I have tried Free to Play...

[Kelimbror]

Well, if you felt like looking you would find that they didn't "lie" because they've moved the goal post

In the end, personal story can simply be the fact that you, as an individual, have a hand in what is going on. It doesn't mean you have to feel special, or have anything different than any other MMO. Literally just questing with no impact on your surroundings can be personal story at the end of the day.

Hopefully that's not what happens though.

[zerocarbs]

I was specifically referring to what was said in beta as I don't pay as much attention anymore. But it doesn't really matter.

[RoninaThorstone]

In the end, personal story can simply be the fact that you, as an individual, have a hand in what is going on. It doesn't mean you have to feel special, or have anything different than any other MMO. Literally just questing with no impact on your surroundings can be personal story at the end of the day.

Hopefully that's not what happens though.

Exactly.

We say "personal quests series" thinking the chapter 1 to 3 experience and they could be saying "personal quest series" and be talking about the Ilum interlude.

[Deleted]

Way way OT but...Ateup, loving the sig pic and avatar!

[RoninaThorstone]

But it doesn't really matter.

Well.

It does matter to some people.
Personally, I've been blown away by Rifts streamlined questing experience at 50+. Its a hard grind to 60 but the way that you "find" quests is just so much less tedious than talking to 5 dudes standing around a hologram / camp fire

[Kudos]

I tried the F2P option when it first launched, and had trouble squeezing all the abilities from my 50 Sorc and 40 Agent onto two actions bars. The other gripe I had, was that I had over 5 million credits, yet it capped me at 350k. I still don't know if I'll get all those credits back if I re-sub.

I just got an email, saying that they have lifted the action bar limit from 2 to 4. This is a good move, and will actually entice me to try playing again, because I was unwilling to pay to add a few extra action bars.

I get the game is free. If I were just starting out, and didn't know what all the features were missing, I think the game would be awesome. Still, the game is going to succeed or fail on the ability to get old players back into the game, and playing more and ultimately paying more. Unfortunately, old players will instantly log in, and it's made abundantly clear what the restrictions are. For many, this will be a huge stumbling block.

[anyaka21]

I tried the F2P option when it first launched, and had trouble squeezing all the abilities from my 50 Sorc and 40 Agent onto two actions bars. The other gripe I had, was that I had over 5 million credits, yet it capped me at 350k. I still don't know if I'll get all those credits back if I re-sub.

I just got an email, saying that they have lifted the action bar limit from 2 to 4. This is a good move, and will actually entice me to try playing again, because I was unwilling to pay to add a few extra action bars.

I get the game is free. If I were just starting out, and didn't know what all the features were missing, I think the game would be awesome. Still, the game is going to succeed or fail on the ability to get old players back into the game, and playing more and ultimately paying more. Unfortunately, old players will instantly log in, and it's made abundantly clear what the restrictions are. For many, this will be a huge stumbling block.

I understand the point, but honestly, I just don't get the argument. How would you treat a returning customer? They know what they are missing, I'll grant you that, but they are coming back as a f2p player. In other words, outside of what they did at the beginning, they aren't spending a dime to keep the game going.

It's an honest question. How would you treat a returning player?

edit: btw, if you sub for 1 month, you'll be able to get all of your creds back and then you can use them to purchase a lot of the gtn things you'll want if you decide to stay and go f2p

[Kelimbror]

I tried the F2P option when it first launched, and had trouble squeezing all the abilities from my 50 Sorc and 40 Agent onto two actions bars. The other gripe I had, was that I had over 5 million credits, yet it capped me at 350k. I still don't know if I'll get all those credits back if I re-sub.

I just got an email, saying that they have lifted the action bar limit from 2 to 4. This is a good move, and will actually entice me to try playing again, because I was unwilling to pay to add a few extra action bars.

I get the game is free. If I were just starting out, and didn't know what all the features were missing, I think the game would be awesome. Still, the game is going to succeed or fail on the ability to get old players back into the game, and playing more and ultimately paying more. Unfortunately, old players will instantly log in, and it's made abundantly clear what the restrictions are. For many, this will be a huge stumbling block.

They have stated they recognize the flaws with preferred players as, just like you said, they know exactly what they are missing. these are the people they want subscribing, but these are the people who already said it wasn't worth it. I think this market they are hoping to lure into the Cartel Market for unlocks and not a sub. They have made some adjustments to make this more appealing, like the 4 action bars and now 6 character slots.

TBH giving 6 character slots was far more important to get old people checking the game out again and maybe spending some money.

[RoninaThorstone]

It's an honest question. How would you treat a returning player?

I would give them 5,000 coins if they bought the 60 dollar box.
Period.

PS I JUST GOT MY 3RD TRADE SKILL OFF THE GTN FOR 350K LOLOLOLOLOLOL

[anyaka21]

I would give them 5,000 coins if they bought the 60 dollar box.
Period.

PS I JUST GOT MY 3RD TRADE SKILL OFF THE GTN FOR 350K LOLOLOLOLOLOL

I'm telling you the 350k cred cap is going to beneficial in the long run. Players will recognize the cred cap and prices will begin to fall.

[RoninaThorstone]

I'm telling you the 350k cred cap is going to beneficial in the long run. Players will recognize the cred cap and prices will begin to fall.

Yeah, I agreed with you. (or kitty, forget who I was agreeing with).

But yeah. I love the GTN. I have so many unlocks and my coin stack is untouched.

[Kudos]

I understand the point, but honestly, I just don't get the argument. How would you treat a returning customer? They know what they are missing, I'll grant you that, but they are coming back as a f2p player. In other words, outside of what they did at the beginning, they aren't spending a dime to keep the game going.

It's an honest question. How would you treat a returning player?

I honestly think that the worst decision they made was to restrict the action bars. Some classes, especially the agent suffer from a massive amount of abilities. My Agent was only level 40, yet I didn't even want to play her, because I saw no real way to cram them all into two bars. The fact that they are lifting this restriction to 4 for preferred status, indicates they have realised this was a massive, and legitimate barrier for many people - myself included.

I can live with all of the other restrictions, but this is just one example. And yes, a returning player isn't paying anything to come back and check out the game, but if they don't stay and continue playing, then there's zero chance of them actually paying anything to help the game continue.

[deathtakes]

I'm currently playing F2P, while the lockouts of things like the action bar, some items, whispers, companion customization etc. is very annoying it doesn't bother me because I got what I wanted out of it. I wanted to find out if I would like to play this game, and I do, therefore I'm going to subscribe to unlock everything. I think a lot of you are really over thinking this whole thing and are really just trying to find a work around to get as much of the game as you can for as little as possible, but since you can't get the whole game for free you're pissed off. At least that's what it looks like to me.

[Psychlon]

@Ateup

I suggest to read the login screen of any lvl 50 character.... . Every personal story is made to bring you from lvl 1 to lvl 50. As we didn't see any level cap increases I see little reason to add more personal stories. They can just go along with planetary quest for makeb but they very much could add a little bit something to your personal story as the story amount per planet is actually not that hugh.


@topic

I think the majority of people complaining about the F2P system are mostly prefered status player. People which most likely have had a subscription before and can feel/ see all the restrictions. However this will always be the same.... taking something "away" people were used to is never good. The best steps now are to make prefered status as a someone more player friendly like... headslot/ color matching, some chats, inventory etc. . If you can come back as an ex-subscriber and just pay for content you want to experience, not for "features" affecting your gameplay.

[Deleted]

I'm telling you the 350k cred cap is going to beneficial in the long run. Players will recognize the cred cap and prices will begin to fall.

Interesting statement. Any reasoning for that? Someone who, essentially, wants to buy credits with real money can easily just buy cartel packs for 360 coins and sell them for 450-500k a pop instead of getting 350k for some unlock that might cost up to 1200 coins. Sure there is a dumb guy born every day but I highly doubt that this is going to be some stable business. On my server there are barely 20 unlocks being sold on any time and even those are just the cheap ones and not the expensive account wide stuff.

[ZeroWashu]

Exactly.

Not to mention that you should have to work very hard to get the whole game for free...like seriously, pay for convenience otherwise grind it out. This isn't news.

Nothing related to the UI or presentation of the game should cost real money. What is next, charging for turning to the left? Or perhaps using the second mouse button?

Yeah, in the F2P and as a beer and pretzels game its not bad. Simply using SWTOR while queued; virtual machines are great. Still love the sound of light sabers and blasters in the game but damn it has the same problem WOW does; ability bloat.

[Armourboy]

I honestly don't expect much from them at this point but it has become obvious that they didn't have a single update to class stories ready to go. I don't want to say they lied because I don't feel like hunting down exact quotes but they certainly implied it.

TBH this is the point where they lost me. Going through Beta and the early part of the game they talked about how story based the game was, and how they had so much stuff they were working on to keep things interesting. The day the new dailies came out on Corellia and all they were was a box with a list of daily quests to go do, with like two 5 seconds story quests , I unsubbed and went back to WoW. Now thats not saying that WoW is any better or any different than a box with a list of daily quests, but in my mind if I was going to be doing the same exact thing, I might as well be playing the one that already had all the bells and whistles.

I keep debating on whether or not to give the F2P option a go, and they seem to be making it less terrible by changing some things, but It still all comes back to that computer terminal and knowing that part of it really hasn't changed.

[Psychlon]

Your reason to quit SWTOR must be on the "10 most silliest reasons to quit a game"-list. Personal story was to get you through your leveling experience to not have the same leveling way for each character.... .

[Armourboy]

Your reason to quit SWTOR must be on the "10 most silliest reasons to quit a game"-list. Personal story was to get you through your leveling experience to not have the same leveling way for each character.... .

See thats the problem though, every toon did have exactly the same leveling way, minus the few class story elements which was probably like 5% of the content. Really though that wasn't even the largest issue, my problem was at end game, level 50. They sold the game on story, a new patch comes out in a new area so I was expecting some new story, not really new for every single class, but just in general something to move the game story along. I think that was back in March or April and it was kind of the first big content patch after release, and the debate for years was if they could keep up with the voice acting and quest creation part that made the game different. By setting up a computer terminal it just felt to me that it was showing that they wouldn't be able to keep up with it.

Thats not to say that they didn't add some stuff along those lines that I did think was good, the Rhakgoul event was neat, but it was short lived. While I did like it I felt about it like I did about the holidays in WoW, something fun to do, but not something that will keep you around long term.

Keep in mind as well, when we were going through Beta everything from BioWare was about story, everything, including how it would be updated often and how the voice acting wouldn't be an issue because they had X amount already done. I can't imagine that I'm the only one who left because it felt like that part wasn't really going to be forth coming in the future.

[Arteous]

I don't think they implemented that. He was just talking about a future that he envisioned where the game would be "free" but would be heavily monetized with microtransactions, like "you want to reload, that will be $1."

And swtor is a perfet testbed since they know it techincally flopped. They have nothing to lose by testing the heavily monetized model with it. I honestly belive this model is the scourge of gaming. next we'll see another version of it on single player games. nothing like earlier shareware where you could try a few levels and see if you liked it. More of the try the whole thing but you really can't do anything fun in it till you spend some money.

In my opinions the few mistakes they did at start that ended up in my opinion making them fail.

1. Broken heroic dungeons (hard modes). Seriously buggy and obiously untested hardmodes were near impossible for the most part (revan hardmode dungeon was impossible unless you had a tank assasin and sacraficed someone. That's just 1 example. You could spend 2 months (like i did) wiping over and over with huge repair bills doing these hardmodes getting ready for the first raid. Or you could go pvp for that gear and spend 1/2 the time and 1/100th the repair bill to get equivalent gear. (more on this in #2.

2. Simply pvp gear was just as good as pve gear in raids/dungeons. Only diference was how you looked. So everyone who busted their ass in 5 mans getting gear felt cheated that they could of spent much less time to gear up for pve. this translated into pvp armor being best overall because the game did promote alot of pvp.

The game should of been delayed till the hardmodes were ready. Raids were better tuned and less buggy than the heroic 4mans. Or they should of made the top tier pvp armor unavailable untill hardmode dungeons were fixed.

Raids were too easy. Sure there were a few difficulties but i'd dare say 80% of those diffculties were issues with boss scripts and glitches.

3. The world felt too tunnled. I really think the feel of the plantes were more like COD/BF2 single player campaings that ohter people could be running arround in. Look at WoW, EQ, DAOC ect ect. open worlds. I don't recall the planet (the one you get an injection to survive due to the polution ect. is basically a norht/south tunnel where you progress north till you're done and you head back south to the starport. correlia falls prey to this too. I have to say true it's more of a giant city than a world. i just can't walk into that planet and think this is a planet.. it's a city. i keep thinking of SWG's Correlia and feel THAT was a planet.

4. Ea's micromanaging. Seriously by what i've read in blogs and other sources the game was rushed to appease the suits. alot changed to appease the suits last minute. I pine for the day that companies return to the "When it's done" motto. even blizzard lately has fallen prey to rushing releases *cough*diablo3*cough*

5. No reason to really retun to old worlds. If you planned eveyrthing right as you leveld you got all your holocrons so there really was no reason to revisit all those worlds. SWG's resource system kept players going to EVERY world for mining/gathering/skinning/harvesting. Rare npc's and tougher creatures ketp you scouring those planets as well. once you were done in a zone you left. even if you din't get everything off the vendor of that planet. And there was no reason to ever go back and get more commendations of that planet for anything on a vendor. BAD MOVE.

i was truly exited for that game i really was. i just feel maybe star wars is a cursed licence when it comes to MMO's.

sorry i ended up making the post a bit longer than needbe. i just wish this game would of been what i hoped for.