It isn't raiders vs non-raiders or casuals vs hardcore players. Your simply misunderstanding what the root problem is with ToR. The root problem with ToR is an abject lack of viable end-game content. That lack of end-game content affects all players regardless of how you classify them (raider, casual, etc.). Once you reach level 50 what is there to do? Not much since the game shipped with just two very easy to complete Operations. Level 50 pretty much means your choices are to run the same flahspoints you ran on the road to 50 all over again, and over again, and over again, just to get slightly better gear (Tionese or Columi). Or you can level an alt. Leveling an alt means doing 90% of the same content all over again, and over again, and over again, until guess what? Your alt is level 50 and your faced with the same problem as before. Sure you can do PvP if that is your thing. But running the same three warzones over and over and over ad naseum just for what? So you can accumulate valor points/ranks and buy PvP gear? That gets old fast and is just another grind/time sink (like running the flashpoints over and over to gear up). Maybe the real problem isn't ToR, but gamers getting tired of the grind-fest lack of end-game content MMO model that has been used and abused by game developers since the 1990s. ToR failed miserably at breaking this mold. It's just another clone with the Star Wars moniker.

Wait, wut? Do you mean 200 in Fleet then your serve is fine? Or 200 on the entire server? My server (at peak) has around 500-800 total people logged in and it's a ghost town everywhere you go. Based on number of planets, size of zones on planets, and number of instances (warzones, flashpoints, Ops) I think the population a server needs to "feel" like it's well populated is probably somewhere in the range of > 4,000 on at peak. I'd bet dollars to donuts that 4,000+ players on a single server at peak would cause massive server side lag/latency issues and queues to log in.

double post

Thanks for the response. Sounds like my accuracy then is almost where I want it. Regarding my recent raid and getting my behind handed to me, I remember wondering if my Soresu form was possibly bugged and changing forms (and back again) just to make sure. It didn't seem to make a difference. Guess we will chock this one up to a bad string of RNG crits. Normally with my mitigation and our pro healers my health rarely dips below 75%. Last night I had my finger hovering over my oh-$hit buttons all night since I was routinely down in the 20-30% health range, often dipping below 10% health.

When I mouse over my Jugg tank's Accuracy stat I see it is broken down into two parts: Basic Accuracy and Special Attacks. Currently my basic accuracy is 97.97% and my Special Attacks is 107.97%. Can someone tell me what the difference is? I've read a tank wants somewhere between 105%-110% accuracy, but are they talking about the Basic number, or special attacks number? Since the last patch went through (one last week) I noticed I'm getting hit a lot harder than I was pre-patch. My guild regularly runs hardmode EV and KP but we skipped raiding last week (patch week) and instead hit KP last night. My gear hasn't changed, but the healers were struggling to keep me up on multiple fights last night. I'm in 4 pieces of Rakata (helm, bracers, legs, gloves) and the rest is columi. Buffed (w/o stim I'm around 21,500 health. Rarely do I fret about my health and on most boss fights I don't even use my defensive cooldowns. But last night I was having to pop them left and right. Our OT who also plays a Jugg noticed it as well. I died enough that my repair bill for the KP raid was ~$80k. Was it just a bad raid night with some runs of bad luck? Or was there some stealth change that either nerfed healers, nerfed our mitigation, or buffed the hardmode Ops? Thanks!

PvE servers FTW!!!

What constitutes "Heavy?" On my server when there is 500 players in total in the game ours is listed as Standard. Is Heavy 800? 1,000? 1,500?

100% agree. It's like the dev team they hired at Bioware to produce ToR never worked on a MMO before. Hello people, MMOs aren't new!!! ToR is no different today for the most part than EQ was back in 1999. Yet ToR launched without many components that MMO gamers today take for granted as standard fare. Rift comes to mind as probably an example of a MMO that launched with (most of) the right components. Rift's problem was that it was just another sword & sorcery MMO, of which the market is inundated. One thing I'm starting to wonder is if the engine Bioware licensed was so shoddy that the true problem with ToR is that the game can't handle too many players in one place at any give time, thus necessitating a very low player population per server in order to maintain decent performance. Seems most servers have a population at peak times of 500-1,500 players. This few players, spread amongst 50 character levels, spread amongst a dozen plus planets, spread amongst warzones and space ships translates to simply very few players in the same area at any given time thus creating the ghost town effect. Server mergers may simply be out of the question because doubling or even tripling server populations may make the game unplayable due to server side lag/low frame rates.

Want to know a huge difference between WoW and ToR comparing them as freshly released MMO games? A few months post launch the lands and cities of Azeroth were teeming with players and those populations were growing. You couldn't walk 10 paces without bumping into dozens and dozens of players whether is was in the Barrens in a capitol city. ToR is already a ghost town on many servers and based on player observations those populations are decreasing. I know it's anecdotal, but on my server at prime time back in December/January there was well over 250 people in fleet and putting together groups was a snap (especially since I played a tank). Now at primetime, I'm lucky to see 75 people in fleet and getting groups can take 60-90 minutes. Last night I was on my level 12 alt (since sitting in fleet for 30-45 trying to put a group together for a HM was an abject failure) I went to Drommund Kass to level. Mind you, this was around 10 pm CST so a little after primetime, but I was running around Kass city and even though there was ~20 people on the planet I didn't run into a single person in the city. It felt like an abandoned ghost town.

Up above your chat box is a UI tab that tells you the total number of players on fleet. No need to use the /who UI, which limits returns to 100. On my server at primetime there are typically 75-125 people on fleet. A month ago that number was well over 250. I'm sure a reason for the drop is two fold, people quitting the game and people re-rolling alts and shelving their level 50 toons for lack of end-game content. Problem comes when your alt hits level 50. Rolling atls and running the same quests on the same planets over and over and over again does not equate to fun end-game content.

Though my guild is smaller (only about 10-11 active players) we have been clearing hardmode EV and KP on Tuesday nights for about a month and a half now. What I have found over the past 3-4 weeks as most of our members have geared up in Rakata/Columi is that a) no one wants to run flashpoints anymore, and b) not many members logs in anymore except for Tuesday nights. We had about 4-6 members that were heavy into PvP, but once they all hit rank 50-60 valor they got bored with PvP and stopped doing that. Now, on any given night (other than Tuesday), I'm lucky to see maybe 3-4 people in my guild logged in. Most are either only on for a very short time, just doing dailies on Illum/Correlia, or playing a low level alt (this is what most are doing). Few in my guild (myself included) even bother complete their flashpoint daily/weekly. What is the point of doing it?

Thanks for noticing that, I fixed my post to reflect the difference between active subscribers and active accounts. The difference being active subscribers are paying accounts (versus a closed account) and active accounts are accounts that people actively log in and play. There may be some actual industry technical jargon to label these difference, I'm just not aware of what it might be. Highly subjective, but I would consider an "active account" one where the owner logs in multiple times per week and actively plays the game. I know of many accounts that the person has quit the game for all intents and purposes (no longer logs in to play) but their subscription has yet to expire (i.e. 1 month left) and they have no intent to renew it. Sadly, not a whole lot. Which is probably the basis for many of the complaints people have about ToR.

I think the better questions is, what exactly constitutes the massively part of massively multiplayer online gaming? Lets assume the 1.7 active subscribers equal 1.7 active players (which I think we all can agree it doesn't, but humor me for arguments sake). 1.7 million people playing a video game seems pretty "massively" to me. But, those 1.7 million people are divvied up between dozens and dozens of servers. And of those 1.7 million people many have varied times they are capable of playing. After all the dividing up of players to servers, and further breaking them down by who is on at any given time (primetime usually is the litmus test for the health of a servers population), you may be left with only 500-1,000 people on-line per server at any given time. Does that feel very "massively" to you? Doesn't to me. Now further divide them up between levels, locations, and interests, and the end result is a much smaller population of people to group up with (such as only 50-150 people in fleet). Does that feel very "massively" to you? Doesn't to me.

Salient points (I didn't include all your points for sake of keeping my resposne to a minimum). But, for many players in guilds that were pre-registered there was pre-assignment to a specific server. This was a nice feature since it helped guilds coordinate their members so they would know what server to select on launch. For many of us with considerable time/effort invested into our characters and guilds, the thought of starting anew on a different server is not one we consider optimal. For me and many of my guildmates (mostly older players, many with families and other obligations), I know most of us would opt to quit the game versus start over from scratch on a different server. For me, a big part of this is simply little desire to experience the game's content all over again. Other than the class specific quests, everything else is pretty much the same stuff. I don't know about you, but I rarely enjoy re-reading a book as soon as I complete it. Maybe a few years later re-reading it might be fun, but not so soon after I just completed it.

Double post

Max level in vanilla Wow was level 60, not 50. I would probably agree with this statement. But, I believe the problem isn't so much the consumers as it is developers not changing the game model. In effect, we have been playing the same MMO game since March of 1999 (when EQ was released), just with different graphics. All the "advances" each subsequent game has brought to the genre are really just window dressing. I think today developers believe their franchise brand (whether it be the Warhammer Universe, DC Comics, Star Wars franchise, etc.) is sufficient to draw players (and their all important dollar) in. I think over the years the failure of many Star Wars or Star Trek video games would have proven to developers that a great game is what players want, not just a recognizable title. Creating one in a well known universe (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.) is the icing on the cake. But that universe by name alone does not make the game great in and of itself.

I don't think its absurd, just not as good as the "AE tank" classes like Powertech and Assassin. My guilds MT was a powertech and I was the Jugg OT until our MT had to take some time off from the game and I became by default my guild's MT. Although we don't run any nightmare mode Ops we do clear EV and KP on hardmode weekly and I don't see much of an issue with my AE threat. Granted, this is because a loose mob typically doesn't hit hard enough to 1 shot other raid members. So, I don't care as much about a lose mob or two because I have time/ability to get them back onto me. One thing I did notice, though, was that our powertech MT was able to hold aggro on packs of mobs very well AND his single target tanking/mitigation/threat was about on par with mine. Knowing this, I'd take a powertech tank over a Jugg tank any day of the week.

There is also a Jugg DPS spec. That ability is specifically for them.

Just going off a commonly cited developmental cost many pundits toss around. MMOs tend to cost more to develop than other games. And your average game these days seems to come with a $30-$50 mil development price tag. Seeing how much writing and voice acting was required for ToR, plus how much advertising they did and number of years it was in development, I can believe it might have cost $200 mil or more to make.

Yes and no. Hindsight being 20/20 the WHY part of only 2% of players (going to have to take your word on that percent, though my gut tells me it was probably a higher number) ever seeing end-game vanilla WoW raid content was because of the simple logistics of trying to field 40 players for a raid. Your guild needed to be far larger than just 40 people and you needed a very active recruitment to continually replace people who took time off and/or quit the game. Most people don't necessarily want to be part of a huge guild where they may only know a few of the players and the rest are strangers bound together only by a guild moniker. Most large WoW guilds were just an amalgamation of many smaller guilds that banded together so their members could raid end-game vanilla WoW content. This is also why so many vanilla WoW guilds also rapidly fell apart. WoW even recognized and rectified this issue in its expansion packs by moving away from 40-man raids to much smaller raids (which opened up end-game content to smaller guilds who tended to be closer nit groups of friends in real life). IMO this was a good trend.

I can only speak for my server (Girrada the Hutt) but that sounds like the Republic population on my server. I've leveled two toons to 50 and I think I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen a higher level Republic player on a planet. 19 out of 20 PvP matches are against other Imperial teams. You definitely don't get the sense that there is a second faction playing the game.

True, but one thing WoW did have was a slower leveling pace AND more robust end-game content at launch. And what I mean by "more robust" was that Molten Core and Onyxia were not easy to conquer. IMO the simplicity and easyness of ToR is exactly what will be its dowfall. First time my guild attempted Eternity Vault it took us 3 hours to learn the fights and clear the instance (and we are in no way a hardcore gaming guild). First time we tried Molten Core way back with vanilla WoW it took us 10 hours just to clear to and defeat Magmadar. Do I want to return to my MMO being like a job? Absolutely not. But at the same time I think ToR is simply too easy. ToR is a fun single player game that allows some co-opt play if you desire. There really is nothing Massively Multiplayer feeling about it in my humble opinion.

If Bioware has 1.7 million accounts let's assume that means they sold 1.7 million copies of the game. Say the average sale price was $60 (assuming far more players bought the non CE version). That equals $102 million in retail sales. Now, they have only been billing for say 3 months (and I'm not even going to try and factor in their monthly costs to operate/maintain the game). 1.7 million accounts at $15.00/month equals $25.5 mil per month, or $76.5 mil for January-March. Total revenue generated by ToR to date would be around $178.5 mil. This means EA/Bioware still has yet to break even on the game. This of course is assuming the development cost of ToR was ~$200 mil (I read somewhere that some pegged it closer to $300 mil, but it's all speculation). My numbers are just guesstimates, but it gives you a general idea. Server mergers are usually as death knell for a MMO. It is a primary sign of a MMO in decline. I can see why EA/Bioware wouldn't want to be contemplating server mergers only 4 months after their >$200 million dollar MMO launched, it would make the investors seriously jumpy.

Interesting, I would think it would be just the opposite. For us, summer means being outside doing stuff (swimming in the pool, going on hikes, fishing, camping trips, soccer, baseball, vacation time, etc.). In my guild (all adults >30 yrs old, many with families/kids) our raiding/MMO game playing slows down measurably in the summer months because our members tend to have many other things to occupy their time other than sitting in front of a computer.

Most existing Artificers probably purchased the Magenta schematics that are on the vendor. Ergo, there will be ample supply and that will drive prices down. The real problem with color crystals is that once someone has the one they want they have little need to purchase more.