SWTOR going F2P

[Don]

Not much detail on what the actual costs but I think western MMORPGs really don't get it. You can only play 3 PvP games a week unless you buy a weekly pass for some unknown $ (I don't see it under $3 though). You can only die five times IN THE ENTIRE GAME before you have to auto respawn at default respawn point (no spirit rez) or you can, of course, insert a quarter to continue.

The point of F2P to western developers seem to be making the game suck as much as possible under F2P so nobody would ever play the game. I mean yes the Chinese/Korean/Russian F2Ps are borderline scams but at least they try to make it enjoyable before they take your money. Western F2P is like someone beating you up and say see that's what happens when it's free, so you should subscribe to the game. I mean if you're a F2P why would you ever try to get PvP gear since it'll either take you like an year to do it at 3 games a week, or you probably have to pay like several month's of weekly passes just to get enough PvP games in. You'll most likely still suck because the guy who played first has a huge advantage. People always say selling gear is bad, but honestly it'd be more attractive to pay $50 to buy a set of uber PvP gear, as opposed to spend $50 to grind enough PvP games via PvP passes or whatever. It is not exactly fun to gear up for PvP (you'd just get utterly stomped while accumulating currency while you're weak) so why pay money to just suffer even more?

[Zeus]

F2P is a new thing. Companies are still trying to see how far up your ass they can go before you demand a reach-around.

And it'll never be like it is in the Orient. People here are more willing to have things shoved further up than in other countries in the world.

[Don]

From what I understand the non western F2Ps work like they sell you this uber ammo that does double damage for $1, you probably use it up in a game or two but it definitely does what it claims to do. Sure you end up accidentally paying them way too much money once you're used to the uber ammo but there's no doubt this uber ammo really works as advertised and you're borderilne godlike versus anyone who doesn't have it.

In SWTOR if you're on getting PvP gear and assuming you don't get on a ranked team (no one would want a new guy that can play only 3 games on a team), the most expensive items (Lightsabers) cost 3000 ranked + 2000 unranked roughly. If you win every game you play that's 140*3 = 420 unranked. You need 11000 (trade 3 to 1 for ranked), so you'd need 25 weeks at 3 games a week to your lightsaber. And that's just one piece of gear and you'd still be ridiculously weak compared to anyone decked out in gear. From experience it takes several months of playing hardcore to get a full set of gear and most of it you'd end up getting utterly stomped since as a new guy you're obviously way behind compared to the guys who already have this stuff. I'm guessing you're not going to sell the weekly pass for $3 or less, so if it takes 5 month to get full gear that's 5*4*3 = $60. You probably need to shell out $10 to just equip it (artifact items require more $ to equip, because you know, kind people might actually give you free gear otherwise). So you could spend a lot of money and your gearing up process would suck (it sucked even when everyone was on equal footing because there's always the guys who play way more than you), but why would you ever do this? You could go to one of those Korean/Russian/Chinese F2Ps and just buy the equivalent amount of ammo or rent a weapon and I'm sure $60 can get you a lot of instant kill fun. Sure at the end you're going to say 'wow I wasted $$$ on ammo" but at least it'd be pretty fun while in a western F2P you'd be like "Wow I wasted $ to grind this stuff out when I can just rent the stuff in another F2P".

Honestly I think it'd make more sense for SWTOR if you do say Sith Warrior + Jedi Knight main story are free, $5 for each of the other 6 storylines (which is actually pretty good), and yeah that'd mean you can only play 2 classes unless you pay more but I can actually see people put $5 for Bounty Hunter or whatever as opposed to insert a quarter so you can revive faster when you'll invariably die. I think Jedi Knight types are currently on the overpowered cycle so you wouldn't even feel particularly weak.

[Julius Seeker]

They still have to make money somehow. It would be foolish if they released a licensed game and had no available expenses in the game; both servers and the license cost money to maintain.

I personally am fine with the freemium model, and think that is probably the best way to market a game requiring online fees. I like it a lot better than the typical subscription model that forces you to pay a monthly or annual fee even if you don't play the game at all that month. Ideally, I would prefer a time credit model, in that the player gets something like 30 minutes to 1 hour a day free, but they have to use credits to continue playing longer than that - for example a time credit might be $1-2 dollars, and allows unlimited access for a 24 hour period, or a $5 dollar credit for a week, and then a more standard 10-15 dollar credit for a month of unlimited access. That's a bit of a compromise between the freemium and subscription methods.

They would just need to have proper analytics to sniff out people who are abusing it by having multiple accounts that they play for the free allowance every day; which isn't really that difficult to implement.

[kali o.]

The model used for to F2P is really inspired by EAsy (one of EA's F2P divisions). What that means is that SWTOR gets a bunch of "theme packs" (cough*gamblepacks*cough), which are designed to entice subscribers into spending additional money to get a shot at 'ULTRA RARES!!!". With gear already in the store, along with gamble packs, Pay to Win is just around the corner.

Meanwhile, the "Freemium" players get nickle & dimed at every available opportunity, making a la carte purchases a non-option...either subscribe or mooch, that's the choice here. And if you think I am joking, EA has arranged it so you need to PAY to unlock quick bars....yes, PAY to have a working UI.

With how hard the actual game failed, it's no surprise the F2P transition looks prepped to tank as well. Idiots.

[Don]

Well the gamble packs work at some level because I know plenty of people that spent a ton of money on them in other games but it might have long term damage to your game, but at least with the gamble packs you can say maybe it's some kind of tried-and-true, if dubious, way of making money.

Assuming a conversation rate of 100CC = $1 (most likely 80 CC = $1 to trick you into thinking stuff are less expensive than they really are), you're looking at $10/month to just do PvP assuming you want to play more than 3 matches a week, and you'd need a $12 to even equip the gear you got, not to mention it's very hard for an average guy to come anywhere close to finishing the PvP grind even if you miraculously win every game you play (which you won't) in a month. How can this be anything but a model to exploit those who are too dumb to realize they're being ripped off? The gamble packs, assuming the win rate is known, is at least no matter than someone blowing a lot of money on real gambling and it's their right to do so. Speaking of which, I think there's ruling that if you don't publish your win rate in these gamble packs then it amounts to scam because you can obviously make the super rare stuff 0.0000001% to drop if you don't even have to tell people what the odds are.

I also saw stuff like $2 to show your title or $3 to hide your helm. It's one thing about nickle & dime people to death and company have a right to make money, sure, but as far as I can tell this is literally trying to make your F2P experience as miserable as possible so you'll be forced to pay, except the game really isn't that great to begin with so all you'd do is get people to quit.

I'd think offering $5 for each of the story archtype quest would be much better way to go about it (and offer 2 of them for free or whatever) in terms of getting real value for your money, especially given SWTOR's strength is supposed to be the archtype quest, not the other stuff that's exactly the same as any other MMORPG out there.

On the UI thing, you start with 4 bars which is probably enough, but you got to pay to unlock 2 more bars. It's funny because everyone (including me) just figured they'll give you only one quickbar and make you have to pay the rest which probably speaks a lot about what people think about how this endeavor will turn out.

[Eric]

Obviously the game wasn't built with Free 2 Play in mind, they fully expected WoW type subscription numbers.

The model of limiting GAMEPLAY features unless you pay is a bad one.

I even heard they limited the number of hotkeys you can use and bars. X_X

edit: confirmed.

"Unlock: Additional Quickbar for 250 cartel coins"

lol wow.

[Don]

F2P can work if the game is designed from the ground up to support it. I don't see WoW being a successful F2P if they went that path because the game isn't built for it and SWTOR sure won't be either.

You do get 4 hotbars without paying though it's pretty easy to use up all 4 bars. You have to pay to display your title or hide your helm (which seems to actually be a big deal because people really care about the hooded look or something for Jedis). Western sub -> F2P games seem to operate on negative reinforcement. They give you this game that is actually painful to play so you might be enticed to pay. Of course most people will just uninstall the game and go elsewhere. Perhaps you can argue it'll fool some people into spending money before they realize they're getting a bad deal but the Chinese/Korean/Russian are way better at whaling people in compared to the western guys. The 'rent gear' system works much better as a way to entice people to accidentally pay too much because you're uber the moment you rent that stuff. In SWTOR even if you started paying hundreds of dollars for stuff you're still going to get completely steamrolled in the PvP because you start off way too weak. Nobody's going to pay money to get steamrolled.

[kali o.]

You do get 4 hotbars without paying though it's pretty easy to use up all 4 bars.

Actually, it was confirmed to only be ONE hotbar. I say "was" because there must have been alot of hate & venom tossed at "Bioware" over this and today they announced they will up it to TWO bars. In addition, they've come out with a "Preferred Status" option geared at returning players which will tone down some of the obvious cash grabs aimed directly at them (pay to equip owned geared, etc).

Even though some of the issues have been addressed, the fact that Bioware even went down this path makes it clear they won't handle it properly. I mean, locking out a usable UI? Why not lock the resolution at 640x480 too and offer higher res for sale...I mean, that'll totally help people enjoy your product and entice them to sub

[Don]

You do get 4 hotbars without paying though it's pretty easy to use up all 4 bars.

Actually, it was confirmed to only be ONE hotbar. I say "was" because there must have been alot of hate & venom tossed at "Bioware" over this and today they announced they will up it to TWO bars. In addition, they've come out with a "Preferred Status" option geared at returning players which will tone down some of the obvious cash grabs aimed directly at them (pay to equip owned geared, etc).

Even though some of the issues have been addressed, the fact that Bioware even went down this path makes it clear they won't handle it properly. I mean, locking out a usable UI? Why not lock the resolution at 640x480 too and offer higher res for sale...I mean, that'll totally help people enjoy your product and entice them to sub

Hmmm the blurb I read said 'add 2 hotbars for subs' so I assume it's 4/6 but honestly it wouldn't surprise me if it started out as 1.

Artifact equipment authorization is 1200 (presumably $12, possibly more) and yeah I sure see no reason to return a game if I have to pay $12 to just equip what I already have.

The 5 total deaths before you cannot resurrect in place is pretty hilarious too, especially given the large number of quests where you slog through a ton of respawning stuff, see a cut scene, and get jumped and immediately die before you realize what's going on in this game. Maybe they should just delete your character after 25 deaths unless you pay up.

They might as well say: "If you want the pain to stop, better pay up!"

[Shrinweck]

They've made some changes that help address some of the issues, namely adding a preferred status and a second quickbar for F2P players.

Preferred status is available to anyone who has made any kind of SWTOR purchase ever and you remain one forever. It includes:

• The Sprint ability at Level 1
• Access to your Cargo Hold (an 80 item Player Bank)
• Access to Secure Trade (starting at level 10)
• The ability to send Mail, including one (1) attachment
• Increased allowance for chat message frequencies in Public chat channels (such as /general)
• An increased Credits Cap
• Access to the Who List
• Three (3) additional Sale Slots on the Galactic Trade Network (for a total of 5)
• One (1) additional active Crew Skill Slot (for a total of 2)
• Reduced skill point respecialization costs
• Increased Server queue priority

Also I've already seen a dev reply that said that if you're a subscriber then you don't have to pay to use the artifact gear, which isn't even all that necessary until you're grinding endgame shit at which point one should really just pony up. There was an information release that said that you'd have to pay cartel coins for purple gear even if you subscribed but that was a typo and subsequently corrected.

There's some annoyances but I'm not seeing anything too terrible for what's essentially at the very least several dozen hours of free content. If you ask me if you expect to get through all the content without paying in a F2P MMORPG without a ton of annoyances then you aren't being very realistic.

That said, before they made the change to two quickbars I was too miffed to even bother posting in this thread. When you start a new character these days you only have like four free slots on the first quickbar lol

Two is manageable at least through chapter one, which is what a decent trial period should be.

[Don]

Actually purple gear is very easy to get with any kind of crew skills though there usually isn't much point to bother with them until you're level 50. You'll pick up enough commendations just from doing quests to pick up an artifact box per planet. Of course with only one crew skill per character you probably can't make anything useful unless you've like 15 different accounts. In particular purple weapons are usually worth making because they account for a disproportional amount of your total offensive/healing stats.

The preferred status is going to be like EQ2's silver status except it's free in EQ2 because you get 500 SC for having an account and downloading the client for FreeRealms so you don't actually have to spend any money. Of course I'd argue EQ2's F2P model is a bad example in the sense that you'd never have much reason to go beyond silver (at least until Destiny of Velious).

[Shrinweck]

Purple items are not necessary though, so that's the point I was making. You can't expect to go through a F2P MMO with all the bells and whistles. And carrots being constantly dangled in front of you is a side effect of that.

[Don]

Purple gear is nothing special these days. If you've a particularly nasty level 50 story boss you almost need purple gear to win in a reasonable number of tries, especially keep in mind that you can only die a TOTAL of 5 times before you can no longer resurrect in place. I guess you can buy recruit mark 2 gear though I suspect they'll put some restrictions on that too because it's basically equal to a tier 1 purple gear even for PvE now that's for free except it's blue-colored.

Purple gear drops far more often in SWTOR compared to other games. You'll get one per planet without trying. If you do any kind of crafting it's hard to not have quite a few schematics for purple stuff (though the F2P restrictions make it hard since it takes 3 skills to make something).

[Shrinweck]

The bulk of the F2P players aren't grinding level 50 content, I really am not arguing any of my points from this perspective. Not paying a cent and grinding level 50 content is not going to be feasible and arguing from that viewpoint isn't something I'm going to be doing.

The bulk of their income in this model is going to come from people on the 1-50 treadmill. Some are going to say fuck it and subscribe, others are going to give in and buy some cartel coins to pepper about for certain functionality, and the others are going to unsubscribe or just play free. With level 50 content largely locked completely from the non-payers, talking about how they're going to get geared is jumping the gun. Free players aren't going to care about getting geared for operations. Puttering through the 1-50 content doesn't even require blues most of the time. And resurrecting in place is something you can easily give up if you're going to get through the treadmill for free.

[Don]

The whole notion of 'you're getting level 1-50 for free so blah blah blah' is ridiculous. It's not like people don't know what's the expected leveling experience for a MMORPG. You're taking a game that isn't particularly great at the leveling experience (though the story quest is pretty good), make it like 5 times worse for the F2P, and people are supposed to be impressed by that even though almost everyone who plays MMORPG even casually knows what is expected for a typical leveling experience in MMORPG?

Even if you have the full 1-49 stuff for free that isn't necessarily enough to entice anyone to stick around because the grind at the level 50 really sucks, but of course it's about 5 times as painful as it normally is, and SWTOR has one of the more painful leveling up experience with its tendency to drop multiple mobs immediately after a cutscene to clobber you before you realize what's happening. For the most part the story battles expect you in mostly blues to beat them relatively comfortably assuming your class isn't just grossly overpowered. Usually you get that with your quest greens + random purple you found in each planet + some random blue/purple you can make via crafting. Of course since purple is flat out not an option and crafting is gutted you'll just be in all greens and you'll usually die at least once against even a typical 2Xstrong formation let alone anything harder.

Devs and people in general need to stop pretending as if free is worth wasting 100-200 hours on something you've already seen before you've played any MMORPG in any depth, except the F2P version is usually way more painful than a normal experience. People's time is not this cheap. The fact your game requires 100 hours of gameplay to just get to a level where there is supposed to be content should be considered a bad thing, as in you should be giving up some stuff to entice people to even put up with your most likely failed game (which is why it's going to F2P) instead of slap them even harder. This is why EQ1 was never able to get any new blood. It takes more like 1000 hours to get to a level where you can actually do stuff and why would you invest this kind of time on a game that was already way obselete? F2P should be doing what WoW does with the prerolled level 85 characters for subbing. Make it like for $15 you get a level 50 character equipped with blue level armor, or alternatively for $15 you get say a 10X XP modifier on story quest so that you can hit level 50 by just doing them and nothing else for those who want to actually experience the story (regular quest can be left alone).

By the way, when WoW came out with the 'refer a friend' deal that lets you get triple XP, it's actually pretty fun to bot an account and then get like 5 levels for turning in 10 quests. While the cheap guys (like me) just got a trial guy to do it, a lot of people actually shelled out another subscription simply for the ability to level at 3X the normal rate. You're talking about obselete content so there's no integrity issue here if you can go DING DING DING DING on levelups. For the most part the leveling experience is something you want to see at most once and most of the time it'd be better if it's actually 0.

[Don]

They should really be selling stuff like this in F2P:

Uberize - XP gained from all sources X4. Damage done to NPC X 4 by your and companion. Damage done to you by NPC reduced to 1/4. Does not work on Operations, hard mode flashpoints, or level 50 world bosses. Cost $5 per character. Each component can be toggled off if wanted.

And then charge $10 for the archtype stories besides whatever 1 per side you give for free. You can basically get a single player game for $15, and it'd actually be somewhat satisfactory too. You might even see Darth Malgus defeated.

You can also buy the Uberize buff for hard mode flashpoints ($2, lasts until one FP is cleared), and $10 for customized Operations (lasts until an Operation is cleared) because otherwise you'd never be able to beat the gimmick puzzle bosses. You'd make it such that gear is only obtained when the whole thing is cleared (or someone would just reset before the last boss), it'd give some amount of gear that'd be reasonable for this kind of money.

[Don]

Saw a list of price unlocks: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=549765

Assuming 100 CC = $1 (I'm guessing it's most likely 80 CC = $1 because F2P games love to pull this trick), you're looking at:

$1 to resurrect in place.
$1 to display your legacy name.
$3.50 to hide your helm or make your armor look the same color as the rest of your armor.
$6 for each race.
$2.50 for a hotkey bar
$0.90 for a charge of the equivalent of a hearthstone.

Some of these prices are pretty crazy even for a F2P. Apparently the prices used to be lower but they raised them by 50% after it went on PTR because, I don't know, maybe player feedback told them it was too cheap?

[Shrinweck]

Most of that's a luxury and most games have you paying just to get at story content.

Some of the single use cartel coin stuff is crazy though and hopefully no one falls for that idiocy. I've looked at the prices and none of it seems too outlandish.

[Don]

The cost for the cash shop finally came out. It's 90 cartel coin = $1. Not quite 80 but not 100 to 1 either (common trick). Here's a page showing what the costs are:

http://www.darthhater.com/articles/feat ... ber-to-f2p

Honestly, I've like $100 of Station Cash for SoE games (bought them at various double/triple promotions) that I never used, and I think they were a better bargain than what SWTOR is offering. I got bored with the SoE games before I had a reason to use the Station Cash but if the game was actually good, I'd have used it for the class/gear/spell unlocks.

The page notes that it costs about $110 (9700ish CC) to get the same basic functionality as a subscriber account. Of course you still don't have access to the content itself. This is just basic stuff like being able to equip stuff you got (which you won't have, because you don't access to the content).

I checked my account, it says I have 900 CC. I have a 6 month sub to the game when it came out, plus maybe another month or two. From the chart, it looks like I can either buy a hotkey bar or the 3rd crew skill slot. Believe it or not, I actually spend most of my time in a MMORPG crafting, so I'll probably do the crew skill except I wouldn't be able to equip anything useful that I can make (because they're artifact quality). For that matter, I have 8 characters and as a preferred character I'll only have access two of them, so I can't really do anything with my characters to begin with.

I still think SoE had the best cash shop even though the games themselves probably aren't worth playing. You start with enough cash shop money to buy say another class and sure most likely you won't enjoy the class because the game sucks but at least it feels like you might want to try out some of the cash shop stuff before you realize the game itself isn't worth playing. Here in SWTOR I literally see no reason to use the cash shop before even considering if the game is worth playing or not.

[kali o.]

You won't get any of those "free" cartel coins on your account unless you are subscribed on the first day of F2P launch... I guess EA thought handing out a couple of dollars of pretend currency to spend on pretend items was too much investment to lure back a portion of the 2+ million former subscribers....

*chuckles*

[Don]

Really? Not that it matters since even if I have 900 CC all along that's not even enough for me to buy an Artifact Equipment Authorization which would allow me to actually wear all the gear I have. I think if you were subscribed the entire time SWTOR has been around and have the super deluxe edition you'd have like 2500 CC, which I guess is enough to buy 2 hotkey bars, Artifact Equipment Authorization, and maybe a few rows of inventory space, so you actually have a UI and can equip the gear you find in the game.

The article says you need like 9750 to unlock everything a subscriber gets. I'd say to even entice anybody to come back you'd have to give them about half of that (~5000) because there actually isn't a lot of fluff to cut out in that 9750 thing, and this just gets you a working UI. You still don't have any of the content unlocks!

[Don]

I like this exercept on the F2P conversion, even though it's not true.

"Just head to kill couple mobs, I draw my lightsaber to attack them, and after 3 swings of my lightsaber get pop up message please sub to Tor You may only use 3 lightsaber swings per week.
While that happens, I fucking die.
I am in disbelief."

The funny thing is most people aren't sure if this was a joke (I'd assume it is, but hard to be sure!)