Now I don't follow WoW news on any level nor do I have any interest in the game itself. But I got my weekly mmorpg.com newsletter and it had this small article that I found interesting. At the end of Q2 2015 (April to June) WoW reported their subscriber number at around 5.6 million, at the end of Q1 2015 (Jan to March) their subscriber number was around 7.1 million, and at the end of Q4 2014 (Oct to Dec) their sub number was around 10 million. It's pretty insane to think that in just 6 months they lost nearly half of their subs. Apparently this is the lowest number of subs they've had since 2005 or 2006. Interesting to think about..... the only game that can kill WoW is, well, WoW lol.

 

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150804006820/en/Activision-Blizzard-Announces-Better-Than-Expected-Quarter-2015-Financial#.Vckpovl0d8E

 

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/17261508174

 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/08/05/world-of-warcraft-has-lost-44-of-its-subscribers-in-six-months-but-thats-okay/

Garrisons were just that incredibly awesome. Really.

Well, it's not like TOR, FFXIV, GW2 and ESO each gained like 1 million sub from WOW's declining audience so this only shows how much of an anomaly the game was and the mythical "WOW audience" ain't for grabs by any publisher

WoD wrecked wow, bigtime. It turned into farmville with the garrisons, and with so many quitting the game the raiding became a desperate fight to keep 10 people in a group. This expansion has just been a huge let down, and ended it for a lot of people (myself included).

And after the next expansion, it'll hit 25M. WoW players are like that.

5 million of those are good farmers the rest are the hardcore raiders.

I haven't played WOW since 2007 and was amazed at how low the numbers are today. However, as I only tend to PvP, the changes they are making are enough for me to probably go back and take a look, especially as this games PvP has no future.

People just don't have the time and loyalty to just stay subbed when there's no more planned content, now that the player base is older and there are a ton of other MMO and multiplayer options out there.. They said they're done releasing content until the next expansion, which currently has no release date. Still, 5.6 million subscriptions is quite a lot of steady money coming in. Most likely that once the new xpac is released, it'll jump back up to 8-9 million.

Perspective is a fascinating thing in this regard.

 

If on Nov. 22, 2004, the day before WoW launched, someone had told Blizzard "hey, in ten-and-a-half years, your MMO is going to have 5.6 Million people still playing it, it's going to hold a bigger portion of the marketshare than every other MMO on the market (by a significant margin), and it's going to have made over $800,000,000 in revenue over the previous year" ... well, they'd probably have thought those projections were so optimistic that they were flat-out ludicrous.

Edited August 13, 2015 by DarthDymond

Perspective is a fascinating thing in this regard.

 

If on Nov. 22, 2004, the day before WoW launched, someone had told Blizzard "hey, in ten-and-a-half years, your MMO is going to have 5.6 Million people still playing it, it's going to hold a bigger portion of the marketshare than every other MMO on the market (by a significant margin), and it's going to have made over $800,000,000 in revenue over the previous year" ... well, they'd probably have thought those projections were so optimistic that they were flat-out ludicrous.

 

Yeah, as a matter of fact, when they launched the game they were expecting 500,000 subs max. They had no idea it would be the most successful MMO by far for 10 years and probably beyond.

Edited August 13, 2015 by chuixupu

Damn! Guess I can no longer say that WoW could continue to lose subs at their current rate for five years and they'd still have more subs than their next five largest competitors combined. 'Cause they're at that point already.

 

The age of the premium MMO is at an end. If even WoW is losing subs at this rate then it's fair to say the subscription-based model is as dead as a doornail.

And yet still smoking the rest of the competition. Speaks volumes as to what's out there, including here.

 

Wasn't a fan of the Follower's, nor the Shipyard's update, why I stopped playing.

 

Every dog has its day. so will WoW's, but it's not coming anytime soon.

I just hope this ushers a new age of innovation in MMO space. Every subscription MMO banks on the WoW formula

 

Group content, where everyone furiously mashes their keyboards to maintain their rotations because the entire game is based around a UI element, the quickbar. Group content where the entire goal is mash your rotation to keep your dps/threat/heal up to the tempo of keys per minute, like you're in a the keyboard mashing version of a symphony orchestra. Current generation of WoW-style players might make good concert pianists.

 

Group content is stop-and-go, "NOBODY move, we must first discuss if you know this fight." "I want 1,2 to perform task A. I want 3,4 to perform task B. I want 5,6 to perform task C, etc. On the count of three we all go. 3. 2. 1." Mash your keyboards. They way group content gets played is like a Massively Online version of final fantasy tactics advance for the gameboy advance. Everyone in the group content has their assigned movement space, their assigned moveset, it's all turn based tactics, depending on how slow your group is or how many times one person needs to be lectured by the Raid leader before they carry out their assigned moves without hand-holding.

 

That's group content. End game raids/operations.

 

Arena Combat. Then the second element of wow formula is arena player versus player. Auto teleport all persons in queue to a segregated multiplayer arena match. Arena matches net you commendations to exchange for Arena PVP gear. This fundamentally killed all of SWTOR's pvp servers, observe every night that US PVP servers never reach Standard population it's always light. BECAUSE there is no reason for a would be griefer or dickish PVPer to waste his time hunting in the open world when he could be earning commendations in arena match. Arena forces every would be pvper to only play arena pvp, there is no other option OR YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME trying to legit pvp in the open world.

 

Need to be redesigned:

Group content

Arena content

 

----------

MMOs need to move away from:

Quickbar combat system

 

The only future I see for quickbar rotation based MMOs is to give the player a rotation customizer and autoexecutor that automatically plays the rotation you preprogrammed through an ingame interface. Basically legalize scripting and give players an ingame method for arranging an autoexecute script OTHERWISE move away from quickbars as your primary mode of combat.

 

THE ENTIRE user experience in an MMO is designed around the quickbars being present in the User Interface. MMOs won't change until you get rid of it.

----------

I've been known to rant about quickbars and hotbars before, here are my other two rants from 2013. The time period was before The Elder Scrolls Online release, only a few promotional materials had been released. This will explain why I dislike hotbars so much. (They break immersion, your eyes focus on cooldown timers instead of the game world)

 

02.17.2013

 

I watched the promotional '

' trailer, when I came back to SWTOR I noticed my eyes spending most of my attention/focus looking at the hotbars, waiting for the moment cooldowns expired and when I could finally press the next key bind.

 

but uhh.. I'm really starting to get tired of playing Massively Multiplayer User Interface Games, in general.

there are some upcoming mmo's promising a lot of cool game winning features. Example: two features promised in tESO are 1. NO quick/hotbars EVER and 2. NO COOLDOWNS**. "On-at-all-times" UI elements will be removed or kept to a minimum in this upcoming game, they will try to represent everything visually on screen (like dead space's ammo counter and health bar) . Goal is to not not break your immersion AND allow you to soak in, the graphics without User Interface plastered on top of the game world. tESO is an exploration based game and they want you to actually look at the game world in front your character NOT the quickbars and interface...

 

I loved Dead Space's unique health bar built-in to the over-the-shoulder player model's suit and the ammo counter visible on the weapon model itself. That visual design choice went a long way in making Dead Space 1 a great game.

 

 

**no cooldowns promise holds up, the balance/gameplay limiting factor will be managing mana and stamina. Cast, hit, strike as much as you want, when ever you want , you'll only be limited by mama and stamina.

 

 

 

MMOUIG

 

 

06.15.2013

 

...

The Division, the show stealer. Stole this years E3 with open world multiplayer online role playing shooter. Tom Clancy name plastered on the logo means it takes place in the not too distant future on this Earth, today's world but in an open world game.

 

...

 

Almost all the future multiplayer games leak mmorpg aspects, they just wont have the 'massively' prefix attached to the genre title.(titanfall, the division, watch dogs)

 

Swtor is out the picture, last gen, dying breed. Were all clinging on to the old way of what a mmo and rpg should be. Many people are jumping ship, out of this old way of running mmorpg, or boarding the last train to save the genre: The Elder Scrolls Online (eliminate hotbars, cooldowns, cut down UI, make players observe the ingame world instead of the User Interface.) Elder Scrolls Online is open world too

 

MMORPG players are stockholm syndromed into thinking the 'WoW-style game' is the only way to play a video game. Can't and won't play anything that isn't similar to WoW. Swtor falls under this umbrella.

Edited August 14, 2015 by Falensawino

I'm sorry, but I LIKE my quick bars. I like them in single player games and I like them in my MMO's. while it was cute for all of five minutes playing dead space with their integrated UI - it got very old, and very annoying. I like seeing my abilities, i LIKE seeing cooldowns, I like seeing them in both single player and multiplayer games. its a damn good thing that Bethesda games are moddable, otherwise, I wouldn't be able to play them.

 

not to mention UI is NOT what makes or breaks the game, unless its a final straw in a pile of everything else going badly.

 

the problem with WoW is very simple. WoD is a bad expansion that cost more money and had less content than any prior expansion in history. WoW is losing subs EVEN with wow tokens being implemented (and yes, they did count them in their sub count, they said as much) becasue of its dropping quality, especially in a face of so much more competition than when the game first came out.

 

MMO market is currently oversaturated. we have more games than we have target audience. so you cannot just rest on your laurels anymore. will Blizzard regain subscriptions with new expansions? don't know yet. but so far... they might get 1 or 2 mill back just to check it out, but I don't see them sustaining the numbers. in fact, I see WoW losing even more subscriptions in this quarter, due to terrible content drought. 6.2 was the last content patch, confirmed. the rest is just minor tweaks until pre-expansion event.. and since there isn't even release date, tentative date being sometime next year?... yeah.... they are still a juggernaut who will lumber along out of sheer inertia. but Blizzard has been disappointing their long time fans lately, choosing to move into MOBA market. its their prerogative naturally. but they are slowly but surely killing off WoW, milking it for as long as they can, but I don't think its anywhere near their primary focus anymore. to work intensive to produce compared to profits they have off healthstone, etc with fraction of development effort.

WoD wasn't a bad expansion. Most people agree that WotLK was the best, and none of the subsequent ones have lived up to it, whether it's fan nostalgia or just the fact that the game isn't getting any younger and neither are its players. I think they've all been equally fun and somewhat disappointing in some aspects.

 

The current MMO model is certainly on the decline - personally, I don't think we're going to have the next big thing until technology steps up a bit more. VR will probably be the real new frontier in RPG gaming, and we need internet that is able to handle large amounts of graphical data lag-free.

WoD wasn't a bad expansion. Most people agree that WotLK was the best, and none of the subsequent ones have lived up to it, whether it's fan nostalgia or just the fact that the game isn't getting any younger and neither are its players. I think they've all been equally fun and somewhat disappointing in some aspects.

 

 

we may have to agree to disagree then. but objectively speaking it was expansion with highest price tag and at the same time least amount of content.

 

I'm too lazy to look for it now, but someone did the comparison table of content for every expansion and WoD is glaringly sparse in terms of dungeons, raids, dailies and other activities. while I disliked Cataclysm for variety of reasons - at least there was plenty to do and they tried storytelling improvements, they just overdid it a bit with phasing. and as much as people hate Pandaria - they have actualy improved storytelling there and again - there was plenty to do. the issue with it, other than basing it around the race that started out as long ago april's fools joke - was that they gated gear, especially Valor gear behind dailies and reputations, making it very alt unfriendly and making dailies/regrinds feel mandatory.

 

but instead of learning from that - in WoD they removed dailies all together, leaving behind... apexis grinds. every reputation is basically a grind. people though Shaoshao rep was a drag so they gave us an entire expansion of Shaoshao reps. people thought that certain steps of the legendary quest were too grindy... so they made legendary ring even grindier. people complained about Garrison being basically a requirement to acess every WoD story bit.... so they added a shipyard, which is worse version of Garrison and locked more story behind unlocking that - and shipyard cannot be unlocked, unless you upgrade your Garrison to lvl 3. and don't even get me started on Ashran. how can company that created wintergrasp and Tol barad mess up Ashran so badly.. I may never know.

 

its like someone decided to look at player complaints and instead of trying to improve things, they just took every feature people disliked and turned it up to 11. all the while keeping content as sparse as possible. WoD makes SoR look like content glut.

 

so while yes, players are getting older as does the game... they have been getting older for a while now. WoW weddings and WoW families have been going on for years and years. so that's not the reason people are leaving in droves during this expansion. and as much as I dislike complete removal of flying and endless delays of re-implementing it (I'm not using one of my tokens until patch 6.2.x - aka the flying patch is live. and I don't even know which patch its going to be anymore, since it used to be 6.2.1, but now its 6.2.2) but not even lack of flying would have gotten that many people to leave, especially after a massive surge at WoD release. no. that was quality and quantity of content. or rather lack of thereoff.

Edited August 14, 2015 by Jeweledleah

I haven't played WOW since 2007 and was amazed at how low the numbers are today. However, as I only tend to PvP, the changes they are making are enough for me to probably go back and take a look, especially as this games PvP has no future.

 

I quit WoW because of PvP. I don't play PvP for a living, it's just my favorite pass time in any MMO and sadly WoW's PvP is a joke. You think here is bad? Damn, in WoW you better play a melee because no healers/casters are going to make it - won't live past 15sec with all those stuns, interrupts, silences and lockouts. No fun.

 

WoW is a beast, it's still fun to play but it's aging badly and no amount of fluff they present for their future expanions are going to help it. Sure, people will come back for the next expansion and the mass move elswere, loosing it's core playerbase with every expansion since Pandaland (at least it started to get visible back then).

 

I still have a month of frozen sub from back when I was trying out WoD, will probably jump in for a while next year to be yet again sorely disappointed and return to LotRO and SWToR

we may have to agree to disagree then. but objectively speaking it was expansion with highest price tag and at the same time least amount of content.

 

I'm too lazy to look for it now, but someone did the comparison table of content for every expansion and WoD is glaringly sparse in terms of dungeons, raids, dailies and other activities. while I disliked Cataclysm for variety of reasons - at least there was plenty to do and they tried storytelling improvements, they just overdid it a bit with phasing. and as much as people hate Pandaria - they have actualy improved storytelling there and again - there was plenty to do. the issue with it, other than basing it around the race that started out as long ago april's fools joke - was that they gated gear, especially Valor gear behind dailies and reputations, making it very alt unfriendly and making dailies/regrinds feel mandatory.

 

but instead of learning from that - in WoD they removed dailies all together, leaving behind... apexis grinds. every reputation is basically a grind. people though Shaoshao rep was a drag so they gave us an entire expansion of Shaoshao reps. people thought that certain steps of the legendary quest were too grindy... so they made legendary ring even grindier. people complained about Garrison being basically a requirement to acess every WoD story bit.... so they added a shipyard, which is worse version of Garrison and locked more story behind unlocking that - and shipyard cannot be unlocked, unless you upgrade your Garrison to lvl 3. and don't even get me started on Ashran. how can company that created wintergrasp and Tol barad mess up Ashran so badly.. I may never know.

 

its like someone decided to look at player complaints and instead of trying to improve things, they just took every feature people disliked and turned it up to 11. all the while keeping content as sparse as possible. WoD makes SoR look like content glut.

 

so while yes, players are getting older as does the game... they have been getting older for a while now. WoW weddings and WoW families have been going on for years and years. so that's not the reason people are leaving in droves during this expansion. and as much as I dislike complete removal of flying and endless delays of re-implementing it (I'm not using one of my tokens until patch 6.2.x - aka the flying patch is live. and I don't even know which patch its going to be anymore, since it used to be 6.2.1, but now its 6.2.2) but not even lack of flying would have gotten that many people to leave, especially after a massive surge at WoD release. no. that was quality and quantity of content. or rather lack of thereoff.

 

A million likes.

 

Regarding flying: I'm a casual mount collector. I have a boatload of mounts, lots of them flyers. I don't give a bald rat's behind about the lack of flying. My co-gm quit over it and will not go back unless there is flying available at max level at launch. I still poke at him about it on vent.

A million likes.

 

Regarding flying: I'm a casual mount collector. I have a boatload of mounts, lots of them flyers. I don't give a bald rat's behind about the lack of flying. My co-gm quit over it and will not go back unless there is flying available at max level at launch. I still poke at him about it on vent.

 

well... I'm with your Co-gm actualy after dealing with the horror that was WoD terrain, I'm not buying another WoW expansion unless it allows me to bypass all the arbitrary obstacles Blizzard likes putting in player's way nowadays to artificially extend otherwise thin content - by flying over them.

 

funny thing is... lack of flying doesn't bother me at all in SWTOR with maybe exception of Belsavis. but lately WoW zones are pretty much all Belsavis maps taken up to 11 >_>

 

aaaaanyways. Legion would have to be spectacular, just to maintain costumer base that WoW has left IMO.

 

its just I was thinking, as badly as the game is aging - its playerbase aging is actualy to their advantage, becasue I know of a lot of people playing it as families with their kids. people who have been leaving not because they are too busy, but becasue new content is less fun.

I'm sure it depends on what kind of player you are. I'm not a soloer. I push to max level as fast as possible and do group content. Really don't have any interest in anything else. From my perspective, the thing that I was disappointed with in WoD was that there was fewer dungeons than usual. Doing group finder around level 98-100 you were stuck doing mostly Skyreach over and over and over. And they didn't really make new exclusive hard modes either. I miss them doing that in swtor too.

 

its just I was thinking, as badly as the game is aging - its playerbase aging is actualy to their advantage, becasue I know of a lot of people playing it as families with their kids. people who have been leaving not because they are too busy, but becasue new content is less fun.

 

Older people with families tend to play differently though. We used to play for hours on end through to morning doing the most mundane things like just wander around exploring or killing the same group of mobs over and over just to get rep. We don't have the time energy to do that anymore. We don't have the money to spend on multiple accounts. It's more play a little here, let someone else play a little there, unsub when nothing's going on, move over to another f2p MMO in the meantime.

I'm sorry, but I LIKE my quick bars. I like them in single player games and I like them in my MMO's. while it was cute for all of five minutes playing dead space with their integrated UI - it got very old, and very annoying. I like seeing my abilities, i LIKE seeing cooldowns, I like seeing them in both single player and multiplayer games. its a damn good thing that Bethesda games are moddable, otherwise, I wouldn't be able to play them.

 

 

not to mention UI is NOT what makes or breaks the game, unless its a final straw in a pile of everything else going badly.

You like seeing visual confirmation that the keyboard key press went through and a cooldown started in your quickbar. What you seek is visual confirmation that the thing worked. You don't need precious on screen real estate occupied by 6 quickbars though. You can provide visual confirmation without taking up space, of which ultimately only distracts the user playing the game.

 

Here's the test... when you start an ability with a cast bar, do you A. look at the character animation or B. focus on the castbar as it fills up? I'm pretty you're distracted by the castbar just like everybody else. People play for these visual on screen distraction elements and pay little attention to what actually occurs on screen.

 

not to mention UI is NOT what makes or breaks the game, unless its a final straw in a pile of everything else going badly.

I'm being reductive, I'm trying to boil everything down to it's base element and as I see it now, UI is a pretty big base element. WoW lasted so long because players can customize and redistribute their UI addons and macros. SWTOR has a mini customization scheme editor but nothing as expansive as WoW's customization and WoW's capability to fundamentally change how you play the game [by modifying the interface].

 

I could be completely wrong, a fool and nobody would notice because I pick the worst threads to enter these discussions. I'm discussing the future of MMOs and this is a just a topic about Blizzard's quarterly earnings report.

 

 

 

You like seeing visual confirmation that the keyboard key press went through and a cooldown started in your quickbar. What you seek is visual confirmation that the thing worked. You don't need precious on screen real estate occupied by 6 quickbars though. You can provide visual confirmation without taking up space, of which ultimately only distracts the user playing the game.

 

Here's the test... when you start an ability with a cast bar, do you A. look at the character animation or B. focus on the castbar as it fills up? I'm pretty you're distracted by the castbar just like everybody else. People play for these visual on screen distraction elements and pay little attention to what actually occurs on screen.

 

I'm being reductive, I'm trying to boil everything down to it's base element and as I see it now, UI is a pretty big base element. WoW lasted so long because players can customize and redistribute their UI addons and macros. SWTOR has a mini customization scheme editor but nothing as expansive as WoW's customization and WoW's capability to fundamentally change how you play the game [by modifying the interface].

 

I could be completely wrong, a fool and nobody would notice because I pick the worst threads to enter these discussions. I'm discussing the future of MMOs and this is a just a topic about Blizzard's quarterly earnings report.

 

 

I actually have two more typed posts ready to paste here, but I don't want to waste it on this thread...

 

I think I'm going to end up pasting my replies in another thread called "The Future of MMORPGs" http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=8367905

 

It's kind of interesting to see WoW reaching the end of its lifecycle. In that other thread a video from 2012 is linked talking about why MMOs fail at competing with WoW. Now, 3 years later a new scenario rises, WoW can't compete with itself and subscriber count decreases.

 

What you're discussing here, really ties in with that other thread, "Future of MMORPGs"

 

contrary to your apparent belief you

 

1. do not know what I want better than I do. I like many other semi casual players are clickers. we need visible UI so that we could "gasp" click it. so I want both. I want to see my press-able abilites AND I want visual confirmation of those abilities actualy working. but i LIKE having my cast bar, I like seeing that that ability went on cd, even when I can bind some abilities to keys I can reach and not just clicking them on screen. and concidering damn near the immediate creation of mods for ESO and Skyrim etc that allows people to have VISIBLE UI, as well as popularity of said mods? you don't know what's best for a very large number of players any more than you know what's best for me.

 

2. do not know what's best for MMO's as a whole. only what you would prefer to see, personally

 

3. you are wrong about WoW , both why other games cannot compete with it and why its declining.

 

 

but that's ok. you are not the only one with pet cause, thinking that that cause is be all end all.

 

P.S. UI mods do not fundamentally change how you play the game,. they change how you see the screen, but mechanics remains the same. and you can modify UI's look in SWTOR as well.

Edited August 15, 2015 by Jeweledleah

You like seeing visual confirmation that the keyboard key press went through and a cooldown started in your quickbar. What you seek is visual confirmation that the thing worked. You don't need precious on screen real estate occupied by 6 quickbars though. You can provide visual confirmation without taking up space, of which ultimately only distracts the user playing the game.

 

How the heck would even heal in this game if you reduced the UI that much? The biggest chunk of real estate in your UI is the raid frame, and if you couldn't click on names in that raid frame you'd pull your hair out trying to tab target friendlies or click on moving character models to be able to cast a heal at someone who needs it. Heck, I want to see you click through the back of a boss to heal that tank on the other side.

 

That would be a huge unfriendly change to every melee and tank class, simply because they would be hardest to heal in that situation. And this game is already melee unfriendly.

How the heck would even heal in this game if you reduced the UI that much? The biggest chunk of real estate in your UI is the raid frame, and if you couldn't click on names in that raid frame you'd pull your hair out trying to tab target friendlies or click on moving character models to be able to cast a heal at someone who needs it. Heck, I want to see you click through the back of a boss to heal that tank on the other side.

 

That would be a huge unfriendly change to every melee and tank class, simply because they would be hardest to heal in that situation. And this game is already melee unfriendly.

 

he's possibly thinking of directional healing. like ESO, neverwinter, wildstar.

 

well... ESO healing what I tried of it is boring, becasue its all smart heals that I can barely control. Neverwinter is interesting, but suffers from exact problem you describe. targeting players directly can be a pain with large boss around, so you just have to hope they stand in your AoE pools of healing and get enough healing from debuff on the boss (when it comes to healing on a cleric anyways, having done no healing on a paladin, as I stopped playing around the time they were released) and wildstar..... while that game amuses me, healing in it? does not.

 

another possibility is him talking about scrolling through group members via hot keys rather then clicking frames directly. which again is either terribly inefficient, or requires extra memorization. and without seeing healthbars clearly and in one spot, it can actualy ruin immersion becasue now you have to watch healthbars on players out on the rest of your screen, often spinning just to make sure you are seeing everyone.

 

or maybe he's talking about not having trinity at all, so healing is not a concern. which.. I have tried in GW2 and meh. I play that game despite lack of trinity not because of it.

 

or maybe he's talking about something else entirely, but above I my guesses anyways.

Edited August 16, 2015 by Jeweledleah

UI is not the problem with WoW and the MMO genre.

 

The problem with the MMO genre is, quite frankly, manifold.

 

I'm not sure if anyone has noticed, but the primary market for Western MMOs, the United States, has been in an economic slump (to be polite about it) for nearly seven years. The Chinese MMO model is not nearly as profitable as China has legal limits on how much time one can spend playing video games and there are no 'subscriptions' but a pay per hour model there. Europe isn't in the best place, economically, either.

 

People, lately, are too busy managing life and work (or looking for) to play video games. This in addition to the rising cost of everything has left a lot of people strapped for cash.

 

Me, I'm on a fixed income (combat-disabled veteran of Afghanistan) and obviously it won't be increased to compensate for the ridiculous inflation at hand. I'm only subscribed here now because I no longer have to spend cash to play WoW (subbed through mid-November via the Token and have been since June). The main reasons I haven't quit yet are my guild (some of whom also play TOR, but most of whom refuse) and because my main character (that I rolled in March of 2006) is approaching 450 days played.

 

Yes, a large part of the game's current demise is Borelords of Paymore (paid $10 more for less content... GG Blizz!), and I'm liking how things are looking for Legion. Until Legion rolls in, I will be raiding & role playing with my guild on WoW while maintaining my four level 3 garrisons to make gold (gotta have a stash for Legion).

 

I'm still leveling my 'main' here in TOR, but I'm loving the story (the main reason I wanted to play a BioWare game)! The ability to level with just story missions has been a godsend! I'd be much further along already if I hadn't lost my keychain token in my recent house move, and could have logged into my old pre-order founder account, where my Shadow was already past Taris.