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James Ohlen on GDC, discussed SWTOR problems

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  • DaRoamerDaRoamer Member Posts: 249
    Originally posted by tiefighter25
    Originally posted by DaRoamer
    Originally posted by tiefighter25
    Originally posted by DaRoamer
    Originally posted by tiefighter25

    I wouldn't put too much faith in spin. He doesn't quantify those statements, just says they are going up. Remember, there will soon be 17 servers. No mater how MEGA they are, there are limits to how many they can hold. 500k+ subscribers and 2 million new FTP accounts are not what they are capable of holding by a large margin.

     

    (If you want to be a true doomer and gloomer, 6 of those 17 servers are German and French, and they recently laid-off their non-English forum community managers.)

    Eve has 1 server.  They have 450k subs. 

    Not exactly comparing apples to apples are you? Or do you believe the SWTOR servers are capable of anything aproaching EVE's server capacity?

    I don't know, why don't you tell me what SWTOR's server capacity is.  You're the one making the correlation between the number of servers and their sub numbers.

    According to she who's name can't be mentioned, 3 times the original servers, or 6,000 players. (Which does seem about right when you consider the Fleets as the main social Hub.)

    17 servers x 6,000 players is a max congruency of about 100,000 players. (And the servers haven't come close to being Full/Very Heavy in a long time).

    If I assume that congruency = about 20% of total game population, that's 500,000 total players. If I assume that 3 out of 4 players (based on the pop increase after the FTP transition) are FTP, that's 125,000 subscribers. (This is all assuming all 17 servers hit full every day, so I'm erring on the high side, by a lot.)

    Granted, a portion of that subscriber population is spending a lot more then their sub each month, “If you spend hundreds of dollars on packs, looking for an item, you don’t feel totally cheated as you can sell it on,” said Ohlen."

    How much, I don't know. I do know EA only say they were happy with the initial numbers, but didn't know if it was long term sustainable. (They also didn't give the usual FTP has brought x ammount times of more revenue hoopla.)

    I do know Bioware is still streamlining their workforce.

    I can't say if they're making a profit or minimizing losses.

    I do know that 17 servers (at about 6k people max a server) = 500K+ subscribers and 2 million FTP players does not compute.

    It doesn't compute because you're using made up numbers.  We don't know what their server capacity is, you're using an estimate.  However there was 400 people on the Republic fleet when I logged in around midnight and more than 200 people on alderaan alone, Republic only. 

    Let me take a sample right now at 2:30AM:

    On Nar Shaddaa right now, at 2:30AM there are over 200 people on the imperial side.

    There are 200 people on Coruscant right now as well.

    Dromund Kass has 250 

    Imperial Fleet has almost 300

    64 people PVPing republic

    130 people pvping on imp side

    This is not exactly prime time.  Averaging it out to say 125 on the planets, fleet, pvp and ops/flashpoints/ships times 2 factions right now and you're looking at about 5000 people with the server listed at Standard and my server is not one of the busier ones.  According to Torstatus it's in the bottom 4 of US server population.

    Moving on to your assertion that the servers haven't been full/very heavy in a long time.  You might want to consider your definition of "long time" since both statements were true just this week with some servers being full and the AVERAGE of the servers being Very Heavy on Monday:

    http://www.torstatus.net/shards/eu

    http://www.torstatus.net/shards/us

    Keep in mind that with the expansion coming out soon many people are not logging in since new tiers of gear will be coming and there isn't much point to grinding the current gear right now.

    Your concurrency number is also way high.  You honestly think that 1 out of 5 active players are online at any one time?  Maybe occasionally but not on average.   In fact Raph Koster has said in the past that 20% of your subscribers have likely not even logged in the past 30 days.  Other analysts say that "you're lucky to get 5-10%" concurrency. 

    Lastly James Ohlen said in his talk that they are STILL the second largest subscription MMO in the west.  Since we know that Eve Online has over 450k subs then your estimate of 125k subs is even more laughable.  Especially since you made up some number of population going up 300% with free to play.  Torstatus shows that before f2p the servers were averaging just under Heavy status and post f2p they jumped to Very Heavy. 

    I understand that people like yourself have a hard time coming to terms with SWTOR doing well but making up numbers to try to refute facts doesn't strengthen your position.  It makes you look desperate.

     

  • ignore_meignore_me Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 1,987
    Originally posted by DaRoamer
    Originally posted by tiefighter25
    Originally posted by DaRoamer
    Originally posted by tiefighter25
    Originally posted by DaRoamer
    Originally posted by tiefighter25

     

     

     

     

     

    It doesn't compute because you're using made up numbers.  We don't know what their server capacity is, you're using an estimate.  However there was 400 people on the Republic fleet when I logged in around midnight and more than 200 people on alderaan alone, Republic only. 

    Let me take a sample right now at 2:30AM:

    On Nar Shaddaa right now, at 2:30AM there are over 200 people on the imperial side.

    There are 200 people on Coruscant right now as well.

    Dromund Kass has 250 

    Imperial Fleet has almost 300

    64 people PVPing republic

    130 people pvping on imp side

    This is not exactly prime time.  Averaging it out to say 125 on the planets, fleet, pvp and ops/flashpoints/ships times 2 factions right now and you're looking at about 5000 people with the server listed at Standard and my server is not one of the busier ones.  According to Torstatus it's in the bottom 4 of US server population.

    Moving on to your assertion that the servers haven't been full/very heavy in a long time.  You might want to consider your definition of "long time" since both statements were true just this week with some servers being full and the AVERAGE of the servers being Very Heavy on Monday:

    http://www.torstatus.net/shards/eu

    http://www.torstatus.net/shards/us

    Keep in mind that with the expansion coming out soon many people are not logging in since new tiers of gear will be coming and there isn't much point to grinding the current gear right now.

    Your concurrency number is also way high.  You honestly think that 1 out of 5 active players are online at any one time?  Maybe occasionally but not on average.   In fact Raph Koster has said in the past that 20% of your subscribers have likely not even logged in the past 30 days.  Other analysts say that "you're lucky to get 5-10%" concurrency. 

    Lastly James Ohlen said in his talk that they are STILL the second largest subscription MMO in the west.  Since we know that Eve Online has over 450k subs then your estimate of 125k subs is even more laughable.  Especially since you made up some number of population going up 300% with free to play.  Torstatus shows that before f2p the servers were averaging just under Heavy status and post f2p they jumped to Very Heavy. 

    I understand that people like yourself have a hard time coming to terms with SWTOR doing well but making up numbers to try to refute facts doesn't strengthen your position.  It makes you look desperate.

     

    point is moot. With 32 million users or 20k, SWTOR is the most successful disappointment ever. SWTOR is a movie with an avatar that you get to direct between scenes. Like WoW, if it's successful enough, there may be future designers who dumb down the genre even further in hopes of creating a more efficient toilet for money and time.

    Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011

  • FromHellFromHell Member Posts: 1,311

    F2P players don´t "leave", that is where the good numbers are coming from.

    I still play the occasional warzone in F2P preferred mode, but I did not spend a single dime on SWTOR since last August, and I don´t plan to before the game is radically improved.

    The "new" F2Pers will get to 50 sooner or later, maybe make a second char or leave as well, because the game is no different than at launch, the group finder and Legacy does not change that fact.

    Makeb is said to be 10 hours worth of content. Woohoo, that will keep subs alive.

     

     

     

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  • tiefighter25tiefighter25 Member Posts: 937
    I like underdogs, SWTOR is an underdog; I don't trust statements from a guy who claims Bioware thought they had upwards of 5 months of content at launch. I also don't put much salt into claims of being the #2 sub based MMO, but then never release subscription numbers.

    I honestly believe the game can only hold 100,000 people at a time, and those people may or may not be subscribers.

    To a degree it is moot, because they are seeking higher revenue per player then a monthly subscription via the cartel market.

    Whether this is working ot not, I will only know after Makeb if they continue to release meaningful content assuming EA lets them.

    Just food for thought, EVE's highest concurent player percentage is documented at 17.7%.

  • daltaniousdaltanious Member UncommonPosts: 2,381

    Swtor is for me best game ever, matched only by wow. Enjoyed a lot also gw2, 3rd currently on my list. Imo of course.

    I have no objections about swtor, nearly perfect game, bug free (except maybe pvp for which I care like for last year's snow) experience, great feeling to live in star wars universe, incredible dialogs and sometime though moral choices (sacricice old npc friend or innocent hostages), story line with really incredible twists (great jedi master being actually emperors "son"), ... etc etc. Never ever in my life have played and enjoyed any game for about 7 months strait. Even with wow, gw2, ... i usually need break after 3 or 4 months.

    Well, support is bad, really bad. One have to wait for days to get some generalised answer that has nothing to do with what player asked. Fortunately not that I needed it a lot.

    I think games should be or pve or pvp. Many games sink because at the end nearly every1 is disappointed being pve ruining pvp aspect or viceversa. Guess wow did it here best.

    Big problem for swtor was not at all game or staff or ceo's.... but big problem that have sinked many other could be good games. Haters community. Never, with exception of wow, have seen so many haters hating and bashing game over and over and over and everywhere and everywhere ... Really disgusting.

  • DaRoamerDaRoamer Member Posts: 249
    Originally posted by tiefighter25
    I like underdogs, SWTOR is an underdog; I don't trust statements from a guy who claims Bioware thought they had upwards of 5 months of content at launch. I also don't put much salt into claims of being the #2 sub based MMO, but then never release subscription numbers.

    I honestly believe the game can only hold 100,000 people at a time, and those people may or may not be subscribers.

    To a degree it is moot, because they are seeking higher revenue per player then a monthly subscription via the cartel market.

    Whether this is working ot not, I will only know after Makeb if they continue to release meaningful content assuming EA lets them.

    Just food for thought, EVE's highest concurent player percentage is documented at 17.7%.

    Yet you used 20% as your average.

  • altair4altair4 Member Posts: 158

    If thousands of new players try the game every day they are in worse shape than I thought. Server status and X-fire indicates that they still are dropping players and with that many new players per day they must be losing a huge amount of players aswell. Sure will mostly be F2P players but still. 

    Also I think a big majority of the 2mil new accounts was created the first 2 weeks of F2P when the current population went up by 3-4 times and has since then almost reached the same low level it was before F2P.

    So ye let's tell em the typical number twist to make it sound like it's going well when it's not...

  • DaRoamerDaRoamer Member Posts: 249
    Originally posted by altair4

    If thousands of new players try the game every day they are in worse shape than I thought. Server status and X-fire indicates that they still are dropping players and with that many new players per day they must be losing a huge amount of players aswell. Sure will mostly be F2P players but still. 

    Also I think a big majority of the 2mil new accounts was created the first 2 weeks of F2P when the current population went up by 3-4 times and has since then almost reached the same low level it was before F2P.

    So ye let's tell em the typical number twist to make it sound like it's going well when it's not...

    The same Xfire that shows them as the 3rd highest played MMO behind WoW and GW2?  Also, your other statements are completely false. 

  • ktanner3ktanner3 Member UncommonPosts: 4,063
    Speaking of math, how in the world can ANYONE play a game 120 hours in one week? There's only 168 hours in a week so that leaves only 48 hours(6-7 hours a days) to do other things like eat and sleep. Maybe  a lot of people had more free time over the Christmas holidays, but still that's a LOT of time sitting in front of a monitor. No wonder some people get burned out on games. 

    Currently Playing: World of Warcraft

  • ktanner3ktanner3 Member UncommonPosts: 4,063
    Originally posted by daltanious

    Swtor is for me best game ever, matched only by wow. Enjoyed a lot also gw2, 3rd currently on my list. Imo of course.

    I have no objections about swtor, nearly perfect game, bug free (except maybe pvp for which I care like for last year's snow) experience, great feeling to live in star wars universe, incredible dialogs and sometime though moral choices (sacricice old npc friend or innocent hostages), story line with really incredible twists (great jedi master being actually emperors "son"), ... etc etc. Never ever in my life have played and enjoyed any game for about 7 months strait. Even with wow, gw2, ... i usually need break after 3 or 4 months.

    Well, support is bad, really bad. One have to wait for days to get some generalised answer that has nothing to do with what player asked. Fortunately not that I needed it a lot.

    I think games should be or pve or pvp. Many games sink because at the end nearly every1 is disappointed being pve ruining pvp aspect or viceversa. Guess wow did it here best.

    Big problem for swtor was not at all game or staff or ceo's.... but big problem that have sinked many other could be good games. Haters community. Never, with exception of wow, have seen so many haters hating and bashing game over and over and over and everywhere and everywhere ... Really disgusting.

    Oh I've seen worse. November 2005 when the NGE patch hit SWG. This was just days after customers bought the latest expansion. Nothing will ever compare to the hate and disrepute leveled at SOE after that. And it went on for years. The current hate leveled at TOR is a tiny fraction of that though they are persistent. 

    Currently Playing: World of Warcraft

  • strangiato2112strangiato2112 Member CommonPosts: 1,538
    Originally posted by tiefighter25
     I also don't put much salt into claims of being the #2 sub based MMO, but then never release subscription numbers.

     

    well we know how much subs the #3 sub game has, so we at least have a floor for subs.  And that floor is a lot higher than people want to admit.

     

    And its not hard to use math to make it believable

    lets say the servers average 4500 at peak, that would be 7200.  Using a more realistic concurrency number of 10%, we have 720000.  If 2/3rds of those people are subbs you have 480k.  And in freemium games most regular players do sub, so 2/3rds isnt an unrealistic estimate for a game with a f2p model as restrcitive as SWTORs. 

  • strangiato2112strangiato2112 Member CommonPosts: 1,538
    Originally posted by ktanner3
    Originally posted by daltanious

    Swtor is for me best game ever, matched only by wow. Enjoyed a lot also gw2, 3rd currently on my list. Imo of course.

    I have no objections about swtor, nearly perfect game, bug free (except maybe pvp for which I care like for last year's snow) experience, great feeling to live in star wars universe, incredible dialogs and sometime though moral choices (sacricice old npc friend or innocent hostages), story line with really incredible twists (great jedi master being actually emperors "son"), ... etc etc. Never ever in my life have played and enjoyed any game for about 7 months strait. Even with wow, gw2, ... i usually need break after 3 or 4 months.

    Well, support is bad, really bad. One have to wait for days to get some generalised answer that has nothing to do with what player asked. Fortunately not that I needed it a lot.

    I think games should be or pve or pvp. Many games sink because at the end nearly every1 is disappointed being pve ruining pvp aspect or viceversa. Guess wow did it here best.

    Big problem for swtor was not at all game or staff or ceo's.... but big problem that have sinked many other could be good games. Haters community. Never, with exception of wow, have seen so many haters hating and bashing game over and over and over and everywhere and everywhere ... Really disgusting.

    Oh I've seen worse. November 2005 when the NGE patch hit SWG. This was just days after customers bought the latest expansion. Nothing will ever compare to the hate and disrepute leveled at SOE after that. And it went on for years. The current hate leveled at TOR is a tiny fraction of that though they are persistent. 

    The funny thing is the SoE hate was directed at the wrong company...

    That company is the one that probably told Bioware 'well give you the license if you make it very WoWlike"

  • PhryPhry Member LegendaryPosts: 11,004
    Originally posted by strangiato2112
    Originally posted by ktanner3
    Originally posted by daltanious

    Swtor is for me best game ever, matched only by wow. Enjoyed a lot also gw2, 3rd currently on my list. Imo of course.

    I have no objections about swtor, nearly perfect game, bug free (except maybe pvp for which I care like for last year's snow) experience, great feeling to live in star wars universe, incredible dialogs and sometime though moral choices (sacricice old npc friend or innocent hostages), story line with really incredible twists (great jedi master being actually emperors "son"), ... etc etc. Never ever in my life have played and enjoyed any game for about 7 months strait. Even with wow, gw2, ... i usually need break after 3 or 4 months.

    Well, support is bad, really bad. One have to wait for days to get some generalised answer that has nothing to do with what player asked. Fortunately not that I needed it a lot.

    I think games should be or pve or pvp. Many games sink because at the end nearly every1 is disappointed being pve ruining pvp aspect or viceversa. Guess wow did it here best.

    Big problem for swtor was not at all game or staff or ceo's.... but big problem that have sinked many other could be good games. Haters community. Never, with exception of wow, have seen so many haters hating and bashing game over and over and over and everywhere and everywhere ... Really disgusting.

    Oh I've seen worse. November 2005 when the NGE patch hit SWG. This was just days after customers bought the latest expansion. Nothing will ever compare to the hate and disrepute leveled at SOE after that. And it went on for years. The current hate leveled at TOR is a tiny fraction of that though they are persistent. 

    The funny thing is the SoE hate was directed at the wrong company...

    That company is the one that probably told Bioware 'well give you the license if you make it very WoWlike"

    The thing with the whole NGE business with SWG, is that it wasnt until much later that we found out what had gone on, and who was to blame, and although i still think SOE had a great deal of culpability, at the time all we could see was that SOE was totally ignoring all the feedback from the Test server about the NGE, and 'carrying on regardless' and even when they did launch it, it was barely even of Beta quality, it took years for them to patch it together and even when the game closed down for good, it still suffered from a rather large number of design flaws that were inherent in the NGE implementation. But at the time of the NGE it was Smedley and SOE that had their heads above the parapet so to speak, and the SWG community 'en masse' that was revolting against what they perceived to be the Evil Overlord that was SOE destroying their game.. even today, despite everything, SOE still has an image problem, us gamers arent all that forgiving, nor able to forget for that matter, though im surprised at how much flak LA and GL in particular, managed to avoid over the whole debacle..  a lesson there for any MMO developer to learn from, hopefully image

  • ktanner3ktanner3 Member UncommonPosts: 4,063
    Originally posted by Phry

    The thing with the whole NGE business with SWG, is that it wasnt until much later that we found out what had gone on, and who was to blame, and although i still think SOE had a great deal of culpability, at the time all we could see was that SOE was totally ignoring all the feedback from the Test server about the NGE, and 'carrying on regardless' and even when they did launch it, it was barely even of Beta quality, it took years for them to patch it together and even when the game closed down for good, it still suffered from a rather large number of design flaws that were inherent in the NGE implementation. But at the time of the NGE it was Smedley and SOE that had their heads above the parapet so to speak, and the SWG community 'en masse' that was revolting against what they perceived to be the Evil Overlord that was SOE destroying their game.. even today, despite everything, SOE still has an image problem, us gamers arent all that forgiving, nor able to forget for that matter, though im surprised at how much flak LA and GL in particular, managed to avoid over the whole debacle..  a lesson there for any MMO developer to learn from, hopefully image

    I'll never understand why they did it. Even if SWG was down to 300,000 subs(which is still good in my book), that's still $3.6 million dollars a year. Their overhead couldn't have been that massive with all the problems that never got resolved. They had to be making a profit with it. Their biggest problem was being able to come up with a game plan and sticking with it. 

    Tor's biggest problems are the same ones that most thempeark games have:content. Any game that focuses on dev created content is going to have this problem. It's made even more difficult because TOR's design of 8 classes with a different male and female voice for each. At some point they're going to run into an issue like  the voice for female imperial agent not being available. What then?

    Currently Playing: World of Warcraft

  • KenFisherKenFisher Member UncommonPosts: 5,035

    Problems for others, I can't say.  Problems for me... 1) spending tons of money on boring voice over storyline, 2) spending very little money on an unfinished engine and not optimizing it for performance.

     


    Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security.  I don't Forum PVP.  If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident.  When I don't understand, I ask.  Such is not intended as criticism.
  • tiefighter25tiefighter25 Member Posts: 937

    It was my mistake to bring up exact numbers.

    The point I was trying to make is that FTP did not save SWTOR, subs buying in the cartel shop might.

    James is throwing about statements of 2 million new accounts, 2nd biggest MMO, etc.

    I would have replied sooner, but I thought the thread would be locked.

    Apparently bringing up X-Fire, linking to it, and embeding screen shots is now OK if you are defending SWTOR's wilder statements.

    The essence of what I was trying to convey is this, there is a finite space for all of this millions of new accounts to reside in.

    Let's say the Mega servers can hold 12 thousand per server, that's still only a max congruent population of 204,000.

    That's not a lot of sapce to cram in 500K+ subs and 2 million FTP accounts.

    X-fire had SWTOR jump from 22 to 10 when FTP launched.

    Since then it has slowly slipped back down to around 14.

    Terra has passed SWTOR on the X-Fire chart for a while, and is now right behind it.

    (Funny how I remember the X-Fire proves nothing threads from not so long ago.)

    Also of note, the embeded XFire graph shows that the average SWTOR player (on double XP weekends) plays on average 5 hours a session.

    If only we could go back in time and warn Bioware with this information.

    Also to the one poster that said that we should assume two-thirds of all players are subs because the FTP system is so restrictive; I cannot make that leap in logic.

    The game went  (restrictive) FTP and the population increased, therefore most new players are subscribers. I can't make that assumption at all, nor has EA released any sub numbers since ages and ages ago.

    The game's population is not growing, it has been in a steady decline since FTP that only stopped when the double XP eekends began.

    Revenue on the other hand, might be going up. Some people really like spending money on gambling packs.

    As to the poster who commented on how low STO was on the x-fire chart, circa a year ago, that's what the SWTOR forums were saying about EVE.

  • SBE1SBE1 Member UncommonPosts: 340

    Look, this game is a huge flop from a financial point of view.  Most everyone on the project were fired, laid off, re-assigned, etc. It has many reasons for the flop.  Heck, the CEO had to resign a few days ago.

    The good news is that if you enjoy the game (big if), then the cartel shop and their semi-free model have stopped the game from shutting down, for now.   I think that's the point of the presentation: to minimize fears that the game was going to be cancelled entirely, which was a real risk.  I mean, EA used to say that it would require 500,000 subs to be profitable.  I'd bet it's far less than that currently but with the reduced staff levels they can probably get by with maybe 250-300,000 or maybe even less if the cartel shop is really successful.

    For the haters, the good news is that this financial disaster might actually stop MMOs from being developed with bad engines, high-expense PvE content that everyone burns through in 30-days, and MMO companies start to make exciting sand-box games. For me, the upside to the disaster of SWTOR makes me look forward to the future of upcoming MMO games.  I really doubt we'll see another AAA WoW clone for a long, long time.

  • erictlewiserictlewis Member UncommonPosts: 3,022

    Well they are shutting down the apac servers and merging them up with the NA ones,  continued server mergers looks real bad.  

     

  • pantaropantaro Member RarePosts: 515
    i watched all the cut scenes,did most of the quests and still hit 50 within the first week of launch.Like many have said they just didnt do their homework on MMO's.this is nothing new.
  • LogicLesterLogicLester Member UncommonPosts: 68
    Originally posted by erictlewis

    Well they are shutting down the apac servers and merging them up with the NA ones,  continued server mergers looks real bad.  

     

    There's really no choice, empty servers look worse.

     

    Their solution pretty much sucks though.  I mean it is the "best" solution, but for Bioware, not for the APAC players.  The best solution for them would have been to merge APAC into one big pve server and give anyone from the pvp or rp servers a free transfer to a similar NA server.  But then they couldn't cut costs by shutting down operations over there, and would actually have to get off their collective butts and get server transfers working right now instead of some vague "soon" date.  So in their eyes, win/win.

  • hikaru77hikaru77 Member UncommonPosts: 1,123
    Originally posted by tiefighter25

    It was my mistake to bring up exact numbers.

    The point I was trying to make is that FTP did not save SWTOR, subs buying in the cartel shop might.

    James is throwing about statements of 2 million new accounts, 2nd biggest MMO, etc.

    I would have replied sooner, but I thought the thread would be locked.

    Apparently bringing up X-Fire, linking to it, and embeding screen shots is now OK if you are defending SWTOR's wilder statements.

    The essence of what I was trying to convey is this, there is a finite space for all of this millions of new accounts to reside in.

    Let's say the Mega servers can hold 12 thousand per server, that's still only a max congruent population of 204,000.

    That's not a lot of sapce to cram in 500K+ subs and 2 million FTP accounts.

    X-fire had SWTOR jump from 22 to 10 when FTP launched.

    Since then it has slowly slipped back down to around 14.

    Terra has passed SWTOR on the X-Fire chart for a while, and is now right behind it.

    (Funny how I remember the X-Fire proves nothing threads from not so long ago.)

    Also of note, the embeded XFire graph shows that the average SWTOR player (on double XP weekends) plays on average 5 hours a session.

    If only we could go back in time and warn Bioware with this information.

    Also to the one poster that said that we should assume two-thirds of all players are subs because the FTP system is so restrictive; I cannot make that leap in logic.

    The game went  (restrictive) FTP and the population increased, therefore most new players are subscribers. I can't make that assumption at all, nor has EA released any sub numbers since ages and ages ago.

    The game's population is not growing, it has been in a steady decline since FTP that only stopped when the double XP eekends began.

    Revenue on the other hand, might be going up. Some people really like spending money on gambling packs.

    As to the poster who commented on how low STO was on the x-fire chart, circa a year ago, that's what the SWTOR forums were saying about EVE.

    You are not playing the game and sadly for you, you are just wrong, talk with the people who is actually playing the game or have a sub and maybe you find out the true state of game and how James Ohlen words are right in this case about the game. 

  • WickedjellyWickedjelly Member Posts: 4,990
    Originally posted by daltanious

    Big problem for swtor was not at all game or staff or ceo's.... but big problem that have sinked many other could be good games. Haters community. Never, with exception of wow, have seen so many haters hating and bashing game over and over and over and everywhere and everywhere ... Really disgusting.

    What a load of bs.

    This game going to f2p so quickly had nothing to do with the "hater community". I swear some of you will look to blame anything to try and justify why your game did not live up to the revenue potential some assumed it should.

    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.

  • tiefighter25tiefighter25 Member Posts: 937

    I'm sorry. Apparently everything I said was wrong.

    Here, here's another article reporting that SWTOR has 4.5 millon players!

    http://www.pcgamesn.com/swtor/star-wars-old-republic-gaining-10000-new-players-every-day-going-free-play

    IT MUST BE TRUE!

  • WizardryWizardry Member LegendaryPosts: 19,332

    It had nothing to do with linear questing,which i assume is what he is talking abotiu content.We already knwo that is boring as heck,but i think msot of us were at least accepting it,hoping sooner or later the game woudl expand,show more depth and become a little less drab.

    However when i kept tryinmg every class to 20,i soon realized how shallow the design was and it was among the worst i have played.

    What i gather from this producers perception,is that he thinks by simply adding 5000 more linear quests,the game would flourish?I would fire his ass in a heartbeat becuase it tells me ,he has ZERO clue about gaming.

    Here is a hint  for him...

    1 FUN <<<Do wahtever it takes from puzzles,to utilizing team work,to interacting alongside and with NPC's ect ect.How often did we see movers being used in this game?It was like amateurs creating the maps.Even ship doors was simply warps,i mean geesh,talk about cutting corners.The taxis were a decent touch,that is the sort of thing the game needed more of.

    2 Character and combat DEPTH,this one is a huge fail by most devs.

    3 More systems and REAL content.I find it disturbing thjat devs think they can call linear questing content,it has become the very basic core of game design,it is EXPECTED.To use the term content,we should be seeing ideas above and beyond basic game design.I mean we don't go around calling the sky box in a game ,content or the shrubs on the ground content,it is basic game design.

    Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.

  • tiefighter25tiefighter25 Member Posts: 937

    As an intresting question of what is cause and what is effect, SWTOR's daily numbers have increased a bit, AFTER this story was passed through the media.

    Marketing.

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