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

Reading this thread reminds me of the "glass half full//half empty" argument. It really is a difference of perspective. There will be players who are impatient and want to see the hyped-up WoW killer arrive NOW. Then of course you have the fanboys/easily satisfied players who see nothing wrong. But in the middle you get those players who understand that the game is far from complete and are willing to stick around a while longer to see if they actually fulfill the promise.
My point is that everyone wants something different out of the game and everyone has a different level of patience when it comes to waiting. I will be giving this game a few more months. I don't expect rated warzones or free server transfers to be some sort of miraculous heal-all when they finally do arrive but I do expect, and I'm sure many of the more level-headed players will agree with me here, that BW will continue to put in the features we all expect from a modern day MMO and then some. If that doesn't happen then there really is no reason to keep paying $15 a month for an unfinished and incomplete game. The idea that they will string us along as they keep delaying basic features such as arenas is just something that most players won't stand for. I hope this game runs to it's first anniversary, not crawl and stumble like so many other games have.

Huh? No it didn't.

I can't remember 1 WoW thread from release of vannilla to WoTLK (I'm sure there was the odd one, maybe)..... it may have had them in the years since that, but for that first time WoW pop was genuinely growing.

People complained about a lot of things, but WoW dying wasn't one of them.

There were plenty BUT it was a different tense. Most of the doom and gloomers over there would say stuff like: IF you don't do X then WoW will die. And it got said, a lot. A whole lot. Often, tons.

DIsclaimer: This from U.S. release to right at end of BC beta. I ran screaming then.

Not even RIFT has merged any servers. The free server transfer service they started several months after launch did just fine.

As to this game, to be honest, I personally think it came out a year or 2 too early, there's so much missing from the game even compared to F2P browser based MMOs its frightening the sheer amount of features missing

Good point....GW2 currently only has 490K likes on their face book page TOR had well over a million at this stage and over the past month it has gone from 1.5 to 1.9 mil (remember that number drops if you unlike)....some folks are even saying that GW2 might get a half million sales and are doing happy dances about that; In it's first five months TOR is over two million sales and around 1.7 million subscribers... people minimizing the success of this game are mind boggling.

To add to this, Goretzu is more or less correct in that not many people complained when WoW first launched. The reason is that MMOs were still relatively new, and the overall MMO genre was still small. Having a small population was normal.

However, the typical "launch surge/dropoff" still happened. What's strange is that MMOers knew and expected it back then. These days, it seems to be suddenly a brand new concept that people can't seem to wrap their skulls around.

Just close this tiresome thread already. Op is just beating a dead horse.

CLOSE IT!!!

Going to have to beg to differ. I "worked" (MVP) on Blizz forums in that time frame and I read just about every single message in several sections (one of which was General) and there were absolutely "doom 'n' gloom" posts. LOADS of them along with the standard "wait 'til game x comes out, they will KILL this (WoW) game".

This has been going on since DAoC was released (and even a bit when EQ was released amongst the UO folks) but the sheer volume now is astounding.