Why Star Wars: The Old Republic is Losing Subscribers
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The problem is that this epic quest ends. The player has killed his main nemesis, saved the galaxy and.now what? An NPC tells them to do daily quests, engage in player-versus-player, or join with other players to do Operations ((raids) in other MMOs)) or Flashpoints ((dungeons). There are no more story missions to pursue. It's like the player's been unceremoniously dumped into an entirely different game.
This new game is a very average MMO. The Operations have some interesting boss fights but there's not enough content to keep serious raiders busy; most of the learning curve for each fight is simply adapt to strange bugs. The Flashpoints are more challenging and fun than the Operations but there's little reason to run them more than once because they give crappier gear than the latter. Furthermore, the Operations are tuned in such a way that you don't need to farm up Flashpoints for gear before you start them. The daily quests take too long to reach so they feel like busy work rather than a fun part of your gaming routine. The player-versus-player Warzones, meanwhile, have the same flag-running and territory-capturing that you've seen in any other MMO with PvP.
A player who doesn't like the end-game options for Old Republic could just roll a new character. There are eight different classes in the game so that's eight different BioWare-caliber stories to play through. Unfortunately, though, there's a lot of shared content between different classes. For every unique class quest you complete, there's maybe three or four quests designed for all classes. While my Sith Assassin's storyline was a nice change from my Bounty Hunter's, the thought of slogging through Nar Shaddaa's quests again removed all enthusiasm.
