The end of the arguement. Is SWTOR in decline? Can it be saved?

Perhaps it was a tad sweeping, yes, I'll give you that.

My point was that the option to pay Blizzard for a transfer to a hub server so that you can continue your career in a saturated environment has been heavily leveraged by the player base. I know guys who have dropped hundreds of bucks on transfers, re-customization and faction changes.

Most people here would call that "money grubbing". It is. Blizzard doesn't care.

They're making money hand over fist thanks to servers that have built themselves up so much that anyone who wants to be someone will shell out to go there.

Genius when you think about it.

Why are all the BioWare crusaders and apologetists saying these sources are not reliable? We have confirmation from EA that they are indeed laying off 500 - 1,000 employees (to be expected, the EA PR machine has already spun this layoff as a "restructuring plan where we expect to recuperate the number of people being shifted around by the end of the year") and that poor performance for BF3 and SWTOR is reflected by the huge losses resulting from a huge investment on marketing strategies which are not returning a proper return on investment.

1.2 was not the resurgent patch that BW was looking for. This is obvious by the free month of gameplay to keep a hemorrhaging playerbase from dwindling even faster. You can ignore all of the complaints you want from all the people who are having a dismal gameplay experience on low populated servers and the innumerable number of players who are dissatisfied to the game but that would be turning a blind eye to very real issues facing this game in both the short-term and the long-term. Although the forums are probably frequented by a minority of the playerbase, there is still a sufficient number of players to draw a population sample from which would accurately predict the sentiments players are currently having and whether or not this indignation can be statistically projected to result in unsubscribing. Player complaints are not superficial either; they demand answers to very obvious issues.

Let's not forget that BioWare has to compete with Diablo 3 next month which is the behemoth to compete against for every single game developer this year -- add GW2 to this furious battle between game developers and SWTOR finds itself in an extremely competitive market.

Investors are not dumb. Within two weeks of the game's release, Brean Murray Carret & Co (a reputable investment banking firm) quickly "issued a note to investors on Thursday morning, slashing its price target on EA stock from $22 to $28. Analyst Todd Mitchell said he had “creeping concerns” over Star Wars: the Old Republic’s profitability." These investors did not re-issue another note even when the numbers for February were released. They know this game had too many issues when it came out and no amount of post-release patching was going to save it.

EA has already made its initial ROI on this game. But, internally, the management is obviously not happy with the subscription numbers (as expressed in the article linked by the OP) and seem extremely wary about the future health of this game. When the developers include a "preview pane" for the Legacy abilities to come out in 1.3, it's quite pathetic that they need to show players future updates to hopefully keep people playing for their subscriptions for the incoming new features.

IMO, the omission of Ranked WZs and a complete destruction of the finely crafted class balanced present pre-1.2 has damaged the game beyond repair.

Anyways, I'll be here until Wednesday. Then my subscription is over.

GW2 may technically be 'different,' but it's still getting the same treatment. It isn't going to be as good as you think it is, because no game can live up to expectations. No MMO has ever lived up to expectations since WoW, and WoW only managed to because at that time expectations were non-existent for MMOs.

The fact is that TOR is dying, even the press in the last few days have finally turned on TOR and are calling it what it is a bad game.

From the looks of things BioWare is going to be losing most of the Dev's here very soon, the player base is going to drop down come this week as people see 1.2 hasn't changed anything and has made everything worse. The plague was a bad idea and is upsetting most of the player base.

The death blow to TOR is coming as well, everyone I've talked to really wants to play Secret World. Guild Wars 2 is already being looked at as what will be one of the best games of the year. And Diablo 3 is well Diablo 3 we all know how well it will do.

So no nothing can save TOR, it's too little and too late to save it.

And now, because it has made such an impact, people have lofty expectations for it with every new content release. And so threads like this get made in the WoW forums too. Is this the end for WoW?!

This just in; we're all dying. Some more rapidly than others.

Update: EA corporate communications sent the following statement to Joystiq: “EA is growing and looking to hire hundreds of people for our digital, console, mobile and social games. Like all game companies, we make occasional adjustments to resize teams as projects are completed and new priorities are established. Overall, we expect that headcount will be up at the end of this year.”

Enough said.
Stop it with this Conspiracy theories.. People only laugh at you for it.
And Bf3 got back development cost and more... Don't believe everything you hear, or read unless it's coming from EA.

Just like everyother mmorpg, right?
I mean Aion has been dying since release, right? With over 2 - 3 million subs, yeah.


Tinfoil hat much ?

Exactly. GW2 is getting the build up, it'll have a short honeymoon then all the hate will start. This is what has become of mmo's and mmo players.

I remember this prediction in every MMO I have ever played

Never once have they ever been right, never.