Originally posted by Gdemami

Neither.

TOR managed to gain substantial player base, meaning people do like the game. Only problem is it was too expensive to make.

People bought and played the game from hype and the Bioware reputation. 2 million sales at launch before even playing the game, even before knowing they liked it. Then 75% quit. The majority really did not like SWTOR

It has only sustained a high level player base, as people do not want to just write off the game after buying it, especially after buying the collectors edition - a waste of money if you end up just playing theough one class and quit within a month

WOW started off small with a small playerbase, and then grew to mass proportions, which means people liked WOW

the game is single player for leveling, but not for end game.

swimming, day/night are just a feeling in every game

cutscenes is 90% of leveling, only 10% is for endf game.

loading screens are in all games and last the same.

space i find it very relaxing and enjoyable.

................

things that make me quit

1. no global chat

2. all items BoP

3. removing items is something that i hate

Hmm.  My 'primary reason' vote has to go to "the OCD/dedicated behavior patterns of a large number of very vocal and persistent 'haters', followed by a predictable 'all the cool kids are hating on this game' surge of 'me toos'."  But the originals are still chipping away at the stone, to this day.

But that was probably more of a local phenomena.

The game itself had a fairly complete set of issues, too.

About time someone made a post like this!

...

OTHER: mainly, they did not incorporate ANY SWG stuff. As issued as SWG was, it had many interesting and cool features to built and expand on. Large worlds, player ctities, non combat classes, living worlds asf. SWTOR totally ignored EVERYTHING and made on pupose a sort of anti-SWG, which was just absurd.

Other also import points INVPO:

- dead, sterile, non-animated worlds: NPCs standing around like glued to the ground, no city life, no ambient sounds, asf. Everything that made the planets feel like theatre stages more than actual worlds.

- lack of social hubs, space station was BAD BAD idea to make a "meet and greet" place

- waaaaay too serious. Nothing funny, cute or stuff to distract from the war. Seriousness needs contrast. The civil life to be worth defending, fighting for. Same issue as in Tabula Rasa: if all is war, what civil good society we are actually fighting for? All that made WOW a success: the cute, the absurd, the funny; something for everyone. This is way too much a male wet dream of combat and heroism without anything else.

- lack of playable alien races. In a Star Wars game simply an unforgivable sin. Period.

- some planets are really boring. Taris anyone? Again, possibly because of the totally not animated worlds, which just is not believable. But also the quest series are often strangely dull and uninspired. I really dunno why so many praised the writing of SWTOR, because I really found it lame, dumb and tiring in too many places. Class stores were great, ok, but the planetary quests often waaay too boring. Some planets are really a snoozefest and a pain in the ass if you have to make them a second time.

- cartoony graphics. In such a serious setting as Star Wars, the visual were just a bad choice. It might work in more lighthearted stuff, but for Star Wars especially the cartoony graphics were simply a horrible choice. I am not against stylized realism per se, but Star Wars and cartoon just simply should never ever meet.

- NPCs talk WAAAY too much, and my companions (strangely) way too little. I don't really need to know the entire biography of every unimportant NPC, but my companions were way too uninteresting and shallow. I would have invested into much more fleshed out companions, as in Bioware single player games, and then leave most NPCs less chatty. I don't care about the life story of some imperial officer or what, but my constant companions! A really, really odd choice of emphasis Bioware made. As I predicted before launch, people will SPACEBAR through dialogues much more than Bioware expected.

Given the results of the vote so far, we can count on Bioware to:

• Add more cutscenes (95 percent of players love them!)
• Scrap any hint of world design that is not linear in nature (75 percent of players love this feature!)
• Drop their supposed super secret space project in favor of the space mini-games they already have (97 percent of the players voted they would leave the game if space changes)
• Never add weather or day/night cycles (99 percent of players never noticed this was left out of the game!)
• Make no modifications whatsoever to the "gameplay feeling " (like EAWare could anyway)
• Increase the time of loading screens (97 percent of players like them!)
• Completely remove all endgame features  (85 percent of players voted it's the best ever in a current Star Wars Game!)
• Never implement swimming (99 percent would never use it)
• Keep catering to all the gollums in their community (who make up 98 percent of the remaining community!)
• And grope you up and down until they get their greasy little paws on your wallet (The 28 percent of people who chose "other" feel like they are not paying enough!)

There wasn't a choice for all of the above. So I had to choose other.

problems i had with was lifeless worlds (the same character model everywhere

npcs look like they are having conversations no sound coming out from them)

a cut scene for everything (no i do not want to listen to your life story to kill ten womprats)

forced to do everything in a chain including questing

hardly any rewards for exploration

no system of progression for gathcraftsplorers like me

There were too many things to choose just one.  Overall, the combination of those things caused me to burn out quickly and lose my will to log in.

I can't help but think that if SWTOR had been more like SWG (pre-NGE) and less like WoW it would have been more successful. Still....I enjoyed the game for the brief time I played it and don't regret buying it.  Live and learn, I say. :)

Originally posted by superniceguy

Originally posted by Gdemami

Neither.

TOR managed to gain substantial player base, meaning people do like the game. Only problem is it was too expensive to make.

People bought and played the game from hype and the Bioware reputation. 2 million sales at launch before even playing the game, even before knowing they liked it. Then 75% quit. The majority really did not like SWTOR

It has only sustained a high level player base, as people do not want to just write off the game after buying it, especially after buying the collectors edition - a waste of money if you end up just playing theough one class and quit within a month  Don't forget to add in those that would have bought a 3 or 6 month sub bundle and tried to get their moneys worth from that before quitting

WOW started off small with a small playerbase, and then grew to mass proportions, which means people liked WOW

 

Main reason SWTOR failed? HMM... Could be it had to much this...

And not enough this...

Single Player Game with MMO badge.

Reason enough?

Verticle progression.

That's generally what I think is causing the longer-term failure of MMOs today. We can see it in SWTOR, we can see it in Guild Wars 2, and I imagine we'll see it in The Elder Scrolls Online. It's the common thread.

Look at what people said about SWTOR: the levelling process was engaging and entertaining. For the most part, people enjoyed the story-driven content up to end game, and then the complaints started when the verticle progression hit home. The same thing happened with Guild Wars 2: the prevalent opinion is that the levelling process is fun and engaging, but then people hit endgame, verticle progression kicked in, and people complained. The drop off point for both games happened after a month or 2, when the majority were starting to hit cap. Seems reasonable to assume that end game content is, for the most part, the problem.

Just look at World of Warcraft's release cycle: peak-concurrency usually comes shortly after an expansion release, and number drop off over the year. This has been happening more dramatically with MoP, with number sliding noticably down as the expansion's age grows. Again, the common thread is a mid-term drop off as players begin to hit the verticle progression at end game.

The problem is that we've been pursuing progression in such terms since EQ, but mostly since WoW popularised the formula back in 2004. No developers or designers have made any effort to diversify verticle progression, and have certainly avoided trying to introduce new forms of non-vertical progression.

Now I'm not saying that verticle progression as end game SHOULDN'T be offered. It is a mistake however to offer it as the ONLY brand of progression at cap, and there needs to be more content options for players that doesn't fall within "new raids" or "new dungeons".

It has nothing to do with a lack of multiplayer content, or social content; most people would rather spend the vast majority of their time in their own little bubble. It has nothing to do with raid encounters being poorly designed. It has nothing to do with their not being enough raid content at end game.

Do you want to know who I blame for all of this? The "veterean" EQ/DAOC/GW/WoW developers that people like ZeniMax and Blizzard tote as their "trump cards". The reality is that saying you have an EQ dev just means your game is going to follow the crowd. I'm not really interested in TESO at all because they have DAOC developers working on it. I played DAOC. It was great. I don't want to play it again, tyvm. I'd like some new faces to come to the fore. I'd like to see people who've never worked on an MMO before, or at least have never led MMO development before, taking the lead on these bigger projects. I'm fed up of seeing tired hacks being rolled out to steer the development of big and potentially great titles into the very much known waters of the MMO space.

We've had the better part of a decade of constant raids and dungeons, and it's about time someone grew some balls and challenged that paradigm... because it's flawed.

Originally posted by just1opinion

 

There were too many things to choose just one.  Overall, the combination of those things caused me to burn out quickly and lose my will to log in.

 

I can't help but think that if SWTOR had been more like SWG (pre-NGE) and less like WoW it would have been more successful. Still....I enjoyed the game for the brief time I played it and don't regret buying it.  Live and learn, I say. :)

Even if it was like the NGE, it still would have been better.

The final years were pretty good, and its only short comings was the 9 iconic professions instead of the customisable 32, and the lag and bugs from the many changes which could only be fixed if written from the ground up.

It still had its crafting intact mostly, and space was virtually the same. There was plenty more content and stuff to do in game in the end, and you still could do your own thing.

Near the end I think NGE was just as good as pre-NGE in their own ways, as NGE had loads of things that pre-NGE did not, and pre-NGE had things that NGE did not get back. I would only play pre-NGE version again as long as it had the content that came since NGE and have the game mechanics of pre-NGE, but then some of the content probably would not have worked with pre-NGE mechanics. The NGE in 2005 was atrocious though, and a lot of people never  gave it a second look after that. In the end SOE did a fantastic job rebuilding it over the years, with their very low staffed dev team, and churned out more content in the first half of 2011 (the 2nd half was devoted to its closure) than SWTOR has had since it launched

I thought SWTOR was going to be like the NGE than pre-NGE, from the limited number of professions, and it being said was like WOW, but written from the ground up, and being more polished than the NGE, but nah, it is like WOW but more restrictive. SWTOR makes WOW look like a sandbox!

Originally posted by just1opinion

 

There were too many things to choose just one.  Overall, the combination of those things caused me to burn out quickly and lose my will to log in.

 

I can't help but think that if SWTOR had been more like SWG (pre-NGE) and less like WoW it would have been more successful. Still....I enjoyed the game for the brief time I played it and don't regret buying it.  Live and learn, I say. :)

   You are one of many people who say this, but the fact is that SWG was a failure so Sony instituted changes which kept the game afloat for awhile but was still a failure