There has never been any official statements on the budget of the game. Ever. You can't even do an estimate because you have no idea about the costs. "Analysts" have estimated the budget anywhere between 100 and 200 million. But in reality it could even be above 1 billion. We simply have no idea so using any number to prove (or improve) your argument is ridiculous. Don't do it. It only serves to spread misinformation.

It's not 300 million. It's 800. Get your facts straight. Geez some people are lazy.

Actually they did. Their subscriptions at the end of 2011 were up compared to the end of 2010. And there are many posts about players returning after crucible was released.

I don't think faction change was available before they last added servers so I don't know if they've made any rules regarding that. I know for sure there aren't any time restrictions to faction change and server transfer currently but that's because there aren't any new realms.

You also can't transfer characters between region servers. Actually to be able to play in other region you need to buy the game and all the expansions you want to play for this specific region. Although I think there's an ip ban in china for non-chinese players anyway but eu<->us "transfer" means paying a lot of money and starting from scratch.

It was a response to me playing pvp at 40 fps by someone who's watching over my shoulder. If those slowdowns occur often then, yes, there is something wrong with your setup. If it happens only when the game is reading something from the hd then it's normal. By normal I mean that it's a known issue that hopefully will be resolved. There's always slowdowns when a game tries to read from the drive. Even in single player games. In tor it seems a bit more noticeable and, most importantly, for some reason it doesn't benefit from a fast drive.

O,rly? http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/282/screenshot2012022716485.jpg

Not necessarily. There hasn't been a previous mmo that had significant focus in creating alts. We'll see whether the majority will like this design but it'll take a few more months and it will definitely be a factor in the size of the playerbase.

Same could be said about an increase in subs. While a slight drop is more probable than a slight increase you simply don't know.

Depends on what kind of drop you're talking about. If you mean a drop to current rift levels like that guy a few posts above then, yes, grasshoppers with guns is much more believable.

Indeed, how could you even think of doing something for the server community! If you're not getting direct benefits (in a short amount of time) from doing something you shouldn't be doing it.

Exactly. That's the only thing that's important.

Well the methodology he's used seems pretty good. Obviously there's no way this is even close to 100% accurate but I doubt there's a large discrepancy between his numbers and the actual numbers.

Tell that to the people playing those "dead" games.

The one with people still playing them and having fun.