What is the point of my $15 a month?

Yet, you're still subbed? Curious as to why, if there's no reason to sub once you purchase these unlocks quickly and easily.

Yours, mine, and every other subscribers fees are not enough to grow the game... The cartel market was necessary, so you should be thanking people who pay into this market for the game's existence and continued growth. In order to keep these people paying into the cartel market, they need to continue growing this aspect of the game as well. This is simple economics. They can't make every cartel item free for subscribers or profits dip too low. Save/spend your monthly cartel coin rewards wisely, buy the cartel market items that people have put up in the GTN instead of using coins.

If the game is not providing enough content for you as a subscriber, unsubscribe. Until you unsubscribe, BioWare will continue to see your money and that's all that matters. This is a business, businesses need to make money, bottom line.

You paid 15$ at launch, you still get the same amount of content (actually more) as you did then.

Can you remind me how much you are paying per month? I forget.

The unlocks are one time but subs get a bunch of qol things beyond the unlocks.
30 minute Ouick Travel
More toon slots and options on them
Better mail system
Faster leveling
Just off the top of my head.

I ran my first character on F2P. It was alright, but when I went back to roll a few alts, the idea of having to put up with the test drive version of the game seemed miserable. The reduced XP is the worst because by your 30s you are having to run absolutely everything on every planet to keep up.

Not sure why you quoted me. I'm not arguing that sub isn't worth it -- but someone else, who IS a subscriber, is trying to say there's absolutely no reason to sub.

Just calling out his BS.

But you missed the part where I precisely compared the Cartel Market to the Blizzard Store. Regardless of whether or not I can log into the game (which, by the way I can---I currently have a subscription to DCUO, SWTOR, and WoW), if I buy something from the Blizzard store, I have it on every single character on my account, regardless of which server I am on. It is a fair question to ask if your competition does it this way, why are you not? Why are you doing something worse than your competitors? EA / BioWare treats this as a business, I, as a gamer, do too.

First of all, when I say "you" I mean, you know, the royal you, not you specifically. A subscription is required to log on. If you have a subscription, of course you can log in. But a subscription for SWTOR is not required to play the game. Apparently you missed my point entirely, so I'll repeat it. Blizzard does not rely on their store for the game's income. It's entirely supplemental. They don't need to think of ways to get more income to pay their bills through the store. Bioware does, because the store IS the main source of their income. They don't make their items all bind on account for the same reason that Blizzard doesn't let you level all the way to 85 for free.

Hey man. What you are saying is so obvious. Wanna know the REALLY sad part. I'm sure that if the voters knew all the horrible things that the other companies did they would still think that EA was the worst! Anyone that would vote a gaming company "Worst Company in America" is just a fool. You can justify it however you want but that is the truth. If the Worst Company in America was only ripping me off for $15 a month, LIFE WOULD BE FANTASTIC. People wake up and see what is really going on in our world. If you get this pissed about $15 a month then wait till you find out what is really going on. I just hope that when you do find out, you put the same passion behind fixing our world and country that you do to try to fix an mmorpg. For everyone that understands what I just wrote, remember it is easier to fool people than it is to convince them they have been fooled.

Well it hasn't launched yet, so I'm not sure how it will work out, but so far, the plan for Star Citizen is to have a cash shop converter only, which allows you yo buy in-game currency with real cash, to prevent there being two different different game currencies (like credits and Cartel Coins).

Or, you can look at Entropia, which has no cash shop as all in-game currency is purchased with real currency, with $1 USD = 10 PED (project entropia dollars). However, the big thing about this is that if you gain a sufficient amount of PEDs through providing services for other players or killing mobs and selling the resulting loot, or looting other players in space when you kill them in your spacecraft, you can convert PED back to USD. The only requirement is that the minimum for conversion is you must convert at least 1,000 PED, and they will send you a check for $100 USD in the mail. (Try converting Cartel Coins back into the cash you spent on them.)

I'm on the hunt though. Are there any other MMOs out there with a science-fiction bent that don't have a cash shop?