rofl the catch 22

 

Btw, I applaud you fighting the good fight in the forums. I gave up a couple weeks ago. DOOOOOOOOOM

Conveniently ignoring that nothing he said actually had anything to do with any of the points I made, I see!

If I had a nickel for every update that's been predicted to KILL THE GAME...I'd be broke. We need more updates.

What does it take to "kill the game" for you? Zero players, or is dramatically reduced population sufficient?

What does it take to "kill the game" for you? Zero players, or is dramatically reduced population sufficient?

Dramatically reduced population would kill the game fairly fast. Because as more and more people leave, others who stayed can’t complete group content in a timely manner when they login.

Which causes them to become disheartened by the lack of players and they stop playing to.

When that happens you get a snow ball affect from people leaving who would have normally stayed if the population was healthy.

That’s what ends up killing the game in the end. Not the people who initially leave, but those who were happy with the game, but end up leaving from lack of population.

The challenge for Bioware is to not instigate the snow ball affect. Which will be difficult this time when we already have a lot less players than we did the last time they caused people to unsub when they didnt listen to overwhelming negative player feedback.

Dramatically reduced population would kill the game fairly fast. Because as more and more people leave, others who stayed can’t complete group content in a timely manner when they login.

Which causes them to become disheartened by the lack of players and they stop playing to.

When that happens you get a snow ball affect from people leaving who would have normally stayed if the population was healthy.

That’s what ends up killing the game in the end. Not the people who initially leave, but those who were happy with the game, but end up leaving from lack of population.

The challenge for Bioware is to not instigate the snow ball affect. Which will be difficult this time when we already have a lot less players than we did the last time they caused people to unsub when they didnt listen to overwhelming negative player feedback.

Yeah, THAT boat sailed out of the harbor before 4.0 hit.

In terms of a healthy endgame SWTOR is already effectively dead, and has been for a long time. It's not a fast death to be sure. More like getting knocked down a Sarlacc's maw, and there may still be a lengthy period of slow digestion before SWTOR is completely dead, but the endgame isn't going for any long scenic walks at this point. It probably couldn't even crawl to the toilet at this point. It still twitches and spasms a bit, but that's about all it's got.

There are still some of us old timers floating around, but I think we're really just restless spirits bound by the curse of the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Kurj may be right that there aren't really enough of us left for Bioware to really need to worry if we disappear.

The market for SWTOR, assuming the customers are sane, isn't MMORPG endgame. It's a one time play through of the large amount of existing story content. So 8 class stories, and dark and light side versions of 5-6 expansions, some large (if you count wading through a sea of sky troopers) and some tiny. An expac that's good for those customers makes sense from business perspective, and they're customers that won't care about changes per se, they'll just care about what's their initial experience.

That doesn't mean that SWTOR has limitless time to unwind a typically botched expansion over a year and a half. At least not if the changes mess up ability to do story content, which is both vast, and typically gets low priority for bug fixes.

There are some Star Wars quotes that suddenly have relavance.

"You have failed me for the last time."

:csw_vader:"I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it further."

Only it's Disney saying them to EA. Massive's "open world Star Wars project" is far enough along that they've mentioned its existence, and even which engine it will be running on. They're a console game studio, so it might well not be a direct competitor with SWTOR which very much comes from Bioware's PC game design lineage. So there's less chance that it will line up as a SWTOR killer in the way EA fantasized about SWTOR being a WoW killer. That said, if going after WoW is like picking a fight with Vader, then going after SWTOR is probably equivalent to picking a fight with C-3PO.

If whatever Massive cooks up translates from console to PC as well as Jedi: Fallen Order did, and it has the endgame to hold onto players, I think SWTOR could well end up in a world of hurt.

I'm sure the folks at Bioware have had thoughts along those lines too. It may be driving part of their approach to 7.0. SWTOR's selling point has always been the story and the Star Wars setting. If they could change the gameplay enough so that it had excellent story, excellent gameplay, and the Star Wars setting, then that might let them hold onto more market share. Think of a game like TETRIS, or Lemmings. They can eat up a lot of time, be fun, and gameplay is really the ONLY thing they've got going for them. So shooting for gameplay excellence is smart, and it's something Bioware might have the resources to do.

I've seen enough previous expacs coming from Bioware that the way this one is looking so far doesn't look nearly as different as they need it to be to reach that sort of excellence, but I think they probably are at least trying.

I think Bioware have been given an end date of sorts (time line). Of course I’m just guessing.

But I believe they’ve seen the writing on the wall and are throwing all their mad ideas into this expansion and through next year because it’s a last hurrah before development is stopped.

Wether that means they shut down the servers or just go into full maintenance mode where they restart the servers once a week to clear the cache.

Even the SWG devs did development right up to the last week before their servers were closed because the devs wanted to show what they’d been working on.

That’s what this feels like to me. I hope I’m wrong. I really, really do hope I’m wrong.