http://www.thedailyblink.com/2012/08/f2p-free-to-post-complaints-in-the-comments/

daily brink on sub losses.

I am currently not subscribed and very biased about resubscribing. I am missing the "interesting" class quests - only thing i am interested in at this time.

General Reasons

higher expectations roused than delivered

• For me it was Bioware´s games (KOTOR I, II) - though biased about the LS/DS choices and fixed area advancement
• During the development they announced they want to tackle their biggest competitor Activision Blizzard´s World of warcraft
• Public relation wording
• During pre-order "up to 7 days pre-launch" - without saying anything about a gated launch - I and several others waited for their invitation
• 1.1/1.2 "huge success",...,"see a lot of people leveling" - yes there was not end-game. But a end-game failure is a huge leveling success.

customer support

customer support. - To be honest during an Wow-american trial - a ticket that was answered by a human being within like 30 minutes of game time got me hooked on that game and this has been a pleasure since. - SWTOR customer support is different - Once I was lucky to get a CS-chat - at least I can confirm this actually exists.

Forum management

• Unwanted threads get locked, deleted or moved to the "suggestions forum".
• same for Test Server. - This forum is for bug reports - questions about features or if bugs have been squased get moved or deleted.
• suggestions forum is unmoderated. While on other forums double posts get locked and redirected - this forum is wild wild west. A thread http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=4870137 about addons gets a dev reply in "FP&OPS" forum - the 30 pages of suggestions get ignored

Test Server

The 1.3 Test Server and Update 1 were both compiled with stuff pre-1.2. E.g. ops marker keybindings were missing or the windows were not movable. Bug reports or questions about this were squashed that the test server is used for "developer bug testing". In return we got like 8 maintainance sessions. I have NEVER experience that for a single major content update.

Game mechanics

Story - "your choices matter" - fully voiced

Those two got me hooked - and they still spoil me. While there is a lot in disorder in this game the attempt did offer a new experience.

I did enjoy the story - to immerse into the story. Cinematic cut scenes fully voiced are a cool experience - to be asked to make meaningful decisions as well. -- Unfortunately a LS-1 sabre did ruin the experience for my first character. I missed in the tooltip that it requires LS-1 that I didn´t have at that time - sold my old and was more or less left without a weapon. My choices were no longer free and the min-maxer on LS-DS and affection took over.

Replaying stories with other characters took away the illusion of "your choices mattter".

on rails

Story - Contrary to the announcement that the choices matter - 1-3 or 1-2 only matter in terms of money, items, affection and alignment. - And as such destroyed the "meaningful and matter" on the choice side. - While I understand that splitting story lines increases development costs exponentially - there is too much of a P&P RPGer left in me.

Space - The first space missions were fun and challenging. Later it was only boring   - grinding. Having space missions with other players would have added a more dynamic game play.

PvP - "You have been steamrolled". stun, stun, stun, stun, *dead*. Yeah baby more of this. - pre-made team versus pug - that´s fair.

grouping rewards

Huge change I keep forgetting about. Grouping up with others does reward you with extra XP for completing quests together, social points and better loot. - Contrary for Wow where it penalizes you with 1/2 XP and less loot. This was a good idea. Unluckily it became too hard for me to find people to quest with and I was too grind-spoiled to justify Essels-runs to myself just for Social Points.

Legacy

Great idea. Your family - experience - rewards you with perks and features. Again the PR text was a good read - reality was different. - a money sink with rewards either unlocked by legacy unrelated actions or purchasable with money.

UI - unfinished - too late

1.2 with a customizable interface was late and the group finder tool with 1.3 the last stop before the cliff. - Still for me visual or audible procs are missing.

end-game grind

I am not a grinder. I used to grind. I know I can do it, but my time is more valuable than to convert X hours into x currency. There is no fun factor involved in this. The developers missed anything that would keep me (and others) hooked on playing a level 50.

incompetent crowd

During leveling 90% of the time you are faced with people unable to complete anything. 20 soldiers can´t kill 5 imps, but your 2 man army can slice through almost anything.

So free2play in autumn?

I have no idea where the SWTOR ship is heading. It has some really good additions and ideas - but the implementation did not life up to what it could be.

There is still stuff I would like to see - but I don´t want to give money to EA - as they would misuse it and state I support their decision. A sensible business man would assume that extending into a new field of commerce will cost money and teach a few lessons. - Using the same conditions on the third sequel of a computer game as well on a completely new genre leaves me wondering what people expected. - Hard to find a comparison but something like GM announcing to manufacture mobile phones and attacking apple and 6 months after launch complaining that the mobile phone sector did not life up to the expectations, but their new car sold well enough to off-set the losses.

Since I am not used to a quality like this from Bioware I want to blame EA to release an unfinished game and push the game into a cash cow that it is not.

On the long-term I don´t think they will change on customer support, their PR, in-game implementation.

I am willing to resubscribe to experience the story - yet the charts and FAQ hint that F2P will still cripple the experience - e.g. limit bank tabs or inventory space. But the only way to "punish" EA is to spent my money elsewhere. Their main competitor that offers:

• good costumer support
• better community interaction
• released when it´s done - rather wait and fix first than later
• more end-game diversity (arena, warzones, achivements, dungeon challenges)
• area loot will be implemented
• class diversity, different race models, different main hubs
• Addons to enhance my screen to meet my needs

I will miss:

• incentives to group up (social points, experience, better loot)
• legacy (being able to unlock parts due class advancement - e.g. race unlocks)
• star wars
• free dead server transfers
• fully voiced - cut scenes - class / story / group portals

Hmm, you have good points and I agree with you. But change SWTOR for WoW...

It's like changing from win 95 for win 98...

Quote from ChuckNorris »

Hmm, you have good points and I agree with you. But change SWTOR for WoW...

It's like changing from win 95 for win 98...

Well. I don´t know. I have to admit that I have had more fun with WoW and spent more time there and did join it when Vanilla was already in a mature stage.

The comparison with 95 and 98 does not work on a lot of things. Wow can handle 100dreds of  people in a city - on the fleet I get lag and loadin screens. Wow is far more feature rich than SWToR.

WoW loading screens are scarce and even with my loads of addons faster than my SWTOR basic UI.

I have been thinking a lot why I am SO UPSET.

• the IP and story telling idea are great
• server and engine suck for an MMO. Your technology needs help... lots of help... lots and LOTS of help. :( 
• theme park levelling wasted a lot of resources. On wow you will travel through zones, here you might even skip a planet apart for class story
• No Breath - Getting F2P out of the hood after 6 months and even removing HK-51 feels like F2P was always the backup plan - A plan for a miss. -- WoW almost killed Blizzard - they had nothing in the pipeline but this game, maybe that´s why they did succeed - they simply had to.
• horific critic management. look at the dev tracker after the F2P annoucement - "closing", "locking",... -
• Server merges went smooth and 1.3 added a few goodies that mended some community wounds - then they´ll shoulder the executioner axe and say "ow by the way we are going F2P."
• Does Skyrim as a sandbox single player game ask you to pay 15 bucks? but 15 for an unrestricted theme park experience.
• I regret I purchased a digital deluxe edition. Now i get a retail copy for a month subscription. - Would you have faith into your Italian restaurant that starts offering it´s dishes for a quarter of the listed price?

A new MMO does not become an MMO over night or by sorcery or IP. An MMO has to adhere to some rules:

• the community grows over time. It may have a burst for the first months but then it shrinks and might grow again.
• you need to have content. During the levelling and in the end-game. Missing out the first will drop out people on the rise - missing the later when they reach maximum level. - have timed events - seriously a single server event (raghoul in 6 months) for a change and entertainment
• Ease or spice up the leveling process by different story lines or different quest zones - planet replay value was almost 0 to me. WoW´s revamp added an incentive for me to redo zones.
• have y good customer support - meaning staffed up - be able to respond to tickets on-time. Merge in-game, website and email tickets to a single accessible database. - wait for customers to confirm a ticket closure or enable them to reopen the ticket till they are satisfied.
• have a good QA and public testing before a release or customers will make you eat your pants for downtime and bugs
• people are not forgiving - once they decided you are Mr evil - pets nor thrones will get you on the light side
• communicate with your customers. Tell them what´s ahead of time - why things are the way they are and make them fell well treated
• sharding (creating different servers) may have been necessary in the past but with the current technology opening up hundreds of servers just opens the risks of over and under population - both hurting the customer experience.
• MMO´s are a social game. So just giving a single player game a network access does not make it a success

The main problem is that these things focus on the long-term investment. That might pay off after 18 or 24 months or even take longer. Poor companies like struggling EA cannot afford such long-term investments. A Game needs to pay off after 4 months or be called a miss.

That´s why there are so few competing quality MMO´s out there. First of all the playerbase is limited. It does take some amount of time to play these games, then you need to develop the stuff and be better than your competitor.

F2P is one game model. It may have been selling well in the past, when it was new. I came from a F2P game to WoW. Why? Because the content was poor. It was Pay2Win, engine and customer support sucked. Companies may have gotten 300% revenue increase in the past - but once the market is saturated F2P sells will decline as other game models.

For me it´s Skyrim, WOW MoP or the new MMO Blizz said they are working on - maybe there is some news about it at blizzcon.

And for the last - I don´t belief that success can be measured in dollars or rate of investment.

"Blizzard have announced that their massive annual convention won’t be happening this year..."

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/01/25/blizzcon-2012-cancelled-will-return-in-2013/

Excellent post, I couldn't agree with you more.  I think it is terrible that BW/EA whomever you want to put the burden on didn't care to hear their customers attempting to give them quality feedback about what they wanted/needed/expected.  This happened from the start(beta) where players were able to see/experience the game and continued post launch.

Quote from zephous »

I am currently not subscribed and very biased about resubscribing. I am missing the "interesting" class quests - only thing i am interested in at this time.

General Reasons

higher expectations roused than delivered

• For me it was Bioware´s games (KOTOR I, II) - though biased about the LS/DS choices and fixed area advancement
• During the development they announced they want to tackle their biggest competitor Activision Blizzard´s World of warcraft
• Public relation wording
• During pre-order "up to 7 days pre-launch" - without saying anything about a gated launch - I and several others waited for their invitation
• 1.1/1.2 "huge success",...,"see a lot of people leveling" - yes there was not end-game. But a end-game failure is a huge leveling success.

customer support

customer support. - To be honest during an Wow-american trial - a ticket that was answered by a human being within like 30 minutes of game time got me hooked on that game and this has been a pleasure since. - SWTOR customer support is different - Once I was lucky to get a CS-chat - at least I can confirm this actually exists.

Forum management

• Unwanted threads get locked, deleted or moved to the "suggestions forum".
• same for Test Server. - This forum is for bug reports - questions about features or if bugs have been squased get moved or deleted.
• suggestions forum is unmoderated. While on other forums double posts get locked and redirected - this forum is wild wild west. A thread http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=4870137 about addons gets a dev reply in "FP&OPS" forum - the 30 pages of suggestions get ignored

Test Server

The 1.3 Test Server and Update 1 were both compiled with stuff pre-1.2. E.g. ops marker keybindings were missing or the windows were not movable. Bug reports or questions about this were squashed that the test server is used for "developer bug testing". In return we got like 8 maintainance sessions. I have NEVER experience that for a single major content update.

Game mechanics

Story - "your choices matter" - fully voiced

Those two got me hooked - and they still spoil me. While there is a lot in disorder in this game the attempt did offer a new experience.

I did enjoy the story - to immerse into the story. Cinematic cut scenes fully voiced are a cool experience - to be asked to make meaningful decisions as well. -- Unfortunately a LS-1 sabre did ruin the experience for my first character. I missed in the tooltip that it requires LS-1 that I didn´t have at that time - sold my old and was more or less left without a weapon. My choices were no longer free and the min-maxer on LS-DS and affection took over.

Replaying stories with other characters took away the illusion of "your choices mattter".

on rails

Story - Contrary to the announcement that the choices matter - 1-3 or 1-2 only matter in terms of money, items, affection and alignment. - And as such destroyed the "meaningful and matter" on the choice side. - While I understand that splitting story lines increases development costs exponentially - there is too much of a P&P RPGer left in me.

Space - The first space missions were fun and challenging. Later it was only boring   - grinding. Having space missions with other players would have added a more dynamic game play.

PvP - "You have been steamrolled". stun, stun, stun, stun, *dead*. Yeah baby more of this. - pre-made team versus pug - that´s fair.

grouping rewards

Huge change I keep forgetting about. Grouping up with others does reward you with extra XP for completing quests together, social points and better loot. - Contrary for Wow where it penalizes you with 1/2 XP and less loot. This was a good idea. Unluckily it became too hard for me to find people to quest with and I was too grind-spoiled to justify Essels-runs to myself just for Social Points.

Legacy

Great idea. Your family - experience - rewards you with perks and features. Again the PR text was a good read - reality was different. - a money sink with rewards either unlocked by legacy unrelated actions or purchasable with money.

UI - unfinished - too late

1.2 with a customizable interface was late and the group finder tool with 1.3 the last stop before the cliff. - Still for me visual or audible procs are missing.

end-game grind

I am not a grinder. I used to grind. I know I can do it, but my time is more valuable than to convert X hours into x currency. There is no fun factor involved in this. The developers missed anything that would keep me (and others) hooked on playing a level 50.

incompetent crowd

During leveling 90% of the time you are faced with people unable to complete anything. 20 soldiers can´t kill 5 imps, but your 2 man army can slice through almost anything.

So free2play in autumn?

I have no idea where the SWTOR ship is heading. It has some really good additions and ideas - but the implementation did not life up to what it could be.

There is still stuff I would like to see - but I don´t want to give money to EA - as they would misuse it and state I support their decision. A sensible business man would assume that extending into a new field of commerce will cost money and teach a few lessons. - Using the same conditions on the third sequel of a computer game as well on a completely new genre leaves me wondering what people expected. - Hard to find a comparison but something like GM announcing to manufacture mobile phones and attacking apple and 6 months after launch complaining that the mobile phone sector did not life up to the expectations, but their new car sold well enough to off-set the losses.

Since I am not used to a quality like this from Bioware I want to blame EA to release an unfinished game and push the game into a cash cow that it is not.

On the long-term I don´t think they will change on customer support, their PR, in-game implementation.

I am willing to resubscribe to experience the story - yet the charts and FAQ hint that F2P will still cripple the experience - e.g. limit bank tabs or inventory space. But the only way to "punish" EA is to spent my money elsewhere. Their main competitor that offers:

• good costumer support
• better community interaction
• released when it´s done - rather wait and fix first than later
• more end-game diversity (arena, warzones, achivements, dungeon challenges)
• area loot will be implemented
• class diversity, different race models, different main hubs
• Addons to enhance my screen to meet my needs

I will miss:

• incentives to group up (social points, experience, better loot)
• legacy (being able to unlock parts due class advancement - e.g. race unlocks)
• star wars
• free dead server transfers
• fully voiced - cut scenes - class / story / group portals

 

 good post id like to add the ilum fail and how gabe was at pax on a live stage lying his ass off to 1000'a about ilum then ends up instancing it and making it worthless then promising in 1.2 an ilum revamp then nothing.

The choices dont mean shit except for points

George zoeller was the one id blame for most of the not listening to us bit though. I got lot of infractions for asking him directly why are we doing what you want? the game is supose to be for the fans not him. Thats a legitimate question. So most of us disagree and he goes to singapore LOL 

Dev team 

James ohlen - how does this guy have a job? I have never seen a more arrogant tool besides john smedley. Best pvp team eh james?

Gabe ametegelo - worst bleeping dev i  have ever seen in my life this guy should be banned from developing games. Hes destroyed 2 games now.  They finally shut him up i noticed when he did interviews it was a pr nightmare lol.

Did anyone else notice the signifigence of the furniture items like the sith throne and rancor statue?

Hopefully, this means ship customization will be coming soon. What else can you use furniture for in this game?

That is the speculation right now since fluff items do better when they can be put to use.  I really hope we don't see people whipping out their Sith thrones to sit in front of the gtn lol

Looking over these posts, people could argue either way or point.  Instead, I will post how I feel on the subject.  I am an old school gamer,  that has enjoyed gaming long before this free to play business.  I've always been a fan of paying my monthly sub and playing as much as I can.  With that being said, as long as the f2p stuff stays the way it is currently outlined and premium members get full access to the game, I will stay subbed.  It was a good game then, it should be a good game now.  I think Bioware is on to something great with this game, they just need more time.  I feel bad for them that EA is putting so much pressure on them.  I will never forget some of my all time favorite games that Bioware has put out.  Those hits alone will motivate me to stick with swtor for the long haul.  Bioware has made so many great games that it only seems fair to give them a fighting chance to make this game what I know it can be.  Some people say this game is the biggest flop for Bioware but I think this very well could be their finest moment.  The raise, the fall and god willing, thier redemption.  Good luck guys, some of us are here with ya and will continue.

Quote from f0xtr0t369 »

Looking over these posts, people could argue either way or point.  Instead, I will post how I feel on the subject.  I am an old school gamer,  that has enjoyed gaming long before this free to play business.  I've always been a fan of paying my monthly sub and playing as much as I can.  With that being said, as long as the f2p stuff stays the way it is currently outlined and premium members get full access to the game, I will stay subbed.  It was a good game then, it should be a good game now.  I think Bioware is on to something great with this game, they just need more time.  I feel bad for them that EA is putting so much pressure on them.  I will never forget some of my all time favorite games that Bioware has put out.  Those hits alone will motivate me to stick with swtor for the long haul.  Bioware has made so many great games that it only seems fair to give them a fighting chance to make this game what I know it can be.  Some people say this game is the biggest flop for Bioware but I think this very well could be their finest moment.  The raise, the fall and god willing, thier redemption.  Good luck guys, some of us are here with ya and will continue.

Sado incognito?

Nope.  My droid sometimes adds weird spaces to the post and sado was nice enough to come along and clean up the formatting for me.  Nothing more :)

Hmmm, I dunno man... Sado never "cleaned up" the formatting for me... maybe it's because I am Chuck Norris eh?

8)

lol for some reason my android adds all these spaces lime I sit and jam on the enter key.  It's weird lol.

Good luck with that my friend. Unfortunately, having already supported 2 companies that i absolutely adored (old LucasArts and Blizzard) when they were going into a different direction or difficult times or re-evaluation of their product line and services or whatever you want to call it, I can predict where this is going to end. My only advice would be to stick around if you enjoy the game now and leave predictions to others, at the end of the day we have no idea what BW, let alone EA, really have in mind with this game.