention it, if what you want is a sandbox with "meaningful" PVP why would you have even tried SWTOR in the first place? I mean, that strikes me as me going out and trying out Darkfall or something.

Gimme mount and blade combat with left click being attack and right click being defend and no more than 5-8 activated abilities, dungeons of dreadmore style character building, no level requirements on gear, diminishing returns for leveling, end game based around territory/resource control with set winning conditions and periodic map resets with rewards amounting to nothing other than a championship trophy and maybe a parade.  Actually just give me about 30-50 million and i will make a game i like.

[Riggswolfe]

 What I want in an MMORPG? A sandbox, and a meaningful PvP. Basically EvE in non-space.

What I bolded and colored there? Won't happen in a AAA multi-million game. I am a bit tired of Diku myself but I know, for a fact, we'll never see another UO style game or an Eve with millions of dollars behind it. It just won't happen. "Meaningful" PVP is not attractive to enough people (people like to dabble but do no like pvp affecting the rest of the game) and the sandbox games don't make as much money. Sorry. Them's the facts. If you want that you might as well just quit now because it's not going to happen.

[Reg]

No, no! It's crucial that he try every single new game knowing it's not what he wants so that he can then fascinate us all telling us about why he's unhappy.  I know that I personally just never tire of hearing that kind of stuff.

[Paelos]

I want to punch anybody in the face who uses the term "meaningful" in multiplayer gaming. It's a pet peeve of mine.

It was the lynchpin term in Cataclysm, as an example.

[Threash]

 What I want in an MMORPG? A sandbox, and a meaningful PvP. Basically EvE in non-space.

What I bolded and colored there? Won't happen in a AAA multi-million game. I am a bit tired of Diku myself but I know, for a fact, we'll never see another UO style game or an Eve with millions of dollars behind it. It just won't happen. "Meaningful" PVP is not attractive to enough people (people like to dabble but do no like pvp affecting the rest of the game) and the sandbox games don't make as much money. Sorry. Them's the facts. If you want that you might as well just quit now because it's not going to happen.

You think people are going to keep sinking hundreds of millions into WoW clones to get the underwhelming sub numbers of Rift and SWTOR? I think at this point we are more likely to see something new than the same old thing.

[Sjofn]

We may see something new, but "meaningful PvP" isn't going to be it.

[Falconeer]

Reg, again I want to stress out that I am one of the few still playing and still enjoying the part that is relevant to me (PvP) even though it's not my favourite kind of PvP. I am that flexible. Look, I don't know what's so hard to understand here. I can have some fun with something while still be able to see what's wrong with it. I don't have to root for the game and its success. I can still pay a subscription while being able to say why something is doomed to fail or why it's fundamentally shitty. The opposite is equally true, I could still say something is fantastic, awesome, perfect, and still not feel like playing it.

On one side there is my harsh criticism to what SWTOR tried to do and how poorly it did it. That totally held true from beta to now, three months in. If anything, it now seems _some_ of you see what I and some others were talking about.

On the other side, I have a good bunch of long time friends I play PvP with every night, and while it's not what we'd really love to play, it can still be entertaining (for a couple more months) and I have to admit that combat became "crispier and snappier" around launch enough to make the whole confrontational part entertaining enough.

And when I say that SWTOR is a wasted chance, I don't mean that they wasted the chance to make _my_ next favourite game. I mean to say that they wasted the chance to make a Diku with enough fresh stuff to keep a million subscribers interested for more than three months. "Yous" included.

I don't doomcast games for the sake of it, I don't hate everything Diku despite my preference for sandboxes, and I don't hate SWTOR for the questionable pleasure of being a naysayer. I wanted to like it, I couldn't like it the way they wanted me to like it or some of you seemed to like it, now I am enjoying what I can of it while waiting for something better to come out. I did the same with many free to play shitty Korean mmos and regardless of the theoretical production value, or the fun I am having, SWTOR is -at the moment- a mediocre product in its genre. If you think I demolish games out of boredom you are wrong. I actually often hyped stinky pieces of shit just because they smelled like my favourite cologne, only to find out that I was wrong and admitting it soundly and repeatedly afterwards. It happens.

[Evildrider]

I have/had alot of fun doing WZ's in SWTOR.  It's pretty much raid one night a week, pvp and shoot the shit with friends the rest of the nights. 

[Threash]

One thing this game could do to get me back is add about 3-4 different huttball maps.

[FieryBalrog]

An outsiders view as someone who didn't like WoW or SWTOR. I remember feeling really left out by not playing WoW. All my friends were playing and they were all really excited about it. People posted when they hit max level or killed some boss or whatever. It's why I eventually gave in and played. Nothing like that for SWTOR. If I didn't come to this board, I would not even know SWTOR existed.

WoW really found the pulse of online gaming in the same way the iPod found the pulse of the music industry. Both of them are massive cultural landmarks in their respective arenas.

Much of SWTOR is trying to bottle someone elses lightning, but it's old and kinda tired lightning.

[Riggswolfe]

 What I want in an MMORPG? A sandbox, and a meaningful PvP. Basically EvE in non-space.

What I bolded and colored there? Won't happen in a AAA multi-million game. I am a bit tired of Diku myself but I know, for a fact, we'll never see another UO style game or an Eve with millions of dollars behind it. It just won't happen. "Meaningful" PVP is not attractive to enough people (people like to dabble but do no like pvp affecting the rest of the game) and the sandbox games don't make as much money. Sorry. Them's the facts. If you want that you might as well just quit now because it's not going to happen.

You think people are going to keep sinking hundreds of millions into WoW clones to get the underwhelming sub numbers of Rift and SWTOR? I think at this point we are more likely to see something new than the same old thing.

Yes I do. Not because it's the right thing to do but because the only true success story in the MMO world (for the West at least) is WoW. Nothing else even comes close. Some games are moderately successful (LOTRO, EQ2 and Eve) and out of those 2/3rds are Diku. WoW clones fail. But they don't fail as hard as sandbox/meaningful pvp does. So there is still a feeling of "if we could just get things perfect this time we'll have 1 million subs!"

I'll take a stand right here and now. You will never, ever see a meaningful pvp game succeed. It will not happen. It's too niche because noone wants to be the lambs to feed the wolves. Give that dream up. It's dead. UO was its heyday and its never coming back.

My own personal dream MMO is skill based (like Asheron's Call) rather than level/class based. Skill meaning your characters skills. :) I'd also like a big, open world. Back in the days of AC I used to just pick a direction and go exploring. However, I have seen the writing on the wall and know that that is not coming back either unless the rumored Elder Scrolls game keeps the FPS/explore/skill system from their single player games.

[Numtini]

I would have been happy with SWTOR if it ran well and was up to the current state of the art in terms of features. That means configurable UI, some better social tools, multiple specs, and decent polish. It wasn't just that I missed those things, it was also the message sent by a game with that big a budget not having them was "we don't give a damn about making a good game because we assume our customers are rubes who will buy the license not the game."