When I think of the MMO community I am reminded greatly of the first person shooter industry. In the FPS industry there is total brand recognition and brand loyalty. People who play Halo 3 are insanely critical of every other first person shooter out there.
People who quit Halo 3 are worse. People who quit Halo 3 end up looking for a game that simply does not exist
In a similar way the old MMORPG community still flocks around looking for the perfect MMO game. While Massively.com represents a very positive MMO community, MMORPG.com represents the disdain of former World of Warcraft players.
Star Wars: The Old Republic for so many was a chance at making another World of Warcraft. Less than a week after the game launched people were clamoring that the game population shrank…. it did not.
A month after people claimed it shrank… it did not.
We’re now two months in and all signs show the game’s population is still growing.
The thing people are slowly realizing is that the large population of the game isn’t level capped. While the Fleet Republic will see around 200 people, the other zones will look at about 40-50 players each.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is still growing and all signs show that it’s population will not fall any time soon.
So the question is… when will it fall. Or more appropriately, what will cause it to fall. There is after all a chance that SWTOR will continue to grow in sales and will find a revenue model that will attract more constant players.
So off to what will cause SWTOR to fall!
#1: Late Content Updates
When an MMO launches it comes with a set amount of beginner content. It is designed to be intro friendly but also offer up enough of a challenge to keep people playing.
Star Wars: The Old Republic launched with two raid 5-boss raid dungeons each representing about a four hour clear. This is potentially the most end game ever released in an MMO. It doesn’t sound like a lot but consider that World of Warcraft launched with no end game at all. Rift launched with no raids. Warhammer Online had one raid dungeon. Age of Conan had one raid dungeon. Everquest had one world boss. Final Fantasy 11 had no end game content.
So in the content department SWTOR has released with the most content any MMO has had to date.
But in spite of that people have beaten SWTOR’s content pretty easily. Having attracted a lot of experienced MMO players SWTOR has a lot of people who beat hard content fast… and they did. SWTOR released with three modes that require more and more gear to beat. And they’re beaten.. all of them.
This is nothing new. Every single MMO that has had introductory content has always had it beaten in under a month. The only ones that last longer are those that ‘gate’ their content. WOW for example gated their Lich King content so that you could only beat certain boses every two weeks.
So its obvious, after a month in any MMO at all people will have nothing new to do except farm content… and they will.
People will farm content to prepare themselves for new content. I know this because my guild is doing this now. The lead developer will give a timeline for new content. The timeline is usually close to the launch of the game. So in this case new content is promised for mid-March, which is 2-3 weeks away.
In the new patch will be more things to do. Included in the new patch will be a new raid, new PvP stuff, new gear sets… all sorts of stuff.
Now imagine you are grinding out gear for two straight months to prepare for a new raid coming out… and it doesn’t get released in time.
What is the first thing you will do? It’s actually obvious, you will drop your subscription.
If the folks at Bioware know what is best for their game they should launch the patch in the time frame they promised. If they delay it to ‘get it right’ people will just leave the game.
If they drop us a buggy ass patch people will stay around… because they will have things to do. Bioware can just spend the time they were going to spend perfecting this patch by fixing it.
A lot of people criticize developers who release buggy games but honestly developers who wait around for years (cough Apogee with Duke Nukem Forever) are just as likely to lose their core audience while they wait to make things super awesome.
People want something to do and they’ll complain that it is buggy… but you’ll still have these people kicking around.
#2: A New Better Game Comes Out
As far as I can see the MMOs coming out this year will be TERA, Guild Wars 2, WOW: Pandaria, and The Secret World. Out of these four games I can see none of these that are better.
TERA’s combat system is very similar to that of Hellgate London, a game that came out four years ago and flopped after being hyped as a “skilled player’s” game. It is also a Korean MMO similar to Aion with very controversial female sexuality present which will rate it up to M and also deter a lot of Western buyers.
Guild Wars 2 was really really hyped up as something amazing and people are STILL trying to hype it as something amazing. But when you look at the game they made it is pretty much the same thing as WoW. The fact that it is B2P (buy to play no subscription) means that even if the sales for this game are insanely high, there is no reason to believe it will threaten the number of subscripters to a subscription based game. After all, did you quit your MMO when you picked up a single player game? Probably not.
WoW: Pandaria much like every WoW expansion promises to fix everything! The new MMO is promised to target a younger audience which means it can actually challenge SWTOR which has a General rating. BUT BUT BUT WoW: Pandaria is not a new game and to play Pandaria you will have to buy all of the other expansions. With this many expansions for WoW out the chances of WoW to pick up new customers continues to get reduced. The only way WoW: Pandaria will hurt SWTOR is IF WoW amalgamates Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm into one expansion cost.
The Secret World has no leveling in it which makes it unique. This basically means people will be playing the first MMO ever made that starts at end game content. For people who are waiting on end game content this is going to look very attractive.
So right now the games I think that will ‘knock out’ SWTOR are World of Warcraft: Pandaria and The Secret World.
But both of these games have to be phenomenal. WoW: Pandaria has to offer exciting new content and an experience that is more than just a raiding grind. WoW will need to ‘fix’ it’s PvP and the addition of the new Monk class cannot ruin the game like the Death Knight class did.
For The Secret World to make a big bang it has to really market itself as a different kind of MMO. People do not want to play level grind games followed up by end game grind games. The Secret World offers something very unique which will attract new people to MMOs. Because it is aimed at NEW PLAYERS instead of existing MMO players in order to knock off some SWTOR numbers its marketing will have to emphasize on how innovative this game is.
After they lose members to these games they can get them back. To get them back they have to release content roughly around the same time as these games launch so that when people look back to SWTOR they see content they can play. If they do not have content ready they will not see people return.
#3: Changing of the Guard
About six months before the launch of a major MMO no employee of the studio making it is allowed vacation time. Usually people are putting in 60-70 hour weeks and really just trying to get things finished up. The alpha testing period has begun and every little bit of feedback will need immediate and efficient treatment. When the closed beta starts they kick into high gear as they are now developing the end game content that will shape the game.
So when the game is finally launched you are dealing with a stressed out staff that is ready for vacation… and they do. The staff usually go on vacation. Sometimes they do it all at once and the project is handled to another team.
The new team doesn’t have quite the vision of the old team. Because of this it takes longer for them to produce content, it takes time for them to get familiar with content creation tools, and everything is just generally slowed down.
Some horrifying changing of the guards include Age of Conan who did a full on shift having their entire staff go on a vacation and leaving a skeleton crew to work on updates.
Another horrible vacation launch was Lord of the Rings Online which launched with many horrifying bugs and a largely incomplete game. With most of the team off on vacation fixing everything was slow and the game would not become… uh… fun… until a year after launch.
So the folks at Bioware have learned their lesson from past failures and stated that they are keeping on all developers from the game to this one game which essentially means vacations will be done slow and effectively for their poor employees in Austin.
If they lose too many developers to vacations you will see a slow down in development and a twist in the vision of the game. If this happens you will see horrible consequences… and of course people leaving the game.
#4: And Finally… Summit Failure
Bioware came up with a really great idea for making this game better. They would invite guild masters to Austin, Texas (where the Bioware-Austin studio for SWTOR is located) and they would talk about what they want to see in the game, what needs work, and what they like.
It is an excellent opportunity for the folks at Bioware to really give people what they want and maintain those subscriptions.
The summit will start on March 4th and end on March 6th. So it’s under a week away.
This move is something similar to what CCP did. These are the guys who ran EVE Online and despite all odds and every single MMO out there getting consumed by World of Warcraft… they not only survived… they thrived. Surely Eve Online has had its ups and downs but the studio did so well they bought White-Wolf (makers of World of Darkness) and are finishing up on their masterpiece for console Dust 514.
The secret to this success with community interaction and acting upon it. CCP hired on permanent testers and created a gamer’s council. The gamer’s council could raise issues and vote upon it. This made it so that people with excessive amounts of in-game currency could use in-game currency to purchase more game time. Every motion passed was something gamers wanted and CCP continued to grant them that power.
CCP had a pretty big subscription loss last year when they opened an item’s shop against the will of gamers. It was a huge disconnect between community and developer, the first to happen since the game started up.
CCP apologized and hoped to get the gamers back… but they didn’t.
SWTOR’s Summit has one chance to impress. They have to take people’s ideas and actually be interested in them. If one idea is popular enough it has to go in the game. If an idea is actually innovative they need to develop it thoroughly.
By setting up this summit they have put them in a position where they have to make some radical changes to the game… or else people will leave to spite their failed efforts. In the end Bioware has to keep its promises. If it can prove to be a great developer to the MMO community they will stick around. If they just prove to be a money hungry group of thugs then people will leave like all the others
March 1, 2012: I made a grievous error in section 1. Rift did in fact have one end game dungeon Greenscale’s Blight.
When SWTOR developers Bioware-Austin announced they were putting something in the game that cost 2.5M credits to purchase everyone asked “how do you make that much money.”
TheGameGuru.Me 