Attentive readers will have noticed I’ve been keeping somewhat quiet about my MMO playing for a while now. It’s not because I haven’t been playing MMOs, in fact I’ve been playing quite some WoW but rather it’s been because I’ve been having trouble figuring out exactly my thoughts about Swtor F2P details.
As I said before, I’m not a fan and I think Bioware is shooting itself in the foot long-term but I struggled with expressing the why. Luckily, ControlBlue, a commenter on Darth Hater, expressed it in simple terms for me.
They are clearly made to convert demo players into subs THROUGH frustration.
Well said my friend. I think this sums up nicely my issue with swtor F2P. Why make the player experience miserable until they pay? Why….
… I give up…
Although it’s tempting to go into speculations as to why exactly Bioware made things this way, either sheer stupidity or greed or plain evil… they are doing it. I do believe short-term it will bring about a revival of sorts and an influx of cash but the core issues will not be solved.
So there’s my thoughts on Swtor F2P. I just don’t understand the strategy anymore…
I suspect it’s only miserable to past subscribers who will remember exactly what the game was like before F2P. New players might not find it as frustrating.
That’s a possibility but I’m wondering… I mean, being locked out of certain quest rewards can’t go over too well even with completly new players.
Also, will new players be fine with being locked out of certain content or limited? You could be right, but I’m not sure either.
You have to play for awhile before you start getting purples, and with only access to one tradeskill you probably won’t be crafting your own.
As a subscriber myself to SWToR, I don’t have a problem with what they are doing beyond the fact that Bio has to implement F2P in the first place. If they made it so that the majority of the people are satisfied with the F2P experience, then what is their motivation to pay for any of the extras? I love this game and I don’t want to see it go away. If F2P can introduce more people to the game, and give them an incentive to become subscribers than more power to them.
My only worry is that I still don’t know all the details of the F2P model and I am hoping that they don’t implement something that will affect the subscribers.
You ask a pretty good question there when you ask what would motivate players to sub if they didn’t have incentive. There’s two way to approach this.
Either you do like they are doing and restrict the player with limitations to the gameplay itself or you can take an approach more like Turbine did with Lotro and DDO where you give most of the functionalities of the game but less content and make the user pay for the content they want.
It’s a subtle difference but in one case you frustrate the player into subscription and in the other you give them an experience more like a regular player would have and then tell them that if they liked it they can pay for more.
So, for me I’d rather entice players to sub because they love the content and not because they feel restricted.
i think you are looking at it from a glass half empty perspective, Hunaiam. the f2p experience should be good enough (not miserable) to encourage them to sub or spend money in the cash shop. if the goal is to earn money and/or increase the player base, the proposed model is not the way to go. imo and from my personal experience games like rift, lotro and gw2 do it right. these are all games that have some form of f2p and i’ve spent money on all them.
even though i pre-ordered swtor, as it stands i’d rather give my money to one of the other aforementioned companies.