Originally posted by Trionicus
It's finshed failing? I thought it was still around with uuh.. 1.3million subs.

6 months ago:

"So 1.7 million is a failure huh?"

Now:

"1.3 million. Sure is a failure huh?"

Somewhere in the future:

"500k doesn't sound like a failure to me. Stay mad, hater."

I didn't know TOR would fail, at least until I got to try pre-release beta. Then I knew something was off, but just couldn't put my finger on it.

Then I realized, it failed (is failing) because it was released as unfinished product. When you market your product to a certain population, you better make sure you deliver everything the competition has + a bit extra.

I'm pretty confident that SWTOR would easily hit 5 mil. box sales and would have at least 50% retention, if it had couple more BG's, arena PVP, working large scale PVP zone, alternative leveling zones and LFG tool.

It didn't happen.

Originally posted by Slayra

You managed to use the "word" -WoW- 16 times in two short paragraphs. GG.

The SWTOR devs pretty much did the same thing in interviews before release :P

Originally posted by superniceguy

Originally posted by ktanner3

Originally posted by klinnear

Originally posted by ktanner3

Originally posted by klinnear

Originally posted by FrodoFragins

SWG at 250k subscribers pre changes was still a failure.  SWTOR will never be the failure that SWG was.

SWG also didn't cost the crazy amount that SWTOR did.  There is no doubt that TOR had tremendous initial success.  It should have, with the expensive marketing campaign thrown at it.  SWG's marketing was no where near a competitive level as MMO's were not mainstream at the time.  The only way we will know whether SWTOR is a larger success is to wait and see if it can retain a high level of Subs over a period of time.  If it can hold 500k plus then no one can argue that it was not a success.  Everyone has to get out of the idea that any MMO right now is going to hit WoW numbers.

I personally don't see SWTOR hanging onto those kind of numbers over a significant amount of years.  Its pure opinion though, and I could be proven wrong int he years to come. 

What I have noticed though from games like Archeage, The Repopulation, and Grimlands is that true Hybrids seem to be up and coming, where Theme-Park style questing is mixed into a large open worlds that contain all the social elements like player driven economy, pure crafting professions, player housing and player cities, etc .

 

 SWG only had that 250k for a short period of time. During most of it's existence it was around 50k or less. So by even your own standards SWG wasn't a success,

From the charts I have seen SWG remained above 200k from 2003 to 2006, and then dropped drastically.  (Although not sure how accurate these charts are http://mmodata.blogspot.ca/)  200k pre-WOW was not a complete failure.  Like I said, in comparison to the amount of money TOR has spent I don't think we can call TOR a failure if it's numbers stay above 500k for the next couple of years.  I am not arguing that SWG is or was more successful.  It wasn't.  But I don't think it was a huge failure in its first 3 years either. 

I don't think it was a huge failure either. I'm just making sure that we are applying the same standards across the board. SWG had plenty of hype for it's day. There has never been a Star Wars game of any kind that didn't have decent marketing behind it.

Also I think that the player base of MMO's are maturing into wanting more complex games, with a lot of the elements that SWG had.  Most of the gamers that were 14 when WOW first came out seem to of outgrown the more simplified MMO.  Again pure opinion on my part, but with the sudden high interest in Hybrid MMO's that would make sense to me.

 I'm interested as well in some of the upcoming titles, but I don't think they're going to have that much of an effect on TOR. TERA didn't seem to affect TOR in any way and I doubt that TSW did either. The players that jump from game to game are always going to do that because they get bored easy. The people that are curently enjoying TOR aren't going to jump ship until they themselves get bored., The disgruntled vets on this site tend to see WOW in eveyrthing so I doubt they'll ever be happy. The MMO market is a big pie now. One game's success doesn't neccessarily mean another game's failure. 

SWG was not that hyped, as I did not realise about it until it was released.

KOTOR was more hyped than SWG in 2003

Broadband pentration wasnt that great back then either most people were still on dialup, PCs around that time also were just about to become affordable to most people at that time also.. lot of things that older MMOs dealt with and limited a lot of people from playing them due to those 2 obstacles, that and SWG was a resource hog.....wasn't like WoW where you could play the game on some cheap ass E-Machine....

Originally posted by SumterSide

Originally posted by Trionicus
It's finshed failing? I thought it was still around with uuh.. 1.3million subs.

6 months ago:

"So 1.7 million is a failure huh?"

Now:

"1.3 million. Sure is a failure huh?"

Somewhere in the future:

"500k doesn't sound like a failure to me. Stay mad, hater."

So what is considered a failure ? The fact that the game population went down faster than Kim K for a paycheck in 6 months time ? Even SWG was bleeding but didnt lose most of their population till NGE hit the live servers.... Noone really knows how many people are left if there was 1.3 mil left EAWare would of been throwing it in everyone's face with press releases like they did when they had 1.7 mil, they have been silent for months now about subs, if they arent saying somethings definitely wrong then? So you have a number that equals failure ? Below 500K 250k ?
 

If people liked the game people would be playing it obivously people aren't doing that , hence the plummeting population, face it .. it's a single player game that people played thru once and are never coming back, me included.

I dont think TOR is a failure per say.

They made the game they wanted to make and made it well. Perhaps TOR was too much like all the other games that are on the market at the moment, and hence when people played it they got tired of it sooner rather than later.

Perhaps this will show other devs that the masses are getting burnet out on the current crop(last 10 years) type of MMO and to be able to hold players longer than a few months they need to start coming up with something different, or go the GW2 way and make their games completely F2P from the get go.

Originally posted by VultureSkull

I dont think TOR is a failure per say.

They made the game they wanted to make and made it well. Perhaps TOR was too much like all the other games that are on the market at the moment, and hence when people played it they got tired of it sooner rather than later.

Perhaps this will show other devs that the masses are getting burnet out on the current crop(last 10 years) type of MMO and to be able to hold players longer than a few months they need to start coming up with something different, or go the GW2 way and make their games completely F2P from the get go.

GW2 way is P2P not F2P! :P

TOR is a failure?

Did they shut it down?

Over the life of a game (esp a sub based game like TOR), I doubt it'll cost EA money.

Heck, PS1 has barely anyone playing but it made how much $$$ for SOE?

OP is spot on with his assessment.. sadly EA/BW didn't make this game for Star Wars fans, it was made for WoW fans and like already mentioned, nobody does WoW better than WoW so once the voice over novelty wore off and people realized how bare the game really was, they went back to WoW. Blizzard should thank EA/BW though.. my friend vowed never to touch WoW again then after a few weeks on SWTOR endgame, went back to WoW as he realized how good it was in comparison to it's competition. 

Originally posted by theJexster

SWG pre CU had around 250k subs.

SWG NGE had (rumored) around 10k

SWG NGE was a failed attempt at a Star Wars them park. Star wars fans like freedom, creativity, uniqueness, and more than anything, they want to live in the star wars universe. They view Luke as the hero, not themselves. A theme park is contrary to the very beliefs that Star Wars and it's fan hold dear.

So what should a company do after seeing that making a Star Wars game into a theme park failed, make another Star Wars game theme park! Makes perfect business sense. Because we all know Star Wars fans are all WOW fans right, no, not even close.

If TOR was a hybrid, take what the last 2 years of SWG was and mix it with SWG pre CU then add in some modern touches it would have destroyed WOW. Players don't want more WOW, they already did WOW, and WOW does WOW better than any of these other hacks can do WOW. Not to mention half the WOW players are sick of WOW but just keep playing it because it makes no sense to start over in another diet coke half baked WOW when your already getting WOW.

Silly 60 year old corporate decision makers, they heard "10 million players, $15 a month, Star Wars like Warcraft" and they thought it was a sure thing, they underestimate us, and now they burry TOR with all the other soulless cash grabs.

Because they can't learn from their mistakes.  Here's an old (2009) article on Warhammer's failure.  It was updated in 2011, about 6 weeks before SWTOR released:

http://www.alteredgamer.com/warhammer-online/44427-what-went-wrong-with-is-it-a-failure/?cid=parsely_rec

And if you don't read all of it, you can read the take-away...

How You Can Tell When an MMORPG Is Doing Poorly

Mark Jacobs himself said the way to tell if Warhammer is doing well is to check a few months after release and see if they are adding servers. He said if they were removing or merging servers, that would mean the game was doing poorly. Since its release, Warhammer has had at least 4 major server merges. ** 63 ** servers have been shut down, leaving WAR with only 9 active servers. Some players are now playing on their 5th server. This is extremely disruptive to the population and culture of each server. On a game based around PvP (RvR), they are forced to merge servers. You can't have PvP/RvR if you don't have enough players around to fight.

217 to 22...    Houston, we have a problem...

Originally posted by Senden

OP is spot on with his assessment.. sadly EA/BW didn't make this game for Star Wars fans, it was made for WoW fans and like already mentioned, nobody does WoW better than WoW so once the voice over novelty wore off and people realized how bare the game really was, they went back to WoW. Blizzard should thank EA/BW though.. my friend vowed never to touch WoW again then after a few weeks on SWTOR endgame, went back to WoW as he realized how good it was in comparison to it's competition. 

 

 

My first SWTOR guild was a WoW/Rift guild.   People who played together for years and years.   They were burnt out on WoW and wanted to add SWTOR to their cross-game-clan.

They up-and-left in just under two weeks, including deleting the SWTOR page on the clan website, while leaving the small handful of new recuits holding the guild...

I think TOR having more subs as a "failure" than SWG did at its peak during its "success" angers many disgruntled SWG vets.

In my opinion, a game fails when I stop having fun playing it and I'm having a great time in SWTOR.  I miss the times when people played games just because they were fun.  No one cared about how many subs a game had, or if it went down so many points on the stock market or even if they changed staff members.  None of those factors will affect the fun I have playing my main.

Originally posted by SuprGamerX

 Heh , when EA is a part of something , you can be sure as hell that it will crumble. :)

Yesssss. Yesssss. Wise words.

I can only say it failed to gain my intrest in playing SWToR and thats me saying who is A: a Star Wars Fan, B: A Gamer, but as a gamer that enjoy's all sorts of genre's. But I have certain expectations when entering in one of the gaming genre's.

If I feel like playing a restricted/scripted game I will play and enjoy singleplayer games. But when it comes to playing a MMORPG I need to have this feeling of freedom and this is what I thought MMORPG would be, go far beyond what we already can play in multi or singleplayer games.

But unfortunaly the past have shown allot of us that to many choices can not be populair, for those who played SWG we all know, saw and read the complaints from those who left and lets face it most of those complaints was what really made the NGE. SOE decided to listen MORE to those who left or didn't play the game then listening to those of us who actually where enjoying the way SWG was made and we just wanted more polish and less issue's/bugs, but we where enjoying the game to it's fullest.

Have to admit never have found a MMORPG that gave me that awesome experiance SWG gave, even with all it's bugs and issue's.

Obviously allot had to do with the commutity, but the most important things was the game offered so much freedom and so much unscripted content as the content was created by the players, you didn't need some NPC tell you to kill 5 rancors for it's hide or bone, you had players who either spam requested needs on spaceports or or mails where send around from player to friends and from friends to players. There where allot of langauge's in the game from all the different species in SWG and you had to actually learn those from other players. All in all you needed eachother for so many things, don't let me get started with the way the economy worked with all those player made shops, players incl. me could spend whole gaming sessions you to search for specific items/resources, sometimes even day's or a week, same goes for going out for resources to find that perfect spot.

SWG was the closest thing to a virtual world MMORPG as I already knew the story, I knew who where the hero's, I could just life out this fantasy being in this Star Wars Universe but carving my own journey, my own adventure, having to depend on others who later even became friends or simple strangers.

Oh btw mastered allmost all profs except Jedi, bountyhunter, but eventually went fully crafter on 3 accounts and my challenge with my crafters was to have a hugh amount of patients to wait for the next high qualtiy resource spawn. It took me 6 months before I told I had become a master doc. mainly because the resources I needed to make the perfect buffs didn't spawn regulary. Obviously I gathered so much resources in those 6 months I could make so many buffs from low to high stats that I sold cheap which wasn't alway's excepted by those one day grind resources quicksellers, them not having any idea how long it actually took me to gather those resources to eventually be able to make them.

But enough rambling, but a small idea why SWG was so a alive of a game to me but mainly due to it's feature's the game provided but unfortunaly we the minority could work those feature's as the majority wanted something else. And with box sales of around 1.5mil and who where playing steadely around 200/250k tells me we where the minority.

I still might try SWToR but perhaps my mindset when entering the game should be more focused on it being KoToR with co-op feature's, perhaps I even might enjoy it more then when I get in with a mindset of going into a MMORPG.

How did I know ? Bad art style and bad combat gameplay.

Originally posted by AzurePrower

I think TOR having more subs as a "failure" than SWG did at its peak during its "success" angers many disgruntled SWG vets.

And how many did play MMOs back in 2003-2004 when SWG was at it's peak?

MMO back then wasen't Mainstream as it is now it was a niche market, and most people still didnt want to pay a sub for a game they bought, so please get your timeline in straight and think before posting.

Originally posted by Terranah

I never wanted to be 'the hero' in precu SWG either.  I had three avatars and they all had their own history and lives and unfolding drama.  Though flawed it was the best mmo I played because it let me play the way I wanted to for the most part.  I could mix and match my skills, pick up new abilities, drop ones I didn't like, experiment, tinker with different classes.   

 

TOR failed because you can design themepark game mechanics in a day, whereas there are much more complex interractions in a sandbox.  People erroneously believe there is nothing to do in a sandbox because there are little to no quests, but it's just the opposite.  In a sandbox, as in life, there is always something to do for those who want to do something.  Design wise, themepark is checkers and sandbox is chess.  

 

...keeping my fingers crossed for the Repopulation mmo, because besides that which can not be named, we will not see another game like precu SWG anytime soon.

I never look to be the "hero" in any MMO I play, at least the way they define "hero."  I'm someone who just wants to craft and work with others in a compelling environment. 

In SWG, I went from a small time player to one of the largest eco powerhouses on a server, who used his economic clout to form alliances with other guilds, to where i was easily one of the most important Imperials on the server I played on.  yet in my guild, I was basically a ceremonial elder.  i wasn't the "hero."

In POTBS (a relatively themeparkish game) I was not the "hero" by any standards.  I maybe did about 15-20% of the total quests in the game.  Only near the end of my time was I one of the "top 10" pvpers on the server, and even then I was only at number 10 on my best day.  Yet I was once again rose from being asmall time businessman to being the kind of guy the nation leaders loved having, even if I got absolutely no recognition in public.

Games can't make people feel "heroic" just by throwing the word out there.  You need good game mechanics.

Originally posted by AzurePrower

I think TOR having more subs as a "failure" than SWG did at its peak during its "success" angers many disgruntled SWG vets.

Yep, that's it.

It wasn't because EA took a beloved IP and turned it into a bad WoWclone.

It wasn't because of the obnoxious advertising for the game that couldn't possibly live up to expectations.

It wasn't because this underwhelming mess was the product of potentially the largest video game budget in history.

It wasn't because over 200 Bioware employees are now jobless because of EAs mismanagement and complete obliviousness.

It wasn't because EA is so brazzen to charge us a sub fee in a market that is HURDLING toward the B2P model.

It's because it's more popular than SWG.

Well, buddy, SWG lasted 7 years and during some of those year, it had 250k subscriber. I doubt SWTOR will have half that by the end of the year.

Originally posted by AzurePrower

I think TOR having more subs as a "failure" than SWG did at its peak during its "success" angers many disgruntled SWG vets.

I think having their game killed and supplanted by something 10% of it's depth is a more likely explanation. 

There were a few signs that SWTOR would fail.

First, it's made by EA. For reference lets take a look at EAs prestigious track record of MMOs:

-Warhammer Online

-APB

-The Sims Social

EA is the proud owner of the worst failures in MMO history.  EA is a curse. And it's been branded on The Secret World as well.

And lastly, there was an obscure SWTOR interview video (I can't find it) where a Bioware dev said something along the lines of "Were banking heavily on people rerolling"

Those were my red flags.