From what I saw in Lotro before I stopped playing and uninstalled it (I was a Lifetimer too) I have no doubt that whatever BW/EA choose to put in the store however OTT it is there will still be a section of the forum community quite happy to justify it and cheer them on to further excess. Also in my opinion pretty much all the content released since they went F2P has been pretty awful and grindy from what I saw. I bought RoI with points saved up from when I was working overseas and couldn't play and got my main to 68 before deciding the new content was so tedious I just couldn't face it anymore.

Hate to rain on your parade but I can't recall any company saying their cash shop will have P2W/Advantage items in them before they launch the said shop, but they usually still end up making an appearance when the devs realise that just selling fluff doesn't pay the bills.

I agree this is from my experience what actually happens with regard to tokens you get as part of your sub. More and more things disappear from being realistically obtainable in game into the cash shop and in a short while these tokens are next to worthless especially if you have alts as these tokens are account based. Part of the fremium model usually involves trying to milk subscribers (usually the most loyal section of the playerbase) above and beyond what they pay as a subscription.

Ah the old convenience or advantage arguments. I remember these fondly from the old EU Lotro Forums. Personally I think convenience items are the start of a slippery slope and advantage/store only buff items and then P2W usually follow fairly quickly.

""There's a peril in designing it wrong," says Fernando Paiz, executive producer of Dungeon & Dragons Online at Turbine (and husband to fellow Turbine employee Kate). "If you are pressuring them too much to spend, you can turn the player off from the whole experience." " - quote from article. Strange quote from one of the main cheerleaders for F2P games. I'm fairly sure he has also been quoted as saying you can treat your subscribers as badly as you like because they always ***** and moan but the majority won't leave at a presentation to industry insiders at Pax East 2011.

I'd have to agree. SWG suffered from two major era problems to me. One, it was stuck in the time period between Episodes 4 and 5 and so as people have said left the scope from any story development pretty minimal and when they did it tended to be at odds with canon. Two, the Jedi/Sith problem although in the expanded universe there were apparently a few other force users floating around in this period, realistically there are only 3 lightsiders and 2 darksiders around according to the films. SOE never really got round this problem and the fact that people want to play force-users. Period immersion was broken quite a lot by having 20 or 30 people running around in social hubs with sabers.

I think taking names of inactive characters/accounts and making them available again has been suggested in other games forums. Not sure but I think there is some issue to do this with this and consumer protection laws in certain countries or something along those lines.

In many of these cases though as a healer I would prefer the tank to go in first and be allowed to get the aggro of the group. Healing one tank is much easier than trying to keep up a tank and 2 DPSer's and if push comes to shove I keep the tank up. Like you say though it is situational and when I'm on DPS I will sometimes peel off to other mobs the skill is knowing when you can do it and when you can't.

If I'm on healer and the DPS are behaving like idiots I just stop healing them as well. DPS stealing aggro, breaking CC, not waiting for tank/healer cooldowns,etc have caused more wipes than tanks and healers put together over the years in groups I have played in.

Most cash shops start out swearing blind that they are all about convenience and fluff and will not sell advantages, they all seem to end up the same way though, its just a matter of time in my opinion. With EA involved I suspect it will be a case of sooner rather than later.

The fact that the majority of new content was poorly designed with long periods between updates of any substance (i.e. not just ones containing store shinies), very grind orientated and designed to push people into the cash shop. Also a matter of particular concern for people who want to keep subscribing to TOR is the now purged Turbine statements that the sub payers game would be unaffected by F2P. Originally we were told that we could get any character improving items in game as sub payers and wouldn't need to use the store. The first break of this was stat tomes which were in fairness in game but at such an insanely low drop rate that even if you ground instances 12 hours a day you would had next to no chance of getting a drop, thus making the only viable method of getting them, you guessed it, the store. Before the Turdbine apologists jump in pointing out that since the cap on stats has been removed with RoI these no longer make a massive difference, maybe not but they did when they were originally released and were definitely against the spirit of what developers originally claimed. Since then they got bored with even keeping up that pretence and put in high quality healing pot that did not share cooldown with those obtained in game. You used to get your relics (slotted items) from Legendary items returned automatically when you broke them up, now they get destroyed along with the LI unless you buy a scroll from the store to save them. Basically what you will see over time in all likelyhood is the slow slide of previous in-game items and mechanisms into the store as they become harder to obtain by gameplay alone or become store only. This may be fine in a pure F2P model but when sub-payers find the company trying to milk them via the store on top of their sub it starts to grate somewhat. I'd compare letting games companies have cash stores in games as giving a small child the key to a sweetshop and telling them not to use it.

Every game has said this when they have announced going F2P, People are pissed because their experience in other games tells them that this isn't the case in reality. For every player who thinks the F2P model was a good idea, there is one who thinks it ruined the game. I suspect you can tell fom my signature what I think of F2P from my experience in Lotro which I played from launch to just before RoI.

Financial analysts offer opinions, that is all. They are frequently wrong either because they are just clowns or they are getting backhanders from companies to push their stock. Anyone remember that the major rating agencies were still giving CDS's and other toxic derivatives AAA ratings (which makes them either incredibly stupid or corrupt) right up to the 2008 crash? I don't care how many credentials an analyst may have or not have, I still wouldn't trust a word they say.

Beacuse they are gullible fools who trot out two arguments, either: "you get 500 points free a month on subscription and on a lifetime account" - Most of the character improving items won't leave you with much change from 500 for one item which is usually single use and character only not account wide. There are a few account wide purchases but these are few and far between. Many of the advantage items are available as in-game drops and anyway you don't really need them. - Anything that is available in the store and also in game has an insanely low drop rate that unless you are prepared to give up your job/college and devote you life to grinding mobs you are unlikely to ever get (cue someone posting an anecdote about how they killed one goblin and got a drop ). Regardless of whether you do need advantage items or not they are still an advantage. The in store healing pots make some raid bosses easier and from memory do not share a cooldown with in game pots thus allowing players to increase their healing for cash over those who do not use shop. Also on the issue of stat scrolls they may have declined in controversy since the stat caps have been removed (due to their effect becoming less) but a large section of MMO players like to max out their characters and these scrolls and LI's help players do this and so making them effectively store only is basically exdploiting these peoples game style.

Goblin Town came with the eastern side of the current Misty Mountains map as well, so yes I would say that combined there is an argument to say this was a major zone. Also even though it launched with no raid SoA did launch with 2 massive 6 man instances at level cap (Carn Dum and Urugarth) which in my opinion were better designed than most MMO raids. MoM launched with six 6 mans (7 if you include the non level cap Forgotten Treasury) as well as the Watcher. SoM launched with 3 mans, one 6 man and imo a pretty terrible raid. RoI launced with a raid that was supposed to be released earlier in the year as part of the anniversary update and RoR as far as we know no instances at all so there is definitely an argument that while Turbine were never exactly brilliant at getting end game out on time they have been getting worse over the years and it has declined even further under F2P.