The elephant in the room

All SWTOR has to offer is Star Wars. An unfamiliar Star Wars setting that only a few have bothered reading up on (unless you are a KOTOR fan). No wonder that no one feels like they are living in a Star Wars universe.

Go log in to Jedi Covenant at peak EST playtime and tell me that experience isn't night and day from most of the other servers. This seems such an easy fix to me and a regular part of running a MMO..The longer the delays, the more players lose interest.. That's too bad, as this game is worth playing albeit with friends - not alone....

Yes the reason why the populations are low is because they added to many servers because so many people were crying about waiting to log into a server and play.

If you want to see a game that has some seriously unhappy players go read the D3 forums.

funny too, because i barely can bring myself to play D3 for more than 30 min every other day, and blizzard sold 6.3 million copies already.

whats this say about gaming? gaming is where it has ALWAYS BEEN. with a very small minority of society, you have cool developers making cool games for gamers. and then theres people who play blizzard games...

im willing to assume that no less than 25%, if not 75% of ALL blizzard gamers only play WoW, D3 and maybe sims as well. its just like the wii.

just because theres a fad that happens to take place in a sub-culture of media doesnt automatically degrade the rest of the community of developers and games.

im really sick of everyone comparing blizzard games and numbers to everything else. its 2 totally different markets now. of the 3 people in my family that play WoW and D3, they spend 90%+ of their "gaming" time playing a blizz game and the other 10% other games.

now thats not to say, that blizzard games aren't "games" that i would want to play, i do play them. but if i was on an island and i could only pick 1 developer for the next 10 years, i would get every game out and everything made in the next 10 years, i sure as hell wouldnt pick blizz. it took them 10 years to release 2 games. WoW is good, and D3 is the most overrated stuck in the 90s game i have ever played.

lets move on from expecting 10+ million subs for swtor, and for those of us who enjoy great games, who aren't here on these forums complaining that games arent more like blizzard, get back to playing are fave games, and leave the forums to the naysayer party.

My reasons why the game failed (in no particular order):
1. The class story lacked real choices (didn't go through all of them but the stories I did see lacked any meaningful choice)
2. Class story on republic side was boring (I wanted to play a Jedi Knight but couldn't stand the story)
3. Lack of exploration (some of the planets like Coruscant or Nar Shadaa are just hallways)
4. The planets are very static with no weather, no day/night cycles, and the mobs just stand there waiting to die
5.The music is good, for the small amount of time it plays, but on every planet I have to listen to the sound of my speeder for just about the whole time I am there.
6. OPs are easy, when you don't hit bugs, and gear from them is way too easy to get
7. I can't level alts, after leveling a character on each faction, without having to replay the same story in the same order. Yes there are class quests, but they are far and few between.
8. PVP is gear based without it you get slaughtered. Didn't mind 1-49, though it got tedious playing the same warzones again and again. It is also unbalanced, not that I expected it to be as it is a difficult thing to do.
9. World PVP happened to me exactly once while leveling.
10. cant swim all the water features are shallow
11. No x-server LFG
12. Extreme population problems and lack of action to correct it
13. The game runs terribly and graphics aren't that good
14. Combat is not very fluid and there are ability delays
15. The game copies heavily from WoW
16. No same gender romance options
17. Lack of in game combat logs
18. Lack of addons. Some people hate them but for people with disabilities it can be very beneficial and allow them a much better gameplay experience. I'm not disabled I just saw a post about this and it made me realize how it could allow much better access to the game and content for some people.
19. No alien species, I mean seriously they are all pretty much recolored humans. Would have liked to see Togruta, Cathar, or Trandoshans as playable.
20. Character customization is seriously lacking; a lot of clones.
21. No way of character customization changes after creation; ie changing hairstyles or adding scars.
22. Nothing to in end-game that is non-combat like pazaak, swoop racing, or pod racing
23. No chat bubbles
24. Can't sit in chairs
25. Space Combat is unintuitive and on rails
26.Crafting is almost useless and is going to be even worse in next patch
27. Lack of intuitive guild features
28. The amount of bugs and the time it is taking to fix them
29. Gear design was terrible (I liked the gear I got in the beginning better then tier gear)
30. Can't have my companions in my legacy tree; this is a very bad oversight.
31. Social points were a good idea but they are poorly implemented.
32. No reputation grinds; it adds to re-playability and can give cool non-combat rewards
33. Can't customize my ship
34. Too many loading screens
35.The fleet was poorly done all the vendors on the fleet should be on Dromund Kaas and Coruscant. Also the Republic fleet looks terrible.
36. The GTN
37.No non-combat macros
38. Customer service; they had closed many of my tickets without resolving them. Also the Hoth incident accusing player of being liars and fraudulent.

The simple truth is you cut every possible corner to get the game released in Q4 of 2011.

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.

If Bioware expected players to leave, as they say, then why was there no back up plan?

As you say, they obviously have all the data, metrics etc, it's what they've chosen to do or not do as a result of that data that is ...'pick word of choice'

190 servers are absolute ghost towns, you can draw your own conclusions... And like many posters have already said: The game's other problems have caused the population issue.

...All SWTOR has to offer is Star Wars.

So ok, a lot of people have left because the game's not their cup of tea.

But for BW to leave the people who are sticking with the game in the lurch like this is ... just really, really bad. I simply cannot fathom their thinking. They must be living in some sort of dream world if they don't think the population problem needs urgent sorting - it needed it 2 months ago.

I'm afraid that when transfers come it's going to be far too late.