Why are all the BioWare crusaders and apologetists saying these sources are not reliable? We have confirmation from EA that they are indeed laying off 500 - 1,000 employees (to be expected, the EA PR machine has already spun this layoff as a "restructuring plan where we expect to recuperate the number of people being shifted around by the end of the year") and that poor performance for BF3 and SWTOR is reflected by the huge losses resulting from a huge investment on marketing strategies which are not returning a proper return on investment. 1.2 was not the resurgent patch that BW was looking for. This is obvious by the free month of gameplay to keep a hemorrhaging playerbase from dwindling even faster. You can ignore all of the complaints you want from all the people who are having a dismal gameplay experience on low populated servers and the innumerable number of players who are dissatisfied to the game but that would be turning a blind eye to very real issues facing this game in both the short-term and the long-term. Although the forums are probably frequented by a minority of the playerbase, there is still a sufficient number of players to draw a population sample from which would accurately predict the sentiments players are currently having and whether or not this indignation can be statistically projected to result in unsubscribing. Player complaints are not superficial either; they demand answers to very obvious issues. Let's not forget that BioWare has to compete with Diablo 3 next month which is the behemoth to compete against for every single game developer this year -- add GW2 to this furious battle between game developers and SWTOR finds itself in an extremely competitive market. Investors are not dumb. Within two weeks of the game's release, Brean Murray Carret & Co (a reputable investment banking firm) quickly "issued a note to investors on Thursday morning, slashing its price target on EA stock from $22 to $28. Analyst Todd Mitchell said he had “creeping concerns” over Star Wars: the Old Republic’s profitability." These investors did not re-issue another note even when the numbers for February were released. They know this game had too many issues when it came out and no amount of post-release patching was going to save it. EA has already made its initial ROI on this game. But, internally, the management is obviously not happy with the subscription numbers (as expressed in the article linked by the OP) and seem extremely wary about the future health of this game. When the developers include a "preview pane" for the Legacy abilities to come out in 1.3, it's quite pathetic that they need to show players future updates to hopefully keep people playing for their subscriptions for the incoming new features. IMO, the omission of Ranked WZs and a complete destruction of the finely crafted class balanced present pre-1.2 has damaged the game beyond repair. Anyways, I'll be here until Wednesday. Then my subscription is over.

This event is a carbon copy (once again) of a staple WoW event. BW proves that they're not interested in anything remotely creative.

The game is bad. No need to critically think further than this. It's a superficial MMO-theme park. The honeymoon phase is over for many people hence why they are divorcing/distancing themselves from this TORtanic.

A little wordy but 100% accurate. 1.fail...

Don't need to read further than this post. It sums it up very well.

You people need to take a class in accounting and a course in elementary micro-economics to accurately analyze how BW could provide such a promotion at the potential scenario of losing millions of dollars of subscribers money. First of all, you simply can't take X number of subscribers and then multiply that number by $14.99 to approximate the gross revenue generated by a subscription-based service. You have to take in into account the initial sales of the game in order to get a clear picture as to how EA/BW could finance a free-month of play time for millions of users. This includes a segmentation of those who bought the game digitally, a hard copy in-store or online, and those who bought the Enhanced/CE editions (online or in-store). The generated revenue from this POS (Point of Sale) merchanside is going to widly differ from state to state (due to varying taxes), from country to country and their subsequent foreign exchange rate at the time of sale, and because of other factors such as licensing costs and publishing costs which all differ from country to country and state to state. Most importantly is to take into account the different subscription options available to the customer because under certain subscription plans, you are not paying $14.99 a month. Currently, you can purchase a one-month recurring plan, a three-month recurring plan, and a 6-month one. You can as well buy game cards which provide the same functionality but those cards are not pure profit since BW needs to reach out to manufacturers and contract the distribution of these cards to various convenience, grocery, and video-games stores. The revenue generated from the initial sale of the game and its various subscription plans could have already offset the initial cost of development for all we know hence why we could assume the reason for this promotional marketing ploy. Second of all, the way subscription-based services are recorded in accounting ledgers is different from the way a wrench would be sold in Sears' tool department. In the latter, Sears can mark this as instantly recognized revenue. They adjust their inventory to reflect the sale of the item and record the sale of the item as direct revenue that is recognized the day of the purchase (or moment if they are using sophisticated supply chain managerial software) -- this ties into the process of Revenue Recognition but there's no need to go down that road for this example. In BW's case, once the POS event has occurred, their digital/physical product is essentially shifting into a service. Any business model which relies on subscription-based revenue to generate profits must record that revenue as deferred revenue. For example, even though you haven't paid for the month of May, BW registers in its book that you have paid for that month even though you may very well quit tomorrow. To put it theoretically, the transaction has not yet transpired but BW records it in its book in advance anyways. With deferred revenue, you have the capacity to adjust the increases and decreases in subscription numbers by retroactively changing your current deferred revenue. This is why when BW releases their quarterly numbers, you have to be extremely skeptical of their accuracy and validity because you don't know at which point in time they are referring their subscription numbers to. When they say that for the month of March we still have retained 1.7M subscribers, the EA CEO is not telling you that he is using the numbers from the deferred (now current) revenue obtained for the month of February. This is a typical tactic during quarterly meetings to boast about your numbers and other factors -- retention rates is a whole different beast. Finally, to compute these numbers, we'd need access to much more than just a rough estimate of the current number of active subscribers -- and the definition of "active subscribers" is prone to abuse just as Blizzard released their criteria for what they considered as "active" which was quite interesting to say the least. We'd need: supplier/vendor costs; manufacturers/OEM costs; publishing costs; licensing costs; development costs; maitenance costs; salary costs; and most importantly the monthly overhead required to keep this game running. All of these factors will severly impact the monthly profit (Profit = Revenue - Cost) figures that we could estimate. And last but not least, we are talking about EA. A multi-billion dollar international conglomerate that is extremely aggressive in M&A (Mergers and Acquisitions) and dominates the game industry in many, many aspects. BW has the full support of EA since like any serious, capitalistic management, the EA executives want to see a positive ROI (Return On Investment) of a heavily funded project in order to satisfy their shareholders: always remember that this goal is the main priority of any public corporation. TL;DR: this is an exercise in futility. Your method to multiply X numbers of subscribers with the monthly cost of $14.99 is not valid. Too many factors must be taken into consideration to accurately estimate BW/EA's cost of providing a free month of play time.

You do know that the vast majority of players do not ever, ever frequent these forums? Go ahead, ask in your server's General Chat how many people frequent the official SWTOR forums? Maybe one or two will speak up but otherwise it's just an awkward dead silence until someone switches the subject or an ubiquitious LFG comment appears in your chat box. In order to be aware of this change, you had to come on the forums, you had to track down the Georg Zoeller's post that was buried in the hundreds of PTS forums posts he and other developers made over a 2-4 week period. Do you honestly think everyone has the extra time to spend on the forums to learn more about the game they simply want to play? This is absurd. This complaint is absolutely legitimate and it has screwed thousands of players who are in the same situation. I'm one of them. It's ostensibly the #2 reason as to why I've un-subbed (#1 being the omission of Ranked WZs) because, exactly like the OP, I do not want to farm the same pieces of gear again for the third time. Farming BM gear in the form of RNG tokens from daily quests was already a kick in the gonads. Farming the same exact gear for necessary stat increases to compete at high level in PvP is the equivalent of pouring salt over a freshly cut wound. This change should have been retroactive on all gear that was previously modded without any exception. This issue has been handled similarly as the Ilum-exploit which happened in January. It's similar in the sense that BW did nothing right to solve the issue. BW promised rollback for those who abused the system but no one, let me it clear, no one has been banned that I know of (and I know quite a few folks on my server who abused the hell out of that exploit when it came out). And I know first-hand since me and my roomate both abused the system to gain 32 Valor ranks in about 10 hours. Now that I'm quitting I really don't care to admit that I exploited Ilum but if you think that BW has a clue of what they're doing and are actually satisfied with 1.2, then you are the type of person who would probably be satisfied with a replica of Malgus' 7-foot tall statute that would be entirely made out of poop.

That just shows desperation on BW's part. Blizzard didn't start having these kinds of promotion well into TBC. They are begging to get returning players back. By even offering a free month of play time. This is hilarious.

What? http://dulfy.net/2012/03/22/pvp-gearing-in-1-2/ Dulfy has compounded all of the information you need to know about the transition from Centurion -> Recruit gear. This is the conclusion she came up with: If you have Centurion, it is better to just purchase Recruit and be done with it! If you have Champion gear, this is harder to answer. I'd take a serious look at the link I've posted if you want to accurately calculate what your Aim, Endurance, and other stats loss will be from Centurion -> Recruit. And BM gear is not useless in 1.2... You can exchange it for War Hero gear and it has been improved.

The idea that Ravage is one of our best damage dealing ability is simply incorrect. We'll be able to accurately back this statement with facts now that we have access to a combat log but for an ability that is reliant on a channeled, 3-second cast to deal out all of its damage, it's situational at best. Ravage is great against the morons who just sit there while you're wailing on them. With the changes to healing and expertise, this isn't going to be that prevalent anymore. Anybody with a modicum of PvP experience simply runs away at the sight of any Marauders/Sentinels casting a channeled ability that isn't choking you mid-air. Telling people to put points into Ravager as an Anni build is like telling healers they should invest 2 points in an ability that purely increases their DPS: it's useless.

Right. And a mechanic that generates 1 Rage based on a low-RNG with a .3 coefficient which is also limited by a 1.5 second activation timer (essentially every GCD) is not optimal in any way for PvP since you're looking at fights which last a short amount of time and where burst is optimal -- especially with the changes to Expertise in 1.2, that's exactly what BW is shooting for. Again, Empowerment was proven to be a mildly useful PvE ability since it "shines" over prolonged period of time (see http://www.sithwarrior.com for more details.). I see absolutely no point in using it for PvP especially when we have the possiblity to use those extra two points for a talent that gives us an extra 2 second of invisibility which is going to be crucial to escape fights, reset fights, and destabilize your enemy's rotation. My mistake, I forgot to include BA in my rotation. Charge (3 Rage) -> Deadly Saber (1 Rage) -> Rupture (2 Rage; but you get refunded 1 Rage if spec'd into the ability, so essentially 1 Rage) -> BA -> etc. You cannot apply Charge -> Deadly Saber -> Rupture without Enraged Charge. Otherwise you'd have to sneak in an Assault in there or use BA right after Charge instead of Rupture which applies an essential 50% slow now. And I think that applying a slow on your target is the most important factor as most classes (besides Marauders/Juggs/Assassins) are going to be kiting you as soon as you Charge or start attacking them. Since most classes have a 15% increased run speed ability, any time spent chasing an opponent like a decapitated goose is a loss of DPS for a class (and build if we're still talking about Anni) that is 100% reliant in dishing out single target damage.

I watched both the streams and the videos which were posted from guilds with access to the PTS. These guilds went in blind with little idea of what to expect in EC HM (8-man) and they came out quite successful. After 3 hours, content for the first three bosses was cleared and the main boss mechanics were figured out. BW has a casual approach to OPs. The 38% participation rate announced at the Guild Summit proves that they are concerned with releasing content that is accessible to the entire playerbase. It is only inevitable that to accomplish this goal, the difficulty of boss mechanics have to be seriously dumbed down. Most guilds who have been raiding for over 2 months should have all of their core members decked in full Rakata. It won't take long for EC HM to be on farm status and, once again, BW's shortsightedness of not providing effective incentives to clear content at the NM level fails to deliver for those players looking for a harder challenge. The majority of serious raiding guilds have left this game a long time ago because they were the first ones to understand that the OPs content will never be challenging. And even if it is, the subsequent rewards attached to clearing the most difficult modes are simply not worth the hassle.

Most guilds who are still alive and have been raiding for at least two months 16-man HM EV/KP should have all of their core members geared in Full Rakata. BW's approach to raiding is to cater to casuals. They've removed the barrier to entry to raids for most guilds but haven't replaced that barrier with any other kind of mechanic or artificial hurdle to increase the longevity of the content. This means that in a few weeks most guilds will have this instance on farm mode. And unless changes have been applied to NM mode to drop a new set of gear with substantial stat increases from HM (I don't care about change to the color palette of end-game raiding gear as a reward), there is still no reason to run NM mode unless you want a better challenge.

This is what makes Carnage really unattractive since our Force-related stats have always been higher than our melee-related stats. If you have a 3/3 in Malice, your Force crit rate should be at 30%+ (mine hovers 35%) and with the dual raid weapons, I had an insane amount of Force. Even though Carnage was underutilized as a PvP-spec and was bugged as a PvE-spec due to its problems with mob colision/hit-boxes, they had to bring down the spec to the level of Anni/Rage otherwise everybody would switch to Carnage. Essentially, these quality of life changes brought to the Marauder class enables the other trees to be a little bit more viable in PvP but IMO (Valor Rank 66 and second BM character, take it for what it is), Anni still reigns King in PvP. PS - I could care less about PvE. I ran NM mode EV/KP in a PvP Anni build and didn't have any trouble.

No, just no. This is a mish-mash of PvP/PvE skills thrown in together. It doesn't attempt to min-max anything. Those two points in Ravager are useless. They'd be much better spent into Phantom or Defensive Roll/Stagger depending on your preference. There's also no need to put two points into Empowerment unless you're going for a PvE build. Empowerment was proven to be completely sub-par in PvP and especially with the changes to Undying Roar, Obfuscate and Disruption (removing their Rage cost), you're going to need that 1 extra Rage point even less. Enraged Charge is absolutely necessary to get your rotation going if you're using Charge to initiate the battle: Charge -> Deadly Saber (while Charging in mid-air) -> Rupture (awesome that you don't have to apply Crippling Slash since Rupture gives you a nice 50% slow) -> Optional: Ravage if it's not on CD (even better now that it's uninterruptible) -> Annihilate.