Sorry, but I have trouble taking seriously someone who writes, and I quote; in his signature.

It's cathartic.

What Bioware is really saying is; it's complicated trying to make it appear you are more successful than you actually are without blatantly lying about your numbers and getting in trouble with the SEC. The fewer actual paying subscribers you have, the more you have to use devices to spin it so that it appears you have a lot of paying subscribers. "Hmm, we should include everyone who has given us money since release, and we'll call them 'paying members,' because even though they unsubbed months ago they're still members on our forum and they've paid us money in the past. If counting up active, paying, current, subscribers isn't good enough, then differentiate between "players" and "active paying subscribers." Say, " we have X,XXX,XXX active players and X,XXX,XXX active paying subscribers." That's not deceptive and gives a good idea of how many people are actually playing the game. No one cares how many players a subscription-based game has. They care how many subscribers the game has.

To me, the biggest mistake guild leaders make is thinking they have to be 200+ members. IMO, it's an e-peen thing. There's no strength in looking at a 400+ member roster and realizing only 30 of them are active. The 10 Commandments for Guild Leaders: 1. Clearly establishe the rules, whether they're hardcore or casual or somewhere in between. Do not invite incompatible players to your guild, no matter how much you, personally, like them. 2. No more than 10% of your guild should be officers-- otherwise being an officer means nothing and, as a result, being a member will mean nothing. 3. No one should get invited without first being sponsored by a member of the guild, and then spending some time running in a group with the members of the guild. Do not invite unknown quantities. It's lazy and will come back to bite you later on. Being at least a little bit selective also makes your existing members feel better about being part of your guild. 4. Probationary periods should actually mean something, as well as actual membership in the guild. If a player has generated any sort of negativity before becoming a member, that player should be asked to leave before he is promoted to "member." This will also make being promoted to member actually meaningful. 5. The guild leader shouldn't play politics within the guild, and shouldn't talk crap on his own members even in jest. I saw an entire 80 person guild in Warcraft collapse because someone fraps'd the guild leader talking junk on a "terribad" guild healer behind his back. People lost all respect for him immediately. The guild members should always know where they stand, and should always know approximately where other members stand. Any negative feedback should, if at all possible, be done in private. And guild leaders should never kick a member in a moment of pique. It makes you look capricious and arbitrary, like your finger is hovering over the /kick button. 6. Being an officer should mean something, but it shouldn't mean too much. The guild leader should be the identity of the guild, and officers should have a realm of responsibility that's pretty easy to keep up with. Officers should not have leeway to kick members except in the most egregious of situations. A bad officer can ruin a lot of your hard recruiting work if he abuses his priveleges. Also, no one in the guild, including officers, should feel like their role is a second job. Assign each an area of responsibility, but keep to the "half- hour rule" in mind; that no officer's job should take him more than half an hour per day. 7. A casual guild who invites anyone who seems cool should never suddenly throw together an elitist dynamic, like a set raid group run by an elitist raid leader. If there's going to be elitism in the guild (for example, a raid that you can get kicked out of for being bad) that needs to be clear when the member is invited. 8. The guild leader should not talk junk on members who leave. Invariably, departing members will still have friends in the guild, regardless of their reason for leaving, and a guild leader who talks junk on those members appears petty. 9. The guild leader needs to work harder than anyone else in the guild at helping out other guildies, and not fall into a clique, especially when it comes to running content. It's easy for a guild leader to form favorites and get groups because he's the guild leader. I've seen this happen several times, and it always, always, always turns into a bone of contention. The guild leader should be the guy in the guild who, at the end of the week, has grouped with nearly everyone in the guild for one reason or another. 10. The goal of the guild should be to have fun, but the GL has to realize that what's fun for one member might not be fun for another. Be diverse in guild activities. If one guild event is a guild meeting in some out-of-the-way place, the next event should be an achievements run, the next should be a crafting event, the next a PvP event, and so on. Don't get too locked into one aspect of the game or you will lose a segment of your guild.

Difference is, if WoW lost two-thirds of its "existing" subscribers, it would still be twice as big as SWTOR.

And the fact that Arenanet can keep games running for years with no subscription fee, and never have to worry about people counting up how many players there are, it makes one wonder why games like TOR even need a sub to begin with.

Disagree. The problem wasn't that we thought the game should be a WoW-killer. It's that EA/BW thought the game should be a WoW-killer. Trying to take down WoW is an exercise in futility. So far, every developer who has tried it has thought to pull it off by making a WoW clone with one or two key differences. Hell, the final demise of SWG was NGE which essentially took a really unique game and made it more like WoW. Why do you think so many people objected to TOR shaping up like a WoW-clone-- because we knew that it would be the death of this game. If Bioware had decided to make a game that was truly different from WoW, then I wouldn't complain (as much.) The fact that so many fans here are living under the notion that WoW is an MMO standard just makes me laugh. Blizzard is a gaming standard, and Warcraft is their flagship. If you don't have Blizzard's cult-like fanbase and the Warcraft IP, you're not going to be successful copying WoW. If anything, the corpses of failed WoW-clones that litter the MMO battlefield give mute testimony to the fact that WoW's core MMO system is not particularly strong or appealing, because those who imitate it seem to suffer. In the end I think TOR is going to be less popular than Eve Online, and that's sad.

While I think Bioware's #1 priority at this point should be server merges, I don't believe that, in the long run, it's going to mask the fundamental problems that have put Bioware in this position in the first place. It might buy TOR another 2 or 3 months of relevancy, but subs are going to continue gradually slipping away. Other games are going to steal away subs in chunks, and TOR will become just another failed WoW killer.

I was so happy when this game was announced, but I think I became cynical a little earlier than most when I saw the decisions they were making. The "space combat" was the early thing that totally shook my confidence in BW's vision for this game, but I could have overlooked it. But as time went on and things became clearer, it became pretty apparent that this game was being made as a money-grab, and not out of any love for the MMO genre.

Welcome to the club. We're having jackets made and will be gathering every Friday night for bisquits and commiseration (and later in the evening, whisky and quiet sadness.)

Here's why the above is hilarious to me... Back in December (and even earlier) when many of us observed that end game didn't appear to be a focal point for TOR, and worried that re-rolling was going to essentially be the end game, we were besieged by fanboys calling us trolls and copy-pasting the same list of end game features that were going to be so awesome. Some of us looked at the list and pointed out that it was thin, and that it wasn't going to be able to sustain the end game. "LULZ you haters!" the fanboys said, shouting us down. "No developer would be dumb enough to design a game around re-rolling alts! ROFL!" Now that people are figuring out en masse that, indeed, there's just not much to do apart from re-rolling once you've been level 50 for awhile, the fanboys are telling us, "this game isn't for you. Of course BW designed this game around re-rolling alts. It's the whole point of the game!"

Why is it shoddy math? How else is Blizzard supposed to track those accounts? "We have millions of players in China, but we're not allowed to count them because, well, they're poor." "Our NA players don't consider a Chinese person to be one entire person, so we are taking our Chinese numbers and dividing them by 4 in order to be more accurate in terms of the NA perception of a "subscriber."

I got through 2 on Imp side. My first character did everything except bonus quests. (Don't really know why they even bothered with bonus quests since the regular ones cause you to outlevel your zone.) On my second character I was already so tired of repeating the zone quests that all I could do is class quests and queue for warzones. My third character got to about level 30 (don't remember exactly, got to Taris) and I just lost all interest in proceeding. Rolled a Republic toon and got bored. Done. Unsub. Tried to play the "re-roll endlessly" game. It wasn't fun, and certainly wasn't worth $15 a month.

Well, yeah, if they want to show that they have TEN million subs rather than "only" three or four million. Blizzard has had years where they've generated over a BILLION dollars on their ledger while releasing no new titles. Do the math and figure out if Blizzard was exaggerating its claims of success. No, Chinese accounts don't pay $15 a month, but I'll wager that Blizzard's Chinese base, as a whole, generates as much revenue month-to-month as this game has in its best month. WoW could shut down right now and it wouldn't reflect poorly on the game at all. It's a game that was insanely popular for 7 YEARS. TOR is a game that was pretty popular for 4 months.

You're SO right. How do we know the game actually doesn't have 4 million susbscribers, but Bioware, not wishing to appear pretentious, just isn't telling us? They're humble as well as brilliant, those Bioware guys. I know that when SWG shut down it was only because SOE was just so tired of having to count all that money and because they didn't want to appear greedy. As long as we're going to ignore the obvious, we might as well do it right, yeah? You don't suddenly lay off 25% of your staff as a "normal, planned layoff."

Ahh yes... the messiah patch. You can mark any game's success or failure by the posting trend from fanboys on the official forums. We're just past the"gloating over overstated subscriber numbers" stage and have arrived at the "empty-servers while the community begs for server merges" phase. Always during this phase there's a new patch in the offing, coming "soon." For fanboys, this is known as the "messiah patch" stage.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=438399 http://www.torstatus.net/ http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg821/scaled.php?server=821&filename=torstats.jpg&res=landing

You're right man; how stupid to guess that a 50% drop off in activity would somehow correlate to a loss of subscriptions. Of course all those people who are no longer playing the game are continuing to pay for it anyway, just because...

1.3 million subs in March, dude. It's June. Population has significantly declined since the end of the quarter. Have you not noticed the thousands of posts by people complaining their servers are utternly dead? Did you miss the news that they just laid off 150+ employees? You obviously need a math lesson. So here goes: 2 million units = about $60 million in gross revenues ($30 per unit.) 4.5 million subscription units in the first 3 paid sub cycles = about $65 million in gross revenues. That's $125 million in revenues generated to this point The game cost $150 million + to make, and maybe considerably more. Don't forget that EA paid over $800 million to buy Bioware, and this game was one of the main reasons they wanted the company. $3.5 million per month to maintain the game after release. That's another $17.5 million spent on upkeep since release. That means that, at this point, they have spent, at minimum, $167.5 million on the game (and probably much more) and brought in somewhere around $130 million. So... no... they are nowhere near to break-even at this point, and the sub numbers are in severe decline. Don't bother linking to the "EA spend $80 million on TOR" article. It's not saying what you think it's saying. Bioware had already spent a TON of money on TOR before EA bought Bioware, so the $80 million is on top of what Bioware had already spent, PLUS another $20 million spent by EA at release, PLUS the value EA projected into the game when they spent almost a BILLION dollars on Bioware. No, my friend, even a full year of 1 million subs does not pay the rent on this game. That's why EA just laid off 30% of Bioware-Austin.

Go ahead. "1 million subscriptions is significantly profitable." Here's where you don't get it. They weren't saying, "as long as we, at any point, have 1 million subs, we win!" They were talking about 1 million subs over the long term, month after month, like WoW. They weren't talking about having 1 million subs for a couple months and rapidly fading to the point of requiring mass server merges.

When the story is the best part of an MMO... that's a very bad thing; especially when the story isn't really that spectacular.

Dude. It was a Star Wars MMO written by Bioware. They could have put a blank DVD in a box and sold 2 million units. The game is obviously failing now, and if you think Bioware was hoping to be in the position of requiring mass server merges 5 months after release, you're nuts.

Why make an MMO and then make the single-player elements 90% of the focus? The SPRPG part of the game marginalizes the whole point of making it an MMO, and the MMO parts of the game will limit how good of a SPRPG the developer can make. Does anyone really think the SP parts of this game wouldn't be way better if BW wasn't making a bastardized MMO-SP hybrid? When developers started making MMO's it was because they saw the specific advantages that being able to play a game online, with hundreds and thousands of other players, brought to the game. The online part of the game is the whole point of an MMO. Otherwise you might as well just create a SPRPG and attach some type of co-op to it. It would be like creating a single-player first-person shooter, but putting in MMO-style combat controls. I'm certain there would be some players who just don't get it saying that it's fine. What would elude them would be that the point of a FPS game is that the games feature high twitch. Creating a gimped FPS shooter by attaching an MMO-style combat system to it would be stupid. Creating a gimped MMO by attaching SPRPG-style linearity and storytelling to it is also stupid. You might as well JUST MAKE A SPRPG. It's like drinking beer with your chocolate cake. You might love the two things seperately, but when you try to mix them they just don't go together. You wouldn't say, "but beer is good. And chocolate cake is good! So let's create a business plan around serving beer with chocolate cake!!"

You're right. And that is a bad thing in an MMO.

Stop telling Bioware how awesome the story is. The story focus is what is killing this game. It's like complimenting the chef on the wonderful cream-of-arsenic sauce he put on your broccoli.