Originally posted by bhima

Originally posted by GeezerGamer

Originally posted by bhima

Originally posted by GeezerGamer

The funny thing is, if they had just done a good job of cloning WoW, they'd probably be doing fine. But not only did they recycled the same old game, they put crap out there as their flagship.

This is not true. Most people who play WoW won't leave their years of commitment to start over to play another "WoW". Sure they may give it a shot, but the vast majority will realize they are just playing the same game but without all of their friends/guilds/geared up characters.  

I would argue that the same thing that will scoup up WoW players is the same thing that will bring in new players: An entirely new MMO experience. 

It's working for Rift. It's not on the same scale as TOR, but it's actually growing slowly by winning people over.

Rifts sub numbers today would not be considered a success for ToR simply because of the huge difference in operating costs. It may be growing slowly, but it looks like its growth would be inconsequential to the suits at EA who spent what is estimated to be close to 200 million for the game. Also, Rift didn't pull much of that 10 million WoW fanbase if at all, so my point still stands... if you want a game to lure away some of the WoW players for a significant amount of time, you will have to offer them something different.

The point is, Rift went through a similar situation, on a smaller scale. THey had initial success and then lost subs fast and hard. But since then through frequent quality patches, they are winning back subs slowly. Rift was able to stop the bleed and turn it around.

While on a larger scale, BW could achieve similar results with the same focus, but instead at a much bigger scale. My point is, the size difference between TOR and RIFT doesn't matter, if BW would adopt the same philosophy and work patters, they should expect the same results. Not everyone's leaving TOR becuse it's a WoW clone. But because the game itself is crap.

Originally posted by Xenrathe

Just to clarify since some people seem to misunderstand:

Q1 of FY(2013) begins in October of 2012.  So this is a prediction less than six months away, not simply next year.

Good point.  I admit I made that mistake when I started.  A 30% drop in 6 months is pretty  brutal for a new (in MMO terms) game.

Is he taking new MMO releases into account, or is he just predicting the numbers by the continued trend?

My guess is he didn't take soon to be released MMOs into account.

who knows..... all i know is analyst usually just talk out of there butts. literally just farting out of there mouths. usually idiots.

but i will say there is the rare moments that these do nothing ppl get it right so who knows

Originally posted by dumpcat

I agree with some of that but open world PvP is almost dead in WoW soo.. I agree whole heartedly with the NPCs in WoW. in TOR most of them unless they are giving you a quest don't even talk at all. The polish took wow years. PvE is not better scripted, this one area that ToR got right. ToR has an open world just no incentive to explore it. I go off the beaten path all the time, especially the level 30 and up planets, tons of open space.
 

Looks like MMORPG's formatting got fubared again, so got rid of all the spaces.

8 years into the game, yeah the world factor of pvp has decreased, especially given expansions which made pvp zones, differing BG's, etc.  At launch and I'd argue at least 3-4 years into the game, still wasn't uncommon to see pvp raids on various capitals.  Hell, was even a few instances when Garrosh became warchief that people were killing him, and a lot of horde players hated him so much, they let him die.  :p

As far as the NPC's with charm, it didn't really take "years."  They got out the gate pretty strong with that.  Adding additional world polish might've taken time (fleshing out a lot of things), but was still worlds ahead of what currently exists in TOR.  Azeroth didn't feel "dead", and the reason for that wasn't the high amount of subs.  Sure, there were those, but the world was living and breathing, not completely static.

Certain worlds are huge, but in WoW, you didn't take a penalty or risk dying heading off the beaten path just because you were willing to go off the beaten path.

Originally posted by iceman00

Originally posted by Xenrathe

Just to clarify since some people seem to misunderstand:

Q1 of FY(2013) begins in October of 2012.  So this is a prediction less than six months away, not simply next year.

Good point.  I admit I made that mistake when I started.  A 30% drop in 6 months is pretty  brutal for a new (in MMO terms) game.

30%? That is pretty brutal.

Extreme KOTOR fan; I'm shamefully depressed to see TOR in this condition. Better to let it die quickly. Maybe a KOTOR 3 will see the light of day. 

Originally posted by iceman00

Originally posted by Xenrathe

Just to clarify since some people seem to misunderstand:

Q1 of FY(2013) begins in October of 2012.  So this is a prediction less than six months away, not simply next year.

Good point.  I admit I made that mistake when I started.  A 30% drop in 6 months is pretty  brutal for a new (in MMO terms) game.

Only shows that you both have not read the linked article from Gamasutra because it was MMORPG.com that made the wrong statement about Q1.

"Cowen's Doug Creutz estimates that subscriber numbers for the game peaked at 1.7 million in February, and that by the end of the current fiscal year in March 2013, the game will have around 1.25 million subscribers, based on server statistics provided on TorStatus.net."

Always a good idea to actually read an article before commenting on it. :)

Originally posted by Sora2810

Extreme KOTOR fan; I'm shamefully depressed to see TOR in this condition. Better to let it die quickly. Maybe a KOTOR 3 will see the light of day. 

Unfortunately EA/Bioware will most likely not let SWTOR die a quick (somewhat painless) death, they will drag its slowly decaying corpse through the dirt for several years before they call it quits.

Originally posted by joocheese

Originally posted by iceman00

Originally posted by Xenrathe

Just to clarify since some people seem to misunderstand:

Q1 of FY(2013) begins in October of 2012.  So this is a prediction less than six months away, not simply next year.

Good point.  I admit I made that mistake when I started.  A 30% drop in 6 months is pretty  brutal for a new (in MMO terms) game.

30%? That is pretty brutal.

That's about 50% actually.

SWTOR has sold around 2.3 million.

Originally posted by tokyo121

Wow. People sure are quick to scream "DOOOOOOOOOOM" with news like this. No MMO released to date has had a lot of end-game content. Everquest, WoW, and many of the other MMO's to come out have had end-game content added months after release. Bioware is doing the samething. Unfortunately for Bioware, there are many other games out there with more content and more polish due to them having been out for a year or more. Look at Rift and it's content at launch compared to now.

 

Don't be so quick to cry "Doom" and "Go to FTP." Content takes time to develope and test. SWTOR has a great leveling experience. While the end-game isn't a raid-filled buffet, hopefully Bioware can turn it into something other than a WoW-clone endgame where all you do is the same raids over and over and over and over and........

On what basis do you place that hope?  They've already said everything WoW did was their business model.  The only difference in their eyes is storylines and voiceovers.  Other than that, whatever WoW did, they said they will emulate.

Originally posted by Jason2444

Originally posted by joocheese

Originally posted by iceman00

Originally posted by Xenrathe

Just to clarify since some people seem to misunderstand:

Q1 of FY(2013) begins in October of 2012.  So this is a prediction less than six months away, not simply next year.

Good point.  I admit I made that mistake when I started.  A 30% drop in 6 months is pretty  brutal for a new (in MMO terms) game.

30%? That is pretty brutal.

That's about 50% actually.

SWTOR has sold around 2.3 million.

So... what are the numbers going to look like? I thoght SWTOR was down to 1.7 million subs (including inactive accounts) and down to 600-700k active playerbase.

i hope bioware wakes up or we're gonna have to call real time worlds and tell them they were ousted by bioware.

Originally posted by joocheese

Originally posted by iceman00

Originally posted by Xenrathe

Just to clarify since some people seem to misunderstand:

Q1 of FY(2013) begins in October of 2012.  So this is a prediction less than six months away, not simply next year.

Good point.  I admit I made that mistake when I started.  A 30% drop in 6 months is pretty  brutal for a new (in MMO terms) game.

30%? That is pretty brutal.

Shoulda put roughly.  In short, they are going from (allegedly) 1.7 (the baseline number he is working with according to "statistics at torstatus.net) to his projection of 1.25 million at the start of Q1 2013.  as xen pointed out, that's October of 2012.  That's a 26.4% decline.  Slight roundup to 30.

I say that's the best case scenario for EA.  Even losing 30% over the first year of the game isn't something to be proud of.  That isn't going to inspire investor confidence that you've got a long-term strategy for the game to make profit. 

As everyone else points out, the MMO market is about to get a lot more competitive late 2012 through 2013.  A game that lost 30% of their subs without much competition is gonna get people to invest when there is a lot more competition?

Originally posted by joocheese

Originally posted by Jason2444

Originally posted by joocheese

Originally posted by iceman00

Originally posted by Xenrathe

Just to clarify since some people seem to misunderstand:

Q1 of FY(2013) begins in October of 2012.  So this is a prediction less than six months away, not simply next year.

Good point.  I admit I made that mistake when I started.  A 30% drop in 6 months is pretty  brutal for a new (in MMO terms) game.

30%? That is pretty brutal.

That's about 50% actually.

SWTOR has sold around 2.3 million.

So... what are the numbers going to look like? I thoght SWTOR was down to 1.7 million subs (including inactive accounts) and down to 600-700k active playerbase.

Welcome to the deceptive numbers game companies play!

The 2.3 million is a combination between the digital distribution and the physical box products.  Some of these go to venue not wholly owned by them, so the profit margins per unit are a bit tough to discern.

Now by this metric, 3.5 million copies of "E.T" on Atari were "sold."  Just because a game reaches a store shelf doesn't mean it will sell.  Even though the "sold" 3.5 million copies (again, according to the way EA phrases things) the game ended up being a huge debt machine for Atari, and helped almost kill the infant video game industry.

This is where the 1.7m figure comes in.  that's the amount of people who bought the game and installed it.  This again is not the actual subscriber count.  These are people who simply played for the first month.  They have not decided whether or not they will actually become real subscribers to this game.  Sometimes these people also buy multi-month accounts, but don't stick around.  These are combinations of what you call "active accounts" and after a month of play, sure enough, there were indeed 1.7m "active accounts."

Now how many of those 1.7m actually stick around, and how do replacements impact these numbers?  Nobody has any clue.  Some have said through ambigious statements about half of those people stayed, which actually made the numbers around 850k.  Now lets go off this individuals baseline of 26.4 percent.  That would make the actual sub numbers around 625k.

I would say a more realistic number would be between 700k and 1 million subcribers in October of this year.  Yet over those next 4 to 6 months, I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers dropped below 500k due to increased competition, and that right now Bioware has yet to show doing anything really different to "shake things up."

Of course, all of these numbers, including of the analyst, are nonsense, since only the brass at EA knows the actual subscription numbers.

It just goes to show , you cant just continue to copy and paste from other games like WOW add a few light sabers and a few actors talking and expect people to think it is a great game .

I hope developers learn from the failure of SWTOR that we arent going to keep buying the same garbage anymore.

Given all the free time they are giving away it does worry me a bit that maybe the subs are experiencing sharper declines than EA/BW would like but I am having so much fun in the game I can't see it being in "trouble".  Again with all the free time they are giving away though I'm curious to see how things pan out.

Maybe they shouldn't have spent so much on the Voice Over-ing, and more on the content...like a better graphics engine (WoW 2.0 graphics atm).

And I love how they (and here) aren't even mentioning that [u]MOST[/u] of the people who had ME3 (and hated the ending) and SWTOR going dropped SWTOR in protest of the shitting ending Bioware gave ME3. 

Say what you will about it but, you have to admit if you hated the ending and the response a company had towards one of their titles and swearing how you'd never buy from them again, you'd look like a fool to still have an active payment plan for another one of their titles.

-We put our money were our mouth was.

Don't need an analyst to tell us this if you play the game...  Sad really, game was a stunning let down.