The Republic: Doomed To Fail?

7BitBrian

I wish you luck Bioware and SWTOR. Get your team straight and get focused here guys. The game needs some focus.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Caliolo/100003765889295 Robert Caliolo

The EA Curse.
Granted to get the game out they probably hired tons of people to push it out.
Now they are down to the average amount to run an ongoing company.
Might also mean that development will slow.

testguy111

don’t blame EA. It’s bioware who is mass banning people on their forum for openly naming the problems, and who has grown extremely dense and arrogant over the years.

no one at EA forced them to make dragon age 2 such a turd, no one forced them to make 1, the same ending for everyone in mass effect 3 and claiming 16 different ones, when these only differ in saturation and color/tone, not in content.

and the second part is Star Wars. it’s less the biggest franchise, but more the DUMBEST franchise.

the people who like star wars have low attention spans and just like light sabers. it’s the same crowd that liked the prequels.

they are in the millions, but none of them gets invested in an MMO longterm

http://twitter.com/cipero Matt Cipriano

I feel like mmo’s have a very short period of time after they release to capture and hold onto a significant amount of people. Now some people are die hards and will stay through the hard times, but in my opinion, once a game loses that initial surge, it’s gone forever. See with SWTor, it seemed like they took allt he problems people pointed out to them during their beta tests and decided to launch with them. Maybe they just didn’t have the time or sources to fix them before launch, who knows? The problem with this is that instead of using the first couple patches to keep the consumers interested and involved, they used them to fix those same problems. This was the mistake.

http://profile.yahoo.com/FPXO267IVAHL3MK4HRRNRQPNDA Bush Swanson, The American Dre

I don’t like the sound of this. I hope it all works out

testguy111

first honest “The Republic” episode ever.

SO MUCH HYPE when it has been clear for 18 months that the game would be at best “ok” and at worst an embarrassment.

remember that article by a bioware insider calling SWTOR a terrible game? no one believed it back then. not that the signs were not there.

but the name Bioware brand and Star Wars made people not listen.

despite the fact that the Star Wars prequels sucked beyond belief and that BW had zero MMO experience.

http://twitter.com/ItsatrapLOL KB

Sup, I heard you like to state opinions as facts.
- testguy111
  
  my opinions proved to contain more truth than the “facts” presented by BW
  
  you know, like “we have not lost subs” and one week later they have to admit they had sold 2.4 m but only had 1.3 m subscribers.
  
  they spun it to “we’ve only lost 400k” but they had actually lost 1.1 m
  - http://www.facebook.com/maaddoc Magnus Hoffgaard-Fredman
    
    Nah, they had sold 2.4m copies, does that mean that all of those actually subscribed? Yes, you need to sign up for a sub to activate your free 30 days, but once that is activated you can cancel the sub right away. Do you know how many of those 2.4m copies subbed after the free 30 days? May very well be only 1.7m who actually subbed after the free 30 days, which means they did loose only 400k.
    
    Sold copies isn’t the same as active subscribers you know.
    - testguy111
      
      they were counted as such and you HAVE to “subscribe”.
      
      I agree they should NOT have been counted, but by that measurement, they could not claim 1.3 m but maybe half of it.
      
      even the spin master himself from Darth hater agrees that people don’t stay long.
      
      most play their class story line and unsub after 30 days
      
      why do you think they handed out a free 30 days to every player before announcing “subscription” numbers?
      
      real, active subscriptions should not include 1st month, free 30 days or people who have cancelled but are still able to log in cause their sub has not run out yet.
      
      but all these groups were included in the 1.3m
      
      why do you think concurrent user numbers are at almost 25%, in other words 75% lower than they were in Feb?
      
      we’re now at 66k concurrent users at peak times.
      
      EVE online has 400k real active subs and had a 64k concurrent user record

testguy111

how do you guys feel now after you have ridiculed EVERYONE who called BW out and talked about dead, formerly full servers, in January already.

every episode of the Republic the server pop issues have been played down until you could no longer deny it.

took you long enough.

I started on deathwind(?) corridor when it was the highest pop server and at mid January it was empty. all my friends, my guild and everyone I knew had left and I couldn’t find groups any more.

but people who openly talked about this got ridiculed and banned (I still cannot post on the official forums just for mentioning the problems)

and Gamebreaker helped BW hiding their behavior (by not talking about their forum policies) and the mass exodus of players

Smoky_the_Bear

Agreed, the reason i stopped playing was because it was impossible to find groups at max lvl, the only option being level again on another server, didnt want to do that.

On the official forums i posted on two threads reguarding server population, then found them locked minutes later, posted a new thread complaining about this and it was deleted and i received a PM politely asking me not to question forum moderation policies.

As far as server mergers go, if they’d have done them in about march it would have been a mere blip, the only reason they were needed is because BW screwed up in the first place, added too many servers and then increased population cap so most servers never actually got going.

Sub numbers will be a lot lower than ppl think imo, everyone i know unsubbed in the last month or so and they are still technically “subscribed” because of the free month (this really pissed me off, after announcing the free month they saw fit to take a subscription and then tag the free month on after that so i didnt actually get anything free because i stopped playing). There will be a lot of ppl that intended to take their free month then unsub, the number will drastically nosedive at that point and they arent doing anything to help it because they are giving us no information about how they are fixing the server issues etc.

ArcherAvatar

Execute Order 66
nuff said…

testguy111

is that a red letter media reference or directly from the prequels?

http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Caliolo/100003765889295 Robert Caliolo

BTW are these guys still playing?/?

testguy111

except Taugrim, who has been extremely critical of SWTOR on his blog, the rest of these guys have shows, websites or articles they write which are dependent on SWTOR’s success…

http://twitter.com/Luke_Malcolm Luke Malcolm

(Not A Troll) but this calls for a song - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqyUAtzS_6M&ob=av3n

http://twitter.com/Bronzestout Bronze

pokemon is bigger than starwars and a pokemon mmo would sell faster than diablo 3

http://twitter.com/ItsatrapLOL KB

That’s a pretty sensationalist headline, guys. Good job driving up hits though.

testguy111

every time one of these clowns says he’s surprised, I want to punch them in the face.

people have called this in January already. I have called it months ago.

they claim to be surprised about what was common knowledge among actual players WITHOUT a financial interest in the success of the game… yeah, sure

testguy111

2 days ago I told them the concurrent users were at 66k at peak times and now Gary, who took the 1.3 m number as gospel handed down by angels, wonders if the numbers “might even be worse” than 1.3m?

I’d laugh if it wasn’t so sad.

66k concurrent users at peak times is as much as EVE got at one time and they have 400k subs.

how STUPID and UNCRITICAL do you have to be to believe their spin stories?

the game was dead in January already and everyone got a free month in march, when they stated their sub numbers.

we’re at 500k real subs or less and rapidly falling. people who can still play but have cancelled already should NOT COUNT.

testguy111

even if we assume only 10% of subscribers are online at any given time, we’re at 660.000 subs, half the official number.

and that’s the peak times concurrent number.

that’s how I arrived at the 500k real sub number

http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-Johnson/1353890372 Michael Johnson

The Sims Online
Warhammer Online
APB
SWTOR

All made by EA

testguy111

I actually enjoyed warhammer… I’d still play it if it had more players.

and APB wasn’t made by EA, only published.

SWTOR is not about EA, it is the logical conclusion of:

Dragon Age Origins & Mass Effect 2 (among my favorite single player games of all time)

to ——————> Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 (offensive pieces of crap and a slap in the face of fans of the franchises)

BW got arrogant and complacent
- testguy111
  
  but I admit that it might have been EA’s idea to push warhammer out a year too early…
  
  if they had given the warhammer team 12 months more time, it could have rivaled WoW… IMHO at least…
  
  I’ve always preferred the original (Warhammer universe) over the cheap ripoff (Warcraft universe).
  
  nothing against WoW, or Blizzard, which have done much for the genre, but it’s a simple fact that the warcraft universe is copy pasted from Warhammer and made PG 13.
  
  same with Starcraft and Warhammer 20k e.g. the zerg look just like the Tyrannids (which came 15 years earlier) and have the same hive mind intelligence and so on…

http://www.facebook.com/Djbugzee Ramon Garcia

Thats what happens when you Screw up PVP .. Underestimate the PVP base… Dumping world PVP and not even explaining when they plan to address it……. But to Let SR go was just DUMB EA morons he was at least trying to talk with the children crying about stuff!

Joao Takada

harsh headline

http://twitter.com/Deadalon Deadalon

I tell you why Im not playing SWTOR. COMPANIONS !!! Dressing up 1 character is ok… but 5 ???

No thank you.

testguy111

dressing up my companions was the only thing I enjoyed ^^ besides the Agent storyline up to lvl 40

testguy111

why didn’t they do the mega servers at start?

because they didn’t feel they needed to innovate?

or because they wanted to earn a shitload of money with server transfer fees, like Blizz does?

BW deserves this backlash so very very much, I can’t even put it into words.

their forum censorship and their banning of critical players, their arrogance and greed got them what they deserve.

and Gary, your community manager friend was responsible for their forumnazi policies

GettCouped

You are a completely belligerent. Imagine how difficult it would be to keep parties / guilds together on a mega server. Not to mention we have no idea how the logistics work.

Oh ya, a mega server, throw it on up. Like changing a light bulb.
- testguy111
  
  it would be far easier to keep guilds together on a bigger server.
  
  how do I know?
  
  EVE online has ONE server. ONE server with 400.000, in words: four hundred thousand players.
  
  and EVE is a sandbox with player guilds governing, guarding and fighting over space, building stations and fighting year long wars.
  
  the whole game is about guilds and it’s easy as hell to stay connected.
  
  and you can trade with 400.000 people.
  
  compare that to the galactic joke netword/AH of SWTOR
  
  or look at guild wars 1. they had all players on an architecture that felt like 1 server.
  
  and I’m belligerent because BW banned me and over half the people I know for kindly asking them to fix obviously broken systems LIKE THE GTN
  - GettCouped
    
    Eve has FAR less players and is far more spaced out. (No pun intended). EVE has also been out for 8+ years. GW1 wasn’t even a persistent world.
    So let’s say there are 1,000,000 on a SWTOR server. Let’s guess that there are ~50,000 guilds and <100,000 parties. Zones take a few hundred before another instance is developed. So there are over 10,000 instances on this mega server.
    How easy would it be and how complex would the system have to be to manage and try to keep groups together and not interfere with play?
    And please, try to think on an intellectual and more importantly a MACRO level. As much as you think it is, it's not about you, your party, and your guild. It's about 1,000,000+ constantly moving, constantly unpredictable clients.
    
    BTW: Considering your actions now, I highly doubt you were banned for "kindly" asking them to fix anything.
    - testguy111
      
      how many players do you think EVE has? far less? seriously? you’re ill informed. you haven’t even read the posts here. I’ve mentioned EVE’s player base multiple times.
      
      EVE’s concurrent user base is 55k with a record of 64k users. (EVE has 400.000 subs)
      
      SWTOR is now at 66k concurrent users at peak times.
      
      (SWTOR claims to have 1.3 m subs, but statistics from the official forums, xfire and comparing concurrent user numbers to other MMOs suggests that SWTOR has about 500k subs)
      
      so EVE and SWTOR have an almost equal PLAYER BASE.
      
      for me, and everyone who plays the game, that number counts a billion times more than “subs”, which says nothing about how many people are playing.
      ————————————–
      
      servers do not worry about subs, but concurrent user numbers. since SWTORS has gone from 250k to 66k, the complete player base already fits in 11 normal sized servers if we assume one server can handle 6k users.
      
      EVE has the most powerful servers of all gaming companies (it’s basically a supercomputer) and it needs special hardware, so BW won’t spend the money on stuff like that.
      they might beef their architecture up to be able to hold 10k users. that’s 7 servers.
      ————————————–
      
      and it’s 9 years. spring 2003. but what has that to do with server size or guild or keeping in touch with guilds?
      
      to GW1: if it is persistent or not doesn’t matter. the databases on which player stats and inventory are stored do not care about instanced or not instanced.
      it still feels like 1 server. and SWTOR has the guild wars 1 system to an extent: every world is like a GW1 zone. it’s a hub based game.
      endgame plays out like GW1. sit in a city and find a group, and do stuff.
      
      on the contrary, it proves my point. technology that has been available before WoW even is not used by SWTOR, instead, old server architecture is used.
      ————————————
      
      since you obviously have little to no experience in MMOs, here are 3 examples of how it works in games already:
      
      everquest 2, champions online and guild wars 1: the instance you are in is named and you can switch instances at any time.
      
      if you are in a group, you can easily see and choose, or auto-select the instance with your group.
      
      in guild wars 2, you can even server hop in real time. want to play on server X with your friends, just go there.
      
      no charge, no fuss, no waiting. it takes 5 seconds. relog and you’re on your new server.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Steve-Connors/636500420 Steve Connors

Sigh, lets hope this game lives

http://twitter.com/ItsatrapLOL KB

It will be fine. It will probably stabilize around 1 million players, and with the server mergers and transfers coming, the population will be back on track. The doomsaying and handwringing over TOR is just boggling. Is it the next WoW? No, and it never claimed to be. Is it still a good MMO in its own right? Yes.
- testguy111
  
  they got 66k concurrent players at peak time.
  
  http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=449144
  
  how you arrive at 1 mil real subscribers is puzzling (not numbers inflated by giving free 30 days to people with cancelled accounts, like they have done last time)
  
  300 subscribers on average at every server, 99% of all servers “light” and only 1 heavy pop server?
  
  and you assume it will stabilize?
  
  with concurrent player numbers like EVE online or Aion?
  
  you, my friend, have a black belt in “positive thinking”
- testguy111
  
  they got 66k concurrent users, like EVE got and Aion has; games with 400k subs. (thread that proves this is on the official forums. look for scorpienne)
  
  for them to stabilize at 1 mil, they have to get 500k new subscribers.
  
  they’re at 500k now, not 1.3m
  - http://twitter.com/ItsatrapLOL KB
    
    i like your made-up maths. they make sense.
    - testguy111
      
      it’s from a thread on the official forums, and so well documented that the thread has not been closed or the poster banned.
      
      go there and tell him he’s full of shit. curiously though, no one does, and it’s a very very long thread.
      
      or go check xfire and compare SWTOR population to other MMOs.
      
      a lot of people use the 10% of players online at any given time figure as a basis to translate concurrent users to subs.
      
      e.g. 3 months ago, SWTOR had well over 200k concurrent users.
      
      that’d mean 2 mil subs, which SWTOR never had, so 10% is very generous
      
      take the 66k concurrent AT PEAK TIMES now and you land at 500k at best if you assume the concurrent player base during non peak times is considerably less
      
      or check EVE online, which had a 66 or 64k concurrent user record while having 400k subs
    - testguy111
      
      and just to rub it in your face, 7 years ago, when EVE had 15k-20k concurrent users, it felt more alive than my ex-full server did in January.
      
      and 9 years ago, when it started, you could sell stuff on the market and people bought it.
      
      The AH / galactic joke network in SWTOR was dead already at the end of December.
      
      no one could find shit, nobody crafted and nobody bought stuff from you and nothing was on sale for you.
      
      and the idiotic idea that you cannot trade at planets, only at the fleet drove away the last remnants of player economy
- H S
  
  If you think they have even 500k no less a million, I got a bridge to sell you , with fall down insurance too.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Kris-Yeisley/554290488 Kris Yeisley

All the bad press Bioware has been getting over the last year makes me feel like EA is intentionally trying to make them fail.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Ryan-Hamilton/1150725720 Ryan Hamilton

EA ruins everything.

Sar_Chasm

EA has a “FPS mentality”. In other words, they’re so used to a new game coming out every year, that they don’t seem overly concerned if the current games lives or dies. Once they’ve sold the box, the tripwire no longer is worthy of constant attention.
GettCouped

That I can agree with! They are too big and too moderated.

FUNNY video that came out about EA a couple days ago.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-LE0ycgkBQ&feature=g-like

http://twitter.com/benjamintlc Benjamin Crowther

After experiencing SWTOR customer service, I will never pay money for another BW game again, and I used to be a big BW fanboy.

The amazing company they were before EA is not what they are now.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Doyle-Hargrave/1182733324 Doyle Hargrave

heres my question why didnt they take wos 10 mill players? they could have done it. Instead they chose to screw off and make a kotor3 with multiplayer.

All they had to do is remake swg with the voice overs there ya go. Problem is theres to many stupid people running the show. James ohlen make john smedly look competent. He dont even know the difference between game content and features. How james has a job along with gabe is just lolz j

testguy111

they don’t understand why people play WoW.

WoW is not played for its content, but because everyone’s friend plays WoW.

It’s a place to hang out and do stuff and complain about how dull it actually is, but do it anyway cause everyone else is doing it.

none of these geniuses is a MMO player, and surely none of the top brass at EA or BW.

they look at the numbers and think people want a themepark.

but they don’t.

every themepark has failed (after WoW) while a sandbox like EVE is 9 years old with 400k subs and still growing. and all these subs are in the Western world, while 50% or more of WoW’s sub base is in China or Asia.

And EVE is a freaking pain in the ass to learn and is extremely punishing and unforgiving.

But the point here is that EVE’s development cost were a few ten thousand $ or less. Sandboxes are cheap to make.

Now, after 17 free expansions, the game is expensive to run and needs hundreds of people to develop. But not at start.

Themeparks devour all their millions before even 1 player enters the game.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Joe-Everett/1444314595 Joe Everett
  
  MMO players are ruining the gaming community and ^this guy is the perfect example of why.
  - testguy111
    
    do you mean me or the guy I replied to?

mcsumo

Awesome show guys! Really enjoyed your after show chat too. I only found this site because of Guildcast, having followed Shawn and Rubi’s podcast from the start. But I am so glad I did, I watch all of your shows and any other content you bring up.

With SWTOR it is such a shame they are having problems. They brought some good ideas and actually made the levelling process fun. I also had a lot of fun with PvP for a while. But queue times and the window of opportunity for actually getting a PvP match, have just got too bad now.

I really hope they can sort out some problems and recover. I am a GW2/Anet fan first of all, but competition is good for everyone. Maybe I could come back and try this again. Maybe we could end up with 3 or 4 games at 3 mill or so active. The competition would be so great for pricing structures and game content quality, we as consumers would benefit hugely.

Anyway keep up the good work, hope to keep seeing you guys for a good while yet.

Sar_Chasm

I have to be honest, I’ve logged in twice since D3 hit (and D3 isn’t the only thing I’m playing). I also unsubbed (but 6 month sub doesn’t run out until August). I need a few things before I would even consider resubbing:

More character slots – if I’m going to grind legacy, let me enjoy it.

A VIABLE solo endgame pvp queue: if I’m just going to be back-filled into a premade match then what’s the point. Maybe there will be enough people left to fill the ranked solo queues & I won’t have a problem but solo queuing reg matches is going to be a lot worse than people think.

Ability to queue specific warzones. Love Huttball, like CW & NC, hate Void Star.

Cross-server queuing if the “super server” idea doesn’t pan out.

Consolidate the twice-weekly maintenance. If it isn’t game breaking, it isn’t game breaking.

If they added these features, I’d resub even after GW2 comes out. I hope they can bail enough water to save the ship.

ibb27

Release expansion, and you will bring back some of the players.

testguy111

expansion means spending millions on voiceovers and new storylines. forget it.

they’ve cut 40% – 50% of their team. they’re in survival mode, not in conquest mode

scottsummer

/hug Larry

http://www.facebook.com/toph1980 Christopher Fischer

Doomed to fail, amen.

Damir Miric

I just dont see how come 500 people couldnt make that game at least work as it should. So many bugs and bad performance is where they lost many players.

Deffizzle

This might seem crazy but hear me out. Swtor is a perfect example of this, this game has been in devolopment for over 4yrs and was released in 2012 but swtor plays like a game from 2008.

http://profile.yahoo.com/Q2CK4FW6T2AW2HUMBCUSKIAPWY chopsuey

This was expected. Startupgrind.com already hinted that EA set to layoff more than 500 employees.

http://www.facebook.com/elias.rowan Elias Rowan

RE: Casual players seem to make up the core player base for SWTOR:

It certainly looks like that now because they dropped the ball with hardcore players. Go back to a month before 1.2. I am positive from that point to launch and before their customer base was a very healthy amount of hardcore. The problem is those hardcore players didn’t have enough content at max level to stay interested and Bioware completely failed to get that content to them to keep them.
So yea, at this point, the hardcore players have said “See ya”.

Unfortunately, Free to Play looks like their best option. Personally, I’ll probably never play it again, even if it did go F2P. The let down was really too much for me to feel like wasting hard drive space to re-install.

http://profile.yahoo.com/3JO75BNS43WDETCNCO7F7XS6Q4 jo

lol.

Darketower

Wow… what kind of math are you doing there?

500,000 subscribers paying $15 a month = $7.5 Million a month (or $90M a year).

$90M a year will support 900 employees who each make $100k a year (not 90, like you said).

Randy McRandom

I think Ed mentioned it too. Sure that covers those people. Just the people. Nothing about operating costs of the entire building and the hardware those people use plus the hardware SWTOR uses. I can’t imagine the monthly payments on the Bioware building… :)
http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-Johnson/1353890372 Michael Johnson

You seem to be under the impression that EA would be happy with just breaking even
H S

Forgetting that a $200 million dollar investment also requires 15-20 million a year in return to make investors happy. That doesn’t include operating expenses, LA license (30% cut), Hero engine (35% cut) on every dollar made.

So unless BEAWarw has buildings that operate without electric and plumbing, that $90 million a year won’t even pay the bill to keep the AC running.
http://twitter.com/taugrim ⚔ Ed Park

You are correct. I realized my math was off while driving to work this morning, and I wanted to make sure to post here with the correction, but you’ve already done it. I was doing the math in real-time, mistakes happen

That aside, it would be interesting to mock up an Income Statement (aka Profit & Loss) to paint the financial picture for BioWare with 500k subs.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_SGHUTXU3AZVZVA4TXL7234IW3A Edward

I love too much SW to continue playing this game. I don’t feel the SW soul anywhere in this game. Lightsabers and robes doesn’t make a SW experience.
Cut and paste worlds, static npc’s, non inmersive maps… No alien species, no space battles, no pvp. I’m very sorry for Bioware and LA, but this game is a fail for a real SW fan.

http://profile.yahoo.com/A25YQ3HO7U4LIHIHWSLG63WCYI Nisarg Shah

Just an fyi. Having layoffs is negative PR for any company and it pretty much crushes the employee morale. So 99.99% of time companies do not report temporary workers/contract workers as a layoff number. Because some US states do have some laws, believe it or not, regarding hiring after layoffs. One of main reasons why companies prefer to hire people on contract nowadays.

My number is 1000 people were laid off company wide in EA, and about 200 of them from bioware Austin. Sadly these people were not contract/temp employees. These people were either full time employees with benefits or they were converted from contract/temp to permanent position with benefits.

ssjjr21

Still can’t believe I bought this game. I didn’t even last past my free month. Linear game is linear…. not a big fan of WoW but ToR is even more linear than it.

http://profile.yahoo.com/ITHF7XKYGVXFAPCDMDJTKHLBBU Lian Wan

So what was your reason for buying? Star Wars? BioWare?
EA(?!) because you’re insane? :p
- testguy111
  
  hype and good reviews from youtube celebrities and friends.
  
  I got fooled as well…
  
  I hate star wars and was so surprised about the first few agent missions I saw a freind do, that I bought it.
  
  I bought it because it was NOT like star wars at all. lol…
  
  I still think the agent story line alone was worth the 50 bucks, but it’s not worth the sub.
  
  and it’s not an MMO.

http://profile.yahoo.com/3JO75BNS43WDETCNCO7F7XS6Q4 jo

the amount of hyping on bioware’s part is understated here. if you isolate and eliminate fanboy hype, they hyped SWTOR about a hundred times as strongly as ArenaNet is hyping guild wars 2. what’s worse is that if you look back from 1.5 to two years in time….it’s crystal clear that the ideas they painted of swtor are absolutely NOTHING like the game they eventually unveiled.

for example: http://www.gamespot.com/forums/topic/26644187/official-star-wars-the-old-republic-thread—trooper-ciass-confirmed

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3835/a_new_galaxy_daniel_erickson_on_.php

the way they describe the game, it’s nothing like SWTOR at all.

http://profile.yahoo.com/3JO75BNS43WDETCNCO7F7XS6Q4 jo

another point, my heart goes out to the darthater guy. trying to present this stuff in the most positive light possible and really struggling to ague that 1.3 will save the game. any game built like woW that isn’t WoW has died in development.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000504329093 Andrew Ostrowsky

Gary… you might want to take an antacid, because your going to get heartburn with my comments. First nice backdrop in your studio of LOL and WOW. It really gives the impression of credible source considering your obvious fandom of Blizzard Games and LOL, I forget which developer is responsible for LOL, but that is only because they are a FTP game with little to no impact in the world of mmos, especially with hardcore gamers. They are a casual game for casual players. Second, You gave the impression like you were taking joy in the fact that SWTOR had to layoff some of the team. Do you really think D3 can hold players? Are you seriously implying that if Bioware had a reboot here and dropped 1.3 next week and they released news about 1.4 and a timetable those players would not just drop D3 or WOW and go back to SWTOR? I was a WOW player since I was 17, I’m now 23. I quit because the content in Cataclysm was mediocre. WOW is getting old and so is the content recycling with will lead them to failure. Bioware will not fail just because of EA. Third, Gary I doubt you have any played any of the end game content in SWTOR and are just feeding into the doom and gloom subscribers and past fans of SWTOR who were promised to much and when Bioware didn’t deliver exactly what they wanted, they inevitably started to flame every and all things related to Bioware and SWTOR and take pride in the resulting buildup of negative publicity. Fourth, your guests math is wrong as someone pointed out below me. Fifth you make me feel like I’m listening to the Bill O’reilly of gaming, which is not at all credible and especially when you interrupt your guests and manipulate what they were saying into something completely different than what they implied.

Randy McRandom

I think this show was aimed at the negative. That’s the subject. The goal of the show was to point out all of what is going on/wrong with the path SWTOR has or is taking. 1.3 dropping next week? There is an official quote (posted on Darth Hater) that it will not even hit the PTS for 2-3 weeks. That means another 2-3 weeks after that it may go live. And even then, no one knows what will go live. Also feeding the doom and gloom? What is a positive that is going on with SWTOR right now that you can mention. A confirmed list of the great things happening…… Server merges? Ranked Warzones? New PVE content? Nightware mode? Balance changes? All have been hinted at but Bioware has not confirmed those things for the next patch. Group Finder? Yes, they said that is going to be in 1.3 and that is the one thing I can think that will help. As for his end game experience who knows? Justin himself in this episode said there is really no end game. He has seen all the hardcore and pve intensive people leave. Gary’s job as host is to prod his panel and ask all kinds of questions. I am glad you have been playing WoW for 6 years. Many people have been. But Gary has been playing games and making his living on games for a full decade before you even started playing WoW.. I agree that positive things would be nice. But again, what would those be? The subject of this weeks episodes are the layoffs and the whole list of problems.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000504329093 Andrew Ostrowsky
  
  I’m not happy I’ve been playing WOW for 6 years. I played because it drained people into its sespool of a game. My outfit moved from Planetside Aftershock back when I was 16. If you like SWTOR play the game and support Bioware. Sure there are hard times, but this is what EA has done to Bioware. From my understanding Bioware is still all there. We just need to support Bioware in succeeding irregardless of EA. There is endgame content. I’ve been playing it. Its called Alts, Warzones, Flashpoints, and all the other content in the game that Bioware could get out. Most of my friends like this games endgame content rather than playing the recycled content in WOW and LOL. At least Bioware is trying to release new content instead of the same ol. We have to be positive and support them if we want content from a reputable developer that has been tarnished by EA and literally pushed out the door. Back to my original rant at the top. If SWTOR doesn’t succeed, I know Planetside 2 will sink WOW and activation’s Call of Duty. As for the hardcore pve and pvp leaving. I left Kaas City and my guild is still over there and the top on the server. I have an alt I play from time to time and Kaas city is supposed to be the deadest of the servers and I still manage to put together groups. I’m now on Canderous because a friend pulled me over and I’m with another hardcore pve/pvp guild. Give Bioware time to recoup or go back to playing crappy games like wow and LOL who are desperate enough to be FTP or FTP to level xyz or instant endgame players with a resub or what have you. SWTOR is fairing well with 1.3 million players and it will grow over time with Bioware and if it doesn’t I’m going to Planetside 2.
  - MMO_Doubter
    
    Leveling alts (and it was clear before release that BW had designed for that) is not an end game. It is an admission that the end game is lacking.
    
    SWTOR has 8 class stories but you can’t level to cap by just playing the class quests. You have to repeat content – and as special as the cut scenes are the first time you play theme, they are annoying to repeat.
    
    Making a heavily solo-oriented leveling experience inherently harms grouping. If people are enjoying their solo leveling – they are less inclined to group.
http://www.facebook.com/joseph.fiol Joseph Giovanni Fiol

Have you never watched a gamebreaker???

Firstly, they aren’t WoW fanboys. At best they are Guild Wars 2 fanboys, if that.

Secondly, LoL is run by riot. LoL has 32 million players registered and has an average of 1 million players playing concurrently at any given time. Meaning that it’s does impact other games including MMOs. In 2 of my guilds (Eve and SWToR) we had a vent server room just for LoL cause guildies kept talking about it on vent.

Thirdly, Like it or not, D3 did impact SWToR. I haven’t touched SWToR since D3 launched.

the guys at Gamebreaker are not SWTOR haters. They are just reporting the news. Stopping being a fanboy and maybe you won’t get butt hurt the second someone says something.

FYI the community manager at EA who got laid off is a personal friend of the gamebreaker crew.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000504329093 Andrew Ostrowsky
  
  Uh… your one person. Secondly they’ll get bored with it just like every other single player game and then they will come back and by that time 1.3 will be out or Planetside 2 will be in open beta. I would love to have both, but I can live with one. I’ve seen a surge in pops of those who have already left and gone back to my server from D3. Give it time. The thing that is really supporting the trolls is that because of Biowares inaction with server transfers/mergers people are moving from servers that lack players at certain times to ones like Jedi Covanant and Fatman which are overloaded with players and are draining players from other servers to continue the process. Thus we have tons of trolls saying the game is dead, because the amount of players at certain times is lacking because players are going to those two servers. Once 1.3 comes out, most of these problems will be fixed and you and Gary will be eating those words.
Randall Donadio

You lost me at “your” (you’re).

Paul Allen

lol. Poor Larry, hes trying so hard to make this shit positive.

H S

Mega server is code for, we need an excuse to close down 200 servers because they are empty. So we will increase server capacity by 25% and claim its Mega.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000504329093 Andrew Ostrowsky

Ya obviously thats why there increasing population caps, so people can look at one giant light pop server. If your going to troll at least do it right.
- H S
  
  LOL, delusional is delusional.
  
  They don’t need 200 servers all light, they only need 10-15 right now. So they will close down 200 servers and put everyone on those remaining 10 servers and claim they are mega servers rather than admit the game is dead.
  
  if your going to troll, at least try to make it appear real.

http://www.facebook.com/nicholas.benninger Nicholas Benninger

Larry, I understand that you are a writer by default; and as such, are better able to communicate via the written word than spoken. If you are going to speak on this show, for the love of God, please, slow your roll, calm down, and think of what you want to say before your broken speech pattern has to wait for your brain to catch up. The eh-oh-eh-nnn-um-bo sentences really destroy any chance of people bothering to listen to what you have to say during the episode.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000504329093 Andrew Ostrowsky

Rofl, good point

http://www.facebook.com/people/Doyle-Hargrave/1182733324 Doyle Hargrave

One thing is for sure gw2 is going to destroy tor pvp wise. Theres no way in hell that tors going to be able to compete with that. I wasnt a gw2 fan but what i saw in that bwe was just WOW mindlblowing i felt like gabe was describing gw2 pvp but everything gabe said that was supose to be in tor is in gw2 and more.

I really hope gamebreaker crew or some media person explains the difference between game content and game features to james ohlen b/c he doesnt know the difference lmao. How does james have a job still? when i watch him do those videos i swear theres someone off screen to the right holding a gun and he just ate a bad burrito and is groundhogging it trying to get through those videos

http://www.facebook.com/rob.andrewz Rob AndreWz

Poor Larry thats hard to watch … ouch.

http://profile.yahoo.com/XNZ7PW3OFKXKFPHXMJOPA32YMY Josh P

It is sad people
don’t know this, but the main reason the game failed were the
decisions/Mistakes of bioware/EA. Namely:

Mistake 1: Too many servers. Bioware made BAD DECISIONS. They
were too scared to make people wait in 10 min queues for gods sake. You
know, Those uber casuals who wouldn’t be there in a month anyway? (The
big drop off after the holidays) Thinking this game would support 2
million people for six months was folly and the remaining 800k or so are
paying for it because they are spread out across 30 odd servers with
nobody to play with. In an MMO that’s a big problem.

Mistake 2: Focus on a legacy system that has no real impact on
PVE or PVP endgame. Endless hours of coding and bullshit on a feature
that nobody cares about or needs. It’s a glorified unlock system to sink
your credits into. AND IT COMPLICATES SERVER MERGERS. Double fail. Why
in the 7 hells would I wait for 1.3 when all it offers is more crap I
don’t want, when my class is gimped, PVP is a joke, and I have nobody to
play with?

Any article that does not discuss these two things and spits out the
typical pablum about “expectations”, and “you can’t please everybody”
isn’t worth the time it takes to read. I would post it to the actual
article itself but I’m not making an account.

GettCouped

2x post.
GettCouped

Mistake 1: Agree very much so. They should have learned from other mega MMO launches. This was a clear oversight and they should of had a contingent plan for the inevitable population decline.
Mistake 2: I can agree somewhat. Typically, the systems they put in now have been in development for months or even a year. SWTOR was built to be a PVE game. You may not like the legacy system, but it has been successful for SWTOR.
However, I think they didn’t take into account a few things:PVP players have been looking for something to fill the void for quite some time. BW highlighted the PVP content to lure players, but didn’t have the necessary assets to satisfy the team. PVP players have been frustrated for quite some time as they have had nothing to satisfy the void. Also, they are bordering on insanity since the fail of WAR. This lead to a tremendous backlash that affected the population dramatically.
However, at the same time, the community is really getting absurd. People are so angry and so ready to tear anything down instead of trying to build anything up. What does that say about us and the society we build?
We should think of the amount of time it takes to develop content. They put a ton of assets into the PVP side of the game and are now developing content. As you can see from Rift, it takes ~1 year from development to PTS.
MMOs are probably one of the most difficult parts of any industry to develop for. Long production time and a hostile, vocal, and immature client base.

http://twitter.com/Sanovah Nick

is the audio really loud on the left for anyone else?

Randall Donadio

Please

Randall Donadio

Don’t you love when people who don’t know what the hell they are talking about, quote themselves? Daniel Erickson drives me crazy. 100% of 0 is still 0.

I do not wish bad on anyone and I am not glad anyone lost their job, but this is the same gripe I had with Stephen Reid. Their excuses for not following SUCCESSFUL trends are self proclaimed morals that aren’t necessary those of those who truly UNDERSTAND both sides of the LFG fence. Same thing goes for the combat log and DPS meter debates.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Sighphi-Rex/100001042136744 Sighphi Rex

Lucas Arts doesnt have a good reputation for games? Are they mad?
You dont know about video games if you think Lucas Arts doesnt have a good reputation.
Not saying that they have not created bad games but the list of classic excellent Lucas Arts or Star Wars games is tremendously long and it didnt start with KOTOR.

testguy111

if you had dode ANY research instead of talking out of your behind (like light saber fanatics usually do) you’d discover that KOTOR was the only exception.

and that was BW before Dragon Age 2 and before Mass effect 3

Star Wars fans are the lowest common denominator crowd, easily dazzled by glowsticks but incapable of getting involved in MMOs or any complex system.

you know, people who like the Star Wars prequels.

that’s why SWTOR was so easy, was so dumbed down and had no crafting, no trading, no grouping and no open world.

they need to be lead around in the most linear fashion and can only face mobs that can be killed while asleep.

BW should have realized that these people won’t keep playing once their class story is over.

compared to a SWTOR fan, the typical WoW player is a distinguished gentlemen with an assortment of several stylish hats on top of his head
(yes it’s a TF2 joke, sue me)
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Sighphi-Rex/100001042136744 Sighphi Rex
  
  Look if you hate Star War fans just say so…. you dont need more than two sentences.
  
  BTW, none of that has to do with Lucas Arts.

Somet Aider

The story is Biowares thing? Come on! Inquisitor is nice, and the agent on Hutta. But the rest ist boring as hell! The story is sooo boring und stupid. It’s trivial. KotOR II had a interesting story. TOR does not!

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_HX3XEUVA7ZYXZCND45YCO5OVQE Stock

The game is near done and you can stick a fork in it. Number of players is much, much lower than reported but most importantly, the community can clearly see the disconnect between BioWare and MMO players in their approach to the game. In other words, they are either in denial, too filled with egos, or just to arrogant to fix this. That is why many have lost hope in saving this title.

You had a good example in this episode when talking about leveling alts. BioWare mentions it as customizing individual characters, when the reasons you cover in it for being account wide make more sense. The remaining players see most of the stuff being introduced for what it is – an artificial grind for keeping sub-numbers. Too bad BioWare doesn’t understand AT ALL about grind-reward balance.

Unless they humble themselves, and soon, it’s done and will not be much of an industry discussion by the end of this year.

http://twitter.com/Canisrah Shane

All this praise for Steven Reid…I’m confused, they must be talking about some other guy and some other game. Reid presided over the creation of a toxic community, governing by twitter and communicating via cryptic messages that reeked of smugness. Nice guy I guess – but there were too many mistakes made, especially if you were in the Red Zone. The man had to go.

testguy111

I know more people who were BANNED on the forums than who were not.

every critical thread gets locked, every discussion of people who wanted to help BW by explaining to them what they needed to fix gets locked down, and the poster gets banned

yeah. nice guy

Nhoj1983

Umm.. since when did BF3 not do well? It shipped 15m boxes and counting as of two months ago. EA’s a mixed bad atm. It has some big sucesses.. and some failures. I’ve yet to put SWTOR as one of them though that might happen if things really are falling apart as you guys are saying.

Cyclops07

God knows I wish I could sell back my Collecters Edition, what a waste of money. Anyone want a Malgus statue in the unopened box? lol

testguy111

anything George Lucas thought of or touched is best kept in a radiation proof subterranean bunker

http://twitter.com/Jedilace Jedi Lace

$15/month * 500k= $7.5m/month
$7.5m * 12 months/year = 90m/year

If each employees costs $100,000, then bioware can hold 900 employees, not 90 as mentioned at 26 minutes

testguy111

has already been cleared up in the thread. how about reading the other posts before double or triple “clearing things up”.

Taugrim has even replied to the first guy who mentioned it
- http://twitter.com/Jedilace Jedi Lace
  
  Sorry I don’t have time to read 90+ comments, and neither do many of the watchers.

testguy111

and about “hardcore”.

the prequels, as well as the whole SW universe is so riddled with inconsistencies, retcons, illogical and stupid lore and plot devices, it does not attract any hardcore fan anyway.

Star Wars is pure fantasy dressed up as scifi.

“the force” is just renamed “magic”.

Light sabers cut through anything, but you can hit enemy mobs a dozend times and they still have all their limbs attached.

they act like boomerangs when it’s convenient which makes no sense.

the bad guys all have the same red color and the good guys blue. seriously? and you can’t even touch or handle a light saber that is not from your team. how stupid.

light sabers in SW act like wands in Harry Potter.

the force acts like magic in Harry Potter and other bad fantasy bullshit.

suddenly you can “heal” people with the force.

you know, the one thing neither yoda nor the emperor could when Padame died.

healing, i.e. saving people from dying, is somehing no one could do. and now everyone can.

it’s so stupid

MMO_Doubter

Bingo. Very well said.

One of my biggest gripes with SWTOR is that it didn’t ‘feel’ like Star Wars’.

BTW, you missed:

Jedi have to loot corpses to pay for their training.

Space is a solo game.

lee long

you guys remember EA Louse??? ppl should believe him instead of calling him a troll

GettCouped

I remember him, and he is still a troll.
- MMO_Doubter
  
  You don’t know what a troll is.
  
  That does put you in large company around here, of course.
- testguy111
  
  he made an accurate prediction.
  
  that either means he is psychic, or he knew wtf he was talking about.
  
  you seem to define “troll” as someone you disagree with for emotional, irrational reasons.
  
  why irrational? because your predictions about SWTOR have obviously fallen flat but you still defend them and call people who were right names.
  
  you’re a product of the “I feel offended, thus I’m right” culture.
  
  I pity you.
  - GettCouped
    
    SWTOR has the second highest subscriber base and it failed? Even if it is failing or failed, a person “predicting” an MMO to fail isn’t exactly a hard thing to do; since most of them do.
    
    If EA Louse was a reputable source, he would come out to the public.
    
    I haven’t made any predictions about SWTOR, nor have I implied that I have made any, so I don’t know how I am being irrational or what being irrational has to due with the predictions you said I made.
    
    I don’t even subscribe to SWTOR anymore. I played it at launch for a couple months. Tried it out about a month ago and it is a fun game, but it lacks true PVP. This is one of the main features needed to gain a subscription. There are things wrong with SWTOR and it was posted. I am not maniacally defending SWTOR as you are in rejecting it.
    
    Let’s look at this comment section. You have multiple posts and with a brief scan it seems completely negative. Objectively, it seems like you are on a mission to express your dissatisfaction to everyone who says anything even remotely positive about SWTOR. It seems almost obsessive. I am concerned about you.
    
    The fact of the matter is that BW offended you, from your perspective, and you are now lashing out with anger and being subjectively irrational and obsessively negative; thus you’re right?
    - testguy111
      
      according to vgchartz dot com, which tracks offline sales of almost every game, SWTOR sold 2.33 million times
      
      digital sales have to be in the hundreds of thousands. some sources say that swtor was sold 3 mil times.
      
      so 700k digital and 2.3m box sales
      
      and yet they have lost over half according to their inflated numbers which include the free 30 days, the free first month and already cancelled accounts which were still accessible.
      
      see, it doesn’t matter that it was the second highest subbed game.
      
      what matters is, that it cost such a shitload of money, that the measly 500k they have now doesn’t cut it, since it won’t end there.
      
      it is still nosediving.
      ————————————————–
      
      SWTOR went from the 10th ranked game to the 12th ranked game from yesterday to today on xfire.
      players per game today:
      swtor had 1.434
      EVE had 1.102
      Aion had 1.233
      
      and EVE EARNED 66 million last year instead of COSTING 200-300 mil like SWTOR
      
      ———————————————————-
      
      successful? not in player base -> dead servers
      and not in financial terms SINCE THEY FIRED HALF THEIR TEAM
      
      GET REAL
      
      STOP LYING TO YOURSELF
      
      you are so dishonest to yourself, you can’t even admit you’re a fanboi
      
      you know, suddenly I get why you like SWTOR so much;
      
      you’re like the BW team:
      
      you don’t play the game, you’re in utter denial, and you make up your own facts and accuse others of trying to sabotage the game as soon as it is criticized
MMO_Doubter

Indeed. Most of the insider leaks I have heard have been pretty accurate.
testguy111

yeah. I’ve mentioned him in this thread already, but I forgot his name… and I thought he was a BW insider…

but this guy was so spot on. when I read his stuff (I don’t even remember details) I had a Star Wars prequel deja vu.

all hype, no substance and terrible terrible game design choices

testguy111

@ GettCouped who claimed that EVE’s player base was FAR lower than SWTOR’s and that mega servers are oh so complex and daunting and hard to pull off:

how
many players do you think EVE has? far less? seriously? you’re ill
informed. you haven’t even read the posts here. I’ve mentioned EVE’s
player base multiple times.

EVE’s concurrent user base is 55k with a record of 64k users.(EVE has 400.000 subs)

SWTOR is now at 66k concurrent users at peak times.

(SWTOR claims to have 1.3 m subs, but statistics from the official
forums, xfire and comparing concurrent user numbers to other MMOs
suggests that SWTOR has about 500k subs)

so EVE and SWTOR have an almost equal PLAYER BASE.

for me, and everyone who plays the game, that number counts a billion
times more than “subs”, which says nothing about how many people are
playing.
————————————–

servers do not worry about subs, but concurrent user numbers. since
SWTORS has gone from 250k to 66k, the complete player base already fits
in 11 normal sized servers if we assume one server can handle 6k users.

EVE has the most powerful servers of all gaming companies (it’s
basically a supercomputer) and it needs special hardware, so BW won’t
spend the money on stuff like that.
they might beef their architecture up to be able to hold 10k users. that’s 7 servers.
————————————–

and it’s 9 years. spring 2003. but what has that to do with server size or guild or keeping in touch with guilds?

to GW1: if it is persistent or not doesn’t matter. the databases on
which player stats and inventory are stored do not care about instanced
or not instanced.it still feels like 1 server. and SWTOR has the
guild wars 1 system to an extent: every world is like a GW1 zone. it’s a
hub based game.endgame plays out like GW1. sit in a city and find a group, and do stuff.

on the contrary, it proves my point. technology that has been
available before WoW even is not used by SWTOR, instead, old server
architecture is used.
————————————

since you obviously have little to no experience in MMOs, here are 3 examples of how it works in games already:

everquest 2, champions online and guild wars 1: the instance you are in is named and you can switch instances at any time.

if you are in a group, you can easily see and choose, or auto-select the instance with your group.

in guild wars 2, you can even server hop in real time. want to play on server X with your friends, just go there.

no charge, no fuss, no waiting. it takes 5 seconds. relog and you’re on your new server.
———————————————————

that tells you how much SWTOR spent on their server setup. they are
still using old Everquest 1 style servers. that’s 14 year old tech.why
can I server hop in real time in GW2, why can I switch between Asian or
EU zone to US worlds in GW1 in a mouse click and why do I have to
freaking REROLL in SWTOR if I want to change??????

testguy111

to “GettCouped” who claimed that EVE’s player base was FAR lower than
SWTOR’s and that mega servers are oh so complex and daunting and hard to
pull off:
———————————-

how many players do you think EVE has? far less? seriously? you’re ill
informed. you haven’t even read the posts here. I’ve mentioned EVE’s
player base multiple times.

EVE’s concurrent user base is 55k with a record of 64k users.
(EVE has 400.000 subs)

SWTOR is now at 66k concurrent users at peak times.

(SWTOR claims to have 1.3 m subs, but statistics from the official
forums, xfire and comparing concurrent user numbers to other MMOs
suggests that SWTOR has about 500k subs)

so EVE and SWTOR have an almost equal PLAYER BASE.

for me, and everyone who plays the game, that number counts a billion
times more than “subs”, which says nothing about how many people are
playing.
————————————–

servers do not worry about subs, but concurrent user numbers. since
SWTORS has gone from 250k to 66k, the complete player base already fits
in 11 normal sized servers if we assume one server can handle 6k users.

EVE has the most powerful servers of all gaming companies (it’s
basically a supercomputer) and it needs special hardware, so BW won’t
spend the money on stuff like that.
they might beef their architecture up to be able to hold 10k users. that’s 7 servers.
————————————–

and it’s 9 years. spring 2003. but what has that to do with server size or guild or keeping in touch with guilds?

to GW1: if it is persistent or not doesn’t matter. the databases on
which player stats and inventory are stored do not care about instanced
or not instanced.

it still feels like 1 server. and SWTOR has the
guild wars 1 system to an extent: every world is like a GW1 zone. it’s a
hub based game.

endgame plays out like GW1. sit in a city and find a group, and do stuff.

on the contrary, it proves my point. technology that has been
available before WoW even is not used by SWTOR, instead, old server
architecture is used.
————————————

since you obviously have little to no experience in MMOs, here are 3 examples of how it works in games already:

everquest 2, champions online and guild wars 1: the instance you are in is named and you can switch instances at any time.

if you are in a group, you can easily see and choose, or auto-select the instance with your group.

in guild wars 2, you can even server hop in real time. want to play on server X with your friends, just go there.

no charge, no fuss, no waiting. it takes 5 seconds. relog and you’re on your new server.
———————————————————

that tells you how much SWTOR spent on their server setup. they are
still using old Everquest 1 style servers. that’s 14 year old tech.

why
can I server hop in real time in GW2, why can I switch between Asian or
EU zone to US worlds in GW1 in a mouse click and why do I have to
freaking REROLL in SWTOR if I want to change??????

GettCouped

There are a lot of assumptions in your post, and your sources for information is questionable at best. It is not productive, in any way, to debate with you because of your high state of emotion. I will respectfully agree to disagree.

Just to note: I don’t think SWTOR is perfect, and there were quite a few mistakes made, but unrepentant negativity without constructive and plausible solutions isn’t helpful.
- testguy111
  
  then list things you disagree with or that you doubt.
  
  the 66k concurrent users is from the official forum and extensively documented and very well researched and backed by facts and observations from other users.
  
  look for “Population Estimates for the Top 20 US Servers”
  
  they would have closed the thread and banned Scorpienne long ago if he was not 100% correct and had external backing from torstatus and other people
  
  EVE records are easily available. just google it
  
  seriously, if I had written some random BS, you could disprove me faster than it took you writing your reply, just by googling the numbers.
  
  EVE concurrent user record is 63165 , so I was off a few hundred
  
  and SWTOR atm is 66.323
  
  I think you’re just unwilling to think about the implications of what I told you.
  
  or admit that you were utterly, embarrassingly wrong about EVE and SWTOR’s population.
  
  see, subs are useless for players. they matter to EA, but if 80% of the subscribers stop playing, you’re still fucked as a player.
  
  that’s what’s happening
  
  and agree to disagree can be done about philosophical differences. not about facts.
  
  you claimed that EVE had a FAR smaller population. you were wrong.
  
  it’s that easy.
  
  can’T you admit that? are you so fanatical, or so zealous as a fanboi?
  
  you accuse me of being emotional, when I list facts.
  
  yet you back up your claims with nothing. and the few things you openly claim, I have disproved.
  - Randy McRandom
    
    I would say you are emotional because like half the posts here are you saying much of the same thing. I don’t like SWTOR either but calm her down bro! ;)
    - testguy111
      
      another guy who has nothing to say, nothing to contribute except an open dislike for discourse.
      
      well done my young Padawan
      
      “calm down bro!” is the way of the jedi, use it, whenever you run out of energy cells for your lightsaber!
      
      but wait, this is Star Wars, where none of the thermodynamic laws exist and energy weapon don’t need no stinking power to power them!!!!

testguy111

from EA louse post from October 2010:

”
According to Louse, more than $300 million has been spent on the game so far.

“And you know what they’re most proud of? This is the kicker,” the blog
reads. “They are most proud of the sound. No seriously. Something like a
20Gig installation, and most of it is voiceover work. That’s the best
they have. The rest of the game is a joke. EA knows it and so does
George Lucas, they’re panicking, and so most of Mythic has already been
cannibalized to work in Austin on it because they can’t keep pushing
back launch.”

Louse then predicts, “Old Republic will be one of the greatest failures
in the history of MMOs from EA. Probably at the level of the Sims Online. We all know it too …”

”

I bet gamebreaker didn’t take him seriously and neither did anyone else, except people familiar with Lucas Arts and BW’s non-experience with MMOs

but that’s really it.

300 mil are more or less correct, the story, i.e. 20GB sound is the whole game and if it wasn’t a failure, they wouldn’t have fired 50% of their staff

http://www.facebook.com/chaz.rpg Chaz Davis

For those that keep saying that the free 30 days were to inflate subscriber numbers on the earning calls:

The free 30 days were applied on April 25th while Q2 ended on March 31st, way before that.

Besides, if you really want to inflate your subscriber numbers, what they have to do is launch in Korea and China and have them pay by the hour.

IYKWIM

Quench

Why does EA keep using the term “active subscribers?” They said that they include people on free subscription time as active subscribers. Why don’t they just say something like “paying subscribers?” They obviously didn’t have any free subscriptions on March 31st, right?
testguy111

if that’s really the case then I wonder how they got to the 1.3 mil mark with such low concurrent user numbers… maybe that many people bought 3 month subs?

but thanks for the info

about Korea and China… I’ve lived in Korea for a year, and no one there even knows Star Wars… same goes to China I guess…

paying them might work ^^ but BW can’t hope to get many customers from that region otherwise

interesting side note:

xfire stats on
star craft 2:– 2949 players
SWTOR:—– 1512 players

that’s 50% almost…

http://twitter.com/Frogdiceinc Michael Hartman

Can someone tell me why the Darthhater guy was even on this call? Every single time he was asked a question he said “Well……. I can’t really comment…… Well, I can’t tell what I know.”

Seriously. If you are going to be on a call, answer the questions. Sheesh.

testguy111

he’s the lead spin master for BW in the community.

his site has a few pseudo critical articles once in a while to hide that it’s a complete whitewashing tool for Bioware

http://www.facebook.com/jkohlasch John Kohlasch

Gary Gannon is the biggest TROLL in history! funny how he leads the panelists to his answers.

Gary you are the hater. If you actually can put a show on without your bias that’d be great if not get Mike to do the hosting again – He at least wasn’t pushing an agenda.

Failing that of course you could mix up your panels to people that’ll not let you push your opinion and will stop you misusing what they say

testguy111

Gary had, for whatever reason, always ignored or played down the population issues, or signs that the game was a failure.

Now he woke up and is a bit disturbed at what he sees.

I guess he was a bit naive and really couldn’t imagine Bioware + Star Wars to fail.

That’s the whole story.

How about rewatching the last 10000 episodes of The Republic and find one that seriously entertains the idea that they are in trouble??? you wont find any.

so what you’re implying is nonsense

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=862175353 Gavin Morgan

I really fear for this game now, the servers look so badly populated now that people must be leaving in their droves.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Maxi-Demtrix/100003088364444 Maxi Demtrix

Ever since beta, the whole SWTOR community was filled with Yes Men, peeps like the Darth Hater crew and all the other main community sites who all benefited from closer association with Bioware, drinking it up with the devs at all these shows and gaining in monetary terms. There were people giving honest feedback via the forums, yet these were mainly ignored (never replied to on the whole).

main examples:Game Engine (inc of all the different types of latency)Ilum/Lack of Sandbox PVP/World PVPSpace CombatUINo cross server queuingNo group finder for operations/missionsNo 8 man queueing for PVPLack of endgamebasic crafting, not diverse and a lack of things to spend ones money onOver abundant use of crowd control in the gameThe whole game got rushed out, Bioware kept giving it the Big One, “We don’t release stuff till its ready, we don’t release crap!” Yet again and again they did exactly the opposite.The continued lack of communication to the community and all the stalling has come home to roost.How the QA never got 100+ either side in world PVP encounters on different planets and got the engine sorted before launch, though tbh I just think that there is so much crap written code that they will never get it sorted. All the memory leaks (Voss/Taris) were a disgrace too. How did the Devs not look at all the other MMo’s and take all the best elements and bring them into the game, it not like the game was next level in terms of combat and it badly needed the depth in the PVP system, crafting and more things to do beside re-roll alts at endgame.I lead one of the top PVP guilds in the EU filled with Gladiator rank players from WOW and other game. We have gone from 70+ players at launch to max 6-8 players on between our two guilds.Like I say to my lads, Bioware feel like someone that owes me a large sum of money and everytime I run into them they give me some bull story about how they can’t pay me and then I don’t hear from them in ages and then they do the game deal again.I been playing this game since October 2011 and it’s sad to see how this game has been continually mis-managed.I seriously fear for this game when Guildwars 2 launches unless there is significant content launched,Rated Warzones, more warzones, free server transfers, major class balance and solid work done to the game engines coding to allow the re-shape of world PVP.Max GM of Ky’ram Prudiihttp://www.kyramprudii.com

testguy111

star wars fans are unique in many ways…

if you’ve seen the prequels, you know that Darth Vaders whole existence relied on the fact that healing people was impossible.

that’s the whole reason he could be turned to the dark side – with promises to heal his wife

and without darth vader, and his help to defeat the jedi, the old trilogy would have never happened the way it did.

————————

but now, everyone and their brother can heal, just like in all other fantasy games.

or take light sabers…

they cut through anything, but you have to hit mobs, even unarmed ones, 20 times to kill them.

————————————-

star wars fans are a special breed because they ignore all these lore
shattering, logic smothering and seizure inducing inconsistencies and
retcons

SWTOR has nothing to do with Star Wars at the end.

there is nothing left from the old lore and the physics or rules of the star wars world (which was dumb to begin with)

and they still love it and don’t understand or don’t admit to themselves
it’s just about glow sticks, the word “jedi” and the word “darth”.

http://www.facebook.com/scott.cradduck Scott Cradduck

This is why I finally ended up with a one handed pistol build…having to hit something 20 times with a lightsaber was just stupid. At least a little peashooter has justification in not taking mobs down so easily.
- MMO_Doubter
  
  SO true. The SWTOR combat felt WRONG.
  
  Just like it did in Star Trek Online. ‘Personal shields’ as an excuse for targets taking 6+ hits to drop. Garbage.
  
  This what people mean when they call these games WoW-clones.
  
  We had a couple of discussions on MMORPG before STO released about an ‘iconic’ combat system that would feel right. We all know what poor shots the Storm Troopers in SW were. In stead of hits counting against HP – have shots deplete ‘luck’ (resulting in near-misses) and once luck is gone, THEN the target is hit and killed/incapacitated.
JibbaJabba2012

You can say this about most games. In a fantasy game, how many times do you need to slash someone with an axe before they die? Same with ranged combat and bullets etc.

testguy111

from the official forums:

Date Population Loss (by that they mean concurrent user numbers)

5/11/2012 95,859

5/16/2012 85,995 / 9,864

5/18/2012 83,194 / 2,801

5/21/2012 76,255 / 6,939

5/23/2012 73,693 / 2,562

5/25/2012 72,203 / 1,490

5/28/2012 66,574 / 5,629

5/30/2012 66,323 / 251

6/01/2012 65,772 / 551

we’re nosediving

testguy111

the term has no meaning.

it just sounds better that “people who want out, desperately, but are still trapped in subs”

Bestow

How about you start tossing those SWTOR boxes at each other now?

Clowns.

testguy111

give it time until the next eranings call. they’ll still be able to add some spin to the numbers then, but in 4 months, servers are going to be shut down or it’s going free to play.

by then, EVE, an ACTUAL scifi game, will have surpassed SWTOR in concurrent user numbers and CCP is going to laugh their assess off, just like everyone else who saw it comming.

Star Wars sucks, and Bioware went evil with DA2 and ME3

it’s going to be a lightning storm of raw Karma and justice

Alex Mac

No. It will maintain a sufficient playerbase alongside other MMOs on the market. This show is a lot of dread and gloom without a lot of consideration for the bare minimum the game needs, which is currently being surpassed.

testguy111

the game was so expensive to make that the usual number of players that can sustain rift or Aion is not able to sustain SWTOR.

new content in SWTOR necessarily means new millions spent on voice overs and animations.

this is not EVE that earns 66 mil with 400k subs.

SWTOR with 400k subs is losing money.

EA will shut the game down soon, if pop keeps falling. why do you think they fired half their staff?
———————————————-

how about you read comments?

we are at 65k concurrent users.

Aion and EVE, far cheaper games, are close to that.

SWTOR is living on borrowed time.

SWTOR went from

5/11/2012 95,859
concurrent players

to
6/01/2012 65,772

in 3 weeks.

that’s a loss of 30% in 3 weeks.

THIRTY PERCENT and you talk about stabilizing
- Alex Mac
  
  Spare your condescension, if you will, and I’ll be willing to have a true conversation with you. Ignoring that you’re literally running numbers “from the forums” (which oddly, I’ve seen little to no corroboration for), you’ve done a remarkable job at ignoring the main point. namely, that the game itself is capable of maintain the minimum player/subscription base needed to maintain base profitability. It might not be the stellar smash that EA or BioWare wanted but there is room on the market for this game yet. And enough room that it is going to generate returns for a fair time, even on such an outdated payment model.
  Beyond this, we’re seeing alterations and fixes to the very issue of concurrent play. TOR’s issue isn’t tied to total population, but as you rightly hint at, a population spread too far apart. As this is truncated, there’s no reason to believe that the game cannot exist within the market space, even considering the apparent high cost of content generation (which, frankly, I would wager you are grossly overestimating.)
  
  Now, you can continue to prowl the comments here and scream as loud as you want but that doesn’t make you compelling. So levy your hysteria elsewhere, if you will. The mere suggestion that the game will continue to exist is not worth your laborious and schizophrenic tirades.
  - testguy111
    
    I mentioned the post multiple times in this thread.
    
    poster is scorpienne thread is always on page 1 of general discussion.
    
    that proves that you did not go there, EVER in the last 2 months. he had multiple threads that tracked population for months
    
    thread name is
    Population Estimates for the Top 20 US Servers
    
    it’s backed up by almost every user in the 36 page thread, data from torstats and xfire
    
    you dismiss it just because it’s bad news. very mature
    
    go there and look how he got the numbers. feel free to correct him. no one has yet.
    
    and don’t believe for a second that the tread would still be up and the user not banned if it wasn’t sound numbers
    —————————————–
    
    why do people do this? just ignore everything they don’t like?
    
    see, if people like you were more critical, BW would have fixed the issues much earlier.
    
    it’s fanbois like you who lead to the failure of the game. you make them believe the community is ok with what they’re doing.
  - MosesZD
    
    People can’t have conversations with people who refuse to accept cold, hard facts. And you’re that guy. They 900K paying customers in 70 days. The MAJORITY of servers are now on permenent lite status There are TEN servers, world-wide, that still have decent player bases and another TWENTY, world-wide, that you can do ‘ok’ during prime time.
    
    The rest of the 217 are worthless for anything but anti-social soloists…
    
    And you’re bagging on people for their data while sticking your head in the sand and refusing to see it.
    
    Whatever, dude. Whatever.
- http://www.facebook.com/biby07 Ricardo A. Gonzalez Barbosa
  
  well, even “bigger” games like wow have about 50k concurrent players… according to forums… so are these numbers accurate?
  - MMO_Doubter
    
    Do you have a link on that 50k number, because I rather doubt it?
MosesZD

You’d be wrong. They sold 2.2 million copies through March 31st. They only managed to retain just 1.3 million. That’s loosing 900K customers in 70 days. (The first day a sub could get off the books was the 20th of January.)

Games that set new records for people quitting in one quarter don’t have bright futures. No matter how much you try to spin it.
- testguy111
  
  actually it was probably more… vgchartz tracks store/retail sales and comes to 2.33m already
  
  add to that an unknown, unpublished and hushed up number of of digital sales, which could be in the hundreds of thousands.
  
  certainly 30%, if not more.
  
  so we’re at 3 mil at least. with 1.3m “subscribers” most of which probably had already cancelled if we look at the concurrent player numbers that dropped like a stone since then

testguy111

in 4 months, servers are going to be shut down or it’s going free to play.

by then, EVE, an ACTUAL scifi game, will have surpassed SWTOR in concurrent user numbers and CCP is going to laugh their assess off, just like everyone else who saw it comming.

Star Wars sucks, and Bioware went evil with DA2 and ME3

it’s going to be a lightning storm of raw Karma and justice
———————–

It’ll be the return of CONSEQUENCE, the thingy that has been eliminated by Bioware in ME3 and SWTOR.

MMO_Doubter

See, now even I call THIS a troll post.

Most of yours have been quite reasonable, but this one is out of line. No reason to gloat.
- testguy111
  
  you think gloating equals trolling?
  
  how about looking up a definition?
  
  yes, I’m gloating. I want BW to fail, since they treated me like a piece of shit on their forum. In january, I was merely confused as to why they would publish with a trade network that had no search function and that was hiding 20% of the items, even after you got to the subsection where they should have been.
  
  I was merely asking if this was on purpose or a bug. and I got banned.
  
  my friends got banned for asking similar questions.
  
  none of us was angry or upset, just confused. we got angry after we were treated like that. without explanation.
  —————————-
  
  and yes, they eliminated consequence from both games. you could never mess up, never choose any outcome, it’s all an illusion of choice.
  
  if you went good or evil influenced nothing, only light saber colors.
  
  your storyline went to where it wanted, just like in ME3.
  
  a thousand different choices in ME1-3 and the same ending for every player, just in different colors…
  —————————-
  
  so I have every reason to say what I did, and every reason to gloat.
  
  I do not pity these people. they deserve to fail and lose their jobs.
  
  because they did a shitty job
  
  and because their failure will enable other, better companies with less lazy storytelling and a less appalling view of their customers to thrive.
  —————————-
  
  they tried to take the market with 300 million of dollars spent. not with art, game design, originality, innovation, commitment or vision
  
  they wanted to buy market share with the shittiest engine around, the most dishonest rendered game trainers, and server architecture and game design from the last century.
  
  it failed. and I’m still clapping
  - testguy111
    
    I want to clarify that the storyline I played, the Agent one, was fantastic.
    
    what bugs me is that all these multiple choices you could do have no meaning or are the same choice down the line.
    
    one time I tried to save the imprisoned Agent on Nar Shadda(? the city planet) and I tried every story point and all ended with him dead.
    
    I even went to far and fooled my own superiors (which I never did and never wanted to do for roleplaying reasons) but BW twisted the story around so even my help was futile.
    
    it all ends the same way, every time.
    
    why? because it is simply impossible to have truly branching storylines. the amount of spoken dialogue would increase exponentially.
    
    I don’t blame BW for not going so far (it would cost billions) but I blame them for promising it and advertizing with it.
    ————————————————
    
    ME3 took the cake with lying and cheating people. they even advertized the game as, and I paraphrase: “choose your own ending”.
    
    but there was only the one ending. one freaking ending that didn’t solve anything.
    
    no matter what choices you made through all 3 games.

Ryan Fisher

The problem with SWTOR is that they have failed to [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] [spacebar] So you can clearly see that they have some tough decisions ahead.

http://twitter.com/Nathiest Nathiest

MMO People like Gear. People like crazy looking rare Weapons. People like exotic Mounts. You cannot have any of that in a Star Wars game.

Lucius Julius

We had all of that in one and only SWG

http://profile.yahoo.com/THJWE4XEXAMAPW3CUGPFYCUDHE Prime

From July, EA will offer 15 “levels” for free, meaning gamers will be able to join and play the beginning phases of the game without paying. That might be the jumpstart the game needs, analysts say. “Part of it is just trying to be promotional, trying to keep the game alive,” said Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia. “We’ve got a little bit north of a million subscribers on average for the year, and if it goes down too much it increases the risk of the game going away.

http://twitter.com/LordVero a.k.a. Avtron

Where are the guild capital ships?

http://www.facebook.com/people/Ronny-Sunrock/100002737688676 Ronny Sunrock

Don’t expect them before 1.5

steven via

SWTOR needs this..

More mount farming…..
ILUM as either OLD-SCHOOL AV or wintergrasp/IOC…
More achievement farming.
More pet farming…

RANDOMIZED once a week, multi-part, class based quest that provides either PVP or PVE badge rewards…. User’s choice.

Duel Spec…

http://www.facebook.com/people/Ronny-Sunrock/100002737688676 Ronny Sunrock

I agree the game needs more grinding content in the end game. But I’m not sure I would like to see pet farming though… Personal I really find pets extremely lame. They don’t even do anything. They just stand there.

http://twitter.com/ByronLumley Byron Lumley

Typical GBTV Just talk about subs and nothing no other aspect of a game.

Soulcryy

SWTOR is possibly the best MMO ever made maybe gamers as a whole should stop expecting the world given to them on a platter and just enjoy an excellent quality game! Show some loyalty for a change funny thing is they will lay off people and after everyone trys Diablo 3 which by the way SUXS they will come back to SWTOR

http://twitter.com/igzem Paul M

what are you smoking bro?

The Republic: Doomed To Fail?

Legendary Ep127:
Patch 5.3: The Gamebreaker

The Republic Ep138:
Herding Cats

This Week in MMO Ep 145:
Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2, Neverwinter

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