Will anything actually retain customers?

The only MMO that pushes out content like this is Trion's Rift. there is an event every other month or so, so many that it actually irritates some folks. people will come and go during MMO'S some for raids / dungeons / FP'S and some for xpacks.

What retains my sub is the story / lore. my only beef i guess if you could call it that is it is not a sandbox, there is no single player dailies, or real reason to go back to the planets after you hit 50. which is sad because of all the work they put into it. dont get me wrong the heroics are fine but having regular single player dailies / hubs gives players a convieniece of doing them any time they want to even when other player dont.

EQ is getting ready to kick out their 19th expansion. I hope TOR can get on that type of track. Although like I said, some folks will have a hissy fit about having to pay for true expansions.

A game that used to kick content was EQ, and it still does somewhat till this very day. We were getting expansions every 6 months or so nearly 10 yrs ago. Asherons Call used to give folks little upgrades reguarly as well, although in AC's case they didnt charge for them.


Folks complain if a company wants to hit them with expansions reguarly, but that is the only way to truly keep content rolling. The stuff doesnt get produced for free.


I am more than willing to pay for an expansion every 6 to 8 months. In TOR terms, you would be talking a new planet with possibly a new race, extension of story(maybe a half chapter), and lots of single player/group quests and operations. More crafter skills and/or player skills as well. A level increase may be involved.

EQ is getting ready to kick out their 19th expansion. I hope TOR can get on that type of track. Although like I said, some folks will have a hissy fit about having to pay for true expansions.

/clap

Couldn't have said it better myself.

QFT...

Ref the SWG EMU - I dipped in to it a couple of weeks ago, it is still an alpha so only has one server atm and there is obviously some stuff missing in terms of content and not all classes are present / viable yet however.......

During the few days I was playing I took part in and witnessed more constructive, positive and friendly conversations than I have seen or witnessed in 9 months playing SWTOR. The community feeling is already there and as the project develops I would not be surprised to see it become very, very popular. And it's free!!

Considering its a dead game running on a single emulated alpha server, the player cap of 3,000 is reached every single evening. If SWTOR was canned tomorrow do you think fans would invest the time and donations to re-engineer a fully working emulator of this game? SWG had problems of course but the fact that its still around and being played by 3000 people every day plus the hard work and dedication shown by the EMU team and contributors / donators speaks volumes imo.

I literally had to remind myself I was actually paying for SWTOR and drag myself back after 3 days....forget GW2 for casual / second MMORPG.....I will be heading straight back to the SWG EMU whenever I need a break from SWTOR. It may lack the polish and graphics of SWTOR however it is light years ahead in scope, depth, complexity and the sheer amount of things to do with your time ingame.

Driz

Problem with swgemu and similar projects is that if they ever reach the point of significance, certain big company/companies are going to stomp them so hard with their armies of lawyers the project leaders are going to wish they took flower arranging as a hobby instead. Specially if they start collecting any amount of cash to support the project.

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.