Yep. I have opened a ticket. No word as yet.

No. It is was it is. It will always have a reasonable following. There are ways to make it turn a profit or cost less to develop if it comes to it. However, I do think that the days of people playing the same MMO for years are probably over on the whole. People dont have the time or the patients to invest years into a game and no development team would ever be able to keep up with the speed new content and features is demanded. So long term massive player bases are a thing of the past imo. Consolidated servers and new subs is key to ongoing success for the game. A fact that is mirrored in game with guilds trying to survive at the current time. You only need look at the spam on the fleets atm, to witness the consolidation process going on in full force. Thats why 1-15 FOC is a good idea imo. And I expect this is not news to the bigwigs at EA and I would expect to see lots of other ideas to attract new players as the months go on. Accepting that WoW is a freak to this model and should be discounted as such.

I have got it..... Its because Bioware devs need to go back in time in their UFO and then dressed as Elvis they need to shoot JFK and then somehow get back to present day Texas without leaving behind any wreckage that might be mistaken as a weather balloon. ohhh, not forgetting to fake a moon landing along the way. They say they need to do some background checks and stuff... OK fair enough. I am sure this is absolutely the case. As do, I am sure, the vast majority of the "sane" player base. Just dont take too long please. We want to get moved and settled asap.

One easy rule for all MMO's/ groups/ops/ PVP etc.... Its all you will ever need. "dont be a dick"

LI is easy enough if you remember a few main things on the trickier bosses. Obviously as posted throughout this thread.. half decent gear will help a lot with the enrage timers. (columi + ideally) After a few wipes learning the encounters.. any competent group should then be able to run through this place with success ongoing. The trash in Kaon is just as much of a challenge in that sense that you cant just over gear it for immediate success. So if you can handle that, then LI will be fine. ---------------------------- Its a great fun Flashpoint (easily the best in the game imo) and should be run for that reason alone imo. 15 min "charity loot" has spoiled most MMO's. How about just taking it on because its there! Whats wrong with a little challenge.

World of Warcraft was very polished when it launched.. in comparison to what else was around at the time. Love it or hate it but the dumbed down mechanics and look and feel made it very accessible by all. SWtor is less so in comparison to what's around right now. I dont think that's a flaw personally. The market has moved on alot in the last 5 years or so and comparisons to WoW or Galaxies etc....or hoping for the "next massive technical leap forward" were simply not going to happen. SW has flaws, but the biggest problem of all has been the hype surrounding the "expected" sub numbers. It was unrealistic to start with in my view. It has lead to countless issues with regards to the games PR. Its a great game with a bright future if developed correctly ongoing.....but it will occupy a niche in what is already quite a small sector of the overall gaming market to start with. Personally I am fine with that.

Love the game.. but the worlds are lifeless no doubt about it. More pathing NPC's, critters, weather etc....would have been nice.

<<falls off chair laughing >>>> I trust this was massive sarcasm. The vast majority of people didnt stop playing because of the price. If that were true they would not have started to play to start with. Thats like saying you hate a particular movie/ tv show... but you will watch it daily if it were on a free to view channel! If you hate it, then making it free wont change that. Its a red herring used by folk that feel as if they have no comeback but to threaten the developer with something tangible. Sadly its also so transparent that I am sure the developers already can see straight through it. If they have any brains then they are busy reworking the games infrastructure and future development plans around a far lower "solid" subscription base number. (as it should have been to start with).

There are girls on the interweb? Lies! ----------------------------------------- MMO should be a reflection of society. In our guild (thats 10yrs young this year) we have had players who are in their late 70's, some who are 8 or 9 and I dare say some women sneaking in somewhere too. Who cares as long as, just like in the real world, people adapt to their target audience appropriately. I dont want to hear about fluffy bunnies and knitting daily. Equally I doubt most women want to hear teenage kiddies going on about female body parts and their first hard ons every day of the week. Seriously.....its a brave new world!

you mean that isnt normal! Jeeez... I thought we were doing well across 4 raids nights tbh.

As someone who fails hard at any kind of money in these games I can tell you every bit from every source is welcomed. To be honest getting a mail from an NPC was a welcome surprise. I couldn't care less about the amounts. Also.. affection at max on all companions at mind 40's? Maybe I just dont get the whole companion thing. Much happier to ditch them in favour of a group.... but mine are dressed in rags on the whole and hate me. I do wonder if they are going to do a World of Warcraft hunters pet and bugger off and leave me if I dont feed them often enough;) Money is far from hard to obtain in SW. Mail is a nice story element.

4x female toons. 1 x male toon Cyber tranny FTW

How many Starwars fans are in the world that have never set foot in an MMO? or heard about this game? or have had time/ inclination to bail from other games? Or are waiting to be let down by Pandas? Or have their summer hols just on the horizon and fancy being outside? or dont have the PC tools to play effectively yet? or have spent hours in D3/ etc.. and found its all too quick and are looking for something else? etc.... oh and just for good measure again..... How many Starwars fans are in the world that dont even know what an MMO is? Take old MMORPG hacks (like me) that judge, prejudge and then judge again a game before its even hit the shelves these days... what's left is plenty for the marketing people at Bioware/ EA have to go at if they so choose. F2P is not something I imagine will happen any time soon. p.s. So what if sub numbers are 100,000 or 15,0000 or 27 million! I cant only play effectively with 20 or 30 max anyway. The rest just adds background noise.. which is great (dont get me wrong) and is totally needed to add depth and feel and a working community etc.... .. but honestly... are you telling me that the majority of all these "i am unsubbing, the world is ending" threads made by folks would be anything other than that even if the servers were a lot more busy. I doubt it.. We need it busier = Yes. 100% It will change the whole way people view the game = NO Love it or hate it.. SWtor is a generic MMO clone really. I happen to think thats great. But if its not your cup of tea to start with then no amount of hoping the game was "Utopia whatever" will change that fundamental fact.

You have to be really into a game. Have a lot of time invested. Your characters have to mean something. The guild you are with needs to matter etc.. etc... Thats why DAoC and EQ saw some returns after people bailed for a bit....IMO More modern MMO's such as this are far quicker to the "end game". Its not such a big wrench to say goodbye. Equally there are not as many magic moments of nostalgia to recall and bring you back. So basically no... its just on to the next great best thing to complete whatever aspects of that you enjoy as fast as possible. IMO there was always an inevitable percentage of subscribers to SWtor that were never going to stick around anyway. I suspect that has been increased due to the "perceived" issues (that by now everyone knows about). If anything is to blame as far as EA's balance sheets etc... then its the forecasted player base to start with. It was never going to be and never will be millions of players. That imo is unrealistic and always was. (wow is a freak in this regard). I hope some do come back and check out SWtor 1.4 or 1.5 etc.... but I suspect that a lot of the "noise" will have moved to the next best thing and started tearing through that. However there is one last factor that needs to be considered. StarWars is a unique and massively popular story in its own right. Something that you dont see many people consider is the huge numbers of people who own a computer / enjoy some form of gaming/ have never played an MMO and who love Star Wars... but simply DO NOT KNOW about this games existence Only a fool would think that just because we know means everyone else does. So far SWtor subs base has "mainly"captured existing MMO players. There is a big untapped market out there who dont understand MMO's but want Starwars stuff. I would not be surprised to see sub numbers increase dramatically again after some heavy duty marketing hits. The time to do that would be after the game has had time to settle. Atm you do get the sense that Bioware/EA are caught in a storm of playing reactive "catch up" with the player base. Once they get ahead of the curve or start "leading" the game development again, then the platform will be ripe for a big new push for subs. We shall see if that occurs or not over the next few months I guess.

Used Mako all the way to 50 (lvling PT tank in tank spec/ gear from start) Its slower but it helped me get my head round the tanking mechanics properly. There is no substitute to hands on experience with a certain build. Mako allowed me time to take on multi packs etc. and really get a feel for what works and doesn't work. etc.... At 50... I am sad to say I stuck her in a modded up slave outfit, parked her on the ship and started to use Gault., as his DPS allowed me to whistle through the dailes. Only time I would use Mako now would be on a Heroic 4 or something where we need to 2 or 3 man it (due to server numbers being low atm).. and I need a healer. (eg:/ end of torvix) Now 50 and nearing completion of current Operations I have started working with the other pets also, to get them to max lvl /story lines to unlock the legacy bonus's. Although it strikes me that I could just feed them gifts on the fleet.. but that seems a tad lame. Besides its always nice to have a fresh face hanging around. Mako FTW.. besides its funny as hell watching her get indignant every time I chose to shoot someone rather than save them

What a doozy of a fight. Bugged line of site aswell. Sniper - 28 - Failed Sniper 29 - Failed Sniper - 30 - Close Sniper - 31 - one shot Tried all the different companions (even the stupid robot to heal). Tried all the clever LoS techniques. Nothing worked. he even started just climbing over the computer consoles to burn my ***. Anyhow... For what its worth. Its a tough fight, but being somewhere near the correct level, gear and experience with the fight will help. If you are stuck here just keep at it. Good luck.

I am a simple soul. I like to know that I have all inclusive. One charge, one invoice, one bank transaction. Then I can properly relax without thinking about budgets every 2 mins. All inclusive resorts when I go on holidays. Unlimited Broadband (not limited download then pay a bit more if you want more nonsense) All inc sub for any MMO's etc..... Simples... any kind of micro transactional rubbish would drive me away from the game. and making it totally free bar the purchase cost of the box... well that is never going to happen. So..

...nm.... reply to offending thread that appears to have been removed anyway... <<<move on.. nothing to see here>>>>

Same... on a light EU server. Great game, just a shame about some of the fanatical negativity from some of the community. I am looking forward to settling in with SW as one of my hobbies over the next 12 months or so. No regrets at all.

one only needs to troll through a handful of the threads here to see that in many peoples eyes the bubble burst a while back. What is perhaps more interesting though is the reasons why. Sure a few common themes occur, but on the whole there are a lot of different reasons why some people are finding SWtor not all they hoped for. Therein lies the issue. The game cannot possibly ever live up to all the hype and expectations from such a varied player base. It will always be "PR" negative for that reason alone. I am sorry to read that you are not enjoying the game any more. I am far from a fanboy of either the SW lore or big corporations like EA/ Bioware. However, I think (with a few obvious tweeks that are incoming apparently in patch releases) the game has just got started. It has everything I was really looking for and enjoy. What I would say though is, in my humble opinion, a game like this gets better if you can find an ingame community/ guild of "some long term substance" that you can be a part of.

I fail to see the relevance in the immense amount of posts written by some on the subject of EA share prices or subscriber losses. I can only assume that it is one of three things. You are an EA shareholder, its great to say "i told you so" or people are concerned that the game might get axed. Personally I cant see a license that is this important, that occupies a significant chunk of a commercial sector that is only set to grow, getting axed anytime soon. No doubt initial marketing/ sales forecasts were way off. However all it hopefully should do is give the decision makers some pause for thought. The initial estimates were perhaps arrogant and based on understanding WoW domination of this market sector. The reasons for which I doubt even Blizzard fully understand. The fact remains that as a community that care about what happens, maybe we should spend less time on creating lists of things we believe to be better in other games and/or shouting on as many threads as possible about how everyone sucks.... and perhaps devote more time to giving constructive feedback on how we would like to see things develop with SW now. There will always be a large chunk of players that will hop, skip and jump to the "next best thing". There is little point in even factoring them into any financial projections for a game of this type. Its an impossible task to keep them happy, so ignore them quite frankly. What is needed in my view is for a developer to have the long term discipline to stick to their guns and develop a game that has longevity in its play style. If anything make things harder, longer, tougher to achieve. re-establish guilds and a community spirit as the only way to get "some" individual tasks done. Something easy to achieve is worth very little and by default becomes easily disposable in nature. Eg:/ There is no real personal sense of pride or achievement in having full "xyZ" gear if it took you 4 PU groups and 4 days to achieve. Somewhere on here is a thread asking what the future should look like. Well, accepting bug free and a proper number of people per server etc.. etc... in my view the game needs developing in such a way that it attracts and then keeps those players willing to invest time and effort long term on it. I am not a software developer so I have no idea how practical creating enough for a causal/ transient base and enough for a long term teamwork based populace would be. However atm it seems to me that StWTOR has yet to really find its "own" niche. Its playing the same game everyone else is... namely slice into WoW market share. There is more than enough subscribers available to fund continued development on a game that returns to some of the early roots of MMORPG's. eg:/ Slower but more involving levelling experience, More teamwork, less charity loot, more ops/ group preparation etc.... But combined with the more modern (and great) functions of things like X server group finders, warzones, server driven events, UI customization etc.... I also happen to believe there is a open space right now for a game of that type to do very well long term. and there is no bigger global franchise than Star Wars really. I for one will be one of the 1million or 1.3million or 250,000 subs or whatever it ends up being....I enjoy this game and I see it "should" have a bright future.