Will anything actually retain customers?

If they had produced content on a schedule even vaguely similar to what they promised and never used our money that was supposed to be funding new content to fund the F2P2W infrastructure, I would subscribe virtually forever.

So the answer to your thread title is a definitive yes.

Sadly, that's not what they did and it's clearly not the direction they're going.

Well, in reality it's symbiotic to a good degree between consumer and producer (true about everything really). Many of the "old playerbase" are still playing, but in the 20 million players world wide, they are a minority fraction (probably less then 5% in fact). So games are no longer designed to old school standards as they won't sell to a majority of today's player base, at least not as a subscription game.

I don't believe you.

Do we have to have the revenue talk again?

People will get board with things eventually. That's why it's important to refresh interest in all of these aspects. However, doing that too will also eventually get people to leave. The point is, there is no way to stop the influx of players coming and going over time. The only thing they can do is cater to the ones who remain and make content accordingly.

I was with WoW for the better part of 7 years. SWG from the day it opened until NGE. Asheron's Call for ~5 years. I liked this game better than all of them. Believe or do not; it does not matter. *shrug*


Riiiiiight... because we should only expect what the 475 page TOS & EULA say and ignore what the game's managers and EA VP's say about the value we should expect for our subscription dollars?


I don't see how either of those replies are on topic though... the topic being will anything retain subscribers. I'm actually a fairly easy subscriber to retain... for a subscription based game that delivers on par with other subscription based games. This one, obviously, does not even come close to WoW and Rift, to name one much bigger and one (supposedly) much smaller.

Nothing to do with the TOS & EULA vs. "some marketing spin" or "dev misspeak". It's a matter of simple economics. Not my rules, just the way things are. I buy a service and that's it. I don't get to have a say over what the company does with my money after I give it to them. It's the way of things. Fact. I didn't make the rules.

Your assumptions derailed the thread we sought to bring it back.

Actually it does come close. It is on par for the most part. If you consider content delivery schedules. Slower than rift but faster than WoW. The consumer base has changed. They are capriciouos and not as forgiving do to low attention spans.

Yeah, Blizzard have been studiously avoiding making WoW 2 for 3-5 years now, and I think that is why, they know it too.

SWTOR has almost nothing to do with the films though.

Well the content rate the promised is very, very different to what they delievered.

They've promised again for F2P........ but we'll have to see.