Those examples you gave are all older titles in the forced grouping era of MMORPGs. During that era players generally behaved much better, because they needed one another. They were always grouping and if you got a bad reputation you weren't going to find groups. When grouping you were generally sociable and it made for much better communities in general.

The anti-social players started when games became completely soloable. Post-WoW it just became easier and easier for players to do that, and in many cases grouping slowed you down. Suddenly players are rejecting group invites when they are solo because they don't want to have to get slowed down. If they want group content they use group finders with cross server grouping. They may never see these other guys again. So suddenly you have a lot more Greed looters, and anti-social types. There are less repercussions for doing so.

That problem is both in the P2P and F2P games in this era.

Originally posted by firefly2003

In regards to problem players... wouldn't it be easier to just for registration and to actually play the game require a Credit Card on your account file as a mandatory requirement, if a player is banned that CC on file is banned and another CC number is required to make another account? People only have a finite number of cards once their banned they can't come back. It would be a good deterrence to such players and nothing would be charged to the card unless you buy something of course but a ID requirement would be a nice thing to have in all future MMOs and a CC is the best solution, I think their would be a small minority of players out there would be against this mostly, paranoid people, kids, and hackers-cheaters.

I don't think it's a terrible idea, it's similar to what a lot of companies have done with their free trials.

The main problem for us though is that it creates a barrier of entry. We don't want players to feel that they have to pay to play. We value free players. Maybe they convert to paying customers later, but either way we like having them in the game. The percentage of problem players is pretty small, so you cut out of a lot of potentially good players to get rid of a much smaller number of problem players. We want EVERYONE to try our game. If they like it keep playing, if they don't move on. But that's hard to do when you force them to enter in credit card details before playing the game. People are wary they are going to get auto-charged after at time period, which some free trials did automatically at the end of trial periods unless you manually cancel. They may be kids who don't want to go through the effort of trying to talk their parents into giving them some money for it if they haven't tried it yet. They might be suspicious of giving out credit card information to a company they aren't familiar with. Maybe they are on a shared computer and don't want to get out a card. Or maybe they are just too lazy to walk to the table and pull out their credit card just to try a game. 

Bannings have an effect, even on free players. Sure they can make a new account. But they lose all the time they put in to their character. I think people tend to underestimate how much that affects players actions. The cost of a box or a subscription is probably far less affecting to many players than the loss of days, weeks, or months of time. I don't think it's much of an issue when players have already put time into their characters. If they were going to behave like jerks, they would have done that in a subscription game, as well. You just ban them like you would in one.

The problem players that does not help with are the gold spammers. But there are good solutions for that out there already. Automatic flaggings/bannings, ignore features, report features, auto-ignore, and then more complex and sweeping things like having an option to filter out global chat from non-members in a membership game. 

Originally posted by Mkilbride

To be fair, you put "Expected release date" Q4 2013" on the Kickstarter. Now, true, you used the qualifier "expected", so that can be used as an escape, but it doesn't change peoples feelings.

For future deliveries Kickstarter requires you give an Estimated date. Not expected, but Estimated. You have to specify something there. We've only ever officially announced two dates: Start of alpha and start of alpha 2. And we delivered on both of those dates. We're not going to give any firm dates until we are fairly sure we can meet them.

Originally posted by Atrocitus

This game will be delayed until at LEAST spring 2014, if not Summer.

Originally posted by Atrocitus

And to further back the original claim that this game will fail,  look at the recent F2P announcement.

If your going to troll you should at least do your homework. There was no "recent F2P announcement". This game has been free to play from the get go. That was clearly written on the Kickstarter a year ago.

Audio

• Audio Options are now fully functional. There are filters for Music, Combat Music, Sound Effects, and GUI. 
• The following species have all new sound effects: Malagion, Lesoo, Elkar, Drake. 
• Mechs, Robots and Cyborgs each have their own unique sound effects now, rather than sharing audio between them. 
• Introduced new random ambient sound effects (chatter or noise when idle) to a number of species including: Drakes and Lesoo.
• Added a runaway audio timer to prevent cases where leaves combat mode on and is forced to listen to looping audio for long periods of time. After a few minutes it will automatically fade out and allow itself to be replaced by something else if your status changes.

Combat

• Robots, Mechs and Cyborgs no longer emit blood when gore is enabled. Instead you will see oil splashes and spills when they are killed.
• Reduced the energy cost of handgun abilities. 
• Damage and absorption adjustments were made across the board.
• We now support server side combat filtering. This allows you to (by default) disable combat updates from characters other than yourself to prevent combat spam and reduce lag.

Crafting and Harvesting

• Harvesting nodes now uses a similar setup to how extract works unifying the behavior of both systems.
• Harvesting region nodes now support options to return higher quality results.
• Ores and minerals added to the harvester system so they can be found out in harvesting clusters in the world.
• Introduced 70 new crafted items and 23 new recipes.
• Added new training manuals/recipe books for: Logging, Fishing and Mining. 
• The following training manuals contain new recipes: Armor Crafting, Melee Crafting, Chemistry, Culinary Arts, Foraging, Firearms, Robotics, Fishing, Mining, Logging.
• The Foresting skill has been renamed to Logging.
• Wilderness Gathering has been renamed to Foraging.
• Added the following resources to the Oasis Valley Water Basin: Calibrite, Fallon Trees, Chromite and Hok Weed.
• Added the following resources to Hole-Plymouth Trail: Kupletskite Deposits, Morgun Tree, and Maeglium Deposits.
• The following resources were added to Payton’s Peak: Geel, Kosha.
• Added the following resources to Plymouth-Hole Trail: Abandoned Bundles, Multi-hued Yano, and Mika Berry.
• Added the following harvestable resource Plymouth Hills: Byna Berry, Lilac, Rue Tree, Calibrite, and Niurevium. 
• Coal can now be harvested in Fool's Sanctuary.
• Added the following harvestable resources to Plymouth Hills: Fish, Takayura Tree, Azul Flower, and Calibrite
• Added the following harvestable resources to Oasis Approach: Hok Weed, Pyrohemalite, Saverous Tree, and Abandoned Bundle.
• Juro Trees have been added to the Outskirts of Plymouth.
• Automated harvester regions were added to many areas around Plymouth including: Plymouth Pond, Falls Trail, Torn Mist Valley, Plymouth Hills, Ammann Village, Plymouth-Hole Trail, The Hole on the Hill, Mid-Plymouth and Plymouth City.
• Added the following resources to Northern Plymouth; Sarnium, Lesapen Fruit.
• Added Cayro Tree and Ngooberry harvestables to Northern Plymouth. 
• Placebo Plants and Cree'it Trees can now be harvested near Plymouth Pond.
• You can now harvest Melanko Leaves in East Plymouth.
• You can now harvest Morgun Trees along the Plymouth-Hole Trail.
• Added Crafting Workbenches to the following locations: The Hole on the Hill, Ranger Station 56, Camp Taak, Aemar Hydro Plant.
• New harvesting missions were introduced.
• You can now purchase Small Harvesters from NPC crafting vendors.

Dens

• Introduced two new generic den types which are meant to provide content filler over larger areas. Where our typical dens target smaller spaces and often change mob types randomly, this type of den is intended as a replacement for more traditional spawns, which also have their place. The largest advantage over these types of dens rather than a traditional time based spawner is that they can have escalating waves of difficulty and spawn rates can be adjusted based on the number of players inside of them.
• A new type of Arrvor den has been introduced to desert areas. It culminates in a very large boss mob who will give birth before dying. The offsprings are easy to kill but quite poisonous.
• Hokfig are now supported in the Den system with new multi-wave den types. 

Engagements

• Engagements can now specify the Cause of NPCs dilemmas, where previously this was only doable through the mission system. This allows us to have more player focused NPC chatter. 
• Improved AFK player detection in engagements to reduce the chances of players soaking up rewards while not contributing anything meaningful.
• Introduced a new Hokfig Mating season engagement. During mating seasons the Bulls tend to get a little ornery, often trashing anything that gets into their paths, structures included. Buiding barricades around structures is recommended. This engagement provides both combat and crafting opportunities.
• Reduced the number of NPCs in the ambush portion of the Samples to the Convoy engagement, as it was overwhelming.
• Doubled the size of the explosives in the Bombs in the City engagemnt to make them a little easier to spot. 

Environment

• Improved time of day transitions.
• Desert environmental improvements including enhanced dust storms. 
• Fog Optimizations were made which have shown a reasonable boost to frame rate on fogged objects.

General

• The reputation system has seen some significant improvements. While we still hide reputation/faction adjustments from players, we do now provide information at stages to players so they have an idea when they are heading in directions they wish to head.
• If players drop to a certain extent with their parent faction they will receive a warning via the in-game mail system from one of their factions officials, to stress to them that they are heading down a dangerous path. If they ignore the warnings eventually they may find themselves exiled, in which case they will lose their OWON or FPR membership and become a Rogue member.  
• Memory usage has been significantly reduced in the Plymouth area.
• Increased the range at which NPC chatter can be heard, allowing for players to hear more of it.
• Upgraded our internal NPC development systems to make it much easier for our content team to implement the more advanced NPC features in a completely GUI oriented fashion. This should improve our productivity with regards to NPC AI.
• Reduced falling damage by 25%.
• New rare spawning corpses have been scattered thoughout the wilderness. These work similar to chests and have a chance at loot or new collectible items which you can turn in to bounty collectors or the lost and found. 
• Added Skill Imprinting Stations to the following areas: The Hole on the Hill, Camp Payton, Camp Taak, Aemar Hydro Plant.
• Added Rest Areas to the following areas: Aemar Hydro Plant, Ranger Station 56, Payton's Peak, Ammann Village, Camp Taak.

Graphics and Animations

• The following areas have received visual upgrades: Upper Oasis Valley, Plymouth Hills, Outskirts of Plymouth, Oasis Approach, Timbertol, Plymouth Northwest, Oasis Watch, and the OWON Training Facilities. 
• Added 48 new combat animations including rest positions.
• Low Cut and Bald hairstyles have been added for males.
• Introduced several new harvester models. 
• Rifle fire now has a secondary spark particle.
• We have switched to a new font that better suits the game.
• Implemented a new run cycle.
• Improved laser glow effects.
• Upgraded some armor pieces to include mesh belts. 

Items

• Bartenders now sell a highly intoxicating drink called Devil’s Brew. It has very little benefit, incurs some serious penalties, but some find its visual effects enjoyable.
• Introduced a new Hokfig Fluid item which can be spread on your body to attract the attention of the Bulls during mating season.
• Cloning Supplies vendors sell very low quality regeneration and adrenaline stimulators now, as well as a Pharmaceuticals Manual, and Medical Scanners.
• You can now receive locked containers as loot. You will need to find someone with some Hacking skill to unlock them.

Missions

• Generated missions now keep a list of recently completed templates and stop generating them for your character for a short period of time. This should help prevent players from selecting easier templates over and over and rejecting everything else, and also should ensure that players see a wider variety of missions.
• Added improved support for mission clickable props and numerous new mission templates to take advantage of it. Improvements include support to have different reactions based on mission step, support for time capped interactions without needing to hide the props on use, new features to make it easier to test these objects, and an easier to use design interface for supporting step based clickables.
• Missions now have the option to immediately add or chain to another mission during any mission action. This includes through a response option, visiting a location, completing a goal, completing the mission, etc. 
• Added a new mail indication icon which will pop up on your screen whenever you have mail. Clicking on this icon will automatically open your mail without having to go through any other windows. This should make it easier to keep up on new generated missions.
• Implemented several new mission templates that cater to thieves. This includes missions that require you to pickpocket NPCs or steal items from stores. It should be noted that if you get caught doing these activities, it will affect how NPCs view you. 
• Introduced numerous new missions which are themed to ongoing engagements in the area. For example if the Numbskulls begin spreading heavily along the Hole-Plymouth Trail, they will increase their crime rate and new missions become available to retrieve stolen items. 
• New long range patrols and delivery missions were introduced to help players learn how to get from one town or outpost to the next. 
• Introduced a new type of generated mission template where you act as hired security in a heightened security setting. This requires you to find and interrogate potential saboteurs.
• Implemented new mob collection missions which will appear if players happen to be in the proximity of the NPCs when they are doing their collections. This provides players with many differnet routes of completion, but each route has its own benefit and consequences. 
• Introduced two new Entertainer tutorial missions which will teach you the basics of Dancing and Storytelling. 
• You can now progress an additional mission step on The Cult epic mission series.
• New Trap Removal generated mission templates have been added for those with sufficient Trap Knowledge. 
• Reputation adjustments on missions have been adjusted across the board, as well as adding many new character trait adjustments to pre-existing mission templates. 

NPCs

• NPCs can now have one or more pets. Our pet system is not like a traditional MMORPGs pet system however. Pets will not die with their master, but they will obey them so long as they are alive.
• A lot of NPC work was done to Plymouth City to showcase the advanced NPC systems that were added last month. This includes NPCs with randomly forking branches who will chatter with each other as they walk, new Timed Mission opportunities based on advanced NPC interactions, gangs and more.
• Introduced another batch of new generated boss abilities and effects.
• Lesoo now support all-new armor sets, facial morphs, and tintable eyes.
• Added the following new NPC professions: Miner, Geneticist.
• Introduced a slew of new NPC profession, mood and dilemma based chatter.
• Faugea now have their own boss and raid boss abilities.
• Malagion and Cyborg animation scripts have been brought up to date with recent changes for other species.
• Fang Cultist now have longer ranged attacks and energy shields.
• Vultures are not quite as deadly as they used to be. They are still dangerous in numbers though.
• The Brainwashed Mutants in ALT Labs now attack significantly faster.

Thievery and Hacking

• New locked containers are now available throughout the world. You can open these using the Hacking skill. 
• Stealing items from shops now has a chance to skill up based on your skill level and if it was successful.
• Stealing items from shops will now give you a warning of the repercussions before you attempt to steal.
• Added multiple new thievery related missions. These require you to pickpocket NPCs or steal from shops. 
• Reduced the successful theft timer for shops by 30 seconds.
• You must now be careful not to lose too much reputation with your parent faction or you may find yourself in exile. You will be warned via in-game mail a while before this happens to allow you to correct your actions. 

User Interface and Options

• Buy Back is now functional. You have 15 minutes to buy back your items, but can buy them back from any vendor. 
• The Chat Window Settings options now support an option to Enable or Disable Combat Filtering. If this is enabled (the default) then you will only receive combat messages related to your character. If it is disabled you will receive it for all nearby combat activity.
• There is now a Video Option which allows you to set the time of day shadows to update in realtime or to be blended every minute. Some players prefer the realtime updates, while others do not like the artifacts they can produce. This setting allows you to determine which method you prefer. 
• Added a new mail indication icon which will pop up on your screen whenever you have new mail. Clicking on this icon will automatically open your mail without having to go through any other windows. This should make it easier to keep up on new generated missions.
• The Trade Window is now functional. 
• NPC Portraits have been updated and all species are now supported.
• The group window has been updated to better suit the current user interface.
• The Player Finder window now supports filtering of over 20 areas. 
• Improved area name displays at Character Selection. 

World Improvements

• Payton's Peak: This recent addition gets its name from Reginald Payton, OWON's foremost researcher on the Lesoo species. This mountainous area is crawling with dangerous Lesoo who would like nothing more than to capture Payton's most recent incarnation. While Lesoo make up the bulk of the population, Numbskulls, Rhinoc, Drake and Malagion are also available in smaller numbers. The military post here is fully featured, with supplies dropped in by air. It provides many mission and engagment opportuntities, as well as a turret and mech guards to fend off the Lesoo. The battles here can get pretty sketchy, making it a good place to earn medals. 
• Aemar Hydro Plant: A large population of Hokfig have moved in near the Aemar Hydro Plant and Mines, be careful during mating season! As is often the case this brings out Lesoo Hunting parties. Lurkers have also been coming out of the basin depths at night time. Security levels have been increased and the security officers are more dangerous than ever. Many new generated mission opportunities are now available revolving around espionage, machinery upkeep and research.
• Plymouth Hills: Plymouth Hills is now a significantly more dangerous area at night time (when the Elkar and Malagion come out) than during the day. The Lesoo in the area will also attempt to take control of the roads and platforms if you allow their numbers to grow signficantly enough. If they manage to take them they will occupy them permanently until ousted, providing additional boss opportunities, and also increasing the number of Lesoo throughout the area. The Mysterious Cave inside of the area has also seen its difficulty level increased.
• Hole-Plymouth Trail: The S&B Supply Post has opened shop along the road to the Hole in the Hill, which features mission, engagement and crafting opportunities. Long-term engagements in this area revolve primarily around the Numbskulls, a local gang. As their presence increases in the area they will become more problematic and will begin building more camps throughout the area. The main camp rewards a boost to your Thievery skill the first time it is explored. 
• Camp Taak: A new bridge and Landing Pads has been added above the military outpost. Turrets were also added to both the military base and the landing pads. A pond has been added within sight of the outpost which features a predator/prey relationship between the night spawning Elkar and a herd of Okolat. Scaed'ecoo, Rogue forces, Setlang and Rhinoc also have dens or a presence in the area.
• The Hole on the Hill: The Hole on the Hill has been completely redesigned graphically. It now features a much larger bar and casino space, and many new seatable stools. Lights will now also activate or deactivate based on the time of day.
• Northern Plymouth: This mountainous area features a number of dangerous areas targeted primarily at groups. This includes several den types, mobs spawning from the death of other mobs, and some tougher to reach locations. 
• Camp Kjell: This mineral harvesting station and military base is located in the northwestern portion of Plymouth. Its mineral deposits have made it a target of the FPR who are present as a result. Occasionally they will attempt to raid the base, stealing what they can and doing as much damage as they can before retreating. This provides some spin off engagement and mission opportunities, as well. There are also some harder to find locations which rewards players for exploring them with achievements and bonus skill points.
• Oasis Approach: A recently added desert region on the edge of Plymouth and Timbertol. It features Arrvor, Yellow Setlang, Lesoo and Raxin Dens, and some interesting new fauna. 
• Plymouth Pond: You can now access more of the mountainous area behind the pond, and foliage overgrowth has been removed from the trails. Mob distribution has been improved and more harvestable resources are now available. 
• Training Facilities: Numerous graphical improvements were made to the areas. New Entertainer tutorials were added, and the pubs are now considered rest areas. 

Bug Fixes and Minor Improvements

• Corrected the vehicle pathing in the caravan escort engagement in Plymouth Canyon.
• Fixed a deprecated graphics option issue with directional shadows. It has been updated to a new format.
• Repaired the beacon positions on the Plymouth to the Hole on the Hill patrol mission as some of them were under ground after recent terrain changes.
• Fixed a skill gain issue in the extraction code.
• Removed the high detail option from terrain in the video options as it was obsolete.
• Fixed improvement issues with blood splatters.
• Female pupils should no longer look glossy white.
• The We've Been Poisoned generated mission template now properly asks for Geel Flowers rather than Yellow Poxies.
• Fixed an issue with the player count modifier for harvesters
• Corrected many cases where grass had overgrown covering up trails.
• Fixed the Level of Detail on the lamps on the back side of Plymouth City.
• You should no longer receive Protect Plymouth or Defend Freedomtown missions during peacetime.
• Fixed a longstanding issue with the quest tracker and showing up rather than the proper mob name. 
• The mail subject for the Special Delivery and Eviction Notice generated missions should no longer be a run on sentence.
• Fixed a couple of bugs related to switching in and out of action mode via mission dialogs.
• Repaired some cracks and positioning issues in the male armor sets. 
• Fixed a long standing issue with stun, knockback or knockdown getting locked until a relog.
• Corrected some UI bugs related to window size changes with the latest incarnation of the GUI.
• Fixed a bug that was causing your quest tracker to use your last logged in character’s quest tracker data when you first logged in.
• Rogue Nation members can no longer use /activemilitary off to disable their active military status flag.
• Fixed dialog related issues with the following mission templates: All Apologies, Medical Scanners, Harvesting Parasites Taming, and Training Chits.
• Your minimap should now properly update old quest waypoints after you die. 
• Repaired an issue related to character creation on new accounts.
• Fixed some animation related bugs when using dancing skills.
• You can no longer attack Dr. Bateman in the OWON Training Facility
• Fixed an issue with the Purifying Water tutorial.

Originally posted by gervaise1

Average revenue per month was higher in the c.4 months of F2P than it was before going F2P. They didn't say they were making money and the c.4 months included the revenue from Makeb. And increased revenue doesn't mean they are making money.

One other thing I'd like to add along the lines of the original post. I just wanted to mention that we are pretty happy with Hero Engine in general. Every engine has its strengths and weaknesses but overall, even if we had an unlimited budget I think our choice would be to stick with Hero Engine. The only thing we might change if we did would be to use a deferred rendering engine with Hero's core.

Hero Engine isn't a cutting edge graphics engine, but it can produce graphics competitive with other MMOs. But the other areas of Hero Engine really shine. Productivity wise, it's fantastic. Being able to make script changes and have them working in game immediately is a huge productivity boost, as is the collaberative editing tools. Some of our alpha testers can attest to how easy it is to change things on the fly while people are playing. Where in an engine not designed for this sort of thing your looking at restarts and patches and losing a ton of productivity in the process.

While many players might look at things like Unreal Engine, Crytek, Unigine, and wonder why we didn't go those routes instead. They are after all better graphics engines. But they don't tackle the MMO specific issues that Hero Engine does. Seamless world design and on-seam proxies is a complex feature that most single player or small group games don't need and do not invest time in. As is spatial awareness (which allows things like phasing), and being able to introduce data easily on the fly without causing issues to players. Parts systems and character customization. Client side caching, communication between many types of servers where most single player engines are really designed with a one server (the game or zone server) in mind. Those are all things that take time to develop and test properly. So using an MMO specific engine such Hero Engine is a huge time saver for developers.

Originally posted by hfztt

I find it worrying that The Repopulation have not even let all of the 700 kickstarter backers onto the game yet. Suggests to me that they have serious issues with handling load as well.

There's quite a few more than that with the Early Adopter program. But us not letting more people into testing has nothing to do with server stress or load. It has everything to do with keeping testing small until we are comfortable with the product being seen by the masses.

Alpha testers generally understand what an alpha test is. And in the early MMOs beta testers generally did too. They understand things like some animations or models being placeholder, or certain areas being under construction. But in this day and age beta is synonymous with open beta. Most games keep very small betas of experienced testers, and then when a game nears release they start giving away beta keys and letting in thousands of players. That is typically in the couple months just before launch. As a a result, that is the perception of beta testing to a modern MMO player. While many of those backers probably would completely understand a game being in a testing phase, many other players do not.

Repop is in alpha, it's not ready for a large number of eyes on it at this point. While almost every major gameplay feature is working (exceptions being sieges and vehicle upgrades) it still has a lot of animation, FX, and content work that needs to be done before it begins opening the door to larger numbers of players. Alpha phase 2 begins next week, but it will still be a small number of players. Each phase from this point on is aimed to double the number of players as the last. They'll be coming much more quickly and each will be focused on a specific area of content until we feel comfortable with the game moving on to beta.

This has nothing to do with server specs or Hero Engine though, and is entirely tied to how quickly we can finish the content necessary to move to each new phase. 

Hero Engine is a quality engine. The problem is it takes a long time to build an MMO (5 years typically). Star Wars: The Old Republic was their first license. They were building it for their own game, Hero's Journey. Bioware wanted an early copy so they licensed it and eventually they wound up cancelling Hero's Journey and focusing on Hero Engine. The engine has been licensed by many other companies (Zenimax for example). But MMOs typically have a much longer development cycle than single/small multiplayer games, and some of the people who license Hero have chosen to bind it with a high quality rendering engine and use the other features of Hero Engine. 

The important things to note on TOR are that:

1. They used an early version of the engine. I can tell you in the 2 1/2 years we've been using Hero Engine it's improved by leaps and bounds, and that version of the engine was already much improved over the last version Bioware took updates on. That having been said some of the things Bioware said have been taken by players as negatives towards Hero Engine, where they really shouldn't be. For example, one of their employees complained that they couldn't get some things done because the  engine didn't have Timer support. I know it's had that support since we've licensed it, but it is very possible the early version didn't yet have it. It also didn't have Seamless 2.0 support at that point, and many other things. But assuming it did lack Timer support at the time, that's a feature their techs could have built in less than a week. Engines are shells to build upon. Hero Engine provides rendering, physics, networking, etc. All the basics that an MMO needs, but it doesn't provide a game. It's just a shell that you build your game upon. I think that's a common misconception by players. They think that because Hero Engine was used by TOR that it's an engine to build theme park MMOs, for example. That's not the case, it could build a racing simulator, a first person shooter, etc.
2. TOR's graphics performance issues are largely in part to their own design decisions. The game runs well with a moderate number of players doesn't run well on Ilum when you have 50+. Players see that and are quick to blame the engine. But the truth of the matter is TOR's character models are much higher polygon than most MMOs before it (may not look like it due to the cartoony shaders, but they are), and their models used specular and normal maps which many of the older MMOs did not. That combined with higher resolution textures and your pushing cards far more than WoW for example. They also had a huge amount of customization. All that customization comes at a price. You can't easily batch render characters in MMOs due to the many parts used. So that already is slower than a single player game's rendering significantly. But then you add to that the fact that each character has 5-7 different parts, facegen morphs and textures and you have a lot of state changes, a very slow graphics operation. Players love customization they want a zillion different textures. But the more textures that are in a scene the slower it's going to run. TOR had a ton of customization. It worked great for their small group target.It doesn't work as well when you have 50 players all in different gear. Developer's need to make the choice. What's my target audience. If it's PvP you go with lower polys and less textures. If it's small group PvE you can get away with more texture choices and higher polygon counts. Ilum was something they stressed post-launch (the launch version was very different and looked partially complete to me). It is not within the framework of the rest of the game. I think for their game, they made the right choice. If they were say making Camelot Unchained, I'm sure they would have made very different decisions.

@Akerbeltz:

We feel like the market has expanded over the years. There are more people playing MMOs than ever before. But many of those players are tired of the theme park treadmill. I don't think we're alone in those thoughts, there's a number of sandboxes on their way now. That wasn't the case when we began development though.

Repop is a very different game. It certainly isn't going to be for everyone, and we're not trying to make it be. Much of the PvE game is driven by our generated mission system which is very different from any of the other quest systems to date. Some are going to enjoy that some will not. While public quest type systems have become more prominent, we're doing a lot of different things with our engagement system which may or may not appeal to some players. Longer term content shifts based on player reactions and such. Crafting is very complex and intertwined into multiple trees, which will also not appeal to everyone as it is very different from the crafting in most other titles.

The fact that we don't have a large budget combined with those things definitely points to a more niche audience. We're not hoping for 15 million players. But at the same time we're be disappointed to only have 2000 players. The market has expanded over the years, so that a tiny percentage of it is still a reasonable sized number. Yet if you go through the sandbox titles in that time the only one which has been able to sustain any substantial numbers is Eve Online. Eve is certainly a niche title. But that niche is larger than what would have been the market leader pre-WoW, in the west at least. But Eve grew slowly over many years, and with less competition. Star Wars Galaxies also fell in that category before closing, though it never really recovered from the NGE. Most other sandbox titles have had under 10,000 players. We feel that is a mixture of a few things. One being that the games are generally a lot more hardcore and don't appeal to most players (a very small niche) and the second is that most of them are subscription only and players aren't willing to pay money when there are so many free alternatives.

We feel we have a product that can appeal to more than just a few thousand players. I think there's a lot of old school players who miss games that were a bit more social oriented, and not on rails. We also think there are a lot of new school players who are simply looking for something different. There is a huge number of MMO gamers who have never played anything other than Wow-style theme park treadmills. But many of those players wouldn't be willing to try the game with a barrier of entry. A free trial is one way to go about that, but it's not the same. Players don't look at it in the same way. Some players simply are unwilling or unable to pay, but that doesn't make them bad for the community.

So we feel we can hook enough players who will enjoy a very difference experience. But in order to maximize that we need to get those players to try the game. We do that with true free to play. There aren't level restrictions or caps for free players. You can play and do almost everything that a paying player can do. There's a few small restrictions such as you can not form or lead a nation without paying a one time fee or membership, and it's not going to be as convenient (free players have less bank slots, inventory slots, mission slots, etc). But you are able to play and be competitive without ever spending a penny. That's our pitch to players. Why not try it. If you don't enjoy the game, move on with no risk, and no credit card entry to sign up for your free trial.

So our hope is that players will do just that. Give the game a try. And even if it only appeals to 1% of MMO gamers, that's still a significantly larger number of players than what we could expect from a subscription game.

It should also be noted, that while Repop is certainly going to be very different than your average MMO in a lot of ways, we've made a lot of design decisions that are meant to appeal to a more casual audience than your typical sandbox. We do a lot to encourage grouping and make it easier for players to find groups, but it's not forced on them. We also use a lot of generated content so players who need something to keep them focused and moving forward (probably a large percentage) will always have those opportunities. Where most recent sandboxes catered primarily to more hardcore, old school gameplay mechanics, we've taken a middle ground with most of ours. We want to expose players to sandbox features, social content, non-combat options, and the like, but we are also trying to appeal to a more casual fan base than most of the other sandbox titles in recent years. We do feel that more casual players will be able to enjoy the game, but also think that the only way to prove that to them is to get them to try it in the first place.

Originally posted by Yalexy

Look at the feature-list of The Repopulation and then tell me that it's not going to be a P2W-game if it isn't subscription based but F2P instead.

Your certainly entitled to your opinion, but our vision from the get go is very much against Pay To Win, which we've stated time and time again. We feel that free players are important to a games success. Because some other developers don't feel that way, the F2P model often gets a bad reputation.

There's really two ways that developers approach free to play.

1) They cater to the paying players and make it difficult enough on the free players that the free players either start spending money or move on to another game. This maximizes the amount of money you make on each player, while not having to foot as much of a bill for players who are not paying as most non-paying customers will find another game. This method often involves a lot of locked content that you can subscribe in order to unlock, and the free to play is a mechanism to get you to subscribe.

2) They view free customers as being important. Not only can they convert into paying customers, but they can bring in other players to the game, some of them who may become paying customers. They understand that while these players may be costing them a tad of money, they may also be making the game more enjoyable for others as they may be friends, family members, etc of paying customers, and because the more players they have the more enjoyable the game will be for those playing (its no fun in a barren world). 

We fall into category #2. Your not going to find stats items in the cash shop or require to spend cash to unlock a chest or wear good gear. Too many people make assumptions based on some other game they played which tried to nickel and dime their customers with 200% experience potions, gear for cash, lockboxes that you can buy an unlock for, purchasable rare resources, and making game mechanics stacked so that it's miserable to play without paying. It's true that most F2P games to date fell into category #1, but not all. Because that is the route the majority of developers have taken, players often erroneously assume that's all there is. I think in the coming years we're going to see a lot more developers go to option #2. We're already seeing a lot of games that went with the first option slowly shifting towards #2.

This game was designed as free to play. It's been a free to play title since before the Kickstarter campaign, so there is no reason for anyone to act surprised by this. It was clearly mentioned on the Kickstarter page. For the sake of argument, let's say for a minute we agreed and decided F2P was a bad idea, we wouldn't be able to change the model after it was already a selling point on Kickstarter. Now we certainly don't feel that way, we feel strongly that F2P is the correct approach for Repop. But it's pointless to try to convince us otherwise at this stage, it's in writing. Once you start leaving promises unfulfilled your heading down a slippery slope. The business model isn't something that we took lightly. We put a lot of thought into the direction we wanted to take, what we did and did not want to support as part of the memberships and cash shop, and at our overall approach to not create a huge gap between free and paying customers.

My advice for anyone who is against the idea of free to play would be wait until the game opens, and then make your judgments.

@DarkCrystal: Defiance, TSW, GW2 had huge advertising campaigns running, pre-existing IPs, and were on store shelves. You don't see the difference between that and an indie company with online distribution? Putting a barrier of entry on this game would prevent many gamers from trying it in the first place. There is a stigma against indie titles after many disappointing games over the past few years. 

My background is also in the MMO game industry since 1997, starting in the media and database development, and moving on to more of a technical and development role in the later years. To say that the industry is moving away from F2P is highly debatable. Yes, a handful games have begun moving to box + store. Not so much to keep out the free to play players though, but because the box sales are a quick injection of cash, and then they can use the store in place of subscription. It should also be noted that TSW did not start as a box + store model, it started as subscription and moved to free like so many games before them. T

I don't think you can say that the subscription communities are much better than free to play communities at this point. Have you tried using the Group Finder in WoW recently? When you have a large number of players who will often never see each other again and do not need one another, its easier for people to be jerks. That happened when games all became very soloable. In the old days people had to be relatively social due to the forced grouping mechanics. If they were jerks they would only really have other like-minded players willing to group with them. Those players have certainly always existed though. Subscription or no subscription. Now it's easier for them to get away with things like power looting, clicking Need on things they just want to sale, or generally just acting in poor manners. Because even if their group boots them, they are just one group finder or one battleground away from a new one.

There is more to lose from being a problem player due to the up front cost, but that doesn't seem to stop trouble players. It is only really a problem in entry level areas, because while players may not be investing $50 up front, they are investing time. Nobody wants to have a character they have spent, weeks, months, years progressing get banned, even if they never paid a penny. And it certainly doesn't stop gold farmers. There are other avenues that can be taken to fight things like spammers. An option to block global or area chat from non-members, for example, as well as the normal ignore options.

We don't want to put up any barriers of entry on players. The more players we can get exposed to our game, the better. If the game doesn't meet up to their expectations, they can move on with zero risk. That puts the honus on us to retain those players. That's all we can ask for really.

Originally posted by Cryomatrix

This is akin to making $50,000/year putting it all towards a house with no money left over and then you make $100,000/year, upgrade to a bigger house putting all your money into it and you again have no money left but a bigger house. Then you make $200,000 and upgrade to a bigger house with no money again.

I personally am not a fan of anything that allows players to buy power in a game (armor, weapons, with stats, etc). But I don't generally have a problem with things like experience potions or convenience items like removing your experience debt, etc, so long as players don't feel like they have to purchase those items to be competitive. It's obviously more meaningful in some games (PvP especially) than others.

My main problem with allowing players to buy items of power is that part of your status as a player is the gear that your wearing. After a while you are capping out or you are hitting a soft cap in a skills based game and the experience doesn't really matter, but the gear makes a huge difference. In the old days you saw a player with awesome gear and you wondered how they got it as a starting player. Or you envied them if they had more than you as a veteran. That gear was part of their trials and tribulations as a player. I don't like allowing players to simply buy their way past that. One of the aspects of MMOs is the competitiveness. I don't like the idea of thinking that the players who are the best equipped are simply the ones with the most money.

With experience potions, you get similar boosts from things like rest experience which most games feature anyway.  After the initial race for power it really doesn't mean much.

I have no problem with the free to play model though, in fact I prefer it. It lets you try the games, see if it is something you want to invest money in and then go from there. But there's a big difference between some of the models. If I feel I have to spend an money just to be competitive, I'll find another game. If I like a game though I have no problem unlocking things like account perks or the occasional experience potion if I have a day cleared out.

Originally posted by sigreth
Open worlds have everything to do with WoW as it was the first largely popular MMO with an open world (meaning very little instancing). I agree that an open world works to keep the player immersed in the world. However, Neverwinter is not a traditional MMO and shouldn't be. The instancing helps keep the zone population down so that you do not have 3 to 4 hundred people in one area. Even in WoW they cull players into groups of "phase" so that people do not lag out. But really the instancing helps make the player feel as if they are 1 of few instead of 1 of many. This is simply my opinion, I don't expect everyone to feel the same way.

I think your confusing instancing (private instances of zones/areas) with open world (seamless loading in between areas shared by everyone). But even if you meant open world, there were a few before Wow. Asheron's Call was a large seamless world and one of the first MMOs.