Star Wars: The Old Republic Adding Free-To-Play Option In November

EA and BioWare announced today that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be getting a free-to-play option later this year. Players using the F2P option will be able to reach the level cap and play through the full class stories, but their access will be limited for other parts of the game; they will only be able to play a certain number of Warzones (their PvP battlegrounds), Flashpoints (their instanced dungeons), and space missions each week. Access to travel functionality and the game's auction house will be limited as well. F2P players won't be able to participate in Operations, the end-game raids. Subscribers will retain access to all of these features. There will also be cosmetic items sold through the 'Cartel Market' using a virtual currency.

Comments

Are people still playing this?

[crazyjj]

I'm not being sarcastic, I really am curious. There was a HUGE amount of hype around the release (the usual "WoW killer" stuff that seems to accompany any major MMO release these days). Reviews seemed generally positive. Everyone was talking about it for a week or two after release. But then I stopped hearing anything about it. Don't think I've heard anyone mention it for a while. Considering this was supposed to be the game that finally fixed Sony's Galaxies fiasco, I expected more enthusiasm.

I do like the free-to-play stuff, though. And this might lead me to try it out. I just hope they don't cripple it to the point where it's hard to get an idea of what the paid game looks like (like some MMO's do--some that have initials like "W.O.W.," maybe).

Re:Are people still playing this?

[Sir_Sri]

The end game is an was terrible. Bad balance between professions and loot drops. Bizarre itemization and gearing requirements as you move past the first tier of raiding. Buggy content (floors not spawning, interactive objects not working properly). Dailies take an excruciatingly long time to do not because the dailies themselves are bad, but because there are so many load screens etc.

Then the population started dropping and the game became a shell. They've moved just about everyone onto about 10 or 12 mega servers, which is actually a good idea, generally, but they implemented it poorly.

The game has a series of hard DPS checks, which is fine, but then it didn't provide tools to asses dps. Problems like that basically plague the game. You can't ask players to reach a benchmark they can't see, or understand (gearing is especially guilty of this). And the game performs badly on loading, which by itself is forgivable, except they didn't design the game to be bad at loading, (which would mean doing things like giving players free teleports to group or the like) they just... expected you to put up with it.

It's interesting how much the 'convenience' stuff in WoW matters. Having a calendar, so you knew who was going to show up to a raid in game was a whole lot better than trying to use and outside tool. Being able to summon everyone in the group to a summoning stone, again huge improvement. WoW didn't start with those things, but they make a huge difference to how much time you can spend actually playing the game versus how much time you spend getting to the content. I think the difference is that as WoW has evolved the people who make the game want time to be able to both play the game, and have jobs and lives at the same time - so they've molded the game into something they can actually approach as adults. SWTOR didn't get that initially, and to some degree still doesn't. So it's not approachable.

Making a game accessible doesn't necessarily mean making it easy. Hard mode Ragnaros was a fucking hard boss (in Firelands not molten core), and I never did manage to kill him with my group. But I didn't have to spend 15 minutes running between 3 or 4 loading screens to get to him. And Rag is a long run back by modern WoW standards.

Re:Are people still playing this?

[kenp2002]

It was an embarrassment to EA to say the least. They lost over 50% of their subscription base within 90 days actually surpassing the industry's worst launch\retention Warhammer. It was a single player game with an MMO bolted on and after everyone beat it in 30 days. less then 1/2 people bothered to subscribe.

Think of this as a resturant: 50% of the customers didn't like the food enough to come back. Doesn't sound good. Prior to Warhammer, retention at 90 days was about 80% by estimate with players usually averaging 6 months before attrition. The problem is with the market saturation the demographic changed when WoW came into the picture. The Old School MMO players (pre-WoW players) had a much longer attention span in regards to rewards. The pacing, the very core was a longer experience. A novel. WoW came along and transformed that experience into a Short Story. Both enjoyable in their own right, but with the advent of the Theme Park and Sandbox styles (rather then the Virtual World model of Everquest in contrast to say WoW or Eve respectively) and the addition of a structured tread mill. The demands to engage this new demographic are not, IMHO, sustainable via a subscription model.

The problem with F2P is without safeguards, every troll douche and his inbred cousin can just script up and troll, ban, repeat. F2P is a recovery and long tail approach to MMOs and I see the industry needs to change.

MMOs should be more like muds and Counter Strike servers. More intimate, targeting 200-300 people a shard and allowing people to "roll-their-own" shards much like a counter strike server. Transform the MMO industry into a hosting industry where a few of you "Roll-Your-Own" and throw in what mods you want then invite people. Open it public, set a level cap, or an age limit, customize some rules, or make it invite only. Oddly I am seeing an uptick in Muds once again courtesy of CoffeeMud and newer Diku\Merc\Rom derivatives. Maybe a second golden age of MMOs is coming, perhaps the MMO will die and the GMUD will be revived. Who knows.

What I can say is that the original demographic of EQ players are as a majority, parents (statistically, they should all now mostly be about 35 years old) and the time commitment for old school MMOs (you know Virtual Worlds rather then Theme Park\Sandbox MMOs) means devs are left with the ADHD FPS converts that can't stand waiting more then 4 seconds before something spawns.

Re:Are people still playing this?

[Opportunist]

The "gradually" part is the problem. WoW kinda killed that possibility for MMOs now.

WoW was terrible at launch. And I mean terrible. By today's (WoW's, ironically) standard, it would sink in less than 6 months. Days, not hours, of downtime, bad enough to convince Blizz it's maybe an idea to give people a few WEEKS of free play time. Bugs that prevented you from completing class defining quests (and quests that gave you a class defining, critical skill). Class balance that was SO shot that a single shaman could solo encounters that five paladins couldn't overcome. And while we're at paladins, their complete and utter uselessness in endgame. Couldn't heal worth jack (and there was near zero plate armor with heal stats), couldn't hold aggro and hence completely useless as a tank and his damage was so sub par that even a shadow priest (who lacked sensible damage either) could outdamage him. And let's not get started about the skill trees.

But then again, there wasn't really that much endgame to speak of. Molten Core, Onyxia and ... well?

Few people remember that pre-2005 WoW time. Those that do were mostly used to other MMOs, and how other MMOs were quite similar at launch. Frequent crashes, random bugs, lack of endgame content, no sensible class balance. That was the norm with the launch of a new MMO. That actually IS the norm, still, for the obvious reason: It takes a lot of time and try-and-error to find those minimal, but crippling, issues. You cannot sensibly iron out those kinks on the drawing board, these things have to be found out during testing. But what company can afford having its players play through a year of testing for free, 'til they start raiding and see the endgame? How many of them would still buy the game if they've already seen everything?

The main issue here is now that people are used to the post-2009 WoW. A world that had over five years of development and redefinition. A world where the developers had a load of data to draw from and millennia of playtime from its players to find the problems. This is an advantage no other MMO can muster, and most certainly not at launch. Hell, not even half a year after launch.

But we came to expect that from an MMO because we're used to it from WoW. We don't accept daily downtimes for patches anymore, we don't accept crooked class balance for a few months anymore, and we most of all don't accept buggy class quests and lack of content anymore. We don't, because we're used to the way WoW handles it.

But such a game cannot exist at launch. Simple market rules dictate it. You cannot develop a game for 10 years, blow a billion bucks on it and offer a "finished" MMO. Yes, you could do that. But you will NEVER be able to recover that investment. Not to mention that you will most likely not find anyone willing to risk that money on a venture like this.

This is, though, what WoW has behind its success. I would wager that a billion easily went into development so far, of course that is something WoW did easily regain.

Repeating this seems quite impossible, though. And I guess the chances to ever see a game like WoW again surface is close to zero. WoW pretty much ruined the market, by "spoiling" the players. Measuring a new MMO against WoW will make it appear in a bad light, because it simply can NOT be as polished as WoW is.