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

[Arthur_Parker]

Yeah, I don't see what the obsession with millions of players is about, profitably is the main thing to ensure survival, if more people playing outside your server population increased your actual enjoyment we'd all be taking about facebook games or whatever the latest thing is. 

I don't think the main lesson from Eve is that area control pvp is popular for humans, we've been practising it for thousands of years.  I think the surprising thing is that it's popular enough to maintain interest despite the overall game being so incredibly boring to the average player.  For any company wanting a safer bet than normal, it's also focused on elements of play, notably the zone layout that WoW just cannot patch in even if they wanted to.

This is a very old topic, WoW is the best PVE game ever, but it does offer pvp on every server, it's just not epic, story supporting pvp.  That's an itch somebody is going to scratch at some point in time.

[Ingmar]

So, I got Scroll of Ressurected to play some WoW for the first time since I switched to SWTOR, and I was kind of surprised to discover that WoW combat actually feels a lot clunkier and less responsive than SWTOR combat to me now. They kind of felt about the same I thought, when I started SWTOR. I guess those patches really have been doing something.

[Threash]

I thought Rift combat felt the best out of the three personally, and i've played all three fairly recently.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Mechanics-wise rift was a really enjoyable game, it just felt so bland otherwise.

[Phred]

I hope Guild Wars 2 will do a good job at proving lots of people wrong about "what the hardcore PvP players want", or (before we get in a fight about what is "hardcore") what MMO players who are more into PvP than PvE want. What many here seem to ignore is that there are many shades of PvP players. The mistake is to simplify everything down to "wolf and sheep", implying that people stop p(l)aying when they stop winning, so these games would be inherently doomed by the nature of what their players seem to want.

According to this  interview http://www.g4tv.com/videos/51704/guild-wars-2-pvp-system-dynamic-content-preview/ 80% of the
players in guild wars 1 played it predominantly pve. 1:04 for the start of the quote.

[Falconeer]

I don't doubt that. I didn't play it much myself since all they had was Arena PvP and an RTS-like kind of combat. Hell, it barely felt like an MMO when it first came out, more like Diablo with 3D lobbies. Seems like they understood what they did wrong in GW1, and made an effort to combine multiple PvP elements (including some that haven't been tried in a long while) for multiple PvP tastes in one high budget MMORPG.

On the other hand, SWTOR is asking the players what kind of PvP they want. 3 months after launch. I thin the keyword here is "clueless".

[Lakov_Sanite]

It's cause they never had a vision of what they wanted their game to be other than "All the stuff other games have, but with lightsabers."  That is a TERRIBLE way to design a game.

[tgr]

EVE is not a PVP game.  They want it to be, and hype it as such and you get most involved when you're in the PVP game, true.   However, unless things have changed the majority of accounts (2/3 last it was made public) are still in .5 > space and take great pains to avoid .4 < unless necessary.  I wouldn't call that a PVP game, just a game with PVP as a feature.

Let me tell you about the gallente ice interdiction, hulkageddon, and probably soon enough (at least until CCP gets their head out of their ass and rebalance things) a CFC technetium cartel.

All of these had ramifications in the game beyond "oh dear my ship blew up", including ramifications everyone in >= 0.5 systems.

[UnsGub]

EVE is not a PVP game.  They want it to be, and hype it as such and you get most involved when you're in the PVP game, true.   However, unless things have changed the majority of accounts (2/3 last it was made public) are still in .5 > space and take great pains to avoid .4 < unless necessary.  I wouldn't call that a PVP game, just a game with PVP as a feature.

Let me tell you about the gallente ice interdiction, hulkageddon, and probably soon enough (at least until CCP gets their head out of their ass and rebalance things) a CFC technetium cartel.

All of these had ramifications in the game beyond "oh dear my ship blew up", including ramifications everyone in >= 0.5 systems.

Need to include all of the market.  Almost everything is player made and priced priced against other players.

[tgr]

Yeah, but that's not as visible, so they make bad examples. You're right, though, almost everything in the game is made by people now. There's very little NPC stuff left, and if you have enough ISK, you can seriously fuck up an item for a while through market fuckery.

[shiznitz]

I hope Guild Wars 2 will do a good job at proving lots of people wrong about "what the hardcore PvP players want", or (before we get in a fight about what is "hardcore") what MMO players who are more into PvP than PvE want. What many here seem to ignore is that there are many shades of PvP players. The mistake is to simplify everything down to "wolf and sheep", implying that people stop p(l)aying when they stop winning, so these games would be inherently doomed by the nature of what their players seem to want.

According to this  interview http://www.g4tv.com/videos/51704/guild-wars-2-pvp-system-dynamic-content-preview/ 80% of the
players in guild wars 1 played it predominantly pve. 1:04 for the start of the quote.

GW was a great co-op game.  There are never many options for a fantasy co-op game and GW made it fun and easy.  I have been surprised more games didn't copy and iterate on that aspect.

[Threash]

It's cause they never had a vision of what they wanted their game to be other than "All the stuff other games have, but with lightsabers."  That is a TERRIBLE way to design a game.

Lightsabers and voice overs.  Still pretty terrible though.

[Kageru]

I'd been reading the "What about a server merge?" thread in which people on fringe and depleting servers (of which there were a decent number) beg bioware for server mergers and people from populated servers tell them to re-roll. Now I'm reading the "Fatman is full!" threads because it turns out if people are going to re-roll they'll re-roll on the busiest server and overload it.

Does make me wonder how many subs bioware have lost from their lack of managing the situation.

[Falconeer]

Only some data: of the 30 Euro servers my server (Niman, PvP) was the second most populated at launch and according to the server page it has been like that at least until every single server outside of "Tomb of Freedom Nadd" turned permanently to Moderate load.

And it's a dead town. So I'd assume that outside of maybe a couple of servers per region, the situation is really shitty everywhere.

[Simond]

So does this "Please come back" promo technically count as F2P? 

[Sjofn]

Only if all of WoW's "please come back" shit does.

[Paelos]

Only if all of WoW's "please come back" shit does.

I think WoW's Starter stuff actually counts as F2P

WoW Starter Edition

[Sjofn]

Meh, I don't. It's just a big fat trial.

[Paelos]

Meh, I don't. It's just a big fat trial.

But it's freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee 

[Sjofn]

You've convinced me. It totally is free!

[Arthur_Parker]

Is there anyway to track population via an online plug in for this game?  Just wondering as Mythic had realm stats for WAR and then killed the link went it all went to hell.

[Ingmar]

Is there anyway to track population via an online plug in for this game?  Just wondering as Mythic had realm stats for WAR and then killed the link went it all went to hell.

This is as close as you get:

http://www.swtor.com/server-status

[luckton]

Yeah, I recall Everquest and DAoC used to publish actual numbers way back in the day.  Nobody has the balls to do that crap anymore.

[Fordel]

Well back in the day it was a novelty thing. "Oh wow, I am playing with 3000 other people!".


That novelty is long gone and it only highlights failures these days.

[Kageru]

Blizzard happily published numbers when they were going up, Bioware probably would too if they could.

[Ingmar]

They never published the kind of numbers Arthur is talking about - per server current connection type stuff.

[CmdrSlack]

With EQ, the numbers were right there at server select. Based on the camp-centric play, it was really nice to know the server population at any given time.

[Kageru]

They never published the kind of numbers Arthur is talking about - per server current connection type stuff.

True... my bad for not reading more carefully. Of course you could get that information via wow-census (with data gathered via automated add-on).

[tmp]

Hmm well this isn't precise data, but far from looking good

from http://www.gamespot.com/news/ea-laying-off-up-to-1000-report-6371851

Hundreds of developers may soon find themselves out of work, as a StartupGrind report claims Electronic Arts is planning to lay off between 500 and 1,000 employees, as much as 11 percent of the company, with cuts coming as soon as this week.

The story is written by former EA employee and Burnout franchise product manager Derek Andersen and cites multiple sources within the company for the news. Andersen pointed to a variety of contributing factors for the cuts, noting that the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Star Wars: The Old Republic did not meet internal sales estimates and is facing declining subscription numbers.

of course, who knows what their internal sales estimates were set at to begin with. Also, ouch.

edit: the report itself.

Star Wars sell through is estimated to now be around 3MM units, but the subscriptions which are needed for an MMO to payoff are already declining.

[Paelos]

My guess is that if you're dumping 11% of your workforce, they missed estimates by a LOOOOOOOOOOT.

[UnSub]

At a development budget of US$200m, those estimates would have been big. They would have been something like 3m+ box sales at launch and 1m+ subscribing players for 12 months.

The dissembling of BioWare will begin shortly. Some may track the start of it back to the announcement that Dragon Age 2's DLC is being cut.

Beware of open cheque books, for they always carry heavy interest penalties.

[Lakov_Sanite]

It's a shame, I liked bioware.

[Nebu]

It's a shame, I liked bioware.

I think the Bioware we all knew and loved died quite a while ago.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I repeat... it's a shame, I liked bioware.

[Minvaren]

Hell.

If they start cutting the Live team on TOR, they are all but giving up on it.  The game needs a fair bit of love at this point to attract former players back, and get new word-of-mouths coming in.  Slashing devs leads to less new content and fixes, which will just accelerate the game's death spiral.