So according to Bioware...

Khan Academy is *always* the answer.

/Math teacher

Blizzard also counts every person that spends two hours at a game Cafe in china as a sub.

I read the whole article, and everything being said is just a pathetic attempt at damage control. It's like they assume readers are stupid.

Yeah, I am sure the number of people who log in for certain events, or in their BioWare language "telemetry", is useful. Yet, the basic question of how many paying customers...i.e. active subscriptions...are in SWTOR is not being answered. It's too embarrassing.

BioWare and EA are businesses. They know how many people are paying them.

Active subscriptions are constantly changing. We all know that. They are also going down. We know that too. Are they going to constantly advertise that they're losing subscriptions? Of course not, that would be stupid. They will only give current numbers at earnings calls.

Nailed it with the last sentance.

I like how they threw in the "we figured out there are on average 3xx people on each server at any give time." That is just hilarious, so the hundreds-thousands on the 2 big pop servers just gets spread around that much? Maybe they were counting all the alts each player has too, since they tried to make alts a main part of the game with legacy.

Alts have telemetry too I think.

“I do get really good feedback – what we call metrics, or telemetry – that allow me to actually do my job. So it’s more interesting for me to get feedback on how many people played the Rakghoul Plague event, something that happened a few weeks ago. To know if people who hadn’t played for a while came back just to play that… was it so that we had a surge in subscriptions so that maybe people that lapsed came back… I get to know how many people – what percentage of people – participated in it, and how many people finished it. And that’s a number I can work with.”

HA-HA-HA!...HA! Seriously? You get more numbers from an event that took place on a level 20-30 (essentially) planet during a free weekend? I'm sure that must be "more interesting" for you to get feedback on how many people played the Rakghoul Plague event...than say, knowing that there are 1-2 people in fleet at any given time on most servers.

Again, HA! Metrics...are you kidding me? Try logging in some time.

Absolutely no empathy from this. It's like bringing a chalk board with a 96 character algorithm into a class room full of art majors. None of them care a thing about the algorithm itself; instead how nice your hand writing was in scribbling it out.

Here's your metrics from my server right here...
http://www.torstatus.net/anchorhead/...ead/trends/60d

Because MMO's always give out subscription numbers reports to their fanbase and the public on a monthly basis.

No but they certainly give out the numbers to the investors publicly, and they even went so far as to rank the games priority behind some really crap throw away titles.

Yes they do, and they did.

As for that whole priority thing...besides Medal of Honor (Which is a FPS which seems to be the hit genre nowadays) what else was a throwaway title?

Madden, in my opinion. It is a yearly release, and rarely changes in the slightest way. It has fans because of the easy sell to sports fanatics, but as an entertainment medium it really fails in that it is the same rehashed game every year.