SW:TOR F2P releasing soon, and will likely fail.

[Pandabearparade]

If you are unaware of the crippling restrictions put on F2P users in the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic free-to-play model, here's a quick summary of the important points:

-Three Warzones a week
-Three Flashpoints a week
-Two actionbars (initially they made it just one)
-No hearthstone-esque ability
-You have to pay real money to equip epics
-No raiding
-One profession instead of three
-A cap on your money
-No bank access

There are more limits, but those are the important points. This is a recipe for failure, not revitalizing a dying game. Bioware/EA once again proudly display that they are incapable of doing anything on the management end of TOR correctly. I don't object to some limitations on what a F2P user can do, but they appear to be doing their very best to suck the fun out of TOR for people who want to try the game free.

I'm sure a lot of people around here who have a fetish for the word "entitled" will balk at that statement, but it's true. Yes, I know it's free. Yes, I know you aren't entitled to anything from them if you aren't paying them money*. The problem here is that by grossly inconveniencing players who want to try the game free they aren't giving them an incentive to pay, they're giving them an incentive to go play another game.

The free-to-play model they are using really is a great illustration of TOR's major problems in a nutshell. Bioware does not know how to please MMO customers, and they do not change bad design decisions fast enough. The amount of time it took for Bioware to merge dead servers is an enormous factor in why the game hemorrhaged subscribers at the rate it did. They chose to save face and stall merging servers until well after it became absolutely necessary. In an MMO you just can't sit on critical problems and expect people to wait on you. When a large part of the community leaves, it adds a snowball effect that applies more and more reason for the remaining players to leave because they have fewer people to play the game with.

Right now Bioware should be making the free-to-play option extremely appealing to new and returning players, not attempting to do everything they can to make the experience tedious. Every new player who returns is another step in the direction of TOR rebuilding its lost community. The right way to go about fixing TOR (in my opinion) is to offer positive reinforcement to subscribers using cool vanity items and perks from the Cartel Market, not punishing F2P players.

*Hell. Some of you people who overuse the word "entitled" don't think that even paying entitles you to anything, even the right to complain about a bad ending. I don't understand this mentality.

Captcha: Gift horse. The irony is not lost on me.

 

[thatonedude11]

The thing is, The Old Republic was not designed as a free-to-play game, so they have to adapt. Of course it's not going to be ideal. There have to be restrictions on free players, otherwise no one would pay and EA doesn't get any money.

The goal of the free-to-play model for The Old Republic is to get a lot of people to start it for the solo content. From what I understand (I have never tried TOR, so I may be completely wrong) the solo content doesn't really need the things they're restricting to subscribers. Then, presumably most people will try out the warzones and flashpoints. If they think it is fun, they'll subscribe. If not, they'll just play the solo stuff until they get board or run out of content.

Will this work? Well, we'll have to see. At this point though, it can't really hurt.

 

[JaceArveduin]

LotRO wasn't designed as a f2p game either, and Turbine's handled that fairly well. Come to think of it, pretty sure DDO wasn't either.

And when you say no 'bank' access, do you mean no item storage at all? If so, that'll probably kill it faster than anything, except maybe the lack of the map home/hearthstone/etc ability.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

It's a little ass backwards, to be honest. The best thing to do would've been to open up FTP for the warzones and flashpoints and what not in order to populate them and make running them easier for everyone. Make the game feel full and social. Then you sell people the stories and some cosmetic goodies, and Bob's your Uncle. Instead they're giving away what is unarguably the most succulent piece of their content (the personal storylines), putting all the stuff that needs a population boost behind lock and key, and then stripping away basic functionality to make everything tedious.

As FTP models go, it's not exactly a Master's class.

And when you say no 'bank' access, do you mean no item storage at all? If so, that'll probably kill it faster than anything, except maybe the lack of the map home/hearthstone/etc ability.

Dude, FTP players don't even get SPRINT. They can't rez in the field. Basic functionality like chat is locked down until you spend at least a little money. Until a day or two ago, they didn't even let you have a second hotbar.

Bank space? That's a flat out luxury in the bold new world of TOR FTP.

 

[Pandabearparade]

It's a little ass backwards, to be honest. The best thing to do would've been to open up FTP for the warzones and flashpoints

Agreed. Faster queues for people who subscribe is a good thing for them. By restricting the F2P so ridiculously they are also hurting the subscribers.

 

[Smertnik]

I have the feeling charging for the story instead of basic functions would have been a more sensible choice - I very much doubt that (most) people who decide to pick up the game once it goes f2p would be looking for anything other than the story. After all, anything TOR can do WoW can do better; the only thing that makes it stand out is the story and voice acting (well, and the SW setting). Why offer that part for free, of all things? Not that I'm complaining.

 

[el derpenburgo]

And to think, all that money could have gone to creating several decent non-MMOs. TOR is sinking without trace now.

 

[distortedreality]

While it's not ideal, I'll be giving it a go when it goes FTP because I'm pretty much solely interested in the more solo aspects of the game. I put it off earlier because of RL commitments, but it'll be going f2p around the time a lot of those commitments die down, so it's a bit of a win for me. If I enjoy i'll get into the MMO side of things, but realistically as long as I get to play through the stories I'll be happy.

 

[alphamalet]

If it fails I won't be happy if people lose their jobs.

I will be happy to see Bioware and EA get a well-deserved kick in the ass.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

Honestly it was doomed from the start just because its Starwars. Despite what the popular myth is, the Starwars franchise isn't that popular. It has rabid fans, the movies do well enough, but its not the kind of thing that the average person absolutely has to have all the merchandise of.

Maybe back in the early 80's when I remember having a Yoda shampoo bottle, yeah it was quite popular. This has everything to do with the first 3 films, and people liking THOSE characters.

Then the new films came and the same people took their kids to see them, and then those kids watched the clone wars tv show (which I quite liked. Way more than ep 1-3).

But once again its love comes from the characters and Anikin's story I think rather than the universe at large. To even be all that familiar with it, you would need to have read a lot of mostly garbage books that are mostly non canon, or played KotoR.

I have done neither, and contrary to the general assumption on internet forums neither have most people.

So the prospect of making an MMO, which need millions of subscribers to be viable with as much money as Bioware has obviously sunk into it, on a franchise that's popularity consists of 2 major peaks which coincide with the theatrical releases and a steady downward trend thereafter seems shortsighted. If they had released this like within a year of ep.3 they would have made a lot of money.

At least until people realized that there is vertually NOTHING from the films they like in the game. Its set waaaaay before anything they would remotely be familier with, and (I would imagine logically) has absolutely none of the characters they are invested with.

I mean it would be like if they made an MMO based on the Silmarilion, and tried to attract all the LotR fans to it. Very, very few people that love The Hobbit and the Trilogy, are gonna sit down for a bazillion hours and pay each month to wander around Numenor and endure the millennia before Sauron lost his ring. Maybe Ungoliant would be a raid boss lol.

Now, rather than cut their substantial losses, they are going with the "built to fail" F2P model. i.e. make new players that want to try it out (because they mistakenly heard something positive about it) regret their descison by presenting them with the poorest and most broken and incomplete piece of trash you feel comfortable parting with for free.

I play PWI, and have since 2009. Its totally free to play. Really. I CHOSE to pay for several things over the years, and others chose to spend HUGE amounts of cash on it each month, well in excess of 30x or more what a P2P MMO charges per month. They make serious bank off of it.

The secret is giving ANYONE complete access to your entire game for free, then giving them extras that are worth wasting all their money on. Also, when you have a free product people are considerably more forgiving when you only have major new content around 1-2 times a year and if there are technical issues you don't have any obligation to compensate people.

Its simply a good game, full of mostly happy players, that buy what they want when they can. I'm sure it has a very low overhead, and its basically turnkey.

So Bioware...you are doing it wrong. Again. Make a game people want to play next time, preferably one without an established canon that is well past its popularity peak. Or well before its next one assuming the new Disney owned films are any good. Since Once Upon a Time is about the only thing decent they have done in a long time I'm cautiously pessimistic.

 

[Shuguard]

Um well... I did play star wars Tor up until they announced it was going f2p so i dropped it to wait, then gw2 came along. Anyways most of those restrictions aren't that bad. If you just play the game to see the stories you really won't be affected too much by the restrictions. You will feel them a little bit, but most classes can fit the abilities they need on 2 bars and bank space wasn't really needed, unless you horde stuff.

Basically it looks more negative seeing a pile of restrictions, but it's not really as bad as it looks. If anything i would just go back and do the stories as if it was another kotor game.

 

[StBishop]

I have a solution:
F2P to level 15.

Done.

I don't know why this isn't default for all games a year after release.

 

[Tdoodle]

If it doesn't work they'll change it again in a few months, no big deal.

That doesn't sound too bad to me, either. Based on how quickly I got through TOR, 3 flashpoints and warzones a week will probably do me grand. Will probably mean I get more of the stories finished, too. So yeah, quite happy with this.

 

[Hagi]

Eh, with the addition of an extra quickbar it sounds like it'll now be playable just to experience the storylines with a few friends or alone. Which was the best part of SWtOR anyways.

I'll probably download the game again at some point, the levelling experience was one of the best I've seen in recent MMOs and the stories were pretty good.

This lets me get to the good parts of SWtOR for free and skip paying for all the not-so-good parts. Not too bad a deal.

I'd take from what you can. It's definitely not the grand Star Wars MMO people, EA included, were hoping for. But it's a pretty decent cooperative online RPG, considering it will be free.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I'm just gonna play it for the story once and then I quit.

 

[Therumancer]

Well, the big thing about "Free To Play" games is that despite the claims they do not seem to be being run to survive or bring more people in, but to maximize profits. "Free To Play" generally amounts to "pay for everything". If a company creates a game that is a good, solid, fully enjoyable experience for no money invested, they don't make anything. In most cases the desician is simply because $15 a month isn't enough for the guys developing the game in an industry driven by monster profits as opposed to simply making a decent one. It's also easier to blame the subscription model and put the game on "FTP" status than to actually develop the new content needed to fix problems. Probably 90% of the subscription based games out there could have been saved simply by creating more endgame content since that is why they "failed" to begin with.

The biggest issue I have with FTP games is that they rapidly become a valueless money pit. What begins with the claim of being needed for survival, and raising money to create new content and keeping the servers running, tends to turn into an endless cycle of pay to access content in the form of overpowered items, lockboxes, and other issues. I don't think I've seen any FTP games actually take the money they made feed it back into the game and release substantial amounts of new content for free, the most I've generally seen is the release of "grindcore" content with little or no intristic value (this is said by someone who understands that grinding is the core of MMOs, but the trick is to make it a high quality and enjoyable grind).

I'd be surprised if ToR's model actually works to be honest, to me it seems like it's taking some of the worst ideas of other FTP MMOs and intergrating them into it's own model.


All of this rambling aside, it seems unlikely but I've kind of been hoping with the relative failure of ToR, and the aquisition of Lucasarts by Disney that we might see a return of Star Wars Galaxies in some form. Unlikely, but these discussions always seem to get me back to how much I miss my characters there (I played during the last six months).

I'll also add, that companies tend to be full of crap about how much money it takes to run an MMO, something I'm increasingly seeing with EMU projects. Right now there are a bunch of EMUs of dead MMOs out there being run entirely by fans off of random donations, with a lot of the coding being done by the people running them in their spare time. Granted a lot of these EMUs are hack jobs, and are missing a lot of the content as they are re-constructed off of install discs and such so the quality varies, but you still see people actually running the servers, doing maitnence, patching, etc... These games might take a lot of money to develop initially, but I think the costs of continued maitnence once they are out there are exagerrated to say the least.

The way I see things is that something like TOR doesn't need to get ultra-greedy, at this point what's been spent has been spent, taking the game down is relatively pointless. I see few reasons why they couldn't do things like charge $5 a month, or instead of limiting access the way they are, run almost entirely off of donations. The overall project would be a loss of course given the development dollars which I'm guessing they never recouped which is why there has been so much drama, but I figure making something is better than nothing in the big picture. Of course then again I've never been a big believer in the corperate "play big, or go home" mentality.