SWTOR has taken heavy hits to its subscriber base over the past several months and talk has circulated about making the game free to play...
From a business standpoint I believe it would be in SWTOR's best interest to do, or keep doing the following.
1.) Reduce the sub fee
-MMO's everywhere are usually either free to play (which usually means its pay to win) or follow the $15 dollar a month subscription plan... one possible idea is, reducing the subscription fee to say $5-$10 a month, a reduced fee would attract many players that are simply fed up with $15 subs, but still see the wisdom in paying to keep content coming. The amount of players this tactic could potentially attract would by far make up the income lost from the reduction of the subscription fee... I don't see why the MMO standard has been $15 a month (Rift, WoW, ect). SWTOR will need to change their sub tactic if they want to compete with the upcoming Guild Wars 2.
2.) Features and Content
- Since the 1.3 update SWTOR has pretty much all of the standard MMO features plus some newer innovative features that are akin to SWTOR only. The developers must continue to release content on a steady stream to keep a sub base... and it must be free, other wise if people find themselves bogged down by waves of constant paid expansions (its ok to release a full fledged expansion but it must contain new things like new classes, quests, stories, gear and worlds... as well as advance the galactic spectrum)
3.) Difficulty and Length
-From the beginning SWTOR was never considered a particularly difficult game... and that's how people are able to burn through its content so quickly, if the developers made content more difficult and longer people would have to spend more time on it. One of the reasons WoW's Cataclysm failed was because of the ease of the new content and how short the expansion actually was, at this point SWTOR has done fairly well with ingame features, now its time to focus on the content such as Operations and Warzones.
4.) Player Driven
-My final and most important point is keeping SWTOR for the players it was intended for. The developers need to listen to the community and take note (if a raid is to easy make it harder, if the majority of the people want this then do it as long as its within reason) keep the game geared for the players it was originally meant for since release. One of WoW's newest problems is keeping players interested, their last expansion "Wrath of the Lich King" kept players entertained (aside from the grinding) and focused on new and difficult content. WoW's next expansion "Mists of Pandare" is the exact opposite of what WoW players since vanilla wanted, the addition of a cheesy new race that used to be an April fools joke, barely any new PvE content, and the addition of pet battles (basically a terrible Pokemon battle with vanity pets) leave vetren WoW players scrambling to find a new game, it appears that WoW is attempting to change their player base to a younger audience with easier content and terrible features, however if WoW had kept to its roots they might not be having this problem. So in summery SWTOR needs to keep it original yet fresh...
5. Keep the lore true
-An important thing is keeping the game cannon within its own universe... however since SWTOR is located within a period of Star Wars time that is largely unwritten, they can pretty much make up as they go, they should have no problems as long as they give leeway to the other periods of Star Wars History as well as its Future and make sure that the games lore matches up with the books that they release. (Bioware is excellent with story, so this should not be an issue)
That's pretty much all I can think of at the moment, if anyone else has any suggestions please share them, or feel free to critique and criticize mine. The first thing the developers can do is look at this thread and possibly get some ideas and insight...
Thanks
