IGN Report

If this goes F2P, I'll just cancel this and put my gaming time into Diablo 3. It's free, and there's a Real Money Auction House, but at least it's not a persistent world.

From what I can tell at LinkedIn.com, they just hired, this very month, a new programer from within EA in California, whose total body of expertise and professional focus is integrating ecommerce and such. They have a senior project manager, not among the layoffs, whose entire focus is ecommerce, and describes part of her role as "pushing into new areas." She has to have several teams under her, and they have to have something they are up too. Paid transfers, name changes, logical, but not enough to occupy that much payroll.

For all the content that was supposed to be coming out this year, nothing has really happened. My feeling is that the teams are busy retooling the existing game for a more comprehensive F2P model, and that what we have is only the previous trial system turned back on. There will be a store, MTs, and so forth. Likely enough, we see some signs not terribly long after the final server merges.

The writing is on the wall, between the lines, and to be found on any number of wigi boards.

You know what? I've been reading about these hybrid business models, and as long as they have a PREMIUM account option (in other words, all of us subscribed to the game now would be PREMIUM players with access to everything in the game at all times), I don't give a crap if they want to let people into the game for free and open up some stupid 'virtual store' for them to purchase things and not earn them. As long as my experience can stay the same for $15 a month, I'm cool.

Either way, it's clear in this industry that if your game goes F2P, you've failed. The big B hasn't thrown in the towel; they continue to succeed. It'll be too bad if EA/BioWare gives in, instead of going balls-out and putting forth some really amazing content (a full flight simulator for the space component comes to mind, instead of the half-assed functionality they have in-game right now) that will attract players anyway, because it's GOOD.

1) Get a true space experience in there. Moddable ships, missions, fly-anywhere, EVE-style play but with an actual cockpit and seamless transitions to roaming your ship in character ala Star Wars Galaxies. Didn't I hear that they had hired the Jump To Lightspeed designers to work on this very idea, or was I just making too much sense again?

2) Get barber shops in there.

3) Get housing and apartments in there.

4) Get world PvP in there, full-scale, and ship-to-surface warfare.

5) Allow multiple players to board ships, and allow them to man turrets.

Really tick off everything on the checklist that could possibly bring players back to the game for dynamic Star Wars reasons, no matter how small, and continually update them when these features go live.

That's exactly what free to play is....
And WoW is free to play.

Saying "WoW is free to play." is open-ended, and being open-ended, it suggests the 'play' part of that term means 'indefinitely'. But it's not indefinitely. For 70 levels and end-game, you have to pay a monthly subscription.

you know i was on an mmo back in 2001...and they had an interesting mix on the hybrid model

free 2 play was on its own shard servers,and was rarely updated,but well maintenanced


then there were memebrs only servers,which you had to pay a sub fee to access...and thats where the actually good updates were...it was like a way more cool world on the members server

Old news is new again. I do believe a full version of the mentioned "interview" revealed that they company admitted that they would adapt and change as per the market changes. But for the moment Bioware is sticking to a subscription model.

But I suppose running a black PR campaign is doing wonders for this game. Just need to scare the community with a few half truths and a little BS.

Nothing wrong with f2p and though I have many criticisms of swtor and bw I'd still stick around.

On the other hand, if this happens more of my friends that left will finally come back, yeah !!

Looks like Ill be bidding my most favorite game ever. goodbye!

sigh, what crap man