Investors are the kind of people that will invest on guaranteed successes rather than risky adventures. They already aren't funding sandboxes or whatever you're fancying this moment. They only want cash and gaurenteed returns.

While I agree that few days of data doesn't necessarily mean a trend, I have to say, xfire is pretty accurate in these matters.

Just because OP is trying to prove his point of view, it doesn't mean xfire isn't relevant anymore. Age of Conan, Warhammer, Aion, xfire was always very accurate for those games.

Also, keep in mind, SW:TOR launched during christmas, holidays are notorious for screwing up statistics. So don't draw any conclusions and keep an eye it.

Edit: For those who're thinking Xfire represents the population scale of the gamers: It doesn't.

Xfire population statistics doesn't mean anything, it just shows what Xfire audiance is playing, and is very inaccurate for comparing population of players.

What its good at is, identifying and recording trends on individual game's playerbase. A major drop in EVE Online numbers means game lost a good chunk of its players, you can bet its a result of an impact of the playerbase of that game itself.

TL;DR

Don't compare the numbers for different games, take each games statistics individually.

I haven't played WoW in years, haven't bought SW:TOR, I don't really care about it in all honesty. I haven't played an MMO's since Aion (its been, what, 2 years since its release?) so I don't really have any emotional investment in any games in the genre currently. But..

Suggesting an MMO (that has monthly subscription fee) solely by Bioware style questing and story telling is wrong. This is the worst of both worlds actually.

MMO's have, by their very nature, dull and boring quests. Kill 10 rats, 10 wookies, 10 ewoks, we've all been there, done that. There's pretty much no other way, outside of phasing and heavy, heavy instancing to create compelling quest mechanics. Even then, there's a hefty price to pay (empty world, playerbase segregation, having to do quest lines because of this, burnout etc).

Bioware story telling, is dependent on making impact on the world and sustaining it through suspension of disbelief. To achieve this, game world is specially tailored entire from this perspective, for the player. This way you have the illusion of choice, direct feedback from the world about your actions, and interesting gameplay mechanics that are way more involving than simply killing 10 bunnies.

When you combine these two, you get, heavy instancing/phasing, even then you can't deviate much from the gameplay mechanics of an MMO. You get story telling that tries to be immersive and involving, but fails at every turn because it cannot hold its suspension of disbelief and individuality and ends up just being a voiced generic MMO dialogue with maybe an interesting story.

WoW has good storylines, probably is 10 times more involved than SW:TOR. Thats not why people play WoW. Everyone plays it because it has polished and varied end game, and because everyone plays WoW (social aspect).

When I hear about an MMO, I want to hear about how compelling the mechanics are, how polished and varied the end game is, how "fun" it is to play different classed, different dungeons, raid zones, pvp. I want to hear about its meat and bones. Story telling, questing, while fun, they are inevitably, tools that are designed for killing time, to keep you busy while you're waiting your friends to go to a dungeon, or go to a group quest.

I visit MMORPG.com because I'm curious about the reception of SW:TOR, (I guess old habits never really go away) all I hear about it, is how fun the questing, how you SHOULD enjoy it. That sounds a lot like a single player game to be honest.

Why should someone pay monthly fee for it? That is the point of MMO's in the end, its an investment, both time and money. I haven't seen anyone that answered that. Well, other than "because its star wars, because its fun, because its new, because its shiny" you know, the usual launch date hype.

I haven't played an MMO since... Aion?

Anyway, people were saying the same thing OP is saying for Aion within its first week. Look how that ended up.

Is this the guy who said 6 month timeline is acceptable for making only 1 ship?

*Sees the announcement*

Hahahaha

Wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

This sums up my reaction. Holy shit dude.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Nickless_man

Once I see a F2P game which doesn't require my credit card info every 2 days, doesn't require me to purchase some item because to compansate for the lack of a standard MMO feature, while providing intuitive gameplay and content, I'll be the first on the line to play it. I'll even buy hats for it too.

I'd say that since about 85%-90% of the people who play any F2P game are not spending any money on it, and you're swiping a card every two days... you're simply doing something wrong.

Most people are willing to put up for poor design choices, I don't. That means spending money on majority of F2P games. Couple that with the fact that majority of the F2P games are populated by younger audiance, who doesn't have access to a credit card as easily as us, you'll get those figures quite easily.

I've played variety of F2P games, and even the latest ones aren't exempt from this rule.

New kind of F2P games are even worse. Maybe its a personal thing, but when I'm playing a game, I really rather not think about making purchasing decisions just because I want to continue questing in a game, or just because my bag slots ran out.

When we look at the current F2P genre, you have to spend something to get to the comfort level of the most sub based games. Considering MMO's are largely based on grinds, I'll just pay $15 a month and be done with it.

I prefer paying $15 a month to get access to variety of different gameplay elements with unlimited access rather than shelling out $$$ everytime I change a zone or want some convenience (bags etc).

Not to mention the benefits of paying sub, such as better customer service (its common enough to be counted as fact), or equal playground to ALL players.

Of the cash shops I've seen, best one is probably the Team Fortress 2. Which makes me rage on a whole new level because its supposed to be an FPS.

Once I see a F2P game which doesn't require my credit card info every 2 days, doesn't require me to purchase some item because to compansate for the lack of a standard MMO feature, while providing intuitive gameplay and content, I'll be the first on the line to play it. I'll even buy hats for it too.

On second thought, It doesn't even have to have intuitive gameplay, a non shitty one will suffice!

Originally posted by Gravarg

We waited til everyone had done it and the "tricks" to beating it were out to the public.  Much like in FFXI, Absolute Virtue could only be beaten with a good strat.  My guild just doesn't run into a dungeon willy nilly and hacking and slashing at everything.  Make it work like clockwork, just how raids in WoW work.  "When you know what's going to happen, it's easy to know what to do."

Hate to be that guy, but unless you're doing progress runs during the "official" progress phase of an expansion, you're not playing end game.

Comparing the million time nerfed encounter with another games fresh started progress phase is oxymoron at best.

<----- EQ raider.

Goonswarm disbanded Bob.

Bob reformed with Kenzoku (and as Bob reloaded for a brief time)

Goons evicted Kenzoku, kenzoku disbanded and majority went to factional warfare (which was new at the time).

Other members of greater bob coalition either disbanded or got assimilated to other blocks.

Goons controlled delve for quite a while.

Karttoon (a director) got bored and disbanded Goonswarm, taking the whole wallet and the holding corp (goonfleet) to himself. Later he joined newly forming bob.

Old bob reformed and got the IT alliance name, some of the pets flocked back to them.

Goons formed SOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLO, moved to syndicate region.

Goon CEO got recruited by CCP, psuedo intelligence duchebag (the mittani) took control, changed alliance name to Goonswarm Federation.

After settling in to deklein, goons and their pets (test) along with some of the NC started a campaign against IT.

In the middle of fountain campaign, IT alliance started failcascading during this time because of incompetent leadership.

Test got the fountain.

IT disbanded, but some corps remained and their sov stayed up for a long time (probably still up, haven't checked in a while).

Thats the rough story of Bob vs goons etc etc.

Originally posted by IX Forres

I can't be arsed to restate everything already mentioned but here's some "what the ****?" selections from a few moments of poking around.

18 external JS references per page. That means 18 HTTP requests per page, at least on first load, to get JS stuff up and running. Slloooow.

Gzip compression is not enabled. Could pull the page size down by ~100kb by enabling that, which is utterly trivial to do.

None of the static content (images, JS etc) have cache expiry times. This means browsers may well not cache them at all, redownloading every time they load a page. They're also not set to have cache-control:public.

You get cookies with all those images and CSS/JS files; 60kb a page load.

And according to Chrome's auditer, "122.90KB (94%) of CSS is not used by the current page." That's some prime wastage right there.

To load this thread page took 980 kilobytes. That's 4 seconds on my connection (50Mbit/s). 1 second of that is the server coming up with the page I asked for, which is pretty shoddy. Using what my browser's caching, it's still 150kb.

This whole thing stinks to high heaven of bad programming and poor understanding of what makes web applications tick.

 

http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1493904&page=6

Moar stuff.

Originally posted by Hazelle

Originally posted by Nickless_man

Considering there were tons of reports about this issue, I'm surprised that forums were released at this state. Even for CCP, this is a new level of incompetence.

Even a CSM guy reported that loop whole during the first beta, I mean, leages of detailed reports was easy enough to ignore, sure, but a CSM? A person who is, more or less in a direct contact (as direct as one can be with CCP, ie not much but still).

They spent a whole year on this? A whole year of development, and result is a security whole even novice web designers wouldn't do. Screwing with YAF (yet another forum, go google it) to the point that it falls apart is a special ability.

Just lmao at whoever is responsible. That guy (If its a team, than those guys) should lose his(their) jobs over this. Must lose their job over this. You could learn web designing from scratch and design a whole new forum with 70000 hours of manpower.

 

Even while typing this post I'm still laughing hysterically :D.

 Do you have links or pics to back up what you claim?

Specifically that CCP was aware of the security issue but went ahead with the launch anyway?

According you you there were "tons" of reports so finding them and posting them here shouldn't be a chore.  It's not that I don't trust you but I find it hard to believe.

I can't post you a direct link because everything is buried under 40+ page threads. Look at SHC and other forums. Thing is, this loophole is very easy to exploit, this kind of thing is very, very easy to avoid. As I said before, even novice designers mostly have common sense enough to not store vital information on client side. Yes, they're storing vital log in information inside your cookies, in basic text. No encrpytion or anything. Thats how bad it is.

Check well known unofficial forums and you'll se enough proof to make your backside explode while laughing.

Considering there were tons of reports about this issue, I'm surprised that forums were released at this state. Even for CCP, this is a new level of incompetence.

Even a CSM guy reported that loop whole during the first beta, I mean, leages of detailed reports was easy enough to ignore, sure, but a CSM? A person who is, more or less in a direct contact (as direct as one can be with CCP, ie not much but still).

They spent a whole year on this? A whole year of development, and result is a security whole even novice web designers wouldn't do. Screwing with YAF (yet another forum, go google it) to the point that it falls apart is a special ability.

Just lmao at whoever is responsible. That guy (If its a team, than those guys) should lose his(their) jobs over this. Must lose their job over this. You could learn web designing from scratch and design a whole new forum with 70000 hours of manpower.

Even while typing this post I'm still laughing hysterically :D.

Alliances operate on the moon goo level. Typically, power blocks want more valuable moon goo, so their leaders can make more money. Money sources for the regular players are just byproducts of this policy.

Dominion introduced sanctums to the masses. Probably the single most valuable change to the average joe of null sec. Suddenly even worthless regions such as Pure Blind or Providence became more valuable. This didn't change a thing about power blocks however. As they couldn't care less about anything other than moon goo.

Moon goo changes made technetium extremely valuable. So valuable in fact, that prices are still rising and no one knows when its going to stop. That, is what alliances care about.

Fast forward today, CCP wants more movement in null sec. An admirable goal. A goal that I support all the way. The changes they announce to achieve this however, couldn't possible be more out of touch with the reality.

To keep it short; people will whine. After sometime they will adapt, and ratting will become the main source of income for the better part of the whole null sec. This will mean there will be A LOT more bots in belts, and a lot more high sec missioner alts.

Making alliance more unstable is an absurd claim by CCP. This update, proves, that has already been known. CCP doesn't play their game, they don't understand its mechanics and they don't care about that they don't.

Overall, these changes will be nothing but flamebait and bot justification. Well done CCP.

They shut down their Planet service a while ago, I don't see why this time would be different.

City building players are rare commodity these days when compared to the masses, and players willing to pay a subscription to a game that is inferior to Sim City 4 + mods is even more rare.

They have to create an absolutely great game to be able to collect subscription or F2P cash shop. Good doesn't cut it, it has to be absolutely great.

In other words, they had petition rating system but never used that until a month ago.

Whole blog has a "There, we done it, even if it was so insignificant, we've done it because you whined, happy now?" feeling to it.

"My thoughts as a dev:

There is another point to make besides the fact that buying used games does not send money to the developer. Unlike the movies, we do not have a theatre release. That boxed copy on the shelf (or digital download) is our only means of revenue generation. This is why we love digital delivery. There are no used games on Steam.

I know you guys catch a ton of shit for talking about topics like this, but if even a small percentage of your readers walk away a little more educated on the subject then it is a big win for everyone (except gamestop)"

"Hey Mike. I worked at a Gamestop for three years in Dixon, CA, and I can no longer support saving $10 on used games after seeing all of the profit Gamestop turns by hurting the very developers that fuel their business. Every used game purchase means another chance to sell Game Informer, which is just a rag to hype GS pre-orders, which just happens to come with a card that entices you to buy more used games and trade in your new games for less than a third of what you paid for them, which in turn will be sold to someone else for 200% markup. I realize that economic times are tough and people need to save money where they can, but buying used is bad for the industry that is providing you with all of this entertainment. No one wants to see the big picture, so now we get these "buy new or get effed" tactics that publishers are pushing.

Here's a suggestion; how about making the new games more affordable? Another advantage of used at Gamestop is that you can return the games if you don't like them. I have a feeling that there's a lot of underrated games that may have sold much better at the $50 price point."

quotes from: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/8/25/

In KOTOR II, there were 2 prestige classes that focused on stealth, they used the force itself to render themselves invisible. Now this might seem all magical, but considering the limitations of the game engine, it could be something more like a perception filter, making you get unnoticed, like what Obi-Wan did in A New Hope (then Vader sensed him because he used the Force to infiltrate etc).

But I digress, those classes were the Jedi Watchman and Sith Assassin.

Ordinary people could also use stealth field generator belts (provided they had some skill at it I believe). So yes, cloaking exists and is very much alive. You either didn't played KOTOR series at all or played them a long long time ago, long enough to forget the basics, in which case, you should re-play them :p.

In order of probability.

1. SoE shuts its door by the order of Sony.
2. Smedly dies.
2. Cryptic goes bankrupt.
3. Somehow WoW servers explodes.
4. Kotick dies.
.
.
5433. We ascend to become creatures of pure consciousness alone.
5434. Firefly Season 2 gets released.
.
.
.
993234. Someone releases a proper Dune mmo.
.
.
1,e+221. Guy below me gets the point.

New UI looks a lot like Profit UI to me.