Jump to content

F2P restrictions.


Cordarn

Recommended Posts

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.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 88
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

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.

emotes are completely unnecessary in the game, so why not have freebies pay for the privilege of using them?

 

- 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.

Goldfarmer deterrent.

 

-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.

Same as above. Of course it isn't a complete stop gap measure, but SWTOR has always had the least amount of goldfarming scum noticeable than any other MMO I have played.

 

-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?

Helps to maintain the value of the sub, and not atypical of many other Freemium and F2P games. Even Rift, which has one of the most lenient Freemium models charges extra for store purchases for non-patrons.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You're looking at it wrong.

 

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

Subs get bonus access to additional emotes.

- 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.

Gold farmers can't use F2P accounts for farming.

-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.

Gold farmers can't spam chat every second(not that they can't spam regardless, just not as frequently) with F2P accounts.

-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!

Subs get a bonus reduction to vendor and item modding prices.

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

Subs get a bonus exp gain.

 

What else you got?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For God's sake people. If you want to write condescending posts about F2P, write them in the third person and stop referring to the OP as "you" or "beggar" or what not. He can post in forums == he has subbed.

 

OT: As mentioned above, the credit cap and General chat post cap is to frustrate gold farmers. It obviously won't stop them completely, but it encumbers them. This is also why trade, mail, GTN, whisper, etc are blocked out to pure F2Pers (easily removable by a simple $5 purchase).

 

Emotes are just fluff. Doesn't matter if F2Pers get 'em or not.

 

I actually agree with nearly all the F2P restrictions. Except for the one restriction, Artifact Equipment. It crosses the fine line between P2Fluff and P2Win. I would actually have been happy if they had maintained the Event Gear restriction and removed Artifact gear restriction.

 

Other than that one thing, no, F2P restrictions are fine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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.

 

It is not a free game, nor is it a public service of some sort. It is free to play at a very basic level so that if you enjoy the game you will spend money either by subscribing or buying perks.

 

EA/Bioware is not a charity, it is a publicly traded company that is in business to make money. IMO, making the game really pleasant to play as a free player wouldn't help fund the game nor make EA/Bioware money.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Never understood the gripes about swtor's F2P, you get a level 1 to 50 single player game free. Thats not bad at all. If you want to go beyond that pay up, its a product not a hand out.

 

Actually you get EIGHT single player games for free. With about 20 different alternate endings in total.

 

That's a lot of free play time if you ask me.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hello there, this is my 1st post in this forum and for some reason i have decided to post on a controversial topic. I was f2p just 14 days ago, all the things OP mentioned; these restriction made perfect sense to me. but things that did not make any kind of sense to me are :

1. f2p/preferred can't accept lock box/credit box from any quest reward except for crew missions.

2. f2p has only 2 quickbar.

3. pay to hide head slot.

4. pay to show title/legacy name.

 

Rest of the restrictions i understand completely. let's talk about those i mentioned above; even though many people before me raised question about those(i am frequent forum reader) but still let's discuss.

 

1st restriction : this restriction is just plain ugly, how much advantage those lock box or credit box provide to subscriber? after i became sub and now that i can take those lock boxes and credit boxes, i can see how worthless they are; anything they drop are found easily everywhere. more importantly these are quests rewards, when we complete a quest and all the rewards are lock boxes and we can't accept any of them because we are f2p/preferred it looks and feels ugly and disgusting. this restriction serves no purpose but to annoy players. it is even worse for returning players.

2nd restriction : monetizing quickbar? really? i am not going to name and shame here. but every piss poor excuse of mmorpg that are coming out recently; they come out with minimum 6 quickbars; just a few days ago one such game went into OBT and it has 8 quickbars; and they are not monetizing those quickbars. quickibars are standard ui feature every modern mmorpg must have and monetizing quickbar when the game itself only has total 6 is just low and petty. it is simply disgusting. i said it when i was f2p and i will still say it now that i am sub.

3rd restriction : it is also a simple ui feature in every piss poor mmorpg and Bioware is monetizing this feature. sigh..my conclusion toward this is same as 2nd restriction.

4th restriction : same as 2nd and 3rd.

 

These should never been a part of f2p/preferred restriction. these are just plain ugly and show of poor business practice. i understand all other restriction and i totally support other restrictions but these i can never support even being a sub now. it will be great publicity and also great treat to returning players if Bioware were to remove these lowblows.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

the only f2p restriction I disagree with is boxes. you know quest rewards and artifact boxes from crew skills (or slicing boxes)

 

it seems like a complete overkill to restrict them to subscribers only.

 

if you don't one completely free accounts to have all the fun, fine make them purchasable unlock, like most other restrictions. I just vehemently disagree with it being limited to subscription only. its quest rewards. they are cardinal part of the game. they should at least be unlockable with authorization, ala hide helmet, unify colors etc options

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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.

 

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.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Preferred player here, just being sub for 2 months due to the 1 month free promo (and don't wanting to wait for GSF :p).

 

I completely disagree with everything stated here. Actually, I feel sorry for the people spending 15 dollar a month on this game, since their sub gives SO little additional value compared to us pref. players. I know many pref players ingame, and they get around just fine, doing fp's, operations, endgame content, all with spending just one month sub or $5 for becoming pref.

 

Since unlike what's stated F2P and Pref. makes a MAJOR difference. Mailing 1 item or being able to trade alone makes a lot of difference, the extra free char slots, the +150k credit cap.

Aside from that, everything subs get, we can get. They give us more and more, while taking more and more from subs. And still some people say F2P is unsufferable and sub is the only way to play? Quite the contrary.

 

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

So what? Can't say I even use most of them, besides maybe /thanks

- Credit cap

2.1 introduced escrow deduction, since then... it's a non-issue completely. Even without, it's not that hard for a pref. player to get around with, say, 2 million.

-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.

Again, I don't care. Why would I. I only sometimes call for operation groups, and there's no need to spam them. The limit is enough to have regular conversations too. Overall, it's a complete non-issue. And non-existant where it matters (group, guild, private).

-Increased vendor and modification removal prices

Only for old vendors. Apparently newer vendors the prices are equal. Why? BW laziness? Ignorance? I don't know... but more and more this isn't even true anymore.

-Xp reduction

Being a completionist, I much prefer pref XP than sub XP, that makes you outlevel content very rapidly. Really based on preference, but I've seen enough subs who wouldn't mind lower XP, and funnily enough the only option BW gives them is not giving BW money.

 

They even gave us fleet passes recently, greatly reduced the quick-travel time (no more 2 hours base). FP passes are useless since the restriction is broken. There's talk PvP becomes infinite for free players.

Yes, it's a bad time to be a subscriber...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This is my first ftp restrictions thread, so I'm a little amused at the absurdity.
Then you truly missed the glory days of the F2P launch when these threads were much more prevalent and had declared the absolute failure of the F2P system before it launched.

 

Now, to be fair, there was some decent feedback here and there at the beginning and they made a few tweaks without giving away the whole game, but I think the fact that they've loosed even more of the restrictions over time is an indication of just how successful it's been since they feel that they can give more away without making a significant impact on the bottom line.

 

However, you still get the occasional post from someone who feels F2P is unfair to those players but mainly it's because they themselves want to stop paying for a subscription but still have access to everything they did as a subscriber.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Then you truly missed the glory days of the F2P launch when these threads were much more prevalent and had declared the absolute failure of the F2P system before it launched.

 

Now, to be fair, there was some decent feedback here and there at the beginning and they made a few tweaks without giving away the whole game, but I think the fact that they've loosed even more of the restrictions over time is an indication of just how successful it's been since they feel that they can give more away without making a significant impact on the bottom line.

 

However, you still get the occasional post from someone who feels F2P is unfair to those players but mainly it's because they themselves want to stop paying for a subscription but still have access to everything they did as a subscriber.

 

This bears repeating. It's a bit exciting that they're loosening up F2P restrictions as that means they're not only 'able' to do so, but they're making enough money to make it worth their while to throw something to the F2Pers in order to draw more people into the game.

 

TOR: F2P! Now with unlimited Warzones!

 

Makes me smile just thinking about what could be coming in 2014.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This bears repeating. It's a bit exciting that they're loosening up F2P restrictions as that means they're not only 'able' to do so, but they're making enough money to make it worth their while to throw something to the F2Pers in order to draw more people into the game.

 

TOR: F2P! Now with unlimited Warzones!

 

Makes me smile just thinking about what could be coming in 2014.

 

Have they mentioned when yet? As far as I remember they teased in in the 2.4, but any added news, patch notes, ETA, since then?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

However, you still get the occasional post from someone who feels F2P is unfair to those players but mainly it's because they themselves want to stop paying for a subscription but still have access to everything they did as a subscriber.

 

I think you see it more from people who play a lot of F2P games and then try this one out. It's pretty restrictive and some of the restrictions are just silly. I mean you're really going to ask people to pay to hide their helm or unify colors? Obviously that's not crucial to gameplay, but it's still a really petty (very EAish) thing to charge for. It's hard to go from a sub to preferred and still play this game. Especially if you've played around with the Rift F2P system. It's much much better.

 

I enjoy certain aspects of this game, but their F2P system isn't one of the strong suits.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think you see it more from people who play a lot of F2P games and then try this one out. It's pretty restrictive and some of the restrictions are just silly. I mean you're really going to ask people to pay to hide their helm or unify colors? Obviously that's not crucial to gameplay, but it's still a really petty (very EAish) thing to charge for. It's hard to go from a sub to preferred and still play this game. Especially if you've played around with the Rift F2P system. It's much much better.

 

I enjoy certain aspects of this game, but their F2P system isn't one of the strong suits.

 

this basically. tried both f2p and "buy to play, subscription optional" games.

 

and personally, I'm absolutely ok with a lot of the features being paid for. what i'm NOT ok with some of the basic features (like, oh - opening quest rewards) being restricted to subscription only. and no, they need not be free. but they SHOULD be unlockable, just like hide head slot and unify colors and artifact equipment and more FTN slots and all the crew skill slots and weekly operations pass etc etc etc - are unlockable.

it doesn't need to be full access for nothing. but there SHOULD be flexibility to said access. adding escrow purchasable with cartel coins was a step in a right direction IMO.

I understand why they may not want to give preferred/f2p access to certain features or at least reduce effectiveness. I don't like some of them, given my experience with other MMO's but I can to a degree understand. vendors being more expensive? is fine. getting your speeder piloting 10 levels later? again, absolutely fine. only 3 companions able to go out and no crew skill que? again - fine. mailing just one item instead of 8? also fine. restricting quest rewards? wut?

Edited by Jeweledleah
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think you see it more from people who play a lot of F2P games and then try this one out. It's pretty restrictive and some of the restrictions are just silly. I mean you're really going to ask people to pay to hide their helm or unify colors? Obviously that's not crucial to gameplay, but it's still a really petty (very EAish) thing to charge for. It's hard to go from a sub to preferred and still play this game.

 

You are ignoring a very important aspect though..... all of those features people carp about needing to unlock as freemium/F2P are all readily available for credits from other players off the GTN in this game.

 

Now.. for a brand new.. truly F2P account.. that's not easily in reach.. but for a veteran (not even a long in the tooth in terms of play time either) that wants to downshift from sub to preferred.. it's a cake walk these days. Seriously.. I've already got the "conversion kit" in storage on one of my characters that will unlock every unlockable feature or restriction and I purchased it all from the GTN. And I got them all at discount prices too as I was patient and shopped for bargains. This includes a boat load of 600K escrow transfers too (around 40 Million credits worth). So., while I plan to continue to sub, I can flip the switch any time and see almost no loss of access to features. The mail restrictions is really the only thing I would bump up against, and even that is manageable.

 

TL;DR the approach to freedom as preferred/F2P is a bit different in this game then other games, but it is in fact reachable without a long term subscription (2-3 months of sub, and moderate play, is all you would need) and no need for Cartel Coins either (other then to unlock Collections, which even subs have to do). You just need a plan and work the plan.. and you can flip over to preferred with almost zero impact.

Edited by Andryah
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Seriously.. I've already got the "conversion kit" in storage on one of my characters that will unlock every unlockable feature or restriction and I purchased it all from the GTN.

 

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites


×
×
  • Create New...