I cancelled my SWTOR subscription today

I cancelled my SWTOR subscription today.  I spent way too much time telling them why but I felt I needed to do it for my anger at EA/Bioware and not because I think it will have any impact.  Here's what I wrote:

I really liked the single player aspect of the game but the developers totally failed in trying to make a immersive world.  Planets felt empty, playing through the game a second time for my legacy was a chore as there were no alternate paths, travel/spaceports were poorly implemented, and poor map/ quest designs made it seem like you spent most of your time running around a world trying to get around obstacles instead of having fun.  The game's engine didn't seem to be able to handle the load as it the game lagged at times especially when more than 10 people were in the same area.  That is pretty much inexcusable for a game that calls itself a multiplayer game.   

It really feels like you knew this game was poorly designed so you released at a time when  Star Wars/Bioware fans would buy it so you could maximize getting your investment back from box sales alone.  The developer conference in March pretty much confirmed it was released early as there were many comments like "we would have liked to get that into the release but didn't have time."   This game is a failure mostly of the designers that didn't have a good clear cut vision of what was needed, a game development team that couldn't get an engine to work, and upper management that cold-heartedly exploited the love of the brand names to maximize profit for developer mistakes. 

I know I'm not alone in my feelings and despite that I still want to love this game.  I just can't wait any longer for it to improve so I'm cancelling until I hear from those patient enough to stick around that things have been fixed. 

FWIW I have loved Bioware and all its products since Baldur's Gate and have bought every game they've released since that time.  It is apparent that EA cares little about protecting the name that Bioware built over the years.  The Bioware tradition of making sure their products are of the highest quality is no longer a priority so I will no longer purchase any of their products without first waiting a month or two to make sure this doesn't happen to me again.

 I'm not really sure anything else needs to be said.  I have 1 day left on my subscription (I didn't realize it but the they applied the 30 free days before I paid last month) and I'm not even sure I will log in.  It's not like there's anyone online for me to say goodbye.

I may post on this in the future as I hear of new developments but it will be spotty and most likely will eventually stop.

Swtor Layoffs begin

EA announced they were planning to lay off about 10% of its workforce in April and it appears they've finalized the SWTOR specific layoff.  We don't know the exact numbers but I've heard the SWTOR team has about 400 people so anything above 100 would be catastrophic and a clear sign they have given up. Here's the official announcement:

Hey folks, since you’re reading this you may likely have heard that we’ve done some restructuring here on the SWTOR team. Sadly, we are bidding farewell to some talented, passionate and exceptionally hard-working people who helped make SWTOR a reality. Impacting people’s lives this way is always very hard, but we’re ensuring the affected people are treated with dignity, fairness and respect.

Looking back at launch, we all came together and did something historic. We executed one of the largest, most successful and stable launches of any MMO yet in industry history. That is not an easy feat for any development team or company and we are humbled and honored by our fan community’s strong support both at launch and beyond.

Looking forward, the studio remains vibrant and passionate about our many upcoming initiatives for Star Wars: The Old Republic. We still have a very substantial development team working on supporting and growing the game, and we feel we are in a strong position, with your continued involvement and feedback, to continue to build Star Wars: The Old Republic as one of the most compelling and successful online experiences in the world today. There are many strong initiatives planned for cool new content and new features that we’re excited to tell you about in the upcoming weeks and months.
Rest assured that we remain dedicated to delivering a high quality service in SWTOR to you, our fans, and we will continue to support and grow Star Wars: The Old Republic over the weeks, months and years to come.
Thanks,
Greg and Ray

As I said in the article a few weeks back SWTOR subscriptions are going to fall past the 1.3mm they current have to at least 800k by year end.  That's the best case in my opinion and could go as low as 500k (I doubt it goes lower than that unless Bioware pulls the plug or really does some stupid things).

We've heard the break-even is between 500,000 and 1,000,000 subscription so it is obvious they are planning for the worst.  The unfortunate thing is the game has mostly fixed cost so if they are laying off that people in the content creator group is a sign that they are putting the brakes on future development.

Looking at it another way let's assume that it is 100 people and they cost $100,000 each.  That's a savings of $10,000,000 annually which would reduce the breakeven to 10MM / ($15 x 12 months) or 55.6k subscriptions.  It's a nice start but it's not enough to save them.  That's where closing 60+%
 of their servers would be helpful but unfortunately they don't have the code developed to make this happen.

Sadly, I think it may be safe to say that any chance this game had at having a large market share is gone.  What remains to be seen is if they can remain a minor player or become gaming's latest cautionary tale of what happens when management and the developers are out of touch with the reality of their business.

The Hero Engine - the answer for everything

Someone on the forums asked the question why we needed the fleet as a hub and the posts that followed mostly agreed that the fleets were stupid.  This was my response:

I have a feeling using the capital cities as hubs was their original thought then they realized they needed a place to gather that took up fewer memory resources. The reason I feel that way is why else wouldn't they have a speeder go from the Dromund Kaas Spaceport all the way to the Citadel. There's a natural chokepoint between the two and I think the designers originally envisioned this as a gathering place. Also think about the quests after each chapter where they send you to the fleet and then your next quest immediately sends you back to Dromund Kaas.

If you've never experienced it the quest after each chapter is a 30 minute time waster that consists of catching a speeder, running through town, catching another speeder, running through the spaceport to your ship, exiting the planet, loading the fleet, running to the quest objective, getting a quest taking you back to Dromund Kaas, running back to your ship, reloading space, reloading Dromund Kaas, running through the spaceport, getting on a speeder, running through town, getting on another speeder, running to the Citadel, and finally talking to the guy who gave you the quest in the first place.

Wouldn't that design decision make a lot more sense if the Empire's hub was on Dromund Kaas? Despite what many think the games designers aren't stupid. They wouldn't do that if there wasn't a really good reason and that's because Dromund Kaas was initially the Empire's hub. By the time they realized they needed to add a fleet it was too late to change the quest design (I'm pretty sure talking to the guy on the fleet activates your account's legacy when you finish the first chapter with your first character).

I get the feeling that late in the design phase they realized that Dromund Kaas took up too many system resources and if you had more than 15 people in the city player's systems slowed to a crawl. So they added patchwork answer of using a lower resource intensive fleet instead of capital cities as a gathering point. As someone else mentioned, everything in the game is meticulously crafted but the two fleet hubs are almost identical and it is almost like they were quickly put together.

Almost every issue in the game goes back to the fact that they 1) made the worlds too big with too much information and 2) the games engine gets bogged down. Every design decision is based on that.

• Why don't they have mods? Anyone that has played wow knows that too many mods slow down the game.
• Why don't they have an ingame dps/threat meter? It will slow down the game.

• Why are planets dead? They can't add random NPCs to add flavor as it would slow down the game.
• Why is Ilum world PVP gone? PVP battles on that planet turned the best PCs frame rates to single digits.
• Why is there a fleet? It was a design decision to allow a place for hundreds of people the meet.

They have never said it but I'd bet they have a big team working on making huge changes to the engine so that at some point (probably the first expansion), they won't be hamstrung by the engine and the designers can fully develop the game as they first envisioned. It is pretty much the reason for everything.

SWTOR subs vs other similar titles

I was listening to a podcast and they gave me inspiration to compare SWTOR with the first few months of some of the biggest releases in the last few years.  This is how it graphs:

I found it interesting that this graphs shows just how successful the SWTOR launch was with sales eclipsing all three of the other titles. Unfortunately it seems to be mimicking the same decline.¹

Only hardcore fanboys will argue with the statement that SWTOR's subscriptions will continue to fall in the next quarter.  The big question is whether it will experience another 50% reduction like occurred with its predecessors.  That would equate to subscriptions of approximately 700k.  As the only change to the game we can expect in the next few months is the Looking For Group feature I'm afraid the answer will be yes as that won't encourage players to come back.

One thing that will be interesting is the announcements we see in June-July that come from EA/Bioware in their attempt to stop the bleeding.  Frankly I'm shocked that no one in a lead position on the SWTOR project has been "reassigned" yet.  One thing that has been protecting them is that EA didn't want to show any displeasure to the project managers for fear of spooking the investors.  Now that the investors are spooked we may see big changes in the game's leadership which will no doubt have a big impact.  Whether that will be a good thing of a bad thing for the player base is impossible to know.

¹ In case it isn't clear, the purple line is the combination of all 3 titles (Rift, Age of Conan, and Warhammmer).

Funny SWTOR rant post from Eurogamer

I read an article at Eurogamer about SWTOR that was interesting but the best part was the comments as some people obviously put a lot of time into them.  The consistency of their feelings makes me really wonder where the designers heads were when they developed the game.  Here's some of my favorites:

I think this guy sums up a lot of people's feelings which is a bad sign for the August profit call:

Well if you turn up to a party and there is no one there, and the people there are all upset because the party is shit, you're gonna want to leave; whether you are a casual party-goer or hardcore party master. Umm did that make any sense?

I am playing SWTOR and basically the game feels very empty and quiet. I am only playing it co-op until all the story is done, pretty casual maybe. I did play WoW fairly hardcore until it broke me and pretty serious in general about my gaming. So this guy at EA can suck my left nut when I quit my subs when I run out of story and there is nothing but a few daily quests left...

Someone else picked up on executive's comment that is a perfect metaphor for SWTOR:

"Star Wars: The Old Republic: it's more important than Tiger Woods PGA Golf."

This guy hit many of the same things that has upset me:

I was one of the hopefuls that wanted this to be the best thing since bacon. Bought the CE and all. Unfortunately i didnt find what i was looking for.

The negative points that really put me off were these:

1) Levelling was way too quick. And once you got there, there wasnt that much to do. Most of the time i was just getting into the storyline of the current zone, you know, when it really starts to get good, and then you realise you're way above the level of the zone, more than halfway through the next zone's lvl range, and can pretty much skip it and move onto the next! Some zones were pretty nice, and the story was great but you ended up skipping it entirely coz it just got too easy and the gear was too low level.

2) Lack of diversity when levelling an alt. My first toon was a BH, and it was awesome. My second one was an IA, and i was a bit irked that i had to play through the same zones right after going through them not so long ago with my main. Then i started a SW and beside the starting zone, the rest of the planets were the same! Yes i know the story makes the difference, but i still feel that there should have been more options. If the game was truly story driven, then you should have had real "left or right" choices that make you take completely different routes, even if you're dark/light in both.

3) Maps were sickeningly linear. You couldnt really go out and explore the world. There was a path, and you had to run on it. The SWTOR World is huge as it has so many planets, but you never really get an idea of this size as you're always running on corridors. The planets do become quite open as you level further, but i just dont like to have run around a set path with every toon for 200 times each time i quest in that zone. I missed the freedom of choosing if i wanted to climb that thing over there or just wander off in a direction for more then 10 mtrs.

$) Mounts. All the money for very little speed. 'nuff said

I really hope that the devs keep working hard on this and make it into something that can keep players having fun. In my opinion, they just launched the game and they're already trying to catch up with demands of players. Personally, i think that if the levelling speed at launch was 50% of what it is now, they would have given themselves more time to work on fixes, and more time for people to enjoy the content.

I might reactivate 6 months from now if i'm in the mood to see what has been improved, but not for now. 

This guy was upset that the executive claims about the titles launching in the next few months:

"They're not the Star Wars fantasy. It's not the big expansive universe that appeals to so many people worldwide."

And exactly where is this 'big expansive universe' in your Star Wars game, Mr. Gibeau? I wasn't able to find it while bashing tedious mobs through the sterile pipeline planets, where there was nothing to discover or explore, nothing to make me feel I was in the galaxy far far away.

"You continually perfect the experience."

So obviously you will get rid of the horrible FPS engine and the over-instanced planets, where the players watch loading screens as much as they play, and where you almost never see anyone because most of the servers are emptying and the instances isolate players from each other. Obviously you will also add the day/night cycle because a MMO in the year 2012 without one is just unforgivable.

And while you are at it, just change everything. Change the art direction to something that actually makes the world and the characters look personal and living. Change the gameworld so there is something fascinating and inviting in the planets. Give the game at least a little bit of soul and atmosphere.

Because with this clinical, tasteless wreck, it's shameful you use the words like "perfection" and "expansive" in the same sentence.

A slightly different take from above with similar themes:

There were a number of things that put me off the game, and they all add up:

1) The amount of walking. See: Alderaan as the worst offender. The constant back and forth at spaceports, Coruscant, the list goes on and on. Yes, ok, some of the scenery is nice, but 20 hours later and not much of relevance happening = dead bored.

2) no real sense of impact. Complete a mission, come back 5 minutes later and it's all spawned back. Every time. Granted this is a staple of MMOs, but having come from Mass Effect 3, seeing ME3's DNA here and then have it all totally squandered. Meh... since all the servers are instanced anyway, can't we have dynamic world states...

3) The uselessness of the upgraded speeders. Seriously, after 200,000 credits later, the speeder level 2 is only marginally faster than the 50,000 level 1. The benefit is not proportional to the cost.

4) Stupid independent taxi systems. *cough* dromund kaas *cough*

5) The repeated colour-swapped content across classes. It's absolutely no fun to go through as an alternate class on the same dark or light side, 7 times out of 10 the story ends up at the same place, and it was a fight to go through half these storylines the first time.

6) The space missions. Fun at first, but there's only 5 real levels in the entire game, counting both dark and light sides, all others are variations of the core 5 with ships swapped around or the difficulty increased. Dead boring by level 50. Sapce should have been much closer to a cross between Star Trek Online and X Wing vs Tie fighter than Star Wars Rebel Assault. It would go a long way to add some sense of exploration and it's an easy way to remove the linearity of the ground missions. 

I really didn't have a point with this other than to say that outside the SWTOR bubble opinions on this game are pretty much the same.  The only thing that varies is your willingness to put up with a shoddy effort to play in the Star Wars universe.

At times EA/Bioware is just dumb (LFG)

As I stated a few posts ago my subscription ends on June 23rd and I'm hoping for an announcement of new features if I'm going to continue.  My current goal is to get my Empire characters to max level so I can play through the class story.  Right now I've been able to accomplish this with 3 characters (Bounty Hunter, Imperial Agent, and Sith Inquisitor).  This has highlighted an issue that I'd only read about up to this point and that is the frustration of what to do that comes at level 50.

When you hit max level you get 2 quests that point you to Ilum and Correlia and you can start dailies.  If you include the Belsavis dailies it can take 2-3 hours to complete and will give you a daily credits of around 250k.  This is nice and after a week you have enough credits to buy everything you need and the commendations will upgrade your gear so you can start doing heroics.  It's at this point where you have issues.

My operative has upgraded all her gear and now is ready to start doing heroics.  My choices are either to sit on the fleet and spam general chat hoping someone will want to run heroics or run dailies.  I can't do both because there isn't a global chat feature in the game and as I take the 2-3 hours to run my dailies I will never know if someone on the fleet wants to run a heroic.  I might join them if I knew but there's currently no way to do this in the game.

Simple solution: Create a global chat channel.  Considering they already have chat channels I find it hard to believe it would take more than 10 developer hours to implement this.  Instead we are 6 months into the game and have to make a choice - play the game or sit idle on the fleet to find a heroic.

Even if they implemented the solution I suggest there is another problem.  The best example is when you are doing dailies on Belsavis.  I've complained in past posts that the map/quest developers made huge mistakes by making quest chains linear instead of circular.  One thing I didn't mention in that post is even if you were aware someone wants to run a heroic, you are faced with a choice of spending 15 minutes to get to the heroic then running it and spending another 30 minutes getting back to the point you stopped doing your daily.  I may be exaggerating a bit but not by much.  This means that even people in large guilds have only certain points of their daily playtime when they are available to run a heroic or they will end up wasting a lot of time in travel.

Simple solution: I actually thought this would be a much tougher challenge until I started PVP.  Bioware has been surprised by how popular PVP is in the game and there's a simple reason for it.  When you queue for PVP you can do your dailies until a box appears asking you to join.  Once you click OK you are ported to the PVP realm.  After the match is done you are ported back to the exact same spot you were when you joined.  I leveled through PVE and figured the reason Flashpoints didn't do this is because the coding wasn't available.  Imagine my surprise as I joined a PVP group while doing my dailies on Belsavis and when it finished I was returned to the same spot I left.  It can't be that hard to modify this code for PVE.  That would allow people to continue to play the game as you spam the new global chat channel to find others for the group.  Bioware already even has an EXIT button coded for flashpoints which seems to be tailor made way to tell the server to return the player to their original location.  The programming time on this wouldn't be as simple as a global chat channel but I'd be surprised if it took more than 100 hours to accomplish.

These two changes would have a HUGE improvement on the  game.  They've had 5 months to do these two simple things but have totally ignored it.  After being max level for a short while I certainly have more empathy for the level 50s who quit.  I know that patch 1.3 will include a looking for group feature which I'm sure will be great but this is only one of a hundred issues that need attention and the LFG feature is the only thing that will be included in that patch.  We haven't even been given a time frame on 1.3 so I wonder if it will happen before the end of June.  With 6 month subscriptions running out in July/August, Bioware better be working on more than just LFG.

I know the standard response from the Bioware defenders is WOW didn't originally have these features but if that game launched today they would lose subscribers too.  The dumbest part of this whole thing is if the people at the top of the development chain aren't doing the simple things it makes me wonder if they will be able to fix the game before it is too late.

It's official - Star Wars: The Old Republic has 1.3 million subscribers

I wrote a few weeks ago describing the lengths that EA has gone to keep their current subscribers.  I'm sure EA realized a long time ago that their biggest hurdle was going to be their profit call for the quarter/year ended on March 2012.  That's because the game was released in December and which meant that the December profit call would have good numbers.  Everything they've since that time has been done to make the March numbers look as good as possible.

That's why 1.2 was realized in April.  That's why a free month was given.  That's why they had a guild summit in March.

On the surface it appears their efforts were unsuccessful as the the LA Times is reporting that current subscribers dropped from the January number of 1.7 million to 1.3 million in April.  This is even worse when you consider that a large percentage of people only kept their subscription in April because they got a free month if they were subscribed on the 25th (FWIW, my subscription ended on the 23rd and I was seriously considering cancelling but re-upped to get one month free.  I will reconsider on June 23rd depending on features added in that time).

The most interesting statement from the LA Times article is that SWTOR needs 1 million active subscribers to pay for operating costs to keep the game running.  Keep in mind this means that at 1 million subscribers they aren't getting any payback for the cost to develop the game.  This level only keeps the lights on to pay for the month to month costs.  If you consider that 1 million subscribers equals $15 million in revenue a month, that means their operating costs are around that level which equates to about $180 million annually.

That's a big problem.  EA/Bioware is painfully aware of what happened last year with Rift.  In their first quarter they peaked at 600,000 subscriptions but two quarters later they dropped to 250,000 and are still falling.  The same trend happened with Warhammer - peak of 850,000 with a drop to 300,000 six months later and 175,000 within a year.   Age of Conan followed a similar pattern - peak of 700,000 with a drop to 410,000 in 4 months and around 100,000 within 8 months.

One of the lead developers on the game recently said they are spending all their development time on a looking for group feature.  Given the numbers above that is no doubt a lie.  A few weeks ago I stated that the 10% reduction in staff was a sign that upper management was taking proactive steps in preparation for the May profit call.  If 1 million is the break even for operating costs then the #1 priority of the SWTOR team is reducing operating costs and that means server transfers / merges.

That's actually a good news.  One of the biggest issues facing the game right now is even though there are 1.3 million active subscribers, they are spread unevenly over 200+ servers.  With the number of people that are playing they only really need about 100 servers which means they are paying for twice as many servers as they need to and getting to this level will not only reduce costs but go a long way in addressing one of the biggest problems in the game.

As for me I need some information that both server merges and a looking for group feature will be in the game by the end of the summer or I'm going to let my subscription lapse.  I'm sure many other people that still have faith in Bioware feel the same.  The next 3 months are vital if the game is going to have a future or the August profit call will be fortunate to hit 500,000 active subscriptions.  If that happens EA will be losing at least $3 million on the game every month¹, so drastic action will need to take place in June/July or the 10% drop in EA's stock that happened today will seem mild in comparison.  Anyone who's ever been in a publicly traded company knows that spells doom for any project and development will be severely curtailed which would kill any remaining hope for the game.

¹ - I arrived at this number by starting with their number of 1 million people needed to break even which would mean a monthly operating costs of around $15 million.  If the subscription number plummets to 500,000 monthly revenue would drop to about $7.5 million.  One of the reasons many developers get into MMOs is because costs are pretty fixed in terms of support and developer costs.  The only savings I can see is bandwidth along with servers (if they can get the programming to work to make this happen) but there is no way they can reduce costs enough to totally offset the reduction in revenue.  That means the monthly loss on the game will be anywhere from $3 million  (assuming bandwidth/server costs are 30% of total) to 7.5 million (no cost reductions).