Seems Wildstar ain't faring as well as some said...

Yes, I have read many, many posts from WildStar players saying how great their devs are at listening to them. /rolls eyes

WildStar is not a failure, it's just absolutely never going to be as popular as it's adherents think it will be. Neither will EQNext. Neither was SWTOR. I remember before launch how many players swore that SWTOR was going to be the best, was going to crush every other MMOs. And surprise surprise, it didn't.

I really like SWTOR. It isn't perfect, and I've taken breaks from it. There are things about it that have frustrated me a lot. But I keep coming back, and likely will keep coming back. And not because its Star Wars. I don't particularly like or dislike Star Wars. I've seen the movies a few times. I read one trilogy of books. I didn't start playing SWTOR because of Star Wars, I started because my brother (who also doesn't like Star Wars) wanted to play and I wanted to game with him. So I bought it and I think it's great. I've read a LOT about SWG pre- and post-NGE and it sounds like something I absolutely would have hated. Does that mean it was bad? Nope, just didn't appeal to me (or many other players for that matter, ZING!)

As for the constant "People would play SWTOR if it wasn't Star Wars!" I ask this: SO WHAT?! It IS Start Wars. Saying "if it wasn't Star Wars..." is meaningless because that is part of what people like. So it's part of the game, and part of the enjoyment.

To be honest most of the SWTOR haters have moved on, even if you mention the game on MMORPG.com these days you'll find quite a few people supporting the game, and it used to have a high concentration of "haters".
A lot of players have even come back. Now it's mostly just SWG vets that are proclaiming TOR's the worst failure evah, and the Anti-Christ to boot.

See you in a couple of months!

You know, I've been playing Wildstar since the beta. I think there is a lot of fantastic things going on there: paths are an interesting addition; not being hard so much as it's eliminated the hand holdy-ness that has become so prevalent in video games is an absolute breath of fresh air; the combat is fast and fun; and the graphics, lore and stories create the feeling of playing within the world of a really cool Saturday morning cartoon.

That having been said, and as much as I love the game, unless the devs at Carbine pull off a miracle with their next game update I honestly don't see it making it to 2016, regardless of whether or not they move to some time of free to play model. I really don't. More than any other "boom to bust" MMO launch of the last five years, the fault for the rapid loss of players is squarely the fault of the Developers than it is on "changing market forces" or whatever external forces you want to blame. There is the saying that insanity is defined as doing the same thing repeatedly expecting different results, and NC/Carbine did exactly that with Wildstar, only worse: they saw all the mistakes the others had made, made plans to avoid those mistakes, and then ignored the plan and did what all the others did.

As much as you see raiders complaining tedious endgame grinds, they weren't the ones who began the exodus: it was solo/non-raiders, who had been assured that for the first time there was going to be content and progression for them at max level, were the ones who began leaving without a word. They'd been lied to yet again, only it was even worse: instead of reaching a dead end within two or three weeks of hitting max level, this time the best gear that they were ever going to see was available on the auction house the moment they hit level 50 because there was no real progression planned for them, and alt-ing is a tedious/unrewarding process due to the complete lack of variation in leveling. The majority of these players don't give an MMO a second chance, so now NC/Carbine are left the "hardcore raiders" ("hardcore" yet they find the raiding attunement process too difficult) whose numbers are not sufficient enough to support a triple A MMO. "Casual players", aka "the silent majority", don't trust these guys any more and it's a huge uphill battle that they're looking at to get them back, whether they go free to play or not.

I would love to be wrong about my prediction because I honestly do enjoy Wildstar, but even with the players having free transfers to consolidate on certain servers before the magaservers are in place, more and more players are leaving. Yeah a bunch will come back to check out Drop 3 (including me), but from all indications they're still going to find too much of what drove them away to begin with: too much RNG, a tedious raiding attunement process, and no meaningful endgame progression for non-raiders. I'd love to be wrong, but even when they change their business plan (which I expect sometime from November to January), I think that NCSoft will still be announcing server closures by late-September next year to sunset the game by December 2015.

Never made it that far, but from the people I know who have, the challenge in the attunement process is not the one designed into it; rather it's the large number of show-stopping bugs in the game that make some of the instance-based requirements impossible to complete as intended, barring one from advancing unless they're in a guild that knows the problem, knows a workaround and can commit the resources to perform it.

as for eso....never buy an mmo that is coming to consoles also.

I disagree. Final Fantasy XIV is pretty good and is on consoles.

It risks doing the same as Wildstar though - locking players out of content due to "skill" (which in ffxiv terms means how quickly can you and the rest of the raid avoid the insta-wipe mechanic). There is precious little for players to do unless they're capable do clearing the hardest content - 2 24 person raids and 4 8 person extended boss fights (assuming you can beat turn 5) plus a number of toborro's courtyard fights (primals). It's not nearly enough to sustain a casual endgame crowd and will drive people away.

TOR has endgame doing well - NiM raids for the hardcore, SM raids for everyone and they're manageable.

Unlike Wildstar FF has a very loyal fan base so I think it is less of a gamble for squareenix. Plus they are pushing hard to there Japanese market, something Wildstar does not have. The game has been out over a year and seems to be doing great. It was not for me but I can see people sticking with it for a long time to come.

I haven't heard about bugs in the attunement process for over a month now; my comment there was actually a veiled poke at all the people who clamored for a "return to when games were really hardcore" and then whined when they got exactly that. Now the process is going to be an account wide unlock, which I think is like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul: it essentially removes content from the game. Instead of fixing it to make it fun, they keep it tedious, but you only ever have to do it once.

Oh definitely. But a couple of bad patches as have happened recently and a distinct lack of content for less hardcore players is a dangerous Road to be going down.