People just don't play this game for long anymore. Time for a new star wars mmo?

Honestly, I love SWTOR as a MMO very much if it did not become overwhelming. I think I would have played it endlessly if they froze the level grind, and focused on lateral expansion, adding content that can be explored with the highest level characters in various modes of difficulty. So, you'd have an intimately familiar character that could have either more and more adventures or gradually work up to the next challenge level in either PvE or PvP.

If instead of rebuilding all our ACs from ground up and sinking all the development into the level 65, scaling and crafting rebuilt, they would have given me half the story of the KotFE (5 chapters) with build in Flashpoints, upgraded ops with preserved 3 levels of difficulty, a few new instanced 1 boss Ops like Colossal Monolith, 3 extra warzones (1 of each type)...

...then they would repeat the process every 6 month, and rotate in and out the old content to keep it fresh....

...that would have been an ideal mode for me. I could have chipped away at perfecting my skills happily without added burdens in a stable environment not being continuously worried about keeping all the balls in the air, and having to relearn all the time!

The difference is none of the games you mentioned at the end require as much of a time sink, require monthly fees, and have better replayability IMO. Add to the fact that the MMO business model is pretty poor. You spend tens of millions of dollars and a year or more of time to develop content that will be consumed in a few months. No I don't have any exact numbers, but you didn't provide any either. I've never heard of Camelot Unchained or Blade and Soul and GW2 numbers, even if they are gaining players, are probably still below their numbers in the first year.

Its based on fact no MMO gained 6+m players.

FFXIV is gaining players because it launched in new Asia territory. It isnt all thea popular in the west. Apart from that expansion wasnt all that successful and new content was dealyed for at least 2 months (which leaves at least 5 months content gap) It also suffers from huge player drops between content updates.

MMO as a genre is losing players for 5+ years now.

And you hit the nail: what does every game you mentioned share: PvP. And not crappy gear/level based MMO PvP but skill based PvP.

A LOT of MMO players migrated to MOBAs because they got tired killing same boss for months and even paying 15$/month to have the privilege of killing same boss for months because they need gear to be able to play new content.

Ye, it aint working any more, what a shocker lol

I can't speak to broad trends in the game, but a few things in this thread strike me as odd:

• The idea that if you've been playing the same video game for 2-3 years and are now bored with it, that's somehow indicative of a problem with that game. That's more likely an indicator that you should do other things with your free time for a while, until you miss SWTOR and want to play again. Let your sub lapse and only re-sub when you're truly interested. It's way too easy to let MMOs become a second job, where you just log in every day because you logged in the day before, and you have all these self-imposed obligations (running dailies, raids, farming, playing the market, etc) that feel very tedious and boring. You're playing a game, it's supposed to be fun - so if it's not, don't criticize the game for failing to keep you interested; take a hard look at how you're spending your time and ask yourself if you're really enjoying what you're doing. If not, move on - there's no harm in doing so and it doesn't mean the game is bad if you do, it just means you need to break out of the monotonous rut you've gotten yourself into.
  
  
• The idea that recruiting faceless masses into a guild by inviting any randoms simply b/c they don't have a guild tag - and then not having those players become active members - is somehow indicative of a problem with the game. I just recently started and on almost every new character, I get invited to a random guild without any preamble whatsoever. Once in that guild, I'm generally ignored - I'm just another anonymous number to these guilds and they're just looking to cast the widest net possible WRT recruiting. They obviously just want to inflate their member numbers, they don't really want to invest any time into their membership. Only once have I seen a new guild try to engage its new members - set up guild FP runs, encourage grouping for Heroics, offer to help with questing and gearing, etc. All the others are just big collections of total strangers who never interact with each other. Go figure, when you run your guild like that, people are likely to leave because there's nothing about your guild that makes any different than any other guild (or really any different than being guildless). You have to provide something to your members that makes them want to stay and get involved, and bring all their alts into the same guild b/c they have such a good time with the people in that guild. If you're basically ignoring 80% of your members and they leave your guild or stop logging in to that character as a result, it's not the game that's at fault.

FFxIV is popular on asia not so much on the west... camelot unchained LOL, made by the guy that made warhammer lulz please

I can pick this game apart all day long with the endless list of mistakes and problems with it. I am also happy about some the changes coming. Before I say anything else, I have no issues with any other mmorpgs, or streaming anything except here in this game.

At core whats wrong with this game? Its a crappy game. Most people have connection issues, heavy lag spikes, long loading screens, and now a rubber band effect on whole maps. This right here is what drives players away. Do you have any idea how much this stuff drives me up the wall more then anything else.

Rumor has it its the engine, and then bioware went out of their way to say they were not replacing the engine for the game, so I take from that the rumor is somewhat accurate.

As for wow dont talk about something unless you know the facts. The expansion for wow had very little to do with the loss of subs. The reason it suffers is because their scheme has become plain, simple, and not interesting. Also their is a whole host of issues over their that they have swept under the rug, that is starting to find its way to the surface.

What exactly is TORtanic?

Oh, I got it now. It was the nostradamus type people online that forsaw this game dying (which it didn't) The cute trolls online that said TOR is like the Titanic and it's going to hit the iceberg and sink and TOR sounds a little like *** and has the T at the beginning and happens to be 3 letters so you substitute *** and put TORtanic.

That's cute It really is.

What is WITH people all the sudden attacking the game on it's own forums this past month or so really hard. People, as a whole, are very interesting creatures to study hmm..

must analyze posts and behavior tendencies again.

No they would likely ruin it, they would butcher it so it had the same combat mechanics as every other mmo, with enemies that stand still (lol)

Sorry but I watched what they did to the elder scrolls... never want to see a single player game made into an mmo ever again.

This is absolutely true of a lot of the "leveling" guilds (I aplogize about the classification I just don't really know how else to describe the guild you join for the XP bonus, and guild ship access, while you're leveling to speed up the process). If you do not engage at all with your members then your retention rate will always be insanely low. People definitely play this game a ton still. Guilds succeed when their members know one another and interact. I know for me the guild I am in now is fantastic. I love logging into TS and then the game just to see who is online. We've all gotten to the point where we'll just have a great time talking in TS for hours on end instead of even play the game. There've been times where we're all having a great time laughing at all of our awful jokes, and I found myself just running around my strong hold. Every Sunday we have mandatory meetings followed up by a guild event for those who can make it. We have newsletters going out weekly, and we are always hanging out in TS. There's something to be said for that kind of structure. People connect with each other that way.

Bottom line, you have to be engaged to have the kind of experience in guild that most people look for whether they realize it or not. And most importantly, you have to have the leadership in place that really wants to have that guild be awesome for its members. If you're the leader, that responsibility is on you. Unless you just did it for the tag in which case it's all good.

I'd say that if you're able to recruit 200 people to your guild that that is the real sign of how many people are playing this game. That would say to me "a lot".