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SWTOR offering "free to play option" this Fall. [Update: More Details]

A positive step forward. One can't deny that. My only issue is that I don't want to pay a monthly fee. I will gladly pay for unlocks and further level advancement. Or heck, 15-20 just to unlock the 50 cap and continue to play. 15 a month is more than I am willing to pay for an MMO.

Note, I'd gladly pay if I actually enjoy the damn game :P

This will be a good test. I will definitely try it but I won't be subscribing.
 
vaelic said:
I find it odd that the story line, probably the only good thing in TOR is FREE all the way
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Although free i think they will try to inconvenience you as much as possible while you do it, by limiting your travel and your gear somehow, to force you to at least pay for some ease of use features.

Just this weekend i started playing Kotor 2 TSL again, with the finished restored content mod, and now that i can see the game in all its finished glory, it´s by far the best SW story ever told in a computer medium.

It´s a pity Bioware didn´t sub-contract Obsidian to do the writing on TOR, Kreia is a fucking amazing character.
 
I don't get people knocking on this game. It was fun, IMO. The stories were well written, the voice overs were great too. Just because it plays like WoW that's something to dig against? To me that's a positive in some lights since I really liked WoW as well. I only stopped playing due to the lack of players even after the server transfers. Now that it's going F2P I'll probably play again if TSW doesnt take up all I my MMO time.
 
dubq said:
I don't get people knocking on this game. It was fun, IMO. The stories were well written, the voice overs were great too. Just because it plays like WoW that's something to dig against? To me that's a positive in some lights since I really liked WoW as well. I only stopped playing due to the lack of players even after the server transfers. Now that it's going F2P I'll probably play again if TSW doesnt take up all I my MMO time.
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The game was fun. Then you hit level 50.
 
dubq said:
I don't get people knocking on this game. It was fun, IMO. The stories were well written, the voice overs were great too. Just because it plays like WoW that's something to dig against? To me that's a positive in some lights since I really liked WoW as well. I only stopped playing due to the lack of players even after the server transfers. Now that it's going F2P I'll probably play again if TSW doesnt take up all I my MMO time.
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Most of the hate it gets is completely irrational. It's not a great game, but it's by no means bad. They fucked up the endgame pretty badly, but the main appeal of the game is the story. The leveling experience was the best I've had in any themepark MMO.
 
dubq said:
I don't get people knocking on this game. It was fun, IMO. The stories were well written, the voice overs were great too. Just because it plays like WoW that's something to dig against? To me that's a positive in some lights since I really liked WoW as well. I only stopped playing due to the lack of players even after the server transfers. Now that it's going F2P I'll probably play again if TSW doesnt take up all I my MMO time.
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The WoW formula has been in the majority of MMOs since its release back in '04.

People want something new, but developers find it too risky to stray away from that formula, even though its what gamers want.
 
Moaradin said:
Most of the hate it gets is completely irrational. It's not a great game, but it's by no means bad. They fucked up the endgame pretty badly, but the main appeal of the game is the story. The leveling experience was the best I've had in any themepark MMO.
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To KOTOR and Star Wars fans? Sure, but if the story is the best part of the game, it should've been KOTOR III, not an MMO.

They had absolutely no foresight, no plan for endgame, and a mess of systems that all sucked ass. Warzones were laggy, broken, and exploitable as hell. Let's no even start with Ilum, and half of the endgame instances were glitched beyond playability.

Of course the MMO decision was based on the fact that EA's entire business strategy is: "Well it worked for those guys, so if we replicate the system, we'll also replicate the success." Pair that up with a developer that has been going downhill for a decade now and you get steaming piles of mediocrity.
 
Moaradin said:
Most of the hate it gets is completely irrational. It's not a great game, but it's by no means bad. They fucked up the endgame pretty badly, but the main appeal of the game is the story. The leveling experience was the best I've had in any themepark MMO.
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I think the biggest issues i had with the game was the grind at level 50 and the absurdly bad writing in all of the class stories i played (Sorcerer, Sage, Knight), especially the Sorcerer and Sage... if your going to promote the game as the next best thing to a single player kotor game the story and writing have to be up to standard at least.

I know that people rave about the the Agent story, but thats a drop in the pond content wise.

I wish that Bioware would have taken a little more time polishing the game to be what they claimed it was.
 
BrokenEchelon said:
to KOTOR and Star Wars fans? Sure, but if the story is the best part of the game, it should've been KOTOR III, not an MMO.

They had absolutely no foresight, no plan for endgame, and a mess of systems that all sucked ass. Warzones were laggy, broken, and exploitable as hell. Let's no even start with Ilum, and half of the endgame instances were glitched beyond playability.
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They have fixed much of the game, optimized it several times, looks better, and have added content to it. At launch they had a big mess yes but it's greatly improved along with new systems that were much needed.
 
Moaradin said:
Most of the hate it gets is completely irrational. It's not a great game, but it's by no means bad. They fucked up the endgame pretty badly
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That's all that needs to be said. There's another game out there that fucked up the end game too recently. Go ask a group of people how they felt about Diablo 3..... Screwing up the end game in MMO's or games where 100's of hours are expected is worthy of harsh criticism.
 
Ifrit said:
So that means I can finish the story missions sans filler for free?
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Depends what you count as filler, but if you mean side quests, then no you still have access to those and will likely have to play through them to complete a class story. If you want to skip side quests and such you will probably have to purchase XP boosters with microtransactions.
 
BrokenEchelon said:
To KOTOR and Star Wars fans? Sure, but if the story is the best part of the game, it should've been KOTOR III, not an MMO.
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When I walked home from work and thought a bit more about this new F2P model, that's what I imagined: a single player on/off switch.

Toggle that and all the social elements are turned off. You don't see naked toons named jbondgoku2020 jumping in the cities. There are no waiting lines after respawning quest items and mobs. Maybe allow bringing in friends from the friends list, but mostly keep it clean. Increase mobility in cities. Boost experience gain and make the story more meaningful, not just talking heads and bad loading.

But that'll never happen.
 
glaurung said:
When I walked home from work and thought a bit more about this new F2P model, that's what I imagined: a single player on/off switch.

Toggle that and all the social elements are turned off. You don't see naked toons named jbondgoku2020 jumping in the cities. There are no waiting lines after respawning quest items and mobs. Maybe allow bringing in friends from the friends list, but mostly keep it clean. Increase mobility in cities. Boost experience gain and make the story more meaningful, not just talking heads and bad loading.

But that'll never happen.
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That is pretty much how it is now, everything but the fleet is a ghost town.
 
Hollywood Duo said:
That is pretty much how it is now, everything but the fleet is a ghost town.
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You are obviously not currently playing the game. They are doing merges and the destination servers are heavy. They increased server caps as well as zone instances to allow more players. Game on these new server set ups are well populated with lot of players running around, much improved over launch which had smaller caps spread over 200 servers
 
glaurung said:
When I walked home from work and thought a bit more about this new F2P model, that's what I imagined: a single player on/off switch.

Toggle that and all the social elements are turned off. You don't see naked toons named jbondgoku2020 jumping in the cities. There are no waiting lines after respawning quest items and mobs. Maybe allow bringing in friends from the friends list, but mostly keep it clean. Increase mobility in cities. Boost experience gain and make the story more meaningful, not just talking heads and bad loading.

But that'll never happen.
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At that point though, you'd might as well just make the game a single player RPG. MMOs should be about finding ways to cultivate cooperation.
 
Was browsing the news channels on TV and found Peter Moore getting grilled on CNBC (I think it was CNBC) about SWTOR going F2P. The reporters were really not buying his reasons (excuses?) why this is a good idea. He was lucky that they had to cut his interview short as he was getting visibly flustered. He tried to spin the whole SimCity AMU numbers but they just weren't buying it.

I found one of his reasons really terrible in a comical way: he claimed they do exit interviews with players who quit and 40% said if they didn't had to pay anything they would still keep playing.
 
I knew this would happen and I was excited to hear it but after reading the chart of the features you get when it's free it's pretty nerfed. I'd be better off paying monthly again.
 
BattleMonkey said:
You are obviously not currently playing the game. They are doing merges and the destination servers are heavy. They increased server caps as well as zone instances to allow more players. Game on these new server set ups are well populated with lot of players running around, much improved over launch which had smaller caps spread over 200 servers
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As someone who recently got back into playing TOR, this sums up my experience fairly well. I'm only level 28 at the moment, but there's always other folks around questing and looking to do Heroics.
The server in general is much heavier populated than the one I was on during launch. I've never had issues finding a pvp match or a PUG for heroics.
 
This is going to be fucking huge. Trust me.


But I will say, the "limited" world travel functions worry me - I already spend too much time in the middle of fucking nowhere running to the next taxi shuttle. If I walk up and someone's like "hey, you can't take this shuttle until you achieve Cartel Platinum status" I will be pissed.

Also, "extremely limited" listings? The economy already sucks and I'm dead broke half the time...
 
bengraven said:
This is going to be fucking huge. Trust me.


But I will say, the "limited" world travel functions worry me - I already spend too much time in the middle of fucking nowhere running to the next taxi shuttle. If I walk up and someone's like "hey, you can't take this shuttle until you achieve Cartel Platinum status" I will be pissed.

Also, "extremely limited" listings? The economy already sucks and I'm dead broke half the time...
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I doubt they will limit taxis, a lot of the zones can only be reach by taxis, like in Tatooine or Nar Shadaa for example. They will probably limit or remove quick travel for F2P tho, make you run to the next outpost instead of teleporting.

Edit: Maybe they will remove in zone taxi points, but keep interzone ones, that would make sense.
 
BattleMonkey said:
Depends what you count as filler, but if you mean side quests, then no you still have access to those and will likely have to play through them to complete a class story. If you want to skip side quests and such you will probably have to purchase XP boosters with microtransactions.
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Yep, side quest mostly I consider filler, unless they're pretty good. But yeah if I can play the story all the way trough then sign me the fuck up
 
maybe people just slowly get sick of playing that same old dungeon crawling crap over and over again. Its 2012, time to use the internet for some real unique multiplayer experiences. Eve online, mentioned in this thread, is a good example. Just dont go after that 11 billion WoW player base, just DONT!
 
VaeVictis said:
Was browsing the news channels on TV and found Peter Moore getting grilled on CNBC (I think it was CNBC) about SWTOR going F2P. The reporters were really not buying his reasons (excuses?) why this is a good idea. He was lucky that they had to cut his interview short as he was getting visibly flustered. He tried to spin the whole SimCity AMU numbers but they just weren't buying it.

I found one of his reasons really terrible in a comical way: he claimed they do exit interviews with players who quit and 40% said if they didn't had to pay anything they would still keep playing.
Click to expand...

It actually does make sense, what happens in the mmo genre, is that when one person leaves the rest slowly start leaving, by initially stopping the initial player from leaving you are removing one impetus for the rest of them leaving.
 
If anyone's deciding to jump in and try it now, could I ask a favour?

They're currently doing a refer a friend scheme, where you can get a nifty speeder if a referral signs up for a month. It's nothing ground breaking, but I'm a nerd for these things.

So let me know if you'd like to help out (there's no obligation after all, and it would score you some good karma, and maybe a nice little credit bump down the road) :)
 
can I spend my cartel ka$h on better dialogue options? I don't like choosing between plush dildo and spiky dildo. at least for the intro content I played while free-trialing, it reads like something a 14 year old would write.
 
PatrickLyons said:
can I spend my coins on better dialogue options? I don't like choosing between plush dildo and spiky dildo. at least for the intro content I played while free-trialing, it reads like something an overweight 14 year old would write.
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Most of the sidequest dialogue is ridiculously bad, a lot of the class quest dialogue is as well. If your looking for fun in the class quests i would stay away from the Sorcerer and the Sage ones and roll an agent, from what i hear it plays like 007 in space.
 
VaeVictis said:
Was browsing the news channels on TV and found Peter Moore getting grilled on CNBC (I think it was CNBC) about SWTOR going F2P. The reporters were really not buying his reasons (excuses?) why this is a good idea. He was lucky that they had to cut his interview short as he was getting visibly flustered. He tried to spin the whole SimCity AMU numbers but they just weren't buying it.

I found one of his reasons really terrible in a comical way: he claimed they do exit interviews with players who quit and 40% said if they didn't had to pay anything they would still keep playing.
Click to expand...

This is the video of the interview here:

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000106278&play=1
 
Kem0sabe said:
Most of the sidequest dialogue is ridiculously bad, a lot of the class quest dialogue is as well. If your looking for fun in the class quests i would stay away from the Sorcerer and the Sage ones and roll an agent, from what i hear it plays like 007 in space.
Click to expand...

Never seen dialogue that would be considered ridiculously bad. It all fits within the universe, it's all very simple and straight forward and it's Star Wars. Some of the class stories are very basic and not all that interesting at times, but for game writing none of it really awful or any worse than anything else out there. Some of the class stories have some real excellent moments as well.

Sage definitely was really boring for the most part though, just very sleep inducing.
 
BattleMonkey said:
Never seen dialogue that would be considered ridiculously bad. It all fits within the universe, it's all very simple and straight forward and it's Star Wars. Some of the class stories are very basic and not all that interesting at times, but for game writing none of it really awful or any worse than anything else out there. Some of the class stories have some real excellent moments as well.

Sage definitely was really boring for the most part though, just very sleep inducing.
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I think i just ended up looking at their (Bioware) writing in the context of the 2 previous Kotor games, the difference is substantial.

But this is all in hindsight, at the time i played SWTOR i remembered i had a lot of fun playing to 50, regardless of writing quality or story deficiencies. Looking back, it´s obvious to me that the problem was always the endgame.
 
I rather enjoyed the BH storyline on Alderaan. Bunch of pompous nobles talking down to you. Then I punched them in the face. Actually I rather enjoyed the whole BH storyline. Had me really invested during the last couple of zones.
 
The amazing thing about this is, you didn't really need to be some kind of professional business analyst to know that this was going to happen. Anyone who has been paying attention to the subscription based MMO model over the last decade could have told you that this was going to be the case, Star Wars or not.

I don't know how hard they had to delude themselves into thinking that pouring all this money into SWTOR was a good idea.
 
I think the game has come a long way since launch. I don't think that the free to play option would have been necessary if they had combined servers much earlier on. I started off on a server with a low population and the difference between the original and destination servers are like night and day.
 
i got absolutely shat on for saying this would tank like a motherfucker.

"bu but, starwars" No, it's not starwars, it's biowares LAME kotor setting, and we exist in a time warp where the prequels made everything shit.

Time for a celebratory victory wank.
 
Jexhius said:
The amazing thing about this is, you didn't really need to be some kind of professional business analyst to know that this was going to happen. Anyone who has been paying attention to the subscription based MMO model over the last decade could have told you that this was going to be the case, Star Wars or not.

I don't know how hard they had to delude themselves into thinking that pouring all this money into SWTOR was a good idea.
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You could tell it wouldn't last because the main feature they kept touting was the "all quests have voice overs".
 
Maybe EA just wanted to break even on the game quickly with subscriptions initial purchases and once it became profitable they decided to do this?
 
Jexhius said:
The amazing thing about this is, you didn't really need to be some kind of professional business analyst to know that this was going to happen. Anyone who has been paying attention to the subscription based MMO model over the last decade could have told you that this was going to be the case, Star Wars or not.

I don't know how hard they had to delude themselves into thinking that pouring all this money into SWTOR was a good idea.
Click to expand...


I agree but not fully. Noone was able to tell how big of a shit this game really is before reaching level 50, or playing it for more than a boring month. I had some faith in it because I needed a big, involving MMORPG since LOTRO just ain't doing it for me anymore. Didn't read any leaks or play any beta and I thought Bioware could have redeemed themselves after the horrendous DA2. I wanted this to last me years, and here i am weeping after playing the thing I hate the most, PvP, for the remaining paid time I had after finishing story quest, or selling Mandalorian Iron for big prices, or looking at the ungliest thing ever in amazement: my Smuggler PVP armor, and telling myself LOTRO, a game from six years ago and full of flaws, still completely trounces it
 
Wait is it actually true Bioware is not allowing F2P players forums access and technical support, the hell is this, assuming it's true and not photoshopped, PR person being wrong or something do Bioware even know what they're doing.
 
Principate said:
Wait is it actually true Bioware is not allowing F2P players forums access and technical support, the hell is this, assuming it's true and not photoshopped, PR person being wrong or something do Bioware even know what they're doing.
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The forums suck enough as it is (like all official mmo forums) and you want them to open it up to free users? I don't know what's worse, this or patchers 50 million active users statement.
 
Pachter is completely nuts.

5 million, yeah, possible. 50 million, no way. If you added the subs of all the major MMOs that are on the market you wouldn't even get 50 million.
 
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