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More Than 1.7 Million Active Subscribers 2/1/12 [EA Conf Call Discussion Thread]
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I was looking at some past prediction posts earlier, and noticed a comment I made a while back about the "sheeple effect" - funny thing is, before playing it, I thought that if they sold this well, it would take off. I'd assumed that it'd have your basic MMO structure, and the community could sell the game, in spite of whatever shortcomings it had. I didn't count on the shortcoming of lacking the MMO element itself, that no matter how many people play, there wouldn't be much of a community. So even the sheeple effect would be impossible.
So as for these numbers, it doesn't matter. We're still in initial sales and first months subs, but its clear that retention is terrible, ongoing sales aren't even close to making up for it, and they're just spouting numbers to milk the game as hard and as fast as they possibly can, because they must know the way its trending.
Feel free to quote me in six months, btw
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4727747
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4727902
But you did say:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4699592
and a few post later:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4699615
Yet even with your skeewed numbers that are, at best, conjecture and debatable:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4727736
Now don't infer I'm trying to argue SWTOR is the greatest thing since sliced bread, because that is not what I'm doing. I'm simply quoting your own words and letting them speak for themselves in relevance to this discussion.
I didn't go back very far for these quotes. I do share a similar memory as Shodanas and it's likely the comment(s) we are recalling were made quite a while ago.
Note to moderation: Please realize that I am not flaming, baiting, or 'calling out'. I am respectfully correcting and user and pointing out discrepancies. I'm using facts and citing my sources.
"Please keep your arguments and posts on topic, and argue the ideas and topics of the thread instead of insulting other users."
"5) In closing: attack the opinion, not the poster. Ad hominem attacks do not strengthen your argument, in fact, they accomplish the exact opposite."
We really need separate forums for every newly launched game. There can be the anti-<MMO> one and there can be the 'what general discussion should be' one. All the lamenting can happen together where each can find solace in like minded can't-move-on-ers leaving the rest of us to actually move forward and discuss meaningful and relevant topics.
I got blasted by a few of my friends because I made it into beta long before them and said the same basic shit I'm saying now. They blasted me to smithereens saying I just hate everything, too critical, etc. Ironically, every single one of them - two of which had the ce have quit this game.
Me...the only one of them that was rather critical about this game from the start is the only one still subbed.
Hahaha
Granted they were big BW and KOTOR fans so I think they were more defensive about me dissing their prize and joy and jealous I was playing it before them than it was anything else.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
What is it with you always feeling the need to post this shit? Haven't you done this like 2 or 3 times now? What are you so worried about?
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
TOR will be dead after a month!
1.7 million subscibers as of Feb/2011.
TOR will be dead in 3 months! The numbers are a lie! EA stole my cat!
Just because some people don't like something, doesn't mean everyone else will feel the same way. If that were true, no MMO's would be successful, not even WoW.
Really? Man that is simply messed up.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
It's ok, the thing crapped the place up all the time and had a gooey eye.
Why is everyone so excited over this? Wait 6 months down the road when you will see the real indicator on how the population will be then and not now, the new shiny magical feeling of the game hasn't wore off the most casual players haven't reached 50 yet and are unaware of the glaring issues the game has currently.
First playthru with a class is a great experience while leveling once you get to 50 and you decide to roll another you begin to notice that the world quests run together on that faction's side why would anyone bother to listen to the VO's a 2nd time thru with the same quest you finished on your last toon? Let alone 3-4 times, space bar thru it, the only thing that is unique is the seperate CLASS story arc, and it ends quite too soon leaving you once your 50 with the feeling of WTF? What now?
The huge faction imbalance of Imperial Vs Republic on nearly every server Republic is outnumbered 5:1 with the exception of 2 server which are RP servers.
The noticeable population drops on all servers with some migrating to the heavyiest server loads, 4 of our major guilds on our server disbanded completely and quit playing completely.
World PVP is dead at 50 on Illum due to massive imbalance of Imp vs Republic fresh 50's are advised to not even go to Illum, Republic is effectively locked out of Illum from doing their PVP dailies or doing world PVP period blocking Republic PVP gear progression a side effect of massive faction imblanace, and since patch 1.1.0 with the dailies change to Illum and Valor Increase for holding Illum objective, that day after the patch lead to 8hr exploit by the Imps farming Valor gaining fast ranks even going from rank 1-60 in that one period before on the forums a offical response was made by the dev team that they screwed up and had a emergency patch later that night that nerfed it giving the majority factions on each server a massive gain on PVP ranks exploited to Battlemaster rank. No Rollback or punishments or bans were done.
PVP Warzone Daily and Weekly when warzones are won credit for winning the WZ is not credited to your daily or weekly (bugged) this is a huge issue atm. Warzones starting with imbalanced teams ex(6-8) which is a huge disadvantage to the team with less peeps, and their is a bug with the UI reset which allows you to bring in more players causing a bigger imbalance of teams gaining a huge advantage and explioiting your win for the match.
Republic classes animations are broke and slower and ability delays are a problem right now that will be dealt with in the upcoming March Patch, they recently had a patch that dealt with some ability delay issues but they still persist, some classes are worse than others with delays and slow animations that dont fire Trooper being the biggest culprit here. However when you play a Imperial character all animations and abilities fire correctly and on timely basis. (Have Republic and Imperial characters 4 - 50)
Hardmode -Nightmare-Flashpoints and Operations are borked with their loot table and Master Looter is broken atm , crafting mats won't drop off bosses etc.
The lack of Guild Functionality-(Guild Banks-Mail-Quests-Etc) The complete lack of community and no tools to foster community there is no reason right now to even have guilds or community cause everything from 1-49 isolates those players so much and the instancing you rarely see anyone unless you on your prespective faction fleet station.
Lack of Class Balancing and absence of combat log, it seems to most people who are at 50 are wondering why since there is a combat log in TOR already but the dev team won't activate it for some reason is growing suspicion due to their favortism toward the Imperial faction given most recently that its been revealed on our server 2 devs are members of a Imperial guild called Sith Happens has been pre-selected to go to the Guild Summit in Austin, Texas all expenses paid, a growing concern over demands wanting a full list of guilds going to this summit and how balanced is the faction representation going to be ? Or is it going to be guilds that Bioware that themselves play in the Live servers their guilds get to come to the summit automatically? Biased feedback that there will be yes, yes men to Bioware yes. With the neglect of any real class balancing namely the Sith Inquistor/ Sorcerer Adv Class ( a developer favorite several of them play Sorcs) have seem to skip any changes to Sorcs but have made a suprising change to Sith Assassins which werent even OP to begin with. And the aruguments on the Sorcs continue on the offical forums, when BW does do balancing they go over the top like they did with Tuesday's patch nerfing Agents and Smugglers into the ground. But what is even more fishy is that is seems they are trying to hold off on the combat log so people won't have the proper evidence to show proof that a certain class or players up to sheniggans wont get called on.
Lack of anti-cheat tools as of right now if your a smart player using hacks, memory editors, wont likely get banned read about how one guy got over 300 people that reported him on one character before they banned him finally.
Terrible customer support- TOR's customer support is based in India which leads to tickets being completely ignored or locked and ignored by the staff only way to get things resolved is by calling BW .
I can go on and on about the more glaring issues that are affecting the game atm , and this is first hand experience from myself and guildmates and other players across 4 servers I frequent on, I have canceled my sub today which ends on the 20th so if your just leveling up your first character and think everythings hunky dory thats fine but when you get to 50 you will see all the problems this game has and it has a lot of problems , and many people have been right about the game the whole time it is nothing but a single player with Co-op, the MMORPG features are barely working or nonexistant, basically a lobby game at 50 instanced play (Flashpoint-Ops-PVP)
Wait, wait wait! First, it was "wait till after the free month", then it was "wait till after 2-3 months", now it's "wait 6 months"?
You mean to tell me that now I have to wait 6 months for this game to fail? Holy crap, dude! I'm a themeparker, my attention span is not that long.
[Mod Edit]
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Where did I say that this game was going to fail after the first month? Nowhere... however if they don't fix the glaring issues that are blatantly out in the open for anyone with a brain can see then yes this game will lose its steam fast.
Worried? Nothing. I'm just working on my light side points trying save people from infractions.
I keep posting it because users are ignoring it and breaking the rules. Your post here is showing me that I need to continue doing so as you are derailing this thread, something I've previously posted about in these 2 or 3 times now.
Maybe we can continue this in private messages and you can tell me why my posting of pertinent rules bothers you.
We really need separate forums for every newly launched game. There can be the anti-<MMO> one and there can be the 'what general discussion should be' one. All the lamenting can happen together where each can find solace in like minded can't-move-on-ers leaving the rest of us to actually move forward and discuss meaningful and relevant topics.
Stop Quoting MarketWatch, they got the quote wrong!!...Iv posted this like 10000 times in this thread, even posting links to the actual BioWare quote, yet people are still quoting the incorrect MarketWatch wording....
Please Stop Quoting MarketWatch!
I'm not even sure why anyone cares about this. I don't care if they have 5 million subs. The game sucked for me and a lot of others and seems to be sucking for an increasing number of people as time goes on. Maybe they will take some of that money and make the game better.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Nah, they should spend the money on using famous people/characters for commercials. Jar Jar Binks is my first suggestion, followed closely by a talking sarlacc.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
Boggle.
There are still a few hardcore SWTOR fans still tying to pretend EA's bogus 1.7 million number is actual paying subscribers?
It would be one thing if EA wasn't caught in their attempt at lumping their paying subscribers and all the people still in their free month and forced to come clean. But to still cling to a number that EA themselves have already admitted isn't actual paying subs?
SWTOR has maybe a million or so paying subs at best. 200 million dollar budget and Bioware managed to just avoid the humilation of having less paying subs than WAR did after its first month, 850k or so.
Lol no, you're quite wrong I'm 100% correct within the interval I defined for the first period. I clearly stated which part I was talking about and should be obvious. Too early to conclude the rest, I said we'll see about the next months. This is not WoW.
Also you're doing it wrong, you can't pull a "told you so" when you completely missed the mark by 500k and, again, I never claimed victory for the future unknonw parts of my prediciton so you fail again, try harder.
This game is at its peak I think it will only go down hill from here. The game reallyw as not worth the $60 purchase price much less a $15 monthly sub.
AMD Phenum II x4 3.6Ghz 975 black edition
8 gig Ram
Nvidia GeForce GTX 760
Don't know, if this link is being posted before (60 pages are way too much to read through
).
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-02-02-star-wars-the-old-republic-paid-subs-estimated-at-1-3m
This article contains even more estimations regarding the active subscription count (estimations range from 900k to 1500k). This estimations from several analysts are all made AFTER EA's Conference Call from yesterday. I find most remarkable, that even analysts who follow EA with professional interests couldn't tell the true subscriber number despite EA's reveals ....
So assuming that everything EA has revealed is correct in form and content (someone would go to jail, if that's not the case, as many said
), there seems to be no way to determine anything concrete out of the said. The only conclusion regarding the Earnings Conference Call that can be made is: EA don't want anybody outside know the exact numbers. All numbers out there are more or less educated guesses.
The only thing that's strikes me is: why is EA so deliberate about the numbers? If they were as good as many in this thread claim, why hidding them behind statements revealing nothing concrete?
Well, as many others stated: next quarter it will be much more difficult to dilute the numbers. And maybe then there are hard facts to rate the success of TOR. This conference call is not an appropriate way to do so ....
So here I am again on a standard pop server. Looking for an fp grp. Have a tank and myself as a healer and can't even find 2 dps because there are currently 43 people on fleet. I gotta say. Normally I don't go this far, but you folks that think there isn't a population issue or all the servers are brimming with players are simply idiots.
No other way to put it really.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Those numbers seem a little disappointing. This is the Star Wars IP after all. EA said they need 500k subs to break even and 1M subs to make an OK profit. 1.7M is probably going to be the peak active subs number and with a typical 40% loss in the first three months the game would be sitting right at the 1M mark. Which is decent, but not a home run. People will argue that the game could grow or have an unusually high retention rate and maybe it will, but in my humble view it's just not exceptional.
It's also a bit deceptive to quote sales figures from December and subscriptions from December and January. It leads a lot of people to falsely conclude an insane retention rate of 85%. It's important to acknowledge that there can be a lot of 'spin' in these quarterly reports. I'm not saying lies, but carefully selected or worded statements. My favorite example was a CEO that spent $20 million on a racing sponsorship and got called out by an institutional investor during one of the quarterly calls. The CEO replied that website hits increased significantly once the sponsorship started so therefore it was worthwhile spend. He was 100% correct. What he didn't explain, and maybe didn't fully understand, was that we launched a new version of the website for the sponsorship and it had a lot more web page elements like images and therefore every page view resulted in significantly more hits. The front page went from around 58 hits per page view to 104 hits per page view. He could have reported page views, conversion rates or revenue impact which would have been more accurate. He had that data available, but chose not too. Any of those would have shown negligible results from the sponsorship.
I'm sure the 1.7M number is accurate, but you just don't really know how it was determined. Using the word 'today' could just mean 'the report that I recveived this morning' when the actually data might have been from a couple weeks ago. "It takes ten business days because of how we collect the data and Accounting needs to verify it etc..." Not saying this is the case, but it's prudent to be skeptical.
I read it as 85% of people who entered a headstart key decided not to buy the game as of the end of their fiscal quarter (dec 31st). IMHO that isn't good at all. 15% attrition BEFORE the first month for a Star Wars IP MMO is abysmal especially with the chances everyone had to beta test it (which is why I didn't touch headstart or retail)
Kinda funny how putting something in a different context could change something from a good report to a BAD report.
I think it is still too early to see what is going to happen. However I hope that those playing it truly have an MMO they enjoy. I also hope that someone comes out with a triple A title that caters to the rest of us.
Archeage is my dream
GW2 is my hope
Love Guild Wars? Final Fantasy? Harry Potter? Lord of the Rings?
Here is an excerpt from the new series:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/79738399/Archeon-and-the-Virgo-Moon-Excerpt
@Firefly2003
I wont copy/paste your post even adding you as the OP, and i definitely wont rewrite it as my own. But as a republic player i myself and probably many many others that dont post much (like me) would really appreciate it if you would make a new thread and list those problems. It lists everything this game needs to work on to be on a completely new level. Please consider making a new post because many people wont read 60+ pages. I feel people still leveling might at least want to know. Especially anyone unfortunate enough to be a die hard republic that bought this game based on the pre release marketing of Ilum.
...and yet I never get any infractions. Think the last time I did was when I was joking around with dr balt and got one for calling him a dirty chindu around the time Aion launched. Which was simply meant in humor yet I got a warning for it because apparently someone took it personally.
Feel free to continue on posting the rules unnecessarily though to no avail.
Maybe you should contact them directly to inform them how they should better perform their duties? I'm sure they''ll appreciate your feedback.
>_>
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.