Originally posted by BigRock411

Well they were either going to do large content patches or give us a trickle of content every month.  This is kind of new territory for a mmorpg as most games wont add content untill well after launch.

I agree it was small, august apparently will have a significant content patch.  I think it was more a gesture with this first patch.  Letting us know that new content will happen every month, even the first month.  Even if the content is small its a nice gesture to people who are paying them monthly.

Personally im not sure if i would prefer it on a monthly basis or once a year with huge content patches...dont think i really care as long as they keep adding to the game.

Spread that misinformation.

Monthly content

The Asheron's Call franchise is unique in providing complimentary monthly content updates and "Events" that added new quests, skills, landmasses, monsters, gameplay dynamics and bug fixes for all subscribers. Storylines link multiple episodes to form distinct "story arcs".

TBH no amount of pve missions would satisfy me. They would have to have a major pvp update and add new mechanics to Fusang to get me to resub.

Any pvp that involves capture points... but no incentives to hold them is fail. Nothing like cap swapping. They should have learned from WARs mistakes.

Originally posted by potaco

If you're worried about the monthly updates not being worth the subscription, here's an easy way to fix it:

 

- Cancel your sub when you run out of content and get bored

- Resub once there have been enough content patches to provide you with $15 worth of value

 

Problem solved.

That's not an easy fix, unless you play solo. If you are part of a Cabal(guild) leaving for a month or two or three will make it hard to keep up and informed.

As for the /7 years/. here is what I don't get. They released with 2-3 months of content.  If they had so many quests held back why not put more in so your new players will not get bored and leave to early?

Adding a few missions that people finished in a week, isn't helping your retention.

Originally posted by Ryowulf

Originally posted by potaco

If you're worried about the monthly updates not being worth the subscription, here's an easy way to fix it:

 

- Cancel your sub when you run out of content and get bored

- Resub once there have been enough content patches to provide you with $15 worth of value

 

Problem solved.

That's not an easy fix, unless you play solo. If you are part of a Cabal(guild) leaving for a month or two or three will make it hard to keep up and informed.

As for the /7 years/. here is what I don't get. They released with 2-3 months of content.  If they had so many quests held back why not put more in so your new players will not get bored and leave to early?

Adding a few missions that people finished in a week, isn't helping your retention.

Well, it depends how your Cabal is. Mine is a group of 19 of my friends, we all played WoW together, and a few of them have played games with me since the 90s (Myth: TFL, UT99, etc). We have 21 accounts in our Cabal, the extra 1 is a joint account we are using to keep an eye on new content while we are all unsubbed. Now, our set-up is kind of unique, but I do know of a few other smaller groups of friends that are quitting at the same time to resub 4-6 months down the road together, too. :P

It is not like good update content has not been done before, Lotro still does well in this regard though no where near as good as it did in its first first two years.

If TSW does have good content updates it will be the first MMO since Lotro to pull that of to my knowledge. So folks are right to be a bit suss they will keep rolling them out.

Does not have to be monthly. Lets say they are going to add a new region to up level cap, I would exepct it to take about 6 months to do that well. All depends on how big an update it is.

Other posters have mention the like of content updates in AC, yes guys this is how MMOs used to be. Before MMOs became wham, bam, thank you for your preorder.

It all have to be about revenue, if it falls below a treshhold they fire dev's or make less contend.

It happens to any mmo, and it seems the trend and life cycle of a current mmo is as follows.

Game launch - massive income

3 months later - 20% playerbase drop

6 months later 40% playerbase drop

Critical point reached

Dev's are fired or relocated to new projects

1 year later game is as good as death, or 80% of the servers are ghostowns.

Time will tell, but with so much competition going on between WoW / GW2 / and some wicked incomming FPS named PS2 the 3 i named will most likely compete with the majority of the playerbase playing mmo's.

Dunno how the future looks for TSW, no idea how many boxes they sold, but looking at the trends of the past few years, it doesnt look to bright.

Originally posted by jusomdude

Doubt it will last honestly. They all start out like this. The last update was probably made before the game released. Just company BS. Saying things to get people to buy.

As long as the content is like the last one, there is no reason for it to not last indefinetly.  Asherons Call has monthly updates and it hasnt missed one in 14 years.

Originally posted by syntax42

I am excited to see a major content patch after a month.  It doesn't feel like they are only adding content that should have been in before launch, unlike SWTOR's legacy system.

How long do you think they can maintain "monthly" updates to the game like this?  Do you think they will reduce the frequency to quarterly, and still retain subscriptions?

It does look like they are going to prioritize monthly updates over expansions. It would make the subscription based model logical. They have stated that they have two new areas (like Kingsmouth) in production and that they will release them as monthly updates. They have also stated that they will add Raids and possibly a PvP dungeon. They have also mentioned a second persistant PvP zone which they dropped before launch, which probably was a good idea, because they got a LOT of input from Fusang that they will need to incorporate before releasing it.

Regarding them "holding back" on content before launch, I call bullshit on that one. They delayed the game by two months to polish up the game. Sure the quests where planned all along, and they probably had like 90% of the assests done. What they didn't have was time to test it and do the last polish. The same goes for the two new areas. Sure they were probably started months ago, but that doesn't mean they were done at launch. Maybe they were at 40% and 80% done?

If you want to do monthly updates, you have to have a pipeline of new areas, quests, minigames, raids and so on. For TSW they made a 7 year plan which I really hope they can actually pull off. It will probably have gigantic changes underway, especially when it comes to gameplay elements like combat, PvP and raids.

Originally posted by Preacher26

TBH no amount of pve missions would satisfy me. They would have to have a major pvp update and add new mechanics to Fusang to get me to resub.

Any pvp that involves capture points... but no incentives to hold them is fail. Nothing like cap swapping. They should have learned from WARs mistakes.

There is an incentive to hold the points, it's just looks too low in comparison the the incentive to loose/recapture the point. If they made it so white marker points didn't start ticking before a set amount of time had gone by, or that the ticks went: 1-2-4-8-16-16-...-16 in 10 minute increments or that loosing a facility reduced the white marker tokens for the last 30-60 minutes.

... in addition, they would probably have to remove some of the PvP quests in Fusang, they are encouraging the grab quest - capture point - leave mentality.

Originally posted by bcbully

Originally posted by BrightestDay

dishonest patch notes - check

 

auction house still in the buggy and unintuitive state it was in when they disabled it - check

 

chat still broken - check

 

 

won't be long now till the schedule slips all together.

What is this "chat still broken?" I have never had an issue like the majority of people. Is it not saving subscibed channels and you have to manually subscribe to each zones general?

 

What is it?

It wasn't saving the channel subscriptions on custom tabs.  It has now been fixed providing you recreate the custom tab and follow the instructions on the launcher.

The Auction house works... if you have the player made addon.  So all Funcom have to do is integrate the fixes from the addon into it and it should work fine.  It's not perfect but it does work.

As for the content patches.

Well, there is nothing to indicate they won't be able to put together similar content to the the July patch every month. It's mostly going to be a few extra missions (7 last time) with the occasion big patch with a raid (which knowing Funcom will be overly difficult and bugged for 6-12months anyway).

After all they aren't really adding any more content than other MMOs, they are just stretching it further.  Rather than getting one big patch every 6 months like you get in WoW, you get 6 smaller patches. Overall you might end up with the same amount of content but you get it more regularly so there is always something to look forward to.

I guess the hope is that players will remain subscribed to see what is coming next month.  Will wait and see if that works or not.  I suspect they will lose a lot of the hardcore content locusts who have already finished all the nightmare mode dungeons, killed regional bosses, finished every quest in the game, completed their ability wheel and so forth.  The rest of use mere mortals might stick around a bit longer.

F2P game are anyway all but free. i prefert paying 15€/month and playing all the game without limitation. I pay for server, for no or at least not much lag or server down and for GMs with good knowledge and quick answers.

Actually i never noticed  any problem with the server, ping is good, stability is good. There's bugs, but nothing that you can't bypass or that a GM can't unlock (and they answer in less than 15 min most of the time).

I pay my 15€ it's what i give for a burger with chips and coke on a saturnday evening ... lol ...