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Freemium restrictions detailed, updated Oct 16
Karteli
Member CommonPosts: 2,646
EA has updated their list of "F2P" Freemium restrictions on their main website.
http://www.swtor.com/free/features
Some features were known, others are clarified further. The list was updated on the official website on Oct 16, 2012.
Mouse-over items in the columns to get a popup window to list the following (ripped from their website:)
Subscription:
All players can play their full class stories from Level 1-50.
Full access to all Character Creation choices.
Unlimited access to Operations.
Unlimited access to Warzones.
Unlimited access to Flashpoints.
Unlimited access to Space Missions.
Purchase more cargo space with either in-game Credits or Cartel Coins.
Purchase addional inventory space with either in-game Credits or Cartel Coins.
Up to three (3) crew skills.
Unlimites access to the Quick Travel ability with a reduced cooldown.
Unlimited access to the Emergency Fleet Pass. Bypass the cooldown by purchasing a consumable item with Cartel Coins.
Revive at the nearest Med Center or in the field with a cooldown.
Priority status in the Login Queue.
[UPDATED] - Equip all purple items they acquire, assuming they meet the in-game requirements (class, level, etc)
[Used to say, kept for rationale of responses below] - Cannot equip most purple items unless an authorization is purchased from the Cartel Market.
Freemium:
All players can play their full class stories from Level 1-50.
Limited Character Creation options.
A Weekly pass to unlock Operation access is required.
Three Warzones per week or purchase a weekly pass to unlock this restriction.
Full rewards from three Flashpoints per week or purchase a weekly pass to unlock rewards for all Flashpoints.
Three Space Missions per week or purchase a weekly pass to unlock this restriction.
Gain and expand the Cargo Hold with Cartel Coins.
Expand inventory slots with Cartel Coins.
One Crew Skill or, purchase additional Crew Skill slots with Cartel Coins.
Longer Quick Travel cooldown period or purchase an authorization to permanently reduce the cooldown for Quick Travel.
No access to Emergency Fleet Pass. Purchase an authorization to unlock quick travel to the Fleet.
Revive at the nearest Med Center or a total of five (5) times in the field. Unlock additional Field Revive with Cartel Coins.
No priority status in the Login Queue.
Cannot equip most purple items unless a license is purchased from the Cartel Market.
------------------
Stuff in yellow is a SWTOR official website correction (oops EA).
Stuff in orange is just informative, to clarify previous speculations.
But some stuff in red raises some flags:
-- I guess you get 5 free deaths, where you can easily resurrect. This will be a hassle for long quests that go deep inside labyrinth mazes plagued with fast spawning trash (West Tatooine comes to mind).
-- Freemiums have to buy purple equipment training (license) eh with real money? Sounds P2W, ie making someone "pay up" to be even the slightest bit useful to others .. It does say "MOST PURPLE ITEMS" for freemiums. Returning level 50 players have no reason to come back unless they are willing to buy Purple Training from the cash shop... that is unless they want to suffer on a new character with heavy restrictions elsewhere. Once a character gets to level 50, they will end up sucking, unless they fork over money to be slightly competitive, while still retaining their "free" status.
I find the whole system far too restrictive. Wouldn't it just have been better to give the entire game 1-50 away for free without restrictions, then restrict level 51+ for Makeb and beyond? As it is, I forsee many aggrevated free players, who will end up never getting to level 50, having rage quit long before then.
What do you all think?
Want a nice understanding of life? Try Spirit Science: "The Human History"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
Comments
Way too restrictive, I have a lot of purple items that i would need to unlock for more than 1 toon, try 4 toons have puples. So yes that is way restrictive.
I find this fremium to be a joke, but hey they want folks to sub up, and that will force those who want to run with purples to sub up or to pay with cash.
I also notice the pay to win features included there in the store.
I think anyone familiar with how BW implements things shouldn't be surprised at all.
It's definitely more restrictive than I think it should be. The Med Center penalty sounds absurd to me. Maybe you always rez at the start of the zone? I can't imagine rezzing at the fleet after the first 5 deaths.
I don't understand the limitation on purple gear for subscribers.
I don't agree with you that you should have unlimited access to EVERYTHING up to level 50. The incentive would be too huge to just make twinks, assuming you can turn off EXP in the game. If not, then they'd still be giving away too much stuff.
As long as you can level to 50 as easily as it was done on launch, I don't see many issues other than storage space.
My concerns as a player revolve around what things are permanently unlockable on all characters with a single purchase and which require subs.
I won't judge it until it goes F2P and I get to try out leveling alts.
I think that's an error on their site, the reason is that on the French translation it reads:
"Possibilité de s’équiper de tous les objets violets obtenus, à condition qu'ils respectent les condition en jeu (niveau, classe, etc.)."
Which translates to :
"Able to equip all purple gear aquired, as long as they meet the in-game requirements (level, class, etc.)."
Which would make sense seeing the site clearly marks it as "Unlimited" which the English tip tool contridicts.
Edit: The Deutsch translation also says the same thing as the French translation, so I'm quite sure it's just a mistake on the English translation.
"Alle erhaltenen violetten Gegenstände können ausgerüstet werden, wenn die Anforderungen im Spiel erfullt sind (Klasse, Stufe usw.)."
Because flying a Minmatar ship is like going down a flight of stairs on an office chair while firing an Uzi.
That would be truly classic, Make the carrot(gear) un-obtainable without $.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
That it was clearly a typo, when the box itself says unrestricted and the tooltip is word for word what freemium is - an obvious copy/paste error.
Heh I agree , burn baby burn I say lolz
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
What do I think? For a game you don't like OP you sure obsess over it for some reason.
You have 3 choices...1. Pay the sub fee 2. Don't play. 3. Play over time with cartel coins. Otherwise quit crying about a game some of you don't play or like anyway. It's their game and their rules you don't like it too bad.
nuff said.
All my opinions are just that..opinions. If you like my opinions..coolness.If you dont like my opinion....I really dont care.
Playing: ESO, WOT, Smite, and Marvel Heroes
For people just looking to try the game out and play through the 1-50 stuff, I think the limited character cration options might be a shot in the foot. There aren't any details, but I'm guessing it will mean something like "any class but only human", although knowing bioware/ea, i wouldn't be surprised to see them restrict it even further to only 1 advanced class available for freemium players.
The other issue I see is that they are trying to still force people into a subscription of sorts, by only allowing operations/flashpoin/warzone access on a weekly basis through the cash shop, rather than a one time unlock for individual instances.
You make me like charity
So... you can playy all the class stories for free? Without buying the box or paying a dime?
How on earth are they going to earn any money from this deal?
I'll just go in and complete another couple of class stories myself. I care nothing about their raids, warzones, space missions, crew skills or other "purple purples". And judging by how their sub numbers plummetted after people completing their class stories, I suspect most people don't.
For what it's worth, the purple item restriction on subscribers appears to be a typo. The French version, for example, lists the only item restrictions for subscribers as being the normal stuff related to class/level/type.
You make me like charity
When I was playing you couldn't turn off xp. I wanted too with my mercenary alt(no need having one unless its a healer at 50 for pvp), but I leveled from 48 to 50 running warzones, so I think you would only be able to twink short amounts of time, before leveling. Plus the armor is crap pre 50 and the way the wz's equal everyone out, theres no real benefit to even trying to twink, other than pre 50 wz's would pop faster when I played, but Im sure thats changed by now.
Plus you gain rest xp which help's push you into leveling as well lol
Maybe it is a conspiracy? If people complain too much they can always say it was an error, if not they say the French and Dutch translation is the error...
Seriously, I dont think they are stupid enough to not include this in the subscription, that would actually loose them more players than just staying as P2P.
I am also surprised about those 5 medcenter visits, it sounds stupid to me (even though it at least doesnt punish the competent players). It will only hurt the noobs, the people they really do want to get to keep playing, they are the reason you want to have F2P in the first place.
EA need to think a little more on this if they want to turn the game around, being a little generous would actually earn them more points with the players and have the potential to bring back a lot of more people.
Could be part of the strategy is to get people drawn into the story and then sell future chapters for cartel coins or subs.
I liken this to when Vanguard came out with the First F2P model. It looked terrible on paper, it was really bad. No gear over green and other stuff that was an instant turn off. By the time it opened up, they had changed some stuff and it wasn't too bad. It wasn't great bad it wasn't as horrible as the inital plans made it seem.
I will take the same approach with SWTOR. Poke my head in and see what is doing. They are going to use the F2P conversion and the awarded Coins of course to try and get people back. The passes for PvP and Operations might be 50 cent to 1.00 a week or something not so terrible. Guess it's at least worth a look.
For story buffs 1-50 in greens, blues and oranges for free doesn't sound bad at all. Just if you like anything else that it starts to get annoying. I see it as you can box yourself in for a bit and get all the story modes done and then decide whether to keep going or stop and wait to see what the next expansion brings.
This structure seems pretty bad.
All in all, (even taking into account that the purple gear restriction for subbers is a typo), it appears that EA isn't serious about FTP players in either a FTP or Freemium way. The FTP aspect is just an extended trial. The vast majority of cash shop purchases will be from the subscribers. Of note in this regard, the cash shop will be selling to subscribers a bypass to the Fleet Pass cool down; cash shop will be selling additional cargo hold space to subscribers; the cash shop will be selling additional inventory space to subscribers; and of course, vanity pets, gear, speeders, and lock-boxes.
The FTP accounts will not be participating in SWTOR's endgame in any meaningful way. All the FTP unlocks are rentals, a week at a time. Unless the price of those rentals is absurrdly low, it seems unlikely that many will purchase a week pass to Warzones, Operatons, or Flashpoints. Who is going to group with these new unguilded, undergeared players to run instances? Whom among the FTP players is going to buy a weekly pass to get facerolled in Warzones? Even if they pay for the weekly pass, will FTPers have to pay additional fees for any decent gear looted?
In regard to FTPers it is all stick and no carrot. There is little incentive to pay for anything once the class story is complete.
If you think that this will drive them to subscibe, well that would be defeating the whole exercise of converting to a Freemium system.
EA said the problem was that people didn't want to pay a sub in the first place. So EA's solution is to create a FTP tier that drives players to either subscibe or quit?
And to those thinking that the game wil attract many new subscribers from the FTP extended trial, over 2 million of the game's target audience tried it and moved on. Since then, the game hasn't changed in any meaningful way, why expect a higher retention rate among any new players with the FTP relaunch? This system isn't creating a new way for players who don't want to pay a monthly fee to play the game on their own terms. In fact, this system is a bit of a farce.
Most everyone knows why the game went FTP. EA could have at least put more effort into making their efforts to hide SWTOR's subscription numbers more like a geniune belief that FTP is the new "exciting monetization model of the future".
I think EA/Biowaste is clueless on F2P and will continue the SWTOR flop.
I also think EA Louse was right.
Yet nobody believed him, sad really.
I feel like this part is unclear to many people. I believe what it is trying to say is that free players can only revive 5 times in the field (right next to their body) and then after that they have to revive at the nearest med center and run back. It seems like many people are taking it to mean that you can only revive 5 times in-zone total, but I don't think that is the case.
I don't really see this freemium thing working too well for them. When I first heard the game was going F2P I thought about trying it out again but now I have lost quite a bit of interest. I understand them wanting to give subscribers a reason to stay subscribed but it seems like they don't really want free players to play the game.