As a Star Wars fan, I really wanted to see this game succeed. I had hopes that the FTP model would possibly resurrect and save this game as I feel the way the game plays could appeal to eniugh players to keep it around for awhile. After reading the FTP model they are going with I see a huge influx of players coming in and trying the game only to be frustrated by the limitations and eventually leaving. Knowing Bioware this model doesn't surprise me, but I hoped they could check thir ego and financial dreams at the door to show they really cared about the success of this game.
I still don't believe him. If you keep throwing shit at the wall sooner or later some of it is going to stick. That is how predictions work in terms of MMOS.
However, doesn't change the fact that this freemium model sucks. I will stick to monthly sub if i ever want to go back again.
This game is NOT free to play, its a freemium model in the same vein as Vanguard. Why oh why do these companies think freemium models work I have no idea. I guess people sign up for this but man, can you imagine the loads of people who would come if it was a FTP model?
Cash shops work. A FTP model with a cash shop will bring in loads of money without having to limit content. I was going to try this out but the restrictions are so RESTRICTIVE!
Was just considering resubbing to see how hings have developed and then I read about restrictions on subscribed accounts. There goes THAT idea!
The image itself said subscribers are unrestricted in gear, it's just the tooltip that said otherwise which is a copy/paste from the freemium one. It's updated now, confirmed subscribers have no restrictions for gear outside the usual game-related ones.
Not sure if they're reading the death penalty limit wrong or not either. You have 5 times to revive in the field (which is limited already for subs but in a time based fashion) before your forced to revive at the nearest med center on the planet. Your not returning to fleet as OP speculated.
Oh I don't know.....instead of working on "Fremium" they instead fix Ilum (how long has Ilum been shut down?), balance the classes (you know, the ones everyone asks for when making a ranked PvP WZ group) and a few other major complaints people had about the game. It would probably get more people back to paying subs rather than figuring out how to play the game for free. Or, it could just be beyond the capability of the developers to fix the actual game so they have to go this route.
Oh well. Bioware fails on it's first MMO. The stories were good, the rest of the game was meh.
Those who want to Play for Free will learn to play with in the restrictions. Those who want to live outside of the fence will have to pay, and pay for those who don’t pay. Those three a week items are twice as many as I need. The only thing I may want is the additional crafting skill slots, one skill may be do able. Once you leveled to 60 the first time you never need those skills again right. Re-Leveling scavenger and armstech every ten levels just adds to the challenge.
Free players will solo to endgame, they may then purchase a purple license, and a few weekly pvp passes. So long as they can keep their expenditures below $15.00 a month, the free players will be happy. What am I saying, more like $5.00 a month and they will be happy.
When you had 100 players all paying $15 a month the company made $1,500 a month. Now that a quarter that number (25 players) are spending money in the cash shop, the company still expects to make $1,500 / month. So those cash shop users are expected to spend $1,500/25 = $60 per player every month. Then all those free players will whine about p2w when it fact it is just someone else paying for them to play for free.
Pardon any spelling errors
Konfess your cyns and some maybe forgiven Boy: Why can't I talk to Him? Mom: We don't talk to Priests. As if it could exist, without being payed for. F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing. Even telemarketers wouldn't think that. It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
Item Equipping: FULL ACCESS - Equip ALL purple items they acquire, assuming they meet the in-game requirements (Class, level etc)
OP, please update your original post to reflect the correct information.
EA's website for SWTOR was updated, again, to reflect their correction on subscribers gear usage. Given that EA has a bit of a history for firing their employees, I suppose the person who mistyped this into the main website adversisement is going to get hell for this Public Relations blunder (which also caused an uproar on the official forums).
It is updated on the OP. Subscribers can wear all purples, at will, given they can use the item type and meet the level restrictions, etc.
Freemium players still must purchase purple gear training from the cash shop in order to use "most" purples (likely all the good ones), which is really dumb if they are trying to attract returning players to get those lv 50's back into the game and refamiliarize themselves with their characters. New players are going to be less than entrusiastic, as well. That part stands.
The whole thing is just an elaborate scam on the people who are already paying for subs as there is no way the game will bring in more subs in the long run.
This is not FTP! the game is still based on PTP.. If the cash shop wasn't going to be geared at milking the sub players then why not just have a 30 day unlimited trial as i could see that working really well for them.
The freemium model is just garbage and really FTP has a bad name as it is, Bioware and others who do this freemium garbage just give it an even crapier image. Seriously just do what AION did and the game will take off as I think TOR is way better than AION. Even the BTP option would be better, but like i said they might as well leave game alone and give an unlimited 30 day trial since all they really claim to want is more subs, but i think some of us can see though the BS of milking the few hundred thousands to replace what should be millions of players.
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.
It comes down to the argument of whether it's OK to give free stuff away to people who would have never tried a product anyways. Players who are very interested in SWTOR have, for the most part, already tried it, with 2 million unsubscribing.
Does the music industry really suffer when someone who never heard a song before and had no intention of buying an album gets to download a song for free? Through a bunch of BS music labels claimed it hurt them, but surely word-of-mouth facilitates popularity more than anything else, and many people want an original album for music they like. Free material does promote accessibility more rapidly. For instance VEVO operates on YouTube to give away free music & their videos, with revenue obtained via advertising now. This was a very successful solution to make both sides of the issue happy, and VEVO expanded to "music on demand" software. I don't think the business model would have worked out so well for them if they gave the music away for free with a lower sound quality, for instance, which would be EA's model. [advertising isn't the only way to inconvenience customers btw, don't read it as such]
Giving full access to alts wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, as gamers would eventually tire of this and look to continuing their adventures lv 51+, as a paying customer. Giving everything away without restrictions may only offer immediate short term financial gains for EA, but in the long run, it would pay off far better than limiting game features & driving freemiums away, while, at the same time, trying to show off how great SWTOR is. If EA keeps to releasing content quickly, there would be an abundance of new content to tempt someone into subscribing after playing some characters up to 50 (and getting bored of old world content).
I guess I don't get the whole idea of wanting "F2P" to revive SWTOR, and then insisting that free players need to get nickled and dimed from the starting gate. People disassociated themselves from SWTOR because it was not worth the subscription (or their time). Coercing them back into a subscription while gimping main game features will not be very fun.
I agree with the above posters suggestion (JobeArthur) that EA should have used NCSofts Aion model, which includes an unrestricted game, with paying players getting faster leveling and fluffy items (special house furniture, costumes, illusions, etc). EA could have very well done this in conjunction with 1-time DLC for new content, as a hybrid. I prefer 1-time fees because it helps force developers to actually want to release new content on an accelerated schedule. No new content? No new revenue.
And EA/Bioware is about to provide a perfect example of the wrong way to implement f2p.
When F2P models work, it's because they make their money off of convenience, cosmetic, & novelty items. When F2P models fail, it's because they are implemented in a way that restricts gameplay, and usually is designed to try and milk as much cash out of the average player as possible.
Top that off with making it so even the sub model pushes you to spend extra money on the cashshop, and GG EA. You clearly haven't learned lessons from examples in the industry.
SWtOR's good sides, imho, never were the operations or warzones. They weren't bad or anything but frankly there are other games with much more engaging end-game content.
What makes SWtOR, to me, a good game were the class stories in addition to the social MMO features.
I greatly enjoyed playing what generally are well-crafted storylines whilst chatting with my guild or to random strangers. And being able to take a character I was invested in thanks to the storyline to group up and engage in heroic quests, warzones and flashpoints.
With this F2P scheme it looks like I'll be able to do exactly that. Enjoy the best parts of what SWtOR has to offer for free.
I look forward to being able to play this on the side for when I'm in the mood for a story-based game as well as some random social interaction.
We are the bunny. Resistance is futile. ''/\/\'''''/\/\''''''/\/\ ( o.o) ( o.o) ( o.o) (")("),,(")("),(")(")
I don't know which money hungry company is worse, Turbine or EA. I don't play both fail games either way, but poor sucker for whoever is going to play this so called free game lol.
I was really happy to see this game go f2p. I was anxiously waiting to return. But now, after seeing this, I probably won't. I'll probably level a few alts or something, just to see the other stories that I missed, but I certainly will not pay to access warzones and flashpoints every single week. No thanks. I only ever play f2p games if it's a 1 time purchase type of deal, as in you buy permanent access to dungeons or pvp areas. I will certainly skip the endgame for this one.
To the poster above me: I actually think that Turbine's model is great. They have a few hickups for sure. But most of everything that you would want can be bought by playing. Except pvp, which is my only gripe atm. But other than that, I like the system a lot.
-- I guess you get 5 free deaths, where you can easily resurrect. After that .. umm back to the fleet to res?
What? No.
Have you ever played SWtOR?
When you die there's two options. Either you can resurrect at the exact spot you died and you get a 10 second invisibility to get to get to a safe place and heal up or you can resurrect at the nearest med-center.
The first option you can, apparantly, use five times (a day I'm guessing?). Saving yourself a run back a few times.
The second option is infinitely available.
So yeah, you can either pay for the convenience of resurrecting at the spot you died more often or you can take a few minutes to run back to your quest from the nearest med-center.
We are the bunny. Resistance is futile. ''/\/\'''''/\/\''''''/\/\ ( o.o) ( o.o) ( o.o) (")("),,(")("),(")(")
I was really happy to see this game go f2p. I was anxiously waiting to return. But now, after seeing this, I probably won't. I'll probably level a few alts or something, just to see the other stories that I missed, but I certainly will not pay to access warzones and flashpoints every single week. No thanks. I only ever play f2p games if it's a 1 time purchase type of deal, as in you buy permanent access to dungeons or pvp areas. I will certainly skip the endgame for this one.
To the poster above me: I actually think that Turbine's model is great. They have a few hickups for sure. But most of everything that you would want can be bought by playing. Except pvp, which is my only gripe atm. But other than that, I like the system a lot.
You said it yourself. Everything is on the store, how could someone justify that by saying it could be earned by playing as well. Why would someone get the top notch item by doing nothing but take out the credit card rather to someone who actually tried to play and raids. The whole concept of a store like Turbines is just bad.
Originally posted by snapfusion I want to make sure IM reading this right, even with a sub you have purchase something from their cash shop in order to equip some in game purple items?
That's exactly what they're saying, yes.
LOL
This game is going to burn faster and harder than it has already.
No, thats wrong, if you have a sub, you dont have to pay for anything.
3 warzones a week? The way it was working when I quit, you would queue up 3 times only to get 5v8 each time and the warzones either end in 2 minutes for lack of players or they're boring, lopsided matches. Restricting F2P players to 3 a week over all characters is a joke.
it also seems like they arnt offering anything to those who bought the game back at launch. PLus the Freemium stuff doesnt even seem like its worth bothering with, and I still wouldnt be able to justifiy th 15 bucks a month when i wouldnt do anything. At least in wow the pokemon battles are strangly addicting.
these restrictions are too greedy even for subscribers. The worst thing is that free players have to buy acces to purple gear. IF i play as a free player and use cartel points to lift some limitations like bag space, more chances to revive in the field, etc... im already spending enough money to be competitive against a subscriber, but if i dont pay for purple gear access then everyone with purple gear will destroy me, pretty much P2W right there.
That purple gear restriction is the biggest BS in P2W F2P mmos everyone complains about. If EAWARE dont change that ill never touch Swtor again, ever. Bad publishers fail to deliver when faking honesty and will keep failing with greed over their heads.
Comments
I still don't believe him. If you keep throwing shit at the wall sooner or later some of it is going to stick. That is how predictions work in terms of MMOS.
However, doesn't change the fact that this freemium model sucks. I will stick to monthly sub if i ever want to go back again.
This game is NOT free to play, its a freemium model in the same vein as Vanguard. Why oh why do these companies think freemium models work I have no idea. I guess people sign up for this but man, can you imagine the loads of people who would come if it was a FTP model?
Cash shops work. A FTP model with a cash shop will bring in loads of money without having to limit content. I was going to try this out but the restrictions are so RESTRICTIVE!
-lvl 80 MERC BH
Ooops..
Was just considering resubbing to see how hings have developed and then I read about restrictions on subscribed accounts. There goes THAT idea!
The image itself said subscribers are unrestricted in gear, it's just the tooltip that said otherwise which is a copy/paste from the freemium one. It's updated now, confirmed subscribers have no restrictions for gear outside the usual game-related ones.
Not sure if they're reading the death penalty limit wrong or not either. You have 5 times to revive in the field (which is limited already for subs but in a time based fashion) before your forced to revive at the nearest med center on the planet. Your not returning to fleet as OP speculated.
Oh I don't know.....instead of working on "Fremium" they instead fix Ilum (how long has Ilum been shut down?), balance the classes (you know, the ones everyone asks for when making a ranked PvP WZ group) and a few other major complaints people had about the game. It would probably get more people back to paying subs rather than figuring out how to play the game for free. Or, it could just be beyond the capability of the developers to fix the actual game so they have to go this route.
Oh well. Bioware fails on it's first MMO. The stories were good, the rest of the game was meh.
First mistake was that they made the game subscription based instead of b2p.
Now they make it free to play aka pay sub to play or there's no need to play because of so many restrictions,wich is even worse than before.
What i got say is fail once is ok.Fail twice and you are burned.
Good job ea/bioware failing again see ya after 10 years when you realise that games are not about making money only.
ps:who is going to play fre to play with so many restrictions?lol are they out of their minds or they just looking for stupid victims.
Good luck failing again ea/bioware
Free players will solo to endgame, they may then purchase a purple license, and a few weekly pvp passes. So long as they can keep their expenditures below $15.00 a month, the free players will be happy. What am I saying, more like $5.00 a month and they will be happy.
When you had 100 players all paying $15 a month the company made $1,500 a month. Now that a quarter that number (25 players) are spending money in the cash shop, the company still expects to make $1,500 / month. So those cash shop users are expected to spend $1,500/25 = $60 per player every month. Then all those free players will whine about p2w when it fact it is just someone else paying for them to play for free.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
It clearly says:
Subscriber
Item Equipping: FULL ACCESS - Equip ALL purple items they acquire, assuming they meet the in-game requirements (Class, level etc)
OP, please update your original post to reflect the correct information.
EA's website for SWTOR was updated, again, to reflect their correction on subscribers gear usage. Given that EA has a bit of a history for firing their employees, I suppose the person who mistyped this into the main website adversisement is going to get hell for this Public Relations blunder (which also caused an uproar on the official forums).
It is updated on the OP. Subscribers can wear all purples, at will, given they can use the item type and meet the level restrictions, etc.
Freemium players still must purchase purple gear training from the cash shop in order to use "most" purples (likely all the good ones), which is really dumb if they are trying to attract returning players to get those lv 50's back into the game and refamiliarize themselves with their characters. New players are going to be less than entrusiastic, as well. That part stands.
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.
The whole thing is just an elaborate scam on the people who are already paying for subs as there is no way the game will bring in more subs in the long run.
This is not FTP! the game is still based on PTP.. If the cash shop wasn't going to be geared at milking the sub players then why not just have a 30 day unlimited trial as i could see that working really well for them.
The freemium model is just garbage and really FTP has a bad name as it is, Bioware and others who do this freemium garbage just give it an even crapier image. Seriously just do what AION did and the game will take off as I think TOR is way better than AION. Even the BTP option would be better, but like i said they might as well leave game alone and give an unlimited 30 day trial since all they really claim to want is more subs, but i think some of us can see though the BS of milking the few hundred thousands to replace what should be millions of players.
It comes down to the argument of whether it's OK to give free stuff away to people who would have never tried a product anyways. Players who are very interested in SWTOR have, for the most part, already tried it, with 2 million unsubscribing.
Does the music industry really suffer when someone who never heard a song before and had no intention of buying an album gets to download a song for free? Through a bunch of BS music labels claimed it hurt them, but surely word-of-mouth facilitates popularity more than anything else, and many people want an original album for music they like. Free material does promote accessibility more rapidly. For instance VEVO operates on YouTube to give away free music & their videos, with revenue obtained via advertising now. This was a very successful solution to make both sides of the issue happy, and VEVO expanded to "music on demand" software. I don't think the business model would have worked out so well for them if they gave the music away for free with a lower sound quality, for instance, which would be EA's model. [advertising isn't the only way to inconvenience customers btw, don't read it as such]
Giving full access to alts wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, as gamers would eventually tire of this and look to continuing their adventures lv 51+, as a paying customer. Giving everything away without restrictions may only offer immediate short term financial gains for EA, but in the long run, it would pay off far better than limiting game features & driving freemiums away, while, at the same time, trying to show off how great SWTOR is. If EA keeps to releasing content quickly, there would be an abundance of new content to tempt someone into subscribing after playing some characters up to 50 (and getting bored of old world content).
I guess I don't get the whole idea of wanting "F2P" to revive SWTOR, and then insisting that free players need to get nickled and dimed from the starting gate. People disassociated themselves from SWTOR because it was not worth the subscription (or their time). Coercing them back into a subscription while gimping main game features will not be very fun.
I agree with the above posters suggestion (JobeArthur) that EA should have used NCSofts Aion model, which includes an unrestricted game, with paying players getting faster leveling and fluffy items (special house furniture, costumes, illusions, etc). EA could have very well done this in conjunction with 1-time DLC for new content, as a hybrid. I prefer 1-time fees because it helps force developers to actually want to release new content on an accelerated schedule. No new content? No new revenue.
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.
And EA/Bioware is about to provide a perfect example of the wrong way to implement f2p.
When F2P models work, it's because they make their money off of convenience, cosmetic, & novelty items. When F2P models fail, it's because they are implemented in a way that restricts gameplay, and usually is designed to try and milk as much cash out of the average player as possible.
Top that off with making it so even the sub model pushes you to spend extra money on the cashshop, and GG EA. You clearly haven't learned lessons from examples in the industry.
I'm actually pleasantly surprised by this.
SWtOR's good sides, imho, never were the operations or warzones. They weren't bad or anything but frankly there are other games with much more engaging end-game content.
What makes SWtOR, to me, a good game were the class stories in addition to the social MMO features.
I greatly enjoyed playing what generally are well-crafted storylines whilst chatting with my guild or to random strangers. And being able to take a character I was invested in thanks to the storyline to group up and engage in heroic quests, warzones and flashpoints.
With this F2P scheme it looks like I'll be able to do exactly that. Enjoy the best parts of what SWtOR has to offer for free.
I look forward to being able to play this on the side for when I'm in the mood for a story-based game as well as some random social interaction.
We are the bunny.
Resistance is futile.
''/\/\'''''/\/\''''''/\/\
( o.o) ( o.o) ( o.o)
(")("),,(")("),(")(")
This is called F2P/Freemium?
I don't know which money hungry company is worse, Turbine or EA. I don't play both fail games either way, but poor sucker for whoever is going to play this so called free game lol.
I was really happy to see this game go f2p. I was anxiously waiting to return. But now, after seeing this, I probably won't. I'll probably level a few alts or something, just to see the other stories that I missed, but I certainly will not pay to access warzones and flashpoints every single week. No thanks. I only ever play f2p games if it's a 1 time purchase type of deal, as in you buy permanent access to dungeons or pvp areas. I will certainly skip the endgame for this one.
To the poster above me: I actually think that Turbine's model is great. They have a few hickups for sure. But most of everything that you would want can be bought by playing. Except pvp, which is my only gripe atm. But other than that, I like the system a lot.
What? No.
Have you ever played SWtOR?
When you die there's two options. Either you can resurrect at the exact spot you died and you get a 10 second invisibility to get to get to a safe place and heal up or you can resurrect at the nearest med-center.
The first option you can, apparantly, use five times (a day I'm guessing?). Saving yourself a run back a few times.
The second option is infinitely available.
So yeah, you can either pay for the convenience of resurrecting at the spot you died more often or you can take a few minutes to run back to your quest from the nearest med-center.
We are the bunny.
Resistance is futile.
''/\/\'''''/\/\''''''/\/\
( o.o) ( o.o) ( o.o)
(")("),,(")("),(")(")
You said it yourself. Everything is on the store, how could someone justify that by saying it could be earned by playing as well. Why would someone get the top notch item by doing nothing but take out the credit card rather to someone who actually tried to play and raids. The whole concept of a store like Turbines is just bad.
Pretty much its either Grind or Store.
No, thats wrong, if you have a sub, you dont have to pay for anything.
DAOC Live (inactive): R11 Cleric R11 Druid R11 Minstrel R9 Eldritch R6 Sorc R6 Scout R6 Healer
these restrictions are too greedy even for subscribers. The worst thing is that free players have to buy acces to purple gear. IF i play as a free player and use cartel points to lift some limitations like bag space, more chances to revive in the field, etc... im already spending enough money to be competitive against a subscriber, but if i dont pay for purple gear access then everyone with purple gear will destroy me, pretty much P2W right there.
That purple gear restriction is the biggest BS in P2W F2P mmos everyone complains about. If EAWARE dont change that ill never touch Swtor again, ever. Bad publishers fail to deliver when faking honesty and will keep failing with greed over their heads.