There’s a thing that happens to sports teams when the coach ‘loses the locker room’, meaning that the coach has lost the trust and confidence of his team. I think that Bioware has truly lost the locker room with SW:TOR at this point.
The forums have always been a terrible place, but with the failure of patch 1.2 and now the morale-busting news that 25% of the subscriber base bailed last quarter, they are really becoming tough to read.
SW:TOR will be free to play by 2013.
Moral of the story kids: don’t release an MMO in a flooded market with a ridiculously easy end-game and no real PvP bracketing.
Word problems brah: If it takes your core player base on average 1.5 months to max out, and it takes you 4 months for a meaningful content update to the endgame, and you have been out 5 months = you are going to have a bad time.