Which player communities will be left in a few months?

[davidp_newton]

My oh my Bioware seem to have shot themselves in the foot with this patch (again) don't they.

 

The subject of this post is to consider the question out of the various player communities in the game which ones are still around in decent numbers, which ones have been devastated and what the situation will be like say in January or February next year? To my mind there are a number of communites within this game that can be defined:

 

• Progression ops players
  
• Ordinary ops players
  
• Ranked PvP players
  
• Ordinary PvP players
  
• Roleplayers
  
• Casual story content players
  

 

There may be more but I think that list covers the main areas. The progression ops and ranked PvP communites were always very small as there will only ever be a limited number of players with the skill to actually clear nightmare content and get to the top of the PvP rating charts. The other communites are much bigger with the last being the largest I think.

 

Considering their current health I believe that the following is true. The progression ops community was devastated during the middle of last year with the revelation that there will never again be nightmare mode operations and that there will be at best a very long delay before the next operations release (18 months at least between tiers) and at worst possibly never again seeing an operation released for this game. That community is essentially gone from the game and are not ever going to come back. The ranked PvP community has been suffering from a content drought as well and the stats on ranked warzone participation are telling. Season 1 saw 34,687 ranked solo players and 19,094 ranked team players. Season 6 saw 20,824 ranked solo players and 6,619 ranked team players. That's 40% of ranked solo players and 65% of ranked team players gone. The trend has been consistently down and I see no reason why it won't continue in season 7. Incredibly poor class balance and lack of cross server queues and lack of any new warzone content for 2 years contribute greatly to this decline and like the progression ops community I don't see it being reversed.

 

Moving to normal PvP players and normal operations players, there are far more of these players than those right at the top end. Nevertheless I think that it is fair to say that the combined ops and PvP population is probably a minority in the game. These communites are much more healthy than the ranked PvP and progression ops communites in that there are still sufficient numbers of players around in them to make them viable game forms. Nevertheless I think that these communites have also been declining due to the content drought of recent months. Some of the players who have come back to the game for KotFE are from these communites and so there has been a temporary uptick. That said I do not believe that it will be anything other than temporarily arrest the decline of these communites, primarily due to lack of proper new content for them.

 

Moving to roleplayers we come to another minority community. Hyperspace Beacon carried an article today about KotFE causing an existential crisis amongst at least some roleplayers in this game. To my mind plot holes in KotFE and its massive paradigm shift compared to the state of the game beforehand risk alienating the roleplaying community.

 

Finally considering the casual story content players we come to the largest segment of the game community. Many of these players are not skilled at playing the game, but to do story content high end skills at playing the game are not necessary. These players returned to the game in much larger numbers for KotFE than any other part of the player base. However I think that today's events have shown just how fragile that community is as well. I don't know what proportion of this part of the player base will leave over the companion nerf, but I suspect a sizeable chunk may well do. This part of the player base will be hit hardest by the nerf as they are the ones who rely most on their companions in all content. Personally speaking I tested out the heroic 2 content with an affection 27 companion on Makeb and Hoth to see what it would be like. The Makeb mission saw me get fairly low on health a couple of times, but the Hoth missions were an absolute cakewalk. That said I was playing that content on a character with a mixture of rating 216 and 220 gear with a full set bonus so it is a powerful character. Many people have complained in other threads that they cannot do the heroic content due to the companion nerf. There is a thread that is only a recent one and when I last saw there were 81 replies to it; most of those replies are people saying that this nerf will mean they will unsubscribe from the game.

 

So in summary I believe that the progression ops and ranked PvP communites are essentialy completely gone from this game and will never come back. I believe that the ordinary ops and ordinary PvP communites are still around and moderately healthy but that their future is not looking healthy due to no new content for them on the horizon. I believe that the casual story player community is the healthiest of the communities at the moment, in line with Bioware's stated goals for KotFE, but that Bioware's missteps like today threaten to turn this community sour and against Bioware. I also am of the opinion that Bioware's one chapter a month story cadence will not be sufficient in and of itself to retain a lot of the casual story community as subscribers.

 

This game is far from inevitably doomed. However Bioware's mismanagement of it has already destroyed several elements of the game community and severely damaged others. I believe that unless Bioware significantly increases the amount of content to be released in 2016 when compared to 2015 even casual story players will run out of things to do in the game and consequently many will unsubscribe. I consider that there is significant question mark as to whether this game will last to end of 2016 as an active MMO.

[Gorrdan]

I don't think anyone in their right mind would say SWTOR is going to die in few months. Although, drop in population is inevitable and so are number of servers shrinking further down. And with kind of decision BW is making lately they might accelerate the inevitable.

 

One just needs to look at the amount of servers game was released with and how many are we left with now.