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Gamasutra: The Burning of Star Wars - The Old Republic


Urael

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Original Article.

 

@Massively.

 

"SWTOR's 'end-game' was anemic at best, especially compared to the well-received storyline content." Ludgate writes. "Surprise, surprise; most of the people who paid for the game didn't continue subscribing after playing through the story once or twice. Between the annoying grind and the recycled content -- another one of those annoying MMORPG tropes -- the game's single player content ended up being even less fun than a normal single player game, never mind the subscription fee to keep replaying it."

 

Discuss! :cool:

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The one major free thing in all of SWTOR's F2P is the single player storyline. If you're happy doing nothing but the storyline in a fairly single-player-esque and slow, limited, grindy fashion, and you don't mind not getting any quest rewards (you have to subscribe for those), you really don't need to spend a cent on SWTOR. And that single player story is probably SWTOR's most redeeming feature.

 

So here's the conundrum. Droves of people are going to download SWTOR for free, connect to the servers for free, play through the story for free, and quit (for free). BioWare doesn't just get nothing from these F2P players, but in fact pays for all that bandwidth so the F2P player can do it on the servers. It'd actually make more sense for BioWare to release an offline, stand-alone version of SWTOR on The Pirate Bay then to build its online F2P MMORPG around that model.

 

^This.

 

So, on the one hand, BioWare is trying to create an F2P experience so horrifically bad that it brutally coerces players into subscribing, but on the other hand they actively sabotage the very thing subscribers wanted in order to remain subscribers.

^And This.

 

Echoing my comments on these forums. :cool:

Edited by Urael
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I think they'll coerce a good number of people into subscribing.

 

I just re-subbed after playing it for a grotesque amount of time for 3 months last year. Looking at the F2P restrictions, and considering how much time even a single SP campaign involves, $15 is a no-brainer, unless you're 12 and your Mom won't give you the money.

 

I can't promise a long subscription, but every $15 they get from a month's sub is roughly equivalent to a $60 box game retail sale, as I understand the economics.

 

The game didn't capture the insane WoW subscriber base, but how many people are actively playing through the ME3 campaign right now? 200,000? I could write a mean article about "Red Dead Redemption," if I wanted, which I stopped playing after 10 hours.

 

I stopped playing TOR after hundreds(!) of hours or something absolutely disgusting (which is why I quit.) These sniping articles are bogus, to me.

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^This.

 

 

^And This.

 

Echoing my comments on these forums. :cool:

 

You forgot to mention the dizzy logic behind their contention that the $15 subscription fee was too high to retain subscribers... so therefore their solution to that problem is to implement a system that simultaneously lessens the percieved value to subscribers while trying to squeeze more money from us. Genius I say!

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I think they'll coerce a good number of people into subscribing.

 

I just re-subbed after playing it for a grotesque amount of time for 3 months last year. Looking at the F2P restrictions, and considering how much time even a single SP campaign involves, $15 is a no-brainer, unless you're 12 and your Mom won't give you the money.

 

I can't promise a long subscription, but every $15 they get from a month's sub is roughly equivalent to a $60 box game retail sale, as I understand the economics.

 

The game didn't capture the insane WoW subscriber base, but how many people are actively playing through the ME3 campaign right now? 200,000? I could write a mean article about "Red Dead Redemption," if I wanted, which I stopped playing after 10 hours.

 

I stopped playing TOR after hundreds(!) of hours or something absolutely disgusting (which is why I quit.) These sniping articles are bogus, to me.

 

Your comments read as if you didn't read the whole article. I agree with what TUXs said. This article is an honest look at the State of SWTOR. If EAware is smart they will read it, head it, and make the changes suggested. The author did give his thoughts on how to fix SWTORs Freemium model. The article wasn't a "snipe shot". :cool:

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I don't know.... complaining about a MMO's lack of end game is a bit of a truism. Its like complaining that TV networks eventually end up showing re-runs. And I'm really not sure how well even the ones that are or were supposedly good at this really are. (Basically how much time out of the gate do they need to develope it?) . Also so much of the "end game" can simply get realm vs. realm. And I have to say, some of my most boring time I've had gaming in a MMO was with my guidlies in Dark Age waiting to lay ambush for the other side....... I actually logged out and claimed it was a disconnect just to escape the boredom on at least one occasion. Edited by Addaib
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old article is old

 

Date of Article. 14 Dec 2012. You're attempts to discredit (and show you didn't read it ) to defend SWTOR actually take away from SWTOR. The Author of the article was brutally honest about what is wrong with SWTOR. :cool:

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Eh, I don't know, most the time what I hear in general chat (outside of the fleet) is the opposite, people are subbing up because they enjoy the game and want their shackles removed. We'll see how long that strategy lasts, but it's working so far..
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Eh, I don't know, most the time what I hear in general chat (outside of the fleet) is the opposite, people are subbing up because they enjoy the game and want their shackles removed. We'll see how long that strategy lasts, but it's working so far..

 

Which was the point the author was making in his comments about the "coersion to subscribe". :cool:

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Nothing new and I would have to agree that F2P is atrocious and that the author of the article hit it on the nail. F2P is just a marketing tool to draw people into becoming a subscriber, which was what EA intended it to be.

 

However to the defense of the new F2P system, I have many friends that never tried Swtor and were turned off from it because of the initial cost to buy the game when it came out. After I told them it was F2P and you didn’t have to pay to install it, they went ahead and jumped on it. I left them alone for a like a week or 2 and next thing you know some were subscribers and some weren’t. I told them to wait until lvl 50 to sub, but they didn’t want any of that. Either way they became paying subscribers from this.

 

But yeah it would be stupid for anyone to pay for all the unlocks considering no one know just how much longer this game will last. If you paid for all the unlocks today for 2 characters, which according to the author of the article was about $180 and the game closes in a year, you would have been better off paying the two 6-month subscriptions and saved about $30 with every feature unlocked.

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You forgot to mention the dizzy logic behind their contention that the $15 subscription fee was too high to retain subscribers... so therefore their solution to that problem is to implement a system that simultaneously lessens the percieved value to subscribers while trying to squeeze more money from us. Genius I say!

 

Indeed. The author points that out in the article. :cool:

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Sometimes I really wonder why people stick on the forums spitting on a game they should leave as they do not like it. You should stop looking for confirmations to your negative thoughts about SWTOR and do not waste your time here. Out here it's full of MMOs, and for sure there will be one that fits you perfectly.,:D
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I stopped reading at 20 person raids.

 

Heh anyone that can't count is not fit to dish advice

 

It is unfortunate that you let something so small as a typo keep you from reading the entire article. The author feels exactly as I do and have been saying on these forums all along. In the end like me, TUXs and others, the author want's SWTOR to succeed. He is just unimpressed with how EAware is going about it. :cool:

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Sometimes I really wonder why people stick on the forums spitting on a game they should leave as they do not like it. You should stop looking for confirmations to your negative thoughts about SWTOR and do not waste your time here. Out here it's full of MMOs, and for sure there will be one that fits you perfectly.,:D

 

I would be nice if EAware would actually listen to feed back like this. But, as we all know any press on SWTOR is good press on SWTOR if it gets people to take a look at the game. This article is spot on. Beside fixing bugs, if EAWare actually listens to the author and others that share this view, they could have a very succesful product. Right now they are skimming the edge of mediacrity at best. :cool:

Edited by Urael
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I would really like to read a true story about the launch of this game, it still amazes me that it could fail so hard with so much money and such a bulletproof ip. And just continue to fail over and over with every new bad idea.

 

I was never really one to believe all the EA is evil stuff. But I do think it's obvious that EA was behind the rushed conversion to F2P in under a year. Usually takes large MMOs a good year or two before such a large scale change like this.

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To be fair, this article has been blogged and reposted about on tons of gaming websites already.

 

I assume that makes it "old" in internet time. :D

 

It wasn't posted here, I searched prior to posting. What better place to discuss than where consumers of SWTOR can comment on it directly and hopefully those comments will be read and taken into consideration by EAware. :cool:

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Which was the point the author was making in his comments about the "coersion to subscribe". :cool:

 

Maybe, but I refuse to agree with him because I find that he's a moron. I don't think SWTOR is the fairest F2P model, but it gives you good content for free and does its job of getting people to sub.

 

To begin with, I logged in to my old account and checked the in-game market to find out for myself what it would cost to have a subscription-like game experience without a subscription.

 

Logging onto a F2P game and wanting a subscription like experience without a subscription? Get real, I've played my fair share of F2P games and have never expected to be treated like a sub, nor do I know what it feels like to be a subs so it's impossible for me to expect it. Most people coming to this game fresh aren't going to know the perks of being a sub and likely won't care. If they want to they'll sub to get those perks, if not they'll likely just play F2P or leave. It seems the only people that are raging over SWTORs f2p model are returning players.

 

You have to pay for four different passes to unlock four of the game's five content avenues (all but the story) and each weekly pass is 240 cartel coins. As each cartel coin costs a little over 0.727 cents USD each, 240 per pass, four passes per character, two characters, four passes a month = 7680CC, or $55.84.[/Quote]

 

If you're doing that much content then why aren't you subbing? The whole point of the passes are for free players to play what they want at less of a cost than a subscription fee. If you seriously expect to get all that on two characters for less than $15 a month then you are just looking for a free ride.

 

And that's assuming you're going to plunk down $180 to unlock everything (including hotbars to put your abilities on so you can actually use those abilities) on only two characters. You can't actually get more than two characters (as far as I can tell)

 

This is the real kicker for me, when you don't do your job as a reporter and report things and do actual research and just say 'as far as I can tell', then your opinion needs to have its validation checked. It's true that SWTOR doesn't have an option to buy character slots yet, but if he was really going to report on SWTOR he would have done some actual research and found that Bioware is trying to get that feature in as well as improving character slots and action bars for F2P players.

Edited by Norke
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I was never really one to believe all the EA is evil stuff. But I do think it's obvious that EA was behind the rushed conversion to F2P in under a year. Usually takes large MMOs a good year or two before such a large scale change like this.

 

Imo the bad decision to make this game f2p before fixing it or bringing it up to speed with its competition like WOW and Rift pales in comparison to the absolutely horrible decisions bioware made at release to leave out things like combat windows and macros and continues with allowing people to sell all the end game gear on the gtn. And i think that is all bioware, not EA.

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