Subs down 25%

What so many people seem to fail to grasp is what the numbers mean and what time periods they are from. Read the report and think about it. The 1.7 million subs was a number that was current at the end of December as the report says. The 1.3 million subs reported just today are from the end of March. Let's think about this for a minute. It was 1.7 million at the end of December. That means everyone who was playing the game was in their free 30-day period. So anyone who so much as created an account and input their game code was being counted. The report released today is from the beginning of January to the end of March. That means that those who played their free 30-days and then left (very common for MMOs) were part of those 400,000 subs lost. Then, the amount of people who actually had 1-month subs and then left (not as common but common enough) were also counted.

What that leaves are the people who subbed for 3-months and 6-months as far as who invested early and now won't continue to. We won't have any numbers affected by the 3-month subbers until the next report months from now. We won't have the numbers affected by the 6-month subbers until after the summer is over and those are rarely a significant number of subs. According to what was stated before the game even released, the game only needs 500,000 subs to turn a profit. They are still sitting on nearly 3 times that amount. Most MMOs that are P2P or former P2P barely have a couple hundred thousand. Very few or none that I am aware of (please correct me if I'm wrong) can even say that they have or had 1 million subs even at their peak.

The game is fine. The server populations have been averaging 20 to 30% Light for a couple months now. These sub numbers are not recent losses. They very likely took these losses between January 20th and February 20th and then remained stable afterwards. Daniel Erickson likely didn't lie when he said subs weren't dropping because you have to consider when he made that statement. It was well after the end of March. I find it likely that 1.3 million was the stable number after their one-shot subbers and freeloaders left.

Really? My cousin has that blood clot problem (can't think of the name off-hand), but he used to get cut all the time while we were playing as kids - near as I can recall, he's still alive and kicking after 30 years. Let's go over that line a bit closer, buddy:
There is an attitude problem in the community, which will be the cause of issues - not the problems within the game that can be corrected with rational thought, cause you see, pal, my cousin can live with his disease because he is rational about it and thinks about solutions when something happens. The good part of our community does the same. The only ones dying here are the self-serving doom and gloomers who demand to be stroked at every opportunity in order to feel that their lives are validated in some small way. Fortunately, BW pays attention to the rational thinkers in the community - that's why none of us are worried, and that's why this game will finish at the million sub mark or better by the time the next report rolls around. We still have a lot of detritus to slough off, once that happens, the game will be in solid shape for years to come.



In your opinion, natch. I play on the PTS, Light, and Standard servers, and have no issue finding people to play with on the Standard server (even without being in a guild), and even on the PTS. I didn't say that we don't have a bunch of servers that do have population problems - but the game as a whole does not. A Standard server is more than adequate for the MMO experience - especially for those who do not wish for the type of experience that includes fighting for resources or waiting in ques to play a game they are paying for. We certainly do not have half or more servers with an issue, no matter how many doomers and gloomers like to throw those figures around.

And please pray tell, what contructive criticism am I railing against? I certainly will take anyone on spouting off anecdotal, unproven, or outright false information. However, I am in full support of character transfers, a solid PvP game (though I am by no means a good PvP player - yet), and changes that will make grouping easier - though I am hesitant about cross-server grouping, as those with experience seem to think it would be a bad thing. I am also for revamping the GTN because it is very difficult to use as it is now, and making changes to the Legacy system that brings unlocks down in price (and bumps up the character limit on servers to make the race unlocks and future playable races viable). I certainly would like to see changes to the Legacy system that allows us to give different surnames to each of our characters, and institutes an account-wide legacy bank so we can more easily trade items between our characters, even if they are on different servers. Of course, I would love a full-fledged space component to the game, but realize that a good system is far into the future. I am, however, opposed to turning this game into something it isn't - such as SWG 2.0 or GW2 in space. So yes, I will oppose those ideas, but if you saw a post I made where I bashed a legitimate request (and not a demanding QQ post where the player wants his candy now, or he is taking his ball and going home), then please provide me a link so that I may review it and offer a correction if needed.

BJ

Read my signature, and then also realize they did the same thing for the 1.7 million. The 1.7 million was as of close to the end of February, not December.

1.3 million is still pretty decent.

So you're saying they lied to players and investors?

The crafting is tedious (20-40 minutes on a single item so you can reverse engineer it for an RNG chance at learning the recipe you want?): Garbage

No group finder: Garbage

Tired holy trinity class mechanics: Garbage

Melee hate everywhere in pve, doesn't help the balance between ranged and melee: Garbage

PVP revolves around an arbitrary PVP stat that inherently makes you more effective across the board in PVP combat: Garbage

No cross server PVP, suffering from faction imbalances so you get the same warzone (Huttball) all day every day: Garbage

Open World PVP zones are ghost towns: Garbage

Let's not forget that while it may be cool the first time you do it, flashpoints with lots of conversation CRAWL due to having to wait on people's loading times for responses. Can be this way in heroics or grouping with someone in landscape content as well.

Those conversation/dialogue wheels are cool when you're soloing, but when you're with other players.. not worth it, it crawls and people spacebar anyway to try and speed it up.

Well, you can lie to players, but you cannot lie to investors (not since Sarbanes Oxley became law).

WHY do folks keep saying onlu 400k lost when it is 1.1 million subs lost. Please someone explain this to me.

Posted in big red letters cause it keeps getting eaten by the rage in this thread.

WHY do folks keep saying onlu 400k lost when it is 1.1 million subs lost. Please someone explain this to me.

Posted in big red letters cause it keeps getting eaten by the rage in this thread.