In preparation for launch (ah, those words sound so good) there are several things happening in the SWTOR hemisphere and a lot of them involve deleting/wiping all sorts of data. Earlier today some of you may or may have not received an email suggesting you uninstall your SWTOR Beta client. Things are not as straightforward as that. It is suggested that everyone that played the beta since before November 25th should uninstall their client. Still, it is also said that if you played the beta after that date you should be able to patch up to the launch version. If you participated in the beta earlier than the Big Beta Weekend you might have a lot of leftover files that will just take up space or worse break your SWTOR installation. In that case you might want to just uninstall the damn thing and download it anew once early access downloads are available. This and more is explained in the thread posted on the official forums here.
 
While we’re on the topic of forums … the official ones will be wiped come December 10 and they will be replaced by bigger, better forums. If you want to save any private messages or important threads the time to do so is now! Among the changes there will be new forums and subforums including a community blog feature. You can read the official announcement here (before it is wiped from existence).
 
There were 750.000 unique players during the Thanksgiving Beta Test and more than two million applied for the beta out of 2.4 registered on the official swtor.com website. In case you don’t know (which means that: a) you never participated in a MMO beta before or launch; or: b) you were hiding under a rock) ALL of the characters created by those players in the beta will be wiped as the servers are prepared for launch.
 
With all the above said – 10 DAYS LEFT – before people will be able to create their first permanent characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Never thouhgt I’ll see the day.
 

SWTOR Life is proud to present another addition to the site that we hope all Old Republic fans will appreciate. It is a page that will keep track of all the posts Bioware developers and staff are making on the official forums. There is a version of this found on the official site (link), but we weren’t satisfied with the features it has, nor the functionality. We present you a version that has instant search (it’s more of a filter applied to all posts) of all dev posts integrated so you can search for posts only by one of the developers or a keyword. You can also sort all the dev posts by the person that posted, forum it was posted in or date. We plan on adding more features to the page, like adding Twitter posts to the mix, and we hope to bring them very soon. It is still in a sort of a beta state so please report any problems you might have with it.

My main motivation behind this post is the fact that very soon official swtor.com forums will be hitting 1 million registered users. At the moment of this article being written the number of users is 999296 (you can check this by entering http://www.swtor.com/community/member.php?u=999296 and incrementing the number at the end until you get the message “Invalid User specified”). This made me wonder how does The Old Republic fair against the market leader, World of Warcraft, and a popular newcomer that is about to be released this week, Rift. Please note that all of these numbers do not necessarily mean anything, because we are looking at three products in different stages of their lifecycle and the numbers come from “unreliable” sources. They are unreliable because they depend on how active a company is on a certain social network. There are however some trends showing up that I just couldn’t look away from.
NOTE 1: The number of forum members is a bit tricky because just having a WoW account makes you a forum member. SWTOR forum member number is based on reading the URL and it is actually a number of created accounts and not active accounts. Rift is about to be released and I think their current forum number is based on preorders and not all of the people that purchased the game. I will revisit this in a month or so to see how the numbers changed.
NOTE 2: Included are alexa.com traffic rank stats as well. There is a problem with World of Warcraft traffic rank because prior to the release of Cataclysm expansion they moved their main community site from www.worldofwarcraft.com domain to battle.net domain. I am providing a graph of both these domains traffic ranks where you can clearly see the change in traffic rank for worldofwarcraft.com and battle.net. At the same time battle.net traffic rank also includes rank for other Blizzard games. That is why I chose WoW’s traffic rank prior to Cataclysm which was around 1000. Rift’s traffic rank drastically rose around beta time. Prior to that it was at around ~40.000.

	World of Warcraf	Rift	Star Wars The old Republic
Facebook Likes	1,145,267	138,228	253,228
Twitter Followers	113,224	15,244	28,473
No. Forum Users	Unknown	179,055	999296 (estimate)
Alexa.com traffic rank	~1000	6,450	12,494

alexa.com traffic rank 6 month comparison

I wouldn’t want to draw any solid conclusion from this but The Old Republic is doing very good for a game that hasn’t even entered pure beta stage. It is already approximately two times as popular as Rift, which can be contributed to the awesome promotion Bioware has been doing and I think mostly thanks to the Deceived and Hope trailers. We’ll revisit these numbers in three weeks when Rift should be at its peak to see if choosing this particular moment had an effect on Rift’s numbers. I welcome all your comments on the subject and suggestions and interpretations.