Accelerated Time-table
February 7, 2012 4 Comments
With the release of news of SW:TOR having an 85% retention rate going into month 2 (hat-tip), with “most” of them paying at this point. So, I decided to go ahead and look around to see what kind of bargain I could get on a boxed copy of the game. Happily, I found a listed brand new copy on E-bay for ~$35 US after shipping. With a friendly WAR-blogger-fellow rerolling to Republic, I bit the bullet and just decided to accelerate the deal. That was Friday I believe, and I got the game last night. Fast shipping FTW. So, I’m in the game now. Playing a Light-side Jedi Guardian, just like I did in the beta. Happily mashing my space-bar through all the conversations because they are identical to what I did before. I stayed up way past my bed time, finishing up Tython and getting my light-saber.
Things that encouraged me to go ahead and dive in earlier:
- MMO boredom: I’m not plugged in to EVE with any corp, and don’t have the time for the highly fun, but time-consuming socio-political machinations that make the game great.
- An impressive quote: “As a result of greater than expected earnings in Q3, EA will increase the marketing budget for Star Wars: The Old Republic in Q4.”
- The Rahk-ghoul thing: BioWare is hitting the game hard with content updates right out the gate. Keep it up like Trion is with Rift, and you’ll make customer’s very happy.
- DotA2 and LoL are methadone: These two games are amazing fun. But if you require a sense of persistence & progression, that’s just not what these games do, and I crave some of that.
- HeroEngine: I was curious to see how well it actually played out, and I won’t get another chance until Dominus launchers.
- Lum likes it. That’s worth at least giving it a try for $35.
So yeah, let loose the slings and arrows, and all that jazz.
About Shadow
Shadow-war 
The 85% retention rate given by EA is interesting because X-Fire shows a 33% drop in “hours played.” This really illustrates how you can’t use X-Fire charts to prove your points with factual accuracy…
Either EA is lying (doubt it) or the drop in hours reported by X-Fire is not correlated to retention rate at all and is merely those same 85% of players simply playing less hours. Or perhaps SWTOR only retained 67% of X-Fire users.
It’s really hard to say!
Hours played don’t equal people retained.
For circumstancial evidence you only have to look at a small population.
These facts could exist at the same time:
You have 100 gamers in Decembers each playing an average of 6 hours a day which is 600 hours a day.
In January you have 85 gamers playing an average of 4.7 hours a day which is 400 hours.
So, Xfire and EA might not either be lying. It makes plausible sense mathematically and statistically that not only was there a loss of 15% of the player base when it came time to renew subscription, but on top of that the existing player are not playing less hours a week.
Which to me, makes perfect sense. Last night Shadow played roughly what, 5 hours straight. Would he have done that on a normal weeknight say a month from now?
*…on top of that, the existing players are now playing less hours a week.
Hell no. I just wanted my glowstick damnit. Last night I think I played for 2, and logged in for 3.