Jeff Hickman and Bruce Maclean now on IGN with details on story

I would say that while not the ONLY way it is the only reliable method. This method is, to an extent, the same method they tried at launch. They game us HUNDREDS of hours of story all at once. As soon as they finished that and end game ran out something like 1 million subscribers left.

When a player leaves, they rarely return because something new and shiny has caught their eye. Even a near monthly roll out of a new chapter will MAYBE work for the first chapter or two but players consume this stuff FAST. They schedule vacation days around it for god's sake. You can never create new content fast enough so the content has to be repeatable.

In a BW perfect world scenario it would work because everyone would play through the story of all 8 classes. This would make the story they are making "repeatable", after a fashion. That isn't the real world though because people have specific likes and dislikes.

Example...I loved the Operative. I went to roll a scoundrel as it is the mirror class. Even with 12x exp I can't get past level 25. I think the Scoundrel animations are stupid and I think the story is simply bad.... snarky dialogue does NOT = good story. have tried but the only other Sith story I can dig is the Inquis BUT it plays so similarly to my consular I am STRUGGLING to get to the end of the story because I am bored with how the character plays.
Other people just like Jedi, or just like Troopers etc.

Its more than six months.
They advertised 16 chapters. We'll get 9 in October, the remaining 7 will get released on a monthly basis beginning in early 2016. This gets us to July 2016, so maybe we'll see new Endgame Content in the fall of 2016.

Also, we'll get no new content between October 2015 and early 2016. Thats the bright future to look forward to.

But is it a convincing reason?
For many players, endgame was the deciding factor to stay subbed month after month. BW sold them their product with MMO activities not just story.
But now BW will offer a different product; much more story but only story without new endgame content.
The question is whether or not it will work and the key will be if it is sustainable past October. What will those do in spring of 2016? After the movie, after many months of playing a couple of hours of story content and old ops again and again? Will they stay if they have nothing to look forward to?
I have serious doubts that it will work out.
For the hardcore raiding community i think the death blow has already been dealt. It'll take some time to think it, but when we get no new raid content in the fall, many players and especially many guilds will be lost forever.

And no, its not just a couple of players. Their metrics have always been ****. The vast majority of players who stay subbed for a longer period of time engage in endgame content. Maybe only with a toon or two but it keeps the game going day after day.
Good luck with winning them over with nothing but 16xZiostStory. Changing the horses midrace might proof more difficult than many here seem to think.

We'll see - ultimately it will come down to the 'new and shiny' issue you raised, but episodic games like Wolf Among Us and the Walking Dead game are proving profitable when well-made.

The difference between this approach and the situation at launch is (to put it in the most crass, anti-player terms possible,) now they've figured out how to string us along. If there was an option to subscribe for only one day for 1/30th the price of a monthly subscription, then yeah this model would be doomed to fail because everyone would take the one-day sub, complete the chapter and then maybe come back next month for another one-day sub.

If BW is actually able to put out another chapter in each and every billing cycle, though, that will be a different story - they'll have gotten the full month's worth of income, and we won't be able to power-game through next month's release until next month comes (and we pay again). The problem they had at launch was that they released five months worth of content all at once, and then players finished it in a few weeks and only paid them for the first month.

The risk here would be that people wait four or five months, subscribe for one month, and then play through all five months worth of content in that one month. If the idea of ongoing episodic content is appealing to a gamer, I doubt that person is the type who'd be patient enough for that approach - so again, it all comes down to the question of whether there are enough potential customers who are interested in this type of content. BW seems to be making the gamble that there are.

TBH I think something else is going on. For them story is simply easier. That is their comfort zone. I would bet a weeks salary that when this launches in October the 7 remaining chapters are already finished and in the can, they aren't going to be calling voice actors back month after month. On top of that having all that time spent in a cinematic makes the game itself "feel" bigger even though it is not playable content, because they are a time sink. The fact it is not playable content means that you don't need bug fixes, don't need to retune mobs (like when silvers were hitting MUCH harder than golds) etc. which adds another layer of simplicity to everything.

The more I think about it the more I think that this is all about pressure and they are simply using spin to justify it. Remember metrics can be used to justify anything really.

EA wants something HUGE to coincide with the new movie. BW feels that they can't do MMO huge but they can do story story huge. So for the short term gain of doing as ordered they have gone the story route.

Also this differentiates themselves from battlefront. I would wager they want to see how many players jump ship to that game. It wouldn't make much sense to pour a whole lot of resources into PvP say and then find out most of your Pvpers left for battlefront. So focus on the story to try and keep people interested and then see what you have
left when the smoke clears after battlefront's release.

The new CEO over at EA has NO problem killing existing games, let alone games simply in development. They just saw a MAJOR example of this with the shut down of Shadow Realms. That was a HUGE shock to them, no one there saw it coming. So they are likely in "panic mode" to an extent, on top of everything else, in all honesty

I agree that this is ultimately the whole issue, which was my point with:
I certainly understand being... skeptical of their metrics, but they've got numbers on how many people are playing the end-game content vs how many are playing through missions and story (and not just how many are at level [X] with mission [Y] in their mission log, but how many are actually spending time playing through those missions and advancing their stories, heck they have metrics on whether people are spacebarring through the conversations or actually watching them) and they're using those metrics to adjust there model to 'give players what they want'.

We'll see if they're right about it.

Good points all around and as to the bolded bit, I'd venture to guess that gamble is more than an educated guess.

It's not as if it's never been done successfully before as GW1 did pretty well for itself with even less MMO elements than TOR. And they did plan to use the model with Shadow Realms. Merging that team into the TOR team to use the tried and tested and now hot again IP with a large fanbase & production tools + game basically already in place is a substantially smaller gamble on their part.

Like I said above I will wager that the 7 additional stories will be "in the can" when the Expac launches so there will be no issue with them giving us one per month. The thing is though, how long do you think it will take someone to get through a chapter? It's only 5 levels...we are not going to be seeing launch sized chapters. I don't know about you but I don't pay a subscription to for a couple days worth of content, even if they do feed it to me in dribs and drabs t stretch it out.

I know I am not alone in the thought that if I have to wait 2-3 weeks (maybe more) until I get the next chapter, and there is nothing but the same stuff I have been doing for the last you to spend the time, I will not sub, the cost/benefit is simply not there.

I think this is why they are adding all of these loyalty incentives tbh. They know A LOT of players will be wary of this shift so get the expac for free and these other benefits. I would suspect they will be more "loyalty" bonuses rolled out as well. They will say what they did "hey don't worry new MMO stuff coming out in 2016 and while you wait here are these shiny things for ya." Heck they are going so far as to make a companion unique to subscribers.

If you have to do that though it says you are NERVOUS as all heck.

Simple, we go against Vitiate, get our asses royally handed to us, we are frozen in carbonite to survive the trip to medical facilities, and then the Fire Nation attacks.

Or it happens at the beginning of the War. We are their prisoner, but somehow get freed/escape.

I think this is going to be the question everything hinges on. $15 is the price of a movie ticket, so if I get a movie's worth of enjoyment out of each month's new content, plus the ongoing option to PVP, GSF, etc periodically in between, I'm probably going to be on-board with the new model.

Operations only keep me occupied for about two to four hours each month, max - they're just not a big part of how I spend my game time. If these new chapters add in a few hours of playable content every month, I'm going to be getting more bang for my buck.

No one is saying "You! Player [X]! You should like this new model", if it doesn't fit an individual player's play-style, then it doesn't fit, and it makes sense that BW's going to lose that person's subscription over it. The question again is whether there are enough players out there that this model does mesh well with, so that the net result leaves the game doing better than it was before.