The elephant in the room

to be fair - that's still nowhere near 70% =)

I love a good story, but story in games is nowhere near the level of storytelling available in other media. It just isn't there because the technology isn't there yet. People left SWTOR for two reasons: the gameplay is slow, shallow, and often unresponsive, and the setting far too off the beaten path from the familiar Star Wars canon. Way too much swords and sorcery, not enough conflict and space.

These are not the 2 reasons people left, PvPers left due to no competition, no 8 man queues, rated WZs being pulled, major class changes in 1.2. Read the server forums there are good bye posts every where or the PvP forums. I haven't heard one person complain about the game not being "star wars" enough other then the few that think anyone with a lightsabre one shots everyone else. There are many reasons people stopped playing assuming its 2 reasons is a stretch a lot of people played the game that could careless about SW in particular PvPers.

As someone noted before there won't be another WoW MMO that pulls 10 mill yet everyone thinks that is the barameter. Look at Rift they lost a crap ton of people and closed servers yet they are still releasing content, yes Tron didn't spend the cash EA did nor did it have the expectations. But the game can survive and there are way more then 20k people still playing.

That said when I stopped playing past games I didn't come to the forums to bash the game or people that want to play it not sure what the point is? Also the comment about not free transfers cause you have to pay your sub of you aren't playing why do you need the transfer.

Have fun doom and gloom crew which will move onto GW2 and so on. They will transfer people onto severs to boost up the player base, if it's 15 heavy servers so be it those that enjoy the game will keep playing.

1.3 mil includes the free month given out. We really have no clue how many people are actually playing.

In addition it's illegal for EA to lie to it's stockholders so they CAN'T give false information on their subscriber base..

(More) reasons I quit the game:

Upcoming patch fails:

• "Free" server transfers are not free if you have to resub in order to transfer, with the alternative being that you get left behind in a dead server.
  
• Their new legacy perk system also costs like 100k per perk that you want to unlock. What a joke.
  
• Still no dual spec. A legacy perk that costs half a million credits and gives you the ability to respec once every hour (or whatever the cooldown is) is not dual spec. Better than what they have now, but still pathetic.
  
• Groupfinder is useless if there is nobody to play with, and still useless if you have no desire to do flashpoints for columi gear.
  
• No patch notes mention fixing/optimizing the engine, which is extremely important.
  
• No mention of a timeline for rated PvP, so I guess it's being pushed back even further.

In order to revive my interest, they will need to make significant progress in the following areas:

1. Serious engine optimization
2. Aggressive population concentration
3. PvP overhaul
   a. Severely reduced grind for top-tier gear
   b. Harsh nerf to top-tier gear to make it only slightly better than what is easily obtainable by casual players, to the point where the advantage is so minute as to be nearly non-existent. (therefore, mostly for style)
   c. Better class balance
   d. Preservation of groups, Ops queuing, and group leader queues overriding individual queues
   e. Enough population for near instant queues
   f. Worthwhile world pvp, especially while leveling
   g. Split 10-49 bracket into 10-29 and 30-49 (shouldn't be a problem with population fixes)
4. UI mods
5. Legacy system that doesn't cost credits to progress
6. Operations overhaul
   a. Much, much faster wipe recovery
   b. Fixes to stupid looting issues with master looter and chests
   c. Mechanics that don't rely on short enrage fuses for difficulty
7. Substantial reduction in the amount of time necessary to complete daily/weekly quests
8. A cosmetic system that lets you take set bonuses from anything and get augments on anything, so that you can actually look how you want. Also, light/med/heavy versions (or just one adaptable version) of social gear.
9. Trade skills that don't suck, and that match biochem in pvp effectiveness.

What made 70% of the player base leave will still be hampering this game if server transfers ever do come. A single threaded game engine makes the combat system and animations slow and clunky feeling. Load times kill any feeling of living in the actual world. "Exhaustion" zones prevent you from interacting with the other faction while leveling. Having warzones where you play against your own faction defeats any sense of community outside your own friends list. No ability to make an 8 man team to play warzones sucks. No server economy to speak of.

You spent 1000s of hours to add in voice acting and never actually made end-game content that was challenging and fun. You make us search all over the internet to find interviews about what is going on with the game instead of telling us in the forums FIRST. Your "metrics" you balance everything around seem to be driven more by forum QQ than actual numbers: "Teams of operatives stunlocking people and making them quit the game". You have mislead us over and over and over about features coming SOON that should have been in the game at launch.

The simple truth is you cut every possible corner to get the game released in Q4 of 2011. I am not sure the game will even last the summer. You said you needed 400k subs to be profitable and I don't think you even have half that right now. So, yes your priority is server transfers (should have happened a long time ago) but without fixing the rotten core of this game you will continue to lose players.

Dropping from 2 million to 1.3 million isn't a 70% drop. it's a 35% drop , and it's also inevitable as people try out the game and inevitably some of them decide they don't like it.

At least do the math right.

PS : Didn't they say they need 400k subscribers to break even and anything else is pure gravy ? I don't think SWTOR is shuttering the doors any time soon.

We know the populations was over 2 million at one point with over 2 million copies of the game sold.

So it could have 2.2 mil, 2.3 mil maybe even 2.4 mil without mentioning it being close 2.5 to say 2.5 or above or rounding up to almost 3 million as a marketing figure.

so it could very well be 2.2, 2.3 and only mentioned as above 2 mil

so 1.3/2.3 = 56%

The point if anything is developing the game properly so a downward trend does not begin, since it is fair to assume that from all the large hype swtor has generated that everyone is aware that a swtor MMO exists, and therefore 100s of million potential players are passing up this game already since it is not what they want... which means it needs new content for new hype to attract from new players ... or continuing with more of the same will only generate small hype to only people who care about swtor since everyone knows about swtor anyways that will only be really heard by its current customers and old customers, mostly.

They are at around 800k subs currently.