They -could- give some time to be nice but they -owe- us nothing... Nothing in the EULA that stats they guarantee populated servers and backup said guarantee with added game time if not met.

1 movie ticket, 1 small popcorn and 1 small drink...... if you're lucky.... and that's only for 2hrs of entertainment.

Quoted for truth. People always seem to forget this.

In this day and age, Id imagine "success" means a game is retaining enough subscriptions (or microtransactions) to sustain employment in, devlopment, support, and enough to at least maintain current technology and maintenance levels. Of course a percentage for profit, but a lot of companies conciter success breaking even as well, so either is fine but profit is prefered. Most mmos break even with initial box sales, some even pull ahead with some profit at that time as well. All companies want a smash hit but it almost never happens, that's just part of the risk. TOR: Even if we are to believe the 300 million number for TORs devlopment (which we know is bunk but I'll run with it anyway). We will also say they sold 2 million copies at launch, which might be lowballing it (including box and digital). Thats 2 million copies at release and an average $75 per sale. Give or take thats roughly 150 million in raw sales at release. Say there was a 75% retention for the first subscription fee.. that's another 22.5 million.. Even if the game has lost 75% every month.. the money adds up pretty quickly. 22.5m, 16.875m, 12.65m, 9.5m, 7.1m... around 68.65m + sales of 150 and we are already hitting 218.65 million... Remember this dose not account for new people buying and entering the game after the initial sale.. This is important since box sales boost capital faster then subscription fees.. one box sale is roughtly 4 or 5 months worth of sub-fees. It also dose not reflect server, bandwidth, employment and building mainteniance costs. unscientific extrapolation result - I'd bet they have made back their initial investment and devlopment costs by now, if they haven't, they should be close. I, like many thers, feel the game cost no where near 300 million to produce.. I'd have to give it a ballpark of 80 to 180 million.. yeah a wide field still but no where near 300 million. Was TOR successful... Sure... Dose it have staying power? We don't know yet.. :-/ Remember though, WoW was complete garbage it's first year and riddled with issues which were poorly managed.. People are only remember WoW 5+ years after release...

I'm sure they were not planing on the layoffs but it is still pretty normal that they still indeed happened. All game companies lay people off on a regular basis, it's just the way the industry is. Very few people stay with a company for more then a handful of years for various reasons in this field. Those that can stick around are also concitered senior in their department (Sr programmer, Sr Artist, Sr Animator, ect...) in only 3 to 5 years - and they maynot be around for 6 or 8 in total. It's always sad to hear of someone loosig their employment, I know i've beent there myself, and, infact, am still there. But it is a part of this industry that can't be shaked and anyone entering the field is well aware of the employment risks. EA itself is notorious for their artist turn-a-round... Think puppy mill levels. :-/

It's so crazy it's boarderline genius. I think it could work, in my opinion.

Hum... and here I thought most of the abilities looked like they came from Warhammer Online.. You know, since a lot of the same people worked on both... regardless... So lets run with WoW inventing these horrible abilities.. We have WoW to blame for the current state of blind-button-mashing in curent-generation mmos; so, bassically the -worst- aspect of current gen mmos? Nice.. another reason to not like WoW. Thanks for the education. Glad I never played it afterall..

21 is a ton of people - why are you guys hogging all the players over there?

Unsubscribed. HARDCORE PVE with a mix of some CASUAL, like 75 / 25 or so.. I find the forums more entertaining then the game.. heh.

I hadnt realized there were games that already did the above - that's fantastic. I also agree, whomever changed the formula back to this archaic approch.. is a bad.. bad.. person.. :-/ [note: the mmos ive played (eq1, eq2, planetside, swg, warhammer, daoc, tor, horizons) have always been character-locked-to-server. :-/ ]

I think one of the greatest advances the genre we could see in the future would be the removal of the the "character" from the "server". Break this connection. Setup Characters so that once we log in, we select a character then a server to play on. There would, of course, be new challanges to over come but the end result would allow people to play on whatever server they wished and change on the fly (like changing chat rooms). Sure populations would fluxuate but commuities would be formed by the players themselves, and if they need to, they can relocate. Sometimes it's good to play on a dead server if you are looking for a named mob but other times you want to have a ton of people around if you are trying to sell something. Allow people the freedon to fluxuate between servers at will and communities will be formed regardless. It's 2012, the chains that bind "a character" to "a server" should be broken. Anyway, just a thought.

Yeah I do agree with you on both accounts. We're on the same page. The only real reliable number I can go on is Box sales in the US, which was under 3mil for the last WoW expantion - which is still awesome and any company would be happy to have those numbers. It would be interesting if WoW launched this year.. and in it's place it was competing with, like, EQ or something.. Would WoW succeed? It's an interesting question with only speculation as an answer.. but always still fun to ask. [note: ive never owned a cell phone and/or smart phone, no ipad, or iphone, no texting anything, no twitter, and only use my land line once a week or so... but yeah, point taken. ]

Right, they were after WoWs numbers - that said Bizzards counts everything as apples and apples... and that just leads to issues in numbers. Did they hit 10mil? sure I'll give it to them. Who is their biggest customer, China.. and you do understand that the way we buy and play, say WoW, here in the US is -not- the same way it's sold in China, right? Anyway. this is all besides the point I was trying to make... MY point was in not listening 100% to a single crowd of people that have only ever played one game and only ever want to play clones of said game.. This argument makes no sense since if they only want to play Clones, why not just play the original game? I won't debate with a WoW fanboy though... i'll just refer back to my #1 listed above. All argumentative fallacies.. back on point.. When a game is as easy as TOR is, there is no point to play it for very long, it has no "staying power". If that is what they want, that is fine, but they shouldn't act all surprised if their numbers drop off. I'm guess they wanted staying power though.. People are screaming for transfers and mergers, which they should, the game is streatched out over too many servers... The issue is, once they do get into that group and do the zone they desprately want, there is nothing to do after. The game is designed and built around people playing alts as endgame - and many people are finding out that "alts" is a pretty lossy endgame mechanic. again, just my opinion.

The anonymity of the internet makes people opinions feel important. :-/

On the republic side, 26 has been the normal for a while now... and has even slipped into a "high" rating. Imps have had it far better with their higher population.

Completely Agreed. Just to add.... There seems to be a few different types of players here on the boards. 1) The exWoW player. The game needs to be like WoW or it will fail, period, no way around it. Though they have never touched another AAA mmo, this is the way they feel at heart and will defend it to the death. The issue is that they -only- have experience with WoW and they do not understand the genre has been around far longer then WoW was a twinkle in Blizzards eye. These are the same players that hate TORs graphics but will defende WoWs to the bitter end... really?! 2) Then you have the players that have a huge list of games under their belt. They will easily rattle off a dozen, 2 dozen or even 3 dozen games. The problem here, to squeeze in that many games they are not loyal to a single game and couldn't possibility of played a single game for longer then a month or two, possibility even less time. 3) Now you have the people that say they play a game but trully have not. The example here would be all those that said they played SWG (launch) but have no clue what their talking about. If SWG had as many people playing the game as claimed to have played it, it would still be around and the NGE would of never of happened. A lot of people did play the game, I'm not taking away anything from them, but we all know there are a ton of people that claim to have played that have not. Now filtering out a lot of the above - game companies can start getting some good feedback.. There are, of course, more areas they must filter; the above is just a small example or what to watch for. The companies that do best are the ones that will take the feedback but implement changes slowly over time, if at all. EQ1 was huge and is still considered a more "hardcore" game then what the current genre offers - but people still play it even though its 13(?) years old? This shows that not all gamers want rewards handed to them, they want to earn them.. yes.. sometimes that involves some grinding, or, heaven forbid, the accutal loss of experiance when you die. People say they want a game thats all instant gratification.. Well, here you go, you now have TOR.... But people are leaving the game regardless... sure transfers/mergers will help at first... but in the end, when you have instant gratification, there is no reason to stick around for the long haul. Anyway - just my opinion... :-/

Sadly, not everyone, but a lot of the current MMO generation of players -are- jerks to each other already with or without the social pressure of being on the same server. :-/

I saw that as well in the video... I did jump on last night and checked the server page - One was very heavy, 2 or 3 were heavy, pherhaps a handful were normal, and the rest were all light. So out of 210+ servers, ~10 had a population. :-/ Hast time i saw a full page of "normal" load servers was about a month after release.

When I read that sentence, Dragonball Z (or GT) jumped into my mind where they would "power up" over several episodes.... "Ahhhh!" - "Ahhhhhhhh!" - "AHHHHHH!" heh..

Liked Completely Voiced 100%, and Story Companions Taun-Tauns Disliked Too linear gamplay Too easy overall (just my opinion) Limited endgame without rerolling an alt. (endgame shouldn't be about rolling alts) This is just a list of three of each, I could give several more examples to each area.

Also, that retractable coffee-cup holder is called an Optical Drive, it's not for holding cups.

They should be merging servers at this point, we do not need 200+ servers anymore. Knock it back to 25~50 and all the remaining servers will be much heathier - well... that is... till their force choked some more. :-/

Ive said it before and I'll say it again - the best way I can describe it is that TOR feels more like a console game then a typical MMO (name your poison). Not that there is anything wrong with console games. The point is, these are different genres; if i wanted to play a console game I'd be playing one. Port the game to playsation or xbox live and the game will do awesome. The addition of all the voice work is down right amazing - everything else is very lacking though. :-/ just to add though, daily quests is not "content" in my mind. It is the first time though but after it's just empty filler. There are tons of different levels of endgame gear in this game - but all endgame content (including hardmodes and nightmare modes) can just be done with normal player crafted level 49 purple gear - so why bother chasing gear at all? Just too easy a mmo for my tastes (my opinion). The stories are great but thats also why it feels like a console game to me, as story is also their strong area as well. :-/

Kira... Human, and a spunky red-headed firecracker... enough said.

Yeah no, definelty agreed - "Bound" is no hting new - it's been around in one shape or another for goig on 10 or 12 years or more.