How massive do you want your MMO to be anyway?

In case you haven't heard yet, The Old Republic's subscriptions are down by almost a quarter since EA's last earnings call. Obviously this isn't good news for anyone who wants to see the game succeed, though 1.3 million subs are still nothing to scoff at. In all honesty though, I kind of expected this drop-off to happen, even if I was hoping for Bioware's sake that it wouldn't. It's been quite obvious from the gaming media that SWTOR has become a victim of its own hype and that many people who bought into it ended up being disappointed and leaving the game. Those numbers were going to show sooner or later, and that's okay.

The thing is, it's still a great game for what it is, and the important thing for the devs to do right now is to keep making improvements and adding new content for the players who do like it. If people are having enough fun, they'll tell their friends. Just don't panic about winning back every single person who bought the game on launch and ended up unsubbing shortly after. I get that EA wants to have as many subscribers as possible, but you can't please all the people all the time - and honestly? My own game experience is actually better without people whining in general chat about how Bioware fails and how they are going back to WoW soon. 

On a related note, but not entirely the same subject, the official forums are awash with demands for server merges. Inquisitive Myths has some interesting numbers on how active some servers really are. Now, I understand that it is possible for a server's population to shrink enough that group activities stop being viable, but I do kind of wonder where that limit actually lies. (A future subject for Mythbusting perhaps?) In general I would think that SWTOR servers should actually be able to sustain themselves with a smaller population than those in many other MMOs, simply because standard groups generally only require four or eight people (sixteen is possible for operations but I think that's a bit of a niche thing considering that there's no benefit to it), where other games require larger numbers. I wonder how much of the "my server is dead" talk is really just perception.

I mean, what are your first thoughts when you see this screenshot? "My god, that server is dead"? Does it make it any better if I add that it was taken at roughly 5am CET, when all the night owls had finally gone to bed but the early risers weren't online yet? To me it was certainly a bit of a novelty to be the only person on the fleet, but I didn't find it disconcerting. Maybe it's an old-fashioned view to still think of my fellow players as people more than content, but it comes naturally to me to accept that people need to sleep sometimes. It's part of the natural rhythm of the world, both real and virtual. When I saw someone whine about how dead the game was just because they couldn't get a group for normal mode Taral V at 3am in the morning, I just thought that this was ridiculous.

Sometimes I also wonder whether Bioware haven't done themselves a disservice by putting that little population number in the top left corner of the screen in each zone. I mean, I appreciate it as a feedback tool, because it makes it easy to adjust my expectations for getting a response to requests or questions posted in general chat, but I get the impression that a lot of people simply look at it, see a single digit and immediately feel like the sky is falling. In another game, the zones might have exactly the same or even a lower population, but because it's not actively pointed out to the player and most don't bother with using the /who command all the time, they might never even notice. "I can't believe I'm the only person in Un'goro Crater right now, clearly WoW is dead!"

Maybe it's also because I have a lower "crowd threshold" than others due to being a bit of an introvert. Of course I want to see other people around in my MMO, but I don't necessarily need to have loads of them in one spot. Every now and then it's nice to have a big event that brings everyone together, but I don't need massive crowds in my everyday play. Being unable to click on the NPCs because there are so many other players in the way doesn't enhance my gaming experience. The Republic fleet on my server rarely sees more than fifty people online whenever I'm around, but to me this feels just fine. In fact, when I log over to an Empire alt and there's two to three times as many people on and general chat is buzzing with LFG requests, it actually makes me feel a bit overwhelmed.

All that said, I can absolutely see that there are certain thresholds where lower population becomes an issue. For example we pretty much never have more than two warzones running at once on Republic side, one for the low levels and one for the fifties. This means that if you're the ninth person in the queue you have to wait twenty to thirty minutes between matches even during prime time, and two or three people deciding to stop for the night immediately prevents any new games from popping at all, effectively grounding everyone else as well.

I do hope that Bioware will think of a good way of addressing these issues, though for now there are at least some stopgap measures that people can take to alleviate the situation themselves. To use my warzone example, no time like the present to get some guildies interested in PvP if you're just one or two people short for getting a game to pop...