Will anything actually retain customers?

Not on intrepid we had plenty of people competing. The only time short term monopolies formed where when new crafting comsumables were added. Once everyone figured out where to get the new consumables and who were willing to farm them (or pay people to farm them for them) the competition went back to normal. There was a whole buisness in just farming mats and selling them to crafters. All killed by the CU. Don't get me started on how the entertainment industry got nuked.

Tthroughout my MMO career I've not really interacted with many ex SWG players before SWTOR. And I must say they are the most fanatical and bitter gamers I've seen post on a forum

honestly, if BW was able to release a new chapter for all of the classes every 3-6 months, along with a new warzone and operation every 3 monthes people would stay.

The thing is though SWTOR is rather sadly basically a WoW-Clone with nothing like the content.

It doesn't have WARs RvR (it doesn't have RvR any more at all).
It doesn't have SWGs breadth or depth or anything sandboxy.
It doesn't have CoH customisation.

The game needed another 6 months in Beta to be ready for release, but even then it was not going to be an innovative game, and that's what is needed to retain people.

It probably would retain large player base. You would only need to pay for one mmorpg that has those features as oppose to play wow, gw2, sandbox mmorpg, and a similar CoH mmorpg. Thus, base on pure economics it would make sense to subscribe to this super mmorpg. Unfortunately, I doubt it any mmorpg will have all those features in the near future.

Very true. And Rift bled out subs as fast or faster and in as great a percentage as this game has to date. Which demonstrates that "content, content, content" won't keep players either.

The player base has become nomadic in nature. It is what it is. They are going to hop/feed/hop/rinse&repeat across the MMO offerings now days. No stopping it. The real question is what is an MMOs stable player base size, which is what you get once attrition flattens out and you move into a cycle of join/leave equalibriium. Other then WoW, the magic numbers seems to be ~ 30-35% of launch numbers for a heavily hyped MMO. WoW follows a different dynamic, but even in their case they are suffering post expansion hemoridges of 40%+.

40%+ expansion hemoridges? WoW the last quarterly report lost 1.1 million subs which is about 10% of thier sub base. The two quarters before that, they had no lost...was stable at 10.2 million for two 3 month reporting cycles. Where do you get this 40%+ figures?

You have to understand what their subscriber base actually IS. It's not 10M+ paid subs, and never was.

Use mmodata.net to see that only about 5 million of their subscriber base (in 2010) was paid subs in NA/EU. The rest are Asia pay-2-access accounts (not subscriptions as we commonly define them), which remain "active" for life once they are opened.

So in reality, they had at best 5 million paid subs at the last expansion launch (go ahead and check mmodata.net if you don't believe me). AND, they have lost 2 Million of those over the last year. Hence, 40% post expansion losses, and that is probably generous since mmodata.net no longer breaks out WoW East/Westdata and hence does not list recent subs numbers for WoW

I have played umpteen mmorpgs and SWG pre CU was far and away, my favorite. I'm not going to create a wall of text explaining why it was so good. I will say the basic format was in place to make the game even more amazing.

It was released too soon, very buggy, and unbalanced, but. the game concepts were/are extremely solid.


It isn't often you find volunteers hacking away on an emulation, funded by voluntary donations, and determined enough to keep at it for years. Know of any other community that clings to a dream like that?

That is how good SWG pre CU was.......bugs, imbalance, and all else included.

All these SWG glory days people need to go to www.swgemu.com and play to your hearts content. I just left there because guess what...games boring as hell after about 3 weeks.

No matter what BW does it wont be able to satisfy this fickle mob.

We get a solid update today and terribad mercs cry over rocket punch.