300k is about right. 2mill was cinfirmed in December as active (2,4 mill bought the game)

218 servers. Now after transfers, 187 servers are empty. So...

about 2mill / 218 = about 10k per server

31 servers left = about 300k people are active in SWTOR

The subs number is probably a lot higher, but that's not for long.

Originally posted by ktanner3

How much fatter can the fat man get? It's already heavy to full at prime time and now more servers will be transfering characters to it.

I don't think there's gonna be any difference. Those servers were dead. 100 people each.

Originally posted by SQTO

I dont see a problem with switching between any server types because there is little difference between the server types.

Also it is funny that some people are still crying about chat bubbles, rp is about using your imagination, so try using it.

If I want to RP by watching Chat window instead of scene with characters with assigned text bubbles, I'm not gonna pay for this game and rather go to some RP chat or forums.

RP immersion in SWTOR is below zero.

Yes. Server transfers will be only for selected low population servers and some are excluded from the system and left to die on thier own. [mod edit]

I play on English european RP-PvP server - Lord Calypho. It used to be very active server and remained pretty good population far longer than most other servers, but recently (2-3 weeks ago) overall game population dropped radically and our server became ghost town aswell.

Next week finally starts free server transfer system. The system works that players from multiple low pop servers will be able to transfer to 1 destination server. Nobody knows how many destination servers will be there, but we already know that we can't transfer from EU to US servers and vice versa. And now comes the "funny" part. We also can't transfer from PvP to PvE servers and vice versa. Ok. that's all fine and working for most of us BUT: What about RP servers? Cos Lord Calypho is ONLY server in its category (EU english RP-PvP). Finally a few day ago someone answered this question without PR bullsh*t like thay do with every announcement and Q&A. German Community manager told us that our server and some others from defferent languages and regions are EXCLUDED from free server transfer system.

Absolutely un-f**king-believable!

And let me tell how Bioware sees RP-PvP servers. The same as regular PvP servers. There is NO name policy, no chat bubbles, nothing... It's just PvP server with a little bit more firendly and mature community. Oh wait! The community's f*cking gone already. And at this point nobody cares about RP anymore. PvP server wit soem population is better than RPing alone on an empty fleet.

And I'm not even gonna start on the transfer itself. Lack of ANY guild support is just slap in the face to every guildleader. No guildbank transfer, no guild transfer. No name tranfer, no legacy name tranfer and so on.

1) Spring 2006 - Bioware Austin announcement, so it's safe to say 2006

2) EA pushed it, Every year of marketing cost a lot more money and they started way too early in oct 2008

features are/were dropped cos of lack of time obviously

3) You forgot this number :P

4) nobody knows, I guess around 100 mill 50% of final number

5) It's not official, but somewhere around 200 mill (Voiceover in 3 languages for MMO, 3 cinematics and huge marketing for 3 years, Star wars license cost a lot of money, then 800 people worked on the game for years)

6) wait for post-mortem, they are all under NDA for years, so we won't know for a long time

7) 2.4 mill at launch and it was also a peak for the game, Most active subs were 2mil

8) Now - under 1.3mil acoording to EA in April (my guess - under 800k and dropping), 1.7 in Feb, more in Jan, 2mil in Dec

9) 500k paying subs are profitable for EA. We can only guess what's gonna happen if it drops under that. EA can close MMO in a week, as they did with APB 2 years ago and many more like Sims online etc.

Originally posted by Tnice

SWTOR is the biggest failure in gaming history.

:D harsh but probably truth

Originally posted by erictlewis

Originally posted by Dromedarr

Originally posted by erictlewis

Originally posted by cutthecrap

Hmm, I dunno. I was curious and checked xfire (yeah, I know, shouldn't do that etc), but it looked to me that a lot of games had a drop the past couple of weeks. Sounds like a D3 effect that helps a lot. And didn't SWTOR have something like 200-250 servers or something like that, instead of 13?

I read somewhere that MMO servers usually have an average population of 10k per. But even if it'd be only 4-5k on average, that's still a lot.

You not been reading then.   The average server has 324 playing at a time according to one article released today.  http://www.vg247.com/2012/06/01/swtor-mmo-subscriber-numbers-are-funny-things-with-lots-of-variables-to-consider-says-bioware/

However the real truth is those are the 10 servers listed as standard.  2 servers are listed as heavy possibly 2k at one time.  the other 200 servers are light with less than 250 playing. So yes you got 13-18 OK servers with some health only. www.torstatus.net

You can read this thread about the real numbers.  http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=4521388#post4521388

All I can say is you got to be kidding about the 10k per,  there is no way that has happened, nor will it happen until the do the super server thing if they do.

 

I've seen screenshots from servers where people are ALONE on the fleets! You can't go any lower than that.

I had a few times I logged in and only 10 folks on the fleet on tarro blood.  I have seen one screenshot with 1 on the fleet,  I saw one screen shot with 4 on the entire empire side of the server, but those were taken during the am. All I can say is bw would be lucky if the total playing at one time was more than 60k spread all across the servers.  Now that the free 30 days has worn off I would expect to see more drops in population, but most servers are so empty it is impossible for totstatus to keep up with those due to the baseline that is being used.  EQ2 has more folks playing on my one server of guk than all the swtor servers added up at one time.

there's a guy who's done pretty extensive research about current population and currently is just above 60k online. and declining each day

Originally posted by erictlewis

Originally posted by cutthecrap

Hmm, I dunno. I was curious and checked xfire (yeah, I know, shouldn't do that etc), but it looked to me that a lot of games had a drop the past couple of weeks. Sounds like a D3 effect that helps a lot. And didn't SWTOR have something like 200-250 servers or something like that, instead of 13?

I read somewhere that MMO servers usually have an average population of 10k per. But even if it'd be only 4-5k on average, that's still a lot.

You not been reading then.   The average server has 324 playing at a time according to one article released today.  http://www.vg247.com/2012/06/01/swtor-mmo-subscriber-numbers-are-funny-things-with-lots-of-variables-to-consider-says-bioware/

However the real truth is those are the 10 servers listed as standard.  2 servers are listed as heavy possibly 2k at one time.  the other 200 servers are light with less than 250 playing. So yes you got 13-18 OK servers with some health only. www.torstatus.net

You can read this thread about the real numbers.  http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=4521388#post4521388

All I can say is you got to be kidding about the 10k per,  there is no way that has happened, nor will it happen until the do the super server thing if they do.

 

I've seen screenshots from servers where people are ALONE on the fleets! You can't go any lower than that.

I don't know if it's complete copy from WoW. I'm not interested in WoW and never been. Or possibly even from older game like EQ. Dont know.

So I started playing SWTOR Dec. 13th and hit level 50 on Jan 2nd. So about 20 days of progress. then I got my first set of purple gear in about 2 weeks max. So we are about 1 month since start. Fast forward 5 another months and I'm still lvl 50 and with purple gear. Actually 2 sets of purple Gear - PvE and PvP.

What's the point of making gear colors if most of the time I'm having purple gear? and it's not gonna change. Every other new gear will be also purple. What's the point of having differnt colors for 20 days and then years with 1 purple mess in my inventory?

Looks like some old design from years back that went horribly wrong. At least PvP gear could be differnt color.

Originally posted by smh_alot

Originally posted by Dromedarr

Originally posted by davestr1zl

Originally posted by Bardus

105 views so far and not a sole has taken a stab at this. I'm kinda surprised TBH or is TOR the only game we have any numbers for? Maybe they thought they were bragging by leaking it?

No one knows how much TOR cost, nothing was leaked, only speculated.

Likewise its very unlikely that anyone knows how much the vast majority of games actually cost, so honestly its impossible to compare as it will be comparing one speculation to another.

200mill, 800 people working on it, 4 countries, confirmed in LA times. Google for link if you dont trust me.

 

Those were figures that article writer was throwing around, but there has been no confirmation from EA/BW at all. In fact, there has been no reference or other indication at all in that article - no quote, no 'according to' or 'via' - where he got his figures from or whether it was an estimation, a lazy rounding up, a general guess, another source, even if that was the only place where that figure was mentioned. Without all that, it makes those figures dubious and odd.

I mean, come on... do you honestly think that the game cost only 100mill? that's budget of AAA singleplayer game these days. 2 years of development and marketing. SWTOR got 5 year of development and huge marketing push and biggest voice over porject in history not only games, but entertainment in general!

endgame content and hype killed it, but long term would be COMMUNITY. this game has NO community at all. Missing chat bubbles and  meaningful social hubs with very confusing "server group" forums would kill the game anyway.

Originally posted by Zippy

Originally posted by Dromedarr

Originally posted by Zippy

Tor has not been steady at all on Tor Status.  It has had massive decline every day since January.  With the exception of a 3 day stretch shortly after 1.2 released where there was a posoitve gain fro 3 consecutive days.  But that was immediately followed by bigger and bigger drops each day.  The Tor Status shows the total amount of the drop from all servers in the bottm left corner.  That has been dropping of late as there are so few peoplle left and almost all servers are dead.  There is very little room forit drop nowas it only has a handful of servers left that are not dead.

yes, there's been decline, but not anything alarming

 

look at the graphs

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg821/scaled.php?server=821&filename=torstats.jpg&res=landing

 

feb till mid May - BLUE

 

it's pretty steady both EU and US

ORANGE - massive drop in last 2 weeks, now it's so low that torstatus can't even detect the drop. it's prety much LOW all the time on most servers

How is that not alrming they want from Very heavy to standard to the lowest possible poin light or 1.0.  One cannot get lower than a one which is essentially where they are now.  All servers are dead except 13 (10 US and 3 Euro)and of the 13 8-9 more will be dead within month.  Essentially they will be left with 4-5 viable servers out of the 200 they started with.  How can the drop off not be any steeper.

ok, once again: last 2 weeks were extremely bad for population. it's so low, it's not even possible to measure it anymore. The last 2 week are alarming. 

Originally posted by n3v3rriv3r

This is the price of arogance.  I stil remember how beta players (and fedback) were treated the first month -thanks to fanboys of course they didnt feel the need to listen to anyone.

Sadly I was one of the fanboys. Not anymore. The game's going down, big time.

Originally posted by Alders

I'm sure producing those CGI trailers wasn't exactly cheap either.  They should have spend 200mil on a 2 hour long feature which i think would have been a hit.

Yeah, those 3 cinematics, produced by Blur were expensive as f*ck. Add royalties for Star Wars license, Voice over in 3! languages, and marketing (promo, booths on major expos like E3, friday updates etc.) for more than 3 years!

Probably cost more than paying 800 people working on the game for years.

Originally posted by Zippy

Tor has not been steady at all on Tor Status.  It has had massive decline every day since January.  With the exception of a 3 day stretch shortly after 1.2 released where there was a posoitve gain fro 3 consecutive days.  But that was immediately followed by bigger and bigger drops each day.  The Tor Status shows the total amount of the drop from all servers in the bottm left corner.  That has been dropping of late as there are so few peoplle left and almost all servers are dead.  There is very little room forit drop nowas it only has a handful of servers left that are not dead.

yes, there's been decline, but not anything alarming

look at the graphs

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg821/scaled.php?server=821&filename=torstats.jpg&res=landing

feb till mid May - BLUE

it's pretty steady both EU and US

ORANGE - massive drop in last 2 weeks, now it's so low that torstatus can't even detect the drop. it's prety much LOW all the time on most servers

Originally posted by davestr1zl

Originally posted by Bardus

105 views so far and not a sole has taken a stab at this. I'm kinda surprised TBH or is TOR the only game we have any numbers for? Maybe they thought they were bragging by leaking it?

No one knows how much TOR cost, nothing was leaked, only speculated.

Likewise its very unlikely that anyone knows how much the vast majority of games actually cost, so honestly its impossible to compare as it will be comparing one speculation to another.

200mill, 800 people working on it, 4 countries, confirmed in LA times. Google for link if you dont trust me.

Originally posted by Rommie10-284

Everything is pointing to the ship snapping in half, but man, I still didn't quite think I'd see it happen.  How can a developer with the string of successful releases foul up an IP like Star Wars?  And yet there is water pouring in everywhere.  The post-mortems should be brutal and not mince words.

I'm soo looking forward to those post-mortems. 200mill game dead in less then a year. That's gonna be epic to read.

yeah, i'm also still subbed till august, but I've not been in the game for 3 weeks now and not planning to return. The whole endgame is just 4 bosses on hard in operation once a week. Other than that? 4 warzones with waiting timer over 30 mins. That's pathetic. Not even chat bubbles to do some cool RP.

Originally posted by Byne25

There is a dip because of Diablo III and Tera. Whenever a new game comes out the populations always dip. They need their server merge ASAP though regardless of who left to play their initial 30 days of gamplay. I still love the game. Looking forward to seeing what is coming through out the year.

That's hardly a little dip. The population (active) has been extremely steady for months and now this in 2 weeks. That's on the edge of recoverability.

According to http://www.torstatus.net/ the population's been pretty steady since February (after initial decline) up to mid May. But look at the graph there! Both US and EU servers went to zero in about last 2 weeks! What a massive drop.

US and EU graphs (highlighted)

i know it's not representation of subscriptions, but it's kinda alarming at this point. Not many people are logging in to the game.

what do you think? Diablo 3?

At this point the server population status is irrelevant, cos about 98% is LIGHT all the time. This is getting out of hand and transfers won't be active till July. And that's optimistic prediction. How much more could the community take on low pop servers to stay in this sinking ship?

The subs could easily go under 500k in no time. and 500k is minimum for EA to be profitable in long run. And we all know how EA can kill an MMO in a week - APB, I'm loooking at you.

This might be one big fiasco.