Star Wars: The Old Republic - Now Free to Play

[RogueIce]

Well, STO got a thread for it, why not TOR?

I was never interested enough to play the game when it was sub-only, but I did download it (Jesus fucking Christ 25+ gigs???) now that I can just pop in whenever and check it out. And...well it's pretty meh. I think I'll just copy and paste my post on it from elsewhere:

So I started playing The Old Republic now that it's F2P. And honestly it's a little meh. I mean I suppose the story choices and stuff may or may not set it apart the further along it goes, but right now it just feels too much like World of Star Warscraft with more dialogue branches and voice acting.

It certainly isn't helped that EA/BioWare have really, really bullshitted the F2P thing. You only get 5 "Medical Probes" which can revive you on the spot for the entire length of your character - unless you pay for it in the cash shop or sub up. Otherwise? Bullshit MedCenter which makes you have to run back like WoW. Oh and when you hit Level 10 they reduce your XP gain unless you buy XP boosts in the cash store or sub. And you can't even motherfucking use the sprint command (unless you buy it with cash or at Level 15 with in-game Credits) which makes all the "run back and forth" questing really, really tedious. Well, moreso than it otherwise would be.

It's also kind of stupid with the Standard MMO Convention of shit newbie gear. Here I am, an Elite Republic Trooper just assigned to the Best of the Best special forces squad. So naturally when they send me to a warzone I show up completely without armor and wearing a long-sleeve shirt and pants. Uh huh...

Honestly I think I'll stick with STO. As annoying as lockboxes are, their F2P isn't totally gimping you with petty bullshit meant to annoy you into a sub or at least cash store purchases. And I far, far prefer their uniform system so you don't have to look like a lowbie scrub when you just start the game. Sure the armor and kits do get more impressive looking when you level but they do manage to look like respectable armor, and actually showing them is entirely optional and most people don't even bother. So you can look like a respectable Starfleet Officer right out of the gate.

I am getting one of those rebate debit cards relatively soon-ish though. Maybe I'll play TOR with their money for a sub to see if the various storylines (which is what everyone likes to rave about with that game) will actually make it worthwhile to either A) sub for reals or B) put up with the nickel-and-dime F2P bullshit.

[Mr Bean]

Yeah the sprint not until 15 was a pretty sharp dick punch to the F2P people.
The thing is with TOR, the only part of it that is good and solid IS the Single player stuff. Some of the flashpoints are interesting but only the first time. Stuff like Black Talon, The Esseles, The Foundary, Malestorm Prison, Colicoid War Games, Battle of Illium and False Emperor are interesting to run through once, not thirty times. Of operations only Karraga's Palace is interesting story wise.

Also universally all the stories except Sith Inquistor get better after getting your Starship between 15-17. Sith Inquistor has one of the strongest starts in the game by giving you a enemy you will loath from day 1 minute 1.

[TheFeniX]

So I started playing The Old Republic now that it's F2P. And honestly it's a little meh. I mean I suppose the story choices and stuff may or may not set it apart the further along it goes, but right now it just feels too much like World of Star Warscraft with more dialogue branches and voice acting.

SWTOR copied WoW by taking all of it's horrible elements from the entire history of the game and tried to compete against the 2012 version of WoW. It even lacks the novelty of SWG. The main quests are really the only content worth doing and that doesn't require money under the F2P option.

And you can't even motherfucking use the sprint command (unless you buy it with cash or at Level 15 with in-game Credits) which makes all the "run back and forth" questing really, really tedious. Well, moreso than it otherwise would be.

That's just like it was at release (aside from paying real money for it) and was just as annoying then as, I assume, it is now. And WoW isn't much better at mobility during early levels, but you can choose compact leveling zones if you want. With SWTOR: you can full-clear Korriban in just over an hour. I did so, first time as a Sith, with my Warrior in an hour 30. Speed-running (skipping any extra quests) through the Jedi starting planet takes a minimum of 2 hours (with another high level player helping you out) because it's just so fucking big and requires multiple instances of backtracking. Mob density and respawn rates sure as fuck didn't help either.

It's also kind of stupid with the Standard MMO Convention of shit newbie gear. Here I am, an Elite Republic Trooper just assigned to the Best of the Best special forces squad. So naturally when they send me to a warzone I show up completely without armor and wearing a long-sleeve shirt and pants. Uh huh...

That's not an MMO convention. That's a convention that spreads across many genres. Bioware loves this shit, no matter the game. Just be glad with bolster, you can actually compete against anyone sub ~45 or so. You still hit pretty hard. In WoW, even with the narrow brackets, twinks running Heirloom gear roll all over you.

TOR wasn't worth the money before it was F2P and no matter what official forum whores state, it's not worth the money now. There's not a single area of SWTOR that doesn't have some form of crippling bug or assault on the senses. I could go into detail, but I already did that in the main thread. I find myself loading up STO every once in a while just to screw around because at least the game work 99% of the time. I'm actually afraid to reinstall SWTOR due to graphics and HDD issues that pervaded my time playing it.

[CaptHawkeye]

Sadly F2P still won't make it look at all fun, interesting, or un-fugly it's massively fugly art and graphics design.

I've never seen a game that turned me off so quickly with a few screenshots. Yech.

[Anacronian]

All that money spent and i have yet to hear anybody who actually like the look of Tor.

[TheFeniX]

I remember seeing alpha (or whatever) build high-res screenshots back in 2008 or so, and the game looked damn good. It looked lively. The characters looked gritty, especially the ones I saw with the Trooper (cracked and scarred armor). Then post-2010 they started releasing a lot of newer screenshots at hilariously low resolution and seemed to be going with a much more stylized (read: lower quality) graphics system which would have flown nicely, had it been 2004 and they were competing against Vanilla WoW and/or SWG. The game just feels sterile, even running around Tatoonie (a planet that has no business looking like that) and the technology was there to make it look as rough of a planet as it was. Even with the game looking like Jedi Outast, they still hadn't enabled High-res textures when I quit. And that's important because they entire game is one huge reskin.

And I could deal with a more sterile SW. But the shit just starts to add up. Fucking Star Trek Online, based around TV show where aliens are nothing but actors in face-makeup had Cryptic design a character creator that leads to Captain Frank N Berry of the IKS General Meals. Meanwhile, the latest Star Wars MMO, based on a movie where one scene in a Cantina shows us we're in an alien Galaxy because every background extra blew the effects budget, we get 4 body types and a few head customizations. It's pathetic and really got me worried within 5 seconds of finally getting the game running.

In the end, everything I need to know about BW design I learned from seeing a pre-pubescent girl on Coruscant with E-sized breasts, a fake tan, and an ass that won't quit. I still can't believe that shit made it past QA.

[Darksider]

So F2P might not be the saving grace for the game most thought it would be. I'd better finish those class story lines as quickly as possible if the game's still going under.

[RogueIce]

That's just like it was at release (aside from paying real money for it) and was just as annoying then as, I assume, it is now. And WoW isn't much better at mobility during early levels, but you can choose compact leveling zones if you want. With SWTOR: you can full-clear Korriban in just over an hour. I did so, first time as a Sith, with my Warrior in an hour 30. Speed-running (skipping any extra quests) through the Jedi starting planet takes a minimum of 2 hours (with another high level player helping you out) because it's just so fucking big and requires multiple instances of backtracking. Mob density and respawn rates sure as fuck didn't help either.

I have a Jedi Knight alt, and I've already noticed this a bit. Also the layout is fucking confusing and I get lost without overlaying the map. My Trooper on Ord Mantell had no such problems.

The travel times will piss me off, I can tell. In general chat someone told me that the Trooper story involves a lot of back-and-forth to Coruscant. Which will be fucking asinine if true. Especially if it ends up going Coruscant -> Fleet -> Mission Planet -> Doing Mission/Side Missions -> Fleet -> Coruscant -> Repeat. Which would appear to be the case. Didn't help that for my first trip to the Fleet I literally had to go to the other fucking side of that rather large area for no adequately explained reason. If I have to keep legging it like this, well...I'll be pretty madbro about it. I actually played a couple days on a Trial Account before F2P went live so I've already had a taste of Sprint so it's just double annoying now.

I'm 99% sure I came across some other bullshit restrictions but I can't think of them now. I'm sure they'll come back to me when next I play.

EDIT: Oh the biggest bullshit I wanted to point out is that the F2P chart is essentially worthless. Nowhere did it mention anything about limited sprint and nerfing your XP gain at level 10 and beyond. So have fun finding that out when you actually start the game, level up to 10 and find out Bioware hates you and you need to sub to earn full XP for your missions.

And they weren't kidding when they said character customization would be limited. A quick glance in the store would indicate that the only starting race newbie players get is human. Yeah, one fucking race. That's it. I don't know of any other F2P MMORPG that has multiple races and is so stingy with them. I haven't actually tried to roll a new toon to confirm it, but since pretty much every race I could remember from my Trial Account character creation seemed to be in there I'm guessing that is the case. I don't know if they've gimped the already pathetic slider choices you get for the actual customization or not.

That's not an MMO convention. That's a convention that spreads across many genres. Bioware loves this shit, no matter the game. Just be glad with bolster, you can actually compete against anyone sub ~45 or so. You still hit pretty hard. In WoW, even with the narrow brackets, twinks running Heirloom gear roll all over you.

True enough about the shit gear. Doesn't help that they've restricted the color meshing behind a paywall. It might make those Commando Greaves I got as a reward semi-useful. Oh well, I'll just have to have mis-matched colors.

And it really makes me mad that my Goddamn Companion gets a set of Havoc Squad Cool Armor while I'm stuck in my shirt-with-a-couple-armor-pads crap. I'm the new CO of the fucking Elite Special Forces Squad and I still look like a noob scrub. Oh and apparently he gets some jungle, urban and a third pattern I forget as well. Or would if I subscribed lol. Granted it's minor but my inner RPer (playing on RP The Ebon hawk server sooo...) was mad. Until I remembered that I'll keep looking like an idiot with a white jacket and pants for probably the next ten levels so why not have him run around in white armor everywhere?

As for the last sentence I don't PvP and have basically no interest in it so that probably won't matter too awful much. I may roll a toon on a RP-PvP server once just to say I did, but I'm sure I'll ragequit after the second or third time I get ganked.

Some person in General actually said they left the RP-PvP because of how utterly abusive the vets were being to the froobies. I don't know if that was just shit-talking in chat or griefing the ever loving fuck out of them, but I was both saddened and not surprised. To read the forums, having F2Pers show up will RUIN FOREVER the game because of all the "kiddies" and "trolls" and the rest of the unwashed masses sullying up their game. I remember that shit from STO very well, especially all the blowhards demanding that PW/Cryptic gimp the shit out of the Silver accounts just because. Well guess they should've been playing TOR because that's what EA/BW did.

Oh yeah and mentioning that some of the F2P restrictions were bullshit in GenChat got me plenty of "well buy the game you want something for nothing etc" crap. Though to be fair, as in STO, there were entirely reasonable pay members who agreed and don't buy into the 'gimp the freepers' line.

One guy said it best by pointing out that the point of F2P is to give new players a good taste of the game and make them want to stick around and spend money on it. Which won't happen with abusive players and overly gimping their accounts so that they get annoyed and look for a better game. Of course tell that to the moronic masses...

TOR wasn't worth the money before it was F2P and no matter what official forum whores state, it's not worth the money now. There's not a single area of SWTOR that doesn't have some form of crippling bug or assault on the senses. I could go into detail, but I already did that in the main thread. I find myself loading up STO every once in a while just to screw around because at least the game work 99% of the time. I'm actually afraid to reinstall SWTOR due to graphics and HDD issues that pervaded my time playing it.

Those issues seem to be there. Oddly enough for the pre-1.5 Trial Account I ran around with, the Jedi starting planet got really chuggy with around 90 or so people in it. But after the patch Ord Mantell with over 100 seemed to run pretty smooth. Until I got to the Fleet which lagged like a motherfucker with around 160 or so people in it.

The worst part is the memory leak or whatever the fuck it is. When I alt-tab out for any reason, it seems okay enough. But then when I bring the game back up it drags like fuck and takes its sweet time to rerender everything from a black and gray mess to (eventually) back as it should be. Which is odd because clearly alt-tabbing was expected since there's a sound option to play game sounds when minimized. It gets far worse though when I try to exit the game itself. It just sits there nice and frozen for about three or four minutes before it will exit to desktop. No alt-tabbing, Windows key or ctrl-alt-del will save me, I just have to wait and hope. And then my computer will act all chuggy even after it finally closes for awhile. And the best part? When I go to shut down Windows tells me I have to wait for some (unnamed, of course) background program to close for about five minutes. This only happens after playing TOR, no other time, so I'm blaming the game for it.

So basically if you minimize the game or quit it sucks major donkey balls. Otherwise the lag isn't all that bad if the population is in some weird butter zone I can't quite determine but seems to exist. The usual odd teleporting of players every now and again but nothing that seemed to affect gameplay.

I mean it's free and I already took the time to download the 25+ gigs so I might stick around for the story, and as I said I may even use some other company's money via a rebate card to sub for a little while and see what that's like. But beyond that? I don't think this game has any real staying power for me.

Shit, even STO is something I'll fire up every now and again just because I can and fly around for a bit because it's fun or just fire off some Doff missions and leave. And they do (sometimes) introduce a mission or two that isn't some raid you have to be uber geared for and shit. And of course I can do so knowing that when I close the game it won't basically kill my computer's processing ability for some God-knows-why reason. TOR can't give me any of that, and that's just sad when motherfucking STO can beat you on random pick up and play enjoyment.

[RogueIce]

EDIT: Oh the biggest bullshit I wanted to point out is that the F2P chart is essentially worthless. Nowhere did it mention anything about limited sprint and nerfing your XP gain at level 10 and beyond. So have fun finding that out when you actually start the game, level up to 10 and find out Bioware hates you and you need to sub to earn full XP for your missions.

And they weren't kidding when they said character customization would be limited. A quick glance in the store would indicate that the only starting race newbie players get is human. Yeah, one fucking race. That's it. I don't know of any other F2P MMORPG that has multiple races and is so stingy with them. I haven't actually tried to roll a new toon to confirm it, but since pretty much every race I could remember from my Trial Account character creation seemed to be in there I'm guessing that is the case. I don't know if they've gimped the already pathetic slider choices you get for the actual customization or not.

Motherfuck, I missed the edit window.

Anyway it seems they updated the chart since a couple days back so the above is no longer correct. And you get 3 races, not just humans.

I also want to mention that not letting you have an inventory bank without paying money is epic-level bullshit. Does any other F2P MMO do this? Or are they just being dickheads?

[Mr Bean]

I also want to mention that not letting you have an inventory bank without paying money is epic-level bullshit. Does any other F2P MMO do this? Or are they just being dickheads?

There might be some Korean Pay to win MMO out there as nickle and dime.

Seriously this entire F2P thing has been a disgrace. I'm pretty sure they spent the last six months since June testing what features they could strip away before players were simply unable to play the game at all then added back in two features...

I mean for fuck sake who thought "Free players level slower" or "Free players move slower" was a great idea?

[Feil]

The voice acting and characterization is nice, as is what I've seen of the storyline - I'm actually interested in what happens next for my character. The gameplay and graphics are so unbelievably antiquated, though, that I quit playing after twenty minutes or so.

3 free races, it looks like.

[PREDATOR490]

Logged in for all of 5 miniutes before I was disgusted by the store.

One of the 'services' they are offering is selling additional quickslots. Words cannot describe how fucking retarded that is.
Want to be able to use all of your characters abilities ? - too fucking bad
Want to be able to use a title - Nope
Want to be able to hide your head slot - Nope

Almost all of the shit they are offering IS shit or something they stripped out of what the players started with pre-F2P. Interesting that STO just launched a new season and I just started playing that yesterday... despite my disgust with their version of the store I find the TOR version even worse.

At least STO actually offered new things in their store, TOR has decided to be even more lazy and cheap by cutting up what was already there.
TOR has managed to become a colossal fuckup of the year which just keeps on sinking further despite the hilarious hype and money that was pumped into it.

[Vendetta]

It really baffles me that for a game where they put in so much effort to copy WoW's homework in their original design they've basically done absolutely no research into what's likely to be a successful F2P offering.

I mean it's not like there aren't really successful and good F2P MMO models, DCUO has a pretty good one, for free you get everything that was in the game when it launched with the only restrictions being less inventory slots, bank slots, and you can only hold up to a certain amount of money (any further money is held in escrow, you can pay to access it).

If you spend $5 real money on anything they upgrade your account and those limits go up a bit.

Then you can either pay individually for the DLCs to access the content in that DLC forever (and get the upgrade mentioned above) or pay the monthly fee which gives you all the DLCs for as long as you're subscribed and removes all account restrictions and gives you all your escrow money, and gives you other freebies like being able to reset key character features like your power and movement types every so often.

D&D Online also has basically the same model, except you can also buy one time passes to the dungeons you don't own.

[Imperial528]

Well, just downloaded it yesterday, started it today. It's fine with alt-tabbing, but my biggest gripe so far is that even with the res set correctly, the interface is blurry and the text is hard to read. Maybe it's my intel chipset, but it hasn't had this problem in any other recent game.

The character creator sucks. Guild Wars 2's creator, which was just a small upgrade over its predecessors creator, is by far better than this one. Oblivion had a better one, for god's sake.

Starting with a Republic trooper. Movement system is clunky, but then MMOs rarely have smooth character movement. Can definitely echo the "armored shirt" complaints.

I don't know how they managed to make the graphics so low. StarCraft II's graphics on very low look just about the same level as this. Fucking Oblivion competes with it. In fact, KOTOR looked better. Now, I do have anti-aliasing set to low, since integrated chips suck, but most other options are set to high.

[Broken]

Yeah, from what I have heard, this is basically the worst FtP system ever, if it could be sold it was priced and put on the market. Bioware/EA really, really dropped the ball on this game; if there was ever a game you could take risks with, it was TOR, instead they just wasted time and money on a game that few want to play.

On the other hand, check out the youtube trailer for the end of the current Final Fantasy XIV, another massively disappointing recent MMO.

End of current FFXIV world

The servers for FFXIV are currently down, but they are relaunching (although not going FtP so far as I know) to a 2.0 FFXIV so they literally nuked the entire world for the new upgrade.

[Knife]

Bah, nothing makes you guys happy. Granted, I still sub, so have no idea what the in's and out's of F2P are, but I went through the same thing with LOTRO. F2P is to either get you to spend bucks in the store and give up and resub. If it's not for you it's not for you.

[Civil War Man]

From what I've seen of it, this whole thing reads like a parody of the very concept of free-to-play.

I mean, according to the site, you have to pay real money to have access to stuff like crafting more than one item at a time, being able to both craft an item and gather mats for it on the same character, wearing gear above a certain quality, sending mail, and seeing which other players are online.

[Stark]

The joke is bioware has another, very lucrative, F2P game that's done right.

[Vendetta]

Yeah, pity they charged £40 upfront for it, rather than doing the sensible thing and releasing it as part of the marketing blitz as a real f2p with sensible monetisation options.

Chances are if I could get the items I wanted in Multi Effect 3 I'd still play it from time to time. I mean it's not like I can say that monstrous grind puts me off, I play world of tanks for fuck's sake, I just like to grind for things I want not grind for the chance of rolling dice.

[RogueIce]

Apparently there are a couple other restrictions that I couldn't see on the chart:

Turns out it isn't 3 times weekly, instead it's only 3 Loot Rolls per a week. You can still do them for exp I believe but after 3 loot rolls you're locked out on looting anymore gear. So do NOT greed on ANYTHING in Instances because they will take up one of your weekly 3 loot rolls.

Only need on stuff that you need.

FYI, even if you lose a loot roll it still counts towards you 3 weekly loot rolls.

The good news is that Bioware will gladly sell you weekly passes instead of the option of just removing that constriction.

Also, some quest rewards(such as green quality stuff) cannot be selected if you're f2p/preferred and you're capped on tokens that you can have for planets and pvp.

Okay, this may be in the chart as "Event Items" but it isn't terribly clear.

Furthermore all stuff that costs creds and/or tokens is 25% more costly if you're f2p or preferred which means that some of the better gear as you're leveling or pvping is completely locked out due to your cap(and them costing more than your cap) even before you hit 50.

The credit cap is on the chart but I didn't see anything saying shops would be more expensive. A dick move there.

And who the Christ knows what other hidden restrictions will show up?

Still looking at the server status tonight it seems to be doing okay for them, but then at game launch they also had a ton of people online so we'll see if the hype around "OMG SWTOR F2P!" will end up being sustained or not. And of course whether enough people will be willing to pay for basic shit other F2P MMOs give you for free or even subscribe to not be treated like a second-class citizen.

[Vendetta]

Bah, nothing makes you guys happy.

Well, some of us pointed out things that make us (and given the success of some other F2P games, DCUO's population jumped 1000% when it went F2P for instance, a significant number of prospective players) happy. It's just that Bioware have perversely decided to do none of those things.

[Vendetta]

Apparently there are a couple other restrictions that I couldn't see on the chart:

Turns out it isn't 3 times weekly, instead it's only 3 Loot Rolls per a week. You can still do them for exp I believe but after 3 loot rolls you're locked out on looting anymore gear. So do NOT greed on ANYTHING in Instances because they will take up one of your weekly 3 loot rolls.

Only need on stuff that you need.

FYI, even if you lose a loot roll it still counts towards you 3 weekly loot rolls.

The good news is that Bioware will gladly sell you weekly passes instead of the option of just removing that constriction.

Again, a bizarre way of handling it.

DCUO, for instance, allows you to roll for loot (and get special raid points to buy endgame armour, which you always get irrespective of loot rolls, and are 90% of the reason for raiding since most loot you can roll for is a sidegrade at best) once per week per boss in raids, and that's for everyone, free or premium. You can purchase tokens which reset your roll/tokens for a raid for the week and premium players get basically one or two resets a month as a perk of membership (depending on the level of the content, higher level stuff costs more to reset).

Which means that there is, well, exactly no restriction on F2P players, they can get the exact same loot from a raid as a paid player (though they will need to have bought the DLC that has that raid content in it if it's not the very first few, but you can do that as a one off which lets you raid it forever).

It's almost as if they're ashamed they've made the game now and want to kill it as fast as possible, because this is not a good strategy for attracting either new blood or cancelled subscriptions.

[Havok]

Sadly F2P still won't make it look at all fun, interesting, or un-fugly it's massively fugly art and graphics design.

I've never seen a game that turned me off so quickly with a few screenshots. Yech.

This is exactly how I felt. The horrible looking characters and graphics were just so off putting I never wanted to put a seconds worth of time into it and I can handle grinding on EVE until I fall asleep.

[Lagmonster]

Bah, nothing makes you guys happy.

I wouldn't say that nothing makes them happy. Complaints about entertainment products can be correct, valid, and entirely relevant to a demographic's purchasing decision, and still not mean jack diddly shit.

At the lowest end of the scale, some people will play any piece of crap so long as it has enough explosions and tits, or gives them a couple of good presses at the 'you got a reward!' button in their brain. And sometimes you just want the simple catharsis of sticking a bad guy with a lightsaber for increasingly hypermasculinized reasons.

For example, my wife subscribes because she likes the escapism of being a violent, slutty Sith. It doesn't matter that there might be better games out there or that some elements of the gameplay experience confuse her or that the economic model might be inferior to others - she simply discards or ignores what gets in the way of her frying some hapless bastard in a cutscene.

[TheFeniX]

In general chat someone told me that the Trooper story involves a lot of back-and-forth to Coruscant. Which will be fucking asinine if true. Especially if it ends up going Coruscant -> Fleet -> Mission Planet -> Doing Mission/Side Missions -> Fleet -> Coruscant -> Repeat. Which would appear to be the case.

I played a Trooper to ~36. Yea, it's pretty annoying, but the Jedi Knight isn't much better what with the trips to Tython. Combined with all the loading screens, the game just drags on. I wouldn't be surprised if travel times (lacking combat or any actual mission objectives along the way) account for over half the playtime for each class.

I can't remember the specific mission, but there was one that was like "Come to Tython, we need to talk." Then you get there and it's like "This is an emergency, people are dieing, you have to get to X planet ASAP." So, why the fuck didn't they just send me a text or something?

As for the last sentence I don't PvP and have basically no interest in it so that probably won't matter too awful much. I may roll a toon on a RP-PvP server once just to say I did, but I'm sure I'll ragequit after the second or third time I get ganked.

PvP was the only real "grind" left in the game when I quit and it was one massive fucking uphill battle. You could full clear EV and KP in two hours (100% of the raid content) if your raid wasn't balls retarded, but PvP queues were filled to the brim with premade War Hero groups smashing under-geared players. SWTOR has to be the absolute worst PvP system I've ever taken part in. And it only got more horrible as BW tried to fix it.

TOR can't give me any of that, and that's just sad when motherfucking STO can beat you on random pick up and play enjoyment.

I don't play STO very much. Maybe 4-5 hours since I unsubbed way back. One thing I noticed was that it doesn't shit all over you like a freemium app for your phone does. I like that. The game isn't really that great, but it's a nice timesink.

One of the 'services' they are offering is selling additional quickslots. Words cannot describe how fucking retarded that is.

Dude no. You're lying. You have to be. Are you telling me they are charging cash money to open the options menu and enable the bottom, left and right quickslot bars? FUCK. I lost the bet with my buddy. I literally saw F2P as going like "Here's 3 chances a week to do X, then you have to pay up. Also, please buy these models we ripped directly from better SW IP." Man, he was right, BW did go full-retard. And this is the same guy who I leveled with and (at around level 40 or so) the bright light of the Star Wars IP could no longer drown out glaring issues with the game and I started into my bitching (like I always do), he told me "Cmon man, you always do this. SWTOR is a good game, just... GOD YOU'RE SO NEGATIVE."

Bah, nothing makes you guys happy. Granted, I still sub, so have no idea what the in's and out's of F2P are, but I went through the same thing with LOTRO. F2P is to either get you to spend bucks in the store and give up and resub. If it's not for you it's not for you.

BW (is it even BW anymore? They fired half the original team and didn't their founder retire?) has gone a route that will almost certainly leave a bad taste in the mouth of anyone trying out the game. The people just now willing to try SWTOR for the first time are not likely big Star Wars fans, so the IP won't carry them into the game. What demographic will the F2P system bring into the fold? Masochists?