Could you post your "conversion kit" by chance? I'd like to prepare for my next trip to the Preferred Land.

make sure bellow is account wide - ends up cheaper in a long run

artifact equipment unlock, section x, hide head slot, unify colors, companion customization, crew skill slot, insert how many you need here skill bars unlock, guild vault access, display titles (legacy and regular) I think that's it actualy. not sure about cargo hold unlock - I'm reasonably sure prefered get it regardless, but I'm going to test it out just out of curiosity. I used to have event equipment authorization, but it seems to no longer be needed.

oh and stock up on passes for your preferred activity - operation passes are definitely needed if you raid, flashpoint passes - only if you run those daily.

that said - before you can buy those on GTN - someone had to have purchased them from cartel shop, so bioware still makes money.

I do still think that there should be at least one time unlock for quest reward boxes. slower leveling and slower rep gain and slower crew skills are noticeable and could be bothersome as are higher vendor prices, but if you are going preferred temporarily or becasue you have less time to play or whatever else - its certainly manageable. you get used to it soon enough. not being able to accept/open quest rewards? THAT is extremely annoying and it shouldn't be the main incentive to subscribe. even mail restriction is nothing compared to it (since as preferred, you can still use mail, it just takes longer and costs negligibly more to mail things around). IMO subscription vs pay as you go should both be equally valid.

make sure bellow is account wide - ends up cheaper in a long run

 

artifact equipment unlock, section x, hide head slot, unify colors, companion customization, crew skill slot, insert how many you need here skill bars unlock, guild vault access, display titles (legacy and regular) I think that's it actualy. not sure about cargo hold unlock - I'm reasonably sure prefered get it regardless, but I'm going to test it out just out of curiosity. I used to have event equipment authorization, but it seems to no longer be needed.

oh and stock up on passes for your preferred activity - operation passes are definitely needed if you raid, flashpoint passes - only if you run those daily.

 

that said - before you can buy those on GTN - someone had to have purchased them from cartel shop, so bioware still makes money.

 

 

I do still think that there should be at least one time unlock for quest reward boxes.

Thanks. And yeah, preferred have to unlock cargo holds. And I've never understood blocking quest rewards of any kind. Especially those boxes, as they're mostly just vendor trash green/blue anyway.

Thanks. And yeah, preferred have to unlock cargo holds. And I've never understood blocking quest rewards of any kind. Especially those boxes, as they're mostly just vendor trash green/blue anyway.

ah, good to know. the only account I have currently as preferred is my SO, and he got his cargo holds grandfathered from his month of subscribing. haven't rolled any new characters there since.

edited to add, sometimes those boxes contain the only quest reward. it maybe like 300 credits or whatever, but you are still essentially denied a quest reward. bleh.

edited again, oh yeah, forgot something important. character slots. you don't get them grandfathered, so if you want to play more than 6 - you need to unlock them

ah, good to know. the only account I have currently as preferred is my SO, and he got his cargo holds grandfathered from his month of subscribing. haven't rolled any new characters there since.

Actually, I think the hold itself is unlocked for preferred now that I think about it, unless I unlocked it way back and forgot about it because it was unlocked on new characters back when I was on preferred. Preferred can only buy additional cargo space with cc or unlocks, though.

I don't really understand this whole thing.

BW and EA are businesses. They are trying to make money. The point of F2P is to lure you in so that you become a subscriber, or at least preferred status. They don't want you to enjoy F2P as a long-term choice. Why would they?

Businesses do not give you stuff for free. That's called a charity and I don't think EA are registered for non-for-profit status.

Try this. Go into a shop and ask them what you can get for $0. Then ask them what you can get for $5. Then ask them what you can get for $15 every month. I think you will find that there are differences in what is available. You'll also find that $15 doesn't buy very much these days and the subscription is cheap.

 

Try this. Go into a shop and ask them what you can get for $0. Then ask them what you can get for $5. Then ask them what you can get for $15 every month. I think you will find that there are differences in what is available. You'll also find that $15 doesn't buy very much these days and the subscription is cheap.

well... lets use cell phone plans as equivalent. if you subscribe to a cell phone plan, you tend to get a nice comprehensive package yes? you go for a contract and they throw in a huge discount on a new phone (might even get one for free) equivalent would be 6 month subscription block to the game.

or you could go for no contract and just pay monthly. you fee will be higher and you'll be getting no free phones, but you essentially get the same service as a contract equivalent would be monthly subscription and/or time cards.

you could also chose to use a prepaid phone and just pay for whatever minutes you use, including your data usage. depending on how often you use your cellphone - it could be a very viable plan for you. equivalent is preferred account.

or... you could just say screw it and just use skype on your tablet, wherever you can find wifi connection. naturally, this will be very limited, but you'd still be able to chat with with people. equivalent of being pure f2p.

the issue I see with current model of swtor is in prepaid version of the plan. theoretically, depending on how much you are willing to pay at any given time, you can get everything that you do with a monthly plan or a contract. it can just get pretty pricey buying all those minutes and megabytes. practically, in case of SWTOR - there are some things you just can't unlock, not even temporarily. and some of those things are just little comfortable extras, not really vital. great to have and certainly make your playing experience smoother, but not game breaking.

restriction on quest rewards that cannot be lifted in any way other than subscription? don't you think its a little much?

bioware is most certainly a for profit company. and as a for profit company, you'd think it was in their interest to provide a better flexibility for how people can pay for their product. that and there are many MANY games on the market that manage to make profit without restricting small but vital parts of the game with such finality.

I don't really understand this whole thing.

 

BW and EA are businesses. They are trying to make money. The point of F2P is to lure you in so that you become a subscriber, or at least preferred status. They don't want you to enjoy F2P as a long-term choice. Why would they?

 

Businesses do not give you stuff for free. That's called a charity and I don't think EA are registered for non-for-profit status.

 

Try this. Go into a shop and ask them what you can get for $0. Then ask them what you can get for $5. Then ask them what you can get for $15 every month. I think you will find that there are differences in what is available. You'll also find that $15 doesn't buy very much these days and the subscription is cheap.

They don't advertise their product as "Play Free", do they?

And also if BW's sole purpose is for free players to spend at least 5$ in game then they would never add Show legacy name or Show Title unlocks or Cargo Hold unlock in cartel market. No their intention is to give free players the illusion that they can unlock everything without paying a $ and make someone else to pay for freeloaders' choice of unlocks. this is not healthy business. i expect this kind of business from perfect world or aeria games or other piss poor eastern asia based company but not Bioware. And if people like you continue to defend this kind of malpractice soon enough our subscription will lose all kind of special treatment in favor of giving f2p "more choice".

They don't advertise their product as "Play Free", do they?

But they do let you walk into the shop for free. They let you look at all the products and see what you could get if you paid them money. Sometimes they even give you free samples. But it's not the same as if you pay for the products.

Surprised that the rich elitist defenders are all keeping quiet. Let me recap for you what they have said in the past regarding such related issue: (Top 10 Elitist Replies of a SWTOR defenders)

 

(1) "Don't like the game? DON'T play it."

(2) "Can't afford a sub? You are doing it all wrong when you should have better spend your time earning income elsewhere instead of spending time here in the game."

(3) "Get a job." (same as (1) and (2) to imply that you should get lost from the game)

(4) "Freeloaders likes to complain."

(5) "Someone on the dole can easily pay a sub. What the else you making noise here?"

(6) "My sub is paid for in 15 mins time spent on my job. What's your problem?"

(7) "If people were to stay off their ciggy and booze, they would have paid for their sub." (I am surprised they didn't mention drugs. Bet they are putting f2p/preferred in the same category as drugs addict in their mind.)

(8) "It is SO WRONG for EAWare to earn a profit. SO WRONG."

(9) "When you want to speak about the GAME. Let us know." (Oh, do we have to buy a weekly pass to speak with you about the GAME? Your majesty?)

(10) "ITS A GAME" (implying you should NOT treat the game so seriously like us the sub who trivialize it as nothing more than a GAME. What is $15 sub? I blew more of it on a single movie trip or a meal. You are wasting my time reading your rants.)

 

Should sticky the above replies so that we can save a lot of bandwidth as it will be reused every time similar queries of this sort pops up.

Gotta love I want it all free posts

I agree with you they should sticky all these replies ( I also like the title you came up with too), also amazed people pointing out the obvious and some still have no comprehension, and they always respond with your an elitist and defender. reality check is needed in most cases, some are just plain delusional

I don't really understand this whole thing.

 

BW and EA are businesses. They are trying to make money. The point of F2P is to lure you in so that you become a subscriber, or at least preferred status. They don't want you to enjoy F2P as a long-term choice. Why would they?

 

Businesses do not give you stuff for free. That's called a charity and I don't think EA are registered for non-for-profit status.

 

Try this. Go into a shop and ask them what you can get for $0. Then ask them what you can get for $5. Then ask them what you can get for $15 every month. I think you will find that there are differences in what is available. You'll also find that $15 doesn't buy very much these days and the subscription is cheap.

Don't use logic in these threads , it will never work

Free to play games make more money, when they are actually FREE to play. Guild Wars 2, Rift LOTRO have all seen increase in numbers and money since being free to play.

SWTOR is not free to play. It's freemium. They have a disgraceful three tier system which punishes players who left the game just after launch and EA/Bioware are essentially blaming them for the games massive failure in numbers.

All the responses here from those calling F2P 'beggars' need to have a 7 day ban. Some people can/not afford even a small amount of money, some are kids whose parents may not have enough money to spend on things like this. Or, some may not think the game is worth £9 a month - 1,7 million didn't and left.

A good developer would see that if you lift these restrictions, allowing access for ALL - more players will come, spend money on the cartel market and everyone will be happy. Why? How many times have you seen players crying out for someone to join their Flashpoint/Raid but there's no one around, or others have been locked out?

Access for all would make the game feel busier, grow the community and make Q times short. But that's from a good developers point of view.

Some people can/not afford even a small amount of money, some are kids whose parents may not have enough money to spend on things like this. Or, some may not think the game is worth £9 a month - 1,7 million didn't and left.

.

I've been to third world countries numerous times, world peace would be great, but businesses are not in the business of caring about peoples economic plight ....

Everyone has access to this game if they have a computer able to play the game, if not happy with F2P restrictions the policy is sub or purchase unlocks, if that policy changes it changes to make money.

They have a disgraceful three tier system which punishes players who left the game just after launch and EA/Bioware are essentially blaming them for the games massive failure in numbers.

.

LOL is all I can say to this , not sure how it translates to EA/BW blaming people for leaving, they are free to sub anytime like anyone else but if they don't they can buy unlocks and still play here.

maybe Guild Wars 2, Rift LOTRO are more suited to you as a game player

 

maybe Guild Wars 2, Rift LOTRO are more suited to you as a game player

I suggest you check my ID number. I guarantee I have been around here longer than you. I pay a sub - do I see value - no. I don't PvE, I PvP and right now, the changes (lack of them) have drawn me close to the mark several times.

And as a SUB, I find the restrictions a joke. Don't like my view...fine but the facts speak for themselves. If players saw value, they will pay, its as simple as that.

Free to play games make more money, when they are actually FREE to play. Guild Wars 2, Rift LOTRO have all seen increase in numbers and money since being free to play.

As does TOR.

Why do they make more content for the Cartel Market than subs? It might have something to do with them making money there. Also, the game has become a lot healthier after going f2p.

If you think TOR isn't making money on it's f2p mechanics... you obviously don't know what f2p makes money with, and why it's the leading strategy these days and subs are a dying breed...

So first off there really is no difference between preferred status and free play status aside form you have access to three or four more things. Further more, is that a lot of the restrictions placed are down right ridiculous.

 

Restrictions like these:

-Most emotes are blocked, this I don't understand.

- Credit cap, putting a credit cap (not to mention a pretty low credit cap) is absurd. Its like putting a cap on how much air you can breath. Seriously you can't buy much cool items like the cassus fett armour or varactyls with 350k or anything on the gtn unless its lowgrade gear.

-having to wait a period of time between each message you send in general chat, now this is just annoying and doesn't make a lick of sense.

-Increased vendor and modification removal prices, not only do you have a low amount of money because of the credit cap but now they are increasing prices so you run out of money faster!

-Xp reduction, your reducing my how fast someone can level now?

That only list some.

 

Come on Bioware, put on some reasonable restrictions and remove the boneheaded ones.

Use your brain first please. There are 2 glaringly obvious reasons why your rant is utterly ridiculous:

1) It's F2P. Turn it any way you want but your paying **** all for what you get. You simply have no right to complain about restrictions if you don't pay anything. If you don't get that, then that's an entirely different problem. Yep, it's that word entitlement.

2) You seem to be very concerned about the credit cap. Well let me explain the dead obvious: F2P accounts without this strict credit cap is about the same as saying gold sellers and spam are ok. You seem to have no concept of how useful it is to gold sellers to have F2P accounts, especially if they can move large sums of credits. Gold sellers and their adds used to be a completely rarity. Since F2P they have become relatively common on starter planets and you even see them on the fleet here and there now. I do not want more gold sellers ruining my game experience so please take a hike with your thoughtless propositions. Gold sellers must be restricted. It's for this reason that you have to wait with chat messages, a credit cap and cannot queue crafting orders. It's all because of gold sellers. So when you say this makes no sense, it really just means you have no clue about this sort of thing.

So excuse me for ranting right back at you, but you are far from the first on this forum to come and complain about the exact same things with the exact same lack of understanding of how and why some of these things work this way.

Too much text? F2P means FREE. Restrictions are fair and limit gold seller activities. Stop being entitled and start using your brain is my advice.

/counterrant

Could you post your "conversion kit" by chance? I'd like to prepare for my next trip to the Preferred Land.

I see Jeweldleah pretty well covered it already...but a few things to add:

1) Event Equipment Authorization - It no longer applies for some event content, but I expect they will freeze preferred out of new event content when it launches.....at least for some period of time. So it is prudent to have this one as well IMO.

2) GTN listing Unlocks, IF you plan to sell items on the GTN. These come in unlocks of 10 slots each. Personally, I have 5 of the unlocks so that I have the same listing depth as when subbed.

3) If you have not already unlocked your full inventory and cargo slots (account wide) either do it before you go preferred... or snap up those unlocks as well. Cargo Bay Unlock you get the first time you sub and I do not believe that expires when you drop down to preferred.

4) Make sure you have character slots unlocked sufficient for your needs as you will be playing preferred at 6 Characters + up to 10 unlocks (16 max at preferred). Unless you are a raging althaholic like me, this is pretty easy to manage. In my case, I'll have to retire some characters, but when/if I decide to go preferred.. that's a non issue to me.

5) a stack of 600K escrow transfers, sufficient to meet your cash flow needs for the forseeable future. The number depends on how much access to your escrowed wealth you think you want as preferred. In my case, since they routinely sell for 75K on Harbinger.. I picked up 75 of them. Basically I invested 6M credits to have access to 40M in escrow. And if I don't use them, I can always resell them and probably even make a profit if I sell them at the right time of the week.

Naturally, you want to do unlocks for "account" not "character" unless you only plan to play one or two characters.

Free to play games make more money, when they are actually FREE to play. Guild Wars 2, Rift LOTRO have all seen increase in numbers and money since being free to play.

SWTOR is making (by reports in quarterly earnings calls) 2X the revenue it made the day it went freemium. And it is the largest freemium MMO in the western market at the moment. And while EA does not breakout exact revenue by product line, it's not hard to figure out what the yearly revenue run rate for SWTOR was in 2013 ------> $175-200M.

SWTOR is not free to play. It's freemium. They have a disgraceful three tier system which punishes players who left the game just after launch and EA/Bioware are essentially blaming them for the games massive failure in numbers.

That "discraceful three teir system" is actually common in today's MMO market. Turbine invented it in fact. Each company does it a little different, but in terms of actual real life economic drain on the player, SWTOR is actually quite modest by comparison IF you take time to understand how it works and take advantage of the local player economies to get your content unlocks from other players for in game credits instead of paying real life money for cartel coins.

As for players who left the game, they get preferred status automatically, which with smart acquisition of unlocks, those dis-invested players can actually play this game for free with very very few actual restrictions, most simply from use of credits they abandoned on the accounts to begin with.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...2392176?page=1

Please stop spamming that thread link all over the forum. kay thanx.

Please stop spamming that thread link all over the forum. kay thanx.

It was relavent, but guess it got trolled to **** on WoW so the thread got deleted.

Basically what it said is that P2P games that go F2P end up being terrible.

Also, unless a Mod says stop I can post link to different threads on different forums anytime I want.

well... lets use cell phone plans as equivalent.

To me, a better equivalent analogy would be a restaurant that offers you an "all you can eat" price and an "a la carte price" for the same item selections. Freemium MMO business models most closely follow this approach. You can pay one price and have access to it all, or you can just buy the items you actually want. And the approach actually serves different customers quite well. It also gives the customer more control over how they spend their money. Of course the "all you can eat" model makes more sense to the customer that wants to taste everything and save some money in the process.

And the Cartel Market (other then unlocks) is the desert tray for the most part. And for both all you can eat and a la carte, desert is extra.

Basically what it said is that P2P games that go F2P end up being terrible.

AND.. it was wrong in that assessment.

AND.. no you are not supposed to link other MMO forum threads. And especially not a dead link for a thread that clearly was trolling in the other forum. That's called cross trolling. Even mmorpg frowns on it in their forum.

But hey.. now that it no longer exists, maybe you will stop linking it, and actually contribute to the discussion if you are going to post, eh?

AND.. it was wrong in that assessment.

 

AND.. no you are not supposed to link other MMO forum threads. And especially not a dead link for a thread that clearly was trolling in the other forum. That's called cross trolling.

Until I get banned, i will keep doing it.

Another part of that thread was that you end up paying more for the F2P games than P2P. Reason for that is that the company bribes you with all the packs and vanity items. Not only are you wasting money by spending more than what you did when it was p2p, the restrictions of the F2P are just out right wrong. Rift, Tera, Maple Story and so on have great F2P formula's that work amazingly.

I agree with OP.

There are just a few things keeping me from going prefered and never looking back. Come on guys!

Support the releaseing of the noose around preffered status (ie. crafting, mod extractions, credit caps and transfering abilities) and you will NEVER SEE THIS FACE AGAIN! Imagine, a SWtOR forum without me always in here debbie downing everything.

Im sure that might garner some support.

AND.. it was wrong in that assessment.

 

AND.. no you are not supposed to link other MMO forum threads. And especially not a dead link for a thread that clearly was trolling in the other forum. That's called cross trolling. Even mmorpg frowns on it in their forum.

 

But hey.. now that it no longer exists, maybe you will stop linking it, and actually contribute to the discussion if you are going to post, eh?

Cross trolling isnt even a real thing. Im pretty sure you just made that term up.