Who Swtor was made for.

Me too. I am the target market.

Citation, please?

Because I personally believe that there are a LOT more casual gamers out there than hardcore.

It's the Pareto principle in action; if 90% of your money comes from casual players, focus 90% of your effort on keeping them happy.

I would be very, very, very interested in AUTHENTIC statistics on "hardcore vs casual" market size.

Except if the figure is actually 300 million then that is terrible management. They could have, and should have more styles to satisfy in an MMO. They do offer some varying content, but when ever I hear 150 million, or whatever, and especially now 300 million and now there is only 3 warzones, a broken open world pvp and several years to do it all...then how can you say it is not terrible management?

They dont know how to make MMOs, since their excuse from the beginning for why illum did not work out is because they were not planning for open world pvp. How can they not prepare for open world pvp in an MMO, that is called star wars, with two opposing factions?

I think the honest answer is... the engine is giving them a hard time. Notice how they said before they had chat bubbles but then removed it because they could not optimize it. So basically they did not have enough 'time' to optimize the engine for open world. Either because it is bad management and they tried to do it in a decent time frame but with a terrible engine, or they dont have great developers... the best in the world as they claim.

300 million, several years, and they call this well managed development for pvp?

We'll take your word for it as the obvious expert on turds.

In other words, I like this game, I'm sorry you are so bitter about it.

Well, duh. Your original claim was that there is no hardcore MMORPG out there - and now you're stating the opposite.

Try making up your mind?

I'm not comparing hardcore populations to casuals, nor am I claiming that they outnumber casuals. That said, they are a substantial market, and the value of that market is considerable as a result.

It would appear to me that WoW kept his attention for the better part of 7 years. Obviously, that would seem to indicate that the level of content, the speed at which he consumed it, and the frequency of the new content was sufficient...

That's a long time for one game, don't you think?

Apparently, SW doesn't have the same draw, staying power, etc... that he described. It isn't built for his style of play. Has nothing to do with sleep deprivation.

I agree with the OP that the current state of SWTOR is NOT targeted at the small percentage minority of players that are looking for very difficult challenges that require coordinated groups spending lots of time working together to overcome.

I find the idea that the content that has been released as 'hard' or 'nightmare' is tuned for this demographic to be laughable. It isn't hard, nor a challenge for players that have grown up on MMOs and have completed the most difficult content in the most difficult games.

It is instead designed for the average gamer, and the average gamer has been very successful against this content.

Which isn't to say it is a bad game or a game I don't find entertaining, but rather like the OP, I understand this isn't where I'm going to go for really difficult raiding content.

And while releasing the game with everything tuned for the average masses makes good business sense, I feel the designers have set themselves up for a very bumpy ride the next couple of patches.

Many players who wanted this to be their new hard raiding game have moved on, and it isn't clear they will come back. Meanwhile the average players have been able to complete content labeled 'hard' and 'nightmare' and feel that this is their game.

So what happens when the designers start making 'hard mode' actually hard and 'nightmare mode' something that only the most dedicated players in organized guilds can complete?

Will they be able to get the players who wanted this level of challenge come back to consume the new 'hard' and 'nightmare' content?

Will the players who have completed 'hard' and 'nightmare' when it was easy continue to have success, or will they get frustrated with the difficulty?

And for a preview of this, just look at the posts whining about the healing nerfs and medpack changes coming in 1.2, and this is before anyone gets a chance to see if the new content is more difficult than current content.

Heck many of the post already have some variant of 'I am a hard / nightmare raider and with these changes the content will be impossible'.

I don't envy the balancing act the developers will have to perform to keep from alienating various segments of the games population as they move forward.

In fact, if I were them I'd just focus on several broad segments and not try to please everyone, especially the small niches.

Those numbers are from single player games. So they look at single player games and the huge multi million demand and make the same quality of a single player game, and then take from something a lot of people consider the standard, WoW, and take from that.

single player quality + WoW = swtor

Not necessarily a bad thing, especially lvling up. But you know... we should have a bit more pvp content in the game, or at least open world with questing that helps with that with the lvling. The fact that it is so isolated is not reassuring that they want to have a real pvp atmosphere in their game other than warzones... or illum, a large 'open world' warzone.

I think open world means that you can run into players questing areas, or cities... so how is that possible on illum with objectives for pvp isolated away from questing? Its basically a large warzone....

In the end being hardcore does not necessarily mean you got a better game.
Making content impossibly hard is easy but making good content is not.
I believe that as the game grows we'll get harder content but what I
don't want and what I'm really tired of from other games is to get the impossible
"have to grind and raid for years" stuff.