NOW = 1.7 Million Active Subscribers | 3 Months from now = Guess What

Man, that was nice of you! I want to join your guild!

This is the heart of the matter a lot of people who are on the forums talking about GW2, Tera & The Secret World isn't getting. It's HYPE. Until you get your hands on a game...

DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE!!!

2.5m? LoL. I bet less than 1m in May - after release of GW2 and D3.

On my (top-10) EU server population declined like 1/3 during last month. No more 2 imperial fleet instances at once - barely can reach 200 players during peak hours instead of 280 + 30-70 in the other instance month ago.

My forced 3 months subscription (system rejected my mastercard and I was forced to use 2 months time card to activate account) expires in few weeks and I'm not going to resubscribe for this game - it was worst experience since Anarchy Online 10 years ago. Except for another game by the same team - Warhammer.

after 50 pages i doubt this will get read, but this is what we all know
Free trails, buddy passes and sales are a method of marketing used to create more player base. If bioware and EA are not doing those above methods, that means 1 of 2 things. This game is done and is crashing faster than we know (:P) or that sales are still increasing and they see no reason to change the current method

Secret world is a walking fail lol

Tera is too asian to appeal to a western audience even though it does look pretty. action rpg MMO should be interesting what fails first lol

GW2 probably will do some damage but not because of PvE but because of PVP. Every MMO is going to take a Hit when GW2 comes out including Wow

everything is always the messiah of gaming when its still in pre-release production.

when swtor was in production it was talked about like it would be the end all of the gaming world. the buck stops here.

now its gw2...

Games that are really designed for PvP first, like Guild Wars, DaoC, etc; don't really have gear progression. Or, if they do it's very minor mostly cosmetic stuff. Instead they have character progression. IE, unlock new skills, unlock new abilities. Mostly stuff that doesn't increase raw damage by a great amount in as much as it increases combat versatility, survivability, and enables new strategies.

WoW was the first game to have serious raiding and supposedly serious PvP in the same game. I'll elaborate on that in a minute...

When you have a raid gear progression based on infinitely inflating stats you must include some form of progression for PvP gear that does the same thing at the same pace; or players in raid gear will /faceroll players in PvP gear. In order to make sure raiders are satisfied with their PvE progression rewards you must make it fairly time consuming to obtain this PvP gear. In the designers eyes it should probably take the same amount of time to obtain as it took a casual raid guild to obtain the newest set of PvE gear.

This creates a hamster wheel in PvP where everyone is competitively geared near the end of every "Tier" cycle, with extraordinarily lopsided match-ups at the beginning of each new one. It creates a time and frustration barrier that annoys and irritates PvPers that might only have 2-3 hours a day to play, ultimately sending them away from the game.

To have enjoyable long term PvP there must be enough sandbox elements in an MMO to enable the PvP to be meaningful in the context of the game world. Guilds or factions should be able to control territories and areas, or there must be other conquest style systems in place to encourage team play and rivalries. These can't be instances because they then become meaningless mini-games without the flavor or satisfaction true world pvp providers.

Finally, PvP gear progression necessitated by PvE Raid gear progression ends up requiring that you reward players for losing; since until they gear up they will essentially have no chance to survive against equally skilled players. This limits the impact of player skill and limits teams not to the best PvP players, but those with the most time.

Overall, WoW styled PvP is funamentally broken. It's not good PvP. It's not meaningful PvP as existed on Darktide in Asheron's Call, or in RvR in DaoC. It's also not PvP that will satisfy real PvP'ers for very long.

This is the most true statement ever. Blizzard has even come out this week and begged it's Diablo fans to lower their expectations of that game because it won't meet them and they started developing that game 15 years ago. The human brain is the most incredible thing on this planet and what it is capable of realizing can't be touched by a computer game.

GW2 will be a fun time filler game and offer new things but honestly after the first beta weekend it is not the messiah. Fun combat? yes Neat mechanics? yes Greatest game ever made? Far from it. Then you have Tera which is an Asian grind fest type game that will cater to some but not the casual audience. This leaves The Secret World, which looks to be something a bit different but considering it is from Funcom who overhype their own products more than any developer in the history of gaming I look for it to be a flop.

Titan will be not be in the same class of game as SWTOR or WoW and will more or less be competition to the Sims meets Call of Duty on Facebook that they are already hinting will be F2P and driven by a cash shop. Blizzard is smart enough to know not to tread in the same water as their cash cow WoW. So that leaves you the two choices of SWTOR and WoW as the main sub based MMO's in the forseeable future. I like the direction this game is going and truly believe that in time it will dethrone WoW as the most popular game in NA/Europe.

People have been knocking the Hero Engine quite a bit but the one thing it does is speeds up development time and the fact that SWTOR can push out new dynamic content at a faster pace through use of that engine should keep people interested in this game for quite some time. I look forward to the coming year and seeing what Bioware can do to cement itself as an industry leader in the MMO game.

bear in mind those guys are given access in exchange for FAVOURABLE reviews, take every thing with a pinch of salt, I have been bitten way too many times by falling for hype.
AION, Rift and Conan to name 3.

...can I get about tree fitty?