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SWTOR: The most unsubscribed-to mmo in 2012?
Khors
Member Posts: 147
Regarding the subject for a few reasons from my early-to mid-game experience, with over 100 hours of play and through level 30, I'm wondering if many more than expected will unsubscribe to TOR more quickly than anticipated.
As opposed to what one might read from an advertising site that suspends disbelief in favor of advertising money, my mmo consumer-oriented constructive open thoughts are as follows.
It (TOR) has had one of the most robust box/digital downloads since its’ release, and knowing that historically ~60% of mmo enthusiasts over the last several years looking for massively-multiplayer entertainment in past games unsubscribe 3-6months out from lack of massively-multiplayer features and content to justify $15/month, it comes to reason that when the majority discover how non massively-multiplayer this game is, it will be the same % of unsubscribers, maybe more.
Maybe more because Bioware fans that are historically very entertained by Biowares Single-Player Cinematic RPG’s will be scratching their heads as to why their paying $15/month for what feels like their new Single-Player RPG, as opposed to a community-centric organically influenced massively-multiplayer game. Hmmm…Im burnt out on the hermit-shallowness of single-player rpg’s, and even in a robust guild, this game thrust me into a mostly single-player rpg experience.
- Tor feels like having the least Massively-Multiplayer features & content of any mainstream labeled mmo aside from STO.
- My transition from Starter area to early-game felt like AoC's Tortage all over again. Very entertaining and lush game-play with story and players abound that you relied on to cooperatively complete content in a challenging environment, leading to post-early game to mid-game where your game-play becomes more redundant of the same content and much more confining in very closed-off and tightly pathed instanced zones.
- Post starter area to mid-game content is not organic; there are absolutely no open-world dynamic events or community triggered or driven events; everything is a short-term staged scrimmage against static & predictable moles that add nothing to the atmosphere, other than those mobs standing on a cube waiting to be attacked by a player.
- So for now, the game-play feeling is one of extreme & heavily instanced linearly pathed & redundant content ‘without’ open-world post-starter to mid-game, but confining pathed maps barren of players.
- About it being heavily instanced; This game is an instance based game, like Guild war 1 was, and plays much more like a CORPG than a MMORPG. Everything is instance based. Even the "open" worlds are instanced or sharded, so If you enter any planet, regardless which one, you will see that it's divided into instances/shards. “Taris instance 1", ect. So even if there is 300 people on your planet, you will never see more then 20-30 of them since the rest is divided into another instances. That certainly removes the feeling of immersion, community, and mmorpg, just as STO proved it did. So if you want to play with a friend which is in another instance you need to transfer to his/her instance to be able to see them. Okay…whatever….he is standing in the exact location I am in what should be a virtual world, but within another instance/shard. But the thing is, this transfer to access game-play has a 30-min cooldown time to transfer to another instance again; lol. Ridiculous. So if Im grouping with one buddy or guildie and then want to make another group quest with another friend, you can’t unless your 30-minute cooldown is up. No open world here.
- Having said that, there are no open-world challenging cooperatively community driven and influenced content; no community-influenced or incentivised dynamic events which involve the battle of Republic vs Empire factions, compounding there being absolutely no meaningfully faction vs faction game-play early to mid-game.
- I don't feel as though players are important to the community or core of game-play, that other players involvement in game-play, traversing a map, mission completion involvement, crafting, merchandising, or trades matters.
- Therefore, I dont get the sense that there is any importance placed on player/community crafting, merchandising & economy when there is the high drop-rate or green, blue and orange items in the general game-play quest-lines and drops from general mobs. Therefore, crafting, merchandising and trades for an emphasis on a massively-multiplayer community-driven economy is significantly undermined.
- Eventhough my server is "Heavy", getting a group for a Flashpoint or Heroic near-promptly is uncommon, as there doesn't appear to be any players in terms of numbers that should account for it being "Heavy".
- There is an incredible emphasis on single-player-esque quests. Bioware has certainly compounded the term ‘Questing’ into ‘Laborious Chore’. The mass amounts of side quests that are a core game-play design feature which I always end up with is astounding; a full quest log of the same fetch, kill 10, 25, 50, fed-ex runs, etc. It really does take away a lot of the feeling of urgency from your main story and importance of completion and de-emphasizes massively-multiplayer. Character progression is mostly a redundant & repetitive single-player chore due to this.
- Heavy “personal” cinematic story, the illusionary 4th pillar, is just another feature which is independent of massively-multiplayer, and derived from the single-player rpg genre, thus compounding the fact that TOR is more of an over-priced single-player rpg than a mmorpg. The voiced-over personal story content is fine for a single-player rpg, but becomes awfully tedious and disinteresting for its complete lack of massively-multiplayer value. In addition, it is not a feasible way to make a long-lasting MMO, nor is it the watershed moment in gaming history that either Bioware or an Advertising site makes it out to be.
So, not only is it massively-multiplayer irrelevant due to it’s complete inorganic nature, being that it has no relevance on community or impact or influence there-of, this story-driven content is developmentally costly, and this single-player rpg diversion, however pleasant it may be in the short term, it's not a viable long-term mmo content model.
- There is no multi-user feature to space combat, it compounds the feeling of the game (TOR) as a single-player game even more-so. So, space combat is single-player, not massively-multiplayer. It's static and doesn't contribute to the struggle of Republic vs Empire within what should be an influential massively-multiplayer environment.
With space combat in it's current developmental state and having it featured as a main element of game-play without any massively-multiplayer content or features is disappointing to say the least. Who would have thought that they'd be paying $15/month for content that amounts to Star Wars X-Wing Fighter game-play.
- Player-involved against player-involved combative & cooperative and competitive content is pathetic and massively-multiplayer meaningless. One can’t choose the warzone they want to play. Only to have 3 shoe-box mini-map 10 v 10 warzones to randomly get pushed into is shallow. There are no meaningful personal rewards or achievements that one can accomplish early to mid-game to strive to differentiate you within the community, or strive to differentiate your guild or faction within the community. Many matches leaves one side down from early game and serial leavers that flood a match compounds loss, while level 10-20 players are matched with level 40-50 players with greater access to skills in a bolster system that is nothing but ineffective. All while pugs are matched against pre-mades with gives a sizable communication, familiarity, cooperation and coordination disadvantage to the pug team. Nothing Bioware generalizes about addressing this is going to address one of the worst pvp-bolt-on fiascos in mmorpg history.
- Targeting system is horrible and doesn't work well in Warzone matches, compounding the frustration of aforementioned flaws of the PvP system.
- The "Stuff" bioware is "working" on is "stuff" that should have been launch-ready; such as UI. Speaking of, the UI staticness and lack of functionality and modification is horrible, while Raid frames are rudimentary and lacking by not updating correctly without being able to see debuffs at all..
- LFG system is completely useless, can't search globally for people who are LFG.
- No combat logs.
- On a labeled Heavily Populated server, zones seem barren of players, compounding the lack of feel of massively-multiplayer.
- Character / Race customization not close to any other mainstream MMO, not to mentioned complete lack of gear appearance customization, which is arguably another indicator this game lacks the massively-multiplayer features to really allow players to distinguish themselves in what should be a persistent massively-multiplayer universe, as opposed to being a mirror image of the other players standing next to you.
- Alignment doesn’t matter. Options are provided to where the only way to get rewarded in the game for your choices is to pick all the light-side or all the dark-side. You can certainly answer the questions as you think your character would, but you lose out. For example, alignment rewards are written to be lightpoints - darkpoints = reward level. Not only non-sensical, but in addition, it completely misses the boat on a 3rd faction; the neutral faction. But lets stick with just Light and Dark, so if one painstakingly accrued 1000 lightpoints and 1000 darkpoints, you would think that one should be able to choose Light-rank I and Dark-rank I rewards.
Lest we not forget that these choices have absolutely no impact or influence as to how the game-play mechanics or environment treats you in-game.
- Longevity overall from a single-player rpg perspective, there is enough in this game to keep one occupied for a month or 2, but from a lack of mmorpg persistence of game-play and lack of organic game-play perspective, it falls flat for all the aforementioned reasons.
------------------------------------------------
MMORPG Score: 3
Single-Player RPG / CORPG Score: 8
Overall Score: 5
TOR is a well produced Single-Player / CORPG in a multi-user lobby-system environment, though doesn’t hold an entertaining or remarkable continuous play value for $15/month for a prolonged period of time as a mmorpg.
Comments
Wrong section.
Soooooooooooooooooooooooo go play Rift? You realized you just described areas Rift is strong in right? Here is a pro tip. Play both. I get my rpg fix from TOR and my MMO fix from Rift.
now now TSW hasn't even come out yet
Im pretty sure you are in the wrong section. He posted about TOR in the TOR forum.
I stopped reading at:
'- Tor feels like having the least Massively-Multiplayer features & content of any mainstream labeled mmo aside from STO.'
because it means your opinion can not be taken seriously. Ever hear of LOTRO?
Also, what does WoW have as Multiplayer content that SWTOR doesnt?
Nope.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/forum/1242/Reviews-Impressions.html
Honestly I think your wrong on SOME of your points, like the fact you keep calling this game a single player game, when it isnt. So it isnt NEAR as team based as games like City of Heroes, me and my friend have teamed every level so far (we are 26) on our Jedi's and I form a group atleast 2-3 times a day. The fact is, like ANY MMO, the multiplayer experience is what you make of it. I knew a lot of people when I played WoW that wouldnt group at all until max lvl, I knew people in City of Heroes with 3 accounts so they could farm themselves and never had to team with anyone, there are a large number of people who enjoy just playing an MMO, solo.
But I do agree with you that subscriptions wont hold up, for now atleast. I still have a good 2-3 months worth of playing, the main story is still very interesting on my characters, I only have 2 characters right now and want to try the other classes out too, but the fact that you have to do all the same side quest and the story is the only thing any different makes me think I wont want but probably another character or 2. I think after 2 months or so they will drop because people are playing this game to much, on WoW, CoH, Aion, etc its easy to just make a new character and start grinding out quest, but unlike those games even speeding through the story parts takes much longer than it would do jump in and fight like those games, I think everyone is gonna get bored pretty soon, so im enjoying it while it lasts =D.
I think if they would have made innovations in other areas like combat, this game might have had a chance to kill WoW, but I dont think people will leave their past MMO for this for long.
Mystery Bounty
So what? This is under GENERAL of the TOR forum. sure he could have put it there, but wrong forum, nope! Its not like he is posting it under WOW general or anything.
you can searts Globaly for LFG just chance the location name to LFG ... ..
"- About it being heavily instanced; This game is an instance based game, like Guild war 1 was"
Another extreme case of OP talking about stuff he knows nothing about. The game is based off of EQ2's design and is absolutely nothing like guild wars.
You complain abut the official review yet your post is filled with stuff that either isnt true, or you are talking out of your ass.
As instanced as GW? Did you ever play GW? Yeah there are a lot of little instances within the game world so you can have your own story areas or not have to compete for particular target mobs but instanced like GW? not even close. The only places that were not privately instanced in GW were the towns. ALL of the rest of the game world was privately instanced. In SWTOR you do have lots of little instances but that is so you don't have to instance whole zones at a time. The vast majority of the adventuring real estate is not privately instanced so you do run into people all the time out in the wild. Also, don't conflate zone copies or channels with instances. Yes it is a type of instancing but it is not private instancing. They are two very different things.
Yes, I to am disappointed in just how disjointed the world feels. You go throw zone barrier disguised as elevators constantly. I much prefer huge monolithic and seemless worlds. The continent of Aden in Lineage 2 is a wonderful example of this. But don't ruin that argument by blowing things out of proportion and saying SWTOR is instanced like GW. It simply is not.
All die, so die well.
[mod edit]
There are tons of valid critique posts out there about swtor. this one is not.
Poor Review; The game delivers exactly on what it always said it would. it is a shame some people don't review with respect to what Bioware said they would deliver as against a set of false expectation.
This is a PvE focus; for small to medium sized groups never really supposed to be anything more.
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Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel
Many of the things the poster says are true. Still, I am enjoying the game, and will give them my 3-6 months to see if they can fix/improve some of the problem areas.
I am currently at mid-game, and I have found space -combat to be a waste of time.
I have found crafting, other than Bio, to be a cash/time sink. Better gear can be picked up as drops/rewards for questing than anything that I can craft. Leveling moves so fast that if one did go to the trouble to actually level up their crafting, anything they made for themselves would be useless in a matter of days.
Most of the world side quests are so easy that teaming is not needed. My mates and I gather on each planet after we have completed all the side quests and story quests, to finish the Heroic quests and flashpoints in a single evening, then move on to the next world where we solo our strory/side quests, and then gather fro Heroics on that planet.
Still....... I am having fun. I will level up several toons over the next couple of months, and while I am doing that, I hope to see some major fixes implemented, and some major content upgrades. I am not ready to RageQuit. Not yet,a t least.
Dusk
I think it's interesting that more and more of these "well, SWTOR was good for a while but I'm unsubbing" threads are poping up. You know, exactly like what all the 'haters' said was going to happen? Do people just completely forget about the honeymoon period of an MMO everytime a new one comes out or do they try to ignore it in hopes that this new one wont disappoint them in a month or two? History repeats itself.
What is wrong with these GW2 fanboys? Just because SWTORs launch has been a massive success which GW2 can only dream of in its wildest fantasies, they have to make up crap that is just plain not true to make it look like they were right? Seriously?
I fully intend to play both games. Im currently playing SWTOR because GW2 isnt out yet. If you dont like SWTOR then fair enough, wait for GW2 to come out and STFU in the meantime. No one cares
Cluck Cluck, Gibber Gibber, My Old Mans A Mushroom
Once again people generalizing what is going on with the game based on their own opinions and observations. Most Unsubbed MMO in 2012. Sensationalist topic to draw in a crowd I though I was gonna seem some actual statistics. I for one spend most of my time now that I am at Max level grouping and did a lot of grouping as I was leveling. I know a lot of people that this is all they play and currently my guild is growing and everyone is excited to get to the raids. Let's wait and see till the referrals start bringing in new customers and those that SWTOR was never meant for start leaving and we will see where the game really stands.
GW2 fans are setting themselves up for failure. They re overhyping something they know nothing about, except what some develoers are saying. Well, duh, of course they re going to make it sound amazing. Overhyping isn t good. That said I m looking forward to GW2 alot, but not expecting my first MMO feel at all. I did the same for SWTOR and truly love the game. As far as most unsubscribed to MMO, not even close, it will have a huge sub base.
Haven't we seen the exact same threads about WoW for that past how many years? Seriously, this is your "proof" the the haters are right and the game is failing? Really? lol
Who said anything about proof? I just said it was the same thing people have been saying. Learn to read properly before jumping to conclusions, Brony.
It s a small amount of people, and I ll bet alot saying it don t even play it, just trying to stir crap up. Of course some playing are going to say they re quitting it always happens, but it s minimal to how many are joining daily. I see brand new people on my 2 servers I m playing everyday, and it s not 1 or 2 new people it s alot. On that note, why is it people have to come and tell us they re quitting a game, no matter what game it is. Are we supposed to care, be upset, cry over it. It s strange to me why people feel they must do this.
imo the game was not ready for launch, however there will be always glitches/exploits, so in a couple of months they should be ironed out; many people will unsub and wait for a major patch. also, players these days are less tolerant, I myself am tired of the half-assed MMOs released in the past 5 years or so. don't be surprised if TOR end up F2P
World of Warcraft will be the most unsubscribed to mmo in 2012. But then again, they have much further to fall. Also, if the games people are leaving WoW for turn out to be disappointing, many will resub to WoW. Come to think of it, WoW's numbers are so huge that it could easily become both the most unsubscribed to game and the most re-subscribed to game of 2012. Which would be kind of funny.
As for your review, from my limited experience with the game, I don't see much I disagree with.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein
WHAT?
These are... beta issues... everyone said they will be fixed by release. I myself experienced the whole "on the same exact spot but in different instances" while doing PUG's. I thought it was just a bug.
Same with alignment. Implementing a neutral alignment seemed like a no-brainer.
So much for "it's beta". Lol
Yes... Bioware spent $130 million+ to make a niche game that would appeal to a small amount of people and keep them subscribed for a month or two.
This IS an MMO. It is MEANT TO BE AN MMO. And - Bioware/EA hoped this would appeal to millions of fans for many, many, many months as subscribers.
Some of these arguments sound like "Oh... they never said they were going to make a good game... so stop judging as you would a good game! It's 10/10 in terms of being very mediocre!!!!!"
It plays exactly like an MMO - with the addition being cutscenes for quest accepting and returning dialogues... that's it! Don't kid yourself that this has the complexity or depth of story design in KotoR games... or any other Bioware RPG.