I am not in a guild, and I mostly agree with you. But keep in mind too, that some problem might also be completely overlooked by guilds. How often we non-guildy were told to "just enter a guild" when we had problem finding PUGs ? So, yes the variety of feedback will probably be greater, but there is still a chance not all feedback will be met. See above with the space combat imemdiately dismissed as "just a minigame". That said, seeing how some of the discussion pannel are 30 minutes, I don't think there can be much meaningful discussed anyway. That gives you the time to do what ? 10 minutes presentation and maybe 20 minutes Q/A , so maybe answer 3 to 5 people's question superficially ? In the end I think before judging the event one way or another , I'll wait that it happens, and see how it was handled. At the moment there is IMHO not enough info to judge. Just cross finger that it is not only PR.

That is barely 3 guild per server, alone on my server I can think of 10 guild names without even thinking too much. ETA so naturally they had to filter and limit the number of guilds. Otherwise too many people would have wished to attend.

Please note that you are confusing having a lot of time, with being good. Finishing content before others does not mean in any way shape or form, that you are a quality player.

No because the majority of the player base don't reach that point. WOW own statistic was that less than 50% do raid, and less than 5% finish a raid tier before the next is published. ONLY the hardcore finish that stuff in weeks. Casual are only *now* starting to reach the last level (if even that, I would be personally only going in the 40ish zone next week).

development is not an infinite resource. If part of the team is doing stuff nightmare/hellish/godhard for the hardcore , then that part of the team is not doing anything else for the 95% rest. Is that so hard to understand ?

Because the time spent making the same content harder, by dev and artist, for 5% server population at best, could be much better spent doing new planet, new story, new stuff which caters to 95-100% of the population. Clear ?

Your definition of casual is out of whack.

You jsut sunk your own argument on why SWTOR should even *consider* hardcore player. See if as you say it takes a few month for the casual to come to the same conclusion, that in reality it means that the dev have many months to develop more endgame content, and by the time all casual reach end game they would have already something prepared. But if they cater to the hardcore community they have to out the content much faster, buggier, and with less planning. In other word you gave ammunition to why dev should ignore the hardcore and concentrate on the casual which will give them time to develop much better and deeper content.

Some people are emotionally invested and find the game a disappointment, but rather than think "that game is not for me, I am not in its demographic but maybe it will be a success in the demographic" they would instead think "that game is bad and everybody will see it my way and it will fail". I unsubbed because i think there are too many part going agaisnt my entertainment, a lot of small one : crafting, GTN, not enough different WZ, etc... I plan to wait 6 month to 12 month, and check again to see if all those small thing changed. I think the game has the potential to be very great , but was prolly released too early, but will potentially overcome that in the next months. i could be wrong though.

Not open to EU market As far as i can remember. ETA might have changed since I tried to buy it at start of january

The OP has a point regarding the SWTOR server statistic. But this is not the only statistic and not the msot reliable one can point to. XFIRE shows the number of hours played by people using XFIRE. http://www.xfire.com/games/swtor/Star_Wars_The_Old_Republic/ They are NOT, and I want it to be clear, NOT at all using the server load.. They simply measure who is playing which game using their own program. Now *ALL* you can say with 100% surety using the XFIRE statistic is that the XFIRE using population dropped in number of hours played. What is on less strong footing is to have the assumption that the XFIRE user population has the same behavior than the general SWTOR population. It is not so a strong assumption IMHO, but certainly not one I can demonstrate. But if you have the assumption, then indeed SWTOR population is dropping. The second assumption and this IS the big one, is that the drop of number of hour played reflect that people number are dropping. IMHO this is the one I do not buy in. Why ? Because it could very well be that "hard core" player are dropping out and replaced with casual player. See, if you have somebody playing 11 hours in average, and 9 people playing 1 hours, then in average all player play 2 hours. But if that first guy drop, and is replaced by *2* player with 1 hours average, the numbers of hours drop dramatically but the total number of subs increase (by 1). Which is why total number of hours played does not say anything, you would need the number of UNIQUE player as statistic rather than number of hours played. my gut feeling is that a lot of those hardcore playing 24/7 , level 50 by mid january dropped, being replaced by much more casual player which is why by first week of january February BW announced their subs increased to 1.7 million (1 million end of december IIRC). Anyway even if you buy in BOTH assumption, if you look at SWTOR XFIRE statistic , it certainly is NOT dropping as fast as the doom & gloom poster would pretend it is (worst case scenario is that number of hours played dropped by 1/4 since head january and 1/3 since head start). TL;DR : xfire is only showing number of hours played which can be misleading.

Well apparently you could care less : by not responding to thread at all. So your "I couldn't care less" is wrong. Secondly "I got 60 fps" without any video showing it off, seriously ? I wish when I did QM research i could have offered that to my peer as evidence...

For all the talk about endgame, only a minority is actually raiding in every MMO. IIRC the WOW stats, is that less than half of the subber had raided a tier before the next tier came in. And then there are the people (like me) which positively and utterly hate raiding grind. SWTOR with its very nice question 1-50 is the best MMO i played. Still there are some progress it needs to be doing before I re-sub. I'll be back in 6 month to 1 year. But SWTOR IMHO is way ahead of WOW and WOW clones, for those not considering raid.

I am not surprised it is that low, and I bet the same is reflected here. There is nowhere near 1.7 M different user on this forum, and there is a small group of hardcore "poster" which you will find in many thread (both fan and non fan at least until their sub run out). I am one of them. But the real metric is not how many % post in the forum. The real interesting bit of info is : does the forum population with its like and dislike, represent fairly the global population ? I would wager that no, it does not represent it, and there are more complainer on the forum than in game. It is a gut feeling.

That is doubtful. To be a commercial success, they said they would need something around 500K subs. They have had at least 3 times that at the start (1.7 M). Even if half of them were gone (and there are many source including XFIRE which hint that at least part of the population is not playing as long as before or even not playing anymore), they would STILL be a commercial success. And no, I doubt half of them are gone, at least until another MMO comes out. So all your doom and gloom is without any basis.

I think some people (like me) might see the game as very good, but coming to a certain level see the flaw and simply decided to wait for the game to be better. That does not mean the game is dying, on the contrary I think if the game engine allows it , it has an enormous potential open to it. There might also have been a steady erosion because school/finals/life. Come summer, and a few big update from BW, I betcha that number will spike up again.

OK let me be more clear on my point. The variation from day to day, is greater than the actually variation long term. You cannot by "expanding" and looking at it show it is stable in population. You would need to take an averaged curve, and plot about longer. You would need to de-convolute the sinusoidal nature of the population variation over day or week, to extract the linear trend. Which is why I linked the other graph showing that the peaks are going down from week to week, as well as the bottoms. It is not stable it is going slightly down. The graph you showed , has too much noise and convoluted sinusoidal function to be able to clearly show anything. ETA: and this is also why I said look again in 6 months, are on such a short period of time it is difficult to make a trend out.

For a very bizarre definition of steady. http://www.mmo-junkies.net/backend/applications_addon/other/statistics/graphs/swtor/yearly/overall-big.png The drop is slow, but the trend is clear : it is going slightly down. IMHO that does not mean the game is dying or a success or anything. This actually means nothing on such a short time span. Now let us talk back about that , say, in june, after 6 months. Personally i would not care less if the subs are dropping. What I *DO* care is what BW will do in the next month to ameliorate the part of the game which are in the way of my enjoyment : * auction house GUI * UI improvement * many more WZ I like the game, but not enough to further subs without such improvement. That talks of more or less subs or login ? Not really interesting compared to the development speed BW will take in the few months. And what will come in new.

As long as your currently paid sub does not run out you can still post. ETA : I have unsubbed yesterday and can still psot, and will do so until 20th of march or something.

Seriously why do you think this game need to be defended ? Can#t he be defended by itself , on its own ? Why do you need to answer to negative comment on the game by telling people to shut up and go away (more or less the natural conclusion of the last sentence quoted) ? Why not simply skip those post/thread with negative critic and ignore them ? Once you answered those fundamental question, you might have another outlook at the negative comment in such thread. Would you say "sell your car and buy another brand why do you post in this car manufacturer forum ?" to somebody after giving a few negative comment on a car they just bought and have some point they are dissatisfied with ? Apparently you would do. And this is exactly what you do here. The other example are stupid as far as analogy goes. Now, the rules is : give your feedback without insult, and discuss the point of the feedback. It can be positive feedback, neutral/guarded feedback or negative one. Discussing the person , saying if they don#t like it they should go away, is WASTING time for everybody. If you want to make a constructive post , then discuss the point which are given by the op, and propose either facts contradicting it, or in absence of facts, opinions differing and why. The constant "if you don't like it go away and don't post here" utterly miss the point of a *discussion*. As a developer I like MUCH MORE to have negative feedback than sycophant "i like everything of it and you shall not say anything negative on it", because it utterly kills an avenue for me to know how to make my product better. Positive feedback is nice, but not constructive ! The depth of the negative feedback, and how often it is reported, helps me know where I should direct my development team. Counterpoint fact or opinion to the same negative feedback as counterpoint also helps decide if this is a real problem or not, and whether the majority feels it as negative or not. Usually under the form of polls/questionnaire sent to clients too, but they don't seem to do them here. The point I want to make to you, that I wish all those "don't post here" complaint misses, is that the negative feedback in the long run help the developer much more than you would think. Even the ragequit frustration feedback can help. But post in the form of "we don#t like what you say" don't help. Indeed they could simply make people wanting to give a feedback, shying from it because they don't want the associated flame with negative feedback. TL;DR If you like this game, you should give a constructive critic response of the negative feedback, but telling people to "not post and go away", in the long run is a bad thing.

if that were true, as a lowbie I would still have been owned (litteraly) by every 40+ after the bracket introduction, as I had been before the bracket. It was not the case. There was a huge difference before and after the bracket introduction.

A screenshot at a single point in time , or even 4 is not a trend. Look at swtor status "population trend". It is hardly "increasing". Though it does not seem to be dropping either in the last 4 weeks.

Heck it even attract "casuals" like me. Normally i hate open world PVP, but as presented up to now by the vids, and comments on the beta, this looks very attractive.

(SNipped) There might be a confounding factor : people making a star war search , unrelated to SWTOR but clickiing on the SWTOR video. It would be interesting to compare to the same growth on video unrelated to SWTOR to try to assess that factor.

It is not a question of facility at creating the content. heck I would say that the content for PVP is much easier than the one for PVE, if only on the programming aspect point of view (you don#t need that much to do 10 warzone comapred to 10 new complete PVE zone), and the artistict aspect (you spare on mobs, on fields, on many artistic resource). All in one, PVE is much more resource hungry than PVP. No the reason every MMo concentrate on PVE instead of PVE is two pronged : 1) retention is lower with PVP player so far as I was told. They are also much quicker prone to complain , on balance, on how unfair they lsot etc... 2) more people enjoy PVE with occasional warzone PVP, rather than open world PVP. If you look back at the only proxy we have , the pop stats from SWTOR status, there was more PVE population. Heck even for those which remember UO, at one point there was enough complaint about non consensual PVP /PKer that they created trammel. This is also nicely reflected in previous generation massive RPG : MUDs which more often than not had PPK switches and duel. So no, "The problem is that make PvE content is way more easy to do than PvP." is actually wrong. heck PVP in a way is easier, as you , the PVPer, *make* the content aprtially yourselves with the competition between PVPer for the better score/win/gear etc...