It wasn't just that, he quoted the exit survey wrong. It was 40% said the subscription fee is why they are leaving. Bioware misinterpreted the metrics, slanted it to say that people want F2P and that will bring the masses back when in reality it was people waiting to give them $15 a month to play this awesome game they were hyping the hell out of, only to find out it was an exact WoW copy with linear leveling and nothing to do once you hit 50, except go through the same linear experience (holy cow that is a hell of a sentence). Until that is addressed, F2P is going to do nothing for this game except show people how poorly it was designed. It is just like the server merges, they did nothing to address the reason people are quitting, and even after healthy populations, they fell off again. The fact that people are expecting these "megaservers" to have a different result without any other changes is just insane. Edit: But apparently it was only the PVPers who left.

How much time, the 12 years EQ1 lasted or the 7 years EQ2 lasted or the 8 years WoW has been going so far?

Then explain EVE, or Rift?

It also lasted 7 years as a subscription game. Makes you wonder if a game that didn't even last a year as a subscription will be able to put up that kind of fight.

Are you really going to say that from the between 700k and 1.2M people that left (at the last investor call) they were ALL PVP players? And on top of that you insult PVP players? There is drinking the kool aid and then there is being so out of touch with reality that you are a danger to yourself and everybody around you.

Bioware has repeatedly proven they have no clue how to interpret their metrics, and their analysis of the metrics is beyond horrific. Any time they quote metrics for anything, you can be pretty sure they screwed it up and are going to address it completely wrong.

When was the first time they mentioned it, March? Don't you think a little more information in 6 months would kind of be expected? Right now people are worried that it went the same way the 'updates and content every month' promise went - completely made up fecal matter trying to retain as many subs as long as possible.

I don't know how people couldn't see the decline in population continuing. They had to have the server merges because the population was so bad on so many servers, yet they didn't address the reasons WHY the population declined. They tried to fix a symptom instead of the problem. Everybody should've seen this decline continuing, since nothing was done to fix it.

It wasn't just that, but the study also addressed MMORPGs giving people facing the dreary reality of unsuccessful job hunting a place to go and escape that reality, if only for a little while. The study was pretty in depth, and I was impressed with it.

It is a myth that economic conditions mean less subscriptions. In times of economic troubles, the relative inexpensiveness of a MMORPG subscription for unlimited entertainment is one of the best values you can get. It is a lot cheaper than cable television, the movies, just about anything else you can think of. There was a university study done on this back around 2008 or so, but I can't find the link now. I wish I saved that paper, people constantly claim that subscription losses are due to the economy, and it just isn't so.

I'm not sure you can say that, seeing as how the first one had over 6.5M sold as of Aug 2010. I think most people were expecting it to do rather well.

I don't see how somebody can claim that any other game is a WoW copy, with modified mechanics, while playing TOR, which didn't even bother to modify the mechanics (or rename some of the skills, or even change some of the skills). In Star Wars you don't have fireballs, you have flamethrowers and people shooting lightning out of their hands. In Star Wars you don't have dragons, you have Krayt... Dragons... (sadly you can't fight them in TOR), and demon things and ghosts and all other sorts of completely non-fantasy stuff.

It took Aion 11 months to implement the token to do the recustomization, but the venders and option were in since launch (just no way to implement them). And that game has character creation customization that makes the BW devs cry in their pillows at night, it was so amazing.

Yeah... but we have horrid clipping from level 1. Why start checking for it now?

Why would they start doing that now?