The Shrine

So I'm still trying to figure out how to play SWTOR for free while still getting the most of the game. Right now it seems like the restrictions are pretty well settled. This assumes the server you're on doesn't suddenly have an economic collapse because right now F2P is viable by essentially the 'whaling' concept. There are obviously some guys who spent way too much money on the cash shop that has a ton of cash shop currency they can't use and since all the end game stuff is potentially tradeable, there's actually a reason to attempt to sell cash shop unlocks to F2P players, and further since F2P players can never carry more than 350K this prevents players from setting ridiculous prices (well some people still do, but they're just wasting their time).

Right now preferred status gets you 6 character slots. Based on the economy of The Bastion here's what I've found:

Crew Skill Unlock (account) can be obtained for 300-350K.
Extra character slot can be obtained for ~100K
Artifact Equipment Unlock (character) can be obtained for 300-350K. Artifact Equipment Unlock (account) varies greatly. The cheapest I've seen is 550K, and the most is 1+ million.
Weekly operation (raid) pass can be obtained for ~100k.
Weekly warzone (pvp) pass can be obtained for ~180K.

You probably can't expect Artifact Equipment Unlock (account) to go to 350K because it's something like $15 in cash shop currency, so if you plan to play multiple characters you should sub for one month and try to get enough money to buy Artifact Equipment Unlock (account). That said you should not sub your account until you have enough money to buy the artifact equipment unlock (account) because the price or even availability of the said item varies greatly. If you only plan on playing a few characters you could just get the character version of that.

I recommend starting out with a Shadow/Assassin because they're the best money makers in the game. Stealth lets you do any trivial content faster than anyone else who cannot stealth, and because they can also tank you can do most heroics.

You cannot transfer money between your characters after you're no longer subbed, so you should divy out all your credits to all your alts ahead of time before your expansion runs out. You should buy all the inventory slots with credits. However I've seen inventory slot unlock (account) going for 100K. Given the last slot unlock is like 200K per person, it'd actually be cheaper to buy this from GTN instead even for just one character.

A non sub cannot have enough currency to buy most of the raid gear so don't bother doing the dailys except for money, though you obviously do need a lot of money to buy all the stuff you need. You also cannot get enough fleet commendations to do any of the heroic space missions though most people don't care much about the space stuff. In 2.0 you can just use warzone commendations to buy planetary commendations so you can just sit in your ship with an alt and play WZ all day if you don't like the PvE aspect of the game as long as you have around 200K per week. If you're not going to use the GTN you should have slicing as your crew skill (best straight up money maker). If you actually try to sell stuff then the crew skill of choice obviously depends on what material happens to sell on your server.

I make around 200-250K doing all the dailys on Belsavis and Black Hole. End of Torvix is pretty hard to do on your own though. You can probably get more if you kill more stuff but I think it's quicker to stealth past whatever you can and keep the fighting to a minimum. If you want to kill stuff for credit, End of Torvix and Lights Out are pretty good options with a ton of strong/elite to kill. Don't bother with Section X (it requires an unlock to access anyway) because everything there is just harder and offeres the same reward unless you care about the cosmetic reputation stuff.

I can't tell if you're trying to find the best way to play the game or best way to game the system. X_X

Eric wrote:I can't tell if you're trying to find the best way to play the game or best way to game the system. X_X

I think it's going to end up being one of those things where the effort to game the system is more than just subbing the game.

I noticed that you literally have only a handful of guys who have too much money that's actually selling the cash shop stuff at affordable prices (most of the crazies sell them at a price above the amount a F2P can carry, ensuring nobody would ever buy them). For example I saw a guy selling 8 PvP passes for 100K each, which is basically 2 month of sub for an amount of money you can easily earn in a week. I figured they were going to stay up for a while and of course when I come back 2 hours later they're all gone and the cheapest one is now 150K. I assume these are the guys who buy the $100 24 pack megapack and is trying to raise 100 million credit to buy Revan's mask or whatever is the coolest thing around (end game gear goes for at most 3 million so can't be for that). Basically as long as 'that guy' is around you can get a fully function MMORPG experience because he has a ton of money he's willing to trade for your credits. If that guy is gone you're obviously stuck with an unplayable F2P system.

SWTOR still has the best non hardcore PvP. It's random enough that you usually at least think you may have hope, and the game is small enough that it feels like you might actually be able to impact the game. And honestly F2P means your chance of encountering the super awesome premade is greatly reduced, and playing against those guys suck, and not just because you usually lose. It's not really balanced, but as long as you're not against 8 guys wearing the best PvP gear it usually feels fair.

Ended up having to sub month because there's no way Artifact Equipment (account) was ever going to sell for less than 350K. Bought 2 at 600/900K, and something like 8 extra characters slots with credits. It's actually cheaper to buy stuff like Cargo Bay unlocks compared to paying credits (e.g. 400K to unlock the 4th one for 1 single character, versus under 300K for the whole account on GTN). I bought 6 weekly WZ passes, though probably should've bought more. Unfortunately I missed out when someone was putting them cheap like 100K X 8 (didn't have the money on me). The passes are only good for one character but it's hard to see why you'd play multiple characters hardcore in PvP at the same time, and they're generally the most expensive passes (raids are cheaper, usually 100K). The only annoyance is that as F2P you can never have your guys craft 5 stuff at a time and you can only send out 3 guys at a time, but unless you're a crew skill hardcore guy this is pretty much completely irrelevent. Well you got to spend more (like 33%?) currency of any kind to get most gear but I think that's fair for paying absolutely nothing forever once you have Artifact Equipment (account).

The enjoyability of this game is really dependent on whether you can get an Artifact Equipment (account) for cheap plus a large number of weekly passes of whatever activity you enjoy doing. I heard they went up to $30 equivalent on the cash shop so it might be hard to find them under 1 million credits, though 1 million is not a hard amount to get (I got 3 million in my bank that I can't use, wasted at least 5 million crafting stuff). It's pretty easy if you like doing group stuff (Flashpoints) or raids (Operations) because those passes are dirt cheap, and raids don't have the reduced commendation penalty since the primary way gear is obtained in raids is via tokens and that's simply 1 to 1.

Honestly if I was Bioware I'd have these fake accounts that randomly sell cash shop for relatively low number of credits (say, 100K) because you really need the F2P guys so that the servers don't eventually become ghost towns. I know they obviously want to make money off the F2P but there's value in a guy who is paying nothing if he's providing the obligatory cannon fodder for your paying subscribers. Yes you might have a problem if all your subscribers eventually figured out they can go F2P but I guess most people haven't figured this out, and besides it's not like paying even 200K per pass is all that much (that's 1 day worth of dailys, and you need to do them for daily comms anyway).

Don wrote:SWTOR still has the best non hardcore PvP.

There is nothing good about SWTOR.

Nothing.

kali o. wrote:

Don wrote:SWTOR still has the best non hardcore PvP.

There is nothing good about SWTOR.

Nothing.

Not even the music and voice acting?

The music is funny because it's likely going to end before it even gets anywhere because either you or the boss has died in the first 15 seconds, and for the most part if a fight goes significantly longer than 15 seconds you're probably dead while alone. Unless you're setup to slowly grind things down you'd never hear most of the soundtrack.