Darth Hater

I've returned as a subscriber, though F2P was the reason swtor returned to my personal radar. I decided that on balance I prefer a lot of the quality of life features that a sub gives, specifically in terms of playing alts, so it would be rather pricy to unlock stuff for all 9 of my old characters to play (not to mention just the ability to play them, once those limits get enforced). My point in returning is to see the stories of the various classes. 

I had 1050 CC due to old subscriptions. All have gone into legacy unlocks (Human race for the +100 Presence boost and a few class XP bonuses). I plan to unlock the Ratataki as well, and after that, if I'm still playing, more of the account wide legacy stuff. I may get a few extra CCs for money at some point, but not this side of christmas. 

My experience has generally been positive. The game feels alive in a way it didn't when I stopped playing back in april, and even though a few trolls have crawled back in, the community is quick to step up to the defense of the F2Pers when some jerk decides they are the root of all evil. 

I love it so far. I want to see this game succeed and I have the money so I don't mind spending a little more if I can get some cool stuff and it helps pay some developers salary. Besides, the more I stay home and play this game, the less likely I am to go out and blow money at some restaraunt. I spent $160 to add 22k CC to my initial amount and have unlocked all the global legacy stuff for my ship, full rocket boots. legacy travel to my ship and Daily hubs. I also unlocked the charater specific perks for my 3 Operations-level toons. I bought 2 or 3 sets of armor and spent the rest on Cartel packs:

On the Cartel packs I have received:

1- Overlord's Throne mount (On gtn)
1- Mask of Nihilus
2- Tythonian lightsabers (Already sold 1 for 1.2 Million credits)
1- White indestructible crystal (+41 endurance- on GTN, selling for 4 million)
5- Pink/ purple crystals (War Hero, Endurance, Power)
1- Carbine for my Operative (Very cool)
2+ full sets of each: Loungewear, Spymaster, trailblazer
10+- Assorted Pets (Horanth, probe, lizardbats, virbrl)
5-6 of each emote( intimidate, menace)
10- Glowing eyes (Red and gold)
14 - assorted mounts (5 Ubrikki Sand Demon, 3 Crimson Claw,  3- Longspur Elite, 3- Ren Night shade)

Plus, Tons of epic mats, XP boosts, etc for my alts.

I still have about 4k CC left. All-in-all, I am very happy with it so far and it is helping me buy stuff I needed (27 level barrel for my BH) and made my overall experience a lot more enjoyable. I plan on sittng down and figuring out how much it would have cost me to unlock everything with credits to compare, but I was having too much fun this weekend.

Hmm so far im in love with the CC store ( ive had decent luck with 6 packs bought and 2 mounts, 3 +41 crystals, 3 cool emotes the glowing red eyes and 5 different pets, a banner and about 50k credits in purple mats and some female clothing options ill prob sell on the GTN.)  I'm a sub, have been since day 1 and I have spent $30 to unlock some legacy perks on the 2 new toons I just re-rolled on Shadowlands server so I could join the Podcast guild that sprung up there ( its made up of old Merc guild members, TORwars fans and other refugees including Allen Shot First 158 individual members so far! ) I'm pretty sure EA will be making bank this first month, we'll see how it goes long -term but even the F2p peeps who aren't Preferred players laugh at some of the restrictions but they aren't "mad" about them at least the ones in our guild I still see some people ( usually old subbers who have returned and are going preferred complaining in local and they just get shouted down by the subbers' there gona be a ton of people who have never played an MMO ever trying out TOR which EA is counting on and they won't know the difference and will pay thru the nose for things.

Section X is great, a lot of good new content in there. The cartel market is what it is....I used my 2200 allotted coins for legacy unlocks (rocket boots, GTN on my ships, etc) and nothing else. The HK 51 quest line was cool, though I Had to have a guildie run my newly made imperial toon through Korriban so I could get the last part on Dromund Kass (I only have republic toons on my main server).  The 2 annoying most parts with Hk were 1) the Imp gank squads huddled up at the vendor in Outlaws den....nobody was ever in there PVPing before on my server.... And 2) having to pay $1 mill or 350 cartel coins for each toon in my legacy i wanted to unlock HK for.  My raid team isn't ready for Nightmare modes so I haven't tried that yet.

I think the main disappointment is what WASN'T there.  I'm dying for server transfers (I have several imps on a different server I could have used for the HK part), and we DESPERATELY need that new Warzone.  I feel like they held that stuff back so they can add something meaningful to their next release and stick to this every 6 weeks release schedule.

Lastly, in regards to free to play, the trolls are back and in full force.  All the lames who were unwilling to pay $15 a month to troll around appear ready, willing, and able to do so for free.  I cant even go in Gen chart anymore, which sucks because as a veteran and guild leader, I enjoy being able to provide answers to questions new players might have.  It must suck worse for the legit new players though, who get answers like "hold alt and hit F4" when they ask a legit simple question On the fleet,,,,

A couple things.  First, I don't know why a new WZ is necessarily NEEDED.  I understand that it's something new, but it's still the same PvP idea.  Most other MMOs didn't have nearly as many PvP maps within their first year and nobody seemed to really mind.

Second, the trolls are going to be around for a bit.  Eventually, they'll go away and it'll be back to normal, for the most part.  And the Alt-F4 "joke" was being used when the game was still sub based.  F2P has nothing to do with that bit of trolling.

at first i had mixed emotions about a cash shop and  cartel coins. but  after playing ToR in a free 2 play environment i can now begin to see the positives for both myself and Bio Ware.

for one                 We  can now buy things from legacy without having to farm god amounts of credits.

so far the only thing i bought was a legacy mail box for my sith warrior. and i plan to use it to unlock hk with other alts with out having to spend 1 mill credits.

But i will never buy anything from the shop that is gonna sell me a chance on ANYTHING............................. i can't stand the practice of them.      and already im hearing of others spending 60 dollars on these packs and never getting what they were looking for.

last i heard someone dropped 500 bucks.  >.<

but on the other hand this relaunch  may be a success if there are people willing to gamble for pixel goods.

If that's what your into.

As a CE owner that has paid for a subscription since launch I had 3,100 cartel coins. I basically paid for all the account legacy unlocks, some inventory rows and another cargo bay. I did buy some more coins to play around with the loot packs. While the titles are amusing (I have 'the Crime Lord" on my Light Side Jedi Sage), I do wish the titles and emotes where account wide, not per-character.

One suggestion I do agree with is that I wish you could earn Cartel Coins via in-game activities. If dailies gave you cartel coins (or there were specific CC dailes), I think that would go a long way to addressing some of the f2p complaints. It would also give the f2p players something to work towards. Being able to earn the coins to unlock one of the three areas (ops, warzones, or flashpoints) each week would benefit the game as a whole. (Or just being able to pay half the cost in cartel coins. Rewarding player time is always a good thing.)

While Jedi Covenant has a goodly amount of players in each zone, it was really nice to see 125+ folks on Tython having a good time, helping each other out. Even the few 'this f2p sucks' trolls got laughed at. Seriously, complaining about the f2p options while they continued to play truly undercut all their points. Patch 1.5 is patch 1.0 of the F2P version of the game. I'm sure Bioware is going to tweak and alter things based on feedback they get and the metrics they gather over the next few months.

Having an in-game means to get coins would be nice. Even EVE had the PLEX things(an item that gives a month of subscription) drop in-game at a very low rate to give an in-game means for people who can't spend real money on them. BW could even make it a weekly if they're too worried about people having too many coins from not paying money. Only getting them from buying them or subbing for a few months seems limited. Adding a tiny way of getting a few of them in-game would be nice.

I was hoping for something closer to Turbine's model. Pay for content and conveniences, not pay for basic functionality (quickbar slots and less XP gain is ridiculous). SWTOR is set up PERFECTLY for the Turbine model, with how the worlds are divided.

For example: Extra storage, legacy unlocks, short term boosts, and races you could pay for. Starter worlds and capital worlds are free, and you can visit other worlds, but you can only do class quests on those worlds until you buy quest packs. So you can buy the Republic Taris pack, which unlocks Taris for your republic characters and so forth.

I think that would have served the community better, made EA more money in the long run and gone over way better in terms of bad vs good press.

I don't see myself staying past finishing the class quests at this point with these restrictions. I probably won't spend much.

Exactly: Setting aside that I can't even get into my account right now because for some reason they've decided I need to answer my security question (which I forgot) in addition to entering my password, even though my account hasn't been compromised, there just isn't any reason to play the game right now for me. It's almost insulting to call it a F2P model at all, but it walks the line just closely enough to qualify as such.

The DDO model would have been preferred. Heck, over there you can get a $10/month subscription for what over here gets you only a couple single-character cosmetic unlocks. It's a demo: That's all there is to it. Unless you want level 1-50 as KOTOR 3 with crap species selection, it's either subscribe or go home.

This is the major difference between failed games going F2P and successful F2P games: A game that fails and goes F2P just takes away some of the content, trying to throw people a bone, hoping they get hooked and subscribe again. Games like GW2 (yes, that old chestnut again), designed like this from the start, have the whole game at your fingertips and add MORE content for you to buy.

See the difference? Failed games make a "F2P" model by locking away existing content. Successful games make a F2P model by adding more on top that you really want to buy. It's so sad. But oh well. If I ever decide I have 6 hours to spare waiting for somebody at CS to pick up the phone and can get back in the game at all, I guarantee you I'll play the crap out of the 1-50, use up whatever pittance in CC they gave me, and never so long as I live give EA one single penny more for this game.

I get what you mean jakj. A game that's F2P from the start just has the F2P stuff as extras on top of the game. A game that converts to F2P just restricts stuff that was already there and makes you pay cash to get back to the pre-F2P baseline.

A good example in TOR seems to be the action bars. If you had played before it went F2P, you had access to a good 4 or 5 action bars. You come back and try it for free, you suddenly find you've lost access to half the bars you used to have. Ditto on basic amenities like showing your titles or even being able to toggle your damn helmet. Those were taken away from people who once had access to them. F2P took away instead of just adding extras. It took away and made you pay to get them back, sort of a hostage situation on stuff you used to have. I like the hostage situation analogy.

what new content have you had to buy from GW2?  i haven't had to pay a dime for any of the content that's been added since launch.  i'm talking game play here. 

I haven't "had" to buy anything: That's the point. What have I bought, though? A bank-size upgrade and some of the mini-pets, because they're cute. A game that says "Hey, here's a game, and if you feel like it, give us some money" makes me very willing to spend money, and eager to play the game. A game that says "Well, I suppose we could let you play our game, but only a little bit, if you're going to be cheap and not subscribe to us, and don't mess up the furniture while you're in there" makes me turn up my nose.

A subscription-only game doesn't insult me the way this kind of almost-subscription-but-we-pretend-it-isn't model runs, especially since they add in crap that costs even on top of the subscription, and act like the free monthly allotment of coins is designed to cover it. If a subscription-based game fails hard and has to let in people for free just to stay alive, it should be on its hands and knees thanking the people still subscribing, not giving them an allowance.

Sith looking gear for my ds jedi knight, kira carson and lord scourge, rep looking gear for Asoka, jedi robes for my traitorous lightside warrior, a trooper/smuggler outfit for my undercover agent, and two black market loot rolls. The rolls were meh, but got a nice emote "menace"