BioWare and EA Reveal Star Wars:TOR F2P Restrictions
SWTOR's gone F2P at least. Here are the restrictions for free players...
Star Wars: The Old Republic, EA and BioWare's Star Wars MMO, has finally made the leap from subscription model to free-to-play, just less than one year after its release. Though SWTOR had strong starting numbers, a lack of new content release has caused the MMO to lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a few months.
More and more MMOS have made the leap from subscription to free-to-play as of late, and it was obvious that SWTOR wasn't far behind. However, in making the switch, BioWare's sectioned off significant parts of the game to be for subscribing players only.
The official SWTOR website delineates all restricted content, which happens to be everything except the story content. However, free-to-play players will be given preferred status if they decide to purchase in-game content, giving the advantages of the ability to sprint, access to bank slots, higher login priority, and increased access to chat and trade options.
For those transitioning from subscription to free-to-play, there's no need to worry about losing characters. Unfortunately, since non-paying players have fewer character slots, such a transition means players will have to make the tough decision on which characters they'd like to keep active.
BioWare's also whipped together an entire FAQ dedicated to answering player questions about the transition, including questions about how many Cartel coins subscribing players will be receiving.

Life taught me that nothing is ever free in this world.
Life taught me that nothing is ever free in this world.
They wanted to see a semi decent F2P business model they should have looked at Cabel.
The Hat infection is irresistible. Those 50 item slots don't last long.
The difference is that you buy one item, even the cheapest item, and you get full player status. It makes sense considering that there are millions who spent $20 bucks on it.
But this just sounds bad. Like WoW F2P bad.
GW has always had the best F2P model. Buy the game and have full access, sure you can buy more player slots or storage space but thats i. Not content.
You guys truly deserve your fall. RIP.
Lets see how fast EA drops this game from its servers due to negative income.
They're working off of a model that's sort of similar to LOTRO. Apparently, that's been pretty successful for Turbine (the dev).
But compared to most F2P MMORPGs today, I'd have to agree. The thing hyped about SWTOR was its allegedly different type of "storytelling" from most MMORPGs. I wonder if BioWare and EA continue to push that in marketing that players will hop on?
At some point, if profitability does go down, I'm sure EA will figure out something else. From all the casual F2P games that EA's pushed out, it'll probably make the switch to cutting out less content and making the game F2P simply by microtransactions with vanity items. Well... I can only hope that this will happen.
- Catherine Cai
your permanent name is jar jar binks and your title will forever be padawan learner
everquest 1 had a sustainable player base of probably less than 30k people before they went free to play, i doubt they ever sold 1 million copies of the game
that said, they would never axe this after dumping so much money into it... at worst the game will stagnate but stay online as many people always love replaying low levels to high.
take a look at a game called numen, its basically an mmo styled game in a single player envirment.
the game is crap at low levels, and if i payed more than 2$ for it i would have been mad, but apparently once you get out of the first area or so, the game starts to get good.
im not saying that its a great game, or that it is worth it, but i can really see ea going in and tweaking the hell out of this game to make it single player and sell it at a reduced price of maybe 30$ for new players, and 5$ for existing, because from what i heard, TOR was more or less swtor 3 story wise.
all they would have to do is rebalance the game to be friendly at a single player level, and possibly re tweak raids (dont know what they are like in this game at all) and even if it was still mmo play style, i dont think there would be many people complaining to hard.
Bingo. They want to claim massive account growth. The more people they get in the door, the more people they can claim to upsell with subscriptions. Having multiple accounts per person helps them pad their stats. EA is all about numbers and image. They care less about customer quality and experience. I'm sure they're already drafting the press releases claiming record account creation and subscription growth.
Guess you weren't around to hear eq get called evercrack. WoW back then wished it was EQ.
Anywho, I played the demo for a week and lost interest. The whole 'find agent' 'find target' 'gather item from corpse' 'give item to agent' model is no fun. Yes, every game has it, but it is normally just a part of the game play... not the main event. I really wish that more games would try and emulate a more social focused game like EVE Online. Yes, the game is not perfect (it is the wet dream of people who love spreadsheets lol), but what kept me in it for a long time was that my corp owned space which had resources, and we had to fight to keep ownership of said space. Sure there was a pre-scripted game that CCP created, but people only play that content for money or standings, not as the core mechanic that kept people in the system. Anywho, iDigress.
EA would not be in this mess if they had just given us KTOR3 like we asked.
I've been told their Madden Card game is a money vacuum (people spending well over 100 bucks to get a good team) so expect an evetual card game...the most convenient thing is SWTOR already has a link to a very good one in Pazaak.
i played eq from the first month it came out till half way through luclin, came back around depths of dark hollow, by the time secrets of faydower came out, i was the best non raid melee dps on the nameless server for a time, and with house of thuell i more or less soloed from 1-89 with a mage before the grind got to me for the final time. at the time i probably was one of the better players, again non raid, still on the server.
everquest has some dated mechanics, like needing to type words to talk to npcs which got very frustrating if you didn't know the commands.
over all, i find it better than wow, because if you get to level 60+ you have some guarentees that everyone knows how to play their classes, unlike wow, where you can end game and not know anything.