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Battlefield Heroes Goes Into Open Beta
EA Digital Illusions CE has quietly opened up the beta of Battlefield Heroes, their long-delayed, free-to-play shooter. After gradually scaling up the number of players in the closed beta, they've now made the game available to everyone and lifted the NDA. EA has not yet mentioned this in an official announcement, probably hoping to keep their servers from being overwhelmed. The game's website is now accepting signups. IGN ran a hands-on preview of Battlefield Heroes back in April.
It's highly likely that that non-paying players will have vastly inferior equipment than anybody that paid for "add-ons". To put things in perspective: non-paying players will be there as free cannon fodder for the entertainment of the paying ones.
EA has done this to paying costumers on previous versions of the Battlefield series: even before fixing all the worst bugs in the previous version of the game, they would put out game expansions which not only had new maps (perfectly fair) but also new and superior kit relative to what those without the expansion could use, said kit being available in the original maps (for those with the expansion) - thus meaning that if you wanted to keep on playing in a level playing field you had to buy each expansion.
That said, with a "free" game it's a perfectly valid strategy of them to do it as long as non-paying players are made aware of that. (although with EA, I suspect they will say nothing about it until they have enough buy-in from non-paying players, at which point they will start selling easy-pwnage add-ons).