Summer of SWTOR

Ranked isn't moving forward because people aren't playing it. They aren't going to kick off a season if there are only 2 or 3 ranked teams on each server. Perhaps they have a new rank system in store. I can't say for sure.

What makes you think they don't love their game?

Did you miss the angry mob that was pissed it wasn't 55? Many people like gree.

Another person who confuses cause with effect.

PvP is not being kicked back because there are 2-3 ranked teams on each server but because EA failed to let people form up more teams:

1) No cross server WZs this makes impossible to queue up and find a game fast and so people quickly get tired and leave. WoW implemented cross server battlegrounds like 5 years ago.

2) The whole RWZ gear up concept is flawed. You put competitive gear to require RWZs to be purchased. Too bad the few RWZ guilds are hardly letting someone with Partisan gear in, so anyone willing to play RWZs has to grind regular WZs for weeks or more. This immediately cuts the pool of perspective new RWZ players, once exhausted the current RWZ pool (natural players turnover) you are left with the same few hard cores and that's it.

Yes yes I know, now someone smart will say that their guild even invites level 52 gear players for their RWZ because they are oh-so-skilled.

3) There is specs and gameplay stigma. I enter a WZ (not even talking about RWZ) and I am automatically assumed to be Shadow tank spec and tank gear and automatically shouted to get cobwebs sitting on a node and get 2 medals a WZ.
In regular WZs I can tell them I am infiltration spec and that I am going to guard the node only for some minutes, then I WILL have my share of fun, deal with it.
In RWZ the leader would not even let me join the team, tank spec or die (yes I know blah blah there's your enlightened guild who allows in every spec and actually does RWZs with 5 infiltration shadow, I am sure it's true).
In the best case it's "1 tank specced shadow in, 1 (out of 10 in guild) infiltration in tops, and this only because dude XYZ with class ABC today can't play (else no inf shadows are in), the others queue up and hope".

Well, I can tell you that the PVP devs don't love their game, and it shows because there hasn't been any content, or significant pvp content, basically since 1.2. If you are going to work on a game, it should be something that you obsess over. That you want to play all night after work, that you want to play on your day off. The pvp content we've been given and now told to wait til 2.4 sends a very loud message that they aren't passionate about SWTOR's PVP. The PVP team must be just taking EA's money and spending it in vegas every week because nothing ever translates into the game for us. With a single year, I could create 10-20 new warzones so what's BW's pvp team's excuse for only one new wz every 18 months with not a single crumb of content for an expansion? Games where devs love and play their own game around the clock show in the amount of content that's added, because they are adding for themselves too.

What makes you think they don't love their game?

Development time takes longer than you think. Compare to wow, which may get one or two new warzones a year

It shouldn't BE a small development team. It's Bioware and EA. This is a AAA MMORPG. They should be making a decent amount of money now with F2P and subscriptions and gouging everyone on the CM for dyes, new hair styles etc.

If Sqaure Enix can completely REMAKE FFXIV in about two years, then what the hell is our development team doing?

THIS. Exactly this! This isn't some indie game from a small start-up. If you figure that the game has about 500,000 subs, who pay $150 a year in subscriptions (we're going with some very rough estimates here), that would be $75million from subscribers alone. That's quite a lot of money. The average salary for a game developer is $84,337 (http://www.gamespot.com/news/average...-84000-6406397). But we don't want average developers. We want really good developers. So lets pay them, say, $120,000, or approximately 142% the going rate for developers. At that salary, a staff of 300 developers (my recollection is that, at release, the game had 400?) will cost $36million. That would leave $39million to maintain and upgrade the servers, pay the utilities on their buildings, etc.

Not that much, I know, but all of that is BEFORE you take into account the CM. Take the huge influx of cash from the CM and all of a sudden a staff of 300 developers (the estimates are, of course, rough. they're also deliberately exaggerated. I think a staff of 200 might be enough. But I use 300 because if we can afford 300, we can definitely afford 200) seems pretty feasible, while still netting Bioware a comfy profit. I wonder if Bioware is reinvesting in the game at all right now? If they want to take their cash and go, that is certainly their right, but I would definitely be saddened and disappointed by it (and I genuinely don't think it would be a good business decision either).