Ben and Bioware Out Of Touch with Players

[Dreez]

I absolutely agree that an MMO should try to appeal to a variety of different play styles[/url], but it's pretty clear that SWTOR doesn't have the resources anymore to put out Ops, WZs, FPs/Uprisings, and story content concurrently.

 

Wait a minute... Think about what you're saying.

 

A company that made 4.2 BILLION DOLLARS cant set aside a few million to fix their mmo that cost 400mil to create?.

That's 4.200.000.000 dollars, not some petty hotdogstand income.

 

The FACT is, EA doesn't appear to WANT TO fix their game. Don't tell me SWTOR doens't have the "budget"

when the company made more 12x as much money in a year then it cost to develope the entire game in 6-7 years.

Edited January 21, 2017 by Dreez

[MeNaCe-NZ]

In general, I absolutely agree that an MMO should try to appeal to a variety of different play styles, but it's pretty clear that SWTOR doesn't have the resources anymore to put out Ops, WZs, FPs/Uprisings, and story content concurrently.

 

If that's the case, then it should do some triage - find the market segment it has a legitimate shot at holding on to and focus on it. I'll be the first to admit that's not ideal, but it's the lesser evil in that situation.

 

The alternative - going two years without raids to focus on story, then switching gears to focus on group content at the expense of story - seems like a fool's errand that's likely to fail to bring back the players they lost, but could easily alienate the ones they have kept.

 

Yet you read the credits for KoTFE ( and just the BWA part ) and wonder *** these people do all day if this is all we get in a year.

Corporate bloat perhaps with no real oversight on how well BWA is being run by EA.

 

That's the downfall to having such a large parent company as is EA. They probably don't care too much how things are going as long as the money is flowing in and when that goal isn't met how often do they come in and fix the issue as opposed to just closing the studio? Sometimes by the time it becomes an issue it's already too late.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

Wait a minute... Think about what you're saying.

 

A company that made 4.2 BILLION DOLLARS cant set aside a few million to fix their mmo that cost 400mil to create?.

That's 4.200.000.000 dollars, not some petty hotdogstand income.

 

The FACT is, EA doesn't appear to WANT TO fix their game. Don't tell me SWTOR doens't have the "budget"

when the company made more 12x as much money in a year then it cost to develope the entire game in 6-7 years.

 

Think on what you just said and that amount of money ... as long as this game was bringing in decent money ( and through to about mid 2016 we have every reason to assume it was meeting goals ) they wouldn't have cared about the attitude of the community etc. - just as long as there are targets being met they are happy.

EA is so huge they aren't going to micro manage this game, it just won't happen.

 

Also they quite likely work a year behind - 6 months at the least.

So budgets are set, plans are made and off BWA goes with their year.

 

So first financial report comes in ... Hmm nice we exceeded targets great.

 

Second report ... OK bit of a decline there but still with where we want to be so that's ok.

 

Third report ... Uh oh more of a decline and now we're outside of where we should be - best go talk to BWA ...That's ok they assure us X ( *cough* 5.0 *cough* ) will fix this so business as normal.

 

Fourth Report ... OK still not where we want to be and we haven't met budgeted goals at all - best go talk to BWA again ... ah ok they made a few errors but this X.1 they say should bring people back plus they have stream to announce new content that is sure to bring people back.

 

Fifth report ... *** now we're really outside of where we want to be - Time to really see what's going on at BWA.

 

Now where it goes from there is anyone's guess but my point is to demonstrate the insane amount of time it would take EA to actually act on this game and worse we have no idea what their goals are. It's not a "wow player numbers are down on torstatus and the forums are angry, let's fix this right now" - it's a long process before they would even become aware enough of issues that they would take action.

 

I imagine we are around this 4th report period now ( due end of Jan ) and Ben is sweating balls because I am entirely confident this game isn't where EA wants it to be.

I'm guessing CM sales are falling right off too ( of course they are if player population is down ) simply by the large reduction in packs available to buy lately from the GTN ( and thus the crazy inflation ) so it's bad numbers across the board. In the past the CM had been able to help offset a loss in subs but now that's not the case if you lose player numbers to a point that even CM sales start getting heavily affected.

[DarthDymond]

Wait a minute... Think about what you're saying.

 

A company that made 4.2 BILLION DOLLARS cant set aside a few million to fix their mmo that cost 400mil to create?.

That's 4.200.000.000 dollars, not some petty hotdogstand income.

 

The FACT is, EA doesn't appear to WANT TO fix their game. Don't tell me SWTOR doens't have the "budget"

when the company made more 12x as much money in a year then it cost to develope the entire game in 6-7 years.

If you want to say "EA should increase SWTOR's budget" I absolutely agree with you. But I don't think that's a decision that's going to be influenced by posts in this forum.

 

Decisions on where BWA puts the resources they do have, on the other hand, do seem to be based in part on feedback here - so I'm going to throw in my two cents that they should prioritize story content like the KotFE chapters. If they have the resources to put out Ops/WZs/FPs at the same time, fantastic, but if it's an either/or proposition, then I vote for story chapters, hands down.

Edited January 21, 2017 by DarthDymond

[ludoviccb]

When you have 80% of the content useless for L60+ players for a very long time, you have really screwed up

as a developer, and right now, Ops are the only way to get gear reliably.. Flashpoints are useless, Heroics are useless,

sidecontent and pretty much everything except Operations are USELESS for gearing up.

QUOTE]

 

Operations are also useless to gear up with tier 2 or 3, but for another reason. They don't reward CXP enough to get those tokens that you need to use the token. With operations, you can get a lot of token, but you can't use them since the CXP rewards for the time only slightly better than Heroics.

 

You need to farm something else, to get command XP to be able to use those token.

[ludoviccb]

If you want to say "EA should increase SWTOR's budget" I absolutely agree with you. But I don't think that's a decision that's going to be influenced by posts in this forum.

 

Decisions on where BWA puts the resources they do have, on the other hand, do seem to be based in part on feedback here - so I'm going to throw in my two cents that they should prioritize story content like the KotFE chapters. If they have the resources to put out Ops/WZs/FPs at the same time, fantastic, but if it's an either/or proposition, then I vote for story chapters, hands down.

 

They did that with 4.0 and it was a failure. They lost a lot of subscriptions and people subbed just for 1 month and had all the story at the end.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

They did that with 4.0 and it was a failure. They lost a lot of subscriptions and people subbed just for 1 month and had all the story at the end.

 

Yes too often these dev houses seem to want to take shortcuts with MMOs and try and reinvent the wheel by spending less and whilst providing less content then act all surprised why it's a failure.

 

There is a tried and true MMO formula basically and that is balancing out the content you release within your 12 month cycles. For the most part until 3.0 this game was achieving this ( not so much for PVP but that was the minority activity up until they drove everyone else into end game PVe activity way ).

If you cannot create that sort of balanced content within a cycle to stick to this formula then don't expect your game to be a resounding success.

 

You either make an MMO or you fail if you experiment as this game has been doing the past 12+ months and try call it an MMO.

Wildstar was an experiment from launch, it failed miserably. How can this current dev team not realise this?

Wildstar didn't fail because it only catered to the "hardcore" - wildstar failed because it chose to cater to a minority.

 

Within an MMO when you focus on one subset of the MMO genre ( in 4.0's case it's solo story ) you WILL fail. 5.0 will be just as much of a failure if they spend all year only focusing on group content ( even though people cry out for it ) because they will drive the solo story players away.

 

2.0 imo was the perfect cycle, I'd love to see more like that.