SWTOR: Random Complaint thread. F2P means P2Win

[6souls]

EA and BioWare are going to try and revitalise Star Wars: The Old Republic by turning free-to-play. That transition could happen any day now; we're in autumn/fall, and that's as specific as EA and BioWare have been.

Perhaps we'll be waiting until mid-December and the game's first anniversary (20th December) for the F2P launch. That way SWTOR would have lasted a year as a subscription MMO.

Nevertheless, with the F2P transition approaching, EA has stipulated what you'll be able to get for free and what you'll need to pay for. This popped up yesterday, so apologies if you've already seen this elsewhere.

According to the SWTOR Subscription vs. free-to-play features, free players will:

• Have limited character creation options
• Be restricted to three Warzones (PVP matches), three Flashpoints (dungeons) and three Space Missions (spaceship combat) a week
• Not be able to take part in Operations (raids)
• Not be able to equip purple artifact-quality items
• Be restricted to five field revivals
• Not get priority space in server log-in queues
• Have a longer cooldown for Quick Travel
• Not have access to Emergency Fleet Pass

It sounds like free players may also have less inventory or cargo hold space. But as with most of the above, the restrictions can be overcome by paying for weekly passes or by spending Cartel Coins - paid-for currency. Money talks louder than mind tricks.

These restrictions aren't in place for the people who choose to subscribe to SWTOR.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...y-restrictions
http://www.swtor.com/free/features

[Prothescar]

So instead of making it into an actual F2P game, like they should be doing, they're making it into some bastardized shitfest. Why would anyone give it a chance play it for free with such immense restrictions placed down?

I see this as a PR stunt that will either fail miserably or garner minute support from mindless drones.

[6souls]

oh come on. you can do like 9 things a week, not terrible. >.>

[Isiolia]

oh come on. you can do like 9 things a week, not terrible. >.>

What'd concern me more than the restrictions on events are the limits on conveniences like field revivals or quick travel. Personally, I stopped playing due to the tedium and shitty combat system - F2P might make it tempting to go back and finish more story content, but not if it's going to be even worse than before.

[Ohemgee]

So instead of making it into an actual F2P game, like they should be doing, they're making it into some bastardized shitfest. Why would anyone give it a chance play it for free with such immense restrictions placed down?

I see this as a PR stunt that will either fail miserably or garner minute support from mindless drones.

DCUO and LOTRO have really nailed down the f2p stuff. I downloaded Lotro and I'm loving it so far (big tolkien fan, but its a solid wow clone which i can't complain is a bad thing at this point)

[Prothescar]

Yeah. Games like Guild Wars 2 and Aion do it well too. This isn't so much a "free to play" situation as much as it is a very limited trial that may as well just let you log on for 7 days before asking for a sub.

[Ohemgee]

Yeah. Games like Guild Wars 2 and Aion do it well too. This isn't so much a "free to play" situation as much as it is a very limited trial that may as well just let you log on for 7 days before asking for a sub.

I guess we have to distinguish terminology again.

In regards to real F2P: Aion (i think, only MMO i havent really played) and GW2 are all box price + no subs.

Lotro and dcuo are Free to download, with a bunch of in game purchases. It gets annoying after a while, but when you're invested in a 6 year old game that has content established it makes sense to play it now more than before.

That being said, I think SWTOR really needs to change their payment plan, because its sub or bust. 1.4 and 1.5 (which i'm glad is on the PTS now right after 1.4) added new PvE content, but it really doesn't add too much to the longevity of the game with how everything is made up to be. I haven't looked in to it since I stopped playing, but are raids still once a week upon completion? If so, that shit needs to change asap.

Who knows, further down the line SWTOR may really be a great game with great content. But its totally not worth paying now. Pay for content in 2012+ must be worth a sub fee for unlimited access. Lotro just restricts your character growth with f2p (you HAVE access to all content that comes with the game+expansions when you buy it, just limited amounts of shit)

[6souls]

[Amiricle]

I really dont see this model bringing back very many ex-players (At least not me anyway), but I'm sure it will get a decent number of new players to try it out.

[Guyverarmor]

I'm back, just re-subbed. For me, it's a pretty decent game. Hell as long as I am enjoying it, no harm in paying for it. Still got about 4 storylines to finish up, so I should be go for awhile.

[Rulke]

I want to, but even for free, I don't think I can force myself to return even to finish up the storyline I'm on.

[Insanecyclone]

You have to pay to unlock quickbars unless subbed. That's just downright pathetic.

http://www.darthhater.com/articles/s...locks-and-more

Summary of Subscriber Benefits

A minimum of 500 complimentary Cartel Coins per month to spend in the Cartel Market
10 additional Character Slots per server
Unlimited access to Warzones, Flashpoints, Space Combat and Operations
Access to all 6 Quick Bars
Priority position in Server queues
Full access to your inventory and Cargo Hold
Create a fully-featured Guild
Unrestricted access to chat
Expanded selection of character species
Free Skill Respecialization
Increased gains of Experience and Valor
Access to all equipment, regardless of quality
Lower costs when removing item modifications and adding augments
Earlier access to Sprint and Speeder Piloting
Access to the Emergency Fleet Pass ability
Learn three Crew Skills
Queue your crafting items
Increased Sale Slots on the Galactic Trade Network
Expand your Inventory and Cargo Hold With Credits

Hiding your helm too costs $$

[Prothescar]

lmfao, this is possibly the first "f2p mmo" that charges money to unlock UI features. I'd be embarrassed to call my product F2P in this state. I stick by my original assertion: it's a demo, nothing more, and it will do nothing to save the sinking ship.

[Dantrag]

lol.............

[Ohemgee]

Surprised they're not harping on the legacy shit

[Insanecyclone]

http://www.swtor.com/community/showt...30#edit5324230

We've been observing PTS closely over the last few days. In that time, we have generally been very pleased with how well the build has been performing, as well as overall reaction to the build both on the boards and in-game. That being said, based on community and internal feedback here and further deliberation, we will in short order make the following changes to the Free to Play restrictions:
Free-to-Play players will now get a second quickslot bar.
Free-to-Play players will now be able to do 5 Warzones per week instead of 3.
The Cartel Coin item lock (i.e. temporary bind) will be reduced to 3 days for Free-to-Play players, and 2 days for subscribers.

We've found some crucial bugs that needed stomping, which is good. These changes will make their way to you probably early next week.

There are a couple of key concepts that should be kept in mind as you review free to play changes. The first is that, to be honest, all of you are looking at a gameplay mode that you will likely never see. Subscribers who choose to cancel their account will typically revert to something that we refer to as preferred status. My fellow designer Nathan Emmott has a post up describing the ins and outs of Preferred Status. Originally, the second quickslot bar was part of preferred status, but this morning based on feedback here and what they were seeing in the community we decided to give it to everyone.

The second is Warzones. Perhaps the most interesting point regarding the Warzones limitation is that some players have concerns that putting limitations on Warzone runs might make Warzone queues less likely to fire. While it is possible that this may happen, we don't think it will -- our subscriber base likely will not shrink much, and for some of our competitors, converting to Free-to-Play has resulted in a subscriber increase! Which means that Warzone queues should likely see improvement from what you experience in game, and at minimum be relatively unchanged in experience.

That being said, one of our golden rules is that the Free-to-Play experience should not cheapen the experience for paying subscribers. If it turns out that the Free-to-Play conversion results in a degraded Warzone experience once we go live for subscribers, you can rest assured that we will quickly make adjustments to the system to ensure that subscribers have an optimal experience.

That being said, it is important conversely that the subscription offers subscribers strong, tangible benefits over the Free-to-Play experience. We value our subscribers greatly, and they are crucial to the success of Star Wars: the Old Republic.

Thank you for helping being our guinea pigs through this experience, and please continue to keep posting your feedback on issues here. We're listening!

http://www.swtor.com/community/showt...21#edit5324421

So the other bit of discussion to have is about the color crystals. I thought in this case that I would start the discussion with all of you, so that you could understand our logic and guide our thinking.

Currently, these crystals appear in cartel packs with a level 10 requirement, and on the store with a level 35 requirement, in order to access stats roughly equal to a standard level 50 color crystal. It's worth noting that color crystals are something that the itemization team stopped improving the itemization of shortly after launch, because people really hated losing their signature lightsaber color because it was no longer Best in Slot. We have, incidentally, seriously entertained removing all itemization from color crystals entirely (it makes many problems go away for us), but we didn't have the time to make such a large change on itemization before this patch went live.

The reason why we put these in with low level requirement is pretty simple: getting an item you can't use in the Cartel Packs really sucks. It's the same reason we pursued the tech that allowed us to make mounts adaptive - we expect a very large influx of new players when we launch free to play, and those guys opening cartel packs to get items they can't use for months (literally, for casual players!) is a negative experience, not a positive one.

So after discussing with the balance team, we decided to put these in with lower level requirements, with the following reasoning:
The balance math shows the bump to be pretty good at level 10 (not something the balance team was uncomfortable with, though), but pretty unremarkable by the time you hit, say, level 30 or so. Since pretty much open world PvP doesn't happen at those low levels, the impact on open world PvP is pretty much negligable.
The way the math works out, the benefit pretty much washed away by the bolster system in warzones, which means there is no significant advantage there.
The crystals are exactly as good as end-game color crystals, which means they have ZERO impact on endgame activities (level 50 ranked warzones, operations, heroic flashpoints, etc). We're still philosophically avoiding putting any stat advantage at this level that subscribers cannot earn through reasonable normal play.
The fact that these items are fully tradeable means that players who do think there's a balance advantage here can acquire them on the GTN for pure credits without spending a single cartel coin.

The net result of all of this is that slapping one of these color crystals in your saber at level 10 effectively makes levelling from levels 10 up somewhat easier, with the benefits tapering off quickly as the player levels up, and eventually zeroing out altogether. We felt, in general, that that was okay. The focus groups that we ran also seemed to think it was okay, as long as we avoided endgame power.

We are more than open to having a discussion about this and other options here (with the proviso that we have very limited time to make changes before this goes live!) if this continues to be perceived as an issue.

[Zetanio]

They seemed to miss the point of FtP...

[Ohemgee]

They seemed to miss the point of FtP...

No. They're doing the FOX news spin on F2P.

But really. There's no point in playing the game for free at all

[Zetanio]

No. They're doing the FOX news spin on F2P.

But really. There's no point in playing the game for free at all

I stopped giving them my money a long time ago, if it was totally F2P I'd reconsider but this is just silly. 5 Warzones a week? Super awesome!

[Insanecyclone]

I can see the reason behind some of these stupid decisions is because they're desperate in needed money after a waste of millions this project was/is.