Honestly? Having the opposite effect, I've already let my guild know this is my last week as I won't be resubbing and the F2P option is much to restricting to continue with.

Nope. As a sub you are still capped at 8k. As a lifetime sub you get a bonus mission that nets you another 1k refinement for a total of 9k. I believe that that extra 1000 is tied to subscription rewards incidently. Don't know, didn't sub for long enough to earn it. Thats nice, but thats not an issue. People buy/sell it constantly. GW2 potentially could have the exact same problem one day, but its not today or anytime soon. More opinion, and conspiracy level ********... so they gave you zen and they are bad guys for doing it? Whatever.

That's nice, but at the end of the day an opinion. The company may, shocker, want to make a profit but with STO they do not FORCE you to buy things as F2P. Every single item is OPTIONAL, and the game allows you to make cash shop currency ingame. Yes, you can earn the cash shop currency ingame... and as a F2P player going from a SUB it cost me $5.00(dilitium equiv) to be endgame ready.. You can't do that in SWTOR. Instead, if you want to wear high end armor, cash shop. If you want a title, cash shop. If you want to color match, cash shop. Whatever, those are optional but the content itself being hidden behind a paywall is not. Raid, PVP, Flashpoints, Guild repairs, the credits you earned as a sub. its all hidden behind CM fees. At the end of the day, I spent nearly $30.00 worth of SWTOR's currency, and am still blocked off from progressing in endgame. If I wish to continue, I must pay more, as the big ones are recurring costs. Factually incorrect opinion, STO runs events constantly that earn you huge lump sums of dilitium. Finishing off the reputations, again, huge sums of dilitium... all that can be converred into cashshop currency. Ships(T6) (aka the best) are also given out as event rewards incidently.

From a subscriber's point of view: Effectively speaking, we aren't getting much in the way of free content. It's hard to argue that it hasn't slowed down significantly. Has our subscription fee lowered any to balance out this loss in content output? Nope. Additionally they are now selling what amounts to content patches as a 'expansion'. Has the cost of that dropped match the smaller size of the update? Nope. $10 for the first expansion, $20 for the second expansion. Increased in fact then. Has our money then been spent on making the game better? Nope. The operations are still buggy FOUR months in, and the UI still lags the game to nearly unplayable levels. So what is our subscription being used for? Funding the cartel market... so that we can buy more things ontop of our existing $15.... yeah, that seems like fair value. From a F2P point of view: Effectively speaking, in order complete endgame content you need to shell out around $20, closer to $30 if you have any interest in your characters appearence. Add to that a recurring fee of ops passes (weekly) and coin escrows's (bi-weekly). This does not include PVP. You are better off going back to being a sub, F2P is a barely viable option (and completely impossible for a new player) if you are interested in raiding as your 'fees' will total up to about a monthly sub anyway.

As far as I can tell, having played more then a few of them. Its near the top of the nickle-and-dime list. Pretty *********** pathetic. Agreed. I subbed to STO for a bit. $5(Credit Unlock) was what it cost me to play comfortably as a F2P account afer the sub ran out. SWTOR.... I've used about $30 of cartel coins, and in the end I'm still running into ******** restrictions. STO also lets you grind things out and earn their cartel coin equivelent ingame, So no, SWTOR is by far, nowhere near the 'best F2P model'.

Yeah, honesty is cancer in a work place for sure. Can't have any of that around. They fired the guys who were working on the engine a very long time ago, and then they fired the next set of guys too. And who knows how many more have gone thru that office since. By now, any shred of documentation is probably long gone, and digging thru code you yourself didn't write is a nightmare in of itself, let along something as big and complex as an MMO. So yeah, they really CAN'T do anything with the engine, because anything they would touch could break the game entirely.

Except.. you know, other games allow you to uncap for a fee. The escrow system is complete balls, so while the ******** bugs and general terrible way the game runs atm drove me from being a sub to a preferred player, the escrow will probably drive me from even playing the game into ignoring it complete. That, actually, is how you shoot yourself in the foot. By pushing people out of your game entirely.

Not only that, but there's no logic behind the performance stutters. I can be standing still, staring at a wall and my FPS swings from 105 to 40 and back up to 105. I run Temple and depending on the part of it I'm in I could be seeing 100 fps, 60 fps or 20 fps... all without exiting the area.

My sub runs out next week, I am currently leaning heavily towards not renewing it. To put it bluntly, of the three games I play.. SWTOR just doesn't work, STILL, months after they broke it with 3.0. Seriously, how the **** do you expect people to spend money on things you can't, as devs, be bothered to fix.

I don't hate SWTOR, but to be blunt the game has steadily gone downhill since launch. The game engine was badly optimized to begin with and in all likelyhood should have been scrapped and replaced with something that works, but 2+ years later its pretty obvious that EA/BW have no interest in spending resources on fixing that issue. Content release has been slowing for years, ideas are tossed in the game and used to get players to spend more money ontop of the existing monthly fees before being abandoned entirely. The base game was amasing, Makeb was alright, but SoR was a joke. No interest in spending resources there either. PVP has been left to wither on the vine for years, and the results are what you'd expect. Match after match of facing the same tiny handful of players, before eventually the queue just dies off. No point spending resources there. So what are we actually getting then, a cartel market that sells us the same items again and again, 'this time with more holes' and $20 single use dyes. So no, we don't hate SWTOR, most us us 'complainers' are simple dissappointed at how badly this game has been managed. Go play something else, there's plenty of mmo's (some even don't charge you per month) that put out better content consistantly at a much quicker pace, only difference being they don't have the Star Wars name to hide behind. EDIT: Before you ask, the reason I don't leave is my raid group seems dead set on sticking it out for now, so I'm beholden to the desires of others.

Yeah, don't bother. I built a new PC a while back, not aimed particularly at swtor but a general gaming rig. Even reading off of SSD's the game still loads like a slow POS, the UI still bogs everything down, and the game generally runs no better. Yet all my other games doubled and neared tripped in performance. So.. probably not your computer, save yourself some money.

Things are not fixed in this game, the cartel market is littered with items that clip, distort, or generally just look like crap. So no, I imagine it won't be changed.

About the only thing I enjoy from this game is raiding, but even there is losing any sense of appeal as each week is just another **** show of broken fights and random buggy encounters. But hey, lets focus on the cartel market Bioware Austin, that'll right the ship.

Trend - the general course or prevailing tendency. I am aware WoW is back up to 10mil players, time will tell if its a blip or a shift in direction for them. Over the years, the population had been dropping, which was why I used that particular phrasing.

Bioware's F2P is not really a viable option if you actually want to do anything, too much stick not enough carrot. So split hairs all you want, Makeb cost me $10 ( with subscription) and SoR cost me $20 (with subscrption) so my original argument stands, twice the cost a fraction of the content. Blizzard's momentum has actually been in a downward direction, each expansion has had fewer and fewer players, with numbers dropping down to 5mil+ as of Pandaria. Yet they continue to put out full sized expansion (maybe not the biggest they have ever dropped). Overall, yes. WoD has been a better expansion if you want to compare value for dollar spent. SOR cost me a third of what WoD did, and offered a tenth of the content.