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

If they confirmed by word that they have an elephant in their office would you believe too? It's easily just a manipulation. If they admited officialy that certailny there is a big hole in this ship and it's getting more and more water very fast people mostly would start panic and would struck lifesaving boats in no time.

Question for you: What allowance was made for the number of people with months-long subscriptions who have cancelled and no longer play? To BioWare these would look like subscribers.

Not necessarily. BioWare has the proprietary metrics tools and programs that tell them exactly how many people actually log in and play. BioWare has more data gathering tools than any other developer ever has.

Now I do want the game to succeed as you can see from my previous posts. However, a couple of things the "naysayers" have said are probably true. People that canceled their accounts, but who have time left and those that are still in the free month they gave everyone are most likely being counted. My son falls into this category. He cancelled his account but can still play as the free month + leftover time have not expired. We won't know for sure how many "active" paying accounts there are until the next quarterly earnings call.

What matters more to me is that I know a number of others like me that are playing less and less. There is no doubt there are a lot less "active" players. Now if Bio/EA fixes/continues to fix issues maybe a significant number will stay. I'd sure like to, but need a reason once I'm done with the class quests.

I believe that there is a window of opportunity to turn things around. BIO/EA is doing the advertisement bit, they've ramped up their marketing quite a bit in the last month or so (some are citing this as a sign of trouble but in either case I think it is a good thing.) Now they have to fix some of the issues to keep the people on the fence, like me, from leaving.

Why do I want to see a very large population? The larger the population the more money BIO/EA makes, and if they aren't complete idiots, that's more incentive to put more money back into the game for improvements/content.

One of the reasons WoW has been so successful and really still is, most of the subscriber loss has been Chinese subs, is Blizzards ability to come out with huge expansions based on the money they are making from the game.

I don't expect any new subscription game to ever reach the level WoW did. There is just too much competition these days. I do always hope that any game I like can attract enough people to keep them making significant improvements.

Is the game in decline? Maybe.
Do I care? No.
Why? Because I am having fun playing the game. When another game comes along that I like, I will play it!
But Alkiii, why do you do this? Because I'm a gamer and gaming is what I do. No microscope required.

Except we know that their metrics include accounts that are inactive, but have time left. Remember their first subscription numbers report? They had to come back and qualify that the first 1.7 million figure included people whose subscriptions hadn't even kicked in yet.

They said their sub base is not declining. BioWare never has lied. Ever.

Great for you man.

Now when they completely drop the ball again on the next patch, they'll at least have you running around the fleet with 2-3 other people.

Thank you for the nice response. The game isn't perfect - and even so called fanboys like yours truly understand that. I posted a few pages back about stuff I too would love to see included. Constructive feedback is awesome. My issue is with griefing disguised as constructive feedback. My people not getting it post was social commentary on a social issue - tact. Folks who preach and spam how their own narcissism is a game breaker for an entire player base in efforts to chase potential subs away is crossing the line. Hence my agreement with the post I replied to.

Or 150 or so other people.
http://www.galactickegger.com/SWTOR/..._45_187500.jpg