Falconer52

Way too much production value in that 1.2 video. More wasted money, a list of features and screen-shots would have been much better.

@Jorev

He says nothing.

It funny how quoting him, in context, is not allowed on any SOE discussion board.

I had his famous quote from SWG where he vowed to listen to the players as my signature on the DCUO boards, it was removed in 2 days. There was a thread of his quotes throughout his time in SOE on the same board, that thread was "moved" to a location where no-one can read it.

You know you have a bad president when every major quote we have of him can be used against his credibility. But SOE has refined the 'bait and switch' and is able to survive. DCUO was by far the biggest SOE dick-punch to the gaming community, it had every dirty trick SOE has used. A 33% retention rate after 3 weeks is a sign you need to change management (and maybe should have stuck with F2P instead of bringing in subs knowing you wouldn't be able to give us 15/mo worth of content updates)

Sony Gamer Safety Tip #1:

Use a security system that is up to date.


Sony Gamer Safety Tip # 2:

Don't piss off the community to the point of retaliation.

@Lafajet

The 300,000 gap is the difference between box sales and sails to retailers, see my above post for a little more detail.

There were also a lot of players who never picked up their pre-order after playing for the first head start and grace period, after realizing that BW had done nothing special (a lot was actually stepping backwards 5 years) other than voice acting.

It's impossible to say, EA is a business, and honest business doesn't succeed in a dishonest market. It is 100% believable and very likely that those numbers are from 31/12/11. The game I log into has lost a lot of steam, around the end of week 2 the game went from 50% of servers with 20+ minute queues, to 95% medium-low population servers. The 800k subscriber number produced by analysts that used EA's financial reports after the free period, which is more accurate and believable at 800,000 subs(was in an earlier massively post). This release by EA is most likely a legal to say half-truth that would make them look better.

We will never hear a official answer on anything related to the sub numbers because the projections for this game where way above what actually happened and anything EA says will result in bad press and stock drops. They didn't realize story isn't enough to hold the bulk of the MMO players, it's actually just another niche market, and those out of that niche are either waiting for another better game, really like star wars, or see this as the best thing available.

In the end though, subs don't really matter. Look at DCUO, it had 300,000 subs after the free period, but it was a game targeted at 7hrs of weekly play, so the overlap of players was very small and resulted in a large chunk of the population leaving the game(including me). The success of your game is based on the population of your servers, and that is nothing special now. I got lucky and was placed one of the high population PvP servers, and even I was unable to do any group content post level 30 because there are usually around 20 other people on each world after at peak times with 5-10 on after hours. So it must be really bad on the servers that are constantly at medium. The first sign of a MMO collapse is the inability for find a PUG anywhere.

@scfs123

Those 300,000 copies are probably un-sold. This is another trick companies use to pad their numbers. When EA says they sold x amount of a product, that is how much they unloaded to retailers, not how many are in the hands of consumers.

The thing here is they have to make a huge jump in transparency. You cant just release tid-bits of hard numbers, you have to release ALL of the hard numbers.

I doubt TOR will give us population numbers. I still have abilities that use "High" and "Low" instead of a solid number (sage: force shield)

Yes I want a fair fight, that means that less than 5% of your effectivness should be determined by your gear.

You will never find 'fair' PvP in any large population game. There is just not enough to keep people PvPing, making your effectivness largely gear based brings more soft-core PvP players into the mix. Sadly for me, I am a casual-skilled PvP player, so i get shafted by the skilled-no-lifers and the gear grinders.

For instance, if 'Expertise' was removed from SWTOR and the difference between level 50 crafted gear, and the highest obtainable set, was only 5%. , PvP would be more enjoyable for me.

Your gaming skill should be 99% of your pvp effectiveness. The remaining 1% is for determing the outcome of two equally skilled players.


Open PvP has yet to be done fairly. Warhammer failed, and then TOR... did the same thing.. When the term 'Zerg' is possible, it's time to scrap the project and start again. Open PvP only belongs in Open PvP games, where there is no game regulated Open PvP locations, other than: THE ENTIRE GAME.

HiRez had the right IDEA while they where in beta(didn't make it to launch) that the high population battles should be a combination of smaller matches that all affect each-other. That is the only form of large scale PvP that should be regulated by the game.

My definition of fairness:
1. There is less than a 5% increase from base max level gear to top max level gear
2. Population is set and maintained automatically.
3. The word 'Zerg' is never used as an adverb

@MorbidCuriousity

There are zombies in the game

and they aren't rakghoul

If anything, the bulk of my negativity has shifted towards BioWare.

For 1 they have Mythic in their offices now, there is no reason every good idea from warhammer shoudn't be in TOR. I'm talking about: Public Questing(automatically resetting infinity repeatable with no reward degradation) 3 PvP scenarios per 10 levels, and a objective driven PvP lake on every planet.

Secondly, the story line. My consular was named "Barsen'thor" a title given to only two jedis in the past. An event like this does not belong in an MMO, at most you should get the equivalent of a metal of Honor. The TOR storyling does not belong in an MMO and does not make sense in an MMO environment. When I see the line "the only living Barsen'thor" I grit my teeth, because i know for a fact there are over a million others running around with the same title. BioWare could have spent a little more time thinking like an MMO developer and not like a single player RPG studio, and made the story make sense in a massive world, where more than one of your class exists. This is basically a 4 player online game, that was given a few changes and moved to game servers instead of P2P transfers.

Thirdly, this genera that TOR shoots towards houses the largest number of griefers of any group, and absolutely no effort was made to prevent this, there should have been level scaling in every pvp environment, Warhammer had almost the right idea, but CoH had a better one, when you PvP in a certain level zone you are either buffed up or down to the level of the zone, and any abilities/skills you obtained after that level are not available to you. This is 100% possible in TOR, even scaling stats, i would tell you how, but bioware isn't paying me.

When I look at TOR I don't see a multi-hundred-million dollar development game 5 years in the making. I see a lot of twiddling thumbs and a scramble to get everything done when the graph of projected box sales was about to intersect with the cost of development.
With all the fuss about guilds and how important they felt they where, the guild system should have been completely fleshed out with banks, advancement systems, capital ships, and such at launch.

Good idea though adding cut content into the "first content update"

"The objectives on Ilum were supposed to be on timers, and the timers were supposed to be locked down," says Amatangelo. "But in the 11th hour, the timers weren't working. So we knew what kind of behavior was going to evolve there. It's not like we were going to delay launch to fix that."

That wasn't the only thing that could have been fixed before launch