A lot of mmo's are cash positive and remain so under F2P because simply the development crawls down to a small team and such a speed that it remains a profitable model.

im guessing here but I suspect there were quite a few players in TOR that had never played an MMO previously. They looked at TOR as KOTOR 3 and treated it as a single player rpg regardless of the title

and like most single player rpgs, they "beat" the game in less than a month. Oh sure a few went back and beat the game again but eventually they too quit the game.

another group of players were the star wars galaxies players. they'd try anything with a lightsaber on the cover. sure it was a fun two weeks but they too cancelled once they beat the game

finally the 3rd group, made up mostly of jaded wow players and some lotr / sto / coh types who bounce around. these guys are like sharks in the water, any blood and they immediately go on the offensive quick to point out that they knew this game would fail

whats there to go back too ? everyone already beat this game

and whats really really sad and pathetic here is the lie....subscriptions were the problem.

The design of the game sucked. and I think they know it sucked. they arent stupid. they know their game modelled after the last 10 mmos...all massive failures by the way...would fail.

its all about short-term massive profits and getting out before anyone else notices the ship is sinking. welcome to the new corporate sanctioned mmo genre. long-term mmo sandbox designs need not apply

I think you make a good point there, riker.

When you see failure after failure, you have to consider that these companies are actually making money on them - or they would either stop or change their approach.

admriker444 wrote: Your kinda right and wrong this is what I think we had.

First off we did have a number of players who made TOR their first MMO. I have a few real life friends who never played an MMO up till TOR. The game is about 50/50 with them, they do enjoy the storyline and even leveling system. They don't view the game as your normal 'hardcore' MMO player would. I did bring up if they quit due to the paying $15 a month and a few of them did say yes. However they feel that way about every MMO, they just don't like the p2p system.

Then we have the SWG Players and really Pre-CU, CU, NGE fans from what I noticed tend to just have a blind hate to the game. Not all of them, most of them however will go on about how great one of those three systems in Galaxies had been. I will also point out that they have the rose colored glasses on. They talk about the space game SWG had however they act like it was in at launch. A number of them have claimed that things like the Corvette had been in at launch.

Now I know this is an odd stance to take and I'm trying not to sound like I'm taking their side or the dev's side. However I think a good chunk of the hate from the SWG players comes from the fact that SWG got shutdown for TOR. That's what upsets them, and the guild I went to TOR with spent most of their time talking about how SWG was 'better'.

Then we have the WoW Players and something you should remember about the WoW Players, if they see anything at all that could 'hurt' WoW they attack it. Know how I love talking about AoC? When AoC launched we had a number of WoW players who came in and blasted AoC for well everything and talked about how great WoW was. WoW's PvE was better, WoW's PvP was better, WoW was just better in every way, shape and form.

And TOR did get that. Why? Out of all the games that have come out TOR is the only game that really could go head to head with WoW.

We then have what I like to call the 'Next Best Thing' players. Those guys are the ones who just go game to game. Remember the Milk Lady thing from Clerks? The Lady looking over every bottle of Milk looking for a thing of Milk that can never go bad? That's how those players kinda are. They are looking for that game that's going to be the MMO that reshapes everything. They are looking for WoW even tho they don't want to play WoW as WoW in their eyes isn't the best thing anymore. This is the player who proclaimed that Tera, Diablo 3, TSW, GW2 would not only beat TOR but be so good it would change everything.

And lastly and yes we have this with TOR we have the 4chan /v/ kids. Most of them just hate the game as it's EA and it's /v/ they hate everything. Really that group is something you are now seeing with every big triple A title now.

You USED TO BE one of those SWG vets hating on SWTOR, swg.

Wanting a game as polished and feature-rich as WoW is not the same as wanting another WoW.

MMO_Doubter wrote: And ya know what? What did it get me or anyone? I can look back at my old posts and I was just as bad as those hipster kiddies hanging out on /v/ screaming about how every new game coming out is the new worst thing ever.

So you know what? I sat down and *gasp* found stuff to enjoy in TOR, in whatever has come out. Lord knows I'm much more happy now then the last few years bashing on everything.

istillwantmyswg wrote:
You posts have certainly improved a great deal.

MMO_Doubter wrote:
I suspect most of the big failures were to far along in development to change course. 5 years ago WoW was the hot shit and taking off like crazy. It has only been the last few years where big failures started showing up like crazy. Even then there was always a few reasons to make excuses for their failures. Mostly bug ridden unfinished designs.

I think most of the current failures are just trying to do whatever they can to recover money or make a little extra. They know they don't have massive staying power.

Shayde wrote:
Not if the art dept was paid more than 1 dollar and the "free" players cost nothing extra in terms of the server farm storage, or bandwidth costs. An F2P game still has overhead costs. They have a dollar figure associated with every player, I'm sure.

Temploiter wrote:
Dildo hats are cheap.

And as SWG proved, having 50K in players paying keeps the lights on. They have like 6 servers now in TOR, there isn't a lot of overhead.