SWTOR: Random Complaint thread. F2P means P2Win

[Ezek]

Well now.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/4...oaned-to-SWTOR

Pachter: Dragon Age 3 devs 'loaned' to SWTOR

Michael Pachter believes that Bioware transferred developers from Dragon Age 3 to work MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The Wedbush Securities analyst speaks as EA stocks hit a new low following the news STWOR is already losing subscribers, and it seems the MMO may have cost EA more than investors.

"Dragon Age III appears to have slipped to FY:14," Pachter told Games Industry International.

"We had previously expected the next Dragon Age to be released in Q4:13, two years after its predecessor. However, we believe that a significant portion of the BioWare team responsible for the game was reassigned to Star Wars in order to create content and fix bugs to keep the game's audience engaged."

[Lucavi]

Except, if you guys weren't dumb, you'd see this wasn't the normal SWTOR thread, but the RANDOM COMPLAINT THREAD. So no, you can gtfo if you don't like to read random complaints people are dropping because this is the appropriate thread for it.

Don't preach logic, sir. It falls on deaf ears here.

On topic, it was a pretty smart move to pull extra hands over to work on SW, as the first few months are always the most crucial in terms of a new game's lifespan. Granted, there were still problems, but clearly, they could have been worse.

[vrumpt]

I'm actually pretty disappointed to see that if its actually true, mainly because the devs seem to be too shortsighted to be able to produce anything more than just more raids and more dungeons. I feel like its going to do nothing but add more problems by bloating the team up to be too big for its own good. Thats not even counting the fact that I don't want to see Dragon Age suffer because of Bioware derping around down in Austin for 5 years.

[The Blackrose]

Am I going to have to lock a few bitches out?

[ringthree]

Let me start by saying that I agree that things are worse than they appear, but this information is just radically poor and uninformed.

A little update to the whole casual numbers thingy. Yeah it is a whole lot worse than what they actually put out. But hey... there are no softening or fudging of the numbers with Arts of Electronica. Going to break up these 3 parts/quotes here:


Part I


Statement in the investor conference call:

"In our last call we indicated that we had 1.7 million active subscribers, and as of the end of April we now have 1.3 million, with a substantial portion of the decrease due to casual and trial players cycling out of the subscriber base, driving up the overall percentage of paying subscribers."

The response to that was the following:

"You know what's worse. Ricetello got it wrong. It was 1.3 million at the end of March. The clown can't even get his own company's fiscal-year-end right. The financial statement package clearly says:"

Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) today announced preliminary financial results for its fourth fiscal quarter and fiscal year ended March 31, 2012.

And goes on to say:

STAR WARS®: The Old Republic™ active subscribers are 1.3 million.


http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail...leaseID=671113


"It's March 31st. Not the end of April. The guy is a clown (or he could have done it on purpose and is a liar). This is as pathetic as it gets. The guy just talks out his butt fast and furious and screws up important details. I honestly don't know why he hasn't been fired. He is to EA what Carley Fiorina was to HP."

This guy has no fucking clue, and he also has an issue with tautology.

A financial report is for a specific time frame. Usually for a quarter. That only covers the financial numbers, profits, losses, etc. There is no requirement that things that effect those numbers from outside that time period shouldn't be included. This is not necessarily deceitful. It is just information that shareholders need to know about a product so they can make an informed decision. There is nothing nowhere that requires the numbers from the game to be from a certain time.

Now, the real reason this is deceitful is that they only reported numbers from when they were giving free time (during the free month), so you had people that weren't paying that were reported. This is bad for two reasons: 1) you have people that aren't even playing (canceled) that are counted, and 2) you aren't making any money on them for the month.

So the guy is kind of right, but for completely wrong reasons.

[ringthree]

I'm actually pretty disappointed to see that if its actually true, mainly because the devs seem to be too shortsighted to be able to produce anything more than just more raids and more dungeons. I feel like its going to do nothing but add more problems by bloating the team up to be too big for its own good. Thats not even counting the fact that I don't want to see Dragon Age suffer because of Bioware derping around down in Austin for 5 years.

I don't know, Dragon Age 2 was already suffering. :/

[Lucavi]

Why would they want to rush Dragon Age 3 anyway? Even if the game knocked it out of the park, it still couldn't hope to bring in as much potential profit as a well-crafted MMO can. The question then becomes "has EA actually made good on their financial investments in SW" in terms of foreseeing how long the game would remain in the higher levels of both popularity and sub numbers. No matter how well it does, its truly difficult to ascertain just how much money they've put into the game as well, and not just through developing it initially.

[Cleverness]

Why would they want to rush Dragon Age 3 anyway? Even if the game knocked it out of the park, it still couldn't hope to bring in as much potential profit as a well-crafted MMO can. The question then becomes "has EA actually made good on their financial investments in SW" in terms of foreseeing how long the game would remain in the higher levels of both popularity and sub numbers. No matter how well it does, its truly difficult to ascertain just how much money they've put into the game as well, and not just through developing it initially.

Not many MMO's come out with realistic models that would net them profit anyway. There's the initial rush cause "omg a new game", then the new game smell is gone and the people hyping it up leave, then the people actually interested in the game are left, and when you consider spotty launches(i'll be honest, every MMO has a terrible launch. Every single one. While gameplay issues are something to leave over, some fixable changes are worth sticking it out for if you enjoy the rest of the game) a few would rather just try their luck on a different game since there is a good variety of ones to try nowadays, especially ones that are free.

And considering the first 2 games were popular, it's no surprise why they'd want to rush Dragon Age 3. It's like asking why Call of Duty games come out once a year; people will buy it. Pulling off that team to work on a different project is silly though. The whole point of different teams is so they work amongst themselves, if your initial SWTOR team can't handle doing fixes themselves in a timely manner then they weren't adequately staffed in the first place for an MMO and the blame for that lies on whoever is in charge.

[Lucavi]

I agree with your first point to an extent, but the question then becomes "Did EA truly think that they had a goldmine of a high enough quality on their hands to justify spending what they spent to create it?"

To your second point, I understand it, hence why we seem to get 2 assassins creed games a year, but aside from that series and the shooters of the day, that approach rarely works out when you start overdoing it. Looking at the past, we have evidence in Tony Hawk games, which were fucking amazing for the first 3, then got stale and died off quickly, and the DDR games. I don't know if I could put Dragon Age in the same category as Call of Duty... I'd liken it more to a series like Dead Space, that will sell well, but should still not saturate the market too quickly, or perhaps Bioshock, who just announced that they're holding back until 2013, ironically.

Back to the SW comment: I dunno if I can agree that they should have been able to handle everything themself. They obviously copied off of WoW, and look how many problems WoW had at launch with server stability and whatnot. Granted, some of the fixes (and features) in SW should have been ready and working right off the back, like dungeon-finder, but server problems typically always happen because no company wants to start out with 300000 servers right off the back; you've gotta test the waters first, and I honestly don't think they ran enough public betas to truly test the waters. I'm not making any excuses for them, and yeah, it was 2011, not 2004, but still, server problems are server problems; they're gonna be around for as long as, well, servers are around.

[Odin'sLaw]

server problems are server problems; they're gonna be around for as long as, well, servers are around.

19/12/12 says the chirstians that think games are the devils work!

[Ambrosia]

@ringthree: Thanks for the clarification!


@Cleverness: Yeah that is one of the major problems in that the SWTOR team can't handle the fixes in a timely manner. I mean the video I posted a couple pages back shows a rather obvious bug (and a really bad one at that) that is still live after 4 months of release. I think it was the week after 1.22 went live (when you could finally change the U.I.). MMO games these days loose that "new car smell" way faster than way back then. If you cannot gather a substantial amount of followers for the long run (especially the first year) then you will either be forced to make severe server merges or switch from the P2P to F2P model. The bad thing about that is when the switch is made for much newer titles (games that have been out for 4 years or less and must make the transition) versus games that have been almost a decade old or older... and slowly make the transition from P2P to hybrid to F2P.


My main gripe is (for the most part) the sheer utter nonsense upper management comes out with (official statements/comments) and how they have handled most things so far. I must of posted close to a dozen adorable quotes from these professional clowns, but the 2 most recent quotes/comments:

A. Frank Gibeau, another top executive at EA, said that no one is directly competing with EA’s Star Wars title in the massively multiplayer online space, and no one else has the Star Wars brand behind it.

B. EA CEO John Riccitiello added that TOR is definitely "more important" than Tiger Woods PGA.

I mean... O:


Why would Johnny the Dicky Ricci Italian Stallion compare... or even comment on SWTOR being more important than golf. I mean I know for a fact that Tiger Woods is to golf as Michael Jordan is to tennis. But I mean c'mon. It just seems to me as too much arrogance (or they are genuinely worried and are just burbling out nonsense) while taking very little action or making them pretty late down the road. We all know games these days do have a faster rate of decline once it launches and nothing wrong with a niche game. But when you have the 1st or 2nd most expensive project made: out the 600 games out there, from the past 15 years or so of MMO'ing... well I would hope that they weren't aiming for being a really niche game with low numbers.

The fact that you have (for NA servers) 10 well populated servers and roughly 110 that range from light to "supposedly" normal isn't a good sign at all. Even on the official forums there have been several threads reaching tens of thousands of views with over 500 responses in some of them urging E.A. to make server merges because BOTH the light and normal servers feel like ghost towns (most of the times). Not sure if you need a expert analyst to see this, but there is no way in hell this (among what was said in the previous pages) be in any shape or form a good sign for the game/team this early in the life of the game.

[ringthree]

B. EA CEO John Riccitiello added that TOR is definitely "more important" than Tiger Woods PGA.

This is in reference to the Tiger Woods PGA video game. It's an EA title.

[Lordender]

EA: Its okay Bioware, if SWTOR flames out, Madden will save us.

[ringthree]

EA: Its okay Bioware, if SWTOR flames out, Madden will save us.

I think it should be mentioned that if you are a developer, you probably want to buy a publisher, and not be bought by one.

Bungie gets bought by Microsoft. Gets fucked out of the Halo title. Buys themselves back out, partners with Activision/Blizzard to publish "groundbreaking" MMO.

Bioware gets bought by EA. Gets fucked by forcing out biggest MMO title in a generation a year too early. Gets demoted internally in EA infrastructure. Cannibalizes other game teams to keep SWTOR afloat.

As an alternative: Blizzard buys Activision. Maintains WoW income stream despite lack luster expansion. Has major new MMO coming, and tons of new uber-level titles of insanely high quality. Controls own production cycle to maintain high quality. Never really losses it's corporate ethos.

It appears that developers generally have a certain corporate ethos (in general pretty good), but that ethos can easily be disrupted with a publishers poor ethos.

[Ohemgee]

I still enjoy playing with the people I raid with. However I have no real incentive to log on anymore outside of the times we raid. Diablo 3 is coming out, and I may play that or continue to play sports titles (nba2k12, mlb12, etc).

I'm pretty sure SWTOR will end up going f2p with a DCOU model (which btw is really fun now because of this change). SWTOR would profit from a f2p model (purchase an in game tauntaun mount, buy other vanity shit, buy access to end game content*)


*Curious, would anyone mind buying access or at least expanded content for end game activities? Like you have your main area - for example Denova (Explosive Conflict), but would you pay for a..."Dynamis-Denova" (lack of better example)?

[ringthree]

I still enjoy playing with the people I raid with. However I have no real incentive to log on anymore outside of the times we raid. Diablo 3 is coming out, and I may play that or continue to play sports titles (nba2k12, mlb12, etc).

I'm pretty sure SWTOR will end up going f2p with a DCOU model (which btw is really fun now because of this change). SWTOR would profit from a f2p model (purchase an in game tauntaun mount, buy other vanity shit, buy access to end game content*)


*Curious, would anyone mind buying access or at least expanded content for end game activities? Like you have your main area - for example Denova (Explosive Conflict), but would you pay for a..."Dynamis-Denova" (lack of better example)?

I much prefer them just taking my money every month rather than having an uneven distribution of content and charges.

Most games that go F2P are operating well below the 100k player mark. As shitty as SWTOR is, I don't see it getting to that point any time soon.

[Isiolia]

*Curious, would anyone mind buying access or at least expanded content for end game activities? Like you have your main area - for example Denova (Explosive Conflict), but would you pay for a..."Dynamis-Denova" (lack of better example)?

It would depend on a lot on the exact model and pricing. Personally, I wouldn't pay for anything more in SWTOR. F2P might get me to log back on to do story content, if I got really bored, but that'd be about it. With respect to other games, however, it's kind of the model that most use anyway - pay for an expansion, get access to new content. Giving players the option to purchase that content a la carte wouldn't necessarily be bad. Paying per entry or something would get annoying.

[CasualPlayer]

Was pretty sure I wasn't getting DA3 after the disappointment of 2 (realize I'm in the minority on this board for thinking that) but this clusterfuck prettg much confirms it.

EA is the worst.

[Renzokuken]

Wow... there are people who post here who think DA2 wasn't a disappointment?

[Grey Jorildyn]

I dun believe.