Pay to Win

MMOs can easily go without subscription. GW2 is a prime example of that. A cash shop alone can hold a free to play game afloat, and swtor DOES have a good cartel market offering almost nothing that is pay to win. As I have been saying - altho League of Legends isn't a MMO - it's free to play model is one of the best out there. You can go 100% pro without paying a penny.

I am just waiting for this forum to be shut down, they defiantly do not want criticisms like this bashing their almighty cash cow.

Yes, if they were designed to be F2P from the start.
This was not.

GW2 isn't technically F2P, it's B2P with microtransactions. But yes, a game can theoretically survive with just box sales and a cash shop. The question is whether that is more profitable for the company or not. If SWTOR had been able to maintain the 2 million subscribers they had at launch, they'd be infinitely more profitable than GW2 can ever hope to be. Now, they get $15 a month from around half a million subscribers, and extra money from people buying from the CM. Although I have no idea how much the two companies make in microtransaction sales, I'd be surprised if GW2 was more profitable.

Again, game companies don't provide F2P/B2P/hybrid services out of the goodness of their hearts. They do so be because they want to find ways to extract money from you. Some are definitely worse than others, but I have yet to play one of these MMOs where there wasn't some sort of restriction or incentive in place to entice people into spending money. That's the point of the whole model.

That is way too easy. You honestly can't compare the two. Sure GW2 looks pretty, but the story telling is poor, the voice acting is worse, they didn't have to pay for using something like the Star Wars universe, cause they used their own etc.

Honestly, you are starting to sound more and more self entitled as the thread goes along. You just want everything for nothing and that's not how things work in this world. If you like it so much that they are free, why not go play GW2 then?

All those games that are built around f2p lack substance and story telling. PvE endgame in GW2 is a handful of dungeons with boring boss fights and grinding yourself silly for a legendary weapon. That's it. If that's enough for you, then by all means go play those games.

Your kind of logic is based on comparing an element completely out of context and I tell you, without context it means nothing.

Quoted for truth. I've been a subscriber since launch and considered moving to Preferred more than once. However, the restrictions and unlock-purchases seemed to be too much of a hassle for me to make the switch. Which is precisely the point; otherwise how else would the game generate somewhat reliable profits? I know it can be done, and I may figure it out some day, but that day is not today.

F2P has never been more than a glorified trial mode. Which is fine; some people play the class stories and are done with it. But if you want to fully participate in the community via Operations, Warzones, crafting and Flashpoints, it's far easier to do when subscribed.

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My views on Free to play, paying, and subscribing. Who really pays and who wins:

The thing is that when this game went free to play, nothing really changed for the subscribers. Other than getting some cartel coins each month and that was it. Here, free to play is so restrictive that there are features that should not be so. The conciseness from word of mouth is from all the MMORPG's that have a free to play option, SWTOR has one of the worst free to play models today. There is no debate about it. Most of the restrictions are asinine. It is a fact. It almost feels like everyone outside looking in is laughing at Bioware right now. Once more, subscriptions in other MMO's that have both models give more to their subscribers than just cash shop currency. They make it much more advantageous and attractive to subscribe while their free to play model is far less restrictive. Even a one time purchase of the game entitles you to even less restrictions still. Everybody's happy. But here, we have basically nothing extra for subscribing, still have to pay for the barbershop feature and extra for newly added hairstyles etc. Holiday purchases? No event? Not even a little something?! Ah ok, fireworks. gotcha... Our $15 per month should pay for all the small extra features added. The one and only time this has happened was with the first attempt for the HK quest. Once complete, it could be purchased through Legacy. So I don't know how I feel about that. But I suppose you can look at it like an in game unlock.

However, the huge problem with this game is the greed from Bioware and EA. It sours everything. Just because they couldn't hold on to subscribers and sustain a profitable income from subscriptions alone, they used a band-aid in the form of a Cartel Market to keep things going. Fine, its not shutting down for now, great. But the problems that caused the mass exodus has not been resolved and I doubt it ever will be. This project had dozens of awfully bad decisions made during development. And for that, we'll always pay extra for it. It's unfortunate, but this game will continue to stay on life support with no change in sight. That is until players get tired of forking over hundreds of dollars extra on top of their subscription every month. But then again, the man in charge of the Cartel Market will always have some new candy in his van for you. I love Star Wars. I couldn't get into SWG. It just wasn't for me. Now, with all the greed Bioware and EA are emanating from this game, it makes it very difficult to support them. Such a shame... This project had such potential but they all simply stopped caring.

Then let us look at two games that were designed pay to play that came out around the same time swtor did that now have a free to play model that is 20x better than SWTOR's. Let's start with TERA. Tera is 100% running on their in game shop, which only offers cosmetic items. And they are doing much better log in numbers as swtor is right now. And the only thing good about that game is the combat. They don't have the "fourth pillar" of story. Swtor has better features than TERA and it is still loosing in numbers. Now lets look at RIFT. Here is a quote from them "No trials. No tricks. No traps." You can have EVERYTHING in the game without ever paying a single cent. And again, swtor still has better features than RIFT.

And these games are doing much better than swtor is now, wanna know why? The F2P model isn't a glorified demo.

Please provide proof that "these games are doing much better than swtor is now". Ideally in terms of how much revenue each is generating.

Seeing how Tera got an extra of 1.4 million new players playing daily, and Trion worlds praising the success of the f2p model and how they will start to integrate it into many of their new games. Not to mention Rift's servers are always on high, while in swtor we are lucky to have one on maybe medium. And then we have swtor that averages 344 players per server and shrinking.