From a Goldman Analyst Perspective on SWTOR

Well, ironically, my story is true since i can msg you bank name, then my facebook acc and you will see him in my friendlist. what makes me and OP different that i state from the start - this is my OPINION, it is not an ANALYSIS, a prediction, that i am not a jedi and cant be 100 percent sure but i SUPPOSE that he is not a real professional like he pretends he is, because, again, i've seen those. He acts more of a student or a recent graduee, but he is as far from being financial/marketing consultant in a company of Goldmans level as he ever can.

Ironically, my other friend is a real attorney and IRONICALLY he is one of a well known Russian social network marketing specialist, he has a b2b company that helps investors build startups and sell them after. Again, know how people on that level think, how do they work. its not like this.

Btw, i really do have a lot of friends from a broad selection of social levels. Performing musicians get a lot of people to know

and i know my english is sleepy in the morning, so - sorry.

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."

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.

Ohlen then went on to say that, while BioWare wants the game to be successful, the game has several plans that will make it profitable, no matter the number of subscribers it will manage to attract.

"There are different levels of success and we have all the different models built out," he explained to Gamasutra. "While we want to be super-successful, we also need to plan for not hitting all our targets. Can we then still be profitable? Yes, but it will take longer. While I can't give away exact numbers, I can say that we have plans for super success in the millions of subscribers... and then we have plans for if we have a much smaller subscriber base.”

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

Blizzard does not cater to their audience they cater to what can and will bring them back subscriptions. Do you know how many people are upset that they are bringing Pandaren into the game? Do you know how many people are pissed they keep catering to the casuals who just want free loot? Blizzard caters to what can bring them the most subs and the most money.



Sorry but if you are talking about a negative association of EA than Blizzard is in no beter boat with the IP bastardizing Activision. Activision has removed EA from the top of the hate category, because all they do is **** all IPs they come out with until nothing else can be milked from them than ditch them. While EA does this with their sports titles Activision is doing it with all their series.




The audience has "spoken" on the forums? You do realize that a small percentage of players post on the forums correct? There is a flaw in people will return to what they know and like and reject the new endeavor. While this is true there is also a time investment aspect to it. You put in 6-7 years with a character or a game it's going to be hard to just give up anyway. Not to mention even with some bugs in the game people will still play they can look over the bugs laugh about them and still have fun, don't believe me go ask Bethesda how they do it every game they release.



If you advised people to divest anything with EA and Bioware off of 1 game than I think you should go back to school. Big reason is Bioware is NOT one of those companies that can/will release a bad game than just close it's doors like less successful or big named companies. Even if the game fell flat on it's face both companies will still be ok while they may shed some talent they will both be ok. And considering the gaming industry growth is expected to and has done nothing but rise your clients would be idiots to do so.



You realize that even the beloved WoW was released with 0 Battlegrounds and has grown since than? When you reach the cap level at anything they ALL become grinds for Gear, Rep, ect. I agree with the non fluid ability but I believe that can and will be worked out. I do agree with no auto attack it's hard to be social when you can't stop hitting buttons for a second to talk to your guild, party, friends, ect. Faction imbalance isn't as much of a problem as people begin to try other classes and combo's. I don't mind the non tired battlegrounds however I wish there was some sort of MMR in the game that would balance it a little better.



The community is what the community makes of it. There are plenty of other sites with server forums up and such but even look at the Warcraft forums only a majority of the Guilds/Players post there, most of them have their own guild/clan pages and they communicate through there. Now let's talk about Customer support at least with the Auto Droid response. You realize that even on WoW (since this is what you're making most of your comparisons to) after every major content patch/expansion their usual response time is a week if not more and you usually get your response in an email or ingame mail.



Lack of metrics and logs I'm okay with for now because I don't want to be pushed into the cookie cutter classes that plague every MMO out there. Abilities are pretty straight forward as long as you read your tooltips so I'm not sure if that's what you actually meant by that. And I hope they do not allow addons and such that plague other games and leave people open to account hacking and such. Visibility on the future if pretty straight forward you just have to know where to look and right now why would they discuss anything other than patching up the problems that have arose from the launch? Cause then you'd have your customer base complaining they are looking forward to other things other than the problems they have at the moment?



And they explained this in the dev tracker at least for the magenta crystal. The problem is people are too lazy to actually look it up. Why should they come out right and tell people where to find them? Not to mention if you go to other sites (You know like people go to wowhead when looking for stuff) you can find the information you need. It just takes a few seconds of looking it's not the developers fault their base is lazy.

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.



The professional note shouldn't even be in there because you do realize that WoW only sold about 1 million in their first week where as SWTOR sold 1.68 million physical copies (No word from how much they sold on Origin) and the Devs actually came out and said they wouldn't need nearly the ammount of subs as Warcraft has to make it a healthy MMO. THis is actually what the game director said.





In closing you can call yourself a Goldman Sachs Analyst or not but you are coming at this post more as a consumer of the current game than an Analyst. I personally don't give a damn where you work but when you construe what you constitue as an "investor analyst" vs a consumer analyst then you're whole title is just thrown out. You realize that most of WoW's old dev team is in 2 spots. Working on Titan and they left for Trion while some still work for the WoW team. OH and as an Investment analyst look at the track record for taking a game offline and trying to relaunch it and tell me that is the way to go. Every game that has been taken down and relaunched has failed with the exception of APB which when they relaunched they had 3 million new users but even then the game is still lack luster.

Bodypull, I'd be more inclined to listen to your analysis/opinions if you grammar checked a bit more. People run into problems when there grammer is vary inconsistent as it bring into question there professionalism.

All of your points have no merit, and are not logical.

It's like you used propositional Calculus for dummies :-)

Try again :-)