Poll: old republic free to play is ready. will you be going back?

[Bullfrog1983]

I might eventually go back if there isn't horrible lag for unknown reasons like there was when I played the game originally.

 

[Rack]

Nope, they nerfed xp rates that were already way too slow and don't offer any non-subscription way of increasing them back up to par.

Well...this is an interesting perspective, to say the least. Way too slow? The xp gain was way too fast. Way, WAY too fast. I remember blowing through areas with quests going grey all around me, and I had to actively avoid PvP, Space Combat AND avoid getting any rest XP if I wanted to not outlevel content before I even got to it. Given they had no real end game in place allowing everyone to blitz through their content was one of the worst things they could have done.

Complaining that TOR's leveling pace was too slow is like complaining that WoW's gear treadmill is too short, or that Dragon Age 2 used too many environments. The rapidity of leveling practically broke the game.

And if the next words out of your mouth are "Well I don't enjoy the combat/leveling so I want it over with as fast as possible", that's the entire game, yo. If you don't enjoy it, leveling faster isn't going to improve the experience, it's just going to let you do more of what you don't enjoy with a higher number beside your name.

Sort of, I don't enjoy the combat/levelling so I want only to do the main story quests and some of the major sidequests. With the xp rate as it was I had to do several dozen "Kill x space weevil" quests in between the main story content.

 

[CCountZero]

Wrong, you only get two. you can swap them out (I think?), but you can only have 2 on your screen at any given moment when you're a free player.

Not entirely correct either. Free accounts get two per character, but there's fairly cheap, permanent hotbar unlocks that you can buy, either directly from the Cartel Coin store, or from other players by whatever trade deal.

Pretty much every last single feature a Sub gets, can be unlocked by items bought in the store. They can all be bought for an individual character, and some of them, like the hotbar unlocks, can be bought account-wide, at about 220% of the individual char cost.

Given that F2P only allows you two chars, the account-wide options are only ever gonna matter if you also buy a char unlock slot.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Sort of, I don't enjoy the combat/levelling so I want only to do the main story quests and some of the major sidequests. With the xp rate as it was I had to do several dozen "Kill x space weevil" quests in between the main story content.

Well come on, man. Those space weevils aren't going to kill themselves!

Really though, some of the individual quests aren't bad. A few of them are sharper/more interesting than the main stories, which can get pretty silly/bland. I do admit selling someone a main story and then gutting all the other game play by stripping out basic functionality and selling it back piecemeal is a pretty questionable business model, though.

 

[EHKOS]

I would still pay for it if I could play it. I only left because my computer got old enough where it would cough and overheat. When I get a new one I am totally going back.

 

[DanielBrown]

Never played to begin with, but I won't try it out now either.
Not a very big fan of sci-fi, and Star Wars doesn't intrest me much. Already play the best F2P MMO there is(LOTRO <3) so I don't want to get addicted to another one. Especially one that doesn't even offer all the action bars...

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Swtor was never particularly good even at its peak, and now with its most stock features gutted in the "f2p" model and the -first- scrap of content. Something that should of been a month or three after launch coming "soon" I think its safe to say that Swtor has been the largest commercial failure of an mmo to date. The most money invested for absolutely no true return

I doubt that. I know that's the popular mythology, in large part because people love to hate EA, have started to love to hate Bioware, and have had a mild hate for Star Wars ever since the sequels. In reality, TOR sold very well, held down a very large body of subscribers for a substantial period of time, and is still one of the most populated MMOs on the market.

The issue with TOR is the high initial cost coupled with royalty payments for the IP created a weight of expectation that the game's curious lack of mechanical ambition set it up poorly to meet. There have been some straight up disasters in MMO history, games that killed studios. TOR isn't anything close to that. It's a financial disappointment and underperformer, but it set itself up for that with impossible or at the very least improbable goals.

 

[Yellowfish]

Depends. Do you have to pay anything on top of the subscription in order to play comfortably? If the answer is "yes", then I think I'll buy Guild Wars 2 instead.

 

[EmperorSubcutaneous]

Only if they add new story chapters. But since Alexander Freed (Imperial Agent writer) left the company, I don't know if even that would convince me.

I more or less see it as a several-hundred-hour-long single player game that I finished, and I have little to no reason to go back.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Well bioware being new to the mmo market makes -some- of the blunders excusable but, and I say this in any discussion involving mmos. Not only did bioware far exceed its reach financially and deliver a frankly underwhelming mechanical experience (combat was wow standard) and a "good for an mmo" story (really its nothing to write home about) but they did so on a terrible and rushed engine and above all else delivered this to us in a state similar to wow at its launch some eight or so years ago..you just can't do that anymore. Players will judge any new contender on how it measures against wow currently.

That said..has it made back its development cost? the exact figures are lost to me and knowing will help show if the f2p move is a last ditch to keep there game afloat, or a desperate attempt to recoup as much as they can before cutting there losses

A couple of things in response to this...

It wasn't NEARLY as bad at launch as WoW was. That's some rose colored glasses. WoW was a broken, unplayable mess at launch. Loot lag could actually freeze you in the act of looting for 20-30 MINUTES. The servers were crashing constantly, queues were hours and hours long. I remember PA retracting their GOTY recommendation until the game became halfway functional. If a game launched today with WoW's technical issues it would be laughed off the stage. The market has changed. TOR had some issues, but nothing even close to on-par with 2004 issues.

You simply cannot do a 1-1 comparison with WoW. I know the arguments about why you must, but it would take a budget of over one billion dollars to try and compete with WoW's content depth and breadth. It can't be done. No one would ever bankroll it. People need to relax their expectations of fledgling MMOs and give them a chance to grow into themselves. Sadly, in an increasingly crowded genre, games are getting less and less time to develop a following. People drop in, decry the game for 100,000 shortcomings, and bolt for "the next big thing", which is inevitably just as big a disappointment as the last. We play games that have 200-400 hours of content on display, and pronounce that there is "nothing to do". The MMO player base has become fundamentally unpleasable. It's a problem without an easy solution.

Finally, FTP is not a "last desperate act". Going FTP almost *always* results in a significant upturn in both subscribers and profit. When DDO went FTP they DOUBLED their subscriber base. Not players, subscribers. FTP is a gold mine. That is why everyone jumps on the FTP bandwagon. Not because WoW is killing them. Because they tend to make money hand over fist. Ask Nexon how FTP works for them. The problem with free to play (or "fee to play", if you will) isn't that it's the last sad gasp for dying MMOs. It's that it's kind of a player hostile model. Would you rather eat at an all you can eat buffet for $15, or have me sell you every piece of food on your plate individually? Make no mistake, EA isn't throwing up the white flag and trying to wring every last dime out of TOR. They're changing gears to a different business model because they think it will make them money. And if history is any indication, it probably will.

 

[Yellowfish]

EA isn't throwing up the white flag and trying to wring every last dime out of TOR. They're changing gears to a different business model because they think it will make them money. And if history is any indication, it probably will.

Well, FTP can be consumer-friendly if done right. The problem is that it's EA and Bioware we're talking about. Now, even if we assume tha EA aren't greedy assholes, we still have to admit that they don't know jack about making games. They're businessmen, not developers, businessmen who meddle in things that shouldn't be handled by someone who thinks about games purely in terms of profit. And Bioware is a developer of single-player RPGs, it's just idiotic to expect them to handle an MMO without messing something up. I mean, look at the game - sure, it has really good class storylines (aside from Jedi Consular and Smuggler, but who plays Republic anyway?) and nice quests, but the combat mechanics are ripped straight out of WoW with hardly any changes. That may be the result of EA's meddling ("hey guys, we want you to make this game play like WoW because we need to broaden the target demographic!"), though.

What I'm trying to say is that I highly doubt that TOR will ever become a consumer-friendly FTP game.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Well, FTP can be consumer-friendly if done right.

Fair enough...let me put it this way. No developer/production company ever took their game FTP because they felt like being nice guys and giving consumers a bunch of shit for free. They did it because they saw an opportunity to improve their bottom line. "Free to Play" might be one of the most misleading monikers of all time.

 

[Lunar Templar]

the restrictions on F2P are retarded. NO.

this, word for word.

it wasn't worth paying for the first time, not worth going back to

 

[Zenn3k]

Nope, not going back.

Game is a boring chore to play, it takes AGES to get anywhere, it takes AGES to kill stuff...plus 90% of the fights are the same every time.

There are still few to no people to level up with through any of the planets, which means few to no people to do any of the group content.

And the big selling point, the "story" aspect was poorly done and all around lazy IMO. The alien voices, which are basically just 4 lines of gibberish repeated over and over is immersion breaking...not to mention they all have generic kill quests anyway. The story never matters after the quest it was associated with has been completed. Nobody you helped 2 planets ago is ever going to show up again to make your choices ever matter, outside of a few light/dark points.

The game is a super lazy WoW clone that spent gobs of money on voice work. Nothing more. It doesn't even deserve to be within the same realm as KOTOR.