I am pretty sure I said that I'd be fine if people who would not pay anything did not get two slots. I am pretty sure I suggested it be part of the Preferred Status level of membership. What I am arguing is that the concept of having to pay for that will very well affect whether someone does come to the decision they like the game. For a F2P player, the way the Cartel Shop and the unlocks are implemented, is the game. While it may seem petty, someone could very well be willing to drop an average of $10 a month on the game, but not if they can't get past that initial experience of being 'nickel and dime'-d. Do people really think that if they don't charge for that additional slot or give it away with Preferred Status, that no one is going to spend any money on the game?

And each of those is a valid question with no right or wrong answer. In fact, I think gear access is an account unlock. Passes should probably be account wide too. We could have a whole discussion on that. But those are more about maximizing revenue on people who are already in the position of paying. Many people won't even get to that stage if the first thing they have to do is spend a couple dollars just for a second tool bar they need.

I hate multiple tool bars for combat. Hate it. If any of the characters I have played could get by on just one bar for abilities, I'd have done it. Is that proof? No, but it is not hard to take a look at the community to see that one tool bar is not enough. The rest of your post, I think we agree I just think this particular unlock is bad because it has too much of a negative connotation which I will get into again below. As I said, there is already an incentive to pay. I've even said that Free levels should not get 2 bars. Yes, if you pay nothing, you get one bar. So why not throw it into the Preferred level of membership? People will feel better paying for stuff that enhances the game and want to pay again. People don't want to have to pay for something that is so fundamental to the core MECHANICs of the game. Once you get people in the door, you can charge them for the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th slot depending on how far they get into it. But you have to get them hooked first, not scare them away.

They already have an incentive for people to start making purchases: unlocking Cargo Hold, trade and chat. If they want to limit tool bars, you should get your second one at Preferred status. I get that many of the people who think this is a great idea don't want F2P in the first place and/or fear free loaders, but plenty of people are more than willing to start forking over money in micro transactions, but not when the first purchase leaves such a bad taste in the mouth. It is a bad business decision.

Most of the armor we see so far is probably just intended for leveling. People hit certain points where they have somehow fallen behind stat wise and can just buy this armor from the store to get them through the next few levels again. (** cue disgruntled crafters **)

They say it has to do with fraud. Maybe int he case where someone is using stoled credit cards, gold selling or reversing charges, but it is to stop someone who can create a free account, buy a lot of Cartel Coins, spend them on the store and them move the items to other accounts.

The 5 days is just the waiting period after being bought from the CC. I think once it has been used or equipped it will bind to the character and no longer be able to be traded.

Do you mean inventory and crew skills type of unlocks? I think anything that is a perk of being subscribed (that is the 'can purchase with credits') will be locked if you unsub, but not deleted. So if you resub, or pay CC to unlock them, they will still be as you left them.

Ah, see I've been looking at it from the other end of the scale, on bigger ticket items like 1200 CC for a whole armor set, or 900 CC for a crystal. I can see with most of the items being lower cost, especially the Cartel Packs, they wouldn't want most of those to be passed down since the replacement is a much smaller cost/loss. Speeders being the other big ticket item are also converted into an 'ability' anyway so it is moot there. Still, I always thought that the last thing you want people to do is feel like they wasted money when your whole model is to get them to keep spending.

IS there some reasoning here other than sticking it to free players? While they only have two characters per server (Legacy) anyway, why come up with ways to deter them spending money in the one spot that was designed for them to spend money?

Then it shouldn't be a big deal to be BoL then, right? As I said before, what it does is add value to the armor, makes it more appealing to buy, because I have some room to make some use of it if I decided to buy new armor later or maybe figured it suited a different character. If you want people to start forking over some serious real life coinage, make it more appealing, especially if you are promoting 12 character slots for subscribers.

I don't know the specifics of the Cartel Store binding, but in general I would agree that it should be BoL (if that binding is permanent). I am a lot less likely to drop $12 on appearance armor if I can't move it to an alt. For example, I buy my first set of armor for my main and it is cool, but I see a new suit a couple months later that I would prefer. I'd be willing to shell out another $12 then there is no $12 wasted sitting in my cargo hold (that is, I still like my old suit but at the same time I wouldn't likely be swapping them back and forth). Now, if I can send that old suit to an alt who it fits, sold! Basically, it adds value to the purchase and promotes future purchases.

I know you emphasis the three days to make it look ridiculous, but it seems clear the intention is that current subscribers will stay subscribed and use the points along with their subscription. So if three days, why not three months? And that is a somewhat honest question, as that is the kind of move that could bring past subscribers back in some form. However, that sort of answers the original question: this is intended to keep current subscribers as future subscribers, not to give past subscribers a way to unlock some of the restrictions they will hit when they drop to F2P.

I'll just bring up something that may or not have more or less been argued already, but a game like HoN does that as an incentive to keep people playing, with the ultimate purpose of getting them to cave in and buy stuff (but at the least keep playing so that it keeps people who will buy stuff playing). SWTOR does not need that as there are plenty of in game incentives. There is no upside for EA/BW doing that. The closest to this I can think of would be Turbine's DDO and LotR F2P models, although I don't know if they still do it. You would get meager amounts of points (DDO may have used an alternate system, destiny points or something) that would allow you to unlock something over time but I don't know how well that worked for them. Keep in mind they were facing being the first ones to introduce this model (at least to mainstream North American MMOs).

Are some or all of the Unlocks account wide? The tips say 'character or account', so how exactly does that work?

IF you want access to all of that you will just need to make an investment to buy it upfront. In the long run you will be saving money. Even sub for a couple months for the extra 500CC a month and then drop to F2P. Gear: 1200 (should be covered if subscribed for long enough already, also you could PvP in blues for free) Inventory: 175 (per row,) Skills: 840 (420 x 2) Headslot: 350 Unify: 350 GTN: 125 (10 additional slots So you might be spending close to 3000 (I left out the inventory cost and cargo hold because I only have one cargo hold tab, but you might need to drop another 700 to 1050 if you want all inventory slots unlocked). That does seem to be a lot, but if you spread that price out over a few months you will be saving money after six months or so. And again, that is if you really want all of that right away since a few of those do not directly impact PvPing. Another question I have about the pricing is if most of these are per character, because than it gets real costly but I guess free players only get 2 characters anyway (per server though, so we could still have a good number of them spread out).

My son (on a trial account) is going to be sad about that (not that I am complaining lol) As for MINIMUM, I could see a system where that amount goes up a little based on length of subscription term (more for 3 month and 6 month plans) or goes up after so many consecutive months subscribed. Although the latter reminds me of something that was already planned along those lines, for this game or another, but don't recall if it was for CC or something else.

There is a welcome screen that lists a benefit of subscribing as 10 additional slots. Will this mean subscribers will have 22 or that F2P will have 2? Also, will the limit of F2P storage (inventory and cargo hold) be less than what players currently start with or can buy up to? That is, is the benefit of subscribers being able to spend credits to increase inventory referring to the existing system or to a further increase in storage space?

I'm more curious about that additional 10 characters. Does that mean 22 character slots for subs, or only 2 for F2P? Is there a thread on this already?

If you are talking cosmetic changes? I think that would be awesome. I thought they were going that route with the Legacy perks like species and heroic moment powers. Some things like being able to have the animation of the opposing alignments power (a dark side sage who zaps with lightning instead of throwing rocks) or having your armor use the opposing alignments appearance (except in WZs). While I think it would be cool, there is this sense that LA/BW are too tight with some aspects of the story telling where someone wearing Sith robes in the Jedi Masters council chambers would be blasphemy.

It sounds like a nice idea, but I think it would have a negative effect on the community as everyone thinks their question needs to be looked into (even if it has been countless times already).

I'm still considering going F2P. I always intended to primarily go through all 8 class stories and I probably could have done that by now but I just don't have the free time that I used to. Most of the restrictions don't affect me too much. I don't craft or raid. PvP has been more of a distraction but it is fun. I like the space missions so that limitation will be felt every once in a while. I could see myself dropping a couple bucks here or there for some PvP or space passes depending on the price and what new zones they add. The one restriction that I will probably feel the most is the species one. Most of my characters are human or cyborg anyway, so I might have to reroll a couple or wait to see what it would cost to unlock them. Of all the restrictions I think this is the one I never thought worked well with this hybrid model. Pretty much all perks across the system lock and unlock the same for all players when they go between free and paid, but the species one is the only one that penalizes some people and not others for a core character creation choice that doesn't even have an advantage.

I can see people who can't get 30 fps anywhere in this game (or even worse) having a real complaint somewhere but when the complaint is that there are places in the game where might not get 60 fps that is just nitpicking.

On the surface I just thought it was meaning that all games would have some sort of online (social, mobile or multiplayer) element but it probably makes more sense they are just trying to justify the new 'always on DRM' of having all games require an EA/Origin login to play.

Chat can show it as an option, you can always get it by hovering over the name or right-clicking. Also, it probably wouldn't be an account ID, but a 4 digit number assigned randomly to that character but not tied to all characters on that account. The only limitation there is you could have bob.0000 to bob.9999, ten thousand bobs, and the ten thousand first one would be out of luck. Don't think that is too much of a worry.