I can't blame people for complaining. This looks an awful lot like a content patch that they're only calling an expansion and raising the cap so they can charge for it. It may turn out differently, but a quote of a dev saying "there's so much stuff to add and it's going to be exciting but I can't tell you what it is" is not particularly persuasive, considering the same thing was said that at launch. People go by what they know, and what they know so far doesn't impress them.

If a person buys that thing, they deserve to get charged for whatever BW can take. A fool and his money...

You know that none of those are subscription games, right? The whole "regular content updates are paid by your subscription" is kind of the point of MMOs. Also, if you don't like the look of Lonesome Road, Honest Hearts or Dead Money but you adore Old World Blues, you can pay $5 for Fallout: New Vegas DLC (as I did, was worth every penny). DLC is ultimately a bunch of amusing sidequests, though. They're selling this as an expansion. You're going to have to buy it to access the game's new endgame. Now, if they later release other "Digital Expansions" all of which raise the level cap to 55 (and don't stack, that way you can choose which one you want)... well that would actually be pretty interesting, and I'd be curious to see how that worked. But that's not what they're doing right now.

And yet, they got you to buy it at all. I don't think you'd better start honking their nose just yet.

If Bioware gave me personally everything I wanted, it would actually succeed better because of a more robust freemium model, less bugs and a more supportive community. At least, that's what I tell myself. Anyway, the only way you can make this argument is if you don't pay attention to names. I mean, before group finder was added, a ton of people complained about the lack of group finder. After group finder was added, some people complained about the group finder! If your take-away message from that was "people are whiners so you shouldn't try to improve things," you failed to pay attention to names. The people complaining about no group finder and the people complaining about group finder were different people. Coincidentally, you might find that the people complaining about the group finder were, previous to its addition, the people defending the lack of group finder. Fancy that. Anyway, this expansion seems comparable in size to a DLC or adventure pack, and is priced accordingly. It's called an expansion with a raised level cap, which is going to require people to buy it (even if they don't want it) to run around in the game's endgame with their buddies. Adventure packs were never required purchases. Expansions never contained so little content. It really is the worst of both worlds.

And yet some of us cook for ourselves and pay maybe a dollar for the meal... Man, I must be the only person on a budget. I know wasteful spending because you can is culturally encouraged, but damn, people.

Vanilla: Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Quirahj (actually two raids), Zul'Gurub, Naxxramas Burning Crusade: Black Temple, Zul'Aman, Sunwell Wrath of the Lich King: Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader, Icecrown Citadel Cataclysm: Firelands, Dragon Soul Pandas: no idea didn't continue playing a.k.a. yes, at least two raid content updates every xpac, above and beyond what they started the expansion with.

There's DLC and Adventure Packs and the like that cost this kind of money, and have somewhere around this level of content. They're calling it an expansion though. Sure, right? They've increased the level cap so it's an expansion? Well, yes and no. The level cap increase actually makes it worse. The increase to level cap makes it REQUIRED to purchase this "expansion" to continue to run around in endgame, which needs to be scaled up to the new cap. DLC and adventure packs and the like were never required purchases. Expansions were never so paltry in size. I'm actually kind of impressed at how they've managed to combine the worst of both worlds here.

I guess I should have seen this coming when they decided that $13.50 was a good price point for giving Preferred players account-level access to Section X. It's a daily quest area! Well, I'm no longer cautiously optimistic about them relaxing F2P restrictions when they get more stuff to offer subscribers, such as more content updates. Because let's be honest. Let's say they didn't tell you whether this was an expansion or a content update, and didn't increase the level cap (they already have a scaling system in place, they use it for 10-49 PvP). Would you call it an expansion if they weren't giving you that word to spit back?

"Digital expansion?" Are you serious? They're getting really short-sighted with their money-grubbing. It's kind of sad to see. I have yet to hear of an MMO charging subscribers for content updates (that's kind of the whole point of subscription in freemium games), so unless Makeb is much, much bigger than any previous planet, this is just absurd. They've already confirmed that there's no substantive class story content included in it, which I guess cuts down on their costs a lot but they're going to have serious trouble selling anyone on this thing. Yeah, I kind of hoped that the guy/guys who came up with "just 1 quickbar for F2P" and "F2P can't spacebar through dialogue" were just an overeager minority. Unfortunately it seems that that's the philosophy running the show and the only thing that can get them to not totally bleed everyone dry is a massive backlash. I suspect there will be a massive backlash. This is also going to drive off freepers/preferred, who now need to drop either $20 or $25 to do so much as spit at endgame. 55 is going to be a ghost town... How many such people do you think there are? There's an immense profit in a small number of crazily dedicated people who drop disproportionate amounts of money on gambling items. I don't like it, but it's a thing. But if you're relying on the whole subscriber base being like them? You're in for a painful disappointment.

I think people who hate on very specific things and then shut up when they're changed get excluded from that group. It's easy to blame complaints on 'haters' and the seeming MPD of a never-satisfied market, but it's absolutely important (if you really want to get into it instead of self-indulgently dismissing people) to pay attention to the names. Sometimes those change, so the styles of diction. Different people want different things, and if 75% of a population thinks a new feature is great and 25% thinks it's awful, there will be complaints whether or not it's implemented. Like, people complained for ages about the lack of a group finder. Then, when a group finder was put in, people complained about that too! You can't please anyone, right? Well, if you'd pay attention, it's entirely different people complaining before and after the fact. And if not, well, you've found your real haters. They're pretty rare though.

I'm okay with it so long as it means they aren't erasing the whole thread, like they did with the last discussion on this. (Also, 'old news' guy was just irritating.) Anyway, there's some places where the author is misinformed, but the bits he's gotten wrong are largely cosmetic. He's bang-on about the F2P model being a "subscribe to get punished less" deal. I personally think that happened because, after deciding that they were giving away the entire story for free (y'know, the part that even the people who quit and hated the rest of the game still liked), they realized they didn't have a whole lot to offer subscribers. I'm cautiously optimistic about them relaxing F2P punishment once they start making things to benefit subscribers. If they make things to benefit subscribers, something I am also cautiously optimistic about. Problem is that the F2P model as it was released is not good at all (and they did a pretty bad job of laying out the perks and restrictions effectively; the Internet has so much misinformation about this it's sad), and right at its release was the time when it got the most publicity. Their implementation of their F2P at release has hurt them, and it's hard to say just how avoidable it all was.

There's no need to deal in hypotheticals. My brother was playing a Stargunner clone on his tablet a couple of weeks ago. For those not familiar, it's a sidescrolling space shooter with a lot of customization regarding what you can put on your ship. For a dollar, you can acquire as much in-game currency as you would be able to make playing the game through a couple of times over. It's enough to buy all the best stuff for your ship to utterly smash the first level. Single player, on a tablet, with simplistic gameplay. It has Pay to Win. It's just that nobody cares because it's a silly tablet game, not a would-be AAA MMORPG.

I'd like to know why it was put in place. As far as things to restrict go, it seems downright odd. I've got an idea on the reason, but said reason is just the paranoid ramblings of a known crackpot and actual information is better. Nothing particularly complicated. (Also I wouldn't mind coaxing the devs out of their shell a little with something easy and straightforward, but y'know.)

Bumping this for justice.

Lol, aren't conspiracy theories the best? There's no paid effort to take down this game. Well, there is, insofar as the guys at BWEU are getting paid. Fine. There's no external paid effort to take down this game.

So, it's pretty well-known at this point that non-subscribers can't get credit boxes as rewards for quests. I'm not asking for this restriction to go away! Far from it, I get the impression it's intended to help keep off the gold farmers with crew skill apps and Slicing. But y'know, that's just an impression. It's not listed in the F2P section anywhere, there hasn't been much talk about it, and I hear a lot of people on starter planets getting frustrated by it. I think that frustration is needless - lots of people are totally okay with sticking it to gold farmers. (Also if there is annoyance it helps redirect it to gold farmers instead of BW.) I was hoping we could get some sort of dev commentary about this. Something like "yeah it's necessary to keep gold farmers from just flooding the servers with free accounts, legitimate players are unfortunately just collateral damage" or the like. Or if that's not the reasoning, some note explaining what is. I don't mind it myself, but the "you can't access quest rewards" is one of the more persistent bits of misinformation running around the Internet and I think it's helping to scare people off who would otherwise play. Again, I don't want this restriction to go away (I say this twice because you know someone is going to come in here saying "it's fine, stop whining entitled noob!") I'd just like some communication on why it's there.

Oh, interesting, didn't know that. Wasn't around for that segment of beta, it seems. In any case, I strongly suspect that the problem doesn't lie on the ticket system being overloaded, but on the human end of the equation. There's probably a timer where, if you don't get a human looking at it, you get an automated message instead. Unfortunately that seems to be the result of a majority of tickets.

Pretty standard. SWToR's F2P model is not particularly good, most of the Internet has realized this. That said, the Internet is also rife with misinformation about it, something BW is largely responsible for. For instance, he says you need to be subbed to get quest rewards. That sounds ridiculously punitive, and it would be if it were true. But it's just credit box quest rewards that are only available to subscribers. (That's pretty ridiculous too at first glance. Presumably it's done to make things harder for gold farmers, but if you didn't know that, it would seem petty, stupid and counterproductive.) He also says that a F2P model should strive to milk existing subscribers, without realizing that that's exactly what's going on. Free players still have the quickbar restriction (it was only relaxed for Preferred players), so that continues to be relevant, though.

Stress tests are for their servers' hardware/software, to see how they perform under load. Not that BW's customer support isn't generally slow/terrible, but how would you stress test your support staff?

There's a reason for overtuning them, though. In MMOs it's generally preferable to the altnernative, where you undertune something, everyone beats it the first day and gets bored and then it's a big waste of development. And if you think there are complaints about them being too hard now, imagine if they had started easy, let everyone fall into their particular strategies, and then beefed up the difficulty? Yeah, unholy *****torm. That's why MMO bosses pretty much always start out harder and then get nerfed later, rather than starting out easy and getting buffed. The people who are golden gods of rail shooters get bragging rights now, and then in a month or two when half the missions take a 10% nerf to enemies' everything (fine-tuning the balance), they can talk about how BW is catering to casuals or something and everyone can zip around blowing things up. Now, did they make it harder in order to sell more space gear on the cartel market? Well, maybe. If so that would be pretty unpleasant of them. But the difficulty of the space missions is not by itself a bad thing.

They're definitely overtuned. Compared to the old space missions, though? You can do the level 5 ones with no items equipped. Definitely welcome to get shot to bits again, now if only they hadn't ballooned the costs of the level 7 gear...

Well, there was combat, but you could avoid it entirely if you took your time and explored thoroughly. Which is GREAT. This was definitely a fantastic offering from them. Super creepy and atmospheric.

Ehh, Arthas and Deathwing were really overexposed in their expansions. I can understand them not wanting to wear out the Sith Emperor out (who is the big bad if anyone is).

I think if the creator jumped ship and left his position to a total newbie, the guild members were pretty much expecting things to close down anyway. >.>