Reasons why SWTOR will be F2P in 6 mos

[Dekai]

Pffft... These servers are stable as the pyramids were at creation. Seems many are looking at WoW launch with rose tinted glasses. Here's a small reminder.

 

http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance.html

 

Very old, but VERY true. WoW launchers should remember it well.

[Asavar]

Cool troll, brah.

[Lucaha]

(The original thread was nuked for violating forum TOS for referencing religion, so here is your religion-free version)

 

So after playing beta, EGA and the first few days of launch, I predict that SWTOR will go F2P in about six months.

 

Lazy

 

This is perhaps the biggest misstep. Biowhore and Evil Arts cut corners by licensing the HeroEngine instead of developing their own. Now, as a developer professionally, I would normally say "Good for them," but it is painfully clear not much money went into developing this engine into something for a AAA MMO. As of 9/2011, the engine still does not support multiple cores nor a 64-bit client. Even WoW supports multiple cores and a 64-bit client.

 

This is sloth, and the fact that BW/EA did not bother to invest in the backbone of this game. Players will burn through your content and dialog. And when they get into the routine of playing the repetitive parts of the game, they will really start to notice how little was put into this engine.

 

Ignoring your users

 

The community management sucks. The interaction is canned corporate responses. There is no detail, the only admitted problem is Taris and that's only because quite literally hundreds of players have fallen into a figurative black hole on that world. This is a poor way to treat your community. To treat them like children. As if giving them information is something they could not handle. Your customers are not asking you to cater to their every whim (well, most of them), but they do enjoy having information that allows them to make informed decisions... like... do they actually need to upgrade, or do you have a really crappy, inefficient engine that you'll eventually patch and do we just suffer or spend our money to get new hardware. Stuff like that. This smacks of pride.

 

Being greedy

 

Another major misstep here was the revocation of a grace period and only reinstating a small span of time after the community set you on fire for it. Given the insanity of the postal services during this time of year, the seven day grace period would have shown forethought and consideration. Can't let those players play an extra week! They could be giving us money instead!

 

Given the fact that this is EA, if the cost of maintaining a viable player base, due to initial craptacular implementation or lack of project planning, costs more money, they are going to court the players until they at least make ends meet so they can save some face in front of the investors. Then they will begin hiking back resources to adding or supporting this game and ultimately F2P with microtransactions.

 

One of the reasons WoW did so well was that Blizzard had all its eggs in that basket. SCII and D3 were not coming out for a long, long time and SC:Ghost was scrapped. They had to stick it out and make it profitable and look at it now. Be sure, if EA can figure out the numbers to make their enterprise more profitable that does not involve SWTOR (in the short term), they'll cut this project quick.

 

Fostering anger in their community

 

This one is on the community management again. They foster this environment. Poor details, poor handling of users, poor customer service. Closing duplicate threads with the snarky "Go here" as if to hide the sheer number of pissed off people. It all contributes to the community's anger at how this is being mishandled. Eventually, that anger is going to translate into people not staying past the free 30 days.

 

WoW Clone, Family Guy Style

 

This game is WoW without all the bells in whistles. It starts out sleeker than WoW, but is missing things that are pretty integral to WoW's success during the end of Vanilla and Burning Crusade. A solid end-game, both PvE and PvP. Better community tools like a group finder (I mean a group finder, not a cross-faction hullabaloo) and so forth. Three years and 100 million dollars for a watered down WoW clone with an exhaustible story and thoroughly abused IP.

 

Engorging your servers

 

I chalk this up to servers. Yes, everyone has launch issues, but given the fact that they put us through that painful EGA, you would think they would have put in the infrastructure to migrate your character to a different one, put in some server caps to prevent qs and everything else. Nope, not happening. So instead they have engorged themselves on players and we are all suffering for it.

 

And with these missteps, I call it here and now. F2P in 6 mos. It will not go away, but I seriously doubt you will see much more polish.

 

tl;dr version

 

" I say I'm a developer and believe I can make better marketing decisions than a massively successful game company, and based off of a 2 day old game, I can obviously say it will fail "

[kottonmouth]

Just shut up and go back to WoW. Or why don't you go to metacritic and rate this game a 0/10 like the rest of the trolls/blizzard cult.

[Axxtasy]

Pffft... These servers are stable as the pyramids were at creation. Seems many are looking at WoW launch with rose tinted glasses. Here's a small reminder.

 

http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance.html

 

Very old, but VERY true. WoW launchers should remember it well.

 

You must have missed Rift's launch. I didn't enjoy the game much, but the launch was certainly smoother and the game much more polished.

[Frostmourn]

They don't need to create their own engine, you idiot. If they wasted time doing that, it would've been an 8 year development cycle. Bioware undoubtedly knew they had a behemoth to create, why add more unnecessary work?

 

Furthermore, WoW had an awful launch. It was Everquest: Revised. The only raid content to speak of was Molten Bore, and that's not including the "it's a 5 man that you 10 man" dungeons of Strath, Scholo and UBRS. Class dynamics were rubbish and broken, the only thing to be praised was the diversity and uniqueness.

 

Bioware have put a phenomenal amount of work into this game, I think it's worth purchasing just for that reason alone. They will add more content as the game progresses, and becomes more refined. I'm yet to decide if I will subscribe, though.

Edited December 22, 2011 by Frostmourn

[dvvx]

The only raid content to speak of was Molten Bore, and that's not including the "it's a 5 man that you 10 man" dungeons of Strath, Scholo and UBRS.

 

Onyxia was available day 1 in Vanilla WoW, but it's nice to know you have no idea what you're talking about.

[grcpan]

They don't need to create their own engine, you idiot. If they wasted time doing that, it would've been an 8 year development cycle. Bioware undoubtedly knew they had a behemoth to create, why add more unnecessary work?

 

Furthermore, WoW had an awful launch. It was Everquest: Revised. The only raid content to speak of was Molten Bore, and that's not including the "it's a 5 man that you 10 man" dungeons of Strath, Scholo and UBRS. Class dynamics were rubbish and broken, the only thing to be praised was the diversity and uniqueness.

 

Bioware have put a phenomenal amount of work into this game, I think it's worth purchasing just for that reason alone. They will add more content as the game progresses, and becomes more refined. I'm yet to decide if I will subscribe, though.

 

They might have put a lot of effort in the game, but it certainly doesn't show, to me.

 

We'll see how much people appreciate it when we get the first subscriber figures after the first and second months.

[kottonmouth]

You must have missed Rift's launch. I didn't enjoy the game much, but the launch was certainly smoother and the game much more polished.

 

Yeh I was blown away by how polished Rift was at launch but lets be honest, the game was retarded for many reasons. This game was astronomically expensive, I can live with getting the bare bones at launch. They just need to patch fast and furiously and I feel they will do just that.

[LuthirFontaine]

They might have put a lot of effort in the game, but it certainly doesn't show, to me.

 

We'll see how much people appreciate it when we get the first subscriber figures after the first and second months.

 

and if it turn out to be high...?

[SchuneiderMidas]

just because you are broke / cant win without standard skill , doesnt mean every game has to go F2P

[Saintt]

Good post, and i pretty much agree with what you said. Story is the main draw card for this game so once everyone has played a few classes through their story they will get bored and move along. After playing for 5 or so days i am enjoying it, its nothing special, not OMG DIS IS BEST GAME EVA! just something different and nice for a change. So unless there is a major content update and fixes annonced before my 30 days free time is up i doubt i will stick around

[Shadysketchy]

my point still stands.

 

 

It did not exist in TBC, and WoW was already at peak popularity.

 

 

No, WoW's popularity peak was during Wrath, at 12 million during 3.3

 

I don't like it either, but the casuals won

[zootzoot]

No, WoW's popularity peak was during Wrath, at 12 million during 3.3

 

I don't like it either, but the casuals won

 

Wow peaked at the start of Wrath as you point out but that was due to the popularity of TBC. The start of the decline coincided with the release of ToC which is where WOW jumped the shark. Ulduar was the last great Raid and it signified the end of an era. The original devs were moving on and the B team took over. Now we have WOWville.

[Elgreezy]

OP's entire post can be summed up with the following.

 

OP had to wait in queue during an MMO launch and a few of his posts got locked so the community managers suck. He also thinks this game is too much like WoW so he suggested some changes that would make it more like WoW.

 

Please, go back to WoW.

[ChockH]

Consider this: A: it is a Lucasarts tie-in, and B: it reputedly had 135 million Bucks invested in its pre-production work. With those two things in mind, if you imagine that it will be free to play in six months, I should think you don't know much about what has gone on in various boardrooms during its birth (admittedly I am not privvy to such meetings either, but I can take a good guess at how they went). However, as obvious a notion as that may appear to be, there are industry examples which also support the assertion...

 

Whilst it is true that some large sc-fi/fantasy franchises have swiched to what it is claimed are F2P models, notably Star Trek Online of late, that switch was after two years of subscription-based play, in which Cryptic pulled back a large amount of investment for what was a comparitively modest outlay development-wise when compared to the aforementioned 135 million dollar price tag which SWTOR apparently came in at, and Star Trek is hardly a small IP, especially given that there is currently another ST movie in production. Moreover, STO does still have some subscription-based mechanics as part of STO's model in spite of the F2P label, which in itself only grants low-level access to the game, necessitating further purchases which make it anything but free to play (except for me and other like me, who bought the lifetime account subscription for it, and I paid the best part of 300 bucks for that privelege, a sum which has been earning interest for Cryptic for the past two years). So when they say STO invloves no fee, it's somewhat akin to saying one is ''a little bit pregnant''.

 

Games which set out from the start to be truly F2P (or at least free following the initial investment in the software, i.e. most notably Guild Wars), are carefully planned from the outset to be financially viable when using such a model, with episode expansions for the base game being an additional revenue stream. But it is not a simple switch to make when one has to recoup a massive investment, and as a result of that, it would certainly be a tough sell in any of the aforementioned boardrooms of the companies whose logos you see on that SWTOR splash screen when you load it up.

 

Given that the Star Wars movies themselves are episodic, with even the first one ever made actually being part IV of the saga, it is certainly true to say that if ever there was a franchise geared toward selling further add-ons, Star Wars would be the one (as evidenced by SWG for one thing), but that in itself is not going to pull in those 135 million big ones, so it is doubtful that SWTOR would fall back on that alone as a revenue stream, especially when such an enterprise is started in order to make profit rather than merely break even. that and the fact that it does not have to do so as evidenced by the almost unprecedented clamour to get into the early access for it which we have seen.

 

Star Wars has been extant for well over thirty years, and has now been the IP for two MMOs as well as countless offline games. It's a proven cash generator, so there will be no need for the developers to give it away free as long as they maintain the production values it has initially displayed and don't ''do a Sony''. Thus if you build it, people will come, and we have seen that ably demonstrated over the SWTOR launch period. And what is more, I bet you they will keep coming too.

 

Al

[Ionut_bejan]

Too many people believe that customer support should serve each and every one on a silver platter.

They already know these problems and they are working on them but there are too many people that call customer support for just about anything and the players with the real problems have to stay 4 hours on hold to talk to someone.

 

Patience is not my strong point, and honestly since i got my early access on the 16th i only managed to play for 5 minutes (with about 10 crashes-on low population servers). I managed to create my character on the 4th try, and 2 seconds later it crashed again.

 

Get over yourself and have some patience and after 1 month, when the "30 days of game time" is over, some players will leave (good riddance), even though not as many as are currently claiming to leave and it will be much better for everyone.

 

Anyone who thinks that Bioware or Lucas Arts would let a game in which they invested hundreds of millions of dollars die on the first month is fooling themselves.

 

Edited December 22, 2011 by Ionut_bejan

[Axxtasy]

Yeh I was blown away by how polished Rift was at launch but lets be honest, the game was retarded for many reasons. This game was astronomically expensive, I can live with getting the bare bones at launch. They just need to patch fast and furiously and I feel they will do just that.

 

Oh yessir, not disagreeing at all. I didn't like Rift's end game, and their PvP system was useless, but no one can argue just how great the game was at launch. Just pointing it out to the people using the "all games are borked at launch" argument.

[adamswc]

I would have guessed that the grace period would go until after Christmas for those getting the boxed editions a gift (but I guess that would be cheating to preorder your own gift and play it before in early access).

[Juntts]

Your account was made in December. You definitely were not in any form of beta. And yes, I know your going to respond by saying you had another account...

 

*yawn*

 

predictable post is predictable.

 

The fact your lying at the start of your thread, leads me to assume your post isn't particularly a trustworthy resource to be viewed as wise sagery.

 

That means nothing...My account says it was made in December, but I have another account that was made in May of 2010. You would be surprised on how many people have multiple accounts.

[mcburly]

So the most hyped mmo in the history of mmos is gonna go f2p quicker than any AAA mmo has ever. That makes sense....

[Chomag]

It has the EA logo on it. Expect the *****torm.

[McVade]

(The original thread was nuked for violating forum TOS for referencing religion, so here is your religion-free version)

 

So after playing beta, EGA and the first few days of launch, I predict that SWTOR will go F2P in about six months.

 

Lazy

 

This is perhaps the biggest misstep. Biowhore and Evil Arts cut corners by licensing the HeroEngine instead of developing their own. Now, as a developer professionally, I would normally say "Good for them," but it is painfully clear not much money went into developing this engine into something for a AAA MMO. As of 9/2011, the engine still does not support multiple cores nor a 64-bit client. Even WoW supports multiple cores and a 64-bit client.

 

This is sloth, and the fact that BW/EA did not bother to invest in the backbone of this game. Players will burn through your content and dialog. And when they get into the routine of playing the repetitive parts of the game, they will really start to notice how little was put into this engine.

 

Ignoring your users

 

The community management sucks. The interaction is canned corporate responses. There is no detail, the only admitted problem is Taris and that's only because quite literally hundreds of players have fallen into a figurative black hole on that world. This is a poor way to treat your community. To treat them like children. As if giving them information is something they could not handle. Your customers are not asking you to cater to their every whim (well, most of them), but they do enjoy having information that allows them to make informed decisions... like... do they actually need to upgrade, or do you have a really crappy, inefficient engine that you'll eventually patch and do we just suffer or spend our money to get new hardware. Stuff like that. This smacks of pride.

 

Being greedy

 

Another major misstep here was the revocation of a grace period and only reinstating a small span of time after the community set you on fire for it. Given the insanity of the postal services during this time of year, the seven day grace period would have shown forethought and consideration. Can't let those players play an extra week! They could be giving us money instead!

 

Given the fact that this is EA, if the cost of maintaining a viable player base, due to initial craptacular implementation or lack of project planning, costs more money, they are going to court the players until they at least make ends meet so they can save some face in front of the investors. Then they will begin hiking back resources to adding or supporting this game and ultimately F2P with microtransactions.

 

One of the reasons WoW did so well was that Blizzard had all its eggs in that basket. SCII and D3 were not coming out for a long, long time and SC:Ghost was scrapped. They had to stick it out and make it profitable and look at it now. Be sure, if EA can figure out the numbers to make their enterprise more profitable that does not involve SWTOR (in the short term), they'll cut this project quick.

 

Fostering anger in their community

 

This one is on the community management again. They foster this environment. Poor details, poor handling of users, poor customer service. Closing duplicate threads with the snarky "Go here" as if to hide the sheer number of pissed off people. It all contributes to the community's anger at how this is being mishandled. Eventually, that anger is going to translate into people not staying past the free 30 days.

 

WoW Clone, Family Guy Style

 

This game is WoW without all the bells in whistles. It starts out sleeker than WoW, but is missing things that are pretty integral to WoW's success during the end of Vanilla and Burning Crusade. A solid end-game, both PvE and PvP. Better community tools like a group finder (I mean a group finder, not a cross-faction hullabaloo) and so forth. Three years and 100 million dollars for a watered down WoW clone with an exhaustible story and thoroughly abused IP.

 

Engorging your servers

 

I chalk this up to servers. Yes, everyone has launch issues, but given the fact that they put us through that painful EGA, you would think they would have put in the infrastructure to migrate your character to a different one, put in some server caps to prevent qs and everything else. Nope, not happening. So instead they have engorged themselves on players and we are all suffering for it.

 

And with these missteps, I call it here and now. F2P in 6 mos. It will not go away, but I seriously doubt you will see much more polish.

 

This is perhaps the stupidest post I've ever read on these forums. I don't even know where to begin, so I'm not going to try. I will say one thing: I think the best thing Bioware could possibly do is ignore 95% of the idiocy that gets posted on their forums.

Edited December 29, 2011 by McVade

[ScartStorm]

so when WoW first launched and there was no end game did you predict it would go F2P?

 

When WoW launched, it had the first 15 man instances and it had Onyxia already in. With the first few patches, the Black Rock Mountain instances were added and then Molten Core already. Seems to me that you are one with the so-called rose tinted glasses if you don't know this. Oh, and by the way - it took about 13-15 days of /played to reach lvl60 in those days and for a normal player, that meant leveling for about 3 months.

[chiselyou]

(the original thread was nuked for violating forum tos for referencing religion, so here is your religion-free version)

 

so after playing beta, ega and the first few days of launch, i predict that swtor will go f2p in about six months.

 

Lazy

 

this is perhaps the biggest misstep. Biowhore and evil arts cut corners by licensing the heroengine instead of developing their own. Now, as a developer professionally, i would normally say "good for them," but it is painfully clear not much money went into developing this engine into something for a aaa mmo. As of 9/2011, the engine still does not support multiple cores nor a 64-bit client. Even wow supports multiple cores and a 64-bit client.

 

This is sloth, and the fact that bw/ea did not bother to invest in the backbone of this game. Players will burn through your content and dialog. And when they get into the routine of playing the repetitive parts of the game, they will really start to notice how little was put into this engine.

 

Ignoring your users

 

the community management sucks. The interaction is canned corporate responses. There is no detail, the only admitted problem is taris and that's only because quite literally hundreds of players have fallen into a figurative black hole on that world. This is a poor way to treat your community. To treat them like children. As if giving them information is something they could not handle. Your customers are not asking you to cater to their every whim (well, most of them), but they do enjoy having information that allows them to make informed decisions... Like... Do they actually need to upgrade, or do you have a really crappy, inefficient engine that you'll eventually patch and do we just suffer or spend our money to get new hardware. Stuff like that. This smacks of pride.

 

Being greedy

 

another major misstep here was the revocation of a grace period and only reinstating a small span of time after the community set you on fire for it. Given the insanity of the postal services during this time of year, the seven day grace period would have shown forethought and consideration. Can't let those players play an extra week! They could be giving us money instead!

 

Given the fact that this is ea, if the cost of maintaining a viable player base, due to initial craptacular implementation or lack of project planning, costs more money, they are going to court the players until they at least make ends meet so they can save some face in front of the investors. Then they will begin hiking back resources to adding or supporting this game and ultimately f2p with microtransactions.

 

One of the reasons wow did so well was that blizzard had all its eggs in that basket. Scii and d3 were not coming out for a long, long time and sc:ghost was scrapped. They had to stick it out and make it profitable and look at it now. Be sure, if ea can figure out the numbers to make their enterprise more profitable that does not involve swtor (in the short term), they'll cut this project quick.

 

Fostering anger in their community

 

this one is on the community management again. They foster this environment. Poor details, poor handling of users, poor customer service. Closing duplicate threads with the snarky "go here" as if to hide the sheer number of pissed off people. It all contributes to the community's anger at how this is being mishandled. Eventually, that anger is going to translate into people not staying past the free 30 days.

 

Wow clone, family guy style

 

this game is wow without all the bells in whistles. It starts out sleeker than wow, but is missing things that are pretty integral to wow's success during the end of vanilla and burning crusade. A solid end-game, both pve and pvp. Better community tools like a group finder (i mean a group finder, not a cross-faction hullabaloo) and so forth. Three years and 100 million dollars for a watered down wow clone with an exhaustible story and thoroughly abused ip.

 

Engorging your servers

 

i chalk this up to servers. Yes, everyone has launch issues, but given the fact that they put us through that painful ega, you would think they would have put in the infrastructure to migrate your character to a different one, put in some server caps to prevent qs and everything else. Nope, not happening. So instead they have engorged themselves on players and we are all suffering for it.

 

And with these missteps, i call it here and now. F2p in 6 mos. It will not go away, but i seriously doubt you will see much more polish.

 

amen.