Is SWTOR a 'big-boy' MMO now?

Well bully for you two but your personal definition is not held by all, so the question remains...

Oh gawd, I do!

I sleep with the CE box under my arm, we pillow talk together. Sometimes I let Darth Malgus Statue get in on the action (he's a cuddler).

I take the CE with me everywhere, I even dress it. Some of my friends have drawn unfavorable analogies to the film Lars and the Real Doll, but I just hit them with Force Lightning and they quiet down.

They're not Force-sensitive so they use the Galactic Basic term "tazer", but as a proper Sith I know that it's Force Lightning.

Well bully for you two but your personal definition is not held by all, so the question remains...

Pot meet kettle yet again. This is also like THE major component of a fan boy's argument.

Pot meet kettle yet again. This is also like THE major component of a fan boy's argument.

Anyway does "big" really even apply to MMOs anymore? What's the actual competition for that term?

Isn't the whole early-2000s MMO psycho-craze kind of deflated and it's just another specialized genre like single-player RPGs now?

WoW, probably the most significant MMO in Western gaming culture, lost its hype train and population growth a long time ago; even Blizzard's baby is firmly in "flatline" level where it has its loyal subscriber base that's not going away and that's about it.

New MMO launches don't seem to garner nearly the same interest or hype outside gamer microcommunities — I think people have moved on to other gaming pastures (like P2W phone-games they can diddle with between calls at work) and/or realized how monumentally wasteful dedicated MMO play is vs. other RL options.

So I guess for starters it's important to establish what "big" even means in this odd-ball genre nowadays.

By big-boy I mean one of the strongest competing in the market. Moreover what I'm getting at here is that despite all these numerous massive triple A MMOs releasing, SWTOR still seems to be going from strength to strength contrary to the countless dooms day messages about *insert hyped MMO release here*.

The latest example of this is The Elder Scrolls Online, a game which has suffered one of the worst releases in recent memory, even the biggest Elder Scrolls diehards have chastised the game and not even SWTOR's infamous 1.2 update seems to match the intensity of which the gaming crowd have torn ESO to shreds.

Guild Wars 2 does not seem to have suffered the same fate and has apparently stabilised.

Other examples of course exist but these releases don't seem to have pulled away from SWTOR at all, on the contrary the theme I am getting is that SWTOR is well beyond the hate train that it once suffered from, passed the hate carriage onto Guild Wars 2 and has only grown in the relative shadows since those days.

Though GSF hasn't been quite the saviour patch it was being touted as, it seems to have gotten an average-good reception and with Galactic Strongholds on the horizon with the long awaited Guild Flagships, players seem to slowly be giving SWTOR a second or perhaps third chance, with many claiming to have gotten a sense of great improvement compared to previous years.

So in the midst of bad releases, the opinion of SWTOR seems to have grown, if so could SWTOR be getting a second wind from all this?

Of course these are merely my own observations and doesn't account for the experiences of others.

But I am getting the sense that the failure to live up to the hype much for these new releases, much like SWTOR did is giving SWTOR's own improvements a time to shine.

Have you gotten similar experiences in recent weeks and share my observations or have you had completely the opposite experience? feel free to chime in but let's keep things civil.

Anyway does "big" really even apply to MMOs anymore? What's the actual competition for that term?

Isn't the whole early-2000s MMO psycho-craze kind of deflated and it's just another specialized genre like single-player RPGs now?

WoW, probably the most significant MMO in Western gaming culture, lost its hype train and population growth a long time ago; even Blizzard's baby is firmly in "flatline" level where it has its loyal subscriber base that's not going away and that's about it.

New MMO launches don't seem to garner nearly the same interest or hype outside gamer microcommunities — I think people have moved on to other gaming pastures (like P2W phone-games they can diddle with between calls at work) and/or realized how monumentally wasteful dedicated MMO play is vs. other RL options.

So I guess for starters it's important to establish what "big" even means in this odd-ball genre nowadays.

I would not call a loss of over 1.7 million subs a strong figure.