The elephant in the room

Come on dude, think about it. You dont see games like WoW and Angry Birds and Farmville strive because of the hardcore fanbase. It's the casuals that bring it into the 'mainstream' and give it the success that they have. Seriously think about it.

If it were the hardcore games that really made the money, then game developers wouldn't keep making these casual games. You wouldn't see game developers making content so easy to complete.

I understand it's hard to think open-minded about it, you see it from your perspective only and that's about it. But games wouldn't be evolving into what they are today if gamers weren't voting with their wallets. There's a reason why people say WoW is for 'causal MMO players' and that it 'does everything for you'.

Wow was built by a hardcore player base that kept the game alive for quite a long time. Wow didn't become the facerolling easy-fest that it is today for several years. It is catering to the EXTREME casuals, which is why even wow's subs are in decline, the game is basically on cruise control at this point while they push Titan out of the factory.

I'm not talking about hardcore *raiders* by the way, I'm talking about hardcore players. You're not a hardcore raider unless you're clearing the absolute most difficult content, which most of us aren't. But you really can't be defined as a casual player if you play for 15-20 hours per week. I'm sorry, but we're talking part time job hours here, thats not casual, whether you raid or not.

Thats the kind of player I'm talking about, you seem confused as to the context of my message. I wasn't saying that the top 1% of raiders keep the game alive, I was saying that people that actually play the game are what keep it alive. And the fact that this game is so mind numbingly boring at end game and everything is streamlined down to the most easily understandable and achievable state that it possibly could be is what is pushing those potentially dedicated players away from the game.

You can't please everyone, but you're certainly not going to keep dedicated players by pushing out a game with basically no complexity to speak of. It's just too damn easy, and thats one of the biggest problems hampering it's success. Btw. Wow does *nothing* for me, not everything, and it's because they have geared the game towards people that can't find the time to get good at the game so they require it to have a system in place to hand out epics to you the moment you get to ding 85. Much like this game does. It is those extreme casuals that I speak of that have caused the clouds in wow to literally rain epics.

Does this list make anyone else want to line all the soup can labels in their kitchen cabinet up? I mean for the love of god this game is like 6 months old.

Oh and they will never ever tell us the current accurate number of subscriptions. They are sure fast to post record breaking numbers and try to inflate things, thats what companies do, but when things start looking bad or take a turn for the worse, they wont tell you that.

At the end of March they stated in the EA quarterly report they were sitting at what 1.1 million active subs? Bioware never stated any numbers at all. You can also bet your butt they tried to inflate those numbers as much as they could. Free trials, free months, whatever. The 3 month subs ended in April, the 6 month subs will end in Aug with the free month slapped into it. Then you have the people who buy subs one month at a time as well. Who really knows where we stand at with subs at this point besides Bioware but what we do know is the servers are becoming ghost towns fast.

WoW went from 12 million subs in WoTLK to 10.3 million that is not 25% of their subscription base; not to mention this is in a game that is 7 years old. http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/02/09/wo...riber-numbers/
To the first bolded statement; while MMO's do lose some of their subscriber base, a 25% loss is not good. This graph was done before the 1.3 million was announced and shows that those MMO's (having a peak active subscriber number greater than 1 million) don't lose such a huge percentage of their customers right after launch. http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png As to your second statement, who says this? Do you have an actual source for this information?
EDIT: also TOR pads it's numbers just like WoW it's called business that is what they do. They gave everyone a free month which will extend the 6 month subs to pad the next quarterly report as well.

im guessing we will not be hearing any more accurate subscription numbers from now on.

The elephant in the room are ex-WoW players looking for something not WoW, ie.....looking for a MMORPG that's not a MMORPG....yes, totally futile.

"Exhaustion" zones prevent you from interacting with the other faction while leveling.

You said you needed 400k subs to be profitable and I don't think you even have half that right now.

so the game went from 12 million sub to 10.3. i said 25% give or take, it could be 20% it could be 18%. im not the math expert and dont care to calculate it out. in the end what i said was the recession hit the MMO market, period. even the big WoW behemoth couldn't stay away from it.

but it's not like I will even take a wow sub count as solid facts anyway. we all know that there are no subs in china(i think it's china) and they only pay for time usage, yet those are called 'active subs'.

you can google 'swtor 85% retention rate' and see all the articles talking about it. reuters(sp?) was the one solid link i found that was linked by gamebreaker.tv yet the article is missing now xD. but believe it if you want. swtor has has the best retention rate of any MMO released in the last 5 years.

Lol, all the people that could afford $60+ for a game suddenly decided $15 a month was too much? Plenty of other subscription games didn't lose 25% of their player base. While I have no doubt there may be a few cases where this did happen I highly doubt it is the reason for the majority of the player loss.
*EDIT: I also never said it was going to fail just made valid points of where the game is lacking. Stop trying to troll anyone who isn't blindly in love with this game.