Originally posted by AdamTM

If i think F2P i think freemium, a la carte content, not literally -free- of course.

BTW, BW and EA can say a lot of things if the day is long btw ;D

Of course, but it isn't as if a freemium model is implemented with the snap of someone's fingers, Turbine took the better part of a year to change their game to suit a freemium system and that was from the moment they decided to do it, other MMO companies also took quite some time to execute the necessary changes for the switch. Since the BW people have stated that their intentions right now are nowhere into that direction and the required time needed for such a switch, an implementation of a freemium model after a year seems highly unrealistic and contrary to anything we've seen so far in the past.

But hey, if you're certain enough of it that you'd be willing to place a 100 dollar bet on it, be my guest

Originally posted by AdamTM

I just see the (properly executed) freemium model as superior to P2P.

For TOR, If the game really has to have 500.000 subs like previously stated by EA, the monthly cashflow would be 500k*15$ so around 7.5M/Month. I think this can be easily reached with a Freemium model like Turbine has with DDO (pay for story-content).

This is slightly offtopic, but it's my opinion as well that a 'paying/gaming a la carte' model, where you can adjust your payment to your gaming needs and activity level and switch between F2P and P2P at will, is better than either F2P or P2P. A hybrid payment model that has enough flexibility. I don't think though that F2P is a switch that the current AAA MMO's like SWTOR will make so soon, especially since I heard BW people mention that it wasn't a model they were thinking of for SWTOR, so that doesn't seem like any implementation like that within a year will be an issue.

Originally posted by AdamTM

Originally posted by alancode

It will not go FTP lol. 

Seeing as almost every MMORPG of the past went F2P recently, strong words.

Well, none of the AAA MMO's went F2P within a year, so that is counter the state of affairs so far, but no matter, I asked for concrete predictions and you gave one, so that was a good post in my books, thanks.

Originally posted by Lobotomist

Originally posted by AdamTM

 

Prediction

 

Sales:

Launch box/digital-sales in the first week (including pre-orders): ~3-4 Million

 

Subscription retention rates (from initial sales, numbers at the -end- of each month):

1. Month: 80-90%

2. Month: 50-60%

3. Month: 30-40%

4. Month: below 30%

+6. Month: ~15%

 

Free To Play prediction:

Month 12-14 from launch

 Quite similar to my predicitons (that i dont care to repeat)

Aaw, no need, I found them and will add them here for completion, you're welcome

Originally posted by Lobotomist

Here is just how i think things will roll out for SWTOR in its first year. Or at least how EA would maximize profits and keep SWTOR alive and thiriving.

Month 1-3 : 1 million subs.
Month 3-6 : 300 thousand subs.
(GW2, D3 launches)
Month 6-9: Expansion launched , subs on slight rise
Month 10-12 : F2P announced , subs on all time low
1 year : SWTOR goes F2P

Originally posted by Lobotomist

Originally posted by onthestick

EA will go bankrupt after SWTOR? come on man seriously.

 They invested so much, there is always the possibility.

Someone here said the initial sales will cover the investment. I doubt it.

But i am almost sure they will not turn any serious profit on it.

After they cover the initial investment and pay off Lucas farm - the game will be well past its first 6 months and declining due to launch of GW 2 and Diablo 3

Originally posted by SuprGamerX

Heh ,predictions on a game that had ALOT of cancelled pre orders?

 One's thing for sure , SWtor won't have anything near what Skyrim had.   And Skyrim ain't even multiplayer (yet).

Lol, MW3 had 10 million sales, BF3 5 million sales, that's the kind of numbers successful singleplayer games are throwing around especially if they're on multiple platforms.

MMORPG's have almost never reached even 1 million within the first month after launch, so what you're saying, comparing MMO sales with singlerplayer game sales, is like saying 'the sky is blue',  well, duh

edit: I hadn't expected the thread to grow this fast, nice one, I see some good, solid predictions of all kinds

Originally posted by sanosukex

the color change had a unanimouse positive feedback accross beta players and forums. I really wish I could find that interview but they state beta testers are for testing features they implement not to influence there direction of the game. Either way its no differn't than the space combat so many people hate it but most will say "something" is better than nothing. Now we HAD an optional feature that was ready to go for launch and everyone loved but now instead we get NOTHING and a note from the devs we are working on something else for the future.

It doesn't really matter that much, because there have also been statements where the devs clearly stated that they paid close attention to what the testers' feedback in several ways was.

It's my experience especially on these forums that (some) people tend to grab one statement they didn't like and elevate that as The Statement that completely, ultimately covered a presumed attitude of the whole of BW company and group of devs and designers, while at the same time ignoring all other statements the devs of the game also made that put things in a different perspective or might even contradict the claim those people are making.

Like said, imo it's simply blown out of proportion. Hate BW or SWTOR all you like, but at least try to uphold a modicum of reason and objectivity, trying to make this into 'BW dev don't listen at all to their testers, it was all a hoax!' kind of stuff definitely isn't.

Originally posted by sanosukex

Either way I agree they are new to the MMO game and to ignore your player base like they are doing with the color change thing and many other issues from beta shows this and worries me the future of this game does not look as bright as I have been hoping...

Sorry, I find this highly subjective and kinda melodramatic.

With the gazillion different opinions that testers will have, there'll always be people who feel that the devs haven't listened to their personal list that bugged them, no matter what they do. That doesn't mean that they don't listen, it only means that they don't just plainly implement and change every thing that this or that group of players comes up with, and also that they don't implement it right away (due to obvious time or resource constraints).

They already mentioned that they were working on something that should offer a better alternative, so that doesn't seem like they're not busy with the subject. If you don't like what they're busy with, well, too bad for you, but it doesn't automatically mean that 'they don't listen'.

Maybe I should have added the part, predictions you encounter here, on these mmorpg.com forums just in case

Originally posted by returnintor

Good idea. Play a Star Wars game where you can't actually fight a war among the stars and ignore a percentage of the game that I've paid for - and I'm now paying a monthly rent for too - because it's of such poor quality.

All those complaints. It's so simple, if you don't like it, don't play it, I mean imho it'd be really stupid to play and sub to an MMORPG you don't enjoy.

As for space combat, sorry, but SWG was completely lacking in the space combat department for the better part of its first year after launch, people coped with it and were still happy while playing and still felt in a Star Wars universe.

There are a lot of predictions being made on these forums. Unfortunately, they're all over the place.

I thought it'd be a good thing to collect them all in one thread and compare them with reality when the time comes.

So, if you have a strong, concrete prediction regarding SWTOR's future and you dare enough, feel free to post or re-post it here.

Don't be suddenly shy, your ideas how large launch sales will be, number or % of subs after the first free month, at the 3 month mark, the number of subs you think WoW will lose, etc, etc, all is welcome, try to make it concrete if possible though.

Also, if you encounter predictions from other people, just quote and re-post it in this thread (preferrably with source link) so that we have the majority of all those predictions spouted in one place for easier comparison and reviewing.

Good luck!

That's odd. Didn't I read somewhere that an appearance tab would be added ingame?

Originally posted by Phry

i guess you didnt spot the irony.. they have to have a FFA zone on a PVP server...  like you still need to get permission to fight someone,   no don't stand there, stand there so i can shoot you!!!

Personally I find it more ironic that there exists people who post more on the game(s) they dislike and have little interest in its gameplay than on the game(s) they claim to like and are interested in, that's some fine irony

As for the FFA PvP, that's iirc more than MMO's like WoW and GW2 have.

Originally posted by returnintor

\This ^^.

WoW has lasted seven years and still has a long way to go. Why? Because it offers freedom and choice.

SWTOR offers neither. I think it will be P2P inside one year and closed down inside two.

Ah, the psychics this site breeds, really, Nostradamus has nothing on them

Don't confuse wishful thinking for actual solid predictions. We'll see how things will be for SWTOR and WoW in the course of 2012 although from the decline that WoW is experiencing already, it doesn't look that good, although it's nice to see a number of people who've been bashing WoW for years on this site - not you - now rush as white knights to WoW's defense.

If you really hate/dislike SWTOR that much, simply move on to an MMORPG you do enjoy, this is clearly not the MMO you're looking for then.

It'll be interesting to see how the sub numbers of WoW and SWTOR will be in 2012.

It's kind of funny, I've seen people in this and other threads praise WoW and AoC in order to talk down on SWTOR, while not even that many months ago a number of those same people were bashing and trashtalking WoW and AoC, in sort of the same derogatory tone they're doing now with SWTOR, funny how that works

Originally posted by RizelStar

Am I the only one who thinks this is off topic.

 

On topic: I ha dthe same type of experience aes.

There have been several posts that have little to do with the OP's request and some even counter to what I specifically asked not to do, which is kinda annoying, but I guess it's maybe impossible to avoid.

As long as it doesn't keep derailing.

Originally posted by Wharg0ul

Shouldn't this be in the spoilers forums?

My request is to avoid spoilers as much as possible and only talk about them in generic terms, and only mention them when someone can't find a way around it with a spoiler alert warning.

Originally posted by DOGMA1138

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

Originally posted by h0urg1ass

Why make a topic asking our opinion and then say that one opinion doesn't matter?

Because I'm not interested at all in what people didn't find or didn't notice, the OP is pretty clear, it is about what people DID discover in differing results or became aware of while choosing different options. It's exactly for this, to prevent the white noise of people commenting 'huh, I dinna find anythin'. So, if you did discover such stuff, then feel free to post it, if not, then don't post.

Well if you want a report of the all the details of every thing some one might have discovered maybe you should've started this thread in the spoiler section of the forums?

On a side not, a negative answer is just as important as a positive one...

That's a strawman argument, I didn't mention at all that I want all the details of every thing, so don't try to make it as if I did.

Like the OP also said, either avoid spoiler details or else if you can't find a way around it, add a spoiler alert.

Like the saying goes, if you don't have anything good or of value to say regarding the OP request, then don't say anything at all. The OP is pretty clear what the topic is about, it's not that hard a request when asked to stick with it and not derail from it.

Originally posted by DOGMA1138

Most MMO's today either have "mirrored" classes or "mirrored" factions, the only issue with ToR is that there are 3 classes for each faction, the AC's are more like spec's/talent trees since more than half of your abilities still come from the core class which means weather you fight a sage or a shadow, a guardian or a sentinal they will still share a large portion of their bag of tricks. This while it might add some benefits to ballancing the game alltough from playing for 4 days straight the game is even less ballanced than when WoW's paladins used to 1 shot any undead player(pre patch 0.3 or what's it 4 during the beta) it causes the game to lack variety especially in PVP.

IMO they should've left the core classes as a standalone class and made the AC standalone core classes the advanced class system was one of the more annoying things in Tabula Rasa for me. AC's need to mean somthing picking one at level 10 seems to be too underwhealming and meaningless, AC's should've been left for an expansion or the end game, what TOR did just feels like a very lenghty class selection during the char creation phase..

I don't see why people are suddenly in a jiffy about SWTOR's Advanced Classes and have so much trouble understanding them, it's almost as if they haven't played any MMORPG's at all

EQ2 had a system where you picked a general class at L1 and then picked your specialised class at L20, just like SWTOR.

AoC uses a general class, within which all the specialised classes share a talent tree, just like SWTOR.

Aion made you pick a general class (1 of 4) at L1, and made you pick your specialised class at L10, just like SWTOR.

In all these MMO's, EQ2, AoC, and Aion, all these specialised classes were considered separate classes just like the classes in other MMORPG's. Yet suddenly when it comes to SWTOR, people have trouble understanding the whole concept of Advanced Classes as separate classes, the same concept already seen and used in former AAA MMO's...

Originally posted by h0urg1ass

Why make a topic asking our opinion and then say that one opinion doesn't matter?

Because I'm not interested at all in what people didn't find or didn't notice, the OP is pretty clear, it is about what people DID discover in differing results or became aware of while choosing different options. It's exactly for this, to prevent the white noise of people commenting 'huh, I dinna find anythin'. So, if you did discover such stuff, then feel free to post it, if not, then don't post.

Originally posted by Loekii

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

Originally posted by Zippy

I am amazed but out of hundreds of MMO friends from amy different guilds I know no one playing SWTOR at release.

This is another kind of extreme statement that makes me raise my eyebrows and suspect the use of hyperbole exaggerations in your arguments. You might be the rare case where indeed none of the hundreds of people you know playing MMO's intends to play SWTOR, but it'd be rare nonetheless.

While hundreds might be an exaggeration in this case, there are going to be a number of people that do not buy TOR, so it is not surprising to see people not seeing their associates rushing out to buy it.

I have certainly seen enough negative reviews from people that tried the weekend that are not interested in the game, as well as those that tend to agree with the feeling, to make it a credible claim.  

Why are you trying to counter a claim I never made in the first place?

I never said that I don't believe that not everyone will play SWTOR. I questioned his statement that of all of the many people he knew ('hundreds of MMO friends') there was not one who intended to play SWTOR when it arrives. The extremity of that statement is what made me suspect the use of hyperbole exaggeration in his arguments, and having a loose view of the truth.

Originally posted by Zippy

Rift was 50-100 hours on release,  Tor is 30-50 hours. 

Sorry, but there are enough beta tester reports around that completely countermand this claim you're trying to make.

Originally posted by Zippy

I am amazed but out of hundreds of MMO friends from amy different guilds I know no one playing SWTOR at release.

This is another kind of extreme statement that makes me raise my eyebrows and suspect the use of hyperbole exaggerations in your arguments. You might be the rare case where indeed none of the hundreds of people you know playing MMO's intends to play SWTOR, but it'd be rare nonetheless.