Oh and I don't pay a subscription anymore. I had a recurring multi-month subscription that won't run out for sometime. I intend to get my monies worth so when I have nothing to do in game, I will be here letting my opinions be known.

I agree on you last point. The thing is this. I am in my mid 40's, have played MMORPGs since UO and EQ days. They are all I play. I also, besides my pension and separate 401k, personbally invest and some of those investments are in companies like EA, Activision/Blizzard etc. (not those, I invest in ones a bit more consistent atm). Because of this I have for about 20 years now followed the financial performance of games rather closely. Here is what we have. EVERY MMORPG, and I mean every one, has suffered financially when there is nothing new to "play". EQ2 had major issue with TSO because it took 18 months. This game had major issues because it was 14 months before SoR came out. I could note others as well but those are two that I think most, if they did not play, are familiar with. SWTOR here is looking to keep people subbed not with new playable content but rather with fluff rewards provided at the same time we get a 60-90 minute updates on a 30+-60 day cycle. Imo it beggars logic to believe that this is sustainable over the long haul. Now maybe back in the day where the games in the market were EQ, WoW, EQ2, DAoC, Asheron's Call, SWG and CoH, FFXI, Lineage you could get away with it. but now what do we have? EQ, EQ2, WoW, SWTOR, FFXIV, SWTOR, GW2, Aion, Blade and Soul, TERA, Secret World, Wild Star, Archeage, Rift, Neverwinter, then add in the games that filled specific niches that previously only MMORPGS filled, such as Destiny, League of legends, DOTA etc. (I purposefully omitted EVE online because it is rather unique in many ways and appeals to a VERY specific type of MMORPG player.) When the market is this saturated, you can't take anything for granted and I fear that EA/BW is doing just that, because of the IP involved here.

The problem is those are, as the industry calls, "whales". "Whales" are fickle players who can leave as quickly as the arrived. To keep them you MUST keep them engaged in playing. When people do not play they do not pay. When there is nothing new to do what keeps them engaged.

If you go to the monthly bits you see some small difference. The problem is this, and it sucks. PvP, especially Open World PvP, has been dead here for some time thanks to the fact the engine does not allow for large scale and/or open world PvP. The main purpose to roll on a PvP server is to engage in Open World PvP. Ergo they all have similar low ratings because...well people just don't roll on them here. Search "Illum" and "PvP" to see the prime example of open world PvP failure in the game.

The thing is though how many people will keep a sub ticking for 2 months when they don't play. You have only to look at the one MMO that used to give regular subscriber updates... WoW. If you actually read all of their releases (not just those around expac launches) you saw basically a Sine Wave in terms of subscriber numbers. Is there any reason to think a different dynamic would exist here. Well I can tell you something. Until this expac the quarterly reports were less than thrilling in terms of this game and its success, after the 6-8 week dev cycle of 2013 calendar year. The only time after that when they had good things to say was the quarter that SoR launched. Even then it was just "brought many new players to the game" but in terms of profits it was not mentioned as contributing to growth in the segment. That is very telling and after that it was downhill again. Then for this expac they did indeed speak of good things. Not surprising since to play this expac at launch it required a subscription. But stop for a moment and consider something. I LOVE SWTOR, honestly I do, but i also have this nasty tendency to think logically. What is logical thought? 1. remembering all the players that complained the sub model was too draconian and that f2p should have more. --- this make me say "why would these players remain subbed... or not be complaining even more because this expac provides less for an existing sub (play wise) than any before it. 2. thinking... "how many players will pay 14.99 a month for ~1 hour of new content on a 2-1.5 month cycle with only a single fluff reward in the same period to keep them playing? 3. We have become a society, even admitted in the December live stream of "binge watchers". Will this dynamic somehow have a disconnect here? If so please provide a logical explanation as to why.

My point is to only note that the game can possibly succeed just not with the current financial model. no more no less. please don't read into things

TORSTATUS Okay the above is simply to prove a point... YES before people say "they increased server capacity... I know. Also before people say "how" does he know? Well he knows because all he does is automatically copy the feed from the SWTOR official site. It's the trends that are important. launch... low drops. when everyone finishes the story it grows. It drops again the weekend the new movie launched. BUT then grows again after the new year. Now with this small update we see yes on the day it launches low drop...the it basically climbs right back up to the November 2015 high point. It will be almost 2 months between this and the next chapter. Can anyone logically say that subscriptions can be sustained with fluff rewards under the current circumstances? So conclusions. I am under NO delusions that BW can suddenly develope new playable PvE content. The team that did that was either laid off or moved over the ME:A and the budget is largely locked in at least until Part I is over. So, imo, BW either needs to change the current financial model and not have KOTFE be sub only. Yeah sure have the "subs get it for free, for those willing to do it, but a B2P option is likely in order. If not I see a rather rough spring and summer for the accountants trying to justify things.

My review? I REALLY Hope that BW has some secret miracle plan in the offing. The story is completely repetitive when it comes to the "meat" of it. The dialogue you get when your character first meets an old companion simply doesn't cut it for a unique play through to not have it be painful. And the fights, which I described above, are not only that but damn monotonous to boot. Have X mobs suddely appear and charge from the most predictable location on the map. You can tell they sent the combat team to ME:A because this is so much copy paste a Votech student could pull it off. Add to that the fact that again they broke something with a simple patch, in this case basic connectivity, for many players. I mean yeah they apologized but we have seen at least twice a month an "I'm sorry we broke something again" since this expac launch. Eventually apologies are simply not enough. At least irl. If they expect any decent amount of players to keep their subs active with the breaks in patches, with all of the above... I just don't know what to say.

TRAVEL and TRAINING I actually find that Travel that is too easy can be a problem as well. There is a happy medium. They can also be a useful currency sink which I think SWTOR desperately needs. The same with training. The amount of credits you get at end game at this point is absolutely ridiculous when you look at the lack of credit sinks. SPAWN CAMPING (from the article) As for the article the spawn camping thing because gone, al la EQ2's Avatars (may they rest in peace) I think was a bad thing. Yes only the top guilds could do them BUT such a mechanic is a lot easier and cheaper to design and keeps those guilds busy. The competitive nature of them kept those guilds busy so you could actually scale back on full on raid zone development, to an extent. The main annoyance of them were for the players who couldn't take them down...their lay something in the Open world they couldn't kill. "HOW DARE THE DEVS MAKE SUCH A THING!!!!" But they actually served a practical purpose... a diversion for a specific player subset that requires limited resources. I see this more as a complaint based in what, for lack of a better term, I sometimes call the "special little snowflake." There are always players in MMOs who don't get the "Theme park" concept. The very nature of this concept means their will be "rides" you either don't like or that you simply are not capable of doing. IRL it would be fear of heights say for a roller coaster, or being two short for a given ride etc. In the MMO world it would be not liking raid type content, or having a rl schedule that doesn't permit you to join a fix raid group. THINGS ACTUALLY IMPROVED As for improvements. The change from a character "tree" set up to the "utility" set up made sense. Unlike a game like Rift, SWTOR always tried to very quickly crush hybrid builds. As such in the end everyone ended up using the same cookie cutter build anyway. Why bother with the greater complexity (coding/balance wise) under those conditions. It is complexity for its own sake. This was a good change that is relatively recent. I am still on the fence about mastery. I get that it streamlines things. At the same time I was on a few PUG runs shortly after KOTFE launch where things got pretty acrimonious. Before you would have a single class "fighting over a drop. Sometimes no fights at depending on what class it was for. Now you can everyone in the group going after the same pieces. So this seems to be something good for the dev side (more simplicity) good for the new player initially (no need to worry about stats) but in the long run, if not actually destructive, risky for the social dynamic. However beyond that I think most of the good changes came out in the 2nd and 3rd years of the game. Adding a Group Finder, Strong Holds, regular content updates on a 6-8 week dev cycle (which sadly only lasted for 2013). BIGGEST FAILURE? These games live or die on new content. In 2013 it looked bright...RotHC, Strongholds, GSF, Dread War etc. They went on a 14 month hiatus however. They said it would never happen again. I rationalized it by saying that a lot of dev resources had to go into the drastic changes to the class system. Imo it doesn't matter what boxes you check elsewhere... you could get combat, travel, class design and balance completely right. You can have the move efficient and bug free engine with the most gorgeous graphics a server based game ever saw. The story could be the video game equivalent of Frank Herbert's Dune saga, epic in scope and beautiful writing. If you don't keep new content coming in the door however, imo at least twice a year (a bonafide expac and either a large patch halfway through or smaller patches at least quarterly as some games have tried) you will loose in the end. Even now you can see even they are concerned with this issue. A story put out once a month with fluff rewards to maintain subscriptions. They get that they need an undetermined amount of new content to survive, but apparently can't produce enough to release it inm a traditional manner... so we have this release cycle.

Actually the last thing didn't really happen until 2013. This game was started by BW 2 years before they were acquired and BWs founders and their hand picked crew made this game. When it imploded during its first year EA cleaned house.

The only thing I would raise issue with is the "worst company in America". It was so clearly tainted by the facts it was an opt in vote AND those that play games will likely be more " internet savvy". I mean seriously, it beat Bank of America that has, since 2008, been ordered to pay over 90 Billion dollars (yes BILLION) in fines and penalties for things like defrauding Fannie and Freddie, racial and sex discrimination, forcing consumers to pay for additional credit card services, falsely claiming toxic securities to be "safe" investments etc. To say EA is worse than BoA is simply ridiculous.

Well many of us already did, thing is a sub isn't immediately canceled, they have a duration, and some people like me feel that we should get our money's worth while the sub count down continues. What's funny is you use a straw man and avoid this obvious point.

The title made me laugh but I would have to say "no." Is it good? You betcha BUT if I divorce the story and characters from the Star Wars I love I have to say there is one that is actually better. The story more dramatic, the characterization also a bit better. Then again I am the type of person who believes something not everyone does, that stories to go from "good" to "great" need tragedy and most of the SWTOR stories lack that and when it is there it is often simply a "blip".

The last part is pretty much it. Just stop for a moment and consider the following issues with SWTOR for years, all uncorrected. 1. An engine with major FPs issues, graphics clipping etc. 2. Commandos watching Med Shot firing from a location they left 5 minutes ago. 3. Agents holding invisible rifles. 4. Leaps falling short or landing and then falling through bridges and platforms. 5. Events being broken, fixed and then broken again in a semi-annual cycle. 6. Item exploits fixed on one item but then the same exploit reintroduced on a new item. 7. Said exploits taking a month or more to correct. There are more, this is just a short list. New issues; 1. In dealing with the latest exploit. How did they investigate who should be suspended or banned and stripped of virtually all items and credits? Looking at credits made on the GTN. That's it. There were a number of people who had never played the GTN before but did this time around, one person even posted the emails back and forth. He bought two instant 60 tokens from the CM. Sold them and made a mint. He did not have a history of making a mint so they nailed him. He had to prove his innocence. 2. Servers being as unstable as a schizophrenic on crack. Servers crash, people get rolled back...this included the loss of REAL money, for those who bought crates on the CM ecause nonspecific item purchases do not leave a specific "name" in a log and so the drones won't refund credits. 3. A degree of communication that is simply embarrassingly low. Yeah we see Eric around a bit more now that their "vacation" is over but when he does speak, it is either brief in the extreme or very shy on substance. I know that there was an "incident" that they use as an excuse but to have one person and his team be the gateway between the players and the developers is not simply inefficient but untenable when you consider all the miriad of issues that an MMORPG will see come up. Now take away the name SWTOR. Make it: "Join us in 'War of the Planets.'. The Galactic Empire thought long defeated has returned to conquer the Galactic Federation. Join the Federation as a Helmsman...".(smuggler}"... Federated Guard..." (Trooper)"...or wield the mighty psychic powers of a monk or scholar of the Temple of Olympus Mons...." How well would a generic game like that be doing with all of SWTORs issues? Tbh I don't think the game would have made it to 3.0 but rather it would have followed Warhammer to the chopping block.

Well to post he has to be a subscriber. Subscribers are consumers. Consumers can, heck should, let their opinions of a product be known. If you disagree, then the correct way to respond is to explain how the argument that BW has simply given us fluff to keep a subscription maintained is untrue. The problem is people can't disprove that. They can, I will grant, make a case that this is only true for long time existing players, but that does not invalidate the point made. You can even be an existing player and like the expac but you must still admit that this is what the expac has given the existing player in terms of new content: 1. 9 chapters of story that took a single day to play through. a. Said story is identical regardless of class. b. Regardless of the decisions you make the consequence is visual (for lack of a better term) it doesn't have a real effect on the character. 2. a single solo instance in 3 different flavors, the Star Fortress. 3. additional chapters released monthly that will contain approximately 1 hour of content. What do they give you in return for maintaining a subscription to do this small amount of content (again only if you are an existing player)? Fluff...this month an HK-55 jet pack. So why might one feel it necessary to raise this issue? We all want this game to be good, to succeed. I don't think anyone enjoys schadenfreude enough to subscribe only for that purpose. How do games succeed? By making money. This expac is making its money by being subscription exclusive and if players don't think there is enough content to justify their subscription they should let BW know this. That way BW can either A) consider whether largely ignoring playable content was a good idea or B) consider if their content choice and financial model are well matched.

No SM raid has ever had anything appealing to hard core raiders. I used to be one. If I still was all the SM raid would have amounted to was a speed bump to slow my progression by forcing me to gear up for HM. The only fight one might argue broke that mode was Underlurker. Before and after that it was easy though and I honestly think Underlurker was overturned, they knew it they just didn't have the resources to change it. In Ravagers though the only thing that game you an issue was Cortanni being bugged. You could kill her hit the escape pod and watch the fight reset, over and over. Again though that isn't something designed for hard core raiders, that's a bug BW never bothered to fix. That is actually the entire point of their SM/HM/NiM set up actually. SM is easy, always has been. Then to "cater to the hard core" players they simple "tune up" the same encounter. That is actually why I have never understood anyone who says this game caters to hard core raiders. Its not like say EQ2 where you have a series of different, and progressively more difficult, raid zones which you must go through in sequence to get the gear for the next one, maybe even a quest that forces you to clear them so you can unlock the final. They create a couple easy SM raid zones you can mix and match as you see fit and then simply add more damage and HP to the mobs in those zones for the "hard core". In terms of initial development yeah story is cheaper but its one and done, with how they set up the raid progression it ends up giving " more bang for the buck" in the long run. As for the idea that this expac eases entry for new players it does the exact opposite in my experience and I feel bad for them. Due to the speed of leveling and instant 60s new players are finding themselves using GF to get into raid zones with strangers when they often don't adequately know their class. This causes a lot of angst, vote kicks and failures on its own BUT this gets exacerbated by the bolster system. I see that they wanted to get new players into raiding as easily as possible but the tools they picked to do so actually work against this because while they get there fast, it is quite often a miserable experience.

You don't even have to go so far as what the OP suggests. Now it does require some suspension of disbelief but the way the game was at launch, even the SoR story worked in this regard. The story did not have our characters being THE anything and there was, in SoR, a short quest that was class specific. BW did what they did this expac NOT because they were returning to their roots, don't drink that koolaid. They never turned their back on the story. This expac is the way it is because EA only gave them enough money to make a story like this.

The next is actually Q4-2016. Their fiscal year is pretty goofy. That said I suspect you are right. My guess is that in 3 months they will talk about the great story of SWTOR, blah blah blah, but not even the indirect mentionof subs. Note they didn't say numbers... They said nearly 3 years... So as of what date? It's all very spinny.

Yes but 1. The first 30% was up because of people wanting to start the expac when it drops... 2. People coming in on movie hype bumps it more. Would we have seen this IF they had not made KotFE sub only? I think I can safely say no. Adding in that they count the 30 days of game time with purchase a " subscription" and it becomes even more...well to be honest, shady, imo. We see nothing about actual revenue growth (which we have seen before for other games EA puts out) and the like. Add in the fact that places like game stop started selling 60 day game cards for under $8.00 , the actual meaning of the number of subs where it matters, medium to long term profits, seems tenuous

It's actually the way most MMORPGs do it though. SE, SOE (now daybreak games) all made/make the raids integral to the story. SE does it with 8 man content that is actually required to advance the story. EQ2 does it by putting it at the tail end of the story so its not forced, but you don't actually see the "end" of the bad guy you've been chasing. I think they want (or at least wanted to) make a "real" MMO but made a game where they simply can't economically keep up with the speed of dev cycles and expected content. I think the problem here starts with the engine. The more I look at the last 2 years we have only 1 of two possibility based on the amount of content we have seen. 1. EA crushed their budget to that of an indie game launched on Steam. 2. They have a Corporate sized budget BUT the engine has so many issues development is more expensive I am leaning towards 2 not only because of all the performance issues but because they rebreak stuff they have fixed over and over again. I haven't seen servers crash as much as BW here either. Either they are incompetent (which I doubt) or they simply have more complications when it comes to coding. It makes sense, I mean they were basically making the engine while they were coding the game. Imagine trying to pour a foundation of a house, put up the framing, lay the dry wall, run pipes and wiring all at the same time to build a house.

ROFL!!!!! Sorry was very tired (13 hour shift and sick)... I tell the wife "I had an advanced form of cosmetic surgery so as to experience life with your species. You are....a disturbing people." (Or interesting depending on how pissed she is) lol

BUT that results in a loss of revenue over the long term and the one thing EA has shown is their lodestone is quarterly GAINS, losses and "soft" quarters are unacceptable, especially since last year they finally jumped ahead of Activision/Blizzard. Gotta love Corporate America

They would be a good addition (not the whole show) and they are actually fun, unlike the courtyard...which I think was a symptom of BW still trying to understand MMORPG dynamics tbh. However, as I said, BW is simply incapable of replicating what SE did. SE could only do it because they rebuilt the game from the ground up...literally. EA will not do that because they are not personally invested in the IP. Final Fantasy is the life's blood of SE (and they are a Japanese Company so saving face is all), Star Wars is "just" a licensed IP and from looking at the Q3 notes they were far more hyped about Battlefront and their mobile games than they were SWTOR. I would say over the next year or so we will see gimmicks for SWTOR. Maybe a financial model change, then a "this time we are all about playable content" etc. They will, in essence, swing for the bleachers each dev cycle and pray it works, because right now from all of BW's actions and statements I don't see a firm direction. It's almost like they are trying to take a SP DLC model and meld it to a persistent MMORPG model. /shrug

You greatly exaggerate the difficulty of the Primals with the possible exception of Bahamut pre-3.0 but that said... Issues with the idea... being practical not saying in theory bad. 1. The engine they have here has issues with the particle effects they already have. One of the things FFXIV ARR changed was they reduced the detail of the graphics BUT made them more stylized so it was still pretty because 1.0 was so crazy that a flower pot (not an exaggeration) had as many polygons and as much shader code as a player character. 2. Their combat/PvE team as part of their plan has been laid off and/or transferred to ME:A. There is no one left to make it. So we have an issue where they would need a complete graphics and/or engine overhaul and steal back the devs who could make the content. As this expac was made on the cheap it is a wonderful dream, but a dream none the less.

Where are who? Note I am just talking about previously in this thread, which seemed to be his point of reference.