Considering that 6 month subs have run out at this point, I wouldn't hedge my bets on them only losing 300k since April or March, or whenever the 1.3 million was from.

The vast majority of MMORPGs that have launched after WoW have had fast starts, and then lost a huge amount of subs. In fact, I don't believe there has been a game that has retained more than 500k. Look at the amount of content Rift gets, yet compare the number of servers they have now to when they launched. Clearly you can still be profitable without challenging WoW. Obviously, in TOR's case it would be harder because everything is fully voice acted. Other points that have been brought up here: Aion is popular in Korea where most of its "subs" come from. I use quotes because IIRC they don't pay monthly fees there, they pay by the hour, just like WoW users in China. Even WoW is having "trouble" as they used to be close to 13 million active players, they're down to ~10 million from the last official report and players claim more have left since then. Still extremely healthy, but it means the years of growing/retaining are over. F2P is not the holy grail. Yes, it gets more people in the door, but that doesn't necessarily lead to more revenue. Does the potential revenue gain from new customers outweigh money lost from current subs + new box sales? If this game switched to F2P and I played for 6 more months would they really get $90 from me, equivalent to sub fees? Hell no. You're comparing Madden sales from 1 year to TOR sales from 1 month? I'm pretty sure those sports games also don't have budgets of $200 million with additional high operating costs of an MMO. I'm pretty sure investors do care about TOR because it's a potential cash cow. A while ago Square Enix revealed what their most profitable Final Fantasy title was. Hint: it was the MMO.

Since when is catering to "true mmoers" a recipe for success? Casual > hardcore market, just look at WoW. The true raiders were complaining when WoW got easier and easier, yet WoW subs kept increasing despite them. WoW on a whole was so much more casual then Everquest or FFXI, yet far exceeded both with subscribers. This game is not perfect by any means, but it's hilarious reading comments of people who think 1 million+ subs is a failure or tanking. There hasn't been a single MMO since WoW in the west that has even managed to hit 1 million in their hey day, let alone after the initial drop off. And every other MMO at launch had a huge litany of problems, some never fixed, and they managed to endure for years. People are just so whiny nowadays.

The issues have nothing to do with internet connection, the problem is the engine. Maybe if you have an extremely recent rig the problems are diminished to the point where they aren't noticeable, but trying to deny that they exist is ridiculous. But in other threads even people who get 100 fps notice the hitching, so yeah. Rift 2010 was missing these same features, but now that it has them it's being used to support your argument against SWTOR 2012. And eventually SWTOR will have the same features. People act like the game will never improve. The fact of the matter is that every game since WOW has been compared to WOW, and all have fallen short in terms of features. I literally can't understand why people are always surprised by this. Can you elaborate on this?

I like how people expect the world from any brand new MMO launch, yet are disappointed game after game. Also, many F2P games are licensed from Asia, so they have months/years of post-launch development going for them. Rift did not have LFG tool at launch.

The disk is definitely continually being accessed throughout WZ. Results after playing in Huttball for 10 mins prior, then logging all reads from then till the WZ ended: 11,000 reads. 5k reads just from dynamic_lower & head, which you'd think would have already been read & stored in system memory prior.

Because the RAM drive is using the 4 GB, SWTOR is not allocating that. I've also looked at file accesses while playing SWTOR, and even when I'm in the same room fighting mostly the same enemies (it was a big room), the same files are being read. Now, maybe enemies have multiple randomly chosen appearances, but there were literally hundreds of reads from several files even after I started fighting the same enemy types. What you describe is how it SHOULD work. Next time I go into a WZ, I'm going to play for 5 mins, then log file accesses. I'm pretty sure I'll still end up seeing thousands of reads. For example, ~10 mins in Huttball resulted in 27,500 reads. This is NOT including the loading screen. Bear in mind when I played SWTOR beta Huttball, and the game in general, ran fine. I'm not sure what happened between beta and retail, but performance has noticeably degraded. And presumably that was with the highest resolution textures being enabled which were removed from world rendering in retail and reserved for cutscenes only. If I got the performance in beta I'm getting now, I likely would have passed on the game.

^This Not lv50 yet so I don't know if performance will be acceptable in PVE endgame, but even with the RAM drive set my performance in WZ is terrible, which is probably a bad indicator. I'm well above minimum specs and I consider this a serious issue.

Have they even acknowledged it as a problem yet?

This keeps happening to me too...

It surely isn't smooth for me with constant FPS drops whenever assets are (constantly) being loaded. I don't recall the framerate being so jerky in beta. I don't even know how anyone could play this game with "minimum" specs. I agree that real time space combat/exploration would be amazing, and something that could set TOR apart from standard MMOs. Really though, "a huge percentage" of former SWG players? SWG was hardly a hit, I doubt they comprise anything close to a majority, compared to people who are looking for a standard MMO or KOTOR3.

I'm sure someone else must have commented on this already with the exact same response I'm going to give, but what exactly is stopping people from chatting with people in the zone? There are also tons of group quests where socializing can happen. I'm not really seeing this as the fault of the game. In Rift, hordes of people would be partied together during world quests and yet there was barely any talking. Like EQ, in FFXI leveling was a group grind yet people weren't overly loquacious. There was almost no zone talking whatsoever besides in the cities. Forced grouping was terrible, that's why games moved away from it (and subscription numbers boomed as a result). I can't even imagine trying to do anything at all in FFXI if you could only play ~2 hours a day. Not uncommonly, your party barely started xping after 2 hours. TOR's problem, from what I can see, is that leveling is way too streamlined with quests. I do agree that you level too fast, as it seems players follow the level curve of an area solely through the solo quests. If you stop to do heroics/flashpoints/warzones/space missions you outpace the curve. I don't even bother logging out in cantinas because I level too fast anyway. Can't comment on lv50 because after 2 weeks I'm not even lv40. As for some of the other comments, TERA didn't even do well in Korea, I don't know how people believe it will fare well here where everyone complains about not enough content. Besides, it's not even the first action MMO in English so it's hardly breaking new territory on that front. GW2 will probably be a good game, but there's no way in hell it will ever live up to the holy grail standard that so many are raising it to.