This post is spot on and I wish that more people would read and understand this information.
Although I still, desperately want to enjoy SWTOR. I made some great friends in that game and I will really, really miss playing with them. One of them told me last week, “the way I see it I’m paying $15 a month to hand out and play a game with people I consider to be my friends.”

I respect that and I really like hanging out with my guildmates. I can’t keep paying BW/EA $15, $135 the remainder of the year, for a game that isn’t delivering anything I enjoy other than a forum to hang out with my favorite group of gamers.

ESO is dropping SO MUCH CONTENT this year that my head is swimming wondering how I’m going to experience it all and still have a life outside gaming… Meanwhile with SWTOR I would pay $15 a month so that I could binge watch GoT while grinding through the same 5 year old content…
I would end up shutting SWTOR off and just watch GoT…

Thanks man, it’s scarily easy to get drawn into the petty squabbles on here but i’m making a concerted effort to try and ‘stay on target’ to quote Gold 5 from episode 3, especially with 5.2 so close to landing.
I love having discourse over the game with intelligent people and although our views are different I love hearing peoples opinions on the game and even though we don’t agree, we can respect each others views.
I don’t know and we’ll probably never know why KOTFE and KOTET came about, and the subsequent drive into PVE/Solo play.
I can see that maybe they wanted to get back to the grass roots of what made Swtor so amazing to begin with i.e the initial stories, perhaps looking to get in fresh blood but why they didn’t see any potential warning signs from the established community as a whole, a greater percentage of which is group/ops based players who want it to move forward in that direction is a strange one. I can only surmise that they expected you to be satisfied with re-jigged hard/vet modes and uprisings which from appearances certainly isn’t cutting it for you guys.
One positive is that they went into Kotfe/kotet with great gusto (as bad as it was) so hopefully they still have that drive and vision for new group content.
I’m going to respond to Wayshuba here as it covers the same topic we were both discussing, one which Wayshuba puts very well I may add, and agree with a lot of his points.
Initially I think it’s maybe a bad comparison between swtor and Eso and FFIV only because they are relatively new/revived games that are pouring out content to a new audience, much like the early days of swtor, where every update brought a new wave of add-ons, basic features that make a game what it is. I am aware that swtor didn’t have housing till much later in it’s existence however I like to think that’s a Quality of life improvement, a non essential addition to a game that is fun more than real content.
Wow I think is a good example of a game that was described by many as dying, especially after Wod which many people hated leaving a near 4 year drought in decent content, but they turned it around big time with Legion and I hope Bioware take a leaf from their book in turning Swtor around the same way.
To sum up it is in Bioware’s best interests to get this title back to the way it should be, and reap the benefits of an increasing subscription audience, but they will need time and much effort to get there.
And with a such hostile community who are waiting to jump on any sign of delay or failure it’s going to be some task.

I find the time and effort wasted defying the player base on CXP, the dates between worthwhile updates and the focus on churning out the same old, same old through the cartel market tell a different story. I’m not being insulting here, but I wish I could see the game through whatever tint the glasses you are wearing have, because I don’t see any evidence on their end to support that optimism. Its yours to have, but I just don’t see any big effort coming down the pipes for us. How many times can a game fall flat on its face before they throw up their hands.

If I was an executive, looking at the numbers on this game, initial investment, plus day to day expenses, the cost of these videos they’ve made, all the cash they’ve poured into the game over and over, and I saw the numbers of people logged in dropping in defiance regardless of efforts. If I saw how everything the studio came out with was received by the players. If I paid attention to reviews and how the mmo community (not the swtor community alone) regarded the game, I would be embarrassed. I’d be running to the plug.

I had a friend who I used to bug to play swtor all the time in the first 4 years of the game. They finally joined up about 6 months ago. I was embarrassed all the time while they played. Years old bugs, terrible systems, everything was cartel market to the point where they as a new player pretty much couldn’t touch the GTN. Its probably a huge contributor to how I feel about the game now…that and the part where they fractured the community by systematically telling splinter groups to piss off, they didn’t matter. I think we’ve all lost friends in these little spurts until we are the only ones remaining in these tiny little cliques. That’s no way to run progression, or roleplay, or even enjoy the game from day to day.

Thanks for the interesting discussions guys, it is good to cover this with reality in view.

That being said, here is my take and why.

SWTOR is done. EA had put a rumored $300 million into this game ($200 million development and $100 million marketing), plus the on-going investment over the last five years. The made a big bet on this title to become a staple in their overall portfolio (they expected it to account for 20% of their total revenues by now) and it never achieved that. Not only that, it has never even made their money back.

Considering an average AAA title for EA is usually around a $40 million investment, EA could have pumped out 7 other titles for that money that probably would have made them around $500-$600 million in return.

My point being, when looking at this solely from a business perspective, EA just doesn’t see the investment being worth it anymore. I think what frustrates most people is SWTOR really could have been the market contender that EA had envisioned – it’s just that BioWare was the wrong studio to do it.

ESO and FFXIV, on the other hand, have a major commitment from their backers. This is why they have turned these titles around and continue to invest in them. The big difference is they both learned from their launch mistakes and corrected for them. SWTOR never did. There has always been a certain arrogance from BioWare and, despite the failure of the TORtanic, they never became humbled from the experience. Both Zenimax and Square-Enix did however.

Finally, I think SWTOR is only going to survive long enough for EA to fill in their Star Wars portfolio a bit more (with the new upcoming releases) and then the plug is being pulled.

ESO seems to be doing comprehensive new updates about every 6 months or so. Huge ones at that.

Maybe WoW, EQ and EQ2 got away with taking extremely long periods of time to release updates back in the day, but game developers can’t get away with that anymore.
There are too many other games out there and even Blizzard now realizes that they can’t put so much time between content updates any more.