Will anything actually retain customers?

This is a load of crap.

Today's MMO players are the same, for the most part, as the MMO players from years ago. I'm still the same player I was way back when Asheron's Call was the top dog. I'm the same player I was when I started playing WoW 8 years ago and quit 7 years later.

I'm not capricious. I simply want features and content to be added at a pace that is worth my $15/month... and I do not want a pay-to-win cash shop. Rift can do it with half the subscriptions of SWTOR (or less than half, depending on which fan-boy is giving the SWTOR number). Why can't EA do it?

This, simple and sweet. Players need things to do. Sandboxy content would provide that. I'll bet anything on it.

Want to keep customers? Let players change their look after creation, allow color changes to ALL armor, allow all armor to be converted to orange armor (you would lose stats in favor of empty slots), allow appearance creation options for companions (with a toggle to disable if desired).

Make our personal ships our housing, allowing us to decorate them inside and out as we see fit, SWG style. Add questable and or drop decorations, achievements and trophies we can put in our ship.

Put turrets on our ships, allow us to group and go out and run space missions with my group members manning the turrets, or just let them jump in their ships and join me in the pipe.

Give us a BF2 style persistent space battleground with both open flight PVE and PVP objectives and the ability to land on ships and go after objectives on foot, man turrets, take the bridge to take over the ships, etc.

Create a supplemental questing system similar to black hole dailies for PVE class and companion play. Using a terminal interface, general droid or alien dialog and canned dialog from existing VO player responses create randomly generated listings with a smattering of VO to spice them up. Rewards could be orange or social armor, or class specific rewards as well as companion affection or gifts.

The missions would allow smugglers to smuggle, BHs to seek out bounties, Troopers to engage in specific objectives, Agents to engage in espionage or sabotage, Jedi and Sith to seek out rivals to turn or destroy them.

Give us the ability to race our vehicles competitively on courses, against other players and npc opponents. Give us pazzak games to play, cards to collect. Put in random turret and space combat encounters when flying to space combat missions or planets (ability to toggle off if desired).

Let us stay in the hangar in our ships. Give us the ability to land on a planet using the console instead of walking out the door.

Give us a whole set of missions inside our vessel...boarding parties, repair missions, escape, etc.

Give us the ability to craft Orange gear personally, with the ability to crit adding a bonus to the mods. Allow slicers to improve non-orange gear stats.

All of these things would go a LONG way, IMO, to retaining current customers by giving them something to do.

I think that he was speaking metaphorically.....that there are more players like you now then there are of us. ;p

People want a game that isn't managed by clueless people, has frequent content/fix updates, and runs well on high end systems like SWTO--oh, wait.

Because they paid for a much bigger game than the subscription model will sustain. SWTOR cost a lot more to develop than RIFT, and it costs more to extend and improve. They think (well, somebody thinks) they can make a lot more money selling Santa hats and Warzone passes to returning players. We'll see.

Sunk costs are sunk. They have no bearing in decisions moving forward, in any business worth a bent di...me. What SWTOR cost to develop is irrelevant to the go-forward strategy.

The notion that SWTOR is more expensive to update than Rift because it cost more to develop is also hogwash. I can develop something very quick and dirty and cheaply but it would be a ***** to maintain and extend. Or I can spend a bit more and make it very extensible. That's the way things work in software. It's not like we're hand-making Lamborghinis vs. mass producing Fords. Generally smaller budget stuff is harder to extend and bigger budget stuff should be easier because you put that thought into it ahead of time. And EA apparently did this as evidenced by developers saying they liked the Hero engine because of how easy it made it to add stuff and VPs saying things like the F2P games can't add content at the same sort of pace they can.

The fact that Rift is running circles around SWTOR in terms of content and feature release pace should make the EA team absolutely livid with embarrassment. But it doesn't seem to. Instead, they want to sell us the Santa hats you mentioned.

I want pirate gear. Maybe an eye patch. Ooooh a parrot. Yes definately a parrot!!!

I don't believe you. I don't believe you can play an MMO for that long and not change.

It's like going to war for 7 years, you want to believe you're the same when you return home, but really you've seen too much.

i hate to say it: the hutt is speaking the truth,,versatility and immersion in the world,,this is the recipe that has kept "that game " on the top for years,,but now they have dropped it,,mists of pandaria will prolly bury WoW
STO? been there, done that,,RIFT? ugly and no epic music,,,TERA? very beautiful, but too intense for casual players
my biggest beef with this game is the grindy combat and lack of freedom and content,,i am practically on rails, both on ground and in space,,im in a big universe and have my own spaceship, but i can still only quest on 2 planets
not much freedom there

Playing an MMO is nothing like going to war and you are insulting military men and women the world over by even thinking to imply it.

It's just a freaking game.

I've seen plenty in MMOs, sure. Most good, some really bad, some really awesome. But the core of what I want is the same. I want content and features to be released on a schedule that makes the subscription fee worthwhile.