BioWare Discusses Future of Star Wars: The Old Republic

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[citation][nom]punnar[/nom]Before SWTOR I played EQ, EQ2, WoW, Aion, AOC. EQ is my favorite and if they'd take the game and put it on a new engine (I don't mean EQ2 syle) I would go back to it. I play a game until it stops being fun and for me since I don't play all the time and SWTOR is still fun. It's those hard core gamers (Proffessional MMO players) that consume the content too quickly (will also get bored of the game too quickly) and will leave the game for another or back to WoW.I want to get my money's worth so I will take my time enjoy the game for a while but I hope that going F2P will not ruin that.[/citation]

EQ is/was amazing. It's the only true MUD style MMO that's ever achieved real acclaim, the last game where character development wasn't limited by "builds" and actions had consequences. Everything after that has been little more than a WoW style themepark.
 
[citation][nom]Bean007[/nom]Yea a tiny portion. You think it's really hurting there pockets?The only reason why WoW is going down is cause it's old. I know that when Blizzard comes out with a new MMO as I stated people will hop on that train and they will gladly pay a monthly fee.[/citation]

Not really, I think the only game other than WoW that still maintains a large base without losing much is EVE. Thats the other problem from what I understand. Like others have said, the lack of end game content. Anything that has to do with a space scifi game even though EVE is mostly ship based, is competing with a game that's been around for more than 9 years, gets regular content updates, yearly major content expansions for free, and minor large content updates every 6ish months or so.

I do agree the other reasons they're losing players is of course GW2, if they're still using the full price expansion, free to play way of doing things. Thats what I liked about the old GW, you could buy the main game, and play through it for free, then buy the expansions if you wanted to.
 
Every world is a shade of brown and gray.

All the characters look basically the same with a different head popped on top.

The zones feel very confined.

The story lines are too tedious...there is no indication why you need to labor through the endless conversations.

 
It's the massive class imbalances in PVP, the patches that make it worse, 99% of the crafting is pointless, stupidly easy to level.

The space battles were fun, but the path is scripted too and serves no purpose.

Mainly the hugely imbalanced pvp and the fact that the pvp does nothing to affect the game.
 
[citation][nom]leongrado[/nom]Isn't WoW the only real success story when it comes to subscription models for MMO's (at least in the US)?[/citation]

No, Rift is doing extremely well with a budget that is a fraction of WoW / SWToR. Trion has put out a decent sized content update every 2 - 3 months.
 
[citation][nom]leongrado[/nom]Isn't WoW the only real success story when it comes to subscription models for MMO's (at least in the US)?[/citation]

WoW had its success well before the F2P concept came around, and the only reason it persists is because the game has enough momentum that people play it simply because it's what all their friends play. As well it has a lot more 'content' available than new games coming out. Blizzard has invested nearly a decade into WoW, it's not surprising that they have enough content to hold a large portion of their subs through slack periods between content patches and expansions.

I'm of the opinion that a game will be successful if it has enough content to hold a player's attention, regardless of payment model.
 
[citation][nom]Bean007[/nom]Yea a tiny portion. You think it's really hurting there pockets?The only reason why WoW is going down is cause it's old. I know that when Blizzard comes out with a new MMO as I stated people will hop on that train and they will gladly pay a monthly fee.[/citation]

Yes it is hurting their pocketbooks. What's happening is that people are moving away from console and pc games, slowly but steadily and is moving to free facebook games. Now you are thinking what has that got to do with anything. Well there is a trend in the market place between declining pc numbers and increasing number of tablets. EA is taking a gamble that they can head off this trend with SWTOR going F2P. Blizzard cannot do this since WoW is a major source of revenue for them. There are rumors in the market place that Vivendi has been trying to sell off Activision for a while, with no buyers. Blizzard fans think that P2P is the market trend because WoW made it so successful but steadily declining numbers in the pc is going to make it hard for companies, even Blizzard in the future to justify going that route.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-29/vivendi-said-to-plan-sale-of-stake-in-activision-blizzard.html
 
The real problem is that companies expect to achieve the success of WoW on a short time and steadily get more and more players, when the problem is that the market is pretty much saturated with hundreds of MMOs. WoW has been around for years, and has far more content than any other game. So to get a sizable amount of subscribers, you need to give players a bug-free experience, interesting gameplay mechanics, balanced classes/skills and lots of content to get MMO players to switch. To do that, you need to invest both money and time. And currently no company has the patience to do that, so they simply try for less than a year, and when things aren't going like they expected, give up and switch to F2P.

And btw, i think taking the Hellgate: London route and basically heavily gimping the non-paying players is a mistake, and it's not gonna help at all with the subscriptions.
 
[citation][nom]Bean007[/nom]Yea a tiny portion. You think it's really hurting there pockets?The only reason why WoW is going down is cause it's old. I know that when Blizzard comes out with a new MMO as I stated people will hop on that train and they will gladly pay a monthly fee.[/citation]
The Warcraft franchise was older than 8 years old when WoW was released. By your logic, WoW should never have been successful because it was already "old".

And you drop 25% of your subscribers in 18 months, yeah, it hurts. Do you really think Vivendi's board or the shareholders are going "Hey we are fine, we still have 9 million"? No, they aren't.

I find it amusing that so many try to claim WoW's massive decrease, when it never had a decrease before, is because it's "old". Seems most of those who make these claims were the ones who screamed loudly against things that would keep it from feeling old like an updated graphics engine, increased character customization, etc.

No, the reason WoW is declining and declining rapidly has more to do with the fact that Blizzard has gone 2 straight expansions and not even released half the content for those expansions they had intended. They do not show the story in the game, they do it in the novels and comics. Want to know why and how Varian is back? Read the comics. Want to know Why Malfurion, Ysera and others are out of the Emerald Dream? Read Stormrage. Then of course there's the constant story retcons.

And the reason SWTOR didn't take off was because they were too much of a WoW clone only set in a scifi setting. If they had had more content, they could have gotten a few more people and possibly hold them longer, but they didn't really offer a compelling reason for your WoW player to leave for SWTOR.

Fact is the sub model can still be successful IF a developer gets content out regularly. $15 a month is cheap. You will spend more than that on a 2 hour movie at the theater. Of course if ArenaNet is successful with Guild Wars 2, then that could shake up the industry and the B2P model could be the best model to go with because most F2P titles also are pretty much pay to win.
 
I didn't leave because of the subscription model. I left because it was too easy/too fast to level and then you ended up with nothing to do but PvP.
 
Going F2P is not mandatory for MMOs, only for crappy ones, and unfortunately most MMOs suck. Bioware Austin almost got it right with 1-50 class story line but failed with PvP big time! They decided to focus on PvE with PvP as an after thought since classes were designed for PvE and fail for PvP. If this MMO didnt have the Star Wars name it would have never broken 500K.
 
WoW only gain it's success by appealing to the market.

Simple as that, however if WoW wasn't released back then and was released today?

It would be a bigger fail then SW:TOR is. It would never had reached 1.7 million subs in the first place.
 
WoW vanilla had a great model. Tedious raids which had gear checks along the way and drop rates for the items everyone wanted were about 1 every 5-8 weeks. Then you could use that gear to destroy people in pvp. Ah, it was fun. Now, they've split PvE/PvP content and homogenized the classes. SWTOR failed by not making classes unique and content engaging/difficult/low drop rate.
 
[citation][nom]Pinhedd[/nom]There are 7 billion people on the planet of which only 65% are between the ages of 15 and 64. That leaves only 4.5 billion people in the target age range. Most of these people live in Asia and play games targeted to their culture.[/citation]
Less than 2 billion ppl have PCs anyway.
 
Once a game goes from Subscription to F2P the subscriber count doesn't really matter anymore, nor holding users. Technical in a F2P environment everyone with an account is an active user even when they are not jumping in an playing every day. If new content draws them in once a month for a few days and they spend money, they are repeat customer.

So once a MMO goes to F2P the importance on an active subscriber base shifts to micro-transaction counts and as most business view things .. revenue.
 
[citation][nom]sykozis[/nom]So, Bioware thinks switching to a "free to play" model will suddenly turn SWTOR into the "WoW killer" it was claimed to be??? Good luck....[/citation]

The only ones who labelled it a wow killer we're Star Wars fans and gamers. Neither Bioware, EA or Lucas Arts ever marketed it as such. The only wow killer will be Blizzard themselves.

Wow has had years and millions of dollars to be where it is and everyone forgets how rough it was at launch with constant server outages and little content.
 
MMORPG are dead, they are boring... The only thing getting me back in to them is a combination of virtual reality (jack in style) Rated R or higher (real life problem solving, sex, violence) ect... an optional cash making system in game is cool too... But for now... Nothing in present nor near future looks Awe inspiring... Just my 2 cents
 
I bought the CE and played for a few months before I unsubed and stopped playing. Their main problems are that it was SO easy to get thru the story in a short amount of time and too many servers with VERY few players. in 2 weeks of just casually playing I got to level 32. after the 2nd month or so most of the servers were DEAD. I'm talking old west dustballs rolling thru the servers.

I stopped by their fourms recently and it appears that they stopped talking to the community and the community is really NOT happy about the F2P move + lack of follow thru with their promises + lack of communication.

if they go F2P, I will go back and finish up my troopers story and then quit again as I could care less, given their track record so far.
 
The market isn't "shifting to free to play"... People will pay for a game they are happy with...

Really the market has shifted so that you have to release a quality game to succeed, not this model of release now and fix it later. The entire crafting system was terrible... I hope it's better, but I'm not going back to find out.
 
from what i understand most if not all of this mmo is soloable.

all they need to do is put in some single player ai, and if the mmo fails, re release it as old republic 3 solo, give everyone who has the old republic a free upgrade to the single player version, and release the single player version for 60$ new.

the story and game play arent bad, only problem is its an mmo.
 
IMO SWToR's grind is what sent players away. It would have been a much better game had Bioware skipped past MMO and simply built a multiplayer story driven game which is really their bag. Prying good stories into a grindfest with little MMO action was a mistake. When I left the PvE content was the same for everyone on each planet sans the story portion (which is very little of the actual questing) and Hutt ball was 3/4 of the PvP matches played. After one play through a player has seen 98% of the content and the rest is a VERY slow grind.
 
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