State of the Game thread

this means that less of the F2P crowd will stay on our server. The f2p crowd will test the NA servers once they realize we have a problem (not as big as some might think, but still bad).

What's everyones thoughts?

I personally don't see free to play as the saviour of our population concerns on the server. It will if anything increase the less desirable elements on our server such as trolling, spam and an introduction of a player base who have a minor investment in the game as a community. We will have the return of some older player and this will be nice but without operations and pvp being freely available the "massive" side of the mmo genre will not be present in the major aspects of the game. So in summary we will get a population spike but not a solution.

However if we develop a strong community then engaging content will be available for all those who wish to be apart of that community.

Numbers and money is all I see as far as F2P is concerned. If anything -- it makes it easier for current players to want to leave -- because the idea of leaving, unsubscribing and still being able to login when you're feeling nostalgic is dangerously tempting. Anyone who's made a few alts and gotten them to 50 will still find that the only thing keeping them around is the (I should say, their) community and the endgame content. I don't meet many people who like levelling for the sake of levelling anymore... and the ones I know who have likely came to the same sentiment as the rest of us; it loses its shine.

(... seriously, for my first 3 characters I refused to move on to the next world until I've collected every datacron and finished every mission -- you get lots of pugs doing so, too... but on my 4th character, I cringed when I did anything that wasn't my class quest.)

Edit: Think of it like this. It's like that girlfriend/boyfriend that you have a 5 year on/off relationship with -- you get together, you break up, you get together again, you fight and decide to chill then get hot then break up again and... I think you know where I'm going. Basically it's long and painful but isn't going anywhere. Am I saying that's what it's going to be like? Not necessarily, but it in all likelihood will encourage it -- and that sort of behavior tends to "mess with the statistics"; as in, for the sake of our population issues, "x amount of people were actively doing operations this month" where x will be high when such people feel like it. That's just F2P in a nutshell. Basically, the "indecision" and "lack of communication" is what drove ALOT of people away -- but it's the community that pulled them back in. So at the end of the day it depends on how the community holds itself -- and thankfully, our server is largely united so on that front credit goes less to the higher ups and more to us.

But it's how the server reacts DESPITE the unity -- right now I'm glad that for us, we're enjoying the game again because as a server we're all communicating and things are getting organized. We've had rough patches as far as inter-guild interaction goes, but that's normal. But one of the Ops progression teams was essentially gutted due to recent events, which won't be discussed, but from the perspective of "It's not worth it anymore", they hadn't cleared HM TFB yet -- had done HM EC and yet that progression wasn't appealing enough to keep them around. Again, community has a large part to play and that's admittedly got me extremely discouraged -- despite the fact that it doesn't affect me or my group's progression at all (hell, we're not even in the same faction).

How does F2P factor in here? Well, content and customer service... the community is small (tiny, even) and despite the huge amount of requests and recommendations and stuff, when you're on a healthy server a community that stinks (either because you smell or they do) usually means you can go to another and start over -- we don't have that option so those that don't get in on the crowd get put out and alienated which feeds their dissatisfaction and eventually facilitates an unsub or reroll... both of which is basically a leave and doesn't help things. As far as customer service goes... well, it's about time we got some communication concerning Oceanic servers -- a few have left since the last mention of Oceanic populations purely from the lack of communication... basically, talk to us more and give us some love (we're insecure and everyone could probably need a hug).

As for content... that's a funny thing. Yes, you have to keep it coming to keep players engaged... how well they live up to "something new every 6 weeks" is going to be something we'll all very eagerly watch. But HOW those things are delivered can put people off... I personally hate the fact that they made flashpoints and operations easier. Never mind that they also made getting black hole comms easier to get... which to be fair, I completely understand -- you don't want players stuck on old content particularly when they're making an alt and can't get it higher enough to catch up with their main so that they could replace whatever spot on an Op, BUT there might have been other ways to achieve the same desired effect (Bound of Legacy tokens I'm sure was suggested at some point or global comms so you can share your columi commendations across your entire legacy). Moving along those lines, the newest thing needs to stay difficult -- there has to be a challenge. I find it highly amusing that SM TFB was cleared up to the third boss within the second hour of 1.4 hitting our server... and this was what? 1-3 am? Yeah. Challenge. It also goes without saying that when they say something new every 6 weeks, that it had better not just mean a new HAT on the Cartel Market... and speaking of the Cartel Market, thankfully it's not a "pay 2 win" from what they've shown us. Yay.

Population: I agree with you. Once they see the population issue here, there's nothing keeping them from swiftly moving. What keeps most of us here, I'm sure, is the feeling of obligation from having been here for so long. It's bad enough that people have already moved to the other servers -- some to Dalborra, others to the US servers. The APAC servers are really only ideal for Aussie players and NZ players... for the rest of Asia the latency can be a bit funny and sometimes is slightly better on American servers. Hell, I'll be honest.. my latency over there was <200ms, which is completely playable and the ONLY time I would have noticed the lag is when someone jumped at me in huttball, me using my knockback and pushing him over the line instead of away from it. Not even in PVE did I miss an interrupt. Point? Population problem. Rolling on our server -- on any APAC server is a hard sell when you look at the upsides compared to the American ones.

... lol. Wall of text. Apologies, alcohol still filtering through from last night's PVP drinking games.

Free to play is not a solution, not with the current restrictions on F2P accounts, come on Bioware.. you seriously think giving us more players on restricted accounts is going to solve our problems?

No, its not, those restrictions will create a division in the community of those that subscribe, those that F2P and pay to do the higher content on and off again basis and those that are just pure F2P.

What we need is more dedicated and subscribed players, people who want to join progression ops, ranked wz's, a large chunk of our servers population is missing out on this content simply because of numbers. I feel Nova's pain, as the founder of the new effort to get people into harder content (Hard CoR progression ops) the past 2 weeks I have struggled getting people to make up balanced and capable teams. Not because noone is interested but simply the lack of population means we have very little variety. Not just that but if one person can't make it or dosen't turn up then one of the 3 teams is screwed.

How is that going to be fixed by F2P? Honestly I'd have to think hard about relying on someone who often isn't able to do ops on a regular basis because his/her account is seriously restricted. 'Sorry, gonna have to skip the ops starting in 10 minutes because my credit card got declined' pfft.

If your serious about helping APAC servers then make the restrictions less hard Bioware, we don't NEED restricted players, we need players that will be able to make the same contributions to the server as the subscribers.

We're doing our part, Visz Alliance, Dawn, CoR, Sun Guard, all the major guilds on the Gav are jumping in to try and bolster moral and get stuff happening, how about helping us out a bit? I really suggest one of your developers go read the Gav Daragon forums http://gav-daragon.enjin.com/home and see the effort your dedicated subscribers are putting in to make sure Gav dosen't die, then get back to us.