Quote bhedrick Quote: Originally Posted by That is probably a legitimate criticism of the survey, but my point still stands: people are railing against Bioware for being out of touch, when its much more likely that the forums are out of touch with what is popular with the "typical" SWTOR player.



Feedback that essentially insinuates that they are too dumb to understand their own customer base, or that they are malevolent and for some reason intentionally trolling their customers, is arrogant and unhelpful. Feedback that suggests the tools they use to gauge customer interest needs improvement, or that the PR team should be more measured, is probably useful to them.



When you analyze mutual fund performance, you have to include the funds that shut down due to poor performance to avoid bias in your data analysis. BioWare needs to understand why every subscriber that left is no longer here instead of simply polling the remaining ones, otherwise the analysis is intrinsically flawed due to survivorship bias and only reinforces the decision paths that have led to the steady decline in long-term subscribers over time.



And please no one reply that subs are up 33% per EA's last quarterly earnings report. There is a massive difference between persistent subscribers (greater than 90 days) and transient subscribers (less than 90 days). The short-term bump in subscribers is because BioWare forced people to subscribe instead of a buy-to-play expansion. Unless that increase is sustained for multiple financial quarters it's just misleading because it was transactional revenue disguised as recurring revenue. Let me be helpful then... the survey is further proof that BioWare is much better about using the word data in talking points than in useful analysis. They constantly confuse lagging indicators for leading indicators, for instance what's left of the player base cares more for a story-defying 25th companion than end-game MMO content because BioWare has decimated the game's MMO subscriber population over the past four years.When you analyze mutual fund performance, you have to include the funds that shut down due to poor performance to avoid bias in your data analysis. BioWare needs to understand why every subscriber that left is no longer here instead of simply polling the remaining ones, otherwise the analysis is intrinsically flawed due to survivorship bias and only reinforces the decision paths that have led to the steady decline in long-term subscribers over time.And please no one reply that subs are up 33% per EA's last quarterly earnings report. There is a massive difference between persistent subscribers (greater than 90 days) and transient subscribers (less than 90 days). The short-term bump in subscribers is because BioWare forced people to subscribe instead of a buy-to-play expansion. Unless that increase is sustained for multiple financial quarters it's just misleading because it was transactional revenue disguised as recurring revenue.





& Andrew on Founder, Retired GM of <Fortitude> on Jedi Covenant & Andrew on SWTOR Economics Avin