Star Wars: The Old Republic [KOTOR MMO]

Originally posted by Ushgarak
So, there were large scale lay offs on the Bioware Austin team lately- 150 people is the number floating around, including about a quarter of the TOR workforce, including Stephen Reid, the lead CM who has been fronting the game for years. Not good news for the game; it does seem that they are cutting costs to meet reduced revenue expectations. It's a particular PR blow for Bioware as they outright stated before launch, as part of their commitment to the game, that layoffs specifically would not happen after launch.

They are now announcing a permanent free trial version of TOR. With luck, they'll keep going this way and abandon the subscription fee entirely, and then I might buy it.

One of the things I saw kicking around on twitter and a few other sites was that many of the people laid off were QA, with the justification that you don't need QA people after a game's launch. Which is, of course, bullshit as if you plan on making new content of course you need QA for that...

And, man. Firing the lead CM. If there's one thing I've noticed, it's that a game's community tends to like the CMs, a lot. They're the face of the studio, after all, and are oftentimes the primary source of info. That's really going to hurt them.

I'd say that the TOR forums imply that Reid was not well liked, but the TOR forums are an insanely negative cesspit so I'll discount them.

The server story is unfortunate. Their plan right now is to create a number of what have been nick-named 'super-servers'. Daniel Ericson has said they have new tech coming in that allows a much higher headcount per server so they can combine many to form better communities.

All very good, of course- but late in the day. They have so many servers because the game jammed up tight at release, which is because the server max was conspicuously low, so they had to open up loads more, most of which are now underpopulated. If they had had much higher server maxes to start with, they wouldn't have had to open so many of those extra servers which are now such a dead weight.

However, I still suspect the bigger long-term issue is that people are finishing a story or two and then feel they are done. Why pay a monthly fee if what you are interested in, the story, is complete? This is the issue with this whole 'story is the fourth pillar' idea. It is a pillar you cannot possibly create at the same speed that people will consume it. If you've pulled in a lot of players on the strength of something so finite... then they are going to leave relatively soon.

Don't get me wrong; I am glad MMOs are starting to give more of a nod to narrative and keeping you engaged as a character. But I don't think it is a tactic conducive to encouraging a subscription fee.

Yeah, the TOR forums are terrible. The feedback I've seen on twitter (which tends to be less negative and more thoughtful...ironic, considering the limited size on messages) has been more or less the opposite of that.

I don't get why they had such a low limit on the servers, either. One of my friends started playing it recently (they gave us a couple free copies at work), and stopped after a couple of months because he said that there was simply no one playing on his server - it was ridiculously underpopulated and it made it hard to really do much of anything.

On the servers I play in there are usually about 10-20 other people on the same planet as me. Sometimes as low as 5 though.

Originally posted by Nephthys
Personally I blame the overabundance of servers. Bioware WAAAY overestimated how many people would be playing and theres just way too many servers with not many people in. And since it takes a reasonably long time to level and the Legacy system encourages you to creat all your characters on the same server, switching to a more populated server isn't something you want to do. This makes it really hard to find other people interested in grouping, PvPing, doing Flashpoints etc, since everyones so spread out. They really fvcked up there and need to merge the servers fast.

Of course, I don't actually care about how populated it is, I just want to play through the story and the game. But one of their patches much have pushed the game beyond my laptops ability to cope. I was playing fine until a month ago. Unless they make it free to play or patch it so I can play again I'm probably going to cancel my subscription since theres no point paying for a game I can't play.

buy a cooling tray?

--

My server are usually decently populated, and i've usually had not much problem finding people to group with. That said, when i started the game i did pick one of the servers with the best traffic.

I'd just like to say that I really loved ToR, however I've not been playing since my free month was up. If they fix the subscription to be per game hours and not unlimited play for a month (why don't any MMOs have their fee in this manner?) I'll definitely return, or if they remove the fee completely.

It's interesting how many people are legitimately gunning for, and relishing, this game's death.

Originally posted by RE: Blaxican
It's interesting how many people are legitimately gunning for, and relishing, this game's death.

Bitter people are bitter.

Not much to be bitter about, really, it's legit not a very good game.

As you've been telling us for a few years. 😛

Actually, I haven't. I was pretty excited about it at first, for a long time. And then info revealed on it started pointing more and more at "generic WoW ripoff", and my excitement faded pretty quickly 😛

O RLY? Lets check the first page of the thread:

Originally posted by Peach
Same. Though generally, having KOTOR, MMO, or Bioware anywhere in a sentence causes me to lose interest.

No, but seriously, I don't mean to accuse you of anything.

But I'm not sure the game is dying yet. Its still got 1.3 million subscriptions. Which makes it about the third biggest MMO out according to this chart I just looked up 5 seconds ago (along with its pair). And Runescape doesn't count anyway so its really the second.

Originally posted by Peach
Not much to be bitter about, really, it's legit not a very good game.

It's a good game, though, imo.

And going by the reactions of the people on the forums, some really are very bitter for the most stupid reasons.

Originally posted by Nephthys
O RLY? Lets check the first page of the thread:

No, but seriously, I don't mean to accuse you of anything.

But I'm not sure the game is dying yet. Its still got 1.3 million subscriptions. Which makes it about the third biggest MMO out according to this chart I just looked up 5 seconds ago (along with its pair). And Runescape doesn't count anyway so its really the second.

Oh, the game's not dying. MMOs doing much worse can drag on for a long time so long as they are in six figures, so TOR will have to continue a downward slide for much longer before it can be called dying. Warhammer Online has clung onto life despite its dramatic fall from a good start.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the next subscriber count closer to a million. That's a heavy count from an objective measure, though TOR is a bit of a special case due to high start up and running costs. The EA bigwigs said that they needed half a million subs to be profitable at all and a million before they'd be happy on the return on the investment. The recent layoffs are very likely to be cost cutting so that they an keep that edge on a lower subscriber base as the numbers edge downwards.

I thought the game was alright- just not worth a monthly fee. If they free-to-play it, I'm in, even if I need to buy a boxed copy. The momentum of MMOs now is towards free-to-play. There is this feeling that WoW style subscription games are no longer financially sustainable. Certainly nothing is going to be like WoW again in the foreseeable future.

Originally posted by -Pr-
It's a good game, though, imo.

And going by the reactions of the people on the forums, some really are very bitter for the most stupid reasons.

Bitter would be if someone bought the game and discovered the hard way what it's like 😛

And no, it really isn't. It's about as generic as you can get. Which, well, is rather BioWare's thing, so I'm not surprised, but seriously, they were claiming to be all innovative with their game and it's just the same generic WoW-style MMO that has been done a billion times over, and has been proving that is no longer a sustainable style of game.

Originally posted by Nephthys
O RLY? Lets check the first page of the thread:

No, but seriously, I don't mean to accuse you of anything.

But I'm not sure the game is dying yet. Its still got 1.3 million subscriptions. Which makes it about the third biggest MMO out according to this chart I just looked up 5 seconds ago (along with its pair). And Runescape doesn't count anyway so its really the second.

Aion, the one right below it, went completely free to play recently.

Also, man, look at the dip in WoW lately...

I really want to know whats up with that 5 million drop and surge from WoW East back in 09.

Originally posted by Peach
Bitter would be if someone bought the game and discovered the hard way what it's like 😛

And no, it really isn't. It's about as generic as you can get. Which, well, is rather BioWare's thing, so I'm not surprised, but seriously, they were claiming to be all innovative with their game and it's just the same generic WoW-style MMO that has been done a billion times over, and has been proving that is no longer a sustainable style of game.

obviously i don't agree, though more about your digs at bioware (generic, really? dragon age and mass affect laugh at that statement) than your comments about the game, but even on that note, you speak about it being generic as if that's inherently bad.

just because something has been done before doesn't make it automatically bad.

Originally posted by -Pr-
(generic, really? dragon age and mass affect laugh at that statement)

Dont forget the kotor and darth bane series.

Originally posted by Nephthys
I really want to know whats up with that 5 million drop and surge from WoW East back in 09.

Yes, that's always been an oddity.

Trying to get an actual accurate WoW subscriber count is a nightmare because the whole system of paying and playing out in a lot of the Asian market is completely different to our own. It's often suggested that this inflates the actual count- though they could be off by millions and still be a clear number 1.

It really is a unique phenomenon. If it dips now, can that even really be seen as any sort of failing? It's been an utterly dominant number 1 for so long. The question is why didn't it start dropping years ago? It just defies expectations. Nothing will kill it. One day the phenomenon will finally die off, and I don't think anything will replace it. It will be a very different market.

Originally posted by -Pr-
obviously i don't agree, though more about your digs at bioware (generic, really? dragon age and mass affect laugh at that statement) than your comments about the game, but even on that note, you speak about it being generic as if that's inherently bad.

just because something has been done before doesn't make it automatically bad.

Dragon Age and Mass Effect are generic, though. Dragon Age especially - there's literally nothing about it (either of them) that sets it apart from any other standard fantasy/sci-fi story.

And when they go on about making a brand new game (at one point they refered to SWTOR as the most innovative MMO ever)...yeah, it is a bad thing.