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Main reason why SWTOR flopped?
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Interesting points... and yet so pointless ;-)
Okay, when I beta'd SWTOR you know what the one thing was I was afraid I'd have to do with my Smuggler: space combat!
The opening cinematics made this pretty clear... and to be honest, the other classes just didn't really feel "space-y" in a not just travel but actually fight way.
Boy, was I glad that there was just this addon of space combat in SWTOR!
Are you understanding what I'm trying to say? So people - apparently you - think that in a game that is set up spanning a universe space combat is a must. Others prefer to look at the classic aspects of MMORPGs i.e. the characters.
As much as I'd like to cheer for a game like Mechwarrior Online, if I can't get out of my Mech, if I can't sneak up on an enemy Mech and planet a bomb on one of its legs and then watch from the top of a hill my Mech is savely parked behind how the other Mech topples over in a nice explosion, yeah, don't count me interested.
So, if you want a space combat flight sim, look around, there are other games, even free ones, though they may not have the SW mark.
Yes, the patches were... well... unwholesome to put it mildly, at least in the beginning... which has many fathers. One is definitely players (still) ignoring the PTS.
BW shouldn't have rushed out the patches after very little testing by very few but rather let the whole thing stew and then release a good patch...
the problem is just that some people were actually having real issue - not me - and they required help ASPA...
which creates a problem situation: do you try to help them at the risk of this really being a simple bandaid and potentially doingjust as much bad (or maybe even more) than good, or do you tell people to suck it up and wait until the patch is ready?
Neither of the 2 is better.
The problem people fail too understand is the complexity of modern computer systems. There are litteraslly hundreds, thousands of different graphics cards with different drivers/driver versions out there. If a company wanted to test all of them, they would already have lost out.
And at the same time you as the game designer need to remember that the gamer's system is his own responsibility: if the game has been confirmed as working fine with the driver version 2 numbers back and the gamer refuses to do a rollback because this newest version is running better with another game, it's up to the player to resolve that problem, not the game publisher (at least in the short run. Obviously they'll have to figure out why maybe the current driver version isn't ticking right with their game... though potentially before they get down to it a new driver may alread've been released...)
Expensive box and pre-orders? I'm not going to ask you if this was your first P2P MMO but, well, you can't have had many before, right?
Yes, the price was some $3 or 4 up above other games, but nothing really drastic... and I remember that very same model having been used thru the early years of the 21st century with MMORPG: you buy the box which costs about as much as a singleplayer game and the obviously comes the subscription... but SWTOR? Expensive? Nah...
"Subs might put people off if the game got trolled, or honestly constructively criticized dependent on view point.
Hype, too too too much hype. Hype puts them off after time."" """""""
Honestly, I have no clue what you are talking about!
I don't give a fuck about hype or trolling in regards to buying the game or not. I'll try to test the game (usually via beta) before buying it, but if there are too many "yeah" screechers or "hate" trollers, that may only effect my behaviour on the forums, not in regards to shelling out the money or not.
Sorry, I think I'm just too old to be bullied or not being able to make my own judgment call.
"SWG shutdown already cast a gloomy atmosphere before launch."
Always love that "logic"...people who couldn't keep the simple fact straight that these are 2 separate games, well, I'm sorry but you deserve to fall on your arse!
And yes, obviously everything is trying to be "WoW"... look TSW is WoW with X Files...
WoW has created a business model that is today just as successful as it was 5 years ago.
Now, this might sound like a dumb question but... why mess with it? Because a minority - yes, a minority! - wants to play something else? Hey, if another game publisher can come up with a business model just as successful, yes, of course, nothing wrong with going for that... but a) you will then eventually see the very same as you did with WoW i.e. clones of said new business model game popping up everywhere, and b) game publishers are not in the business for bringing gamers fun... they are in it for the money! So you may have to excuse them for thinking with their head rather than their heart!
Yes, the missing day/night cycle is a bit of a shame... and yet, after a while I didn't notice it anymore. And considering how "messed up" time is in SWTOR anyways (different planets with different rotations, distances that in RL even with a car would take hours just hopped away via speeder, etc.) I don't think having no day/night cycle is the ultimate deal breaker, at least not for me...
"
I don't get the whole "they've lost subs due to a lack of players"
Well thoose players left for a reason, it's a terrible mmo, which in the end caused the server issues.
I havent logged on since January, and I don't plan to play it ever again, neither does the other 20ish people i started SWTOR with, it's just a boring wow clone done worse tbh.
Sure the fans will tell everyone that the game is great now, that they did server merges, did merges fix bugs? lack of world pvp? horrible instances? Linear gaming? a dead world? a reason to revisit old "planets/hallways"?, WoW like armor? action delay?............and the list goes on.
No it didnt, it's the same shitty game I played in January, and there were people to group with back then, but even so we all left, some went back to EVE, some went back to WoW, and others waited for D3 and are busy with it till GW2 comes out.
I had alot of hopes for SWTOR, I can honestly live with a wall of bugs (Heck I played SWG for 2 years), but the game needs to be fun, and SWTOR just isnt, it's for the singleplayer/crazy starwars fan crowd, it's got nothing to do with a mmorpg, if SWTOR is a mmo, then so is D3 and GW, and the RPG part? every mmorpg I've played, the RPG part were between players, not you can a questgiver, someone seriously missunderstood something at Bioware.
@Trol1, great that you're lovng the game, but your points are just nonsense. Apparently it's the customers fault that the game failed?
I dont blame the devs, its the producers that control the resources
I recall when the game was first announced that it was going to have 3 factions, Sith, Republic, and another "Criminal" type faction
The Republic symbol was a the Empire Symbol, (Which if you think about it, it really is the correct Symbol) the Sith looked something like a neo nazi symbol with 3 "prongs" and Criminal faction looked something like the bounter hunter type symbol
Bottom line the game goes from an Idea, then %90 of it gets cut
Just like TV shows, Music and another other art, the market attempts to reduce it to a "Formula" and then weights cost/benefits to produce the mediocre, over time product gets institutionalized
If a game can be made excellent at low cost, then cut more internally till it becomes mediocre
The market system the way it is always makes the mediocre in the end, at first something surburb, then reduced to the average
But like Mark Twain once said "I dont like the system, but its the best thing out there"
Oh well...........
The game hasnt failed in reality.....certain MMORPG.com posters are far from reality, and I would present the 500M thread as evidence to that claim. Others would have us believe MMO sandboxes are the way to go, and not a single one has had more subs than EQ did 8 yrs ago.
When you say the game "isnt fun"....you mean to say "the game isnt fun to me". I happen to like it, and there are plenty of others shelling out the 15 per month, so they must as well.
TOR is still holding the 2nd most NA subs. I can live with it. Game sales plus subs thus far either have paid off production, or are pretty damn close to the 200M investment. Going forward is pure gravy for EA/BW/LA....something that seems to be escaping the folks crying wolf.
We wont be seeing a game revamp within 2 yrs, let alone a second one. Instead the cries of "it will closed in a yr" will really start to stand out like the claims of "Swg is shutting down in 3 months", and "We are getting back the PRECioUs". Just more wishful thinking from the usual crowd.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
The game has failed. Huge budget, huge IP, destroyed by incompetent scumbag developers and down to under 300k subs. That's failure, pure and simple.
SWTOR is an utter failure, the worst MMO failure in history. Not surprising since it is developed by the worst MMO developer team in history.
Suuuuuure it has.
In 5 yrs, when the game is still chugging along, I bet you will still be trying to run the smack in this forum.
You have been running the 300 or 400k sub thing for a while now. You were full of shit then, and you still are. I would say the beating horse thing is quite apt. Now if you wanna photo ship your RL pic in for the information minister, and throw the caption 'I swear it is going to shut down any minute now", you would have friggen gold.
There is nothing to support your, nor the OPs contention, yet you guys attempt to pass it off as fact. Which is par for the course when it comes to the haters around here.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
I never said it would shut down. Warhammer hasn't and it has 2 servers total worldwide. I know very well how these things go. I'm a regular player with years of experience playing MMOs, unlike you who came here bent on spreading disinformation and fire-fighting for a failed MMO.
SWTOR does have under 300k subs, and that number is still dropping, fast.
It went from over 200 servers worldwide to just over a dozen.
Just match the reality to the lies. Down to just over a dozen servers with 1.3 million subs? It's obvious who is lying.
SWTOR is a total, abject failure, because its incompetent scumbag developers failed to make a good game that players wanted to play, and their arrogance and dishonesty made them ignore all the feedback provided by players to improve the game.
The story is very simple and very obvious. It's Warhammer all over again, but worse: a bigger and faster failure than ever before.
SWTOR does have under 300k subs, and that number is still dropping, fast.
Link to where these numbers are officially given by BW please?
It went from over 200 servers worldwide to just over a dozen.
Weird, just looked at http://www.swtor.com/server-status and there are by far over a dozen servers listed...?
Could it be that you are either living in your own SWTOR hating reality?
Or maybe you are NOT "a regular player with years of experience playing MMOs" but rather someone "who came here bent on spreading disinformation"?
Oooh, watch out, the truth can bite you in the arse, and other body parts! ;-)
No you have been spouting under 200k, and heading to less than 100k....much difference? I dont see it.
Show me under 300k as fact, or else once more it is simply a case of you shoveling the hater shit.
There are still over 600 employees involved with the game. For the numbers you keep spouting BW would have it down to SWG employee numbers prior to the NGE. That just isnt the case. They cut back on 200 of the 800 slots, and the 600 remaining would stand up with any game live/in production save WoW, and possibly Titan.
Yet you are still here spewing BS.
Like I said, I bet you are here in 5 yrs still talking blown out your ass information. If EA/BW ever get to the point that they dip below 500k, we will see the F2P conversation, and income will still keep kicking ass. No matter how much you wish it, this game isnt going anywhere, and it will continue bringing in large amounts of money.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
I assume not, and guess why; their subscription numbers are falling through the floor at the moment. Please provide an official and recent statement that they do not have 300k or fewer subscribers now.
there is one major reason TOR flopped, and i called it 3 years ago on these very forums: it tried to be like WoW. when one of the moron devs said something along the lines of "if you're not copying WoW, youre making a mistake", i pretty much gave up on the game. like this sentence on its own should have been enough to lower EA's stocks, but everyone was so pumped that very few if any paid attention to this comment.
I played for three months... it was not a very good mmo... it was an okay single player game.. would have been better they would have made some kind of lobby and from there you can play the instances... them I liked ... but well... you need people to play them... and there where none of them left on my server... so I quit (not ragequit)
It was fun for three months though... then it got ... boring?
maybe they can turn it around... but personally I dont think so...
Main reasons:
Linear quest design. Quest hubs on rails.
Tunnel design. One step away from the intended path and you hit a invisible wall.
No freedom or focus on exploring in general.
I think all games designed like that will fail longterm. How can it be fun to play something like that for more than a month? Incredible!
Things like:
Kill x of y quests and fedex quests make it worse. People have been doing quest like that for years. Its very old and very boring. Voice acting will not help...
PvP unbalanced and rewards very annoying.
Endgame for PvE -very old ideas that people dont want anymore. Grind gear and repeat. Farm raid instances and bosses over and over. Retart. Do it again..forever.
Perhaps other companies and more important -investors- will stop believing in this type of game design. And we will see new and fresh ideas and games in the future..At least we can hope!
So, what's a failure, again? Games that you, yourself don't like, or what?
Pretty simple, and I was pointing this out years in advance but went ignored.
The concept of SWTOR was the STORY FOCUS element in a MMO.
The problem here, is that they wanted to bring over the Singleplayer RPG feel to the MMORPG genre.
These two genres (MMORPG and SRPG and ORPG) are all RPGs in some way, but very different in taste, which in theory is why something that works in one of those sub genres may not be so successful in the other sub genre.
The Story Focus of a SRPG like KOTOR and DragonAge, just doesnt work in a MMORPG.
From observation alone, you can see this in games that existed before the launch of SWTOR.
what I mean, is that if you observe how the general MMORPG market consumers view story in pre-SWTOR MMO, you can see that the general consumer doesnt care about Story in MMORPGs. in the past Quest Text went ignored for a reason. Many people blamed the lore for this, but the reality of it is, that
in MMO genre, the game is very Time exclusive and heavily competitive .
what this means is that, most players see a larger value in "GAMEPLAY TIME" being spent on staying "Competitive" rather than toying around with reading lore.
this same thing crossed over to SWTOR's cutscenes. Most MMORPG gamers still hold this same mindset, of "Time and Competitiveness". So most people wont stay interested in viewing these time wasting videos of NPC talking, when that sub time can be spent actually staying competitive.
Most of SWTOR's resources went into these Cutscene and voice overs, that the game lacked the MMORPG gameplay that can keep a MMO community interested. the IP alone wont do that. And the Name behind hte developers wont do that.
if you sacrifice gameplay for story in the MMO genre, it simply wont hold up. you can get away with that in a SRPG or even a ORPG, but not a MMORPG.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
In my opinion swtor flopped so bad because when people hit 50 there were 2 choices of what you could do: Farm bgs or Farm heroics/raids. The stroy took a complete back step at 50 and it just became a big grind. I will admit that i loved swtor leveling cause of the story but i didnt wanna level a new char right away just to keep enjoying the game. Swtor needs more things to do at endgame, world events, world pvp, more story content, and make the existing pvp and pve interesting, until then im not touching it unless they give me a freek weekend or something.
Playing: FFXIV, DnL, and World of Warships
Waiting on: Ashes of Creation
For once i actually disagree with you. Sure many people pounded that space bar like no tomorrow but saying that story isnt important in an mmo is completely false. SWTOR was only good because of its story. YOu could say that if theyt devoted all that time and money from the VO and put it into actual gameplay elements it could of been better GAMEPLAY wise, But i feel many people wanted actual story in an mmo and not a ! makr and a click of a button to get a quest.
Playing: FFXIV, DnL, and World of Warships
Waiting on: Ashes of Creation
Games developed for 200-300 million dollars that go from having over 200 servers to having just over a dozen, and with a retention rate so low that 2.3 million box sales goes down to below 300k subs - all in under 6 months.
That's what I call a failure, what would you call it?
No other game has failed as hard, or as fast, as SWTOR.
Funny stuff.
Can you provide links to ANYTHING that confirms what you are saying?
Empirical research and unofficial sources (best we have) says - totally oposite of what you are saying.
If nothing else, you can just look at handful of full servers.
Enjoy.
Doing a 'who' on my husbands server right now...25 people are showing.... not sure how accurate.
I don't know why it has flopped, all I can comment on is why I stopped playing. Firstly the planets with internal areas had endless dull corridors and warehouse-like areas and on the external planets the almost featureless landscapes bored me fairly quickly. Added to that was the tendancy for mobs to just stand about in groups of 2 or 3 waiting to be killed. It was all so linear and mind-numbing. Balmorra was one of the worst zones i've ever played in any game and to cap it once i'd done it with an Empire character I had to go back there later with a Republic character at a higher level. That was when I unsubbed... I just couldn't take Balmorra again.
So uninspired linear zones and boring mobs.
Sandbox,
double standard much?
Let me guess: "hey, I'm a SWTOR hater, whatever I say I don't need to prove it, it has to be right by default. On the other hand, if you are a SWTOR fanbhoy, well, you better provide triple confirmation source otherwise you are completely unbelievable and most likely actually lying!", right?
WEll, as a gentleman, I'd say show me yours and I'll show you mine, but as you are probably going to the "SWTOR haters don't need to show" rule, well, what is the point of continuing?
Because, see, in the end the joke is always on you: 50 Mio subs, or just 1 Mio or just 500K or just 100K or just 10 (yes, 10 as in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), according to you SWTOR haters SWTOR was never a MMO. So there shouldn't really be a difference for us as long as BW keeps the service running at all :-P
Sucks to be a SWTOR hater, can't win 'em, can only lose...
Without actual facts, this estimation has as much value as the things a cow might drop in its stable.
Very true. I estimate the are 9 million subs.
/sarcasm
even if you give them the benefit of the doubt at 400 or even 500k subs .. its still pretty laughable.
if you need exact stats to tell you this game has tanked in a lot of ways ... you haven't been paying attention.
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity.
I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
I have to say the biggest failure for this game for replayable value was 0
I remember as a tropper I enjoyed the entire story line content till I maxed him
But when I rolled alts I just couldnt bring myself to play .I just couldnt and gave up
a friend of mine lately joined SWTOR and he was with his 1st toon and everyday he was telling how much he is enjoying the story line
Then he rolls an alt as a Republic and I tell him thats great I will transfer my trooper on to his server and we can play hieger tiers together. Today he send me a txt msg ( caught me by suprise) that he just preordered the the secret world and not planning to0 renew his sub to SWTOR .he said he just couldnt reroll and level up another toon