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Will SWTOR ever recover?
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Yah, i guess SWTOR kinda became my "fall back to" MMO, being free helps if you want just jump in and out, and it does some things miles above all other MMOs.
I mean just look at FFXIV (and i like FF franchise!, just recently played through VII, Steam goodness), but damn....
If SWTOR was just better overall game WITH story and cutscenes there wouldnt even be a contest.
This
There are better threads - in this forum - that discuss EA's last set of results. Ones that avoid assuming that EA are just talking about SWTORs and start high fiving Bioware.
EA's first mention: SWTOR contributed more money to EA's "F2P pot" than it did 12 months ago. Reason: 12 months ago it wasn't F2P and EA put all the SWTOR revenue into the "subscription pot". So from zero to whatever: a huge increase!
EA's second mention: SWTORs was the main reason for the drop in EA's subscription revenue. Reason: 12 months previous SWTOR had 500k to 1M subs. So no big surprise. SWTORs contribution to the drop may have been bigger it may have been smaller. EA simply gave SWTOR as the main reason. We know that SWTOR has lost many subs though and if the $20M drop was solely due to SWTOR then, allowing for the free month EA threw in, it would be 660k or so. Maybe it was 500k, maybe 700k. Either way EA citing SWTOR as the main reason makes sense.
And whilst EA went on to say that their "F2P pot" + their "sub pot" was up, again, this was for many games. It was making nice noises to the shareholders. As far as SWTORs is concerned they avoided saying that the gain in SWTORs F2P revenue off-set SWTORs drop in sub revenue. Let alone went up 10%!
EA's third mention: subs down 25% since the game went F2P - which I took as a good number. However It underlines that the "just under 500k" number announced in the previous quarter - remember that - was a blip (due to Makeb) and highlights that EA (and other companies) will pick out bits that make them look good / cover up the bad news.
Next year guess what? WAR will contribute less to EA's F2P pot. Obvious given that it is closing. The point however is that SWTOR could be doing "as well" as WAR and we wouldn't know. (And yes it will be doing better but it is the fact that we wouldn't know.)
No way that it recovers. The free to play model is awful and restrictive and the game itself is broken on almost every level. The combat is clunky, the crafting is underwhelming, the PvP is awful. I'm shocked that the game hasn't closed like WAR did, they should be thanking someone that they are bringing in any revenue at this point.
Ah yes the famous not free enough speech well done. Combat is clunky? Get a better PC and internet. Crafting is underwhelming? Yeah making 31 mods armiyrs and enhancements means nothing right. Why post on a game you clearly have not played in a long long time. Pathetic attempt here buddyI can only imagine the two militant SWTOR fans on this site are employees, right?
Ah yes the famous not free enough speech well done. Combat is clunky? Get a better PC and internet. Crafting is underwhelming? Yeah making 31 mods armiyrs and enhancements means nothing right. Why post on a game you clearly have not played in a long long time. Pathetic attempt here buddyI can only imagine the two militant SWTOR fans on this site are employees, right?
Nope but the haters probably are. Most swtor fans are busy playing I'm at work and confused by the haters wasting two years now crying about a video game they don't play.They would have to close down the game , do a total overhaul of the graphics and engine . Basically make an entirely new game for me to come back .
I took your challenge and patched it last night. The game does look better now with graphics updates. It ran a little spiky but nothing too out of the ordinary. The gameplay has not changed, and the game still fails to actually have any feeling of life to it. The game world feels like it was populated by an accountant.
I imagine the people who are still playing are just really into repeating the normal fare offered by the game with friends, and so the communal experience must be the glue. The game itself sure doesn't offer it, and there really is no realistic fix.
The best way I can describe SWTOR is that it is just very boring whenever you are not in one of the stories. There is no point to anything outside of match PvP or following class stories, so SWTOR still fails to achieve any kind of relationship with the player beyond its canned stories.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
Yup, pretty much sums it up, but its good because those parts of game are free.
Vast majority decided SWTOR is not really worth paying more than the box price.
We kinda told them that long before launch, Its a real pity, true opportunity was there, funding, people, time....
As long as this game uses the Hero engine, there will never be a true recovery. They still can't even get chat bubbles to work yet, which has been a MMO stable since like, 1998. Just ridiculous.
I enjoy undercutting people in the market place - it's the only PvP a crafter gets.
The engine I can understand to some degree even though it was never an issue for me, but when people tie a recovery to such ridiculously minor features which quite frankly most could care less about I think its obvious that some people have their priorities in the wrong order. I mean is a chat bubble really so critical? I agree it should be an option but I never really thought about it when I used to play this game.
There Is Always Hope!
no and it wouldn't come as any shock if tor gets shut down next year.
case in point for the last two days i've played tor and have asked the players that are playing what they think. most feel that the free to play system is the worst ever. and after looking it over i can say it really is, even funcom doesn't rip players off as badly as tor does. the classes are boring everyone gets a 'pet' and there's no real way to make your own character. if you play a smuggler you will be just like every smuggler in tor. this is a far cry from swg where you could take skills in smuggling, bounty hunting and medical skills.
pvp is just lackluster and broken. it's not fun and it takes a good 20 to 30 minutes at prime time to get into a pvp match. and even then half the team will bail on the match leaving you under manned. classes are just broken really if you want to do anything in pvp? play a jedi or sith. even then they are not as fun pvp wise as jedi was on swg. on swg you had danger around you if you went jedi, bounty hunters would hunt you down and look for you. you don't even have that on tor.
crafting? heh what crafting? everything is from the cash shop now with nothing that sells as a crafter. sure maybe you'll be lucky and can sell a weapon or armor mod but even then it's rare. an old guildmate of mine told me he just gears his alts up by giving them cash shop weapons and armor then runs a few low level flashpoints and buys the gear with the badges you get from doing them.
the worlds are just lifeless and boring. there's no day and night cycle something that players have been asking for from launch onward. you barely see friendly npc's well now and then you will see one or two talking about the same thing over and over again. look at games like Age of Conan where you get tons of npc's wandering around the cities or even in little townships when you are out in the world. or swg where at one point i once followed a r2 droid around just to see where it would go. and i noticed it was going from a spot near a cantina to a hide out for some npc's. I mean it was spying on people in the cantina! where's that in tor? don't even get me started on the fact that tor doesn't have swimming or housing with player run cities.
the pve is a joke too. the class stories are just boring. I decided to try out a smuggler this time around and *yawn* all i did is run around saying the same lines over and over again with a storyline that i already knew how it wound end. really it was more rewarding to just look it up on TV Tropes rather then play it. as for end game content? the raids are broken and only the truely hardcore guilds do them. a far cry from games like swg, wow and aoc where people are looking for classes all the time to do raids. flashpoints get old fast and the daily areas are much like other planets lifeless and boring.
and what does the player base think of tor? well the few fanboi defenders on here will claim people are busy playing the game and i can tell you that's not true. the pvp community is up in arms over this space thing, they want ground pvp and they want open world pvp. the raiders are bored one of the big raiding guilds i talked too summed it up the minute wildstar and EQ:Next come out they are heading there. I told a number of them to check out TSW and told them how much fun it is and I think I won a few people over. and the role players are just leaving the game, they wanted space that they could go explore in not fighter combat. and no housing no way to get rp clothing other then the cash shop.
tor had two years to turn it's self around. and i remember back in beta begging the dev's to ditch the game they had and make it more like swg pre-cu or even cu. groups begged that they ditch the hero engine and go with something that worked and wasn't as ugly.
really tor sunk the only things that are left are a few people and crew members in air pockets thinking they will be saved at the last minute. there is no saving this, there's only sunseting it and making a new star wars mmo that can give players a complex sandbox world to play in.
Nope SWTOR is not likely to recover it is sad, but I installed the game at least a few weeks ago I check out the game it lacked the cash shop content, and customization I want to enjoy my experience in the Star Wars Universe so I deleted the game from my pc again.
SWTOR could be a good game, but not in the hands of BioWare I hope that someone comes along and makes a new game or something that can be run and manage better.
To be honest the game might stay open for many more years, but likely it will have an ever decline on the population of the game compared to what it did on launch the numbers are quite low and it just might come to the point where BioWare will say the game isn't worth the money and close it down or try to get rid of the game to someone else unless they get some developers who know what they are doing to fix the game for us.
There is nothing to recover about SWTOR, the game is more than fine and have very decent audience.
What might be in need of recovery is EA for their enourmous investments into the game.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
I don't think SW;TOR will be closing its doors any time soon,nor do i think it will ever be one of the top 5 games, but i think it does have its own 'niche' it is a fun game after all, its just a shame that the gameplay itself is so limited, will the game get better over time, i really don't know, the space pvp part of the game might well appeal to some, but its not something i really see being all that popular once the 'newness' factor wears off.
Its a game i still play, but i would be lying if i said i played it every day, as it is i probably only play once or at most, twice a week, for 1 or 2 hours tops, since FFXIV arrived i've been mostly playing that and Planetside 2, even Eve is on the back burner. I think the only real way for SW;TOR to hit the 'big time' would probably involve them redesigning the game around a new game engine as i don't think the hero engine is really capable of delivering the things that people seem to want from it, which is probably never going to happen.
the game has failed, still its a nice little browser game, if it was a browsergame, cause it feels like one. a F2P generic space browser mmo.. one thing is sure, it has very little to do with star wars, its got the name, and glowsticks, thats about it.
Herald of innovation, Vanquisher of the old! - Awake a few hours almost everyday!
Well adding an "expansion" which is basically a Moonbreakers/Star Conflict MOBA won't help.
Another missed opportunity, they're not even trying to think out of their little box.
JTL was 9 years ago and all they come up with in 2013 is another lame space MOBA. Just sad.
The game is not doing great if this thread is anything to go by, the servers are constantly declining, as they were FULL mostly, then Very Heavy, and now just Heavy and Standard?
SWTOR will last as long as the licence holds, but now that the long awaited SSSP is finally coming for Dec-Feb, there is nothing yet to come - What comes next Bioware?
All known content that has been in the works for the past 2 years or more, will all be in game by Dec. SWTOR should last through most of 2014, 2015 if lucky, but they will get more money focussing on creating console and PC games on a yearly basis. I will buy more Star Wars games by EA, but not willing to pay more money into SWTOR. It was fun while it lasted for the few months solid play, but is not a long term game like SWG and other MMOs.
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I think this hits the nail on the head.
EA said in May that they had doubled their revenue since going F2P and based on other stuff they have said this can be estimated at the equivalent of about 420k to 530k subscribers (see below).
So enough money coming in to cover the day to day stuff and turn out small expansions but below what they would need to recover their investment and really take the game forward.
530k estimate (see warning below):
1. End of April Bioware announced 2M post f2p new accounts.
2. May results EA announce 2.2M (just under 500k + 1.7M)
3. So - roughly - SWTOR retained about 200k "old" subscribers.
4. August EA say that they lost 25% of subscribers in switch to f2p.
5. ASSUMPTION: that in August subs had fallen back, after Makeb, to the "old" 200k level.
6. So pre-f2p SWTOR had c. 265k. (75% of 265k is about 200k).
7. In May EA said that average revenue had doubled since going f2p which would means an average equivalent sub count of 2 x 265k or 530k (up to May.)
420k estimate:
8. Even with no new cash shop revenue after May (unlikely) as long SWTOR held on to 200k subs the average equivalent sub revenue up to August will still have been around 420k.
WARNING: First there is the assumption that subs dropped back to the "hard core" level. There will also be rounding down there in EA's numbers - if 1.7M was actually 1.74M then the 200k would become 160k and the 530k would become c. 425k.
I think this type of number supports Phry's comment and ties in with EA's "doing OK" comment.
Ah yes another prediction from you about a closing date. Look at your history buddy. You predicted swtor wouldn't make it out of '12 you predicted it would shut down in '13 you predicted sssp would never be released, you predicted they will never release a new race, you predicted never have a level increase, you predicted never have an expansion, you predicted ALL quests would be from terminals and they would never continue the story EVERYTHING YOU HAVE PREDICTED HAS BEEN WRONG!! now you predict it will close in '14. Keep dreaming buddy I understand the desperation is at an all time high for you and the haters, understand you see your efforts the last 2 years have failed and you see you have another few years of wasting away cause of swtor. I hope you hold your copy of swg tight at night cause there won't be a swg2 and swtor will be around for awhile longer.