It was a big goal for them to avoid a stuttering start, where ”historically” others have tended to where they’d have ”really rough” opening months. Limited launch was the solution.
The subscriber numbers for Star Wars: The Old Republic are still climbing and retention ”has been very good.” The community is still growing and hasn’t peaked yet it seems.
”The launch went really, really well. I think sort of surprisingly smoothly,” admitted Dickinson. ”A smooth launch was one of our goals,” he added. ”We had seen massively multiplayer game launches in the past, and historically, it never goes well. Historically, even the best ones out there had a really rough first one or two months.”
By limiting the number of initial players BioWare could adjust to the sheer demand better without servers buckling under the strain and leaving fans frustrated and put off. ”That really was all about making sure we could get population spread appropriately, and not have that huge rush on day one that could bring our login servers down,” he said.
”There are so many steps in the chain where you can’t test for that scale. In fact you can’t even build to that scale, because the one-day launch event is going to be way, way bigger than even your day 10.”
At the start of February EA stated that SWTOR had 1.7 million subscribers to the MMO which is a phenomenal number for a new title in the market, especially a subscription-based one. The danger is having those users not return once the free trial period has ended but EA and BioWare are happy with the figures.
”We’re still in a place where we’re growing, which is awesome,” remarked Dickinson. As of now BioWare is prepping the largets update yet for The Old Republic, patch 1.2, which adds a number of adjustments to the game and finally unlocks the Legacy system and empowers the user to customise the GUI.
”We are not perfect in our patches,” admitted Dickinson. ”We’ve had a couple patches where we announce ‘We’ve fixed all these bugs!’ … But then we introduce one bug, and that’s the one that’s brutal, it’s right in your face, and the players go up in a storm, then the press picks it up and says ‘Oh god, it’s broken!’”
”One thing is that our public test server has been under-utilized thus far. We’re pushing pretty hard to the community to say, ‘When the 1.2 patch comes up for public test, we really want you to come over. We want a lot of people to jump on there. We have a lot of QA, but we can’t simulate the load or the gameplay of players on every single system.”
Patches are a way of life for any MMO as they need constant tweaking especially when new content gets released. Have you been adventuring in a galaxy far, far away? See below for what update 1.2 will bring.
