I'm feeling Nickel and Dimed by Makeb

It "was" determined as a content patch, it is "now" an expansion. I would agree with you if the planet was the size of Section: X and that it did not come with a Heroic or Operations, but so far its larger than Section: X. Have you even been to Section: X? That was a pretty sizable area and the content there kept me amused for a few hours.

But since this expansion takes place in a totally new planet, with totally new NPC, voice acting, storyline, class levels and abilities, with obvious new end-game equipment, this would not qualify as a content. For me content patches are like taking old things and errr "patching" things up, not come up with totally new content.

It's okay if you don't want RotHC. It's your right as a consumer to shop somewhere else. What baffles me is why people who have already decided to shop somewhere else remain on station (if you will) to soapbox and poison the community punch bowl. They can't be taking a freaking video game so seriously that they look for ways to be offended by it.

It's called activism.

I happen to care about the future of the MMO business model and I'm willing to be a little bit of an activist to try to prevent the model shifting to one where companies can charge a subscription fee and then charge more to download patches that have new content.

This isn't some great new expansion to the game. This is a single player content patch in the same mold as a new collection of space missions, or a couple new warzones, or a new tier of operations. I know there's this huge movement from the company defenders to wait for more information, but there's plenty of information already. We may not know all the details but we know plenty. It's a simple content patch gated behind an artificial level increase that enforces the paywall.

With activism, we can maybe prevent this from taking hold.

There are real world examples of activism working.

Because of activism, black people get to use the same public restrooms as white people. I'm sure there were plenty of people who didn't like the chanting groups of mostly black people forming and protesting segregation. I'm sure those people thought that these 'uppity negroes' were "poisoning the community punchbowl" when they could just as easily use the negro-only restrooms and drinking fountains. But, thanks to activism, we don't have segregation laws.

There are also real world examples of negative consequences that might have been prevented with activism.

Because we didn't do anything to prevent companies from shutting down virtually all manufacturing in this country and shipping jobs over to sweat shops in China, we no longer really have a manufacturing sector of our economy. Those jobs just don't exist any more. Everything you buy just about anywhere says "made in China" now. You literally cannot buy any type of shoes anywhere that say "made in the U.S.A." I grew up in the 80's. No one saw that coming. There was some general sense of concern that we were starting to outsource manufacturing, but there was no activism. There was no concerted effort to stop it. Now, manufacturing is gone and our economy is worse off for it.

Now, you can be as critical as you want of me for choosing to be passionate about this game, but the truth is that Bioware is trying to grab some short term money right now because they haven't made very good financial decisions. This is just another domino on the path to financial ruin. They are going to lose subscribers over this and they are going to lose potential subscribers when ftp people hit level 50 and are hit with a sudden $20 paywall to keep playing. This is bad for everyone.

If this game can be saved, it's going to be saved by activists. We're not poisoning the well. We're fighting for a better environment. Today we use our voices to speak truth to power. If Bioware doesn't change course, then we'll use our wallets. EA will see the loss of subs and shut down the game, and we'll have saved the industry by telling a cautionary tale for any other MMORPG makers who think they can charge their users a subscription fee on top of content download fees.

Good post and sums up pretty much exactly how I feel.

I also worry that this is the start of a new precedent for SWTOR. Are all future content updates going to be 10 bucks? Every 1.5-2 months we have to drop another 10 bucks on top of our 15 dollar fee? Thats an extra 60-80 bucks a year on top of the sub fee. While that;s not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, I just don't think SWTOR is worth that at all.

I play video games (at this point pretty much only ToR) an average of 3 hours a day. Thats 21 hours a week 84 hours a month. That is $0.18 an hour to play this game. If they tack on 10-20 bucks every 6 months for a planet lets do some math and see what that ends up being.

504 hours / (90 dollars for sub + 20 for expac) = $0.21 an hour.

Lets redo that using 1 hour a day on average

180 hours / (90 dollars for sub + 20 for expac) = $0.61 an hour.

Lets compare this to a movie.

2 hours / 13.00 a ticket = $6.50 / hr

How about watching cable tv for 3 hours a day for a month

90 hours / 29.99 per mo (thats the intro price for basic cable from Comcast) = $0.33 / hr

So yeah, this is still the cheapest form of entertainment available.

I play video games (at this point pretty much only ToR) an average of 3 hours a day. Thats 21 hours a week 84 hours a month. That is $0.18 an hour to play this game. If they tack on 10-20 bucks every 6 months for a planet lets do some math and see what that ends up being.

504 hours / (90 dollars for sub + 20 for expac) = $0.21 an hour.

Lets redo that using 1 hour a day on average

180 hours / (90 dollars for sub + 20 for expac) = $0.61 an hour.

Lets compare this to a movie.

2 hours / 13.00 a ticket = $6.50 / hr

How about watching cable tv for 3 hours a day for a month

90 hours / 29.99 per mo (thats the intro price for basic cable from Comcast) = $0.33 / hr

So yeah, this is still the cheapest form of entertainment available.

I think the price is ok, perhaps a bit steep.

But it's not an expansion, it's an adventure pack.


Whatever the PR reason behind calling it and expansion, it isn't to do with content, its more likely to "justify" the price change.

I find that its the same thing either way. I don't mind paying like $10 since its still way cheaper than any of the Sims 3 expansions and probably offers more content than just a few couches and textures. Although some packs from the Sims were amazing.