SWTOR is curently ''failing'' because it costed way more mony than it made so far. SOE sold 1m copies by August 2005. Sure, that's only half of SWTOR, but the costs of SWTOR was waaaaay higher than SWG. And don't forget, even tough they lost alot of subscribers after NGE, they still kept the game going for years, taking 15$ a month. And they added a card game that made good money too.

They are? The technical difference is that species can't cross-breed. Humans can't breed with others? I don't know, just wondering :-)

Altough the numbers of servers can be misleading, it is indeed not a good sign at all EA also made this game possible. If EA wouldn't have bought Bioware in 2007, this game would never been made.

That can't be right for two reasons... - He says there were more than 1 million in August and even EA admitted in August that the game only had ''more than 500k'' subscribers then. - The drop between launch and the f2p announcement was alot bigger than what he says. He says it only dropped with 50% from 2.2m to 1m. That would not be a reason to go to f2p.

There were only around 28k counted logins on average: there are always alot of people that are still subscribed but don't log in. And I can indeed imagine that there will be more than that at the moment, all people waiting for f2p. So, yes, indeed, 20% less logins won't be 20% less subscriptions at this point of the game. But still, if you loose 20% logins, your subscriptions are down too. And not by 5% or so.

Well, according to EA, it was already ''above 500k'' in August. So you can safely bet it was waaaaaay below a million back then. If you look at the estimates from http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=484899 they lost about 20% of the logins between August 15th and September 15th. And you can bet it didn't get better after September 15th. I estimate around 300-400k, at best. And that is very generous, I don't want to sound too pessimistic. If my life depended on guessing between 300k and 400k, I'd go for 300k. If I had to pick between 200k and 300k, I would be in serious trouble. And that includes people like me who are waiting to see if the f2p-money can revive the game or not. And if they will indeed add content regularly after f2p. And if the 1.4 disaster will be repeated or not. Right now, they got a ''get out of jail free'' card. They don't add content, they introduce extra bugs, they don't really communicate any plans. But they can get away with it because a) alot of people already left, so only more optimist people remaind and b) they can use the f2p-development as an excuse. But despite that ALOT of people were furious about the way they handled 1.4 and the total lack of respect for the remaining player base that it showed. They can't get away with that sort of failure a second time, I think.

I doubt that they'll ever do that. Or change classes. Not even advanced classes. The reason is very simple. This game has not enough end-game content, so making alts is Bioware's safest bet to keep players around.

About 1 billion would be a good guestimate for the wealthiest at the moment, me think, maybe up to 1.5. If you have slicing on all your alts and sell all the purple missions, it goes FAST. You can make some money on enhancements, barrels & hilts too, but the market is not that big anymore.

500,000+ was 2 months ago... You can bet it was less already before 1.4 hit. And with the bugs in 1.4, it's even worse, I bet.

I'm afraid so too They are betting all they got on free-to-play, while totally ignoring any other issues they have. I'm pretty sure they are all telling eachother ''yes, sure, we created alot of bugs in 1.4, but, hey, we're too busy with free-to-play to care, things will get better''. I think they are seriously misjudging the effect that a terrible patch like 1.4 has on the community. They don't have a MMO-reputation to fall back to, people simply loose faith that they will get it right. Especially if players make alost of 47 bugs and then a DEV makes a list with only 11. Exactly how hard is it to read the player list with 47 bugs and react to that instead of making your own list? They bugs are described there, that's half the work already done! And if some of the bugs aren't really bugs, well, investigate those too and react. Show that you care about the players, gee.

First, there should have been a roll option ''Need for companion'', between Greed and Need. That would solve this. This is a common problem, I do not understand why this roll isn't dded already. That being said, I would never roll Need for a companion, like player A did. On the other hand, if player B needed it, he should have rolled Need, not Greed. For me, neither A or B is ''right'' or ''wrong''. It's just one of those things that happen, due to poor implementation.

It only offered something for hard-core players in full end-game gear. The rest of got bugs, bugs and then... oms more bugs!

About 2,000 threads, I'd say. That's 1 thread for every 1,000 people that left the game. What would you prefer? That even more people just leave the game, instead of posting their concerns? Or that people voice their concerns in a thread, telling Bioware what would make them stay?

Took them only one week to admit this bug. That's progress, there is hope after all!

There is a reason why companies like EA pay ALOT of ''advertising money'' to the gaming press. It's the media's equivalent of outright bribes.

Pfffffft... If you got 200 million at your disposal, you can do better than a slingshot. There were several mistakes made with SWTOR but being too ambitious wasn't one of them. If you're not ambitious with a 200 million dollar budget, you shouldn't be running a company. I think that with that budget, they could do much, much, MUCH better, if they didn't make 16 advanced classes, each with their own balance and story line. ALOT of time & money went into those 16, without any good reason. 8 would have been enough. But they decided to make 16 single-player stories, which was so costly that they had to cut alot of the MMO features, as explained in the article mentioned in another topic. Bioware simply wasn't ready for such a big budget MMO.

The patch notes are wrong (proofreading patch notes is too much to ask nowadays) and ''Working as intended'' is tricky when you have wrong patch notes...

Nah, EA bought Bioware 5 years ago. Five YEARS ago. You don't stick around for 5 years when you got the ''sell my company and leave'' attitude.

For players like you and me, who are willing to pay 15$ for a game per month, there is no big draw to ''free to play'' games. For the rest... - Well, first of all, the term ''free to play'' is a very, very clever marketing trick. I remember a stuidy from years ago, saying that the word that attract the most customers, is the word ''free''. Ofcourse, the word 'free' is usually a big lie. It is not free to play. These players will pay. But some people are attracted to the IDEA that it will be free. There are very few REALLY free to play games out there. Guild Wars 2 is one of them, you can do everything in the game and their shop is purely cosmetic. But in most games, such as will be the case in SWTOR, you got to pay for the content to unlock. Alot of these players will leave the game the second that they see that their thinking is wrong and SWTOR is NOT free to play but they got to pay for everything other than the main quest line. - Second, some people prefer to pay only for what they want. Subscribers don't do that. Subscribers basically say ''I pay 15$ for features that I want but I know that part of that money will go to features that I do not want''. F2P players have the idea that they will only pay for what they want. They don't want PvP? Thy don't buy the PvP unlock. The biggest fan of free to play are the companies. Preferably companies that don't have any honor. They use smart marketing tricks to take all the money they can get from you. Typically are tricks where you invest time and then hit a wall, unless you pay 5$ to continue. Or when you die, you got a nice shiny button to revive, for only 25 cents! Or create content that is too hard to beat without store-exclusive upgrades. Free to play is a marketeers dream!

Apperently, they're not... they only mentioned 11 bugs... out of the 47 I assume that only a small portion of the DEVs worked on 1.4 & bug fixing because the rest is working on f2P. It's the only explanation that I can see for this disaster. No company can be THIS terrible in normal circumstances.

They need to fix bugs, enhance testing, fix bugs, add alternative ways to level, fix bugs, add end-game content for casual players and then fix even more bugs. Ofcourse, it all starts with confessing that there ARE alot bugs. So, don't make a post where you only mention 11 bugs when there is a compiled list of 47 bugs. That is exactly the type of attitude that will stop any progress on this game.

Now, consider how much money these rich kids with Crossfire will spend in the f2p shop. Compare that in your head with how much poor NVidia users will spend. Welcome to marketing 101.

It has been asked several times before (altough not with the ''hairstyle or a misplaced scar'' explanation, hehe), but it doesn't exists yet. They answered that they will look into it. But that answer is already a year old, so... The .ini files don't help either, the keybindings are stored on the server, not on the client. The only way that you can copy from the .ini files are the chat colors and the channels to join. Altough, if I remember correcte

Well, everyone is entitled to their opinions about both games. But there are certainly some features that GW2 has better, regardlessly of opinions. - Today, they applied a patch. I happened to be on. You get logged off, you download the patch (takes about 5 minutes) and you log back on. That's it! No 5 hours downtime or anything... just log off, download, log on, done. - Server tranfers... you select your character, you say what server you want to go, you log off, you get a drink, you come back, you log on and BOOM, you are on the other server. - Travelling is done with a gazillion waypoints instead of 2-3 minute rides. - The character creation has way more options. - Higher players can help lower levels, their level is automatically lowered to whatever the content is. I personally find this a great feature, because it makes all ''dungeons'' (that are the FPs here) repeatable. - It's free to play. But indeed... the game mechanics are fundamentally different. There are no tanks/DPS/heals. There are no 35 skills you got to pick from in battle. There is no companion. You got to pick what relics to put on your items. There are no speeders. It is indeed entirely different for PvE than SWTOR.

I think that SWTOR wouldn 't even exist if EA didn't buy Bioware. Bioware was in over it's head when they accpted to make SWTOR, way, way over their heads. Without EA's money, this game would never have been made I think. Which, looking back, would probably have been better: that way Lucas Arts could give the Star Wars MMO franchise to a company that has MMO experience and we wouldn't be in the mess we are now.