SWTOR - Will it Live or Die?

When SWTOR first released, it turned out to be an incredible MMO. I've tried every MMO since WoW and this was my ultimate favourite. Questing and story lines are exceptional and the classes extremely fun to play.

A month or two later, we reach end-game content. This is what lead to the downfall of SWTOR. During its peek, it was said that the game reached almost 3 million. Now it's down to 1.3 million as of March 31st and once the free month of gametime expires, it's expected that the game will continue to decline.

As many of you who currently play the game have experienced, the game has been slowly dying for months now.

Since 1.2 hit and their rated Warzone's were delayed, Bioware gave free 30-days to only level 50's. The community outraged and Bioware ended up giving it to the majority of players with an active subscription (players who earned 50 later and those with multiple low level characters that reached a combined level 6 legacy).

Even this free month wasn't enough incentive for players to return. Instead, they're playing TERA beta, preparing for D3 / GW2.

The majority of servers are ghost towns, with imperial fleets (major city) reaching only 20-30 during peek hours. Finding an instance group is next to impossible and PvP queues are 20-30 minutes during peek and non-existent throughout the morning/late night (only 1 is active in the afternoon).

What is Bioware/EA doing to fix this?

North American Server Pop:
- "Normal" servers contain up to 250/250 on each side.
- There are currently only 3 "Heavy" servers during peek hours.
- Majority of servers are "Light"

In 1.3, free server transfers are supposed to happen according to Bioware, but this isn't until "early summer". By then, there won't be anyone left to play with.

People are saying the reason they will not merge the servers is because they want to avoid spreading fear/panic that the game is dying and it would have a negative effect with their investors.

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How do you feel about SWTOR?

I can only play during peek hours 7-11PM or else I'm stuck playing alone on a dead server.

 

Those losses were apparently from the trial accounts expiring, not actual subs. But to answer your question, no; it will not die completely. There will always be a player base for it.

IMO, MMO players who aren't playing WoW are typically looking for the next WoW and are just wasting time with betas and other MMO's. There won't be an MMO with the player base like WoW for sometime, it will take WoW "Killing itself" in order for that happen

 

I like the game and will resubscribe and play it at some point but right now I just plain don't have time to play. I didn't even make it to lvl 25 yet... Been too busy with work and now plan to play D3 for a month or so, then maybe get to SWTOR later in the summer.

 

I got it at launch and I played it for a while. Got 3 toons up to about mid level 30's then realized it's the same grind as WoW to max level but with lightsabers. The novelty of the cutscenes and storylines wore off and I just moved on I guess.

 

GW2 looks to be a serious rival. They invested in what they thought would be overkill in terms of servers for the open beta and even then they essentially DDOS'd themselves offline.

 

Oh come on... there is no grind in WoW or SWtoR.
You practically wake up max level when you roll a new toon.
It is a wonder they make you level at all.

The biggest complaint is that SWtoR isn't really an MMO... its a single player game with a chat room. You do not need anyone else ever. The stories are fun the first time through, but once you have experienced them, there is no point in playing anymore once you max out.

The game's survival depends on new content. Without it, it will die.
WoW has done new races, new content, new equipment, separated pvp and pve equipment, overpowered class1, then overpowered class2... repeat...

 

This. I guess most people never played EQ or even the original WoW. Some levels in EQ took over a day straight of grinding, each. You could play for months without reaching max level.

 

Why no 1 mention MS when talk about grind and leveling ?

imo SWTOR is not gonna "die" , when some people invest time and effort, they wont abandon them instantly.
same hold true for LOTRO or DDO. There will always some people stays.

 

couldnt agree more. The characters and races are the same for both side, but with very little differences. the random events are too few, and not exciting enough. On top of that the worlds are bland, the dialogue is repetative, and it doesnt offer that awe inspiring feeling that a star wars mmo should have. IMO the star wars universe if just too big for a mmo, the games have to be narrow or die hard fans get pissed off if something is missing. I dont blame bioware for everything as the galaxy far, far away is just too complex and diverse to make a game that encompasses whole planets. Before i forget the servers are dead, it's like a ghost town in most of them. these are the reasons why i had to leave, and couldnt "force" myself to pay the subscription fee.

 

I regret never playing SWG, it seemed to me to be the best Star Wars game possible.

 

One of my coworkers mentioned that he believes it won't be long before SWTOR becomes a "freemium" game.

I loved every bit of it when I got it at launch up to about February. Like someone mentioned above, it really did feel like a solo-player game. Not only in the aspect he mentioned, but I could not get into groups for the life of me. In WoW, I always wanted to roll a healer, but never wanted to go from lvl 1-85. So when SWTOR came around, I rolled a Sorc Healer and I thought I would've gotten into groups easy, but that wasn't the case.......it was strange really.

 

My favourite aspect of playing an MMO is this:

1. Queue up Drum & Bass / Garage House music.
2. Join Battleground/WZ with friends.
3. Play for hours, preferably against competent competition

Now that the queue times are sky high, it kills me to see one of my favourite MMO games slowly dying. I truly believed in SWTOR and some of their classes are much better than what WoW ever developed - a prime example is Operative vs Rogue ...Ops is a perfect class. Same applies to Sorc vs Priest. (my opinion of course)

All the PVP players that haven't quit are now rolling on The Fatman server (East US/CAN) or awaiting the free transfers.

 

if they make it free to play, or if they change the payment model to a one-off purchase, i'll try it.

 

Ya I don't think it will die off.

People just want to play WoW and compare everything to it. You'll see the same thing with GW2...

Give SWTOR some time as they are adding new end game content that will actually be difficult.

 

Bought it at launch, cancelled sub even before free month ends. Reasons is that it's too similar to wow, just with light sabers, yet it's a lot less mature than wow, so I can't justify playing an half assed wow clone when I could just play wow instead. No lfg function, no auto battleground queue. All these kind of stuff most mmorpg have that saves player time are all missing. Level grinding is generally slow and boring as well.

 

hopefully it will become a F2P mmo with item shop or something xD

id give it a try if it where that

honestly though i just wish they had made a single player 3rd installment for Kotor. seriously enough of this making mmos out of great single player games... always turns them into crap.

 

All MMOs are single player games with the choice to group with somebody if you feel like it. MMOs will forever be dead to me since I was fortunate enough to play them in the beginning when you met people and made friends, you had a to group to accomplish anything. I played EQ, Acherons Call and Dark age of Camelot for years.

Nothing has felt similar since WoW instilled this notion that you must copy me to make a good game. No game has had a similar feeling to early mmos, 2979823 games have felt EXACTLY the same as WoW. Not to mention the good vs bad being so played out... 3 factions = win.

 

I will let my subscription lapse because of the problem finding groups for raids. This has been a problem since long before 1.2 even with a geared toon and experience of the Ops.

I have no problem with the similarities to wow, I like the star wars stuff, I don't care about the storyline. I played vanilla wow and remember how barren it was for the longest time in terms of lack of new content - but at least you could find groups.

Basically if I can't get groups I am not going to play - they should have thought that through before launch imo.

 

I don't think World of Warcraft: Lightsaber Edition will last too long before it dies off and only has a user base that has the inability to move on after vesting into the game due to time or friends or the extreme Starwars hardcore fans.

 

I don't think it will be free anytime soon. I mean it is EA after all. LOL.

This was one of the most disappointing MMO's I've ever played. It just bored me to death. They didn't try to do anything new. MMO's are stale enough currently.

It's also sad they basically just repeated the same mistakes Warhammer made.

Guess we'll never know the true subscriber numbers because they want to be shady about them: The Old Republic's 'hidden subscribers' are actually gone -Destructoid

 

It took how many years for Galaxies to finally shut down? Don't imagine TOR will be any different unless the number of players completely and utterly tanks.

 

I miss the original WoW. Those were the days - when travelling from one part of the world to the other actually was a journey - and earning that mount was one helluva achievement.

If Blizz fired up a retro WoW server, I'd resub in a shot.

 

Same here. Not that I dislike WoW in its current state, but I did enjoy vanilla more than what it is now. Speaking of the mounts, I remember when I finally finished the warlock mount quest and man oh man did it feel good.

 

I miss games like EQ that required skilled players and teamwork...
Are you a failure? You'd know it, because you would be dead... repeatedly.
Doing so would likely mean you would not be max level (or at least would lose it).

While I do not miss the multiple-year levelling curve or the broken quests, I do miss the players and the truly epic (100+ people) cooperative raids.
SWtoR, WoW, and even Tera have become so /faceroll tolerant that a retarded monkey can expect to reach max level and have the best gear in the game with almost no effort or time investment.

 

It was an epic feeling . It seems like so long ago, good times.

 

Agreed.. that's why so many left and ended up playing in those Private Server realms Vanilla style, without flying mounts that was great days

 

This.

Still, too much grind in either WoW or SWTOR.

 

The only MMO to provide me with epic group combat was wow.

 

I honestly feel sorry for you... if WoW is the best you got, you have never played anything truly epic.

Wow is, at best, a starter MMO for pre-schoolers defined by "huntards" "welfare epics" and "bubble-hearth-pvp".

(PS forgot "pillar-humping arena")

 

Kernal, to cite myself again:

"The only MMO to provide me with epic group combat was wow."

This does not mean it was the best MMO I played, quite on the contrary

 

Every new MMO that comes out have some sort of idea behind it.
Some are advertising PVP, some are advertising features, massive battles, fun pve content, hard coop fights, epic gear, achievements, castle sieges etc.
I mean you need to have at least SOME things that wow already has and bring something new to the table

SWTOR on the other hand were advertising lightsabers and... thats it. It felt like:

— why do we just make a wow with lightsabers?
— wow great idea lets do it, we have lots of fans who support us and there are also people who like WoW, we might hook them
— *few months later* WoW seems to have so much stuff we cant possibly code even 5% of it. We cant even put 200 people into one room, our servers wont handle it, not even 100...
— meh, lets just release it as is and add something later

The game is old, primitive, non-innovative and quite frankly dull. It lacks mid-game, end-game (which was obvious), it lacks any sort of content that is worth paying for monthly, i cant even justify paying for it once. All in all its $hiat, it was a dead-born i played it for few hours on friend's account and threw away, guess i am just not a fan of lightsabers.

Gotto say i played ALL mmorpgs that came out after wow (including wow) and even though they lacked content as well most of them brought A LOT more to the genre itself, unlike swtor.

 

I havnt played swtor online but did they at least continue the story? with revan and what happens and stuff? or is it just a completely different game? Even if the game mechanics are blah i might try for a month just to get the rest of the storyline from the Kotor series.

 

Final Fantasy Online was always better combat for me, it was more skill based not skill spam.

 

Final fantasy online made me feel lost

 

I tired up from SWTOR with 2 weeks. I only got to lvl46.
Im in to MMOs, since i played WoW since beginning.
Theres a class difference between those two games. A big one.
Perhaps i play some more when it goes to F2P. Perhaps not even then.
D3 all the way for me. Recently quit WoW as well. Panda Beta doesnt look too promising. .. Or maybe im finally tired of MMOs.

 

I've got about 48 days left on my sub and I probably won't renew unless the 1.3 patch arrives before then, which need to include upgradable armor and improved server populations. I'm having fun though when I'm actually doing something, but the continuous population decline on my server since I resubbed has made it harder to do group activities. Despite this I think they can turn it around and keep TOR sustainable without going F2P. There's still a lot of players out there that haven't tried it and will get around to it. Bioware just needs to keep churning out features and improvements that will eventually draw them.

 

Guess I am the exception here, but I enjoy SWtOR. I find the class stories a lot more interesting the the quests in the other MMOs I've played.

WoW never truly clicked with me I played to Max in Lich King (I started during the Burning Crusade expansion but didn't max), but kind of got bored before maxing in Cataclysm. Main thing that kept me playing WoW were friends. I kept going back to EverQuest though.

I've maxed one character and reached Legacy level with 2 others (1 on same server 1 on another).

SWToR Lack of people is annoying, I'm not much of a PVPer though. I think they ramped up the servers too fast trying to avoid the wait times at launch.

 

Pretty normal for almost all new MMORPG, server merge will be "soon "

 

I still keep going back to EQ every once in awhile. I have a level 54 character on project1999.org it is a great server and game.

 

World of Warcraft has been improved a lot during the last WoD update. The gfx are better and the population of players seem to be rising slowly back to what it was some time ago. I would definatly go for Wow, it's still a trend and probably will live for many years.

 

Holy thread necro, batman!

 

And another good example of almost classic mmorpg is Aion online.

 

An Corp!

 

I think it is doing pretty well, and it will live. I also think than when playing SWTOR we should not approach it as a traditional MMORPG, but a Star Wars game, which is heavily involved with the amazing SW universe and its lore. I believe the game is meant to be a hybrid between MMO and Single Player.