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Mr. McMissile,
I think Mr. McfNasty is not entirely wrong using relative standards. If I get a good grade when everybody else gets an even better one, I feel bad. When I get a moderate grade while the rest of the class fails completely, I am pretty convinced the test was unreasonable - and I am pretty damn good. Likewise, when the majority of MMOs loses 50% of their playerbase within a week`s time, and mine retains 75% for half a year, I did something right. It`s pretty natural that not all of those who bought the game to try it or who received it as a christmas present will continue to pay for it after the free trials.

The standard you have to use in that context is the relative one, not the absolute one. If your MMO retains considerably more players than the majority of other MMOs on the market, you`re not doing half bad. Of course we would like to see "solid growth". But SW is a front-loaded product; high initial frequency of commercials, closely tied to a major franchise (Star Wars) etc. All of that will attract many initial players who may not really be interested in playing a good MMO per se, but just in trying out that advertised/franchise product. It`s unreasonable to assume the slow effects of word of mouth alone could counter the expectable initial drop-out quota... isn`t it?

- Let's not post things twice -

Edited, May 9th 2012 10:48am by MrMissile

No, I did not compare any game with any other game. I know that you need to introduce a comparison if you want to use SWTOR's decline of its playersbase in order to make look FFXIV bad once more, but just don't make it come over like it was me who introduced it. On the contrary! And I am not going to either, an it is all explained in an earlier post.

SWTOR lost 400,000 players in three months, ok? 23% of the total amount of players. This in reply to somebody's positive note on SWTOR's playerbase. I see such a development as Inot positive. There is nothing more to it. Leave it at that.

Actually you did. You linked the article showing the decline in SWtoR players, did you not? If you want to back track and try to make it seem like you weren't drawing a comparison though, I'm all for it. Why?

It seems silly to me to compare a game that is considered successful despite losing ~20% of it's paid subscribers to a game that is considered a failure and lost ~90% of it's playerbase while it was still free to play.

You need reading comprehension 101, it sold 2 million boxes, but after the first month only 1.7 million subbed for subscription, that extra 300, does not meter. As for you point in growth, this game peaked at 50K then it went down in the low ten's and now it has around 20-25k, it has not Grown.

Indeed. And we are not talking about exchange rates here. We are talking about an individual game. At least I was.

I think we have exchanged views on this long enough, right? Now please... without jabs and uppercuts, quickly: what do you think Tera will do?

Hush, WoW lost less than a million due to SW:TOR, which was less than 10% of their 8 years old game, and people already praised SW:TOR at that time as WoW killer. Relatively WoW could have laugh its ass off SW for such thing, such a puny puny "threat". Relatively you can't call SW:TOR successful, because majority of its total player base come from less than 10% of an 8 years old game. Relatively we can argue relativity all relatively long day.

And feedback marred in internal debate clouds the feedback.

To explain: There is internal disagreement between me as the Socialist and me as the Observer, so I'm of two different opinions:

Socially, the dividing line between a paying gamer and a non-playing gamer is imaginary. We're all gamers, period. Callously calling all those who are not paying right now haters and those who are paying right now fanbois is a divide conceived by the players, and thus imaginary. If we were to take that point on its face, I'd be agreeing with you on not having a social divide at all.

But Scientifically, the factual difference between players is possible perspectives, and to get accurate feedback, you don't mix those variables in experiments. And what is this Welcome Back campaign if not an experiment to see how returning players react to the current changes - kind of like asking for a progress report from two people - one who as seen the work as it progressed and one who has not. That sort of feedback should be separated and analyzed for differences. You can say that this sort or method of value may not hold any worth, but I flatly disagree.

So while I personally would not mind it if we mingled the 'groups' - I understand the reasoning for keeping them separate from an observational point of view, and support it.

In the end - less arguing and more direct feedback. I've always been in support of those concepts.



On a side note to the derail argument: There's no point in arguing SWTOR's successes and failures here as the situations are literally opposite. SWTOR started successfully and fell into decline. FFXIV failed in it's initial debut and is trying to crawl its way back up. The solutions to both of these situations are completely different.



Edited, May 11th 2012 9:39am by Hyrist

Irrelevant to the topic, but I'd say that Yoshi and crew are gambling on getting a stable base larger than what they have with the coming of 2.0.

But Logically I think they understand that the game is going to run like a lamed chocobo financially for quite a while. Even if 2.0 is a much, much better game, they're fighting against a serious reputation marr. It will take a lot longer than just the re-release for them to recover their losses. However, I do feel as if they will recover their losses ultimately. However, how successful they will be after that point will be up to whether or not Yoshi can keep up this new business policy of being an active part of the community. Ultimately, that will be what help the loyalty of those who do stick around.

In the end, any profits made by this game will be made in the long term.

I'm not sure what you mean by this question. What will TERA do about what?