Since we're on the Goldman thing, let's maybe try a different though not-so-unique approach ... one of venture due diligence. Quote all the theorums you want but start-ups are valued on their vision, their potential market presence, their management teams, and whether or not thay have or will have the infrastructure to capitalize on that vision.

Saying SWTOR is an MMO is like saying a field of law is a field of law. Don't ever tell that to the Intellectual Property sector because their field is so specialized that global commerce wars erupt in the name of national proprietary interest protection when they don't do their jobs.

For most the idea is to fill a niche. For the truly bold the idea is to create their own. BW is doing just that by making an MMO play as intuitively and as straightforward as a single player game. The fact that they've blurred that line bodes well for their outlook, and they didn't need 7 years to do it.

Uniquely qualified and capable teams and infrastucture are already in place for measurable success to occur. When left to do it their way, Bioware has a stout track record. And I don't think anyone can argue what Lucas Valley Ranch brings to the table. The real question is this ... is the industry ready for a predominantly story-driven sci-fi fantasy MMO where players make hard decisions at every step that affect not only them but the players they are grouped with?

People, infrastructure, quality, credibility, positioning and a defined upgrade path are all keys to start-up success. But no aspect of growth is more important than adhering to core competencies so the message isn't diluted by outside influence. In layman's terms it's called sticking to your guns. Both Bioware and Lucas industries have plenty enough horsepower and vision - combined with a large enough core customer base - to project both success and growth for their "baby."

goldman analyst? :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

One his analysis is based on some faulty and flawed logic, ignores other factors, etc.

 

Have a hard time believing someone supposedly a "Goldman" analyst would make so many mistakes.

The OP still isn't clear on they're, their, and there. He doesn't know what "monetize" means.

Are you seriously going to tell me that any analyst is going to consider the ease of acquiring white/purple crystals in any sort of serious analysis? This is a troll post that was written by an avid gamer who also happens to be a first-year business student, at best. Has the OP ever even responded to anything in this thread?

Long OP

Your company missed the housing bubble, the dot com collapse, and contributed to the sub-prime lending fiasco. Your company can't manage its own specialty but you want to write about MMOs now.

Good on ya.

The OP still isn't clear on they're, their, and there. He doesn't know what "monetize" means.

 

Are you seriously going to tell me that any analyst is going to consider the ease of acquiring white/purple crystals in any sort of serious analysis? This is a troll post that was written by an avid gamer who also happens to be a first-year business student, at best. Has the OP ever even responded to anything in this thread?

 

Nice snip, and respond, ignoring this:

And if he is actually a "Goldman" analyst, thanks for screwing over the tax payers.

 

 

My bet, he's another of the mansion, 5 car garage types.

Which makes it pretty clear I don't think he is one, and is just a troll.

Game Development is not an easy job... You start up a project, and at some point you have to make a decision that the product is ready to put out on the market. (just read the history of Duke Nuke'em Forever)

You can get yourself into a terrible cycle of "perfection", just trying to keep up with the latest thing can set your release dates back and your budget costs rising.

That being said, no MMO is going to be perfect for everyone. Sure the developers know that there is going to be those hard core gamers that will blow thru the game in no time, but they have to set a limit if they are going to release something.

think of all the hard work everyone did to bring you this level of content, and you blew thru it like it wasn't there.

As for the OP... How can you be a decent investment annalist if you got the time to powergame yourself to the level you are right now?

He works for Goldman, I think they just sell you on what ever gets them the most commission, so there isn't any real research going on.

Greetings,

 

Before I start …

 

1) I am level 50 (Jedi Knight / Sentinel)

 

2) I have PvP'd to Valor rank 38

 

3) I have my professions maxed, all datacrons found and most quests in game completed

 

With that said …

 

We all know this game has many bugs and many things that feel / seem unpolished and unfinished. Conversely, what seems unfinished to one person might seem perfectly fine to another (Hardcore vs Casual perspective as one example of contrast.)

 

My post is about the universal functionality that causes most Western market MMO's to fail. I make a great salary predicting this, as most games are initially supported by VC funds, PE funds and other sources of investment, all of which I consult and broker.

 

I have a great track record dating back to World of Warcraft (for successful bets,) predicted the demise of Vanguard, Aion, FF14 and Warhammer. (For advising not to invest.) Some of the reasons were, of course, Western gamers “dislike” grinds and Eastern specific functionality inherent in Korean and Japanese titles attempting to monetize Western markets. That which is commonplace in the East is moderately tolerable in the West, but ultimately rejected, when it comes to certain aspects of the gaming culture.

 

That aside …

 

As an investor, I look at 3 metrics (in MMO's and MOBA genre titles.)

 

1: Audience

 

2: Market Share

 

3: Long term sustainability (after initial growth.)

 

Audience: When you lease an automobile, you either return to the dealer 12-36 months later to buy or lease again (or go elsewhere,) this is called "lease loyalty" and is often identified with the Brand, salesperson or financial constraint. The connotations of the first two are positive in nature, the second, neutral and not applicable to this discussion. Companies such as Blizzard (for example) are successful because they "know how to talk to the people." They have an audience and cater to that audience.

 

What Bioware failed to do was capitalize on there audience and relied on Brand recognition (which is questionable.) This was countered by the negative association of the Electronic Arts brand and clustered by the involvement of Lucas Arts. (a too many Chiefs and not enough Indians syndrome.)

 

So what was left in this wake were Star Wars fans, KOTOR fans, and people curious to start a new game (MMO) from the on start. Unfortunately, most of these "New" players have played Polished MMO's, and have come from other titles to give this one a chance.

 

Like the test drive, if you have the money, you need to be sold from the start. (And most have the money to purchase multiple games and pay the subscription for the one they ultimately settle on.) The salesperson, the test drive ... it all needs to make that first impression, or for the most part, people will return to what they know and like, and reject the new endeavor for reasons such as those found all over the SWTOR forums and this post.

 

We were sold on Star Wars, but the test drive (and lets be honest) is lackluster at best. The audience has spoken on the Forums – about things we dislike and want changed immediately. (Would you settle on a car that had a bad test drive if you could afford something better?) Bioware runs into two problems here

 

1: Engineer talent (are they talented and efficient enough to overhaul and change what’s needed to be changed?)

 

2: Budget (Are enough funds committed to make the changes happen, or are they hedging there losses and preparing for the worst case scenario already?)

 

I suspect it is a bit of both, I advised all my clients to divest of anything to do with EA and Bioware for this vary reason. They needed to attract more talent from the star, BETA test at least another 5-6 months. They should have overstaffed to deal with forum moderation, customer service and bug stomping, among other issues.

 

These issues, listed above, are only the tip of the iceberg; there are some major flaws in this game that are causing droves of customers to leave.

 

Some of them, but not limited to …

 

Combat: In both PVP and PVE, the non fluid ability delay is game breaking in design. It’s workable albeit annoying and needs to be changed. The game will not be successful long term in its current state. The lack of auto attack is one thing, but the ability delay is too much to swallow.

 

Grind: At 50, HM's, PVP ect all become long grinds ... this will cause some to stop playing or eventually lose interest, not due to the grind, but thru faction imbalance, class imbalance and gear disparity in warzones that get boring fairly quickly. (The same maps can be fun if the issues states are resolved, which all link to root and main caused, such as slow combat.) This issue is further compounded by non 50’s facing 50’s in WZ’s.

 

Lack of Community: No server forums, sharding and lag in non-sharded areas ... well, this is a problem … a very huge problem. Community is a huge part of any MMO, the excuse of (“we cannot moderate separate server forums” and “we don’t want to build community on the forums,” is a load of BS, and as an investor question the companies availably of resources, fund and confidence in product.)

 

Lack of Customer support and service: Auto Droid ticket response after 3-4 days is unacceptable. Not being able to speak to a GM, a human being or call into the call center is very problematic, and brings for the concerns of the previous item.

 

Ambiguity: What abilities do, lack of metrics and logs to analyze what occurs in game, no visibility on the future outside secretive of the cuff comments made by some developers ... sorry, learn to talk to the people please, the current state in this respect again, is not acceptable in today’s MMO market.

 

Questions?

 

How do we get white and purple crystal fragments? Are they in game? Do we need to reverse engineer for them? Questions like these should have answers, even if the answer is "sorry, they are not implemented in game yet."

 

End game Ops bugged, Heroic FP's (some encounters) overturned for 2 weeks now - this is unacceptable, sorry. These are the initial OPS, not newly implemented expansions or patches. No excuse.

 

I could go on about the negative niche and non universal things, but that becomes somewhat ideological in essence. The point here is that, this game has potential that is being squandered daily, and people are responding by leaving the game. Most will not return, and this is proven by 10 years of MMO's failing and the habitual patterns of the market / MMO audience, which is about 24-28 million world over.

 

On a personal note; I am willing to give the game a chance, I am staying to see / hope they make these changes and improvements.

 

On a professional note: The damage has already been done, and the chance to monetize on this game / company is long gone.

 

I think Bioware knows this, and it wouldn’t be justified by a company / business to allocate funds to a project that doesn’t have long term growth and sustainability.

 

WOW grew to 11 million. It started at much less. Aion started with 3.5 million, shrunk to under 350k. SWTOR 4-5 million, and is shrinking daily. This shift alone is problematic and often spells doom and gloom for an MMO title. (Just something else to also keep in mind.)

 

The number of subs that are required to sustain this title and the number of subs required to allocate funds for further development is unknown. I assume they will make a profit, but at the cost of quality in customer service and support, delaying game changes and fixes and also delays in other areas.

 

This wasn't as "bad" a launch as many other titles that have been released, but they didn’t get it right either. There are plenty of other options for current customers and even more on the horizon. I hope other companions look at what happened with this game and learn from the errors. Bioware needs to stick to games they do reasonably well, such as Dragon Age. This game would have been better if they consulted with Aion's engine / combat team and hired some folks from Blizzard or other like companies. The current talent pool and experience level of key people it seems is lacking, and the management team pushed the game in a direction that many dislike.

 

If Bioware decides to make another MMO, I hope they base it off ME or DA. If they think they can save the game, then they need to allocate the funds, take the game off line for 1-2 months and relaunch it. Otherwise, we all need to learn to enjoy mediocrity and a game that might have been.

 

Good day and see you all later.

 

Sinius

Very good post Sinius I understand where you're coming from having a Masters in Information Systems Management/Info Sec. A simple solution to their problem, in which they can salvage this debacle, would be to give their base players 1-2 months F2P while they fix all of their problems. Since these, more likely than not - and they would be fools to do otherwise from an IT point of view, are all virtualized servers, they need to just work on one server and fix the majority of the problems - of course sending out the necessary patches over time. When the "fix" is made, take the servers offline and and re-image the rest of the servers with the fixed version - since these work on snapshots only and then power them back up. This is done when there is some type of virtualized server failure - it's just re-imaged and back up again in no time. As to whethor or not they will do this is anyone's guess. It would be a real shame if this game went totally in the toilet as it's fun and a nice alternative to Rift and WoW - not saying that those are bad games, played them both I have, but variety is a good thing

Greetings,

 

 

The number of subs that are required to sustain this title and the number of subs required to allocate funds for further development is unknown. I assume they will make a profit, but at the cost of quality in customer service and support, delaying game changes and fixes and also delays in other areas.

 

This is my favorite part. In a round about way he says he doesn't know what their overhead is, their EBITA numbers, and what their projected revenue is... but he then "assumes" they'll make a profit.

Analysts don't "assume" anything. I'm an analyst. I'm no economist but I'm a data analyst. Assumptions are best left to fortune tellers and op-ed columnists. Analysts take raw data (otherwise known as facts) and analyze the data in order to give it meaning. For example, using historical data, it's fairly easy to get a restaurant's daily average intake by analyzing how many pizzas they sold and extrapolating that out per the average cost of their pizza. That would give enough data to make an informed estimate (a projection). You could of course itemize their POS machine and have it give you the exact totals of the number of pizzas, the types, and sizes... then compare that to a price chart for an exact figure and cross-reference it with the POS' daily sales report it generates and test for accuracy.

But here, you listed two unknowns then made a declaration without having any evidence for or against. This is called conjecture. The position can't be proven true or false without data. Data does not exist therefore an analyst can not make a projection without having any data to analyze.

Hai guys, I'm Barrack Obama. I say we tax all the people who exploited slicing to make millions of credits and invest that in the Intergalactic Bank of Commerce. We can use that money to provide free healthcare at all medical droids for characters level 30 and under.

 

See I can make **** up to.

ROFLMMFAO - I almost fell out of my chair here at work...

If the OP works for an investment bank outside of a High School treasury then I am the Pope.

OMG THE POPE... can I, just for a second, try out wearing your cool hat?

As for the OP... How can you be a decent investment annalist if you got the time to powergame yourself to the level you are right now?

OP,

 

If you truly are an investment analyst, I would just like you to know that if I received anything as poorly constructed, punctuated, spelled, and presented as your post, I would shred it, send it back to your superiors, and promptly ignore everything you had said.

 

You sound like a gamer who is using big words to try and justify your complaints about the game. You all but take credit for the demise of several games by advising against investing in their parent companies. When you do get down to your issues with the game, the arguments you present, which occasionally flirt with the edges of accuracy, scream little more than what is demanded daily in the forums by spoiled players who want their cake, their oompa loompas, and their free epic gear.

 

I agree the game is not perfect, but continually holding it up to World of Warcraft is comparing apples to oranges, or at least oranges to tangerines. WoW is a seven year old game that has grown, changed, and to many players, declined to the end of its viable lifespan. It now exists only to cater to the long-term players who in many cases only continue out of habit and the desperate hope that maybe the game will get better down the road. The only thing Blizzard has truly achieved is learning how to keep giving out just enough rewards so that the average player is satisfied, but adding new content frequently enough where last week's rewards just aren't good enough, so the player has to keep paying for newer and shinier gear. They keep dangling "soon" and "in development" in front of hopeful players who have lowered their expectations but keep their optimism that maybe it will finally improve.

 

SWtoR is not WoW. It never claimed nor tried to be. WoW is all about the destination. Get to the end. Raid. Get epics and achievements. PvP for better gear and then do it all again next season/expansion/patch. SWtoR has said from the beginning that it is about the journey, the story, and a different experience. Fully voiced NPCs, a story that places you in the heart of the campaign, and immersion into a world that feels like Star Wars without having to rely on previously established characters and events from the movies. WoW simply substitutes pop culture references for originality.

 

Expecting SWtoR to be everything to all players is unrealistic, especially as we are still within the first month since the game launched.

My thoughts exactly! This guy has the grammar of a freshman in H.S. and no where near the vocabulary and sentence structure of someone in a higher level business setting. His writing skills are pure **** which was a clear indicator that the OP was lying through his teeth.

My thoughts exactly! This guy has the grammar of a freshman in H.S. and no where near the vocabulary and sentence structure of someone in a higher level business setting. His writing skills are pure **** which was a clear indicator that the OP was lying through his teeth.

My thoughts exactly! This guy has the grammar of a freshman in H.S. and no where near the vocabulary and sentence structure of someone in a higher level business setting. His writing skills are pure **** which was a clear indicator that the OP was lying through his teeth.

But do we REALLY expect someone who posts on the forums to use the high formal language? Maybe, perhaps, could be he does work there - I don't know, I haven't seen his credentials but he IS posting here and posting using the vulgar so using a linguistic proof doesn't really proof your theorem. Just saying... And besides, when I have to write for my peers, IT sec stuff, or if I'm writing in an academic setting, I use the appropriate language for the setting required.

this is a forum. free style writing is accepted here. ppl, lol, lmao, blah, blah, blah - accepted forms - academia - no way

Great and well written post. Hats of to you sir!

I do wish you would have placed it on Reddit as well though. A much better community there.

The only people I see here are only complaining.

His analysis of the current state of the SW:TOR union is quite accurate, although I think his error was the lack of extra perspective.

In his defense, I will say that MMOs succeed on momentum and I would say it's an exponential thing, very much like viral marketing.

It does take the perfect mix of platform and community to make a successful MMO, but with that said, in BioWare/EA's defense, the necessity to deploy and open up their environment to the public was truly second to none, and I think one of the posters mentioned that closing down the game for two months would've been the DEATH of this game.

I agree, and maybe the game was released because BioWare couldn't continue developing behind the scenes with a closed beta community. As we say in the IT business "it goes into production". Developing like that without generating income means you're operating on a marginal dead weight loss (it has be ... without an income, they're just tossing money of the table).

My friend, who isn't as tenured as I am when it comes to MMOs understands one thing... this game is in it's INFANCY. The first set of quarters WILL ALWAYS BE LIKE AN EXTENDED BETA.

This is the stage that the game is in, guys. We're really just funding further development. We continue comparing this to other more refined games, but THEYVE BEEN UNDER DEVELOPMENT FOR SO LONG NOW and all the kinks have been worked out.

Some problems won't come to light until the product has been released, and once again, this is exactly where we are at. You people need to calm the f*** down, they are having major problems with little experience in the MMO market. You should be zealous with your posts and express exactly how you feel, but you need to give these people time to respond, breathe, whatever.

BioWare/EA, there are some major issues you guys DO need to address... dysfunctional and buggy original content (LIKE NOT BEING ABLE TO ENTER A FLASHPOINT)... that's some serious bull***t. FIX THIS. <<< You will be empty handed unless you fix something that MATTERS.

This is really important because it punishes players for coordination instead of providing them with an experience (and much less a instant reward). When it happened to me, I wanted to delete the game, it was THAT frustrating.

Who cares if the textures are ugly or the voice overs are mishappening? WHO CARES? FIX THE STUFF THAT MATTERS.

I think you guys have a couple more weeks to dawdle around and figure out the ropes, but after that it's going to get serious and you're going to have a dead game on your hands. It's a crappy game, but sometimes that doesn't matter. You've gone to far lengths to "cover that" cosmetically with a good story and voice overs,

BUT VOICE OVERS AND STORY NEVER SOLD AN MMO!

let me Re-iterate. VOICE OVERS AND STORY NEVER SOLD AN MMO. The Story is cool, but ITS AN MMO. You've got great backbone, now make this game BETTER!

MORE GAME, less story. Half of the people who are going to continue paying for the game in the long run... they skip the story. Read it and weep, guys. STOP SQUANDERING precious development funds on voice overs!!! GIVE US A game and then refine the rest of it.

PS: The lack of auto-attack was also a red flag for me.

if you were a investor would you invest in this game?

No. But I would not short ERTS on the basis of it either.

If he was that smart, he would have made his own mmo and gotten rich.

Actually if he was so smart he would trade his own account and got rich rather, than jobbing for goldys for an analysts pay.

Still a much better post than the majority.

So, OP, thanks for the investment advice. Since we didn't sign any sort of agreement, and you didn't issue any sort of disclaimer, then if your advice is bad I can sue you, right?

Am I really supposed to believe you work for Goldman? Lloyd Blankfein would have your *** for breakfast if he saw you spewing crap on a game forum while telling everybody that you're a Goldman Sachs expert.

What a maroon.

Hey Everyone,

Thank you for your feedback! We always appreciate both positive and negative feedback as long as it is constructive.

We will be closing this thread in the interest of keeping the forums consolidated and tidy. Please feel free to continue the discussion and post your constructive suggestions in the Suggestions Compilation thread.

Thank you for your understanding.