[Heeck]

Tbh the reason why 99% of the people I know don't want to play the game because of the ridiculous monthly fees one has to pay.

[Hostile17]

(Original post by concubine)
Haha. The amount of hate EA get is cute. If 'gamers' these days didn't have such ****ty taste EA wouldn't be nearly so evil.

Bioware/EA has been trying to appeal to the least common denominator, but the irony is that games like KotOR 1 and Mass Effect 1 were already very successful to begin with, and thus should never have been overhauled.

So all Bioware ends up doing is pissing off the die-hard fans, while trying to appeal to a wider audience instead, most of whom aren't going to stick around for very long anyway, as ToR has already shown.

I mean, you can't even play the game without having to pay the ridiculous monthly fees. That's an insane business strategy. All of my friends and I loved KotOR, and literally none of us are playing ToR. That speaks volumes. Add to that the ME3 debacle, and no one seems willing to trust Bioware anymore.

Of course we saw this coming with ME2, where you could no longer choose between L, M, and H armors, you could no longer give armor to your teammates, you had far fewer useful powers (e.g. only a tiny few actually worked against enemy defenses, meaning that you had to spam Warp or whatever for the entire game... yaaaaaaaaaaawn), etc., etc.

Bioware should be ashamed of themselves.

[Jimbo1234]

(Original post by mattamz)
I played swtor and quit after the first month... None of my guild played it anymore, just after launch there were 100+ people in the main space station thing then after a month you would be lucky if there were over 4. I nicely wasted £40 on that game

Hopefully TERA will be better or ill just get the panda game.

Just played the TERA Beta.........guess what?
WoW clone

When will these morons realise that no one enjoys spending 1 minute killing one lame monster with the same "click, press 1, press 2, click, click, click, click, press 1..." combo over and over again. That **** is boring.

I would just invest in EvE ans stick about with that, or Diablo 3 as that is fun!

[mikestraws]

(Original post by Jimbo1234)




As highlighted in the 2 red boxes, is it not a bit soon for such a new mmo to offer free returns and "invite a friend" on the front page?
Also I heard that it recently has open weekends as well.
Does this mean that they do not have as many players as they wanted/need?

Can anyone who plays SWTOR say what the server loads are like; are they full, medium load, or empty, and how are current player trends going?

They just released a patch which really should have been in the game from the start, the things that were missing from it were the reasons that most people left, unfortunately those people have leveled at least one character to 50 and now can't be arsed to come back.

In the EU and peak time most servers say STANDARD and there are a couple of LIGHT. No heavies. This could be fixed with a simple server merge but nothing like that seems to be in the works.

To be honest even with all of it's flaws the game is brilliant. The people who have unsubbed are pretty much no lifers who powered to 50 and then cry about a lack of end game content, despite the game currently having 3 raids (all with hard modes) and the majority of the flashpoints have a hard mode most of which are harder than the raids. Then there's dailies and of course, leveling alts.

Yeah if you spend the majority of your free time gaming and you only play one game then that wont be enough to keep you happy, but what mmo has more end game activities than that, other than EVE. And I say other than EVE because I don't really count it in MMO discussions, since most people aren't smart enough to play it.

WoW endgame was raiding a few nights a week and leveling alts the rest of the time, same as SWTOR only the legacy system makes alt leveling more fun. The only problem is, legacy system is a key point to their game, it's one of it's unique features, and yet they waited 6 months to implement it. This was probably their fatal flaw. I forsee the game switching to a free to play model around one year after launch, and them making their money via micro transactions and selling expansion packs. Which to be honest, looking at GW2, is a smart way to go.

(Original post by Hostile17)
I mean, you can't even play the game without having to pay the ridiculous monthly fees. That's an insane business strategy.

(Original post by Heeck)
Tbh the reason why 99% of the people I know don't want to play the game because of the ridiculous monthly fees one has to pay.

What do you rets' think this is, some crappy single player game? Do you have any idea how much running an MMO costs, hell do you even know what an MMO is?
Do you know who else had the "insane business strategy" of monthly fees? World of Warcraft, the most successful MMO of all time.
You are probably one of the kids who before the game was launched was on facebook asking "will this game be out on xbox lol"

[Heeck]

(Original post by mikestraws)
They just released a patch which really should What do you rets' think this is, some crappy single player game? Do you have any idea how much running an MMO costs, hell do you even know what an MMO is?
Do you know who else had the "insane business strategy" of monthly fees? World of Warcraft, the most successful MMO of all time.
You are probably one of the kids who before the game was launched was on facebook asking "will this game be out on xbox lol"

I'm sorry but not everyone is rich enough to pay for the game and pay a massive monthly fee. I highly doubt with the game having sold over two million copies of the game by february 2012 that it would be struggling to cover the costs for running the multiplayer.

Stop trying to patronise me, bioware is clearly trying to milk as much money humanly possible from the consumers.

By the way I'm not a kid

[mikestraws]

(Original post by Heeck)
I'm sorry but not everyone is rich enough to pay for the game and pay a massive monthly fee. I highly doubt with the game having sold over two million copies of the game by february 2012 that it would be struggling to cover the costs for running the multiplayer.

Stop trying to patronise me, bioware is clearly trying to milk as much money humanly possible from the consumers.

By the way I'm not a kid

They are not "running the costs of the multiplayer" they are running the entire game! You seem to be reacting like this is a game with an additional multiplayer componant charging 8.99 a month, it's not, the entire game is online. If you act like an idiot I'm going to talk down to you like one.

It's not nothing to do with "bioware milking money from their consumers" they made an MMO, it's typical for MMO'S to charge monthly fees.

You obviously don't know a lot about business, and this is coming from a guy who knows nothing about business. The game cost a hell of a lot to make, selling the physical copies of the game covers the start up cost and makes the initial profit.

The programmers are still working, they are still writing patches, still preparing new content. The webmasters are still working, the support agents are still working, the servers cost money every month to run. After all that is paid for there needs to be a profit, this is why there is a monthly fee.

If you fail to understand that, then you are a kid, regardless of age.

Also, lol at saying you need to be rich to pay 8.99 a month for a game. You probably piss more than that away each month on alcohol.

[Heeck]

(Original post by mikestraws)
It's not nothing to do with "bioware milking money from their consumers" they made an MMO, it's typical for MMO'S to charge monthly fees.

You obviously don't know a lot about business, and this is coming from a guy who knows nothing about business. The game cost a hell of a lot to make, selling the physical copies of the game covers the start up cost and makes the initial profit.

The programmers are still working, they are still writing patches, still preparing new content. The webmasters are still working, the support agents are still working, the servers cost money every month to run. After all that is paid for there needs to be a profit, this is why there is a monthly fee.

If you fail to understand that, then you are a kid, regardless of age.

Also, lol at saying you need to be rich to pay 8.99 a month for a game. You probably piss more than that away each month on alcohol.

If you think it costs a lot to run a server then you are truly the one who is naive and im certain that the initial profits made from the sales are more than enough to cover the employers fees/costs.

To me and most of my friends 8.99£ a month is quite a lot and adds up to 107.88£ a year, which means unless you play a lot you're really not getting your moneys worth.

Stop trying to make assumptions about what I do, it just makes you look stupid.

[mikestraws]

(Original post by Heeck)
If you think it costs a lot to run a server then you are truly the one who is naive and im certain that the initial profits made from the sales are more than enough to cover the employers fees/costs.

Yeah it covers the start up fees and costs, but what about future fees and costs?
You have no idea, please stop talking.

[Heeck]

(Original post by mikestraws)
How can initial sales cover the employees fees and costs, those employees could potentially be working there for 5+ years?

The game right now is around 20£ on Amazon and when first released was 40£+ but lets just assume the 2 million copies sold in by February 2012 were all sold at for 20£ thats already a 40 million £ in revenue. The profits could easily cover the costs just the profits for bioware would be much smaller, hence my original point .

[mikestraws]

(Original post by Heeck)
The game right now is around 20£ on Amazon and when first released was 40£+ but lets just assume the 2 million copies sold in by February 2012 were all sold at for 20£ thats already a 40 million £ in revenue. The profits could easily cover the costs just the profits for bioware would be much smaller, hence my original point .

Current estimates for the start up cost of the game are approaching 200 million dollars, over the past six years of development.
There were roughly 800 main developers involved, now ignoring all the advertising and other costs, that works out at each dev being paid roughly 42,0000 a year.
Which is not very much money for a game developer working for one of the industries biggest names, so I imagine some would be paid more than that.

However, they also had to pay running costs, utilities, marketing, over 1000 different voice actors to record the game in multiple characters and then in multiple languages, and probably more stuff that I don't even know about.

So you estimate between 40 million and 80 million in revenue. But the game cost at least 200 million to make, let alone to keep online, patched, updated and maintained. Hmm?

[Heeck]

(Original post by mikestraws)
Current estimates for the start up cost of the game are approaching 200 million dollars, over the past six years of development.
There were roughly 800 main developers involved, now ignoring all the advertising and other costs, that works out at each dev being paid roughly 42,0000 a year.
Which is not very much money for a game developer working for one of the industries biggest names, so I imagine some would be paid more than that.

However, they also had to pay running costs, utilities, marketing, over 1000 different voice actors to record the game in multiple characters and then in multiple languages, and probably more stuff that I don't even know about.

So you estimate between 40 million and 80 million in revenue. But the game cost at least 200 million to make, let alone to keep online, patched, updated and maintained. Hmm?

My estimates were literally the absolute minimum profits they made between December 2011 and February 2012, lets not forget the huge sales they'll be making over the next couple of years. May I repeat maintaining a server does not cost much.

[mikestraws]

(Original post by Heeck)
My estimates were literally the absolute minimum profits they made between December 2011 and February 2012, lets not forget the huge sales they'll be making over the next couple of years. May I repeat maintaining a server does not cost much.

Your estimate of 40 million was an absolute minimum; if 100% of players had bought the collectors edition, at over £100 a go, the profit would not have been enough to cover 100% of start up costs and 1 year of running.

Yeah maintaining a server does not cost a lot, but it does cost, however, Maintaining a few hundred servers world wide, paying developers monthly to keep adding in new content and fixing old content, paying support agents, paying for web hosting, paying for marketing, and then paying for all of that again in different countries and languages, not to mention expansions, if the game cost 200 million it wouldn't be too far fetched to assume that a decently sized expansion would cost about 50 million to make.

And what huge sales over the next couple of years? The game is hardly taking over the online scene. I doubt it will ever hit 5 million sales.

However you try and justify it, 8.99 a month is not in anyway a bad business model, nor is it an over charge or a ludicrous amount to expect someone to pay for an MMORPG. I imagine the reason you find the concept so hard to grasp is because you played KOTOR and KOTOR2 and just assumed this would be KOTOR3 with a multiplayer aspect.

[Ocassus]

EvE >> PS2 >>> Tera=GW2 >>>>>>>>> WoW=SWTOR

[kopite493]

of course its failing something like half a million people have decided to veto EA/bioware both of which have part in this game

i was going to buy it originally but after the disgrace that is the ME3 ending im never buying anything with EA on it again

[Jimbo1234]

(Original post by mikestraws)
They just released a patch which really should have been in the game from the start, the things that were missing from it were the reasons that most people left, unfortunately those people have leveled at least one character to 50 and now can't be arsed to come back.

In the EU and peak time most servers say STANDARD and there are a couple of LIGHT. No heavies. This could be fixed with a simple server merge but nothing like that seems to be in the works.

To be honest even with all of it's flaws the game is brilliant. The people who have unsubbed are pretty much no lifers who powered to 50 and then cry about a lack of end game content, despite the game currently having 3 raids (all with hard modes) and the majority of the flashpoints have a hard mode most of which are harder than the raids. Then there's dailies and of course, leveling alts.

Yeah if you spend the majority of your free time gaming and you only play one game then that wont be enough to keep you happy, but what mmo has more end game activities than that, other than EVE. And I say other than EVE because I don't really count it in MMO discussions, since most people aren't smart enough to play it.

WoW endgame was raiding a few nights a week and leveling alts the rest of the time, same as SWTOR only the legacy system makes alt leveling more fun. The only problem is, legacy system is a key point to their game, it's one of it's unique features, and yet they waited 6 months to implement it. This was probably their fatal flaw. I forsee the game switching to a free to play model around one year after launch, and them making their money via micro transactions and selling expansion packs. Which to be honest, looking at GW2, is a smart way to go.







What do you rets' think this is, some crappy single player game? Do you have any idea how much running an MMO costs, hell do you even know what an MMO is?
Do you know who else had the "insane business strategy" of monthly fees? World of Warcraft, the most successful MMO of all time.
You are probably one of the kids who before the game was launched was on facebook asking "will this game be out on xbox lol"

Damn, for SWTOR to need server merges before 6 months is pretty bad.

I see what you are saying, but here is the issue;
Why do you want to make alts, raid, re-do instances when you have been doing that for the last ~4 years in WoW with a guild you enjoy.
As someone already said, most people play end game to socialise, not for the game, so why bother moving if SWTOR offers nothing new?

Game Devs need to start innovating again and realise that the light bulb did not come about from billions of pounds spent into R&D into the candle


As for the subscription, well find me what £40 game will last an entire month, let alone several? To get the same amount of hours from an mmo with a standard game will cost far more than a subscription to an mmo.





As for PlanetSide 2:



Looks sooo good.

[kopite493]

(Original post by Jimbo1234)
Damn, for SWTOR to need server merges before 6 months is pretty bad.

I see what you are saying, but here is the issue;
Why do you want to make alts, raid, re-do instances when you have been doing that for the last ~4 years in WoW with a guild you enjoy.
As someone already said, most people play end game to socialise, not for the game, so why bother moving if SWTOR offers nothing new?

Game Devs need to start innovating again and realise that the light bulb did not come about from billions of pounds spent into R&D into the candle


As for the subscription, well find me what £40 game will last an entire month, let alone several? To get the same amount of hours from an mmo with a standard game will cost far more than a subscription to an mmo.





As for PlanetSide 2:



Looks sooo good.

ill do you one better a game which cause £6 which lasts easily 100 hours before mods is morrowind

[Kaiser MacCleg]

(Original post by mikestraws)
What do you rets' think this is, some crappy single player game? Do you have any idea how much running an MMO costs, hell do you even know what an MMO is?
Do you know who else had the "insane business strategy" of monthly fees? World of Warcraft, the most successful MMO of all time.
You are probably one of the kids who before the game was launched was on facebook asking "will this game be out on xbox lol"

Yawn. If you actually want to engage in proper debate instead of posting derisory comments to people, watch this:



Subscription fees are not the only model MMOs use. Guild Wars merely required you to pay for the box, and you then had access to the game for life. Its successor is doing the same thing, as you can see from the video. Other MMOs, like LOTRO, have moved to models where microtransactions provide the majority of their income. Now, I don't like the "play to win" model, but at least that way you're paying for content you actually want, rather than shelling out huge quantities of money every year for the odd update that may or may not change the things that YOU want changed.

I really, really don't like the idea of subscription fees. Used to be that you'd hand over £40 and you then owned that copy of the game. It was yours to do with as you willed, so long as you stayed within the law and the EULA. When you purchase WoW, however, you don't own a copy of the game. All you've done is purchase access to it for a short time under a contract that only stays as it was when you took it up at the discretion of the other party. That can't be healthy.

(Original post by Jimbo1234)
As for the subscription, well find me what £40 game will last an entire month, let alone several? To get the same amount of hours from an mmo with a standard game will cost far more than a subscription to an mmo.

Loads of strategy games will do you for far more than a month. Pretty much every Paradox game in existence has almost unlimited replayability; Europa Universalis 3, for instance, allows you to play as any country in history between 1399 and 18-something-or-other, and each requires different playing styles and strategies. I'm still playing Rome: Total War and Medieval 2: Total War, years and years after their release, thanks to the replayability of the original games and the vast array of mods developed for free by fans, some of which exceed the quality of the original games. If we're restricting our search to RPGs, Bethesda games are a good bet. Of course it depends on how fast you play, but it took me in excess of a month to beat Skyrim, and I didn't even get close to finishing the Thieves' Guild or College of Winterhold quest lines. Morrowind as mentioned above has armfuls of content, and that's before we even begin to consider mods for any of the games (which again, have been developed for free by fans). Nehrim, a mod for Oblivion, adds a whole new world, far more detailed than that of the vanilla game, complete with an extensive main quest, a decent number of side quests and professional voice acting for every NPC.

But I can do better than that. I can point you to a game that will last you as long as any MMO that is absolutely free. Team Fortress 2, an online shooter by Valve, is a game that, to date, I have poured 613 hours of my life into (sad, I know ). As it happens, when I bought the game, it was still pay-to-play, but regardless, I consider £20 for 613 hours a good deal (3.3p an hour!). Again, fan made content is a big part of the game; amateur modellers and mappers submit their stuff to Valve, who add it to the game (if it's good enough) in updates which are, you guessed it, applied to everyone's games for free.

[Jimbo1234]

(Original post by Kaiser MacCleg)
Loads of strategy games will do you for far more than a month. Pretty much every Paradox game in existence has almost unlimited replayability; Europa Universalis 3, for instance, allows you to play as any country in history between 1399 and 18-something-or-other, and each requires different playing styles and strategies. I'm still playing Rome: Total War and Medieval 2: Total War, years and years after their release, thanks to the replayability of the original games and the vast array of mods developed for free by fans, some of which exceed the quality of the original games. If we're restricting our search to RPGs, Bethesda games are a good bet. Of course it depends on how fast you play, but it took me in excess of a month to beat Skyrim, and I didn't even get close to finishing the Thieves' Guild or College of Winterhold quest lines. Morrowind as mentioned above has armfuls of content, and that's before we even begin to consider mods for any of the games (which again, have been developed for free by fans). Nehrim, a mod for Oblivion, adds a whole new world, far more detailed than that of the vanilla game, complete with an extensive main quest, a decent number of side quests and professional voice acting for every NPC.

But I can do better than that. I can point you to a game that will last you as long as any MMO that is absolutely free. Team Fortress 2, an online shooter by Valve, is a game that, to date, I have poured 613 hours of my life into (sad, I know ). As it happens, when I bought the game, it was still pay-to-play, but regardless, I consider £20 for 613 hours a good deal. Again, fan made content is a big part of the game; amateur modellers and mappers submit their stuff to Valve, who add it to the game (if it's good enough) in updates which are, you guessed it, applied to everyone's games for free.

Paradox games are the B movie studio for gaming.
I played the TW games twice - once to get to grips, the second time to master it. When you manage to conquer the entire world on your second play-through, whey play again? Same applies for ES series. I utterly dominated Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. I can easily get 100% completion within 200 hours, yet with games like Eve, you can play year after year as you can't/don't want to finish it.
And TF2 is a little crap now. Yes, lots of people play it. Why? I have no idea. Within in 50 hours a will be getting very good at any game, and within 100 I have normally mastered it (and I mean winning every match week after week). Take Medal of Honor for example. Its multiplayer was far better, but again, once you master it things like lag become the only bar and you can't resolve them. Some mmo's will last year after year.

(Original post by kopite493)
ill do you one better a game which cause £6 which lasts easily 100 hours before mods is morrowind

... but that game is from the golden era of games which shall never return Thanks to the ****ty 360 being only dvd compatible, it has raped the length of offline games which is partially why mmo's have taken off.

[Architecture-er]

(Original post by Jimbo1234)
The problem is though that 99% of games fall into the second example. Name me one mmorpg which is not Eve, is not a WoW clone, and was not utter crap

Rift!!

They promised us that we weren't in Azeroth anymore!!

[Architecture-er]

I keep trying EvE, getting confused, quit, hearing about it again, get interested, try EvE, get confused again, quit, etc etc

Maybe one day I'll get online with one of you guys to show me the ropes?