Devs at the latest cantina: Class Story, not at the moment...

100% agreed.

1) people not playing a game (left, never showed up, whatever) do not matter. Why? Because they are not active players. They are at best, marketing opportunities for promotional marketing. They certainly are not the providers of content development doctrine for a game they have no ownership rights to whatsoever.

2) Active player counts have been relatively stable for more then a year now. The player base is active, and has been. So stop with the doomsday nonsense about how everyone has quit. Of course we have absolutely no idea (any of us) what the split in subs, preferred, free are... nor does it actually matter either. It's not our game, or our revenue... we are simply players paying for the priviledge (not a right, a priviledge) to play the game under Biowares terms and conditions.

3) IF you owned the game (actually own it.. not just brandish your license to play it), you could stipulate the terms and conditions of play, content development, types of snacks served in the Austin Facility, etc. But you don't. What you have here a good old fashioned boundary issue.. where you struggle with what is actually "yours" VS. what you "think is yours".

I stopped reading after this.

Because the people who left do matter, because it represents lost revenue.
The people who haven't showed up do matter, because it represents potential areas of growth if properly cultivated.

This game is a business. And only the elitist, ignorant, or very foolish say that customers who walk away due to something entirely preventable "do not matter".

Nothing more to say to you.

Ah.... no. There are planetary arc quests to some degree, as well as one-off throw away quest on the planets from launch. But with the introduction of RoTHC... they have put all their story driven focus efforts into faction quests for the time being.

It's fair to say there is no longer new Class story driven content being released at this time. I'm fine with that. But this nonsense where people deliberately do not listen to what is being said by Bioware in response to inquires about story arc development plans is just silly. But hey... people can do whatever they want with their noggins and opinions. But don't expect wide agreement. You'll get wide agreement that class story is great and more would be good... but it stops there.. you don't get to dismiss faction story content and declare it not story content.

Do you have any evidence for this claim? Because if all I cared about was playing through the class stories, I wouldn't maintain a subscription since every bit of class story, and even Makeb, can be done without one.

This is hyperbolic nonsense.

People who left the game after playing it, left for many reasons... all of them personal. Some have since come back and are very happy with the new state of the game (we see them say so in the forum) Some have never come back, and frankly.....in the context of this thread topic.... they don't matter because clearly class story had zero staying power for these early abandonments of the game.

As for people who have not yet played the game... what is your point? Anyone who has not yet played this game probably has little actual interest in either the genre, the IP, or the lore. Otherwise..... two years in.. most would have at least played it Free to try it.. as we also know from forum posts that people do in fact try the game for free, love it and subscribe too (which simply speaks to the overall success of the companies change in business model and marketing.

As for the ever popular "potential revenue growth"... give it rest. You are soap boxing with that nonsense. What matters is if the company is earning revenue in line with plans/projections, earning profit accordingly, and reinvesting revenue earned to support ongoing operations. Pretty sure all of this is happening.. since the game is still open, being actively expanded, and the servers are still quite active every day.....even the PvP servers where everyone has already allegedly left, quit, never to return again (in their own words) at least two times each.

Housing? Not at the moment
Guild ships? Not at the moment
Off-rails space? Not at the moment

Sound familiar? Read into it what you will.

Since you are the one always asking for people to provide evidence of their claims, I'm going to ask for your evidence of this one. Because according to torstatus.net, as flawed as that source is, player activity has been falling over the course of the year. I see a substantial (and expected) drop in player activity in the months following RotHC that accelerated in the fall, with a slight recovery around the launch of GSF, but now falling off again. In particular the European PvP servers look extremely weak at the moment.

So unless you have some confidential internal information to base this on, this seems more like hopeful opinion than fact.

Wish more people would realize this. Just because they say not at the moment doesn't mean it's not being worked on.

See... that's the nice thing about trend analysis. It does not require absolute numbers, only a way to track meaninful changes in the numbers. So.. it's a much easier credible analysis vs trying to have a silly arse discussion about subscription numbers.

Given you are willing to set aside discussion about subscription numbers (which nobody actually knows) and focus on active players recorded in ongoing trend data.....for the purposes of this discussion (where we are talking about active player levels, NOT subscriptions) Torstatus works just dandy. Why? Because while we cannot gleen exact player counts from torstatus (other then ranged estimations) it is extremely good for tracking trends in populations. And in looking at torstatus over the last years data..... yeah... it is a pretty stable active player population. It ebbs and flows with patch releases, and each server ebbs and flows to it's own player localization schedule... but it is in fact stable at the top level. The PvP servers, less so then the RP and PvE servers (which have always dominated the player base anyways).