Originally posted by Greyhooff 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.
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.
I don't really give a fuck how many subs they have or not, it's obvious that it's nowhere near the millions of subs they want or strive for. Fanbois as well as haters however that suck all kinda figures out of their thumb or their dark place where the sun don't shine just annoy me. Makes me think of all the demagogues and others that do the same hyperbole exaggeration thing.
I don't really give a fuck how many subs they have or not, it's obvious that it's nowhere near the millions of subs they want or strive for. Fanbois as well as haters however that suck all kinda figures out of their thumb or their dark place where the sun don't shine just annoy me. Makes me think of all the demagogues and others that do the same hyperbole exaggeration thing.
You may not care, but investors do.
And there were/are people willing to invest time in empirical research, statistically processed the results, and its better data than any fanboi...stuff. Im sorry that results dont connect with fanbois wishful thinking, but it is waht it is.
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.
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.
Failure and death don't mean the same thing. It can still be alive in 5 yrs, sure, but when you launch the biggest budget video game ever, and have to consolidate your playerbase on several servers, 6 months from launch, that is a failure to hold retention. There is no way to spin that as positive.
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.
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.
Failure and death don't mean the same thing. It can still be alive in 5 yrs, sure, but when you launch the biggest budget video game ever, and have to consolidate your playerbase on several servers, 6 months from launch, that is a failure to hold retention. There is no way to spin that as positive.
What is it, something around 20 destination servers out of the 214 they started with? They did the transfers months too late too. They should of started consolidating no later than February. Don't forget laying off half the staff nor all that free time they gave away. That's chugging? Looks more like chocked to me.
What was the spin on servers? They just launched the game with too many? From the queue times that 1st month I think they launched just about right but they didn't quite guess the mass exodus soon to follow.
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.
Without actual facts, this estimation has as much value as the things a cow might drop in its stable.
And about as much as the numbers EA spew out as "active subscribers" hoping you'll mistake them for actual paying subscription numbers.
I don't really give a fuck how many subs they have or not, it's obvious that it's nowhere near the millions of subs they want or strive for. Fanbois as well as haters however that suck all kinda figures out of their thumb or their dark place where the sun don't shine just annoy me. Makes me think of all the demagogues and others that do the same hyperbole exaggeration thing.
You may not care, but investors do.
And there were/are people willing to invest time in empirical research, statistically processed the results, and its better data than any fanboi...stuff. Im sorry that results dont connect with fanbois wishful thinking, but it is waht it is.
Their time, money, effort and research failed then didn't it? It was obviously no better informed than the rantings on here. You can't blame consumers for the failure of a product. Either get it right or go out of business.
Regardless of if and how or why it is or has or will flop/fail and or die, I think it is really sad that so many people seem to thirst for its death.
Like sharks catching the scent of blood in the water.
It is sad, but at this point I want it to die.
I want retribution for the death of SWG, I want failure for path of least resistance devs, and its amazing to me that I feel this way given my love of SW. I'm not saying this to irritate anyone, its just how I feel.
Game failed due to lack of open world player immersion. They isolated and boxed everything into small instances and prevented the huge gaming experience everyone wanted. It was linear progression without being able to step outside the box. They really did not think of the player when they designed the game. They only thought about the story which is great for a single player game, but not an mmo.
the reason TOR flopped? NGE No.2 Jedi ,sith, bounty hunter, trooper, officer, crafting professions
Infact it was worse. Instanced areas. no diversity in the main storyline. illusion of choice when there wasnt any.
SWG flopped. because it was the BETA for TOR come nov 15 2005? lucasarts are wasting their time trying to build a star wars mmo. they had it the first time round.
i was an avid pre-cu and cu player of swg (4 accounts). and how anyone bought a copy of TOR after trying the beta and seeing it was just a copy of NGE SWG, and that it was more bland. boring and pointless than SWGNGE. how did it even last a day. i feel sorry for the star wars fans who bought into this. that is all. lucas. start taking charge. just like you did the first 3 films. or hire someone with a bit of passion. please!
It just didn't gel. When you make a pudding, you can use all the right ingredients and follow the reciple but a tiny flaw means you end up with a watery mess rather then a fine dessert.
To me, SWTOR made a lot of basic mistakes:
1. The graphics. They were ugly and of a Neverwinter Nights quality. Bioware has ALWAYS been heavy re-user of game assets(just how many caves in this game where the same short slight curved to the right design) but this time they went to far. It suffered the same feeling as SWG where cities where just a random arrangement of art assets re-used just way to often. Its worlds just never felt like areas (outside the starter instances and maybe Tatooine). Compare this to WoW, Lotro and TSW where you actually have a geography, a world with people in it.
The graphics were just pain ugly to and far to simplistic, the Hutt planet and the eternally re-used neon twilek, what the hell was that all about? It reminded me of a user made doom level rather then a tripple A 2011 biggest budget ever game.
At its most basic, it just didn't look like Star Wars. Its most basic offence was the heavy armour for Jedi, since when do Jedi wear heavy armor?
2. Zero interaction. More MMO's have this but comeon where are the seats? MMO's are NOT multi-player FPS games. They are social games. Make them social. Even if just 1% actually used the seats to socialize, there pressence gives the game a lived in feel.
3. The flash points were a lie, turns out all the previews were just for the first flashpoint, all the later ones lacked all the choices and story telling.
4. It extended the dungeon crawl that all Bioware games have at the end to the entire game and inflated it to unheard of proportions. Every single player RPG has a section near the end where the story is pretty much over and you face a several hour long section of just fighting to get to the end boss. In SWTOR, this endless dungeon crawl was everywhere and at the end, I just could face killing yet another 20 signature mobs I saw between me and the next bit of the main story when I was already skipping all the side stories.
5. To little content. Most modern MMO's have more content then you need to level up, allowing alt characters to see different parts of the world. Not so with SWTOR, for an alt of the same faction, the story was almost the same except for the few class quests. And frankly the story, the areas and enemies were just not intresting enough to go through twice.
6. Companions were the least imaginative from a company that has become rather famous for its card board characters. They also made absolutely no sense. Bounty hunter was the only one where I found the first companion useful and used her pretty much throughout. The rating system encouraged you to make the choices your companion wanted to make, rather then just play the game as you wanted.
7. Crafting was insane, the buffs giving by companions pretty much mandated that Class X needed to Craft Y and then it required you to send your only companion away for hours at a time. Some classes got their 2nd companion way later then others, crippling their crafting.
8. Space combat was not just a boring on rails shooter, it had just a handful of levels and recycled them.
9. Zero modification of your spacecraft.
The entire game gave me the feeling as if it was designed by a person who had looked up the word MMORPG in a dictionary. It contained all the basics but it never really was a MMORPG. All the above are just minor symptoms.
At its core, is a fundemental and I think unanswered question. What is a MMORPG? What makes WoW, WoW. Why do people long back for SWG pre-NGE/CU/Doc Buff. Why is Ultima Online and Everquest still hanging on? Why has no game since WoW come even close to doing what it did (not just take customers from other games but draw new gamers into the market).
Only when you have answered that, can you answer why SWTOR really failed.
I agree with the OP that there was just a feeling that things didn't fit. First of all, the storyline makes more sense if you put it 200 years AFTER Star Wars and not before as everyone is running around trying to fill the Jedi/Sith vacuum left after ROTJ. Second, why doesn't the special armor (blue and purple) look different? I know it is such a minor point but other games let you show off your crit gear. The spaceships were a little too big. The game was just off.
But what ultimately got me was the repetiveness of the quests if you play more than one class. It is such a great storyline that I built all 8 classes but I'm tired of doing the same 95% of the game to get to the storyline.
Star Wars The Old Republic have not flopped or failed. We just live in the microwave era. We all want what we want now, now, now. Developing an MMO is an ongoing process. The developers have to match what they have conceptualized with what the game's community and players want the most in their game. These things take time. People aren't patient and most people are overly negative about most all games in the MMO genre for some reason. I like the game. I think the game is a great start with tangible places it could go in the future with time given. I think we all have forgotten a great deal about how our own genre works. It is virtually impossible that a game will be every single item exactly implemented perfectly when it is first released.
There have been several updates that assist with finding teams. There have been content updates and world events as well. Things seem to be moving along fairly well. Are there somethings that could've been done differently, perhaps better in my opinion, yes ofcourse. There will always be those things that could be better and that hopefully will be improved upon.
Now there are some games that I have played that were absolute garbage out of the box. SWTOR is far from that. I think we are our own worst enemies when we forget that many people sprint through 50 levels. I know people who grind levels all day and then complain about there not being enough content. If you play these games the way you live your life, then yes, there were never be enough content. These games are not our lives, we can't expect them to be.
The reason we play MMOs is because we don't like our adventures to end...and all it takes is patience and support. Future content is always on the way. It is a benefit of playing a MMO.
MMORPG played in order played: Sims Online, WoW, CoX, EQ2, LinksRealm, LOTRO,TOR...and counting
Comments
I don't really give a fuck how many subs they have or not, it's obvious that it's nowhere near the millions of subs they want or strive for. Fanbois as well as haters however that suck all kinda figures out of their thumb or their dark place where the sun don't shine just annoy me. Makes me think of all the demagogues and others that do the same hyperbole exaggeration thing.
You may not care, but investors do.
And there were/are people willing to invest time in empirical research, statistically processed the results, and its better data than any fanboi...stuff. Im sorry that results dont connect with fanbois wishful thinking, but it is waht it is.
Regardless of if and how or why it is or has or will flop/fail and or die, I think it is really sad that so many people seem to thirst for its death.
Like sharks catching the scent of blood in the water.
Playing: Smite, Marvel Heroes
Played: Nexus:Kingdom of the Winds, Everquest, DAoC, Everquest 2, WoW, Matrix Online, Vangaurd, SWG, DDO, EVE, Fallen Earth, LoTRo, CoX, Champions Online, WAR, Darkfall, Mortal Online, Guild Wars, Rift, Tera, Aion, AoC, Gods and Heroes, DCUO, FF14, TSW, SWTOR, GW2, Wildstar, ESO, ArcheAge
Waiting On: Nothing. Mmorpg's are dead.
Not sure how much Lucas had to do with anything really....!?
Failure and death don't mean the same thing. It can still be alive in 5 yrs, sure, but when you launch the biggest budget video game ever, and have to consolidate your playerbase on several servers, 6 months from launch, that is a failure to hold retention. There is no way to spin that as positive.
What is it, something around 20 destination servers out of the 214 they started with? They did the transfers months too late too. They should of started consolidating no later than February. Don't forget laying off half the staff nor all that free time they gave away. That's chugging? Looks more like chocked to me.
What was the spin on servers? They just launched the game with too many? From the queue times that 1st month I think they launched just about right but they didn't quite guess the mass exodus soon to follow.
And about as much as the numbers EA spew out as "active subscribers" hoping you'll mistake them for actual paying subscription numbers.
Their time, money, effort and research failed then didn't it? It was obviously no better informed than the rantings on here. You can't blame consumers for the failure of a product. Either get it right or go out of business.
It is sad, but at this point I want it to die.
I want retribution for the death of SWG, I want failure for path of least resistance devs, and its amazing to me that I feel this way given my love of SW. I'm not saying this to irritate anyone, its just how I feel.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
Game failed due to lack of open world player immersion. They isolated and boxed everything into small instances and prevented the huge gaming experience everyone wanted. It was linear progression without being able to step outside the box. They really did not think of the player when they designed the game. They only thought about the story which is great for a single player game, but not an mmo.
the reason TOR flopped? NGE No.2 Jedi ,sith, bounty hunter, trooper, officer, crafting professions
Infact it was worse. Instanced areas. no diversity in the main storyline. illusion of choice when there wasnt any.
SWG flopped. because it was the BETA for TOR come nov 15 2005? lucasarts are wasting their time trying to build a star wars mmo. they had it the first time round.
i was an avid pre-cu and cu player of swg (4 accounts). and how anyone bought a copy of TOR after trying the beta and seeing it was just a copy of NGE SWG, and that it was more bland. boring and pointless than SWGNGE. how did it even last a day. i feel sorry for the star wars fans who bought into this. that is all. lucas. start taking charge. just like you did the first 3 films. or hire someone with a bit of passion. please!
It just didn't gel. When you make a pudding, you can use all the right ingredients and follow the reciple but a tiny flaw means you end up with a watery mess rather then a fine dessert.
To me, SWTOR made a lot of basic mistakes:
1. The graphics. They were ugly and of a Neverwinter Nights quality. Bioware has ALWAYS been heavy re-user of game assets(just how many caves in this game where the same short slight curved to the right design) but this time they went to far. It suffered the same feeling as SWG where cities where just a random arrangement of art assets re-used just way to often. Its worlds just never felt like areas (outside the starter instances and maybe Tatooine). Compare this to WoW, Lotro and TSW where you actually have a geography, a world with people in it.
The graphics were just pain ugly to and far to simplistic, the Hutt planet and the eternally re-used neon twilek, what the hell was that all about? It reminded me of a user made doom level rather then a tripple A 2011 biggest budget ever game.
At its most basic, it just didn't look like Star Wars. Its most basic offence was the heavy armour for Jedi, since when do Jedi wear heavy armor?
2. Zero interaction. More MMO's have this but comeon where are the seats? MMO's are NOT multi-player FPS games. They are social games. Make them social. Even if just 1% actually used the seats to socialize, there pressence gives the game a lived in feel.
3. The flash points were a lie, turns out all the previews were just for the first flashpoint, all the later ones lacked all the choices and story telling.
4. It extended the dungeon crawl that all Bioware games have at the end to the entire game and inflated it to unheard of proportions. Every single player RPG has a section near the end where the story is pretty much over and you face a several hour long section of just fighting to get to the end boss. In SWTOR, this endless dungeon crawl was everywhere and at the end, I just could face killing yet another 20 signature mobs I saw between me and the next bit of the main story when I was already skipping all the side stories.
5. To little content. Most modern MMO's have more content then you need to level up, allowing alt characters to see different parts of the world. Not so with SWTOR, for an alt of the same faction, the story was almost the same except for the few class quests. And frankly the story, the areas and enemies were just not intresting enough to go through twice.
6. Companions were the least imaginative from a company that has become rather famous for its card board characters. They also made absolutely no sense. Bounty hunter was the only one where I found the first companion useful and used her pretty much throughout. The rating system encouraged you to make the choices your companion wanted to make, rather then just play the game as you wanted.
7. Crafting was insane, the buffs giving by companions pretty much mandated that Class X needed to Craft Y and then it required you to send your only companion away for hours at a time. Some classes got their 2nd companion way later then others, crippling their crafting.
8. Space combat was not just a boring on rails shooter, it had just a handful of levels and recycled them.
9. Zero modification of your spacecraft.
The entire game gave me the feeling as if it was designed by a person who had looked up the word MMORPG in a dictionary. It contained all the basics but it never really was a MMORPG. All the above are just minor symptoms.
At its core, is a fundemental and I think unanswered question. What is a MMORPG? What makes WoW, WoW. Why do people long back for SWG pre-NGE/CU/Doc Buff. Why is Ultima Online and Everquest still hanging on? Why has no game since WoW come even close to doing what it did (not just take customers from other games but draw new gamers into the market).
Only when you have answered that, can you answer why SWTOR really failed.
Error: 37. Signature not found. Please connect to my server for signature access.
I agree with the OP that there was just a feeling that things didn't fit. First of all, the storyline makes more sense if you put it 200 years AFTER Star Wars and not before as everyone is running around trying to fill the Jedi/Sith vacuum left after ROTJ. Second, why doesn't the special armor (blue and purple) look different? I know it is such a minor point but other games let you show off your crit gear. The spaceships were a little too big. The game was just off.
But what ultimately got me was the repetiveness of the quests if you play more than one class. It is such a great storyline that I built all 8 classes but I'm tired of doing the same 95% of the game to get to the storyline.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
Star Wars The Old Republic have not flopped or failed. We just live in the microwave era. We all want what we want now, now, now. Developing an MMO is an ongoing process. The developers have to match what they have conceptualized with what the game's community and players want the most in their game. These things take time. People aren't patient and most people are overly negative about most all games in the MMO genre for some reason. I like the game. I think the game is a great start with tangible places it could go in the future with time given. I think we all have forgotten a great deal about how our own genre works. It is virtually impossible that a game will be every single item exactly implemented perfectly when it is first released.
There have been several updates that assist with finding teams. There have been content updates and world events as well. Things seem to be moving along fairly well. Are there somethings that could've been done differently, perhaps better in my opinion, yes ofcourse. There will always be those things that could be better and that hopefully will be improved upon.
Now there are some games that I have played that were absolute garbage out of the box. SWTOR is far from that. I think we are our own worst enemies when we forget that many people sprint through 50 levels. I know people who grind levels all day and then complain about there not being enough content. If you play these games the way you live your life, then yes, there were never be enough content. These games are not our lives, we can't expect them to be.
The reason we play MMOs is because we don't like our adventures to end...and all it takes is patience and support. Future content is always on the way. It is a benefit of playing a MMO.
MMORPG played in order played: Sims Online, WoW, CoX, EQ2, LinksRealm, LOTRO,TOR...and counting
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