SW:TOR Looking to Get More Than 1M Long-Term Subscriber

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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Electronic Arts is aiming to sign up more than 1M long term subscribers to cover the $200M development cost of the massively popular game. The Old Republic was released on December 20th and quickly became the fastest growing MMO franchise of all time.
 
I'm not sure why they have slacked on this but having that many servers on opening day was a great idea, but then leaving that many when your economy drops like it typically will is dumb. They don't have cross server support nor do they have much of any content that is contested so they really should have that feature.
 
6 years of development and they still don't have basic functionality yet. Fail.
 
They should have made a better game. If I want to play a fantasy MMO I'll play WOW, instead of an incomplete copy of it in a different setting.
 
What basic functionality are you saying is missing that should be covered by developers making a game at release?
 
I got bored after 1 week of release, stopped playing after 2nd week, Canceled last month.
 
LonerVamp said:
What basic functionality are you saying is missing that should be covered by developers making a game at release?
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A non-crap auction house? If I want to search for Blade Tyrant gear why should I have to pick Armor. then pick Heavy. Then hit search. then type in Blade and hit search again?? Why can't I just type it in?

Also, when looking for crafting parts, you have to know the skill it is harvested from, not used with. Complete stupidity in their design. If they wanted to steal something from WoW, why not their AH system?
 
LonerVamp said:
What basic functionality are you saying is missing that should be covered by developers making a game at release?
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How about a UI that you can atleast move stuff around in. Or when you enter a warzone with a group, that when you exit, the group is still intact. Theres loads of "basic" mmo features that should have been there.

And dont even get me started on the disaster that is Illum......
 
MajorDomo said:
Electronic Arts is aiming to sign up more than 1M long term subscribers to cover the $200M development cost of the massively popular game. The Old Republic was released on December 20th and quickly became the fastest growing MMO franchise of all time.
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How can it be massively popular if it doesn't even have 1M subscribers??!?
Makes me wonder how much EA is paying [H] to post stuff like that ...
 
Apparently MMO's aren't allowed growing pains anymore, or people don't remember the state WoW was in for months after release, then expect everything to be like a 7 year old game is with content and polish at release. Those aren't basic functionalities, they are quality of life improvements (and most of them will be fixed in the next couple weeks with 1.2). I can agree with Illum, as it feels completely tacked on, but not sure it's worth getting caught up on as a deal breaker. As for the AH, again, those are quality of life improvements, and while that would be a great improvement, there are more important things to worry about, like the UI getting more polish (as it will soon). The game has it's issues, but I have played MMOs for a long time, and very few have been as good or somewhat polished at launch as TOR is. The one thing I will completely agree on, and was obviously a design decision with the way the worlds are set-up, is the lack of contested areas. Not an issue on PVE or RP servers, but negates any reason to play on a PVP server. I generally play on PVP servers. This is the first game since EQ that I play on a PVE server because of this design decision.
 
It sold 2 million+ at launch, and as of last month had 1.7+ million active subscribers. If you read the article, it is discussing long-term subscribers. That is, a stable user base that stays above 1 million for a time period of 6 to 9 months after release. The game is still too new to know if that will happen. And regardless to what some thing, it isn't bleeding customers or losing a lot of players. I do believe they need to start merging servers soon as the launch is over and the worlds are more stable. This is important as they have stated they do not want cross server flashpoint functionality this early, as that kills a community and means you are just queuing up to play with people you will never see again most likely. They will be adding cross server PVP though, sometime in the next couple of months, as that is more about competing and winning, then building a community that knows one another.
 
While I burned through TOR's content pretty quickly and quit because of the lack of a challenging endgame, it's a pretty decent game for the more casual gamer who bounces between alts, etc. I imagine they won't have too much trouble getting and keeping a million subs for 6 months, if not longer.
 
I can't think of an MMO out there with very challenging end-game anymore.
 
Lakku said:
Apparently MMO's aren't allowed growing pains anymore
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No they really aren't. MMOs are now held to the same standard as single player games which is to say they are expected to be good on day one. Time was all MMOs were crap. They were complete disasters on day one, usually unplayable (the last SW game was literally unplayable, couldn't log in, Sony had to get Oracle to ship out some DB guys to tell them what they fucked up) and even after that they were highly broken in many ways.

WoW was the first game that introduced non-broken gameplay, it was the first good MMO, something that would appeal to people who weren't in to MMOs yet, something that you didn't seem to need a doctoral degree to play well. However its technical problems were still massive. Took them forever to get it sorted out. However once they did, it was quite good and of course lead to the MMO explosion, WoW brought MMOs to the masses.

Well post WoW launches have been getting better and the bar was really raised by Rift. Big launch, like a million people on launch day, no stability problems, no servers dying, no massive in game faults, the game just worked. It was like a single player launch. It showed that yes, you actually CAN launch an MMO smoothly. They've also death gracefully with things beyond then. They allow for server transfers with no cost period, and as populations have fallen, they've consolidated servers. Should they grow again, they'll bring new ones back online. They respond to what is happening.

So no, MMOs really don't get to have growing pains anymore because there are existing MMOs people can go back to that are good.

In terms of SWTOR I bought it, played a character to max level, got bored and went back to Rift. Not knocking TOR, I think my $60 was well spent, I had fun leveling. However when I hit max level I found the end game to be poorly done compared to Rift and others, and once the top notch story was gone, I found the games flaws stood out much more and annoyed me.

So I canceled my subscription. I am not going to sit and throw money at EA and say "Oh here, take my cash and I hope you figure things out." No, I only have time for one MMO, I'm spending my time and money on the one that is most fun. TOR strikes my fancy some time in the future? Then I'll go back. This isn't a lifetime decision, I can, and do, hop MMOs as often as I wish to.

The two lessons they learn from this hopefully are:

1) Endgame is extremely important. You cannot and will not have enough "regular" content to keep people happy for more than a month or two. The endgame, the stuff they do over and over, has to be good. That is what people will spend the most time on, so they'd better like it or they'll go elsewhere.

2) Spend more of that budget on a better engine next time, rather than licensing the Hero Engine. The engine matters not only because people care about visuals and stability, but because you need to be able to offer features (like server transfers) and if your engine doesn't support that it is problematic. It needs to be very robust and extensible.
 
Sycraft said:
No they really aren't. MMOs are now held to the same standard as single player games which is to say they are expected to be good on day one.
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Exactly. Had they released TOR in 2004, it would have been a relatively good launch against 2004 MMOs. Unfortunately for TOR, it's 2012 and they're competing against MMOs in 2012.
 
Game is doomed IMHO. Here is why..

The engine is ten years (at least) outdated. Back when they were designing games like WoW and EQ the designers decided to "cheat" so as to convserve bandwith and take it easy on servers.

They allow 'tab targetting" or 'click targetting' of mobs. It doesn't realy matter where the mob is (as long as its not behind you) but you can 'automatically' hit the target with your shots, swing etc.. It might "feel' similiar to a shooter to some people who don't game. But its actually quite inferior.

You are just selecting a target and firing a series of hot keys. You don't use what they call the Z axis at all. This is something you notice in WoW if you foolishly try to 'jump" out of a ground based area of effect damage spell.

There is really no place to "jump" because the engine just looks at your character on the ground and determines if the AOE hits him or not. Likewise WoW uses what I would call a 'binary" system for enviromental damage. If you stand in the fire you take X damage. But if you are out of the fire you take no damage. You don't say suffer damage for standing "close" to the fire..

SWTOR has all of these issues despite being a 'modern' game. its not a matter of choosing not to use such features as shooter style Z axis aiming. It's just the engine can't do it. It really is from a mechanics standpoint "WOW in space."

Many of us have played WoW for years so this doesn't do it for us. In short the game is bad because the engine is ten years out of date. I liked Bioware but they screwed up picking their engine. They should have gone with the unreal engine that Tera uses..
 
I guess I didn't play Rift long enough, or find people to do endgame with. A lot of people in general chat were always complaining about the end game and by the time I had reached 50 just didn't want to play anymore. Outside of the Rifts themselves, the ever changing phases, and multiple specs, just felt the game wasn't much fun. And, a lot of what you mention, as in server mergers etc., was done in the months after release, as the game is about a year old now. So, it too didn't have all the things people hate TOR for at launch either. I do agree with the eventual offering of free xfers though, good idea, and agree the Hero engine doesn't seem like the ideal choice. With that much money could have just made their own engine, which from the sounds of it, they are having to do with all the changes they are having to make.
 
This was my first MMO. After a month, I got board with it. Just too repetitive. So I cancelled.
 
That's not true on the 'binary' aoe/environmental damage part. In the end game Ops, as you move away from bosses who do AoE close to themselves, or that drop things on the ground, you take less damage then being close or in the middle of it, but you still take damage. Unless you get completely out of the ring of effect, you take some kind of damage. I do, from a gamer stand point, see the limitations and sometimes wish for more, but games that deviate too far from what people are used to or want, tend to fail. It's a mixed bag, because if it's too much like WoW, it's a cheap WoW clone and people go back to WoW anyway, and if it's too fundamentally different from WoW, people think it's too complicated or just go back to what they are used to. That's why games spike at launch, then die out, as everyone goes back to where their friends are or what they are used to. I do believe the best thing they did to keep players, as someone said above, is the fact leveling is fun for the different classes and stories, and should keep people around for awhile.
 
With all that said, when the expansion for Rift comes, if it hasn't already (don't follow it anymore), I may give it another look as I liked the Rifts themselves and multiple specs, but my server was dead and no one was ever doing anything on it. Maybe try it on a high pop server. I will also be getting Guild Wars 2 more than likely.
 
End game in SWTOR is dead. Gear up in a few weeks and nothing to do after that. PvP is a joke and is more like PvE. Best thing was one of the quotes from their devs saying something to the effect of: "we didn't realize pvp was so popular". Unless they pump out new, challenging and unique end game content soon, this game is going to fade into the dumps.

Right now it's more or less a glorified singleplayer game with a multiplayer component.
 
I played it for two months and the only classes I liked were the Bounty Hunter, and the Sage/Sorcerer. With WoW, I enjoy pretty much every class. I'll give it another chance next month as I switch back and forth between TOR and WoW. I doubt I will be a truly long term subscriber like I have been since WoW came out. Although, I want to finish the stories on my three toons.
 
Lakku said:
I guess I didn't play Rift long enough, or find people to do endgame with. A lot of people in general chat were always complaining about the end game and by the time I had reached 50 just didn't want to play anymore. Outside of the Rifts themselves, the ever changing phases, and multiple specs, just felt the game wasn't much fun.
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I find that there is just a lot to do and that is part of what is needed to keep me happy. There's the Rifts/Invasions which can be good zerg fun, the PvP is quite good better than any other MMO I've tried recently, the dungeons are fun and have a nice selection in difficulty (regular, expert and master), haven't done a lot of raiding but what I did try was good and there's also the raid rifts for fast "lite" raids. The daily quests are nice and there's plenty of them and variation in them so that keeps it interesting.

Basically I find I can log in and say "What would I like to do?" and find something easily. In ToR didn't seem that way. Hardmode stuff wasn't accessible, I was told by people I needed better gear, there were like 3 non-hardmode instances choices, and none of the instances were that great. PvP was awful. The dailies were extremely limited and repetitive. I just didn't find myself logging in, so I canceled. Guess I could have leveled an alt but I'm not big on that.
 
Lakku said:
With all that said, when the expansion for Rift comes, if it hasn't already (don't follow it anymore), I may give it another look as I liked the Rifts themselves and multiple specs, but my server was dead and no one was ever doing anything on it. Maybe try it on a high pop server. I will also be getting Guild Wars 2 more than likely.
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They should of concentrated on more content for the endgame, not necessarily raiding/hardcore, its just that once you hit 50 there is nothing rewarding to do, at least for very long.
 
This game was one of the most painful experiences I have had in any mmo to date. I wasn't too disappointed though, I went in with low expectations.
 
I gave SWTOR a chance coming from Rift. I have loved Rift since beta and will continue playing it as SWTOR just feels wrong, outdated, clunky, and badly "thrown together." I am sure it will be around for quite sometime for all the Star Wars fans, but that's all I think you'll see playing it in 6 months.
 
Since everyone keeps complaining of Rift and wanting to try it again, not trying to derail but next week is the 1year or whatever, and starting on the 8th until 14th I believe you get to play for free if you ever had an account.

If you are thinking of giving it a whirl again, got nothing to lose.
 
I paid $60 to entertain myself for a few weeks, which is more then most single player games can claim (except Rome: Total War and Fallout 1/2). I canceled my account after a month but I don't feel shortchanged. Endgame is pretty sad though, if they're looking for long-term they better make changes. PVP was repetitive and hit it's peak before endgame, Ilum was pretty bad and the only profession that seemed worthwhile was Biochem.
 
Bioware got their priorities all wrong with SWTOR. In making an MMO they took what they know from making single player games thinking it would translate into an MMO. Hence they ignore even the most basic stuff that go into an MMO.

It's clear they spent alot of time and money into the stories notably the voice acting part - in fact they totally went overboard. I like the voice acting and the stories but I have to wonder did they go cheap in other areas of the game?

Non-customizable UI, an auction house that seemed to be designed by a 5yr old, a game that starts choking when you get more than 20 people fighting in an area, sub-par animations that are bested in games that are years old.

Pretty graphics but the world is static - mobs basically stand in one spot all day long. Iif you take a screenshot of the game world at any time that's basically what it looks like in game too - nothing hardly ever moves. No weather system, no night day cycles. Even 1st gen MMOs had those.
PvP is uninspired. I could go on.

But hey the voice acting is the best there ever is...and that's where the money went into. They seem to think that's enough to sell the game on. I think I'll beg to differ.
 
Noticed a few people here mentioning Rift. I quit Rift but now I think I might go back to it
I liked SWTOR because it was a change from the fantasy styled MMOs and it was fine for a month or so but the appeal doesn't last.
 
Level's 1-25 felt "finished" but as you progress, the more and more unfinished it gets. Im at about 40, and half the stuff I do has no VO dialog. Just my toon pointing at a screen or pressing a button. I just killed my sub, and in the feedback section I put in "I will come back when its done. I hope it does not take another 200M for that".

Im going back to Rift. It was more complete then any MMO on launch, and its only getting better.
 
melteye said:
I paid $60 to entertain myself for a few weeks, which is more then most single player games can claim (except Rome: Total War and Fallout 1/2). I canceled my account after a month but I don't feel shortchanged. Endgame is pretty sad though, if they're looking for long-term they better make changes. PVP was repetitive and hit it's peak before endgame, Ilum was pretty bad and the only profession that seemed worthwhile was Biochem.
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I'm a fan of the game and still play regularly (both pvp and pve), but I agree with the above statements. It's worth $60 for the single player leveling aspect and some fun multiplayer stuff. Afterwards its up to you if you want to try the mmo grind or not.
 
Gibbage said:
Level's 1-25 felt "finished" but as you progress, the more and more unfinished it gets. Im at about 40, and half the stuff I do has no VO dialog. Just my toon pointing at a screen or pressing a button.
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Lies. You only wish it had no VO dialogue. Past level 40 has the same amount of dialogue as pre-level 40, but it's comprised entirely of the generic reusable canned phrases, which get so repetitive that you just start mashing the spacebar.
 
Sycraft said:
The two lessons they learn from this hopefully are:

1) Endgame is extremely important. You cannot and will not have enough "regular" content to keep people happy for more than a month or two. The endgame, the stuff they do over and over, has to be good. That is what people will spend the most time on, so they'd better like it or they'll go elsewhere.

2) Spend more of that budget on a better engine next time, rather than licensing the Hero Engine. The engine matters not only because people care about visuals and stability, but because you need to be able to offer features (like server transfers) and if your engine doesn't support that it is problematic. It needs to be very robust and extensible.
Click to expand...

Thanks for saving me the time.
 
Their engine problem is not about the Hero engine. It's about the fact that they bought a license to use the unfinished alpha version of the Hero engine. That's right, a $200+ million MMO, and the cheapest possible alternative of an engine.

They are not eligible to receive updates for their Hero engine iteration (like multi-core client support), but they wouldn't be able to implement them anyway, because they went with a freaking alpha.

I'd rather seen them go GameBryo for this, not the best engine for pretty graphics (and I'm talking the most recent version) but it is capable under the hood. Just not as cheap as licensing unfinished alpha code..
 
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