Originally posted by Sameer1979

Originally posted by pierth

 

I'd posit that this is one of the reasons that F2P/freemium (even B2P) models are taking over the industry- if players won't accept grindy games, and they are to continue catering to solo players that leave within six months anyway, then there's no reason to go the P2P route because there won't be enough players to stay around for it to be more profitable than a cash shop instead.

WHat? how many B2P MMO have released that proved to be so successful that you are claiming they are taking over the industry? moreover F2P is nothing but a gimmick. Most of the players end up subscribing anyways to regular monthly fee for unilimited access to all the features of game because otherwise you end up forking a lot more cash if you stick to F2P model.

F2P model is nothign more thana glorious trial, best deal is still to pay a monthly sub. Companies sure now how to fool people don't they? F2P/B2P taking over industry..yeah right.

Subbing in Freemium game - yeah devs want that. It is "having cake and eating it" attitude. Sub + big cash shop = corporations dream.

Most retarded model from my point of view. Tried it (was VIP in Lotro amongst others) - still it was one of worst deals in my life and I won't do it again.

STILL that kind of model is Freemium model (some ppl put it together with F2P) and it is not P2P.  

There are only few P2P mmorpg's left.

Design and gameplay of current mmorpg's just does not  made them to be games for long-term gameplay.

I am myself tired of trying new mmorg's every months - so I don't do this anymore and just simply not play any.(well there is one I will play in close future, but I doubt that it will be long-term).

Originally posted by pierth

 

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Originally posted by Sameer1979

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Originally posted by pierth   I'd posit that this is one of the reasons that F2P/freemium (even B2P) models are taking over the industry- if players won't accept grindy games, and they are to continue catering to solo players that leave within six months anyway, then there's no reason to go the P2P route because there won't be enough players to stay around for it to be more profitable than a cash shop instead.

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WHat? how many B2P MMO have released that proved to be so successful that you are claiming they are taking over the industry? moreover F2P is nothing but a gimmick. Most of the players end up subscribing anyways to regular monthly fee for unilimited access to all the features of game because otherwise you end up forking a lot more cash if you stick to F2P model.

 

F2P model is nothign more thana glorious trial, best deal is still to pay a monthly sub. Companies sure now how to fool people don't they? F2P/B2P taking over industry..yeah right.

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I extended the logic of the F2P/freemium pricing to B2P because essentially it'll be the same thing- monetizing after the fact via DLC/RMT as opposed to a subscription.

As I argued earlier in the thread, do you have any proof that the majority of players sub for the majority of their played time in a F2P (if possible) or freemium game? I know I haven't but anecdotal evidence is just that.

What about Aion's F2P? Is that a scam?

The only freemium game I've played where it was very necessary to subscribe was EQ2 and that's only if you're interested in its endgame due to gear limitations playing free.

There was survey done on EQ2 forums some time back and majority voted for sticking to sub model. Considering how expensive it can be otherwise to pay for feature unlocks, it makes sense doesn't it?  Why not pay 15 bucks a month and unlock entire game instead of paying for almost everything from character slots to acces to dungeons and what not?

All so called F2P games come with heavy restrictions including Aion or DCUO or AOC etc. And in general a lot more expensive if you want to pay for unlocking specific features or items.

Originally posted by SpottyGekko

Originally posted by sgel

Originally posted by SpottyGekko

Lol, if a game has 700K players, what diffirence does it make whether they are spread over 214 servers or 20 servers ? As long as the servers can handle the player numbers.

 

So having many servers with a few players on each is the same as having fewer much more populated servers?

I think your logic has gone stale... b

[mod edit]

Perhaps my logic has "gone stale" :D

 

So can you please explain to me how subscriber numbers are irrelevant, but server numbers are important ?

Server numbers dictate the average "spread" of a population. If they're moving from triple digit down to double digit servers (ie: 200 -> 30) it means that they spread their population too thin, or the population itself has left leaving a massive empty void that needs to be filled by merging servers.

It shows a drastic shift in population retention with respect to SWTOR & it's overall growth. When your product has "Negative Growth" it means your product has fallen in popularity thus making the listed Subscriber Numbers almost unbelieveable to begin with.

I don't believe they have 700k anymore, and think that due to the server merging it's most likely around 500k or less. 

Originally posted by Sameer1979

Originally posted by pierth

 

I'd posit that this is one of the reasons that F2P/freemium (even B2P) models are taking over the industry- if players won't accept grindy games, and they are to continue catering to solo players that leave within six months anyway, then there's no reason to go the P2P route because there won't be enough players to stay around for it to be more profitable than a cash shop instead.

WHat? how many B2P MMO have released that proved to be so successful that you are claiming they are taking over the industry? moreover F2P is nothing but a gimmick. Most of the players end up subscribing anyways to regular monthly fee for unilimited access to all the features of game because otherwise you end up forking a lot more cash if you stick to F2P model.

F2P model is nothign more thana glorious trial, best deal is still to pay a monthly sub. Companies sure now how to fool people don't they? F2P/B2P taking over industry..yeah right.

LOL- Sadly it worked. Sadly the entire market market has bought this crap- 

F2P has taken over. =(

I see the server merges as just the beginning to block the financial blood cut wound from spurting out anymore. I would not be surprised if a F2P announcement is made in the near future to try and save more monetary leakage and to run as cheaply as possible to recover or gain some stability, as well as bring in more masses to populate the servers.

It's true the overall population is nothing compared to the inital hype, however they upgraded the Destination Servers (remaining servers in the future).

While i agree the remaining* server are not capable to hold 1Million players _at least_ the size is now 4x as big as it was in December 2011. My Server has over 400 people on each faction online in the fleet and 100+ each faction on the startet planets, 50 - 100 on mid level planets and 20 - 40 on corellia / illum). The server used to have only 150+ on the fleet and up to 10 on corellia, while having 50~ on the mid zone planets at best and was _FULL_ during release.

And let's be honest, forthose still playing it's the best move they could have done. Despite the initial Server count, each server was too small always. These changes to the server software and database handling for more people in a "server" should have been there at launch.

Only downside is, Server started to slightly to lag yesterday (database / cluster communications lag, not latency of your connection to the gameservers). :/

I dont think anyones surprised. This game had a good story line. Everything else was so ugly and boring. I really don't see how anyone but a hardcore Star Wars junkie could play this for more then a few weeks. I hit lvl 42, went to the beach and 3 days later my girlfriend asked how my game was. I forgot i even owned the game!!!!!!

Originally posted by nyxium

I see the server merges as just the beginning to block the financial blood cut wound from spurting out anymore. I would not be surprised if a F2P announcement is made in the near future to try and save more monetary leakage and to run as cheaply as possible to recover or gain some stability, as well as bring in more masses to populate the servers.

I predict two things, either:

-A) Dramatic shift towards F2P in 3 to 6 months for the entire game.

Or 

-B) Dramatic change of gameplay similar to SWG's NGE in order to shift in newer blood to the product to recover developement costs. 

Either way, I really don't see a return in SWTOR's subscriber base. They realized what the rest of us have been saying for months now. The problem is that it took them so long to realize it :(.

I am not shocked at all if these server numbers are finalized. Going by this thread:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=449144

I stated the following on the 2nd of this month:

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/353010/page/2

"We have 216 servers in total. If they wanted the population to be at around full or very heavy (around 3k per) during evening primetime blocks, they would have to drop the servers down to 22 servers from 216. If they wanted the population to be around heavy and have around 2k per, they would have to drop the servers down to 33 from 216.

Originally posted by SpottyGekko

Originally posted by sgel

Originally posted by SpottyGekko

Lol, if a game has 700K players, what diffirence does it make whether they are spread over 214 servers or 20 servers ? As long as the servers can handle the player numbers.

 

So having many servers with a few players on each is the same as having fewer much more populated servers?

I think your logic has gone stale [mod edit]

Perhaps my logic has "gone stale" :D

 

So can you please explain to me how subscriber numbers are irrelevant, but server numbers are important ?

I bet he means that you will never agree that the actual subscribers of SWTOR are [mod edit]and you will keep on stating that they are infact 900k or whatever.

Since neither can be proven the numbers are irrelevant when noone can deny that servers are only going to be X very soon.

Originally posted by pierth

Just goes to show the importance of having a quality, compelling endgame.

^

Rift lost servers too but it didnt start with that many and certainly has more the Swtor does now.

Why? Because Rift has an endgame.

People here made a big deal about Rifts questing saying it was shallow but guess what Swtor gave you quite a bit of leveling options and people still left.

Originally posted by potapithikos

Originally posted by SpottyGekko

Perhaps my logic has "gone stale" :D

 

So can you please explain to me how subscriber numbers are irrelevant, but server numbers are important ?

I bet he means that you will never agree that the actual subscribers of SWTOR are 3 (You, Cutthecrap, and MMOMaverick) and you will keep on stating that they are infact 900k or whatever.

 

Since neither can be proven the numbers are irrelevant when noone can deny that servers are only going to be X very soon.

? I don't sub or play SWTOR at all. Lol, fail bait comment

Originally posted by Z3R01

Originally posted by pierth

Just goes to show the importance of having a quality, compelling endgame.

^

Rift lost servers too but it didnt start with that many and certainly has more the Swtor does now.

Why? Because Rift has an endgame.

People here made a big deal about Rifts questing saying it was shallow but guess what Swtor gave you quite a bit of leveling options and people still left.

shows you have to have everything ready when you release the game not hope that people will give you a chance to develope it.

Servers are big, somwhere the 1.7 million subscriber have to go so people can see them...

Originally posted by Ausare

Originally posted by Z3R01

Originally posted by pierth

Just goes to show the importance of having a quality, compelling endgame.

^

Rift lost servers too but it didnt start with that many and certainly has more the Swtor does now.

Why? Because Rift has an endgame.

People here made a big deal about Rifts questing saying it was shallow but guess what Swtor gave you quite a bit of leveling options and people still left.

shows you have to have everything ready when you release the game not hope that people will give you a chance to develope it.

The mmo genre is competitive. Everyone is fighting for those subscriber dollars. When you release you go up against established games with thousands of hours of endgame content. You can not release a game without multiple tiers of content, noone will stay. 

Why would they? 

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by SpottyGekko

Lol, if a game has 700K players, what diffirence does it make whether they are spread over 214 servers or 20 servers ? As long as the servers can handle the player numbers.

 

It sounds like the doomsayers are going to use the character transfer numbers to try to "prove" that the game is finally "dead". Is the subtext here something like: "Wow, if they needed 214 servers for 1 million players, reducing that to 20 servers must mean the game only has 100K players left !!1!!!"

 

SWTOR had the smoothest launch in MMO history, but it came at quite a steep price in the end. Having so many servers at launch (and aggresively managing server loadings) made for very smooth gameplay during the initial rush, but it has left a large number of servers empty now that the population has stabilised.

So, what's really important ? The drop in player numbers is important, and we can clearly see that the numbers have dropped substantially (even by the official announcements), so nothing new there. The re-arrangement of remaining players on fewer (but bigger) servers is expected, not headline news...

 

Stop fooling yourself please.  It would be surprising if the game has greater than 500K active players right now and as soon as GW2/TSW launch they'll be heading down to the 200-300K range. (one man's opinion)

 

Make that 2 men's opinionata.  I think by the end of the year they will be lucky to stabilise at 50-100k.

Man, it's fun to see that ppl always have something to cry about. *rolls eyes*

Had SWTOR started with a lower number of server, people would have been in queue for ages getting the hate rollin'...

so instead BW overcompensated (and added in the "early access" APACs) and now people a crying that the servers are too empty (due to natural reduction of tourism players leaving).

so BW now sets up a server transfer model (not even a server merger, just a server transfer model!) and ppl start crying that this is SWTOR's end as obviously it'll show how few gamers there are actually playing SWTOR...

so, what is it that ppl actually want?

Because I assume with these smart doom-n-gloomers here (who should problably actually sit on the board of every MMO to assure that everything runs perfect) they have the answer that BW doesn't have...

Right now BW needs to determine what works best... and guess who makes that hard: the gamers!

There is no point of creating 2 or 3 "overservers" and a dozen or so mid-strong servers and another dozen light-to-mid servers and then say "hey, we are done!"

Because then suddenly people will start complaining that these "overservers" are too full and that there ain't enough on the mid-light servers and the whole game starts again.

This is a simple, persistant "let's look at the numbers" game where BW needs to see if one server is in danger of going critical and needs to be dropped as a destination server or not.

And who knows, out of all those origin servers, at the end of the day there may well be quite a few "rising from the ashes" when BW actuially finds their prime servers saturated and now goes for the "second class" servers that still have a "stronger" population (compared to other low pop servers) on 'em.

Anyhow, things are in motion, now let 'em progress, will ya? ;-)

It's very good news for SWTOR. Nothing is as lame as playing on a dead MMO-server.

I played in AoC when they merged the servers there, and it helped a lot gameplay wise and because of that helped retention. The only bad thing is that they waited so long - which goes for both SWTOR and AoC.

Originally posted by pierth

 

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Source? Metrics/Statistics? Any proof whatsoever? Because the last two "forced grouping" games that I played were FFXI and EQ1 both of which have run with profitable amounts of players for years.

Certainly, if MMO Pubs are only seeking players for less than six months they should focus on soloers- however if they are looking to profit on more than box sales then it shows that it's a stupid, stupid thing to do.

The problem is you have people on either side of the fence arguing to the extremes of their position, while dismissing or ignoring the other side of the coin.  It's either "All A" or "All B". Too few people dwell in the gray area between that better represents the actual situation. This leads to a complete dead-end in terms of any kind of meaningful discussion taking place, because people on either side refuse to even acknowledge the other.

What I see happening is bigger name developers finding they can provide what is essentially a forced-online solo-RPG with optional group content. That is, optional in that you don't have to do it, but it's there in case you want to. It's not mission critical to progressing in the game - that includes Raids and PvP in most cases.

The developers and, to a greater extent, the publishers are steadily working this into a situation where they get to have their cake and eat it, too. It seems to me that this whole genre is steadily moving toward the "standard" of being forced online single-player games with an on-going revenue model.

Looking at the current crop of MMOs and comparing it to earlier MMOs, even including those that came out earlier in the "WoW Era", fewer and fewer developers are even trying to make them massive anymore.

The genre's being streamlined, simplified and wittled down into a lean, mean, money-generating machine that barely resembles its roots anymore. It's happening right under people's noses, and those same people are eating it up.