The end of the arguement. Is SWTOR in decline? Can it be saved?

You complain the game leveling is too easy when you twink your character in moddable gear with purple mods.

Then stop twinking, and Level in green drop/quest gear then.

Just to add my thoughts to the mix. I was the last subscriber in my guild to quit. I terminated my subscription last night.

My guild and I managed to get the timed nightmare runs done in Karaga's and EV. We were mostly all war hero or battlemaster, and we all felt that the game did not offer enough incentives or activities to keep us playing from day to day.

Things that are seen as essential and common in other mmo's that would have kept us interested are:
1. LFG tool - Cross server. Being able to queue up a quick hm for some tokens, cash, or chance at a schematic.
2. Cross server Warzones - 15 minute queues are terrible.
3. A real achievement system to grind
4. Something unique and difficult to achieve, see the Insane in the membrane achievement in wow.

The game isn't terrible, however, it does lack some fairly common tool sets for mmo's in this day and age. I know that the argument of "its new" will come up. Frankly, it doesn't hold water. If a new car manufacturer came out with a model that was a contemporary of the Model T selling against cars of today they would not be competitive. Same with Bioware, they can't expect to be competitive with a game that is the contemporary of WoW 7 years ago, they needed to launch with the same tool sets that mmo players have come to expect.

A lesson that should be taken to heart for all new mmo developers imo....

Just to add my thoughts to the mix. I was the last subscriber in my guild to quit. I terminated my subscription last night.

My guild and I managed to get the timed nightmare runs done in Karaga's and EV. We were mostly all war hero or battlemaster, and we all felt that the game did not offer enough incentives or activities to keep us playing from day to day.

Things that are seen as essential and common in other mmo's that would have kept us interested are:
1. LFG tool - Cross server. Being able to queue up a quick hm for some tokens, cash, or chance at a schematic.
2. Cross server Warzones - 15 minute queues are terrible.
3. A real achievement system to grind
4. Something unique and difficult to achieve, see the Insane in the membrane achievement in wow.

The game isn't terrible, however, it does lack some fairly common tool sets for mmo's in this day and age. I know that the argument of "its new" will come up. Frankly, it doesn't hold water. If a new car manufacturer came out with a model that was a contemporary of the Model T selling against cars of today they would not be competitive. Same with Bioware, they can't expect to be competitive with a game that is the contemporary of WoW 7 years ago, they needed to launch with the same tool sets that mmo players have come to expect.

A lesson that should be taken to heart for all new mmo developers imo....

When you play 24/7 ofc you will get burned out with no content left, good god...

Good grief, this should be labeled a necro thread.

You people really need to start reading the internet.

You would realize that BW was forced to release the game early because of EA. BW employees stated that the game was not ready and still had another year before they wanted to release it.

They were told by Lucasarts to release now or not release at all.

Now end this thread!

There are several articles like this one out there:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2...ubscribers.ars

The articles all reference analysts predicting a decline in subscriptions by 2013, by approximately 500,000. Although I haven't witnessed much attrition within my circle of friends and their respective guilds, I don't disagree with the analysts' conclusion, and it would be disingenuous to ignore the rather widespread dissatisfaction on the Internet at large. I'm happy with the game and don't plan on quitting any time soon, but I can understand why the game isn't retaining customers or growing quickly:

- Bioware should have designed their infrastructure so that server merges could be easily done at anytime after launch. This includes building out each server for high capacity but leveraging quotas intelligently. I don't know why new MMO developers don't do this prior to launching. Lightning will not strike twice, your game will not be the new WoW, so you may as well plan accordingly for a first-month decline on many servers. And you have to ignore the stigma that server merges spell ultimate doom for your game. After the second month they could have merged many low population servers and avoided losing customers that felt as though they couldn't find other players, and/or complained of "ghost town" servers.

- The game should not have been launched without a robust looking for group tool that included pairing for flashpoints and operations, exactly like the dungeon and raid finders in WoW. This is a feature MMO players of the sandbox variety have come to expect. Like other genres, be it first person shooter or open world RPG, iterations are made and then copied by other developers when they're good ideas. They then eventually become staples of that genre and are refined over time. This is another feature that would have helped to retain customers.

- Travel times took too long to fix. The excruciating default run speed, no speeders in space ports, space ports in general, long cool downs on rapid transit, fleet passes not available to all players, no ability to travel directly to your ship from the game world, etc, etc. Some of these issues were fixed and make the game much more enjoyable. The refinements allowed players to spend more time doing fun things and less time traveling and zoning, but alas, they were "too little too late" according to many people I've spoken with.

- Story pacing is a big issue in the later levels. Gabe/Mike from Penny Arcade summed up his experience here (warning: spoilers), and I've heard very similar complaints from others - and I have to agree in regards to the bounty hunter storyline. Although I enjoyed it overall, there was some obvious padding:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2012/02/13/swtor3

- The Legacy System should have been launched with more features and unlocks, and been less of a grind. It's nice and certainly provides incentives for avid players to pursue, but to customers that were on the fence or looking for a reason to return, it looks shallow and grind heavy.

- And of course lack of end game content is often mentioned. I'm not a raider so I can't even opine on that. I am finding that all of the dailies at level 50 and the planet of Ilum in general is keeping me very engaged on my lvl 50 character. My friend and all the guys at work seem perfectly satisfied with the operations. So I'm ambivalent on this point.


I hope the analysts and myself are wrong and SW:TOR sees nothing but growth and success. The more the merrier and all, and the more successful it is the faster quality updates and content will be made (more funding).