Subs down 25%

Negative...this is for the quarter ended 31 Mar...which is before the release in 38 new countries....

http://www.swtor.com/info/news/news-article/20120426
26 Apr 2012

Nope. I was smart enough to reroll on a higher pop server as well. I rolled pub on Jedi Covenant and imp on Canderous Ordo. I had to leave behind several characters that I had invested time in to do so, but I did the smart thing and have been loving the game ever since. And neither server is clogged up or full of trolls. Not really sure where that comment comes from.

If I'm going to pay for the game, I'm going to be proactive and make my time played more entertaining. I must have missed the memo that the proper way to do this was actually to come to this board and scream and yell about unsubbing. Silly me.

Yes, we should go by the fanboy source of spamming and denying everything.

The amount of ***** given about this is in relation to the amount of facial expressions Kristen Stuart has. Zero.

Please stop saying this lol. AION has more subs ffs. There are A LOT of mmos out there with more than amillions subs.

1 out of 4 players left in the 4th qt alone.

K. 400,000 subscribers lost and EA says they were trial memberships. To be exact, people who played the first 30 days and did not resubscribe. That should be a pretty clear, indicative message to EA and Bioware that something wasn't right from the get go if you lost 400,000 "trial memberships" after people grinded to 50, geared up and stopped playing.

To everyone who is holding their hands over their eyes and peeking out through their fingers... its time to accept the truth of the matter. This game is bad.

Cited article for people who refuse to believe the truth: http://kotaku.com/5908338/star-wars-...00-subscribers

You mean the numbers you just made up? Well no not really because you, as I just said, made them up. (aside from the 1.3 subs part)

Wrong, the number one rule of game design 101 is: Don't trust the player base to do the right thing and design accordingly. Blaming the player base for half assed design flaws and violating the most basic rule of game design is what a company with no clue about economic/community goodwill/relations or community building.

This is readily apparent with the utter lack of apology for the fail that was ilum and not correcting the exploitation via a rollback when they subsequently patched the game with even worse code, and the eventual bandaid for this? 1.2

I dont think there is any need to explain the failures of 1.2 they are readily apparent every time I log into the game to see 0 other guildies on (because they have chosen to actually NOT play this game while waiting for the release of another game, read that again: MY GUILD WOULD LITERALLY RATHER NOT GAME THAN LOG INTO SWTOR I've been a member of this guild since 1993, it's one of the oldest MMORPG PVP guilds, it takes a lot for them to not want to game.) and 57 people on fleet in prime time on the second most populated PVP server.

The subscription loss is bad. There is no amount of justification you can provide to refute this. Even if I didn't have an MBA with extensive exposure to profit and loss statements and preparation of quarterly financials as well as previous experience working for a game company I could see that.

This is about player perception as well as shareholder perception, either they turn it around or they will have staff cuts down to a skeleton crew. EA has done it before and they will do it again. The only way to correct for shareholder perception is to improve retention of the subscription base. Happy players don't leave. To keep and foster happy players you need to develop community mechanics amenable to retention.

Since I know BW is monitoring this thread closely because it has to due with player perception of a declining subscription base I recommend you read this article from someone who knows about community building in a star wars IP that failed due to poor community relations after the designers moved on and a halfwit named Smedley stuck his foot in it.

Or this Article as the original source of building a successful web community, especially for games you may want to buy the book and pass it out to all the staff Bioware.

And the issue here is not about the numerical loss of players, it's the TIMELINE vis a vie the loss of retention. Frankly it's happening to rapidly given the amount of funding this game was provided with. Those numbers re subscribers who are both active and inactive (stopped playing after paying) and include those people who paid 3 and 6 month subscriptions. The drop you see is standard release retention (30 day's is up) and a drop in monthly recurring retention as well as 3 month pre-paid's.

It's not a matter of numbers of loses, we know those people arent playing, it's a matter of: What % of those subscriptions are subscribed but not playing/inactive because that will be the population level at the end of June.

And from where I sit, looking at the numbers during prime time on Ajunta Pall, with no guildies logged in, and given my experience, BioWare has about 2 months to start bringing their A game, and rebuild some community trust before my so called "populated server" starts to look like the others.

I would estimate that the number of people in the initial drop (as with all mmo's) is proportional to the number of initial subscribers. I'd say this really may not be as bad as it sounds.

Believe it or not EA has a very healthy stable of titles they release throughout the year on multiple platforms. They are just fine.

If I had shares in EA I would have shorted them today before the report- and it looks like a lot of people did. Good investors count on people to panic when they don't understand the market (MMO vs console sales) and this was easy to see. Tomorrow morning you'll be able to buy EA at a pretty nice discount and make a profit while the stock settles back to where it was.