Darth Hater

Considering this was the initial burst of activity these numbers don't look very positive with all the work they put into it. A majority (at least on this website) don't plan on spending a lot on coins.

Granted, a majority of the responders are also subscribers, but if their ultimate goal is to get all players subscribed (since their F2P model really doesn't hold up for even the most casual player beyond a few months of leveling characters) they need to find a way to entice them to buy coins or open up F2P more to get money from those who don't want to subscribe. Otherwise all this effort was largely wasted.

What I've seen so far makes me think they'd have been much better off spending that development time on mini-games, new space combat, holiday events, etc... to keep subscribers around and encourage population growth through new interest.

Oh well, I ran out of interest for BioWare's take on the SW universe a month or so ago, and likely won't ever get sucked back in now.

They're really making it less awful to be a paying customer that doesn't subscribe. I realize they probably figured this way was easier than taking things away later, but I'm glad they got on this sooner rather than later.

Yep. There is a guaranteed way of getting exactly what you want. Buy it from a player who got it and wants credits instead. Don't have enough credits? Buy a few items on the Cartel Market, sell them, and use the credits to buy the item.

The single problem with the whole system is that the credit cap for F2P players who have paid money for some coins or were previously subscribed (preferred players) is so low they're mostly left out of the buying and selling of these items.

I understand they're hoping to get these players to spend more real cash this way, but they need to think more than one step back. If a player is buying items off the GTN someone else already spent money on those items.

The larger the in-game market for these items the more money BioWare makes because the people who are selling will be buying their stock with cash. The credit restriction is reducing that market.

As opposed to how it would have worked without the F2P option. You know, where you wouldn't even be able to log in.

While these amounts probably aren't final and we still don't know how much coins will cost, this at least gets me thinking about what options I can "do without".

Honestly, for how little I get to play I can get more than half of what I want (at the current prices) for what I'm being given for having subscribed to this point (even without the collectors edition). Namely action bars and the third crew skill.

I just hope that when they limit character access they allow people to buy additional character slots and possibly pay to up the credit cap too. They could make a fortune on that (especially the credit cap since new future content will likely raise the costs and rewards for just about everything).

It makes me feel good to see them mentioning long term vision on a lot of the changes they've been making. It's a lot easier to support a system than it is to support a bunch of spur of the moment decisions gobbed together into an incoherent mess.

Better to make these changes early in the game and ride them out than to try to adjust them years down the road when you'd have to do a complete overhaul.

I feel like the "pretty much no world PvP happens before level 50" comment will burn them regardless of how accurate it is...

Thank goodness they aren't listening to the "holidays aren't star wars!" people. Of course holidays are Star Wars. It's an entire galaxy full of millions of sentient cultures and we're to believe that not a single one of them has celebrations?!

This game needs things like this to really feel like a galaxy far, far away and not a culture-less combat zone. The best thing is that they can reuse these events instead of creating them to let them run for a week before an operation release and then toss them out. 

This is going to upset all the people who expect everyone to agree that TOR was the "worst game ever!"

Oh well, they've made their fair share of mistakes, but I can't argue with the rewards they did get. At every point along the way it's been a better game for it's time and money investment than anything else I've played.

I just hope F2P can bring in the kind of money that would really cut it lose, because the design principles behind this game have it heading in the perfect direction to entertain me indefinitely. It's just moving so slowly right now since all their funding was cut...

This is a much better way to handle "off hours" players than simply making group finders cross server (where all social interactions are limited to the 1/2 hour you're grouped) and it's a logical next step in a game already designed to instance people off when populations of a specific planet/zone get too high.

Each zone can be run on it's own hardware server (or multiple servers for instances of something like the faction fleets) and still have all the guild/friends list/LFG/chat/mail/GTN/etc... shared through a common server so that it's all one big community but without the hardware limitations.

It will be exciting to see if they have all the logistics hammered out as well as they'll need, but I'm hoping they can make it work because a server population that large would be amazing.